“I doubt Damien would have needed to switch cards during his trip. He hardly had any chances to stop to take pictures. You can check the dates, to be sure.” I popped the card into the slot on Shay’s laptop and loaded the file into a new folder on the desktop.
“These go back to the fourth of May,” I said once I’d checked the first and last of them, “and all the way through to yesterday.”
“Mr Price set off for his first stop, at Islay, on the 11th,” Shay told me, and Vanessa nodded confirmation.
“He did. I think the last photos he took with this camera were when we stopped at an exceptionally pretty spot on Skye yesterday morning.” She’d taken a packet of tissues from her pocket and was quietly dabbing at her face, leak firmly plugged up again, for now. “He put the camera bag in the boot before we locked up the car on the ferry. Any pictures he took after that will be on his phone.”
I ejected the card and handed it back to her.
“Thank you, Mrs Price. You could not have been more helpful. My apologies again for troubling you today.”
She stared up at me as I got up, looking considerably less zombielike than she had when we’d first walked in. “And thank you, Inspector, for being the first person here not to offer me any empty condolences or meaningless platitudes, and for giving today any purpose at all for me. Neither of you is unfamiliar with loss, are you?” She looked down at her awkwardly twisting hands. “Sorry, it’s just that looking back now, at things I’ve said to the recently bereaved myself in the past, I just want to cringe. It’s all so useless, isn’t it? As well as being the exact opposite of helpful, however well-meaning you think you’re being.”
I gave her a solemn, acknowledging nod when she looked up again. Every fresh expression of sympathy just threatened to break you down all over again. Shay was pretending he wasn’t there. She saw that too. We both stood, and Vanessa went to sit at the table while Shay packed up again. My cousin hefted our bags and paused.
“The man we’re after,” he told her, sounding a little hesitant and a little heated, his head well down now. “I don’t believe he knows that you saw him, or that your husband sent you that text. He probably thinks he got clean away with it and that the death will be dismissed as an unfortunate accident. He has no idea how close behind him we are.” It was an entirely different voice to the one he’d employed earlier, but I knew damned well that he was using it with calculated purpose. Shay never sounded heated when he was angry, unless, like now, he’d decided to for a reason. “So yes, Mrs Price, we may never know what further crimes you have prevented here today, but your life did have real meaning this morning.” He shot me a look that I had no trouble in reading. “I’ll wait outside.”
Even after he’d hastily walked out, she stared fixedly at the door he’d disappeared through.
“My cousin,” I explained, stifling a sigh, “is very good at his job, but he has some rather strong feelings about stopping those who destroy other people’s lives. I’m afraid that meeting people like yourself sometimes causes him to become a little angry, Mrs Price.”
“Who did he lose?” she asked. “Who was killed?” How had he known she’d ask me that?
“Both of his parents, and his maternal grandparents as well,” I told her evenly, but not without some rigorous self-control. It was not a time in our lives I ever wished to even think about if I could help it. “When he was twelve.”
I’d been so wrapped up in what we were doing that I’d forgotten all about Annie MacLeod. She’d been keeping so still and so quiet until that small, strangled sound escaped her. Vanessa just nodded.
“And so here you both are,” she said. “Doing something usefully meaningful… as much as anyone or anything ever can in a senseless world like this.” She picked up another cracker and examined it critically. “That seems like a reasonable way of coming to terms with a personal tragedy, to build something truly good out of it, but I can’t begin to imagine how devastating that must have been for the poor child. Was he there? At the time?”
“Outside, yes. They didn’t see him. He was able to identify the culprits.” He had, eventually. It had taken a younger and, I’d always believed, completely out of his mind at the time, Shay quite a while to track them down. I didn’t see any need to mention that twenty-seven other people had also been killed in the explosion that wiped out his family. And I especially wasn’t feeling inclined to talk about how we’d thought that Shay was dead too, for six whole fucking weeks. I felt a sting as my fingernails dug into my palm and carefully unclenched my fist.
“I see.” She was looking out of the window again, but not blankly, like before. Vanessa Price looked extremely thoughtful now. “Hypoglycaemia, was it? What an interesting young man. Thank you, Inspector. Do let me know if there’s anything else I can do, won’t you?”
I motioned to Annie MacLeod, and she stood. I wanted a quiet word with that one. We both heard the crunch of Vanessa’s teeth biting down as we let ourselves out.
Six
Shay
I didn’t see how that could have gone any better. A positive identification! That particular image had raised my hopes when I’d seen it earlier, I’ll admit, but a lot of people could have fitted the description Mrs Price had given the local police yesterday, so
