Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4)

by Oliver Davies

  The uniformed officers who’d reached the scene first had followed procedure. They’d secured the area and notified CID. The detectives’ initial reaction had been unfortunate. They’d had the immediate surroundings searched for evidence, but I could tell, from the amount of time and effort put into that search, that their hunch had been that it was just a drunken accident. We’d be arriving in Wick almost a week after the crime had been committed, so I didn’t have much hope of finding anything up at the scene now myself. We’d need to go and look at it, though. Retracing the steps that our murderers had taken might provide some valuable insights.

  I checked the time. It was only just after eleven. I might as well occupy myself doing as much work as I could on some of my other files until Shay sent me whatever he managed to gather.

  Four

  Shay

  This was just what I needed. Alright, I could do without the travelling circus, but still, a case was a case. I’d been stuck in this house with nothing interesting to work on for more than long enough, and I’d started to feel like I was going a little stir crazy, truth be told. At least Conall and Uncle Danny were down to exasperated eye rolls and snarky comments about the risk of the treadmill catching fire by now. That was a hell of a lot better than the anxious looks I’d caught them exchanging during the week after they’d brought me home.

  I’d been a little edgy myself for a while there, and of course, Conall had picked up on that. A full medical and a fresh set of brain scans had soon settled things satisfactorily. I always had those scans done privately, and I’d checked them over myself very carefully. It was all good, no permanent harm done. I was just in one of my periodic overactive phases at the moment. Well, that would settle down again soon enough, now that I had something worthwhile to focus on again.

  The file Conall had sent me only had one interesting folder in it. The pathologist’s report and the lab results painted a puzzling picture when you put them together. Someone had given Kaj Visser a large quantity of lethally toxic alcohol last Friday night, and there had been ketamine in his system as well. A preliminary background check didn’t reveal any history of substance abuse, so he’d probably been unknowingly fed that too.

  Whoever had killed him had really had it in for the poor sod. There had been enough ketamine in his system to keep him quiet and pretty much incapable of voluntary movement for an hour or so. Long enough to dump him somewhere where he was unlikely to attract attention or receive the medical help he’d have needed when his liver had finished processing the ethanol in the booze. Once it had begun breaking down the methanol instead, the resulting formic acid would have started building up in his system. Things would quickly have become extremely unpleasant for him after that. Agonising chest and stomach pains, blurred vision and one hell of a head-splitting headache. There could be temporary full-body paralysis and then, without treatment, permanent total blindness followed by certain death within hours.

  Methanol poisoning was downright nasty.

  As a murder method, it was highly unusual. If Visser had just been found lying dead in a field somewhere, his death would most likely have been written off as a tragic but self-inflicted accident.

  Mass poisonings from illegal, bootleg alcohol around the world were a shamefully regular event. Usually, deaths from methanol poisoning were due to local operations producing and selling large quantities of unsafe alcohol. Just two months ago, an instance of that had killed two hundred and fifty-six people in three provinces in Northern India over a period of several days, and that was only the latest of a regular string of similar incidents in that country. There’d been seventy-two deaths in Siberia in 2016; thirty-two in Istanbul in 2015; thirty-eight in the Czech Republic in 2012. The list went on and on. Cheap booze was risky anywhere. Tourists had to be careful about low priced drinks in a lot of countries because of genuine, branded bottles in the bars being topped up with bootleg, methanol-laced spirits. And for every death, there were usually even more blinded, brain-damaged or otherwise permanently affected survivors; kidney failure, partial paralysis, there were lots of undesirable long-term consequences.

  Incidents where people were brewing purely for their own consumption were either less common or went largely undetected and unreported. There’d been a case like that in Ireland, in County Donegal, five years ago that had killed two men. They’d been drinking home-brewed Poitín, made from potatoes. Irish moonshine gone wrong with a 97% methanol content. It didn’t take much of the stuff to totally fuck you up. One ml per kilo of body weight should be enough to finish you off in most cases. Call it two to four shots worth.

  Like I said, it was really nasty stuff.

  Kaj Visser’s death, if he’d been found dead from alcohol poisoning, would have been seen as an unfortunate tragedy. An individual had imbibed a lethal quantity of methanol obtained from an unknown source. He’d been on drugs, so for all anyone knew, he might have decided to swig some of the industrially produced stuff from the boat engine supplies or a bottle meant for a hiker’s lightweight stove. What didn’t make sense was that after going to all that trouble to make his death seem accidental, someone had then given him a thorough beating and thrown him into the sea to drown.

  Why? What had caused them to change their plan? The intoxication seemed well planned and deliberate and was unpleasant enough to indicate a major grievance with the victim. Business or personal? There was nothing in the file that gave us any way of telling. Had he run into a second person, or group, after being dumped somewhere to die or had someone just lost their temper and been unable to resist lashing out at an easy, helpless target?

  The interviews Munro’s people had conducted were virtually useless. They contained very little information, and I wouldn’t take any of it at face value, anyway. People were rarely totally honest when asked about someone who’d just died. They tended to say all the nice, expected things rather than point out that the deceased could be a real arsehole sometimes. Well, Conall would do his thing and get more out of them all once we got up to Wick. Meanwhile, the more blanks I could fill in on the victim himself, the better.

  Uncle Danny wandered into the living room after I’d been working away busily for a couple of hours.

  “You certainly look thoroughly engrossed. That’s good,” he said, grinning cheerfully. “I thought you might like some tea.” He put an oversized cup and saucer down on the coffee table for me.

  “Thanks, Uncle Danny.” I pushed my laptop stand out of the way and sat up to claim the cup. “Conall called to tell you the news, did he? I must say, you don’t seem particularly unhappy at the idea of getting rid of us for a while.”

  “No offence, Seabhac a stóirín, but I’m not.” He sat down on the edge of the couch as I prodded the teabag. “You’ve not exactly been restful company lately, you know. More of an exercise in perpetual motion, really. It’s lucky the weather hasn’t kept Conall indoors on his days off, or he’d be pulling his hair out by the handful by now.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’d noticed the energetic gardening sessions,” I admitted. Conall always became a bit restless himself when I was like this. “I was thinking of suggesting a bit of a break somewhere, but I thought I’d leave that up to him. This is better. Even with our little trip to the islands next month, he’ll still have plenty of leave left for a couple of proper holidays over the summer.”

  “Heaven forbid you boys didn’t get your annual quota of sunshine!”

  “Well, you’ve certainly had yours.” Uncle Danny had come back from the States a few shades darker than I was. “You’ve got a very Hollywood look going on just now. I hope your lady friends are all being properly appreciative. Not that you’ve been going out as much as usual lately.”

  “Too much work to get through just now, that’s all. You might prefer to spend most of your time living like a monk, but it’s not for everyone, Shay my boy, and someone has to keep our average up. Speaking of, I’d better go and freeze some of the stuff we got in ready for Jen’s visit. I w
on’t eat much of that on my own.” Yeah, it was a shame about that. Bad timing, but it couldn’t be helped. Jen was cool, though. She wouldn’t make a fuss about putting it off again.

  After he’d gone, I turned my attention back to poking around in Kaj Visser’s history. I’d promised Conall I’d send him all I could by two, and I had a lot to get through before then.

  If you think it needs someone with my rarefied skills to remotely hack into your social media accounts or your phone, think again. The Security Service, the National Crime Agency, and a lot of other players did it all the time. Even Police Scotland had been running trials with cyber kiosk devices since 2016 to hack into phones and tablets, seized or voluntarily surrendered during investigations. Those kiosks were nothing special. They were basically just a password bypass device with a few search parameters the operator could tweak once they had access to all the stored files.

  There’d been lots of outrage and calls for a warrant to be required when that information was revealed, but to me, it seemed like a big fuss over nothing. Criminals were eagerly exploiting new technology as much as they could and weren’t anywhere near as constrained about how they employed it. If law enforcement agencies didn’t keep up, then they’d soon become virtually useless. Yes, there was a reason for concern about potential abuses of power, but hadn’t there always been? Changing technologies and methods didn’t alter the fact that some people just couldn’t be trusted.

  As for illegal software usage, there was plenty of that about. Phone cloning was becoming almost commonplace, and there were enough skilled, unethical programmers to keep the market flooded with naughty little packages if you knew how to find them. Not all the police force themselves always behaved impeccably either. There’d been that case with a female police officer in Lanark in 2017. Well, a former police officer now. She’d become obsessed with a married man and hacked into his Facebook and Twitter accounts, changing his status to ‘single’ and posting nasty comments about his wife as if he’d written them himself. She’d been convicted on a stalking charge and got eleven months.

  The point being that uniform or no uniform, she hadn’t got away with it. The system worked as imperfectly as it always had. Some people got caught, and some didn’t. Those with real power still did pretty much as they pleased, in secret. People like me were living proof of that.

  Uncle Danny lent me his car for my trip into town that afternoon. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere himself. As he’d said, he was too busy with his ongoing consulting work, virtually testing different design tweaks. He wasn’t hanging around the house to keep an eye on me or anything. These were interesting times for his profession, at his level of expertise, and I was really glad he had something to keep him happily occupied. The less time Uncle Danny spent worrying about us two, the better. SpaceX would blow up a few rockets and a lot of money before they got their Starship project working properly, that was a given, but the idea was to keep that to a minimum. Projected launch and operational costs, once they had something that worked properly, would make it all worthwhile in the end. The aim was to develop a vehicle that could put a hundred tons of cargo into orbit for a mere two million dollars a trip, or so Uncle Danny had told us.

  That was an astounding prospect. I doubted they’d raise the trillions needed for their Mars project in a hurry, but there were plenty of other uses for a reusable rocket capable of carrying a payload like that. NASA was currently spending about a billion a year just to keep the space station supplied with a few tons of cargo. A working Starship fleet would drastically reduce the cost of all future satellite launches as well, probably knocking out all the competition in the process. Plus, they were talking about point-to-point global travel too. That would be an attractive prospect to a lot of wealthy people. New York to Singapore in under an hour? Yeah, there was definitely a lot of money to be made by whoever succeeded in keeping their launch costs that low.

  I spent most of the short drive into town thinking about all of that. I might have disappointed Uncle Danny by not choosing to follow in his professional footsteps, but he got it. It was better to pursue your real passion if you could. Besides, he’d got some pretty neat, customised software upgrades out of me over the years. That was the beauty of programming. You could apply the benefits to an endless variety of fields and projects. It was also a vital skill to possess when it came to doing the work that interested me most, on my own terms, which had been another excellent reason to pursue it.

  Conall emerged from the building as I pulled up at Old Perth Road. I was five minutes early too. He must have been tracking my progress to time it so nicely. Alright then. I’d rather have skipped this briefing, but if he wanted the whole team to attend, then I wasn’t going to argue about it. DCI Keane had his protocols and procedures to follow. I could have just video conferenced myself in, I suppose, but if we were all going to be stuck with each other up in Wick, the sooner we began to establish some boundaries, the better. His lot would be alright. They’d got used to me, sort of, over the few days I’d spent here at the end of February.

  Philips, as deputy SIO on the new case, was another matter entirely. The sooner we made it clear that he was not to view me as a shared resource, the better. Any research requests should be taken directly to my cousin for consideration. In other words, Don’t Bother the Consultant. It wasn't an ideal situation, but we could make it work. We wouldn’t be staying with any of them, anyway. I’d made sure of that.

  I climbed out of the car and went to join Conall so he could walk me in.

  Five

  It was a pleasant drive up to Wick on Friday morning. We set off just after half-past seven. I’d decided we’d take three cars, so we’d all have transport during our stay up there as different pairs went off to pursue their own given tasks. I’d also managed to rush through a requisition for a temporary vehicle from the pool for Mills and Collins to use. Philips already had his own assigned car.

  The A9 hugged the coast for a lot of the way up once you got past Golspie, and even before that, there were some nice stretches along the Cromarty Firth. It was a very scenic route, and we even had bright sunshine for a lot of the trip, although intermittent cloud cover dulled things down at regular intervals. It was dazzling enough as we crossed the Dornoch Firth, with sparkling water on either side and no strong side winds to worry about as we crossed the bridge. Neither Ross & Cromarty nor Sutherland were densely populated counties to drive through, and Caithness itself held less than thirty thousand inhabitants. When you put most of those into towns and villages, that left a hell of a lot of empty countryside. You could say what you liked about the weather, but the highlands of Scotland were indisputably unspoiled compared to most of modern Europe. If you wanted room to breathe, you were in the right place.

  Shay spent most of the drive staring quietly out of the window with his earbuds in. He was probably working on something, but he seemed to be enjoying the views too. There was a relaxed, contented atmosphere in our car.

  We stopped briefly for a leg stretch in Helmsdale, Sutherland, with about another forty-five minutes’ drive still to go. There was a nice café on the river there near Thomas Telford’s old bridge, and I took my coffee out onto the terrace to drink. It was a pretty little village with its own recently revamped harbour and marina. Helmsdale was semi-sheltered in the lee of the hill just to the north. Like Wick, it had once been home to a large herring fishing fleet. They’d even had a little gold rush there, back in the eighteen hundreds, panning the river tributaries. That the ‘modern’ village had been built to resettle communities removed from neighbouring straths as part of the Highland Clearances back in the nineteenth century was a less palatable aspect of its history.

  Well, at least the local crofting families had avoided forced emigration, which made them luckier than many. The Western Highlands had lost about a third of their population that way. Crippling debt and the threat of bank foreclosures had forced a lot of landlords to take draconian measures. It was either t
hat or sell off their estates, which many had also done. Enclosures of common land, a generalised move to create larger, more profitable farms, higher, unpayable rents, those factors had all contributed to the unsustainable position of thousands of tenant farmers. The Highland Potato Famine, striking hard on the heels of such measures, had sealed many of their fates.

  The old clan system had certainly had its faults, but the inalienable right of clan members to work the land in their own territories had been respected for hundreds of years. By the nineteenth century, though, that sense of mutual obligation between tenants and their landlords had all but gone in many places. Profit took precedence.

  Caitlin came outside to join me once she had her latte. It was slightly chilly, but it was pleasant enough in the sunshine out on the sheltered terrace overlooking the river. Shay had wandered off downstream a little to watch the water undisturbed and stretch the kinks out.

  “How are you getting on with Philips?” I asked as she came to lean on the wall next to me.

  “He’s alright,” she allowed, sipping her drink as the river burbled away below us. “Awfully curious about your cousin, though.”

  “Only to be expected, I suppose. What have you told him?”

  “Oh, I’ve mainly been suggesting he asks McKinnon or Anderson because I don’t know the answers to most of his questions. Do you work together often? How long has that been going on? Who is he officially contracted to? That sort of thing.”