All interpretations might be valid in their own way, all shapes, all ghosts. The past, ancient and near, is a country as varied and changeable as Scotland herself. To reconstruct it in a useful way is an act not of imagination but restraint — the possibilities must be winnowed, the ghosts held firmly in their places.
Frank Gorrie had found this true in every case he had ever investigated, from the traffic scrapes to the twelve murders he had seen since becoming a detective. It was not simply a matter of pushing the lies to one side and the truth to another; the lies were most often easy to spot. But the truth — there was a nub of a different matter.
The truth in the case of Ed and Claire Mackay was this: Edward Cailean Mackay had been an arse-chasin’ shit, from a good line of them. He’d been gone from Inverness with his wife for several years, working in Wales and England, the neighbors thought, but his reputation remained. He had picked up where he left off upon his return some two or three months ago, as the loquacious Christine Gibbon claimed. Many would testify to it, though they seemed curiously short on names of current girlfriends.
What they wouldn’t testify to, or maybe just could not admit, was the likelihood that Claire would put out his roving eye with a bullet. Especially with the wee babe in the next room. Most especially that.
Gorrie didn’t have children himself, and he guessed he ran toward overromanticizing the connection between mother and child, tending to view it wrapped in tender rose petals though he had ample evidence from his work to tell him different. It was on exactly this sort of matter that he missed his former detective sergeant and sometime partner most acutely. Nessa Lear had a fine compass for reality. Gorrie liked to say he’d raised her from a pup, picked her from the pool of detective constables and made her into a true solver of crimes. But he’d done too good a job — Nessa had been snatched away for a job with Interpol some months back. Never mind that she had asked for the job herself for several years — to Gorrie’s mind she had been wrestled from him, and the loss hurt all the more as no replacement had been forthcoming due to “budgetary considerations.”
The deputy area commander, Nab Russell, had promised a successor in the hazy distant future. For the meantime, DI Gorrie and the rest of CID were expected to make do by using “pooled resources”—Russell’s personal euphemism for the detective constables. An eager bunch, mostly overworked, in several cases very rough about the edges, they were good at running down the odd leads, but not for bouncing ideas with, as he had often done with DS Lear.
Nessa would have been excellent probing the neighbors, much better than DC Andrews, whose monotone voice tended to make him sound more like a footballer than a policeman. He’d been too quick with the interviews; Gorrie had to take him by the hand.
Did Claire strike you as a killer?
No, sir.
Good enough then.
No, detective, we do it like this:
Had Mrs. Mackay seemed depressed? Drawn out? At the end of her wits, would you say? Was she an angry person? More frustrated than normal?
No matter the phrasing, no was always the answer. Oh, she could yell at Eddie, put him in his place. But murder him? Should have maybe, but until it happened not a one of her friends or family would have predicted it. She had not seemed to suffer postpartum depression; she’d gained her shape back after the birth with a mum-and-child program, where the instructor — a looker herself — said she had a special closeness with the child. Her sister said that she had worked at a bank as a teller but had no plans to go back; it wasn’t the sort of job you’d worry into a career.
So that was her story, rounded up with the help of Andrews in about a day and a half’s worth of work. A large question remained — where had she gotten the gun? It was not her husband’s, or at least there was no indication yet that it was her husband’s, and no one, not even Christine Gibbon, could remember any hint of it before.
Having reached a suitable impasse regarding the presumed killer, today Gorrie would turn his attention back to the victim, making his inquiries at the man’s employers and rounding up a few lost ends. But as he spotted Cromarty Firth’s domelike reactor building looming ahead in the early morning fog, an ungodly, un-Scottish creature wading in from the surf, he thought not of Edward Mackay but his son, christened Luthias Edward. It was one thing to grow up without a ma or a da, and quite another to grow up knowing your ma killed your da and then herself, with you in the other room.
What a legacy to leave a child. Gorrie could do nothing for the lad except his job, and while he regretted that his job might well mean pain for the boy in years to come, he endeavored to do his best to remove any question in the young man’s mind of what had happened. He would have done so no matter what the circumstance, but if his patience or stamina flagged at any point, he could gently prod it by recalling the infant in the crib, and imagining him fifteen years on.
A small valley ran between the plant and the road, making the access road seem as if it ran over a moat. Cement obstructions forced approaching vehicles to take a zigging path, and razor wire lined the double row of fences at the entrance; two guards manned the gate and demanded positive proof that DI Gorrie was indeed DI Gorrie.
“Aye, didna’ you know me well enough to borrow five pounds last Saturday, James?” Gorrie told one of the guards as he held out his badge.
“Procedure, Inspector,” responded the man, adding in a somewhat softer voice, “I’ll be payin’ you back next Friday, I’m sure.”
Gorrie was met at the door to the plant by a young woman tall and broad enough to play for the local football team; she showed him directly to the plant manager’s office, not pausing for pleasantries. Gorrie found his pace slowing with each step, resisting the rush. With white walls sandwiched between white acoustic tile and white linoleum, the hallway reminded the inspector of a hospital corridor, except that it smelled of wood polish rather than antiseptic.
There was no wood to polish in the halls, nor was there any in the manager’s office, where the paper-strewn desk, file cabinets, and two movable carts holding computers were all made of metal. John Horace sat behind the desk, his owl eyes blinking once as they entered.
“Come,” he said sharply, though they were already inside.
“My name—”
“Inspector Gorrie, yes. Well?”
Gorrie sat down in the chair across from the manager’s desk. “I am investigating the death of one of your people here.”
“Ed Mackay. Efficient, good at his job.”
The manager’s manner might be common in London where, judging from his accent, he had been raised, but here it was grating enough to be suspicious as well as borderline insulting.
“What exactly was his job?” Gorrie asked.
“Supervised the removal of waste. We follow the Basel Convention in spirit and letter, Inspector. I’m sure that if you check with UKAE—”
“The atomic commission?”
“Quite. We are regulated — heavily regulated. Nothing moves from here without intricate planning. Even the odd hankie tossed in my basket there will be suitably accounted for. We don’t go polluting the environs, Inspector. We have precautions. Our record is exemplary.”
“I see,” said Gorrie. Under other circumstances, he might have been inclined to skip the lecture — he already knew a bit about Mackay’s job. But he generally found it useful to let a man speak, even when he didn’t feel an immediate need for the information. And so Gorrie folded his arms and leaned back as the plant manager began citing safety statistics. In three decades there had been over seven thousand shipments of spent fuel worldwide without an incident; the spent fuel had a better transport record than the average loaf of bread.