That word again, Ewie thought.
If they were true, it was not only the expansion that would be threatened, but Cromarty’s very license to remain operational. The UK Atomic Energy Authority constabulary would shut down the plant in a blink, sending the area’s economic prospects into the deepest of holes.
Ewie started up a moderate incline with brisk strides and rhythmic swings of his arms. He wanted to get his blood circulating, and the oxygen flowing into his lungs. Wanted beyond all else to clear his head.
As he neared the top of the rise, Ewie heard another vehicle coming toward him. A commercial rig, judging from the rumble of its wheels. He reached the downhill side and saw that it was a giant tub of a Unimog. The truck was moving well in excess of the speed limit with its brights on.
Startled, blinking from glare of the headlamps, Ewie stepped further onto the shoulder. The truck kept hauling along as if it were on a speed course. Ewie was sure the driver had his gears in fifth.
Ewie decided to let him go on by before resuming his walk. Probably the driver was some ass who’d fallen behind schedule making a delivery to Inverness, and meant to catch up with the clock by hurtling along this quiet stretch of blacktop with no thought of his or anyone else’s safety. Ewie had a mind to memorize his tag number and report him to the police when he got home.
By the time Ewie realized the Unimog had swerved directly toward the shoulder where he was standing, it was too close for him to get out of the way. Blinded by the headlamps, his ears filled with thunder, he reflexively cast his hands front of his face, thrusting his body back toward the wooded area lining the road.
A split second before the front end of the cab mashed into him, Ewie began to shout something that was part question, part curse, and part expression of fear and anger. But the loud roar of the engine drowned out what little of it escaped his lips, and then everything was over for him, all over, his life crushed out, the truck plunging on down the road, away toward the mainland, the blood spatters on its massive fender unnoticeable to anyone who might chance to see it pass in the semidarkness.
They were lying in bed, the husband on his back with the quilt pulled to his bare chest, his wife on her side atop the quilt, facing him, her right hand flat on his stomach. Her nightgown, a flimsy strip of lace-edged silk, revealed far more than it hid. Slung across his body, her right leg was long, toned, the flesh of its thigh smooth and creamy white.
Inspector Frank Gorrie of the Northern Constabulary, Inverness Command Area, was thinking he might be envious of the fellow she was snuggled against, if only his gaze hadn’t climbed above the generous swell where the nightie did not quite manage to cover her breasts.
She had a beautiful figure.
Gorrie did not know about the face, would not know until he saw a photograph of her as she’d appeared in life. Most of it was gone, blown away by a.38-caliber bullet, and there was blood all over the rest. The shot that killed the husband was cleaner, a single entry wound in the middle of his forehead. Probably he’d been asleep when it was fired, never knew what hit him. His face was tranquil, eyes closed. There was a dash of foam at the corner of his lips.
Gorrie could see that the pillowcases were soggy and red under their heads, under the pistol clutched in the woman’s left hand, her finger curled around the trigger, its short barrel thrust into what remained of her mouth.
Standing at the foot of the bed, Gorrie experienced a brief twinge of guilt that had nothing to do with his appreciation of the dead woman’s comely shape. In police work, you noticed what you noticed. The best and worst in people often rubbed up close, and he would not damn himself for being human. But whatever had happened to the couple, or between them, their intimate connection was a strong thing in the room, and Gorrie suspected his discomfort came from the peculiar feeling that he’d somehow intruded upon it.
He turned to the young constable at the door behind him. “What’s the crack on Drummond from the Child Protection Unit?”
“On his way. Someone from Social Work’s coming with him.”
Gorrie motioned to the left, where they’d found the couple’s infant son in his nursery adjoining the master bedroom.
“Baby’s quiet. You sure he’s okay?”
“Aye, sir. We—”
In the outer hallway, the woman who’d discovered the bodies was working up to another fit of teary hysterics. Her name was Christine Gibbon, and she’d identified herself as the best friend of the looker in the tidbit nightie, stressing in the bluntest of terms that she’d held an absolute loathing for the man of the house and gone out of her way to avoid contact with him whenever possible.
“More of a bawler than that little one, she is,” Gorrie muttered under his breath. “But let’s hear what you were saying… ”
“We found some formula in the kitchen. Nappies in a closet near the crib. Robertson gave him a change. And he’s got him on the bottle right now.”
“Four boys of his own, dabbing the piss off a rashy tossel must be nothing new.”
“Aye. I’d suppose.”
Gorrie released a sigh.
“All right, you’d best get somebody in here with a camera,” he said. “Capture the moment, as they say… not that I expect either of these sweethearts’ll be sending the other any endearments next Valentine’s Day.”
The constable smiled feebly, nodded, and left the room. Gorrie noticed he hadn’t once glanced at the bed. No great wonder. With the low violent crime rate in Inverness, and this his first year with the Force, he’d most surely never encountered anything comparable to the scene in this room.
Gorrie looked down at his spiral notepad, flipped to a clean page, and was about to add a few words to his notes when Christine Gibbon resumed her emotional narrative to the officer he’d stationed in the hallway. Gorrie perked an ear. No telling whether she’d come out with something he hadn’t yet heard.
“I told Claire a hun’red times…”
Claire Mackay, the wife, Gorrie thought.
“… a hun’red time’s over ’n
Said mongrel dog being Ed Mackay, the husband. Gorrie had needed to coax the Gibbon woman into giving his name in her initial statement, as she’d insisted the very utterance of it would rot her tongue.
“… to his drinkin’ and erse-chasin’, but I couldn’t get her to listen. See how he provides for me an’ the baby, she’d say. If it weren’t for him I’d still be in the lands, she’d say. Got to forgive him his weaknesses, and so on, and so forth. Well,
Never mind that it was her mate who appeared to have been the victim in what was shaping up to be a murder-suicide case, Gorrie thought.
“… poor girl, she’d been better off in that cramped old flat we used to share when we was single. What good’s his high job at the plant to her now? Or this high place, in the end tally…”
Gorrie frowned at her latest repetition of what had become a tedious song. The “high place” was a suburban bungalow with a nice plot of green here on Eriskay Road, a short jaunt from the city center. The “high job,” taking Christine Gibbon’s comments backwards, was a supervisory waste-management position at the Cromarty Firth nuclear power plant over on Black Isle.
“… tell you, officer, I knew it would come to tragedy. Better they’d gone their separate ways. I’m not one for dirty talk, but this man was one adulterous
As she dissolved into sobs, Gorrie phased her out, thinking there wasn’t much more of relevance to be gotten from her. Hearsay aside, Christine Gibbons’s account could be trimmed to a paragraph. She’d come to her friend’s bungalow this morning in her automobile, the two of them having planned to strap the tyke into a carriage and go shopping down by the Ness. Because Mr. Mackay would occasionally take a ride to the plant with one of the other
