It had taken Shay less than a week to find a house that ticked all our boxes and then went on to exceed our rather modest expectations. Located on the east bank of Loch Ness, with a garden that ran right down to the water’s edge, the rambling, long inactive B&B he’d snapped up near Dores was absolutely perfect for us. He hadn’t even waited for da and me to see the place before putting a cash offer in. His ‘ready money’ budget had been considerably higher than he’d led us to believe, and he knew we were both good for our shares, once we’d each sold our places in East Lothian. It was less than a thirty-minute drive from the centre of Inverness, too, the icing on the cake. We’d been gobsmacked when we’d seen it; the size of the house, the location, the grounds. As with him, for both of us, it was also a case of love at first sight.
“But what if we’d said no?” Da had asked him.
Shay pointed out that he could always just sell the finished house for a huge profit once he was done fixing it up. As if there was the remotest chance in hell we’d let him do that!
Final contracts, planning permissions, suppliers and contractors, everything had then proceeded at Shay speed, in a whirlwind of tireless activity. Our only job was to find somewhere big enough to house us comfortably for a few months, and da had soon managed to find us a suitable place. I’d even packed up my cottage two weeks before my notice period ran out. The rent was all paid up, but why on earth would I stay there on my own while those two had all the fun?
I swung idly in my chair in my office, working my rapidly spinning Powerball with my left hand while the transcription software worked on the audio file I’d just fed it. My broken bones had healed quickly and well after my ‘accident’ in March, but I still didn’t have my full gripping force back. Pushing this neat little gadget up to high speed a few times a day was working wonders on fixing that problem.
Beyond the high-pitched whining of my physio toy humming away at a decent rate, I could hear Caitlin and my four DCs tapping busily away at their keyboards out in the main office. Quiet or not, there was always something to keep us all usefully occupied. Right now, that meant completing the paperwork on a straightforward little MDMA haul from a nightclub in town, tracking down a group of joyriding kids who’d damaged and abandoned an expensive Porsche 718, and another dozen or so other little bits and bats, all routine cases. Nothing required any further attention from me until forensics sent over a result on the evidence collected from the car.
When the acid burn in my arm muscles became too uncomfortable to be worth continuing with the exercise, I allowed the Powerball to slow down again, its whining tone dropping back through the register to a low, clackety rumble as it did so. You wouldn’t believe the gyro forces those things could pull if you’d never used one. It was almost five o’clock now too, so I could knock off soon without feeling guilty about it.
I put my physio toy back in my bag and flexed my hand. It felt good. The transcription software had finished processing the audio file by then, so I spent the next fifteen minutes going through it, making a few corrections. I sent a copy to the printer and saved the file. I grabbed my pages from the printer and dumped the updated folder back into my ‘current’ basket before checking for new emails. Nothing in the last thirty minutes, and as it was now after five, I didn’t see any reason to hang around. It was a rare and glorious sunny afternoon in late May outside, with hours of daylight left before twilight began to close in. I wondered if Shay could be persuaded to join me for a paddle board session as I shut my computer down, eager to get outside and work off some bottled up energy. I caught myself whistling as I did so and cut it off with an abashed grin. That had been happening quite a bit lately, but I was curbing the impulse during working hours. I closed and locked the window, lifted my laptop bag onto the desk and was just tucking my water bottle into its pocket when the phone rang.
“DCI Keane speaking.” I’d picked it up automatically, not a wise move for anyone planning a speedy getaway.
“Oh, good, Conall, I managed to catch you. Excellent,” the voice of Chief Superintendent Bernard Anderson said briskly. “I’ve just got off the phone with James McKinnon, and he said you were ‘good as new’ again now, is that right?”
“It is, Sir,” I assured him, heartbeat speeding up a little. “The doctors signed me off as fully recovered a while ago.” They’d been rather impressed with how quickly my bones had healed.
“Glad to hear it. In that case, I want you to fly over to Lewis and Harris in the morning.”
“Sir?” I sat down again and dumped my bag on the floor. It had been two months since Anderson had first mentioned using me as a roaming serious crimes specialist throughout his District. I’d been beginning to think he’d changed his mind about the idea. “What are we looking at?”
“I only have the bare bones of it so far, but my Western Isles Area Commander, DCI Trish Morrison, has caught a case she’d like an experienced team to take off her hands,” he told me cheerfully. “Trish will email you everything she has so far in a little while once I’ve told her you’re in.” I heard him tap at his keyboard, bringing up
