Torquil sucked air through his lips. ‘Something didn’t seem right to me, which is why I went to St Ninian’s cave for a play on my pipes. I was just playing pieces at random and when I came to Loch Lomond it struck me.’
Ewan began to sing the words, ‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll…’
‘That’s it,’ Torquil interrupted. He tapped the two words High and Low again. ‘High and low. High methanol and low blood sugar. I rang Ralph McLelland about it and he agreed, there is an anomaly. Alcohol lowers your blood sugar. I asked if it would even do that in a diabetic and he said that methanol certainly would.’
‘So taking insulin would lower it still further?’ Penny asked.
‘It would,’ agreed Torquil, ‘but my point is that Robbie Ochterlonie was a diabetic and he’d recognise if he was having hypoglycaemia, or low blood sugar. Even drunk, he would know that insulin would make it worse and he would have gone for sugary drinks, chocolate, anything sweet instead. What he wouldn’t have done is take insulin and certainly not as much as he apparently took.’
The news evoked surprise in everyone in the room.
‘After taking so much insulin it is doubtful that he would have made it through to the sitting room and drunk more peatreek. But there is more to say. Dr Lamont took several swabs at the post-mortem. I have the results in the report Penny obtained from Ian Gillesbie. There was spermatozoa in his urethra.’
Morag frowned. ‘Does that mean anything, Torquil? As I understand it ejaculation can occur at death.’
Torquil nodded. ‘Aye, it can occur, I believe. But swabs were also taken and the lab found condom lubricant oils on the swabs from the shaft of the penis. It looks as if he had sex soon before death and he was wearing a condom.’
Penny urgently started flicking through the pages in her file. After a few moments, she said, ‘There were no condoms either used or unused found in the cabin, boss. All the bins were gone through, of course.’ She tapped her pen on her file. ‘And I don’t think the tests reported any evidence of body fluids from a sexual partner on him?’
‘If he was wearing a condom there wouldn’t necessarily be any,’ Torquil pointed out.
Ewan winced. ‘This is looking bleak, boss.’
‘So he wasn’t alone when he died?’ Penny asked.
‘Was this person male or female?’ Douglas asked. ‘Is there any way of knowing?’
Torquil shrugged. ‘That I don’t know. But if there was a second person, then it explains things. Like the blunt injury, this Le Fort type 2 facial fracture. It’s possible that someone threw him down or ground his face into the floor. And it could explain the insulin. He may have been given the insulin after getting very drunk. I talked all this over with Ralph McLelland and he thinks this is all plausible.’
Penny stared at Torquil in horror. ‘Gosh, I’m sorry, boss. I didn’t have any suspicions that there was another person present.’
‘Nor was there any reason to suppose so from the facts. But it begins to look like murder. Especially when two things aren’t here that should be. No condoms and no laptop. Remember, he wanted to be a writer, but there is no laptop recorded here in the cabin.’
He added the words ‘no condoms’ and ‘no laptop’ under the scene findings label and drew stars beside them. He picked up his tea and took a sip. ‘I’m going to have to talk with the Procurator Fiscal about it all, which is why we need to get our ideas together first. So, with the knowledge that the two bottles contained the same composition of peatreek it is likely that they came from the same illicit source.’
With a green marker pen he wrote in capital letters the word ‘WHISKY’ at the top of the middle section of the board. Halfway down he wrote the word ‘Peatreek’, and then enclosed them both in squares. From the peatreek square he drew arrows to the pillbox and Lochiel’s Copse squares and then to each of the teenagers and to Robbie Ochterlonie.
‘We have two bona fide distilleries on the island; Abhainn Dhonn and Glen Corlin,’ he said.
Under the label ‘whisky’ he put the names of the two distilleries in circles and inserted arrows from the whisky square to each distillery. Below each one he wrote the names of the owners and of the people who worked at them.
‘So you’ll need the names of the four illicit peatreek still owners,’ said Wallace. ‘Tosh MacNeill, Larry Kennedy, Norman Smith and Drew McQueen. Drew is a crofter and the others are fishermen. We confiscated their stuff. They were the only stills we could find out about.’
‘We’ll need their peatreek analysing as soon as possible,’ Torquil replied as he added their names under the peatreek box.
‘Don’t forget that Catriona McDonald and Vicky Spiers worked at the Hydro,’ said Morag.
Torquil nodded and made a new square for The Old Hydropathic Residential Home and under it added their names and those of Norma Ferguson, Doreen McGuire and Millie McKendrick. He added arrows from the two teenagers’ circles to the Hydro box.
‘It’s quite a tangled web already,’ Penny said.
‘Aye, or a skeleton framework. Now we need to add flesh to the bones. Photographs, we want all the ones you’ve all taken. Print them out and stick them up here.’
‘I forwarded the ones from Stan Wilkinson’s phone and already printed them out, Torquil,’ said Morag. ‘They’re in my drawer.’
‘Ah yes, Stan Wilkinson,’ said Torquil. ‘He took Catriona to hospital and he also found and took Angus. We’ll put him on the board, too.’ He added the postman’s name to the bottom left of the board and circled it, then added arrows to Angus Mackintosh and to Catriona McDonald. Underneath it he wrote ‘Good Samaritan’.
Ewan suddenly smacked himself on the forehead. ‘Boss, I just realised, the burglary! Stan Wilkinson’s phone was among the things that were taken from the station. And among the other bits and pieces were things that Morag’s search team had found.’
‘Including Vicky’s trainer,’ agreed Morag.
‘And my murder shoes,’ Ewan added. ‘They were brand new and unworn.’
Torquil made another list under the title ‘Burglary’ and drew an arrow between Stan Wilkinson’s name and the mobile phone and between Vicky’s trainer and the pillbox. He continued, ‘When I interviewed the staff at the Old Hydro Millie McKendrick told me she suspected that Robbie Ochterlonie may have had a secret relationship. She also thought that Norma Ferguson had a soft spot for him. Then Doreen McGuire said she thought she might be right about that.’
He added the words ‘secret lover’ to the right of Robbie’s circled name then underlined it twice for emphasis. Then he added a question mark and an arrow between Norma Ferguson and Robbie and a larger question mark beside the ‘secret lover’.
‘So, the first question is whether his secret lover is also his secret killer? The second arises if we conjecture that there is more than coincidence about the two events being linked, because the same peatreek was consumed in both cases.’
‘It all puts a different light on our search too, Torquil,’ said Morag.
‘Exactly,’ Torquil replied with a nod of his head as under Vicky’s circle he added the words ‘alive or dead?’ He looked round the room. ‘Or, which seems increasingly likely, as we have found no sign of her apart from two trainers found six miles apart from each other, is she being held somewhere against her will?’
Torquil left the others to reflect on the board while he went through to his office to make calls. He talked the cases over with Josephine Pengelly, the Procurator Fiscal in Oban, updating her on the search for Vicky Spiers and outlining his concerns about the death of Robbie Ochterlonie. She agreed that there was urgency now in finding Vicky Spiers and also discovering the source of the illicit whisky. The pillbox inquiry was now a potential culpable homicide case, because of Jamie Mackintosh’s death, but possibly also one of abduction in the case of Vicky Spiers. She also agreed that Robbie Ochterlonie’s death was highly suspicious and that it should now be considered a murder investigation.