Carrion Comfort

by Aline Templeton

  He’d have to phone the police, but by the time someone in a central office somewhere had taken the call and passed it on to Thurso and they managed to get themselves out here, hours could have passed with Fergus stuck on guard, fending off a renewed attack. The birds wouldn’t give up easily on such a promising meal.

  He looked around. The man’s clothes were filthy, damp and muddy, but he was lying on a surprisingly clean-looking tartan rug. If he pulled it out from under him he could cover him up with it and surely that would give him long enough to fetch a tarpaulin cover and weigh it down with stones.

  Moving him would be a distasteful task. Shuddering, Fergus tugged at the rug and the body flopped over as if it were boneless – a while dead, then, and with the movement he caught the sickly smell of corruption. He shuddered, though in its way it was a relief to know the poor sod definitely hadn’t been alive when the birds began their gruesome picnic. He didn’t touch him afterwards, just left him in the position he’d fallen into, covered him up with the rug and hurried out to the barn.

  When he came back, the ravens were still there; more, even, than there had been. Grabbing some stones from the garden first, he spread out the tarpaulin on top of the rug and weighed it down.

  Then he went back to the house and before he even made the phone call came back with a shotgun. They could prosecute him if they liked. If he got a couple of the bastards, it would be worth it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It had been a serious tactical error. In a bid to distance himself as much as possible from the guests arriving for his father’s seventieth birthday drinks party, Kelso Strang had positioned himself in the farther corner of the sitting room but as it filled up and the sound of braying well-bred voices reached decibel levels to rival the parrot house in the zoo, he found himself trapped.

  It all took him back to the cocktail parties of his army days. He had loathed them in the days when attending at the whim of the colonel was a professional duty; as a filial duty it was no better. Like the colonel, Major-General Sir Roderick Strang loved cocktail parties.

  Mary Strang loved them too. Her face was bright with the joy of holding a party in her very own house after more than forty years of army billets and she was bustling about, greeting old friends and new neighbours and plying them with her very own cheese straws. Kelso might have pleaded a sudden emergency if it would only have annoyed his father – always so ready to take offence – but he couldn’t bring himself to deny his mother her transparent pleasure in his presence.

  Now, as he found himself pinned into the corner by a mustard-cords-wearing Perthshire neighbour who had nothing worth saying to say but was saying it at length anyway, he cursed his conscience.

  ‘Do you shoot?’ the man said at last.

  As a one-time sniper in Afghanistan and former member of the Police Scotland Armed Response Unit, Kelso had a mad impulse to say, ‘Only people,’ but again his social conscience got the better of him. ‘No. Do you?’ he said instead.

  The man looked at him as if he’d said, ‘Do you speak English?’ ‘Well, yah. Not much point in living in Perthshire if you don’t shoot.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Kelso couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but the man was up for the small-talk challenge.

  ‘Though there’s fishing, of course. D’you fish?’

  Kelso had to disappoint him again. ‘No,’ he said, then added in extenuation, ‘I live in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Weekends too? Can’t think what you’d find to do at weekends, staying in the city.’

  It was almost with relief that Kelso saw his father’s rigidly upright figure spearheading its way towards him, as the crowd of guests parted like the Red Sea before Moses. The relief ebbed as he saw that he was leading across a tall girl with dark hair in the Kate Middleton style framing a long narrow face with large brown eyes.

  ‘Someone I want you to meet, Kelso,’ he said, ruthlessly interrupting the anecdote his neighbour had embarked on to illustrate how boring it had been last time he’d had to stay in Edinburgh. ‘Rosie Metcalfe – you remember Major Metcalfe, of course?’

  ‘Of course,’ Kelso said politely, nodding to Rosie, who gave him a smile that exposed rather too many teeth with a flash of upper gum and unfortunately accentuated an already-strong resemblance to a horse. A thoroughbred, naturally.

  ‘She’s here on her own with her parents.’ Smiling, he turned to Rosie and patted her arm. ‘Can’t have a pretty girl like you wasted on all these old buffers like me. And Kelso’s on his own now too, since his wife died last year.’

  He should be past caring about his father’s tactlessness but Kelso’s stomach knotted at the casual mention of Alexa, killed with their unborn baby in a car crash. Perhaps someday he would stop being haunted by grief and the irrational feeling of guilt at having signed the authorisation to switch off life support, but that day still seemed a long way off.

  Sir Roderick turned to the other man. ‘Now, Douglas, you come with me and leave these young people to get to know each other,’ he said and swept him off.

  There was a small, awkward silence. Then Rosie said, ‘I’m very sorry about your wife.’

  She seemed a nice girl. She was looking sweetly sympathetic and she had carefully not noticed the scar that ran down the right side of his face. Kelso gave a small grimace. ‘So am I,’ he said lightly. ‘And I apologise for my father. He’s had a subtlety bypass.’

  Relieved, she smiled. ‘Oh, I know! Aren’t parents ghastly? My ma is just as bad. Are you on leave?’

  Kelso frowned. ‘On leave?’

  She looked puzzled in her turn. ‘Aren’t you in the army? Your father—’

  His lips tightened. ‘I used to be, and he wishes I still was. I think he imagines if he states it often enough it’ll come true.’

  He could sense her discomfort. ‘So – do you have another job?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m a policeman.’

  Her eyes opened wide. ‘A policeman? Really?’

  She might as well have said, ‘Good gracious, how awful!’ It wasn’t that he hadn’t had this response before. Indeed, among his parents’ friends it was the standard reaction, so it was probably unfair of him to say, ‘Yes. Dreadfully déclassé, isn’t it?’ and he felt guilty when Rosie went red with embarrassment.

  ‘Sorry,’ she stumbled. ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t. I’m sorry – that was rude of me. I’m a detective inspector.’

  Her face brightened. ‘That sounds very interesting. Do tell me about it.’

  Training would out. Girls like Rosie, veterans of a hundred dinner parties, knew all the levers they were supposed to press to keep a conversation going. Veteran of a distressing number of army dinner parties himself, he felt the familiar wave of almost overpowering boredom sweep over him.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘Lots of paperwork and stuff, like everything else.’ A description of the last murder case he had been involved in wouldn’t be exactly cocktail party conversation.

  He was suddenly gripped around the legs and an accusing voice said, ‘Unkie, I was looking for you. You were hiding.’ His niece Betsy was scowling up at him, her big blue eyes full of reproach.

  He laughed and bent to pick her up. ‘Well, I’ve been here all the time. Maybe you were hiding from me.’

  She shook her blonde curls violently. ‘No, I wasn’t.’ Then she turned to study Rosie and, all woman even at three, gave her a suspicious look. ‘This is my unkie,’ she said firmly.

  ‘It’s her version of Uncle K,’ he explained. ‘This is the redoubtable Betsy.’

  Rosie laughed. ‘I can see that,’ she was saying when Kelso’s sister Finella came up, carrying a bottle of Prosecco. She held it out.

  ‘Mum wants you to circulate with this. There are senior army officers dying of thirst out there. Sorry to drag him away, Rosie.’

  Rosie said goodbye with a certain amount of relief, Kelso thought, as he went to do as he was told with the bottle in one ha
nd and Betsy on his hip, casting a triumphant glance at her rival over his shoulder.

  ‘You owe me one,’ Finella said in his ear as they walked away. ‘There was a look a desperation on both your faces.’

  ‘Oh dear. Nice girl, but—’

  ‘I know. Daughter of the Regiment. Not your type.’

  He didn’t have a ‘type’. Alexa had been a one-off and there wasn’t another. He let it pass. ‘Do you think I can escape once I’ve gone round with this till it’s empty? I don’t want Ma to be upset.’

  Betsy grabbed hold of his cheeks on either side and turned his head towards her. ‘I want you to come and see my drawing I did for you. Now!’ She jiggled up and down.

  Her mother gave a resigned sigh. ‘You shouldn’t pander to her. On the other hand, it would give you an excuse.’

  Kelso grinned. ‘Discipline’s your job. OK, Betsy. You’re a brat but I’ll do anything to get out of here. It’s bringing me out in a rash. I do sometimes wonder what Grandad would have made of all this.’

  ‘Knees-up down the pub with his miner mates after the shift was more his style. Dad always says darkly that you’re very like him. How are things going, anyway?’

  ‘Fine. It’s an interesting job. I’ve just got back from Ayrshire helping to mop up a crime syndicate – targeting farm machinery, would you believe.’

  Finella nodded. Then she said, ‘Are … are you around for a bit? I might pop in sometime.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said easily but, trained in observation, he looked at his sister more closely. She’d tried to make that sound offhand, but her body language was saying something different. She was looking tired too, he thought, though Betsy – tugging at his hair impatiently now – was enough to exhaust anyone. ‘Are you—’ he began, but before he could finish his sentence his mother appeared.

  ‘Now, you two, we didn’t arrange a party for you to stand talking to each other. Fin, Audrey Stephenson was hoping to have a chat – she’s over there by the corner cabinet. Off you go!’

  Rolling her eyes, Finella departed. Kelso said, ‘I’m just going to do a round with the bottle and then Betsy’s going to show me her drawing, aren’t you, monster?’

  Mary wasn’t fooled. ‘I expect you’ll be taking off after that, won’t you? Thanks for coming anyway, darling. It means a lot to Roddy.’

  Kelso doubted that, but he didn’t argue. As he finished his task and made his way to the door with Betsy crowing in delight, he saw that Roderick had noticed and his lips were tightened in exasperation.

  PC Davidson, sent out from the Thurso Police Station to the Mowat farm on the edge of the village of Forsich, was very young, chubby-faced and pink-cheeked. Perhaps in a gesture towards gravitas he had grown a small moustache, but to Fergus Mowat’s jaundiced eye it looked rather as if it had been stuck on for a fancy-dress party. Wet behind the ears, he concluded.

  ‘You took your time. Did they tell you what the situation is?’ he asked.

  The man shook his head. ‘Never do,’ he said simply. ‘Just, incident reported out here.’

  ‘Ah,’ Fergus said. ‘Got a strong stomach, have you, laddie?’

  ‘Course,’ the constable said stoutly, but Fergus could see his Adam’s apple moving up and down as he swallowed convulsively, and the pink tinge faded from his cheeks as he listened to the details. ‘That’s … that’s horrible. Was he … was he properly dead?’ he said at last.

  ‘Oh aye, he was dead. Very dead, is my guess.’

  ‘Right.’ Davidson squared his shoulders. ‘Better get it over with, then.’ He followed Fergus up the track, casting nervous looks up at the sky on the way.

  ‘It’s all right – they’ve given up. Brought down a couple of the buggers and then the rest scarpered,’ Fergus said, gesturing towards the sagging wire fence round the garden of the cottage where a couple of the black birds, like crumpled rags, hung upside down.

  The sun was high in the sky now, baking down on the tarpaulin that had protected the corpse from the birds, but the flies were gathering and when the constable lifted it up the stench was indescribable. He dropped it back, choking, but Fergus, who was standing at a safer distance, gave him credit for managing not to throw up.

  ‘Come down the house and we’ll get the wife to make a cuppa,’ he said, and Davidson nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  Rhona was nowhere to be seen. Fergus switched on the kettle, fetched the mugs and waved him to a seat at the kitchen table.

  At last Davidson found his voice again. ‘What happened to him?’

  Fergus shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Dossing down there, maybe a drug overdose? Who knows. Could have been there quite a while.’

  ‘I’d say.’ Davidson got out his notebook. ‘Better take down all the details. Full name?’

  It took some time; the constable wasn’t the speediest writer. But by the end Fergus was satisfied that he’d got down the main point – that the man had been lying as if he was asleep and had only tipped over onto his face as Fergus pulled the rug out from under him to be able to cover him up. ‘Quite a smart-looking rug for a down-and-out,’ he added. ‘Not that I suppose that matters.’

  ‘No sign of foul play, though?’

  ‘None at all. Unless you’re talking about the birds.’ Fergus gave a short laugh at the pun, though Davidson only looked bewildered.

  ‘Right, right.’ He tucked away his notebook and stood up. ‘I’ll request immediate assistance. They’ll have to send someone along from CID.’

  ‘Better make it fast,’ Fergus said grimly. ‘The smell of that’ll have every fox in the area gathering and if they think I’m going to stand guard all night they’ve got another think coming.’

  The head office of Curran Services was in a building overlooking the busy harbour in Aberdeen where trawlers and the great ferries for the Northern Isles and Scandinavia competed for harbour space with the PSVs – platform supply vessels – that provide logistic support to the oil rigs out in the North Sea. It was a lot quieter these days, with the downturn in oil prices, but Curran Services was well-enough established and shrewdly enough managed to have weathered the initial storm and had even taken over a couple of its less-well-managed rivals.

  Ailie Johnston was short and stocky, with grey hair cut in a neat middle-aged bob; shrewd blue eyes, very bright behind sensible spectacles, were her only striking feature. She was frowning as she came into the boss’s office.

  The man who sat behind the huge solid teak desk that had been Pat Curran’s up to four months ago looked up and noticed her expression.

  ‘Got a problem, Ailie?’ he said.

  ‘It’s just that Niall’s still not in. I’ve tried phoning and leaving messages, but he’s not replied. Should I maybe be getting someone to go round to his flat?’

  Bruce Michie seemed irritated by the question. His small mouth tightened into a pout and he shrugged. ‘If he’s sulking because I gave him a right flea in his ear last week, it’s his problem. It’s Friday now – leave it over the weekend, Ailie, and if he doesn’t turn up on Monday you can send someone round with his P45.’

  The PA hesitated. ‘That’s all week no one’s seen him. Should we not …?’

  Michie gave a short, sneering laugh. ‘Are you feart he’s perished all alone in his flat and any time now his cat’ll get round to taking wee nibbles – supposing he’s got one? For God’s sake, he’s a healthy loon. Probably went out on the randan at the weekend and now he’s playing sick. Like I said, leave it till Monday.’

  There was a flush of annoyance in his pudgy cheeks and Ailie subsided. Arguing with the boss was way above her pay grade. She turned to go, then paused. ‘Any news of Gabrielle? You went up that way last weekend, didn’t you?’

  Michie didn’t look pleased about that either, his stubby fingers drumming on the desk impatiently. ‘Gabrielle? Didn’t see her. It was just a fishing weekend. Last I heard she was still much the same. Just needing a good rest. Probably.’

  ‘Right.’ A
ilie went out, her mind still on the woman who had briefly been her boss. It was a shame about Gabrielle Ross; she’d been determined to carry on Pat’s business – not easy in the fevered financial climate at the moment.

  He’d been a good boss and a smart businessman, though there were those who said if you went to sup with him you’d be wise to take a long spoon. His drainage business up in the Flow Country had gone bankrupt but he’d come out all right and then made his fortune with Curran Services. There were folks up in Caithness who’d spit on the ground if you said his name, though.

  Right enough, not a lot of people were neutral when it came to Pat, but Ailie always spoke as she found, and she’d liked him. Larger than life, Pat had been − a big man in every way, a force of nature with the legendary charm of the Irish, and it seemed all wrong to see Michie with his pot belly and his bald head sitting in Pat’s great leather swivel chair, his wee leggies almost too short to reach the ground – but fair away with himself even so.

  Working for Pat had been like living with a north-east gale: exhilarating, as long as you could still stand up and it didn’t actually blow the roof off. It hadn’t seemed possible that he could go, just like that, at only fifty-four.

  And Gabrielle, poor wee soul, had done her best to step into his size twelves, when she couldn’t be more than twenty-four or five. She’d thought the world of her dad and he’d been grooming her to take over – just not for another ten years, supposing he could ever be persuaded to retire. She’d come in the day after the funeral, white as a sheet and with black circles round her eyes, but she’d still put Michie back in his place when he’d tried to sideline her.

  Oh, she was her father’s daughter all right – tough enough to do whatever had to be done and like him not prepared to suffer fools gladly, so she’d enemies as well as friends. But in the oil world you needed to be tough, especially if you were a woman, and Ailie admired that. She’d rather be working for her now than for the sleekit Michie – sly, slimy wee nyaff.