She looked around her. I’m alive, she thought, relief flooding through her. It’s over.
The blue sea, the majestic mountains, the Paps in the distance. It all looked so idyllic, but of course there were serpents in this Eden.
Her grey eyes narrowed and the wind tugged at her corkscrew hair as she gazed pitilessly at his shattered corpse.
She felt a nudge at her side and looked down; two adoring eyes stared up at her.
‘Good boy, Wemyss,’ she said, patting the dog’s head.
They turned and walked down towards where the quad bike was parked. Donald had left the key in the ignition. Hanlon stared down the hill towards the sea.
Down below on the road, the Volvo was gone.
36
Murdo Campbell handed her a pen to sign her statement. He turned off the audio recording.
‘So,’ he said, ‘there we are.’
Hanlon had been giving her statement at the police station on Islay. It was hardly a full account, but it would suffice, and Campbell was in no mood to make life hard for her. Hanlon’s face still looked dreadful from the beating that she had taken from Leo. Paradoxically, to Campbell, it made Hanlon look even more attractive.
‘What was happening down at the Mackinnon Arms exactly?’ Hanlon asked.
Campbell pushed a hand through his red hair.
‘HMRC and the drugs squad had a mutual interest in the place. They knew that cocaine of an unusual high purity was coming onto the mainland via the Western Isles, well, no surprise there, but they had narrowed it down to Jura, specifically the Mackinnon Arms.’
He drank some water.
‘My drug squad colleague knew I had an informant who worked in the catering trade…’
‘Kai McPherson,’ said Hanlon.
‘Exactly. Kai, poor bastard, had given me quite a bit on crimes in Glasgow and Paisley. I used to turn a blind eye to his wee deals on the side. Anyway, he was keen to get out of Paisley, get out of crime in general. So I leaned on my sister to give him a job at her restaurant, which is up for a Michelin star.’
‘The Sleeket Mouse.’
‘Well, you’ve eaten there.’
‘I’ve eaten there,’ she said coldly, ‘as well you know.’
‘Well, then.’ Campbell was wearing a dark suit and tie, which he now adjusted; he looked elegant and careworn. ‘When the bar-manager vacancy at the Mackinnon Arms came up, I suggested him. He was ideal for the job. They bit his hand off.’
‘So now you had a man in there.’
Campbell nodded. ‘I did. Firstly, Kai tipped us off about the sex parties. I went, I said I was an Oban businessman. I didn’t take part. I pretended to be too pissed.’
‘Did you learn anything?’
‘No, other than it cost three hundred and fifty pounds, drinks and drugs included, to attend if you were an unattached man, a hundred if you were a couple, that there was no obvious coercion and that although drugs were available it was no big deal. Kai was doing well out of that. Of interest if we’d wanted to object to Big Jim renewing his licence, but otherwise no.’
‘Did Kai know who was behind the alleged drug smuggling at the hotel?’
Campbell shook his head. ‘No. Well, we both assumed it was Big Jim and Harriet. He had the boat as well. But we needed proof. The problem really was our informant, who knew that the drugs connection centred on the hotel, but we thought that meant the hotel as a business, making Big Jim the main suspect, rather than someone who worked in the hotel. It never crossed our minds that Donald Crawford was involved.’
‘So Kai knew that something was going down rather than who was behind it.’
‘Exactly. To be honest, we thought that the drugs were probably going to be attached to Big Jim’s lobster pots.’ Just as I did, thought Hanlon.
‘To be more specific, I mean the buoys that marked the pots. Donald’s job involved collecting the lobsters. When coke was delivered, he’d collect that too. Waterproof packaging. Then he could just sail out at his leisure, collect the lobsters, collect the drugs.’
‘So when Big Jim attacked me there…’
‘Exactly. When McCleod told me that you had been attacked by Big Jim by the lobster pots, it just confirmed my impressions, so I was right about the pots but completely wrong about the man. Big Jim had nothing whatsoever to do with drugs and neither did Harriet.’
Hanlon pushed her hair out of her face. Campbell glanced down at her hands, slim and muscular, a couple of blue plasters on the knuckles of her right hand from where she’d had the run-in with Leo.
‘So how much did McCleod know about your investigation?’
Campbell pulled a face. ‘In an ideal world, nothing, I obviously wanted as few people to know as necessary, but in reality…’
‘You told her, didn’t you?’ Hanlon’s voice was accusing.
‘Bits and pieces. I trusted her.’ He smiled. ‘As did you. Catriona was very plausible. So when she found out, from you…’ he nodded intently at Hanlon, the payback for her blaming him for trusting McCleod ‘…that Kai was meeting me with definitive details at the bothy, Kai had to die.’
‘Well, I suppose that explains that. Why did Kai turn up at the bothy two days before?’
‘I can only imagine that McCleod had contacted him and told him that I had said to meet me earlier. He knew who she was, he would have no reason to disbelieve her. She drove her car over the back way, via the forestry tracks, avoiding the main road.’
‘What if Kai had checked?’
‘McCleod knows there’s no signal where my granny lives.’
‘And Big Jim?’ asked Hanlon.
‘To take the rap for Kai’s
