‘So I’ve been told, Mr Maclean.’ There is a strange little sardonic smile playing about his lips. ‘I’d be interested in seeing that manuscript, sir, if you wouldn’t mind showing me it a little later.’ And I know he knows that I am not writing a book. Still, we both keep up the pretence.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I was out at the lighthouse for a bit of research and got caught in a squall. I was going to take shelter in the chapel, but the rain eased off a bit, and I decided to make a dash for the boat instead. So I never actually went into the building.’
That little sardonic smile has gone. He seems quite impassive now, and it is impossible to read anything into his face. But I am sure he doesn’t believe me. After a moment he nods his head beyond me, towards the garden shed. ‘Would you mind unlocking that shed for me, sir?’
I turn and glance at the shed, surprised. The large padlock hooked firmly through the clasps is locked. I remember that I couldn’t get into it when I was looking for stepladders. ‘I don’t have the key,’ I say, and fish my keys out my pocket. An ignition key for the car, and a couple of smaller keys for the house. ‘These are the only ones I have.’
Gunn purses his lips. ‘The owner of the house tells us that a key to the padlock on the garden shed was among the keys that she gave you when you first moved in.’
I shrug. This is probably true. But I have no idea where that key might be now. ‘Then I must have mislaid it,’ I say. ‘I’ve never had any cause to use the shed.’ And no sooner do I say it than I wonder if I have.
‘You won’t mind if we force the lock then, sir?’
‘Not at all.’ There is a sick feeling evolving in my stomach. ‘Perhaps the owner won’t be too pleased, though.’ I cannot imagine how my attempt at a smile comes across to the policemen standing watching me. Their expressions remain grave.
Gunn nods to one of the uniforms, and he goes to the boot of the nearest vehicle, returning with a wheel brace, a single length of iron with a socket wrench at one end. The constable steps past us and goes to the shed, inserting the other end through the loop of the padlock and levering it hard against the door. The sound of splintering wood is quite clearly audible above the howling of the wind, and the clasps held together by the padlock rip free of the door, screws and all. And I wonder why anyone ever bothered to padlock it.
The officer who is still holding my arm passes me over to Gunn, who leads me to the shed. With his free hand he forces it open against the wind, then uses his body to keep it there, before reaching inside to feel for a light switch. When he finds it, the late afternoon gloom is banished and the darkness of the interior is thrown into sudden, sharp, fluorescent relief.
For a moment, I could almost believe that the wind had stopped blowing. For, in that instant, I simply can’t hear it. And I can feel the sense of shock and confusion all around me, as everyone crowds around to look inside.
The first thing that hits us all, I think, is the smell. The powerful, sweet, pungent odour of cedar wood and honey. And the reek of old smoke, like a cold chimney when you clean out the hearth. But we are distracted by what we see. ‘Jesus,’ I hear someone say. ‘It’s like a bloody laboratory.’
And that’s exactly what it is. A makeshift laboratory that must have cost a small fortune to equip. Worktops lining three sides, rows of shelves above them cluttered with bottles and jars and flasks. Pieces of equipment, large and small, on the worktops or on the floor. A scattering of microtweezers and scissors, micropipettes and rows of yellow tips in a bright red holder. Boxes of latex surgical gloves. To my amazement, much of it seems familiar to me. A hand-held field microscope with an XY slide indexer. A white box, about the size of a laser printer, with a screen set into its bevelled front. The make and model, SureCycler 8800, is engraved into the plastic above the screen, and I know that this machine is used for amplifying DNA. A small freezer unit sits on the floor against the back wall, and, on the worktop above it, what looks like a fridge, with a black box set into the top of it. But I know that it is not a fridge. It is a digital image system used for DNA gel photography. I see the gel tank itself on the counter beside it, and its small black power pack.
There are piles of padded envelopes, kitchen scales, and larger, industrial hanging scales dangling from a hook on the wall. A MacBook Pro laptop computer sits next to an SLR digital camera set into a holding frame and bracket, and the wall above it is pinned with dozens of printout photographs of honeycomb frames. A laser printer/photocopier/scanner sits on a low table in one corner. Hive frames and foundations, and a shallow wooden drawer that I know to be a pollen trap, are propped all along the right-hand wall, from which hang a beekeeper’s protective clothing. Hat and mask, gloves, jacket, wellington boots beneath them. There is a hive tool dangling from a hook, a smoker with its carrying cage and nozzle for directing smoke into the hive, and rolls of cardboard tied with string on a shelf next to a red plastic cigarette lighter engraved in white with the logo Ergo. The top shelf groans with jars of rich, amber honey. Makeshift wasp traps fashioned from old plastic Coke bottles hang from the ceiling. They are filled with clusters of drowned wasps, attracted into the shed by the honey in the jars, then drawn into the traps by a mix of jam and water. And black electric cables loop back and forth bringing power to sockets set at intervals along the worktops.
I can feel the skin of my face burning red as Gunn turns to look at me with the strangest sense of incomprehension in his eyes. ‘So you’ve never had cause to use the shed, sir?’
I cannot think of a single thing to say. The silence that hangs in the air is blown away in the wind, which I hear again, suddenly, as if someone has just pressed the un-mute button. I do not need to look around me to know that every eye is upon me. They have no idea that I am as lost for an explanation as they are. And I hear myself say, stupidly, ‘I can’t explain it.’
‘May I see your hands, please?’
Confused, but compliant, I offer him my hands, and he takes them in his, turning them over, and I see the odd bee sting on my fingers. Small red lumps with tiny scabs at their centre.
He lets go of my hands and takes me by the arm again. ‘Come with me please, sir.’ And he leads me through the silent, standing police officers, up the steps and into my house. Everything is in chaos as we pass through the boot room and into the kitchen. Beside the laptop on the kitchen table, the briefcase I found in the attic sits with its lid up, exposing the bundles of banknotes inside. The folder of newspaper cuttings on Neal Maclean is open, its contents spilled across the table. ‘Maybe you’ll have more success in explaining this,’ he says. And hell simply opens up beneath my feet.
Chapter sixteen
The skyline beyond the promenade that ran the length of the Portobello sands had probably not changed much since its heyday as a beach resort in the nineteenth century. Grand Victorian stone-built villas, and colourfully tarted terraces. Church spires and redbrick factory chimneys. For much of the twentieth century it had fallen out of fashion, only recently undergoing a renaissance that had seen the beach as crowded on a summer’s day as in the old photographs taken in the late eighteen hundreds that Karen had found on the internet.