But it is all, simply, too much. I cannot process everything at once. My brain is suffering from information overload and telling me, ‘Enough!’ Like too much light, returning memory is blinding me. I can see the big picture in silhouette, but most of the detail is still burned out.
My name is Tom Fleming. I am a neuroscientist, and I used to work at the Geddes Institute of Environmental Sciences, until I was kicked out for conducting experiments that didn’t please their sponsors, the giant Swiss agrochem company, Ergo. My wife is suing me for divorce. Or was. Now, presumably, she is treading water until I am declared legally dead after disappearing off my yacht in the Firth of Forth.
And Karen. I close my eyes. My little girl. I can see her now. That shining, happy face gazing up at me with unglazed affection. Love. Dependency. How I adored her. And still do. Despite the sulky, sullen teenager she became. I recall her final words to me before I faked my suicide. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. And I wish I could just rewind time, and do it all again. This time differently.
I open my eyes and remember the message she left for my brother Michael, not realising it was me who had friended her on Facebook. The only way I could maintain even the most tenuous of contacts without her knowing. Watching over her from an anonymous distance. Uncle Michael, I think dad might still be alive. Please get in touch. Somehow she knows I am not dead. I left that note with Chris, but he is not due to give it to her until she turns eighteen, when all of this is over.
But there are more pressing things. Sam is dead, and his killer is on the loose, almost certainly the same person who tried to stab me to death that night in the cottage. Impossible to express the relief I feel in knowing it was not me who murdered Sam. But equally impossible to shut out the guilt. Because I am responsible for his death as surely as if it were I who had killed him. In spite of the breach of security, I know that I must contact Deloit and tell him what has happened.
I sit at the kitchen table and draw the laptop towards me.
My hands are shaking as I swipe the touch pad and waken it from sleep to open up the mailer.
To my surprise, there is an email waiting for me in the inbox. I frown and click to open it. In the moments that follow, I genuinely believe my heart has stopped. Before suddenly it kick-starts back to life and begins hammering against my ribs like someone with a sledgehammer trying to break out.
The email contains a single photograph. It is Karen. She is in the back of a vehicle of some kind, legs pulled up to her chest, and I can see bindings around her ankles. Her arms are behind her, and there is a broad slash of grey duct tape across her mouth. Tears have streaked black mascara down her cheeks, and her eyes are wide, staring at the camera, filled with fear. The message below it reads, A fair exchange. Eilean Mòr, tonight.
It is unsigned, but even before I look at the address of the sender, I know who it came from. And a chill of utter disabling despair forks through me.
‘Hello? Anyone home?’ Jon’s voice startles me, and I look up as the door from the boot room opens to reveal Jon and Sally crammed into the small space among the waterproofs and wellingtons. Bran goes barking excitedly to greet them.
Sally looks at me, concerned, and I cannot imagine how I must look to prompt her question. ‘What’s happened?’
But I turn my eyes towards her husband. ‘Jon, do you still have a boat at Rodel?’
He nods. ‘Only just. We were planning to take her south next week. Our time here is up.’
But I barely absorb what he says, just the affirmative nod of his head. I stand up. ‘I need you to take me out to the Flannan Isles.’
He is startled. ‘When?’
‘Now.’
Chapter thirty
DS George Gunn sat at his desk, leaning back in his chair and staring at the cursor blinking on a blank document on his computer screen. Progress on the case seemed to have ground to a standstill, and he had no idea what to write in his daily report to the CIO.
Circulating the photograph of the dead man in the media had produced nothing more than the usual crank calls, wasting a lot of man-hours in chasing them down. There was nothing back from the lab yet regarding the scrapings taken by the pathologist from beneath the victim’s nails. Gunn was beginning to think they would have to ask the suspect’s permission to circulate his photograph, in the hope that they could at least establish who he was.
He could feel the CIO’s impatience reaching along the corridor to the open door of his office. Chisholm did not want to be here any longer than necessary, and would not be pleased to have Gunn’s failure to close the case reflect on him. As it surely would, back in Inverness.
Gunn sighed and looked at the time. His shift would come to an end soon, when he would escape back to real life. His wife, he knew, would right now be poaching the salmon he had acquired for her yesterday, and in a few short hours Fin and Marsaili would arrive, finally, to have that long-awaited dinner with them. Gunn licked his lips. He could almost taste the rich firm flesh of the fish, and the subtly flavoured garlic potatoes that his wife would serve with it. He sighed again, and swivelled in his chair as a shadow fell across the doorway. DC Smith stood, almost stooping to avoid the lintel, clutching a note in his hand.
‘This might just be the one, sir.’
Gunn cocked an eyebrow. ‘Tell me.’
‘Boat owner at Callanish. Says the man in our photo hired him to take him out to the Flannan Isles a week or so ago. And his vehicle’s still parked where he left it. A Land Rover.’
Gunn knew immediately that he would have to drive down to Callanish. And the chances were he wouldn’t make it back in time for dinner.
He saw the standing stones from a long way off, clustered together on the rise, with their commanding view over the coast of south-west Lewis. Fingers of gneiss pointed at a darkening sky, contours sculpted by weather and geology and time. There was something primordial about them. Older than Stonehenge, and raised by Man for who knew what purpose. Although they were cruciform in shape, they pre-dated Christ by thousands of years, and Gunn had been fascinated by them from childhood. He remembered his father bringing him here for the first time. A day out, a family picnic, but something about the stones had spooked the young George, and nightmares had kept him awake most of that night, and for several more thereafter. He had never lost the sense of awe that they inspired in him.
These days, they were a tourist attraction more than anything else, and coaches rumbled daily to the visitor centre along the single-track road that Gunn now took to the tiny jetty that nestled at the foot of the peninsula, well beyond the stones.
The machair was relatively flat here, dipping down to the seaweed-strewn rocks along the loch side, and Loch Ròg An Ear itself was slate-grey and contoured by the rising wind. As it stretched west, out into the ocean, the waters of the loch were broken only by the low-lying islands of Chearstaidh and Ceabhaigh and the much larger mass of Great Bernera.
Iain Maciver was waiting for Gunn at the old stone jetty, standing at the end of it, leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette and looking out across the water to a landscape dotted by sheep and the occasional croft. He looked round as Gunn drove up, and, because there was no place to turn here, Gunn realised he was going to have to reverse all the way back to the parking area at the top of the hill, where he had passed a beaten-up old Land Rover sitting back from the tarmac.
He got out and met Maciver halfway along the jetty. The two men shook hands. The fisherman had a leathery, weathered face very nearly the colour of tar, and big-knuckled hands that crushed the one of Gunn’s that he shook. There were a couple of small boats tied up along the right-hand side of the quay, and a narrow slipway on the left below a rusted old railing.