Two Years After ; Friends Who Lie ; No More Secrets

by Paul J. Teague

  The call connected. She was standing directly in front of the black car this time and there was no doubt about it, the ringing was coming from inside. Katy stepped right up to the vehicle, moving her face up to the glass. It was impossible to see into the darn thing. She knocked on the driver’s side window. Still no response. The phone continued to ring.

  Gingerly she put her hand on the door handle.

  ‘I’m going to open the door now to make sure you’re okay. If you’re in there, please give me a shout.’

  The door clicked open. Katy waited for a response, half-expecting to find somebody in there sleeping. As she opened it fully, she saw the phone on the passenger seat. It took her a moment to take in the rest of the scene.

  Roger Parry was in the driver’s seat and at first she thought he was asleep. It looked as if he’d nodded off, his head tilted forward. But as she touched him on the shoulder, she realised in horror what she was looking at.

  He was dead. A leather belt was fastened tightly around his neck, looped around the headrest. He’d been strangled in his seat. Katy ended her call. The phone in the passenger seat went silent.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘Oh hell! Hey, over here! I need some help over here!’

  Katy instinctively pulled back from the car. She was waving frantically towards the group of tourists, while at the same time using her other hand to dial 999. She had to call the police. Roger’s face showed signs of the struggle that must have taken place in that car. His seatbelt had kept him restrained, while the tightened belt around his neck had deprived him of oxygen. How different to her dad he looked in death. Terry had appeared at peace, as the sympathy cards suggested.

  Katy felt strangely calm. She knew exactly what to do. Call the police, get some help and go for a piss. In that order. She’d need an empty bladder for when the police arrived.

  ‘Jesus!’ she gasped. His dick was partially out and it was his own belt that had been removed for the strangulation. What the hell had Roger Parry been up to? She wondered if this was some erotic asphyxiation thing. Maybe that’s what the tinted glass was for. Seeing the older couple approach with the Scotties, she pushed the car door so that it was almost closed.

  ‘You alright, luv?’ the man said. One of the Scotties sniffed around her feet.

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ Katy said. ‘A man is dead inside this car.’

  The woman stopped smiling. She stooped to pick up one of the dogs.

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘Just about to,’ Katy said. ‘Can you keep an eye on the car? Don’t touch anything as the cops will want to be all over it. And don’t look inside either. It’s not a pretty sight.’

  ‘You’re sure he’s dead?’ the man asked.

  Katy nodded, and stepped away as the 999 call connected. The older couple moved to stand in front of the vehicle as if they were guarding it. The man picked up the second dog, seemingly having realised the importance of leaving the immediate area as uncontaminated as possible. Katy figured they were more Miss Marple than CSI. They’d probably think the vicar did it.

  Katy gave the details to the police, finished the call and rushed off across the road to urinate. By that stage she didn’t really care if everybody knew that she’d been to answer nature’s call in the bushes.

  By the time she returned, a large group of tourists from the coach had gathered around, sensing that something interesting was afoot. By the time Police Scotland arrived, it resembled a crime-scene Q&A session. They cleared the immediate area and set about taking control of the situation. Not long after, another car arrived.

  As the person who’d discovered the body, Katy was taken to one side. The elderly couple had to hang about too. Everybody else was asked to leave contact details as well as hotel and travel information before they were ushered off the scene. It was a slick, well-oiled operation. It reminded Katy of 1999 – this was what had happened then.

  She recognised the copper who was speaking to her. He’d been there all those years back, at the fire.

  ‘You’re not Alan Buchanan, are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, and how would you know that?’ he replied, studying her face.

  ‘I’m Katy, Katy Wild. You’ll remember who I am when I tell you I was there on the night of the fire in 1999. You were first on the scene. I can’t believe you’re still working for the police.’

  ‘I remember that night and I suppose I remember you. It’s so long ago now. Katy Wild was the young girl who lost her boyfriend … was that really you?’

  Katy nodded. She was amazed she remembered his name, but being in that area it was all coming back to her: PC Alan Buchanan, an Englishman working in Scotland. He’d stood out on that night because of his accent. She remembered him because he’d let her cry on his shoulder. Everybody else was asking questions, questions and more questions. He’d shown some compassion. She’d liked him back then.

  ‘You seem to have a habit of showing up when there’s trouble,’ he said, not thinking. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But you must admit, it’s a bit of a coincidence. Nothing ever happens around here, only the occasional drugs bust or car crash. That fire was the biggest event of my policing career. And now, almost at retirement, this happens. Do you want to tell me all about it?’

  Katy gave him an exact account of everything that had happened. She had nothing to hide. She showed him her phone records, explained how Roger Parry’s contact had come out of the blue, and walked him through every step of how she’d discovered the body. He’d been promoted since they last met and he was now DS Buchanan.

  ‘We’ll need to take your fingerprints,’ he said as he finished making notes. ‘It looks like he was into deviant sexual practices, but we’ll have to investigate fully. Can I take your contact details in case we have any questions? Where are you staying tonight?’

  Katy gave him the name of the B&B that she’d booked. It suddenly occurred to her that this might make it difficult to leave the country. There’d be a fatal accident inquiry and she’d need to give evidence. That was all she needed, a complication in her new, carefree life. Couldn’t Roger Parry have waited to beat himself off until after they’d spoken? She’d never know what he wanted to tell her now.

  The area was crawling with police officers and forensics staff. The monument was closed off and some poor constable had been assigned the task of turning frustrated tourists away.

  ‘Do you want me to run you down to the B&B? I know Judd and Ruby, and they’ll no doubt want to hear all the gossip.’

  Katy was delighted to receive the offer. Her legs had stiffened and the thought of having to walk the eight miles to the village was no longer an attractive prospect.

  ‘Where were we staying when we came here?’ Katy asked. ‘It can’t have been far away.’

  ‘It wasn’t,’ DS Buchanan replied as he buckled his seatbelt. ‘You were a couple of miles down that road. The land has been sold a few times now, and nobody has done anything with it. When you visit it you’ll see the skeleton of a building that was being put up on the site but never finished. It’s a shame, it was a lovely location for a house.’

  Katy looked along the road. It was going to be a pain in the arse having to walk everywhere. She wished she’d thought things through a little more carefully. They drove into the village in silence. Katy couldn’t really remember it.

  ‘Here we are, the Highland Heather B&B. You’ll like Judd and Ruby, they do a great Scottish breakfast. I’ll come and see you again tomorrow. We’ll give things some time to calm down a bit up at the monument, but I’m sure there’ll be more questions to ask.’

  ‘That’s great, thank you. I really appreciate this. I’m exhausted – I only want to sleep.’

  Judd and Ruby were very nice people, but their over-attentiveness was exactly what Katy didn’t need at that moment. She craved an anonymous city hotel where she’d be thrown a keycard and left to her own devices. Judd and Ruby insisted on knowing ev
erything that had happened up at the monument, where she came from and where she was going. When they finally showed Katy her room, every detail of its facilities was itemised one-by-one.

  She dared not mention that she’d been to Spean Bridge before. All she wanted to do was to remove her boots, flop on her bed, and go to sleep. Her brain was fried with everything that had happened that afternoon and her body exhausted from the long walk. At last the doorbell buzzed downstairs and Judd and Ruby left her on her own to go and harass some other poor guest.

  Katy didn’t know how long she slept, but she was out from the moment she heard the door of her room click shut. It was dark when she awoke. Something had disturbed her. What was it? She fumbled for the lamp at the side of the bed and found the switch. She looked around. The noise wasn’t her phone. There had been another sound which had aroused her from her slumber.

  Her eyes were drawn by the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside. There was something on the floor. Somebody had slipped an envelope through the gap under the door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Katy had been antsy all night and awoke far too early the next morning. She was dying to know what Alan Buchanan had to tell her. He’d scribbled a note on B&B stationery, apparently deciding not to wake her up to tell her his news. They’d found something in the car and needed to talk to her about it. She wished he’d just stormed into her room and woken her up. Now she had to wait until he arrived at nine o’clock.

  Katy heard movement downstairs a little after seven. By that time she’d showered, dried her hair, put on clean clothes and read every new Facebook post that she could lay her hands on. She was starving too, having missed dinner the night before.

  B&B wasn’t her normal style. She’d already had to rinse some guy’s shaving debris from around the basin in the shared bathroom – and open the window to give it an airing. She didn’t want to touch the sides of the shower for fear of some hairy male body having brushed against the glass before her.

  Breakfast was as bad. She’d hoped to put away a plate of bacon and eggs and then enjoy a second cup of tea over a morning newspaper. Instead, the dining room was so small she had to shuffle up and share a table with five middle-aged men on a walking holiday, all talking and laughing loudly. To make matters worse, the bacon was fried, not grilled. That was it, no more B&Bs.

  Eventually, the men moved away, leaving her on her own at a table that looked as if it had been hit by a whirlwind. There was one other couple sitting at the second table, talking in bored, stilted sentences.

  ‘Isn’t that garden lovely? It’s been beautifully planted.’

  ‘I love the plates they’ve used to line the walls. Is that bone china?’

  Relief in the form of DS Buchanan finally arrived. Judd got him a coffee and hovered a little too long as he cleared the table around them.

  ‘What do you want to talk to me about?’ Katy asked.

  ‘You were fast asleep when I called last night, and I thought it better to let you get a good night’s rest. We need to get your fingerprints as soon as we can so that we can eliminate your tracks from the crime scene—’

  ‘You’re calling it a crime scene?’ Katy asked.

  He was caught off-guard by that.

  ‘Well no, not a crime scene. Let’s just say the scene of the incident, shall we?’

  ‘It was an accident, wasn’t it? That’s what it looked like.’

  ‘I can’t say until the investigation is completed, but I do need to ask you about this.’

  DS Buchanan reached into a large brown envelope and took out a couple of scanned pages. They were printouts that had been taken from a notebook of some sort.

  ‘What’s this?’ Katy asked, taking the papers as he handed them over to her.

  ‘We’re not sure. We thought you might be able to help. A hardback notebook was found underneath the passenger seat concealed inside an AA map book. It looks like whatever he wanted to say to you was contained in that notebook. It’s marked confidential and it looks quite old, you can see that from the dates inside: 1997 to 1999. It looks like some sort of note-taking from sessions with students.’

  ‘Why are you showing me?’ Katy asked, scanning the handwritten text in the images.

  ‘Elijah’s name is in there. That was the name of your friend, wasn’t it? Elijah? Well, look at the entries from 1998 and 1999. That’s your boyfriend, isn’t it?’

  Katy skimmed the text. She got the gist very quickly.

  ‘This is incredible,’ she said. ‘These must be Parry’s notes from his private sessions with students. Elijah was being bullied in 1998 in our first term. That’s what these notes are about. And Nathan’s name is in here too. Did you know that he was with us when the lodge burned down?’

  ‘I hadn’t made that connection. That’s very interesting.’ DS Buchanan made a note in a small jotter taken from his pocket.

  ‘Do you think he wanted to talk to me about something in this diary?’

  ‘I think that we need to drive to the station to get your fingerprints taken and sort out anything else required by the investigating team,’ he replied, a little too cryptically for Katy’s liking.

  The last time they’d spoken, in 1999, she was barely an adult. The police presence after the fire had terrified her. She was older and wiser now and she wasn’t taking any shit. She was used to dealing with clients who were withholding details of their income. She was skilled at sniffing out their deceptions and challenging those who didn’t want to come clean with the Inland Revenue.

  ‘You know that I’m nothing to do with this, don’t you?’ Katy asked directly. ‘The car was in the middle of the car park, and there was a bus-load of tourists there. You’ve got my phone call to Emma and my calls to Roger confirm my story.’

  ‘You’re not under suspicion. We know it’s nothing to do with you. It looks like he was jerking himself off in the car and trying to give himself some sort of sexual thrill. Only …’

  ‘Only what?’

  ‘This notebook that we found has messed things up a bit. It looked like a straightforward case of man jerks off in car and gets more than he bargained for. But there are some entries in there that bring up something that happened when the lodge burned down. It’s something to do with your friend Nathan.’

  ‘Is it in these papers?’ Katy asked, shuffling through them and scanning for Nathan’s name. She couldn’t see anything, only passing references to how Elijah’s best friend was Nathan and how Nathan had helped him through the bullying. There was even mention of how Nathan had stood up for him once, getting a bloodied nose in the process. She hadn’t known that. It was interesting, but hardly a major revelation.

  ‘Come on, DS Buchanan. If it’s connected with what happened at the lodge, you’ll need to tell me sooner or later. What is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry to bring all this back up again after so many years, but I guess that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You’re revisiting the past, trying to go over what happened.’

  Now it was his turn to hit a bullseye.

  ‘You’re absolutely right. I haven’t been back since it happened. I could never face it. I need to confront that past. I want to understand it better. I was hoping that Roger Parry was going to help me, but it turns out he couldn’t keep his flies up. If there’s something in that diary that can help me get a better understanding of what happened, don’t I have a right to know?’

  DS Buchanan nodded.

  ‘You’re right. You do. To be honest with you that night’s troubled me all of my policing career. You youngsters … well, it was a complete mess.’

  ‘But it was an accident, right? That was the official verdict: accidental death.’

  ‘It was,’ Buchanan said, seeming to Katy a little weary now, ‘but this diary has introduced something that never came up in the interviews afterwards. Nobody mentioned it. I know, I read the transcripts. We don’t have many cases like that in this area. Being involved in that case is what made me become a detect
ive.’

  ‘So, if you’ll forgive my language, what the hell has changed things all of a sudden? What’s got your police antennae twitching?’

  ‘Well, don’t shoot the messenger,’ Buchanan said, hoping she was up to receiving this bit of news.

  ‘Just say it!’ Katy said, exasperated at his prevarication.

  ‘You know that boyfriend of yours – Elijah? There’s no easy way of saying this. I think he might have been having a relationship with your friend Nathan.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Katy barely registered the fingerprinting and DNA swab. She was too preoccupied with what Buchanan had told her about Nathan. The investigative team were telling her they needed to check her phone records and they wanted her laptop too, but it was just a stream of babble to her.

  If she clocked anything, it was how much the procedure had changed since she was nineteen. It was a well-oiled machine of evidence collection and protection. These people knew their job and they did it well. She was blameless in Roger Parry’s death so had nothing to worry about, but being without her phone and laptop was going to be a pain. The police wanted to hang onto them, and that was fair enough, but she needed to carry a phone with her. She’d been a teenager when Suzy Lamplugh had disappeared, and her parents had drummed into her the importance of letting somebody know your whereabouts. In this case, with no surviving parents, Emma had copped for that job.

  Buchanan told her he had an old Nokia at home he was happy for her to take if it still charged. It wasn’t as if the Great Glen Way was the most hazardous place on earth, but he understood the importance of Katy having a phone.

  She signed the inevitable paperwork and he walked her through to the small staff area.

  ‘Tea? Coffee?’