The professor lowered his voice as he turned his back on the onlookers and spoke directly to Gunn. ‘So Murray said it was two days ago that this fella Maclean was seen running from the chapel?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And nobody thought to take a look inside it then?’
‘They were driven back to the boat by the rain, apparently.’
‘Well, I can tell you this, DS Gunn, if it was Maclean that killed him, he didn’t do it two days ago.’ Something like a smile flitted across his lips. ‘In answer to your earlier question, I can’t tell you exactly how long this man has been dead, but it’s more than two days, that’s certain. And, at a guess, I’d say at least four. But that’s all it would be at this stage. A guess.’ He lifted his head, as if sniffing the air. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘there was no boat found, was there?’
‘No, there wasn’t, sir.’
‘So how did he get out here?’
Gunn shrugged. This was more familiar territory for him. ‘Who knows? Perhaps brought out by the killer himself.’
‘Perhaps.’ The pathologist scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘Funny thing to do, though, don’t you think? Bring a man away out here just to kill him, then leave him in the chapel where he’s bound to be found, sooner or later. I mean, if you were a man of murderous disposition, Detective Sergeant, though I’m not suggesting for a minute that you are, wouldn’t you push the body over the cliff? Let the sea take him? Chances are he would never be found.’
Gunn nodded, and gazed up at the rows of dark solar panels along the front of the white-painted lighthouse. He knew the story of the vanishing lighthouse keepers, of course. The sea had claimed them. Or, at least, that was the theory. And it occurred to him that this man’s killer had either wanted his victim to be found, or what had taken place here had been unplanned, and that the killer had simply fled in a blind panic.
He became aware of the pathologist speaking again. ‘We’d better call the coastguard and get the body helicoptered back to Stornoway. I’d like to get this fella on the table as soon as possible.’
Gunn put on his greens and face mask before entering the autopsy room, but nothing ever prepared him for the smell. The perfume of putrefaction, and the gut-wrenching stink released by the bowels during dissection. In his limited experience, pathologists never seemed to notice it.
Outside, the light was fading fast and Gunn was hungry and anxious to get home for his tea. It had taken a considerable effort of will to force himself to attend this post-mortem, which he knew would rob him of his appetite, and he had been putting it off as long as he could. Unlike the professor, who had already expressed his delight at spending another night in the Royal at the Scottish government’s expense, and dining again at the Indian in Church Street, with its luridly coloured curries. He must, Gunn reflected, be a man blessed with a cast-iron constitution.
Much of the post-mortem had been completed. The cadaver lay opened up on the table, the liquids released by the pathologist’s knife draining into a bucket beneath it. The organs had been weighed and breadloafed. And the damaged brain, removed from its fractured skull, was suspended now in fixative.
The victim’s clothing was laid out on a separate table, along with the rock they had recovered from just outside the chapel. A jagged piece of gneiss, about twice the size of a fist, that a man could spread his fingers around. It had blood, hair and tissue still clinging to it, but they had been unable to secure any fingerprints.
‘Seems he put up quite a struggle,’ Professor Wilson said. ‘Forearms are covered in bruises and abrasions where he raised them to protect himself from the attack. Then his killer got through with the first blow to the head, and that, or maybe the second, might have dropped him to his knees, if he was on his feet. Considerable bruising there.’ He tapped both knees. ‘He was struck four times on the left side of the skull, any one of which might have been enough to incapacitate him. But his killer kept going anyway. The final blow was what killed him and did the worst of the damage. You’ll get all the measurements and gory details in my report.’
‘Can’t wait,’ Gunn said dryly, drawing a look from the pathologist. ‘You’re confirming for me, then, that he was murdered?’
‘That, Detective Sergeant, was never in doubt.’ The professor paused. ‘Have you found his car yet?’
‘No, we haven’t.’
‘Identification?’
Gunn shook his head. ‘The picture taken by the police photographer will be released to the press tonight. We’ll see what that brings.’
The professor grunted and lifted the dead man’s right hand. ‘Bruises and grazing on his hands as well. The chances are the poor sod got in a few strikes himself. His fingers are ingrained with dirt, and maybe oil, and his fingernails are short and filthy, so it’s impossible to tell if there’s blood or skin from his attacker under any of them. I’ve taken scrapings from them all, and the lab will reveal in time if they captured any DNA from his killer.’ He ran his latexed palm lightly over the back of the hand he was holding. ‘Strange thing, though, and I only know about this because my wife used to keep bees. He has several bee stings on the back of his hands.’
Gunn moved closer to take a look.
‘You see? These little red lumps with tiny scabs at their centre. Looks like he was stung quite recently, too.’
Chapter fourteen
Gunn enjoyed the drive down to Harris. South-westerlies had blown great ragged clumps of black raincloud across the islands overnight, and everything looked shiny and new in the early morning sunlight, as if freshly painted.
As he passed from Lewis into Harris, even the Clisham, whose peak was normally mired in cloud, stood sharp and clear against the deep blue of the autumn sky, casting its shadow west over the Abhainn Langadail, which ran north into Loch Langabhat itself, a continuation of the extended valley rift that transected the centre of the island from north to south.
On the long descent towards Tarbert, the southern half of the Isle of Harris, he knew, stretched off in obscurity beyond the hills, but it wasn’t until he crested the rise past the town itself, after the turn-off to the Episcopalian Church, that he saw it laid out before him, shimmering in this startlingly luminous morning.
The tide was out, and the sands of Luskentyre glowed silver, very nearly filling Gunn’s field of vision. They never ceased to take his breath away. Ringed by hills to the south, the mountains of North Harris, and the peaks of Taransay to the west, beyond all that simmering turquoise, he wondered if there could be any more beautiful spot on earth.
But he very quickly became firmly regrounded in reality when his car bumped and rumbled over the hardcore being laid for the new road, then sat for minutes on end at successive stop lights regulating the two-way flow of traffic during the roadworks.
Finally, gliding down over a new smooth unpainted ribbon of black tarmac laid only the week before, he reached the turn-off to Luskentyre itself, and spent the next five minutes avoiding the ditch as his glance was drawn repeatedly beyond the single-track road to the glimpses of paradise beyond the dunes. He had often spoken to his wife of buying a wee cottage down here when finally he took his retirement. But there were a few years to go before then.
He spotted the sign for Dune Cottage at the side of the road just beyond the cemetery, and then saw the police car parked behind the house itself. He turned in over the cattle grid, and parked beside it, stepping out into the fresh, blustery breeze that blew in off the beach, and zipping up his quilted black anorak. The uniformed sergeant from the police station at Tarbert eased himself out of a car that was far too small for his six foot, six inches, and unfolded himself to stand upright and shake Gunn’s hand. They knew one another well, the sergeant being of a similar age and having served most of his time on the islands. He nodded curtly, and ‘George’ was all he said.