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

by Oliver Davies

  We checked the stony ground up to the high tide mark without finding anything there either and then climbed back up. Shay gazed across at the ruined castle and its incongruous scaffolding. Conservation efforts were ongoing, but the place had been abandoned for three hundred years and had deteriorated significantly during that time. The World Monuments Fund had put Castle Sinclair Girnigoe on its top one hundred ‘most endangered’ watch list back in 2002, but the Clan Sinclair Trust had been able to do a lot of important work in preserving the place since then. The Inner and Outer Baileys were protected as Scheduled Ancient Monuments, and the Trust was doing what it could to prevent further erosion. The West Gatehouse and the Tower House were in better condition than the rest of the ruin, and hopefully, at some point, a really thorough archaeological investigation of the place could be safely carried out. That could provide some interesting insights into how people had lived here in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries.

  “Think any of the stories are true, about Campbell of Glenorchy getting his agents to slip Sinclair of Keiss’ men a load of whisky the night before Altimarlach?” Shay asked me.

  “I wouldn’t surprise me. Campell doesn’t seem like he was the sort to take the moral high ground. It’s more likely that Sinclair’s men just got pissed celebrating their ‘victory’ in the scuffle they’d had that day, though.”

  The Battle of Altimarlach, in the summer of 1680, had been the last of the feudal Clan Battles in Scotland. Some argued that the Battle of Mulroy, eight years later, should be considered being so, but the involvement of government troops disqualified it. Altimarlach was pure clan feuding. The indebted sixth Earl of Caithness, George Sinclair, had allegedly transferred his estates to Campbell of Glenorchy, his principal creditor. When George died in 1676, Campbell was awarded the title to the earldom and Sinclair of Keiss, George’s nephew and rightful heir, contested the claim. The courts ruled against him, but Keiss had the support of nobles and commoners alike in the area and spent the next few years doing everything he could to make it impossible for Campbell to collect rents or take proper control of the area. Nobody around here had liked the scheming interloper.

  Sinclair’s forces may have been routed at Altimarlach when Campbell invaded Caithness with his own army to back him, but Sinclair didn’t give up. He’d later besieged and retaken this castle. His lands and title were finally legally restored to him a year after the Battle of Altimarlach, and the oppressive Glenorchy was made Earl of Breadalbane by way of compensation. The courts and the crown were fickle allies in those days. The shifting sands of politics, as always, did not offer any man a firm footing on which to stand. Historically, Sir John Campell of Glenorchy was not a character who left a pleasant taste in the mouth. He’d helped Royalist forces during the Massacre of the Macdonalds at Glencoe. Untrustworthy and avaricious, he switched sides as suited his interests and happily took money from both the Clans and the crown. They didn’t call him ‘Slippery John’ for nothing.

  “They say a lot of Sinclair’s men drowned in the river, trying to flee,” Shay said, staring off inland. The battle had taken place a few miles west of Wick by the burn of Altimarlach as it had been called then.

  “Most of them were untrained, and a lot of them were elderly. Besides, if they were as hungover as the ballad claims when they marched out of Wick that morning, they’d have been in no condition to fight, anyway.”

  “Right. Incapacitated, thoroughly thrashed, drowned.” Ah! I saw what he was getting at.

  “Only this time, it was the outsider, the ‘invader’ who was given that treatment. You don’t think there’s any significance to that, do you?”

  “No, I doubt our murderers will turn out to be history buffs. I was just thinking that human nature doesn’t seem to have changed much since then. Tactics that work well generally tend to be used over and over again. Come on, let’s catch up to the others. I don’t think we’re going to have any luck finding evidence here.”

  He was right. We did pick up and bag some bits of litter between us on the way back to the cars, but those could have been dropped by anyone or blown there from a long way off. They certainly weren’t worth analysing at this point, but they might be, later, when we had some actual suspects that we wished to place at the scene and some fingerprints to try to match.

  We had no DNA evidence and no clue to the vehicle used by the murderers that night. There was still a chance that we might get something useful from CCTV footage, either in town or on the road out here, but Munro’s detectives had already looked through what there was without finding anything useful. That didn’t mean they hadn’t missed something, but I wasn’t counting on it.

  It was time to get down to the real work. We had a lot of people we needed to talk to. Mills and Collins could make a start on the town’s pubs and see what the bar staff managed to remember, with a few carefully phrased questions. The rest of us had an appointment to keep down at the VOW offices. The first people I wanted to speak with were the two men who’d been out drinking with Visser last Friday, but we had a lot of other people to interview over the next couple of days. The men who worked on the Crew Transport Vessels and the technicians they carried were a very mixed group. That all the technicians, whatever their nationality, would also speak very good English was a given, but you tended to get better information out of people when you could speak to them in their own first language when clarification was needed. I hadn’t put any of the foreign nationals on Philips and Caitlin’s half of the list.

  Shay had hit me with a pile of statistics amongst the other information he’d sent me yesterday. The UK, Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands were all major European players in the offshore wind farm business, with Belgium, Norway and Sweden also making considerable investments in the field. It was only natural that there would be some workers from other countries involved in a project like the one in Wick.

  Three major companies had formed a partnership to make the Vik Offshore Windfarm project a reality here in Caithness, and they were all specialists in the field of renewables. Two of those were British-based, the other was Danish. The EU now had onshore and offshore wind farms connected to the grid in ten countries, and wind power had become both very financially competitive and a fast-growing industry. It already supplied over ten per cent of all power consumed in the EU and was set to go much further yet. Over seventy per cent of that power came from installations in the North Sea.

  Despite the costs of building and maintaining a wind farm of that size, the potential profits for investors were enormous. How much did the average household spend annually on domestic electricity bills? Vik alone could power up to four hundred and fifty thousand homes. Even if the wind farms sold off the power they produced at low prices, twenty-five years of use out of those giant turbines added up to some serious money. Nobody made a total investment of over two and a half billion pounds lightly. Scotland was already close to powering all of its electricity demands from renewables, and most of that came from wind energy. In 2009, renewables met less than thirty per cent of our national energy needs. By 2015, we’d managed to get that up to fifty-nine per cent and, by next year, we’d be only a few per cent short of being completely green. As one of the windiest countries in Europe, we were certainly on track to become the ‘Saudi Arabia of renewables.’ Huge strides in power storage technologies expanded the potential enormously.

  Philips and Caitlin were right behind us as I pulled into a parking spot down on the harbourfront. I could see two of VOW’s catamarans moored nearby in the previously unused corner of the inner harbour that they had repurposed for their own use. The catamarans, according to the information Shay had supplied, were long-term charters owned by a British company and were usually crewed by a team of three. Kaj Visser had spent most of the last year of his life working on one of those boats. I was very interested in what his colleagues may have to say about him.

  We crossed the road and headed for the big glass door that served as the entrance to the Oper
ations and Maintenance base for the wind farm.

  Seven

  Shay’s background check on Kaj Visser had given us a reasonably good picture of his life history. Kaj had been born into a respectable, educated family. His father was a schoolteacher, and his mother held a low-level management position with De Koninklijke Porceleyne Fles, the only surviving pottery factory of the many that had been operating in Delft during the seventeenth century.

  Kaj was the middle child of three, all boys. Neither he nor his brothers had been outstanding students, but they’d all done well enough to be candidates for university admission. His brothers had both opted to pursue the academic path further after graduating from high school, but Kaj had instead enlisted in the Royal Netherlands Navy, where he’d served for five years. The skills he’d gained during those years had made him an excellent candidate for the career he’d then decided to pursue. He liked the sea, and he’d discovered that he preferred working on smaller boats, so the merchant navy held no appeal for him. The burgeoning offshore wind farm business offered an attractive alternative, and he’d had no trouble in finding employment there. The government of the Netherlands programme for meeting their renewable energy targets by 2023 provided plenty of opportunity for a young man like Visser to gain a spot. He’d worked on the Q7 wind farm, twenty-three kilometres off the Dutch coast from Egmond aan Zee, before coming to Scotland. He had a spotless service record; no failed drug tests, no drinking on the job, reliable, steady, experienced; just the kind of person most in demand for a role like the one he’d come here to fill. As his latest manager here in Wick had told Munro’s people, Visser was an excellent employee.

  His social media accounts had given us a glimpse into Visser’s personal life here in Wick. Like many men in their twenties, Kaj was not actively seeking a life partner, but he did enjoy the company of equally unattached young women. Munro’s people had been told that it was rare that he didn’t find a willing partner to hook up with on his nights out, and we’d gleaned a few names from his Messenger history. Shay had frowned over the banking records when he’d compared them to Visser’s duty rotas last night.

  “All of his monthly expenditures seem to add up, except one. You’d think he’d spend a good bit more than usual on the nights he was out doing the rounds of the pubs, but he must have been paying with cash because he didn’t use his card anywhere.”

  “And?” I’d asked.

  “There aren’t any matching cash withdrawals to explain it. His wages went directly into his bank account but, looking at these figures, I’d say he was getting regular cash in hand from somewhere else too.”

  “Any gambling activity?”

  “Not much. A modest sum to play with each month, but he never did more than dip his toes in the water there, not on the site he used, anyway. We could check the local bookies, but I’d say it was controlled, low-cost entertainment, not a problem habit.”

  So, if Kaj had been getting regular, cash in hand payments from somewhere, what had they been for? Looking at those work rotas, I didn’t see a lot of spare time for moonlighting at another job. Tax dodging aside, there was always a chance that wherever the extra money had been coming from, Visser had been up to something illegal.

  A couple of the girls in his messenger history had become semi-regular dates for Visser for a short while each. I wanted to talk to them too, but I’d need to connect them to Visser legitimately before we could go knocking at their doors. I knew that Shay was itching to get his hands on Visser’s personal laptop to poke around some more, anyway. He was officially cleared for carrying out Digital Device Examinations, so I was hoping that we’d be able to pull the same information from there.

  I’d spent some more time yesterday evening reviewing the interviews that had already been conducted and compiling a list of further questions to ask. Philips and Caitlin could be trusted to follow up on anything else that popped up during their own interviews, and I could always call their subjects back in after listening to the recordings myself if I thought they’d missed something.

  VOW had been expecting us, and a welcoming committee of three shook our hands whilst sadly shaking their heads over the awful thought that anyone would want to kill such a nice young man. I got the distinct impression that although they were more than happy to facilitate our enquiries, they didn’t think Visser’s murder had anything to do with his job.

  The block of buildings that VOW had chosen for their base in Wick had been very nicely renovated, with the nineteenth-century exterior beautifully restored. I knew that the company had spent over twenty million pounds repurposing the previously disused corner of the harbour they needed to use and renovating these buildings for their Operations & Maintenance base. A drop in the ocean, well under one per cent of their total budget for the project. These nineteenth-century buildings had been in a very sorry state, and the new slipway and pontoons outside were also a definite improvement. This investment was a good thing for Wick. The company was going to provide up to ninety new permanent jobs here, and VOW had also set up community funds in both Caithness and Moray, which would pour another few million into local improvement projects over the next few years.

  Much as I would have liked to indulge my cousin’s curiosity by accepting an offer of a tour of the premises, I decided to decline. Apart from the control room itself, there wouldn’t be much else of interest to see. Warehouses and offices tended to be pretty much the same wherever they were. Instead, we were taken directly to the two adjoining rooms that had been put aside for our use. Both were perfectly adequate spaces, probably destined to be offices sometime in the near future. For now, a table and chairs were all we required, and those had been provided.

  Shay and I settled in, and he set his laptop up while I poured us a glass of water each from the waiting jug. He liked to have his transcription programme running during interviews, correcting errors as they appeared. It gave him something to do with the part of his attention not engaged in listening and observing and saved us valuable time later. The first person on our list today was Alexander Morris, known to all as ‘Sandy.’ Sandy Morris was thirty-seven and had started his adult career in the small, surviving local fishing fleet. His years in that trade had given him an enviable knowledge of local waters, depths, currents, shoals and ever-changing conditions. The great days of the herring fisheries here were long gone, but lobsters, crabs, prawns, and scallops were still commercially landed in Wick.

  Once we were ready, we didn’t have to wait more than a few minutes before Morris knocked and let himself in. The company had scheduled things very efficiently for us. Sandy was a lanky, well-weathered, Nordic type of Scot with habitually squinting grey eyes more used to viewing the world from the deck of a boat than any office chair. His hair did happen to be sandy, but it could just have easily been black or brown or red. A lot of Alexanders and Alasdairs went by ‘Sandy’, especially in Scotland. He’d been one of the three men who worked with Visser most regularly, crewing one of the transfer vessels.

  “Mr Morris? I’m Detective Chief Inspector Keane. Thank you for coming to speak with me this morning.” I rose to shake his hand before inviting him to take a seat and resettling myself. “I understand that you and Kaj were good friends? I’m sorry for your loss.” He sat back, seemingly relaxed, and looked me over, attempting to take my measure.

  “Aye, we were. Not close friends or old friends, but we liked each other well enough.” His gaze flicked sideways to where Shay was hunched down behind his laptop, then to the recorder plugged into the side of it. “Who’s he?”

  Shay glanced up through a double shield of blue lenses and hair. “I’m the techie, translator and general dogsbody,” he admitted, letting a little bit of a Galway accent through and half rising to extend a slender-fingered hand. “Sandy, right?” Morris shook the offered limb with a hesitant smile as he read the dangling badge hanging around my cousin’s neck.

  “CIO?”

  “Civilian Investigation Officer. That’s the ro
le I’ve been assigned for this case.”

  “So you’re working with the police, but you’re not a police officer?”

  “That’s right. I’m usually just used as a specialist consultant, but sometimes I’m asked to help with an investigation in person. DCI Keane has a few foreign nationals on his interview list for today. Having a multilingual translator on hand can help clear up any minor confusions.”

  Morris nodded, looking mildly curious. “Irish?”

  “I am, but I’ve spent far more time in Scotland. I kept dual nationality, though.”

  “Lucky you!” Sandy gave him a wryly envious little smile. Lucky us, I corrected that internally. I found the very idea of needing a travel visa to visit the rest of Europe offensive.

  I poured a third glass of water and placed it in front of him. “Mr Morris, some of the questions I’m going to ask you today are pretty much repeats of the ones you heard from DI Foster on Tuesday. I know that might be a little annoying, but please try to be patient with me. We all want to make sure that whoever killed Kaj isn’t allowed to get away with it.”

  “Fair enough,” he nodded judiciously. “So you’ve been given the case now, have you? I didn’t think you were one of the local boys.”

  “Fresh up from Inverness. It’s not unusual, when a murder case comes up, for an outside Serious Crimes team to sometimes be sent in to help.”

  “Specialty of yours, are they? Murder cases?”

  “I’ve successfully closed a few.” And committed one myself, according to the letter of the law. Shay may have been the weapon I’d wielded, but the responsibility was all mine. I’d been the one to make the decision. I was still hoping that hadn’t been one of the biggest mistakes I’d ever made. The recent restlessness my cousin had been feeling was almost certainly coincidental, but it was still a little worrying.