Fin had barely lifted his bag from the luggage carousel when a large hand grabbed the handle and took it from him. He turned, surprised, to find a big friendly face grinning at him. It was a round face, unlined, beneath thickly oiled black hair that grew into a widow’s peak. It belonged to a man in his early forties, broad built, but a little shorter than Fin’s six feet. He wore a dark suit with a white shirt and blue tie, beneath a heavy, quilted, black anorak. He thrust another large hand into Fin’s. ‘DS George Gunn.’ He had an unmistakable Lewis accent. ‘Welcome to Stornoway, Mr Macleod.’
‘It’s Fin, George. How the hell did you know who I was?’
‘I can spot a cop at a hundred paces, Mr Macleod.’ He grinned, and as they stepped out to the car park said, ‘You’ll probably see a few changes.’ He leaned into the strong westerly and grinned again. ‘One thing that never changes, though. The wind. Never gets tired of blowing.’
But today it was a benign wind with a soft edge to it, warmed by an August sun that burst periodically through broken cloud. Gunn turned his Volkswagen on to the roundabout at the gate to the airfield, and they drove up over the hill that took them down again to Oliver’s Brae. They took a right towards the town, and the conversation turned towards the murder.
‘First of the new millennium,’ Gunn said. ‘And we only had one in the whole of the twentieth century.’
‘Well, let’s hope this is the last of the twenty-first. Where are post-mortems usually held?’
‘Aberdeen. We have three police surgeons here on the island. All doctors from the group practice in town. Two of them are locum pathologists. They’ll examine the bodies of any sudden death, even carry out a post-mortem. But anything contentious goes straight off to Aberdeen. Forrester Hills.’
‘Wouldn’t Inverness be nearer?’
‘Aye, but the pathologist there doesn’t approve of our locums. He won’t do any post-mortems unless he does them all.’ Gunn flicked Fin a mischievous look. ‘But you didn’t hear that from me.’
‘Hear what?’
Gunn’s face split into a smile that told Fin they had connected.
As they headed down the long straight road towards Stornoway, Fin saw the town laid out before them, built around the shelter of the harbour and the tree-covered hill behind it. The glass and steel ferry terminal at the head of the new breakwater which had been built in the nineties looked to Fin like a flying saucer. Beyond it, the old pier seemed neglected. It gave him an odd jolt seeing the place again. From a distance it appeared almost exactly as he remembered it. Only the flying saucer was new. And no doubt it had brought a few aliens with it.
They passed the yellow-painted former mills of Kenneth Mackenzie Limited, where millions of metres of homespun Harris tweed had once been stored on thousands of shelves awaiting export. An unfamiliar terrace of new houses led down to a big metal shed where government money financed the production of television programmes in Gaelic. Although it had been unfashionable in Fin’s day, the Gaelic language was now a multi-million-pound business. The schools even taught maths and history and other subjects through the medium of Gaelic. And these days it was hip to speak it.
‘They rebuilt Engebret’s a year or two ago,’ Gunn said as they passed a filling station and minimarket at a roundabout that Fin did not remember. ‘It’s even open on a Sunday. And you can get a drink or a meal most anywhere in town now on the Sabbath.’
Fin shook his head in amazement.
‘And two flights from Edinburgh every Sunday. You can even get the ferry from Ullapool.’
In Fin’s day the whole island shut down on a Sunday. It was impossible to eat out, or go for a drink, or buy cigarettes or petrol. He could remember tourists wandering the streets on the Sabbath, thirsty and hungry and unable to leave until the first ferry on Monday. Of course, it was well known that after the churches of Stornoway had emptied, the pubs and hotels filled up with secret Sunday revellers who slipped in by the back door. It was not illegal, after all, to drink on the Sabbath, just unthinkable. At least, to be seen doing it.
‘Do they still chain up the swings?’ Fin remembered the sad sight of children’s swings chained and padlocked on the Sabbath.
‘No, they stopped that a few years ago.’ Gunn chuckled ‘The Sabbatarians said it was the thin end of the wedge. And maybe they were right.’
Fundamentalist Protestant churches had dominated island life for centuries. It was said that a publican or a restaurateur who defied the Church would be quietly put out of business. Bank loans called in, licences withdrawn. The power of the Church had seemed medieval to those looking on from the mainland. But it was real enough on the island, where some sects condemned any kind of entertainment as sinful, and any attempt to undermine their authority as the work of the devil.
Gunn said, ‘Mind you, even though they don’t chain the swings up any more, you’ll never see a kid using one on a Sunday. Just like you’ll still not see anyone hanging out their washing. Not outside of the town, anyway.’
A new sports centre hid Fin’s old school from view. They passed the Comhairle nan Eilean island council offices, and the former Seaforth Hotel opposite a terrace of traditional step-gabled sandstone houses. A mix of new ugly and old ugly. Stornoway had never been the prettiest of towns, and it hadn’t improved. Gunn turned right into Lewis Street, traditional harbour homes cheek by jowl with pubs and dark little shops, then left into Church Street and the police station halfway down. Fin noticed that all the street names were in Gaelic.
‘Who’s running the investigation?’
‘A crew from Inverness,’ Gunn said. ‘They were helicoptered in in the early hours of Sunday morning. A DCI, a DS and seven DCs. Plus a forensics team. They didn’t hang around once the balloon went up.’
The police station was a collection of pink, harled buildings on the corner of Church Street and Kenneth Street, next door to the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Peking Cuisine Chinese Takeaway. Gunn drove through a gate and parked beside a large white police van.
‘How long have you been based at Stornoway, George?’
‘Three years. I was born and brought up in Stornoway. But I’ve spent most of my time in the force at other stations around the islands. And then at Inverness.’ Gunn slipped out of the car with a quilted nylon swish.
Fin got out of the passenger side. ‘So how do you feel about all these incomers taking over the investigation?’
Gunn’s smile was rueful. ‘It’s no more than I’d expect. We don’t have the experience here.’
‘What’s the CIO like?’
‘Oh, you’ll like him.’ A smile crinkled Gunn’s eyes. ‘He’s a real bastard.’
The real bastard was a short, stocky man with thick, sandy hair Brylcreemed back from a low brow. He had an old-fashioned face and an old-fashioned smell (was it Brut?), and Fin could have guessed he was a Glaswegian even before he opened his mouth. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Tom Smith.’ The chief investigating officer rose from behind his desk and held out a hand. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Macleod.’ Fin wondered if they all knew, and thought that they had probably been warned. Smith’s handshake was firm and brief. He sat down again, the sleeves of his pressed white shirt neatly folded up to the elbows, his fawn suit jacket carefully arranged over the back of the seat behind him. His desk was covered in paperwork, but there was a sense of order about it. Fin noticed that his thick-fingered hands were scrubbed clean, and that his nails were immaculately manicured.
‘Thank you.’ Fin’s response was mechanical.
‘Sit down.’ Smith spent more time looking at his papers than at Fin as he spoke. ‘I’ve got thirteen CID, including the local boys, and twenty-seven uniforms working on this. There’s more than forty officers on the island I can count on.’ He looked up. ‘I’m not sure why I need you.’
‘I didn’t exactly volunteer, sir.’
‘No, you were volunteered by HOLMES. It certainly wasn’t my idea.’ He paused. ‘This murder in Edinburgh. Do you have any suspects?’
‘No, sir.’
‘After three months?’
‘I’ve been on leave for the last four weeks.’
‘Aye. Right.’ He appeared to lose interest, and returned again to his paperwork. ‘So what grand illumination is it you think you’ll be able to cast on our little investigation here?’
‘I’ve no idea, sir, until I’ve been briefed.’
‘It’s all in the computer.’
‘I have a suggestion, though.’
‘Oh, do you?’ Smith looked up sceptically. ‘And what might that be?’
‘If the post-mortem hasn’t been carried out yet, it might be an idea to bring in the pathologist who did the PM on the Edinburgh murder. So we’ll have a first-hand comparison.’
‘Great idea, Macleod. Which is probably why I already had it.’ Smith leaned back in his chair, his self-satisfaction almost as overpowering as his aftershave. ‘Professor Wilson arrived on the last flight yesterday.’ He checked his watch. ‘PM should be starting in about half an hour.’
‘You’re not flying the body to Aberdeen, then?’
‘The facilities are good enough here. So we brought the mountain to Mohammed.’
‘What would you like me to do?’
‘Frankly, DI Macleod, nothing. I’ve got a perfectly good team here that’s quite capable of running this inquiry without your help.’ He sighed in deep frustration. ‘But HOLMES seems to think you might be able to say whether or not there’s a connection with the Leith Walk murder. And God forbid we shouldn’t do what HOLMES tells us. So why don’t you sit in on the postmortem, take a look at the parallel evidence, and if you come up with anything we’ll give it a gander. Okay?’
‘I wouldn’t mind casting an eye over the crime scene.’
‘Feel free. Detective Sergeant Gunn can give you the tour. The local boys aren’t really equipped to be of much use to us anyway. Except as dogsbodies.’ His contempt for everyone outside of his own team, including Fin, was clear.
‘And I’ll want to take a look at the files.’ Fin was pushing his luck. ‘Maybe talk to some of the witnesses. Suspects, if there are any.’
Smith pursed his lips and gave Fin a long, hard look. ‘I can’t stop you doing that, Macleod. But you might as well know that I expect to have this whole thing wrapped up in a matter of days. And just so you’re not under any illusion, I don’t believe there is an Edinburgh connection.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Call it instinct. People here aren’t very sophisticated.’ He smirked. ‘Well, you’d know that.’ He was tapping his pencil on his desk now, irritated by having to explain himself to a junior officer from another force. ‘I think this is a crude copycat killing. There were plenty of details published in the papers at the time. I think the killer’s a local man with a grudge trying to cover his tracks, trying to make us look somewhere else. So I’m going to shortcut the whole process.’ Fin resisted the temptation to smile. He knew all about shortcuts. He’d learned very early in life that they could lead you off on tangents. But DCI Smith was not privy to such wisdom. He said, ‘Unless the PM throws up something unexpected, I’m going to take DNA samples from every adult male in Crobost, as well as any additional suspects we might come up with. I figure a couple of hundred at the most. Economy of scale. A whole hell of a lot cheaper than a long-running investigation tying up officers in the field for weeks on end.’ Smith was one of the new breed of senior cops whose primary concern was the bottom line.
Still, Fin was surprised. ‘You have a DNA sample of the killer?’
Smith beamed. ‘We think so. Despite local sensibilities, we put out teams of uniforms to search the locus on Sunday. We found the victim’s clothes in a plastic binbag dropped in a ditch about half a mile away. The clothes are covered in vomit. And since the police surgeon is pretty sure the victim wasn’t sick, we have to assume the murderer was. If the forensic pathologist can confirm that, we should have a perfect sample of the killer’s DNA.’