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Karen noticed that his stutter seemed to have disappeared. ‘What’s Ergo?’

They had reached the gallery now, and he led her along it, past offices and meeting rooms with glass walls and open doors. ‘It’s a Swiss agrochemical company. Probably bigger than Monsanto and Syngenta combined. They derived the name from the shortened form of the Greek word ergostasio, meaning plant. But, of course, Ergo itself also means therefore.’ He turned to smile at her. ‘I think, therefore I am. I think.’ When she didn’t return the smile, his faded. ‘Anyway, Ergo is the institute’s primary benefactor. They fund ninety per cent of our research.’

‘Which they then exploit commercially?’

Connor flicked her a look, surprised perhaps by her perception. ‘Well, yes. But it provides a wonderful resource for the university, professors and students alike.’ He glanced around the gallery that lined the atrium. ‘These are all just offices and conference rooms for staff and administration. Lab facilities and lecture theatres are located in the outlying buildings.’

At the end of the gallery, they turned right into a long corridor, then left into a small office with two desks pushed together beneath a window looking out across trees, towards the airport. Karen could see planes landing and taking off, but triple-glazing and engineered insulation cocooned them in silence. Connor closed the door carefully behind them, and closed blinds on the glass wall to shut them off from the corridor beyond. ‘Wh-what is it you want, Karen?’ The uncertainty crept back into his voice with the return of the conversation to personal matters.

‘I want to know about my dad.’

His agitation increased. ‘W-well, why? Your mum could tell you much more about him than me.’

‘I’m not talking to my mum right now. And, anyway, I’m not sure she really knew that much about him. You’ve known him since you were students together. You were his best man. And my godfather, for Christ’s sake.’

He looked at the floor, his arms hanging awkwardly at his sides. ‘I’m sorry. I... I’ve been pretty lousy at that.’

‘Well, maybe you can make up for it now.’ She saw him wince, as if she had stabbed him. ‘I want to know what he was like. Really like. What he was working on.’ She paused. ‘Why he killed himself.’

Her godfather turned away to shuffle papers on his desk. She saw him shaking his head. ‘I wish you’d called me at home.’

‘Why?’

‘B-because this isn’t the place to talk about stuff like that.’

She sighed her frustration. ‘I couldn’t find a number or an address for you anywhere. This is the only way I figured I could contact you. It’s like, you know, you haven’t made it very easy.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.’

She finally lost patience. ‘Stop apologising, Chris! Just talk to me.’ And she thought how strange it seemed to be calling him Chris. When she was a child, he’d encouraged her to call him ‘Toffee’, which had been her father’s nickname for him. Not remotely appropriate now.

But if ‘Chris’ seemed inappropriate to him, he didn’t show it. He leaned across his desk and, with slightly trembling fingers, lifted a business card from a clear plastic holder. He took a pen and wrote a number on the back of it, then turned and handed it to her, still avoiding her eye. ‘Call me at home tonight. W-we’ll arrange a time and place to meet.’

Chapter thirteen

Detective Sergeant George Gunn lodged himself firmly in the pale blue aeroplane-style seat on the starboard side of the 42-foot MV Lochlann as she ploughed her way through the medium-grey swell of this mid-September afternoon. He had hoped that by bracing himself with outstretched arms on the seat in front, keeping his eyes away from the window and the tipping horizon, he would survive the trip without being afflicted, as he normally was, by the curse of seasickness. But just fifteen minutes out, he had already begun to feel like death.

Murray sat up front, guiding the boat towards the dark profile of the Seven Hunters, strung along the distant horizon like so many oddly shaped beads. It was a trip he had made countless times, and Gunn envied him his easy way on the water. He was as much at home on it as on the land.

To his annoyance, Professor Angus Wilson seemed actually to be enjoying himself. Gunn glanced across the cabin at the pathologist, and resented the way the man almost invariably made him feel like a rank novice. Who knew how many post-mortems the physician had carried out, how many murder victims he had dissected. How many mangled bodies he had vandalised with his knife, probing for cause of death, uncovering hidden trauma. While Gunn, serving most of his career at the police station in Church Street in Stornoway, had only rarely been exposed to violent death in all its bloody technicolour and ugly stench. And had never got used to it. He liked to think of himself as a student more of human nature than of human physiology.

It was pure chance that the professor had even been on the island. A messy, suspicious death that had turned out, as Gunn expected, to be a suicide. A man who, for some unaccountable reason, had thrown himself from the cliffs in Ness. The pathologist was due to catch the late afternoon flight back to Edinburgh. And after getting the call from Murray, Gunn had only just caught him as he was checking out of his hotel.

Neither of the two uniformed officers they had brought with them from Stornoway seemed afflicted by Gunn’s inability to keep the contents of his stomach in place, and they looked at him in surprise as he dashed suddenly out of the cabin to double up over the back of the boat and heave into its wake.

There was no colour at all in his face as he ventured slowly back to resume his seat. He had grown more inclined to portliness in recent years, and the life jacket fastened tightly around his woollen jumper meant that he had to squeeze himself into it. He ran a hand back through dark hair that grew thickly from a widow’s peak on his forehead, greying now at the temples, and became aware of Professor Wilson looking at him across the aisle.

‘I’m not surprised you’re feeling nauseous, Detective Sergeant, given the pungency of the aftershave you seem to sprinkle so liberally on that shiny face of yours. I’m amazed you need to shave at all. I’ve seen more hair on a whore’s fanny.’

Gunn heard the stifled laughter of the uniforms somewhere behind him.

‘Honestly, man. You get sick in the autopsy room, queasy in the car, bilious on the boat... You’d think, by your time in life, you might have mastered the vagaries of your stomach.’

Gunn refrained from comment as he felt a second wave of nausea rising. He glared instead at the professor, diverting his thoughts from his stomach by focusing his hatred on this vulgar, bullying pathologist who never seemed to tire of baiting him. Everything about him was irritating to Gunn. From his smug smile to his tangle of ginger whiskers, as coarse as fusewire, and the wispy, greying fuzz that ringed a bald, shiny head spattered by large brown freckles. Thin as a whip, and tall, with long, bony fingers, he towered over Gunn, making him feel small in every sense.

‘About forty minutes from here,’ Murray called back to them, and Gunn groaned inwardly.

When finally they arrived at Eilean Mòr, there was a spit of rain in the air and the wind had risen out of the south-west. The east-side landing stage was relatively sheltered from the incoming swell by Làmh a’ Sgeire Mhor, and Murray anchored the Lochlann in the bay and moved aft to lower the inflatable tender into the rise and fall of deep green water. Gunn’s focus on not falling into the sea as he transferred from one to the other took his mind off the nausea. When they were all aboard, and Murray had fired up the fifteen-horsepower outboard, Gunn clung on to the sides with knuckles that glowed white with tension.