She was still doing fifty as she hit the village’s constricted streets, alarmed to see schoolkids strolling along the pavement and running across the road. One wee boy dashed out twenty yards in front of her and she hit her horn and her brake together, causing the tyres to squeal and locals to glare at the car. She hit her horn again, continuously this time, as she barged her way at speed through the village’s main street with its collection of small shops, forcing pedestrians to pay attention to her and stay the hell out of her way.
A sign forced her to take a right at the village cross and she raced down a narrow one-way street past little whitewashed, turreted houses until the road rose again, a pub to her right and a churchyard on her left. A car was sitting at the give-way sign, waiting patiently to turn left but Narey didn’t have time for such a luxury. She went inside the car onto the wrong side of the road and, horn blaring again, barrelled her way into the traffic and onto the road towards Callander, finally able to give in to the pressure that had been screaming from within to accelerate fully again.
Her Airwave burst into life and Addison shouted at her.
‘We’ve picked them up near Drymen using number plate recognition. The camera showed two people in the front seats. We’re trying to get road blocks in place but Bradley’s got a head start on us and a number of routes he can take.’
Damn it, she thought. Why did Tony and Danny have to be down south? Going to visit the Channings suddenly seemed a wild-goose chase and she’d much rather have had them with her. They were part of this, not Addison and certainly not the rest of Strathclyde. It was their case, their capture, their kill. She reminded herself it was just as much about finding Barbie as it was about catching her killer. The difference was that her killer was on the run while Barbie, sadly, was going nowhere.
Every car that slowed her down or flashed their lights as she performed an overtaking manoeuvre was cursed or occasionally gestured at — frequently both. She hit an open section of road and kicked the car past eighty miles an hour, swinging it round bends, praying there wasn’t another maniac coming in the opposite direction or a patch of black ice lying unseen with her name on it.
The road was lined on both sides with frozen trees and the fields were oceans of white. It seemed the further she went, the more desolate and arctic the surroundings became. The frost was thicker, the snow deeper and the temperatures lower as every passing mile took her further into the countryside.
Callander loomed and she was grateful that at least it wasn’t summer, when the main street would have been choked with tourists and their cars. It was busy enough though, and she caused chaos as she veered from one side of the road to another, shooting through a red light and forcing other cars to slam on their brakes. As she sped past the Waverley Hotel, she couldn’t help but think of Bobby Heneghan pulling pints inside and the battered body he’d found on Inchmahome. Was the body of Greg Deans going to be waiting for her when she got to the Lake of Menteith?
The traffic lights at Cross Street were at red where she needed to turn left and a queue of six cars was in front of her but Narey switched again to the wrong side of the road, obliging oncoming traffic to screech to a halt as she swung round the queue, onto Bridge Street and out of town. As she passed the high school, the road suddenly opened up, stretching straight as far she could see and she floored the Megane, hitting ninety, knowing that the snaking, undulating terrain of the Queen Elizabeth Forest was only minutes away.
Addison burst onto the radio again, demanding to know where she was but she used the excuse of the stuttering line to shout that she couldn’t hear him and switched it off before he could say anything else. All she wanted was to get to the lake and Bradley. Nothing else and no one else mattered.
The forest was a bleak, alien landscape, its trees petrified, its surface characteristics rendered featureless by a blanket of snow. Narey hacked her way round its rally course, her right foot lurching from accelerator to brake, warily looking out for deer and ice until she roared out the other side of the park. To her left, a glimpse of the lake unexpectedly appeared between barren trees and moments later she saw the first sign pointing to Port of Menteith. There was more traffic now and she couldn’t get past; she sat simmering slowly as she progressed at tourist pace towards the lake.
She saw that cars were lined up along the side of the road and their passengers were out and walking two deep by the verge. As she finally got nearer to the corner that led down into Port of Menteith and the lake, she suddenly saw there were already Central Scotland cop cars on the scene. For a second she thought they had beaten her there in pursuit of Bradley but then she realised they were there to deal with the crowds that had turned out to go on the lake. Christ, there must have been thousands of people there and she cursed every one of them. It was going to make it all the harder to find Bradley and Deans.
Narey got to the corner and flashed her ID at the cop who had stopped her from taking the turn down towards the hotel. The cop refused to budge initially and demanded a closer look, causing Narey’s impatience to rise still higher.
‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ the cop apologised on seeing she was genuine, ‘but it’s crazy here today. They are all desperate to park as close as they can but there’s just not enough room. Some madman’s already driven right past me to get down to… Sergeant?’
Narey stood on the accelerator, forcing the constable to stand aside, and raced past him with a screech and plunged down the hill towards the hotel, church and lake. The narrow road was lined with people, all wrapped up in their winter finest, and a few of them had to step hurriedly to the side as Narey’s Megane hurtled by. She took the sharp right into the car park, causing another gaggle of would-be skaters and curlers to scatter at her approach.
As soon as she turned, she saw the agitated crowd at the far end of the car park. There were maybe a dozen people buzzing around a blue car and she knew immediately that they were excited by far more than the prospect of walking across the ice. She parked as close as she could and jumped out of her Megane.
‘Police,’ she called out, her ID in her hand. ‘Move back, please. Police. Move back.’
A few of the people on the fringes of the crowd heeded her call and, as they turned, she saw their open mouths and ashen faces and knew what they had seen. In slow motion, they moved for her one by one, in increasing states of anxiety, some pointing beyond the car. As they cleared away, she could see there was just one figure in the dark interior of the car, slumped forward in the passenger seat, head bowed. Instinctively, she put her hand on the bonnet and felt it was hot in contrast to the freezing conditions around it. It hadn’t sat there long at all.
Narey had to tug at the coats and jackets of the final few rubberneckers to get them to move and saw that they hadn’t necessarily stayed looking by choice: they’d been transfixed. As she finally got the last of them out of her way, Narey tugged at the passenger door and opened it to be met by the familiar, sickly smell of blood.
She looked inside and found herself involuntarily taking a step back at the sight that greeted her. No wonder she could smell blood — he was drenched in the stuff. It was spilling down his chest and soaking his shirt and woollen jumper, down to where his wrists were scored red with tie marks. Going against every forensic procedure she’d been taught, Narey caught him by the hair and lifted his head up.
His throat had been cut and the blood that poured from it was still warm and bright red. It struck her that Tony would call it pillar box red, meaning it hadn’t been exposed to the air for long. The man’s mouth hung open and his eyes were wide with shock. His face looked so different to how she’d seen it before, disfigured in death as opposed to being vibrant in life. All around her, she could hear the clamour of people and muffled screams of shock and murmurings of fear and prurient excitement. She should have moved them on but instead she stood rooted to the spot and looked as much a rubbernecker as any of them.