He was unsure himself exactly how he felt.
From the meeting Torquil went to pay a visit to Jessie McPhee, Ewan’s mother. A typical West Uist mist had descended suddenly from the Corlins, and its presence was enough to dampen his spirits. He smiled wistfully as he rode up to the shed at the back of the McPhee cottage. There were at least five holes in the shed roof, a result of Ewan’s hammer-throwing practice. Torquil pictured the big red-haired constable winding himself up and hurling the Scottish hammer over the roof as he worked on getting the trajectory just right to get maximum distance. Getting round to repairing his ‘low shots’ had been a frequent bone of contention between Ewan and his mother.
‘He was a strapping lad,’ Jessie said, with tears in her eyes and a cup and saucer in her hand, as she and Torquil sat before a peat fire in the front parlour.
‘We must not give up hope, Jessie.’
Torquil had known and respected Jessie McPhee all of his life. She had been widowed when Ewan was a teenager. Her husband, Balloch McPhee had been a fisherman, like so many of the islanders of his generation. And in his spare time he had been a special constable, one of the stalwarts of the Hebridean Constabulary.
‘You were always a good friend to Ewan, Torquil,’ Jessie replied, finishing her tea and laying the cup and saucer down on the basketwork tray on the coffee table. She sighed. ‘But who are we trying to kid? First it was Balloch and now it is Ewan. Both drowned. It is something we islanders have to live with. You yourself lost your parents to the sea, and I am not the first West Uist woman to lose her menfolk, and I doubt if I will be the last. I just hope that his body will wash up on the shore someplace and then we can lay him to rest properly.’
Half an hour later as he rode his Royal Enfield Bullet along the snaking headland road, scattering countless gulls from the dunes, he had to agree with Jessie McPhee’s pronouncement. He slowed up as the mist suddenly became thicker and he flicked on his full headbeam.
He just could not get his head round the loss of Ewan. He was so big, so strong and robust. He was not looking forward to the inevitable Fatal Accident Enquiry on his friend and colleague.
‘Damn it!’ he exclaimed, as he slowed and swung the Bullet off the road and through thick bracken onto a thin track through the heather towards the Corlins. It was a shortcut that he often took on his way back to the manse.
He heard a cacophony of dog barking ahead of him and a moment later the Bullet’s headlamp beam caught the eyes of first one then two dogs advancing towards him through the mist. He slowed down as he saw a figure appear behind the dogs, frantically waving to him.
‘Heel, Willie! Heel, Angus!’
Torquil immediately recognized the two West Highland terriers and their elderly owner, Annie McConville. The old woman’s eyes were wide with alarm and she looked shocked.
‘Annie, what are you doing out here?’ he asked, as he cut the engine and dismounted. He pulled the machine onto its central pedestal and pulled off his gauntlets. Annie McConville was well known throughout West Uist for her dog sanctuary in Kyleshiffin. She was breathless and for a moment unable to speak. She grabbed the sleeve of his leather jacket.
I’m out trying to keep my wee doggies from thinking about their friend Zimba. He’s in having an operation.’ She tugged firmly on his sleeve. ‘We’ve found a body! Over there!’
And indeed, on the rocks at the foot of an almost sheer cliff-face lay the broken body of Kenneth McKinley.
chapter six
Annie McConville was a formidable lady. Some people thought of her as the old dog-loving woman who was losing her wits, while others were more generous and averred that she was simply a glorious eccentric. The longer Torquil had known her, the more he had become aware of the strong personality that lurked behind the façade of eccentricity. He was sure that she fostered the image, just as Miss Melville, another West Uist worthy, played up to her image as the retired local schoolmistress.
Yet there was one quality possessed by Annie McConville that was now abundantly clear to Torquil. The old lady had a level head. She had discovered a body under tragic circumstances and had neither panicked nor gone hysterical. What she had done before Torquil arrived was to examine the body for any signs of life.
‘The poor soul has been dead since yesterday, I would be betting,’ she said, looking over his shoulder as Torquil squatted beside the body of the crofter as soon as he had telephoned to Kyleshiffin for assistance.
‘He’s had a fall, that’s for sure. Dashed his brains out,’ she said conversationally, as she clipped leads on the two West Highland terriers who were both cowering unhappily at her ankles, clearly anxious to get away from the disquieting dead body.
Annie sucked air between her teeth. ‘Aye, it looks like an eagle killed him.’
Torquil had noticed the three long gashes on Kenneth McKinley’s face, extending from above the left eye and running diagonally down across his cheek to the corner of his mouth. It was an obvious wound that stood out from the gashes and contusions that he seemed to have sustained in his fall.
Gingerly, and futilely he knew, he felt the neck for a carotid pulse. The cold skin was a shade somewhere between blue and purple and felt rock hard as rigor mortis had long set in.
‘He’ll have been after the eagle eggs up there, I am thinking,’ Annie went on.
‘You may be right, Annie,’ Torquil said, pursing his lips pensively. ‘But perhaps he was after the eagles themselves?’
‘Now why would you be saying that, Inspector McKinnon?’ Annie asked in a voice that almost seemed indignant, as if she was irritated that he had come up with an alternative theory to her own.
Despite himself, Torquil answered automatically, for he was mentally trying to piece things together. ‘Because you don’t necessarily need a rifle to rob a nest of eggs.’ He pointed mechanically to the bullet that lay beside the body, as if it had been thrown out of his camouflage jacket pocket upon impact with the rocky ground. ‘It looks like a .308 rifle bullet.’ He straightened up and peered round in search of the rifle. When he saw no sign of it he looked up at the sheer rock face and the ledge high above. Perhaps it is still up there, he mused to himself.
Annie tugged the Westies’ leads and the two dog stood upright eagerly ready to retreat.
‘I didn’t see that,’ she said coldly. ‘We’ll be away then, Inspector. You know where I am if you are requiring a statement.’
Torquil noted the angry tone that had suddenly entered her voice. ‘Are you all right, Annie?’ he asked concernedly.
‘I am perfectly well, thank you, Inspector McKinnon. I just did not want to say something now that I might regret later on.’
Torquil eyed her quizzically. ‘What do you mean, Annie? Why would you say something that you regret?’
In response Annie zipped up her anorak to its limit and sniffed coldly. ‘Oh don’t worry, Inspector McKinnon, I didn’t mean that I have anything to hide! I meant that I don’t want to say or think anything ill of the dead. Especially not when someone has lost their life so young. It is just that I don’t have a lot of sympathy for anyone who harms one of the Lord’s creatures – be that animal, bird or man.’
Torquil watched her walk off with the two Westies tugging at their leads.
Her parting words had given him a strange feeling. ‘Animal, bird or man.’ He looked down at the bullet lying beside the body. He had left it there deliberately, since it would need to be photographed beside his body. It was certainly a calibre that would be enough to kill a man!
Doctor Ralph McLelland arrived in the Kyleshiffin Cottage Hospital ambulance about quarter of an hour later. It was not a purpose-built ambulance, but was in fact a fairly ancient camper van that had been donated to the cottage hospital by Angus Macleod, the late laird of the Dunshiffin estate. Sergeant Morag Driscoll arrived moments after him in the official police Ford Escort.
Torquil led them to the body and explained his findings before the GP-cum-police surgeon went to work, assisted by Morag, who was forensically trained.
Ralph McLelland was one of Torquil’s oldest friends. He was the third generation of his family to minister to the local people of West Uist. He had trained at Glasgow University then embarked on a career in forensic medicine, having gained his diploma in medical jurisprudence as well as the first part of his membership of the Royal College of Pathologists. But then his father had fallen ill and he had felt the old strings of loyalty tug at him, so that he returned to the island to take over his father’s practice and look after him in the last six months of his life. He had been in single-handed practice for six years.
As for Morag Driscoll, she was a thirty-something single parent of three children. She too had for a time striven to break loose from her island background and had undergone CID training in Dundee before returning to West Uist, marriage and parenthood. Her husband’s early demise from a heart attack had given her a personal drive to keep healthy – which she managed in the main, except for a slight problem with her weight – so that she could provide for her ‘three bairns,’ as she called them.
Together, Morag and Ralph were a formidable team, forming as they did the unofficial forensic unit of the West Uist division of the Hebridean Constabulary. They knew unerringly what the other needed in terms of the examination of the body and the scene.
‘Is it a straightforward accident, do you think?’ Torquil asked, after the pair had spent about half an hour examining and photographing the body, the surrounding area, collecting bits and pieces and bagging them up in small polythene envelopes.
Ralph and Morag looked at each other. Ralph raised his eyebrows and Morag shook her head.
‘Well, it looks like it could have been an accident,’ said Ralph. ‘But I don’t like the look of that bullet you found.’
‘That’s my view as well, Piper,’ agreed Morag. ‘And where is the rifle?’
‘That’s what I thought,’ replied Torquil. ‘I took a walk up to that ledge and saw where he must have tumbled over. But there is no sign of a gun there. So either he didn’t have one with him,’ he paused and stroked his chin worriedly. ‘Or he had one – and someone for some reason has removed it from the scene.’