The Sideman

by Caro Ramsay

  Alone, in the street, pissing down, abandoning her son for the company of a dead body found at the top of the pass on a dark and stormy morning, thinking about a woman she had never met.

  DC Wyngate drove into the car park at Inveruglass in response to a call from the Wildlife Protection Unit. Not his territory but they needed a hand and somehow the buck had stopped with him. It felt like demotion.

  It had taken him an hour to drive the forty miles; much quicker once he had got out the city boundary and the rush hour traffic and he had made good time. The car park was largely empty, except a cop car, small van for the café and a Mini Clubman. It was too early in the day and too late in the year for the coaches full of old folk, on their three days’ tour of the Highlands, staying in second-rate hotels but still cheaper than heating the houses at home. Nobody would go up to the viewing site. Not only was it too misty to see anything but the back of the head of the person standing in front of you, there was the small matter of the blue and white tape cordoning the area off.

  He parked his car alongside the other, opened the door and looked at the sky, then opened the boot and put on his heavy duty jacket and his wellington boots.

  Ahern introduced himself. He was still shaking slightly, not with nerves or shock but with finely controlled anger. Wyngate thought he looked the type, waterproof Rohans tucked into his serious Hunter wellies. The walking stick had been carved from a tree branch, the handle of it made from a horn or an antler of some kind. He was older than Wyngate had presumed; he had the air of a civil engineer or an architect out for a long country walk about him rather than a wildlife ranger. He was not far wrong as Ahern introduced himself as a volunteer ranger, now he was retired. Wyngate nodded as Ahern said he had been an architectural surveyor in his previous life, used to working with mines and underground waterways.

  They walked across the car park, Ahern talking about the amount of blood, the rainfall, how much of it would have already been washed away so God knew how much the poor creature had lost at the time of the … He had difficulty finding the most appropriate word and ended up settling for ‘event’. Wyngate struggled to walk and take notes but fortunately Ahern was clear, concise, accurate as to what he had witnessed and explained why he was there so early in the morning. As they started to walk up the hill on the path that passed the viewing point, Ahern became distressed, as he spoke of the amount of blood. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. To his eyes it looked as though something had been chased, hunted down, he nodded to the north through the undergrowth saying there was another smaller path there that went in a long circuitous route back to the car park.

  Ahern looked up at the sky, mimicking Wyngate’s actions as he had left the car. ‘Even with the rain washing some away. There’s too much blood,’ he repeated, as if the rain itself had stolen the blood, and would the guilty party like to give it back.

  Wyngate looked at the ground, trusting Ahern’s story rather than his own eyes. Ahern knew the area well and had got into the habit of staying away from the official car parks and laybys on the west side of the loch. He had come across a few rough sleepers and wild campers, illegal campsites littered with empty booze bottles and occasionally the odd syringe and bit of burned tinfoil. That morning he had been walking around the loch on the north-west side making his way down to the viewpoint from the north, when he had smelled the blood in the air.

  ‘Smelled it?’ asked Wyngate, panting a little with the effort of keeping up with the man old enough to be his father.

  ‘Oh, yes, fresh and plenty. Somebody will have a deer in their freezer tonight and I hope it poisons them.’

  ‘Any trouble up here with weird goings-on? Satanic stuff? Anything like that?’

  ‘Nope. Just the devil that is the drugs, and that’s enough.’

  The two of them walked, Ahern leading the way, no sense of urgency, an easy stride of his long legs making easy of the steep hill. Wyngate was thinking about the wallaby killings, animal sacrifices? Killing animals to conjure up the spirit of Old Nick did at least make some kind of sense.

  ‘There’s no skin, no intestines, no internal tissue, just the blood? No sign that something was gralloched here?’ Wyngate asked. ‘Could it be human? I mean, can a human lose that amount of blood and live? I’m thinking about the drug wars that are raging in the city.’

  ‘You are a city cop, I’m a country ranger. Both red deer and humans have eight pints of blood. One of those things you get to know doing this job.’

  Wyngate realized that the prospect of a human victim had crossed Ahern’s mind as well. ‘The last three bodies up here were drug related, admittedly little more than kids out getting their kicks from illegal or legal highs, but they were all cold once they got to the pathologist’s table.’ Wyngate was already thinking that he was getting that blood tested, even if they found an antler and a copy of Bambi. He was sure the CSI team carried now an onsite blood test for that so they didn’t spend too much money investigating the site of a dog fight. A two-test system, one to make sure it was blood, the second to make sure it was human. He knew it was an immunochromatic procedure and once they had that, they could then decide whether or not they needed to look for more samples for future DNA testing, but it was all time sensitive in this weather.

  Ahern stopped, suddenly, putting his arm out to his side preventing them from going any further. He looked down at the grass, flattened and fractured, a main area, three-feet wide that narrowed to a tail over a space of about ten feet. There were bloodstains still easily visible, not complete, the veins of it had been washed away leaving droplets in the leaves and spikes in the channels of the grass leaves. There were traces of it, here and there all over.

  By force of habit, Wyngate started looking around, half-listening to what Ahern was saying. His eyes scanning the ground for anything odd. He thought he saw a black bird, near the trunk of a sapling that was bending in the wind. It was small, jaggy and a black that was too dense to be natural.

  He walked over and knelt down beside it. It hadn’t been lying there for very long, the fractured plastic of the Samsung was clean. It was partially embedded into the ground.

  Animals do many great things but they are not generally known for smashing brand new mobile phones. Wyngate make a quick calculation. Whoever it was had been wounded and was probably deceased. They now needed manpower to fan out and grid search the place of the attack. He turned to look out, the Ben was covered in swirling mist; the water was keeping its secrets.

  This was now extremely time sensitive.

  He excused himself from Ahern and started making his phone calls. Crime scene first and then hospitals.

  FIVE

  There was no doubt about it. Valerie Abernethy was feeling better. Her function was improved and her brain was clearer but she had always been a high-functioning alcoholic, and she was very bright. There was a lot she could do with very little thought or effort, it all came so easy to her. She had never really learned to challenge herself. Now she was learning the hard way just how difficult it could be for her to get up in the morning. For the first time she had accepted medication for depression and her mood swings. She had admitted that to the young doctor who had appeared at the door of the surgery where Archie had dumped her. He was a hard-faced man who spoke in terms that made it perfectly clear she had two choices, do as she was told or die.

  It was up to her.

  He was not going to waste his time and effort if she was not going to do anything about it right here and right now.

  She had looked back at him and, in a quiet voice that did not sound like her at all, said that she had lost her entire family.

  ‘So,’ he said, with a beguiling tilt of the head. She knew this meant she had walked into a trap and he was about to close it. ‘You were totally sober before that? I think not.’

  The doctor had repeated, ‘So I’m not going to do anything about it if you are not going to do anything yourself. You need to apply yourself to getting better.
’ He had leaned back in the seat, talking over what she had been through in the last few years, ticking the points off on his fingers, by the time he had finished Valerie had felt that she would have felt terrible for that person, and that person was herself. She was one step removed from it all. And then the doc had said, ‘I don’t think that this is a good time for you to be making big decisions. You need to keep your life on the straight and narrow, you need to let your blood chemistry stabilize. You need to regain the capacity for clear thought so you can get through the day. That will be your first challenge, once you get through that then we can look at the other options. And please, don’t ever do anything on impulse. Recovering alcoholics can have severe issues with impulse control. If you get an idea, even if you think it’s the greatest idea in the world, write it down and think about it again the following day. It will be that lack of filter that has got you into much of the mess you are in.’

  She thought about the gun she had tucked away in the back of her bag that was leaning against her leg. She opened her mouth, getting ready to say that she still had the means to kill herself, and that was still her intention, but when she spoke all that came out her mouth was, ‘I have nothing to do. I don’t even have a cat to look after.’

  ‘You have plenty to do, you just don’t want to do any of it. You need to work on yourself.’ Those were his final words as he pressed print and the prescription slips started to churn out. She tuned out, hearing him vaguely add something, spoken to the wall, or to himself, about being a bright young woman, with a good brain and that the brain will find something to worry about unless she gave it something constructive to do, something challenging but insignificant so she could get her teeth into it but not fret if she failed at it. Then she would be OK.

  ‘And you are going to stay with your uncle?’

  ‘So he tells me.’

  ‘Best thing you can do’.

  And here she was …

  At Uncle Archie’s house.

  Valerie looked round the room, not recognizing it but she recognized the style – it was very Pippa. Very Marks and Spencer’s. But she had no real idea when she had last been in this house, or if she had ever been in this neat little bungalow with the lawn cut in precise stripes at all. She could remember the detached house out in Milngavie where Archie and Pippa had lived before they downsized. When she was a child, Archie and her dad worked together in the fiscal service, and Pippa and her mum were housewives. Valerie and Abigail had played in that house often as children. Uncle Archie and Auntie Pippa were great fun in the way that parents can never be, giving too much freedom and too many sweeties.

  They had been second parents to both girls.

  It was only now, as an adult herself, that she wondered if Archie and Pippa had wanted children too, in the same way that she herself had yearned for them, once she knew that she couldn’t have them. Archie and Pippa seemed to have everything else.

  Having a family had never really worked out for them and they had sold up and moved to this lovely, but charmless bungalow. Small, neat, easily looked after.

  Archie knew Abigail almost as much as he knew her, his god-daughter. He had been Uncle Archie to them both.

  She thought back to what the GP had said earlier at her emergency appointment. ‘We will get these prescriptions picked up, stay well, get plenty of rest, and after a week we will see where we are. We need to survive seven days. If we can do that, if you do that, then we can all move it forward. Here’s the phone and contact details of the AA and support that is available. If you get stuck. pick up the phone and speak to them. I know you don’t want to hear it right now but you are a very lucky woman, you have somebody who’s willing to take you in and look after you.’

  She did.

  Archie Walker, bless him.

  Knowing her was like cuddling a serpent.

  Wyngate had felt quite the king pin, in charge of the locus on the bloodstained site at the loch. There were CSIs crawling everywhere. Cops he had not been on the same shift rotation with for ages had appeared to help out, or as he was starting to see it, they were here to get in his way and he started to wish that somebody else would come along and claim responsibility for the crime scene. It was becoming a poisoned chalice.

  He had been told a SIO from Balloch had been appointed, but as they had no real idea what they were investigating, he had gone back to base and had so far refused to return to a site of a ‘bad nosebleed and a stolen mobile phone’.

  Then a smartly dressed young man had limped out of a very clean Audi and asked the nearest uniform who was in charge. A minute later DS Viktor Mulholland had introduced himself to Wyngate, very sarcastically. He had been seconded back down from West End Central so the bosses said, but it was obvious the people upstairs had been given the ideal opportunity to get them out the way, in a two for one deal.

  ‘Do you have a clue what’s going on?’ asked Mulholland.

  ‘You are the superior officer,’ said Wyngate looking around. ‘And that’s the site up there.’ He pointed up to An Ceann Mor.

  ‘No way am I going up there. No chance, I have a bad leg.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Wyngate, then explained that he thought the CID should already be here and that, if in charge of anything, it should be traffic. Coaches kept pulling into the car park and had to be helped to U-turn and get back out again, although the police activity was proving a bigger tourist attraction than the loch with its beauty hidden behind a bank of rain.

  In the end, Wyngate and Mulholland had a quick resume of the situation, they both had been dropped in the shit by their superiors so they may as well make the best of it.

  ‘The blood, is it human?’

  ‘It is. They are looking for a body. So far, the nearest five A & E’s have come up with no admissions that match this scenario. A search team is coming and I think we need traffic out to get the road signposted right at the start of the loch turn off.’

  Mulholland nodded and looked up at the viewing point, seeing the CSIs walking around in their protective suits, looking rather unworldly high up in the mist. ‘We’ll hold the reins until the results come in, it will go up the tree quick enough. Where is McCaffrey? Has he gone up in the world or something?’

  ‘Who?’ Wyngate looked at his notebook, he had kept an inventory of names. ‘No McCaffrey here.’

  ‘Oh, he’s here. I‘m bloody sure that’s his car in the car park, can’t be that many Mini Clubmen around with three baby seats. He’ll have sneaked in when your back was turned, he’s an ambitious wee sod that one. I’ll see what’s happening over in the car park and let you know.’

  He wandered off, leaving Wyngate to ponder his next move.

  The search dog had been called out, they still had the chance of finding somebody alive. The divers were more expensive and that could wait until there was a higher presumption of death at the scene. It would be the easiest thing in the world to roll a human body down the steep hill into the loch, where it would fall down a sheer rock face into very deep cold water. The blood was human, no doubt about that. They had taken samples at four-inch intervals from the wide patch of grass that appeared to be the site of the first, and main, attack. Ahern was proving very useful as a wildlife tracker and backed up by a constable, the two of them were inching their way along a path that did not exist to the naked eye, both now wearing shoe covers in case they were right and they were walking in the footsteps of the victim. And maybe, whoever had been pursuing them. Or a killer fleeing the scene.

  Wyngate felt he could leave Mulholland in charge at the car park so he too was following Ahern, knowing that the guys were on to something. Then the search dog arrived and immediately followed the path of the three men, nose in the air, rain glistening in baubles on his ebony saddleback, as he trotted along as if this wasn’t difficult at all.

  ‘A second site? What do we think?’

  ‘Well, something happened at the peak there, then somebody ran or was chased down here.’

  ‘
Trying to get to the car park?’

  ‘Why not go out the way they came in?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t safe to go back that way obviously. The path is really only wide enough for two side by side, not a huge amount of room to get past somebody who is trying to stop you from leaving. Or had stabbed you and was standing there with a knife? I’d run in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Or if there was more than one of them chasing you?’

  The dog was moving on, slower now, stopping every now and again to check, casting a glance at his handler to see if that was OK. Then he stopped. And did an about turn, curving his spine into the length of his own body, getting ready to come back the way he had come.

  ‘Why is he doing that?’ asked Ahern.

  ‘The scent runs out, he’d follow it if it was there to be followed. Whoever was here retraced their steps and went back the way they came. Or was airlifted out by an alien.’

  ‘Or,’ said Wyngate, ‘they caught the poor bugger here, dragged him across this grass and tossed him in the loch.’

  ‘Then the dog would take us to the water’s edge, but he hasn’t. So it didn’t happen like that.’

  Wyngate looked at the dog, who looked back at him with eyes that seemed to be asking for a bacon sandwich. He didn’t know how much to trust it. ‘Yeah, thanks for that.’ Wyngate’s airwave crackled. He answered it, ready to point out that he wasn’t a rank that got paid enough to do this job, some of those fat bastards back at Central could come out again now that this had gone up the priority list.

  At the car park, Mulholland had been asking around about McCaffrey, keen to speak to the young officer who had got close to Costello during the Braithwaite case. His eyes kept gravitating towards the Clubman. The windows were condensed over. He checked the other cars that had been parked there for a couple of hours now. Light fog over the windows, McCaffrey’s looked thick and dense, as if the car had been there all night.