The road ran on. They drove for a good few miles past the village, seeing the occasional house and farm building. They didn’t see a single person. She found this slightly unsettling. The road hugged the coastline; occasional forestry tracks ran inland from it and they met no traffic at all until they came to a stop at a cattle grid. After the grid that they rattled across slowly, the dog in the back leaping around in agitation at the noise, the tarmac changed to a different colour and a faded sign said, ‘Mackinnon Arms’. The drive to the hotel was long. Rhododendron bushes on both sides obscured the views.
‘Why the Mackinnon Arms?’ asked McCleod.
‘I’m only there by accident really,’ Hanlon said. She explained about staying on Islay, the need to find somewhere for a while until her accommodation became free.
McCleod nodded. ‘So you don’t know much about the Mackinnon Arms?’
‘Just the name, really.’ She hadn’t bothered to read that much about it on its home page. ‘What’s it like?’
‘Oh, it’s OK, I believe. The food’s good, I hear. It used to be a big private house, way back when,’ McCleod said. ‘There was some kind of scandal, the wife was having an affair… a lot of that goes on, on an island.’ Her voice sounded strangely far away, as if she were talking to herself rather than her passenger. Hanlon wondered if she had someone in mind.
‘And the husband killed her, I suppose,’ said Hanlon. There was an edge to her voice that made McCleod stare at her questioningly. Hanlon had seen a lot of domestic violence in her time.
McCleod shook her head. ‘No, almost the reverse. It broke his heart and he hung himself. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, since you’re staying there. The hotel is on a psychic trail.’
‘A psychic trail?’
McCleod nodded. ‘Yeah, people interested in ghosts and haunted places come and stay. It’s quite big business, ghost tourism. Anyway… the house got turned into a hotel in the fifties, but recently it must have had about ten different owners in as many years. Out of season we don’t get many tourists and it’s difficult to make a hotel pay when you’ve only got those few summer months.’
‘Despite the ghost.’
‘Despite the ghost.’ McCleod grinned; it transformed her face. She had excellent teeth, white and even.
Hanlon nodded. She was beginning to slightly regret booking into somewhere so isolated. Nothing to do with the ghost – she was worried that she would just be left alone with her regrets.
‘Here we are,’ said McCleod, pulling up in front of a large white building. ‘The Mackinnon Arms.’
5
From outside, the hotel at first sight looked idyllic. It was a large building, painted white, with symmetrical window stones picked out in black. It overlooked the sea facing the Argyll coast and the Atlantic Ocean towards America if you kept going westwards. To the rear of the hotel was the car park and, rising up behind it, the Paps of Jura.
So far, so good. It was just like the images on the website. However, as Hanlon got closer, a different picture emerged.
The paintwork was cracked and peeling, and the old-fashioned metal drainpipes had been leaking, staining the white paint an unpleasant shade of yellow. There were a couple of flower tubs in front of the hotel made from half-barrels, but the wooden strakes were rotting and the straggly geraniums were choked with weeds.
There was a small beach in front of the hotel and next to it a jetty that ran out to sea, about twenty metres long. A sizeable launch was tied up to the end. She could see the thick white mooring ropes wound around large metal bollards. To the right of the jetty was a large rowing boat moored to an orange buoy and beyond that an eight-metre fibreglass fishing boat with a covered cockpit.
She looked back up to the road. The Volvo was still there. McCleod was looking at her from behind the wheel, as if intent on making sure that Hanlon was really going into the hotel. Hanlon waved and she waved back, then drove off.
As Hanlon walked up to the front door she noticed, frowning, that the tarmac was littered with cigarette ends. There was a sign hanging on a pole outside; it was quite disturbing, a boar’s head with a bone between its teeth, below it a length of knotted rope, and the name, the Mackinnon Arms. The sign was dilapidated, the tusks of the boar a sinister yellow and rust-covered stains on the bone where the paint had discoloured looked unpleasantly like blood. She walked into the reception area, the usual configuration of desk walling off a back-room management office section and a framed Admiralty chart on the wall, blue and yellow with depths marked in metres, and sandbanks and rocks shown. In Hanlon’s, admittedly limited, experience of small seaside hotels and pubs, this was practically de rigueur lobby decoration. She looked around for a member of staff, but the reception was deserted. There was a framed photo, a montage of hotel staff; Team Mackinnon, it was titled.
She gave it a closer look. Jim Richardson, Owner/Manager; Harriet Reynolds, Food and Beverage Manager; Johanna Helmanis and Eva Balodis, Restaurant Staff; Kai McPherson, Bar Manager and Donald Crawford, Head Chef.
Eva Balodis had a thing for facial piercings: eyebrow, nose and ears. Hanlon looked at the other photos, two very Scottish names, two that looked English and, she guessed, another Eastern European-sounding, like Eva’s. A fairly typical staff composition, she guessed, for a hotel in the wilds of Scotland.
There was a plaque on the wall with the boar’s head motif again, with the
