There were people further along the water’s edge: parents and their offspring, feeding bread crusts to the birds. Some of them started running towards the car. Young had pulled the Daewoo up on to what pavement there was, so as not to block the carriageway. Siobhan skidded down the slope. The doors of the Jaguar were open, figures emerging from either side. But then the car jerked backwards again and started to sink. Mangold was out, up to his chest in water, but Ishbel had been thrown back into her seat, and the pressure was pushing her door closed again as the interior started to fill with water. Mangold saw what was happening and reached inside, starting to haul her across to the driver’s side. But she was caught somehow, and now only the windscreen and roof were showing. Siobhan waded into the foul-smelling water. Steam was rising from the submerged and superheated engine.
‘Give me a hand!’ Mangold was yelling. He had hold of both Ishbel’s arms. Siobhan took a deep breath and plunged beneath the surface. The water was murky and bubbling, but she could see the problem: Ishbel’s foot was wedged between the passenger seat and the handbrake. And the harder Mangold pulled, the faster it would hold. She surfaced again.
‘Let go!’ she told him. ‘Let her go or she’ll drown!’ Then she took another breath and ducked back beneath the surface, where she came face to face with Ishbel, whose features had taken on an unexpected calmness, surrounded by the loch’s flotsam and jetsam. There were tiny bubbles escaping from her nostrils and the sides of her mouth. Siobhan reached past her to release the foot, and felt arms wrap around her. Ishbel was drawing her closer, as if determined that the two of them should stay there. Siobhan tried wriggling free, all the time working on the trapped foot.
But it was no longer trapped.
And still Ishbel stayed there.
And held her.
Siobhan tried grabbing at the hands, but it was difficult: they were locked behind her back. The last of her air was leaving her lungs. Movement was growing almost impossible, Ishbel trying to draw her further into the car.
Until Siobhan kneed her in the solar plexus, and felt the embrace loosen. This time she was able to wrench herself free. She grabbed Ishbel by the hair and kicked upwards, hands immediately finding her — not Ishbel’s this time, but Mangold’s. With her face above water, Siobhan’s mouth opened to suck in air. Then she spat water from her mouth, wiped it from her eyes and nose. Pushed the hair back out of her face.
‘You stupid bloody bitch!’ she screamed, as Ishbel, gasping and spluttering, was led to the bank by Ray Mangold. Then, to a gawping Les Young: ‘She was going to take me with her!’
He helped her out of the water. Ishbel was lying a few yards away, a group of onlookers gathering around her. One of them had a video camera out, recording the event for posterity. When he pointed it at Siobhan, she slapped it away and bore down on the prone, drenched figure.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’
Mangold was kneeling, trying to cradle Ishbel in his arms. ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said.
‘I don’t mean you, I mean her!’ She prodded Ishbel with a toe. Les Young was trying to lead her away by the arm, mouthing words she couldn’t hear. There was a raging in her ears, a fire in her lungs.
Ishbel eventually turned her head to look up at her rescuer. Her hair was plastered to her face.
‘I’m sure she’s grateful,’ Mangold was saying, while Young added something about it being an automatic reflex... something he’d heard about before.
Ishbel Jardine, however, didn’t say anything. Instead, she bowed her head and spewed a mixture of bile and water on to damp earth stained white with feather-down.
‘I was bloody well fed up of you lot, if you want to know.’
‘And that’s your excuse, is it, Mr Mangold?’ Les Young asked. ‘That’s your whole explanation?’
They were seated in Interview Room 1, St Leonard’s police station — no distance at all from Holyrood Park. A few of the uniforms had expressed surprise at Siobhan’s return to her old stomping-ground, her humour not improved by a call on her mobile from DCI Macrae at Gayfield Square, asking where the hell she was. When she’d told him, he’d started a long complaint about attitude and teamwork and the apparent disinclination of former St Leonard’s officers to show anything other than contempt for their new billet.
All the time he was talking, Siobhan was having a blanket wrapped around her, a mug of instant soup pressed into her hand, her shoes removed to be dried on a radiator...
‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t catch all of that,’ she was forced to admit, once Macrae had stopped talking.
‘You think this is funny, DS Clarke?’
‘No, sir.’ But it was... in a way. She just didn’t think Macrae would share her sense of the absurd.
She sat now, bra-less in a borrowed T-shirt, and wearing black standard-issue trousers three sizes too large. On her feet: a pair of men’s white sports socks, covered by the polythene slip-ons used at crime scenes. Around her shoulders: a grey woollen blanket, the kind provided in each holding-cell. She hadn’t had a chance to wash her hair. It felt thick and dank, and smelled of the loch.
Mangold was wrapped in a blanket, too, hands cupped around a plastic beaker of tea. He’d lost his tinted glasses, and his eyes were reduced to slits in the glare of the strip-lighting. The blanket, Siobhan couldn’t help noticing, was exactly the same colour as the tea. There was a table between them. Les Young sat next to Siobhan, pen poised above an A4 pad of paper.
Ishbel was in one of the holding-cells. She would be interviewed later.
For now, they were interested in Mangold. Mangold, who hadn’t said anything for a couple of minutes.
‘That’s the story you’re sticking with,’ Les Young commented. He’d started doodling on the pad. Siobhan turned to him.
‘He can give us any drivel he feels like; it doesn’t alter the facts.’
‘What facts?’ Mangold asked, feigning only the faintest interest.
‘The cellar,’ Les Young told him.
‘Christ, are we back to that again?’
It was Siobhan who answered. ‘Despite what you told me last time round, Mr Mangold, I think you do know Stuart Bullen. I think you’ve known him for a while. He had this notion of a mock burial — pretending to bury those skeletons to show the immigrants what would happen to them if they didn’t toe the line.’
Mangold had pushed back so that the front two legs of his chair were off the floor. His face was angled ceiling-wards, eyes closed. Siobhan kept talking, her voice quiet and level.
‘When the skeletons were concreted over, that should have been the end of that. But it wasn’t. Your pub’s on the Royal Mile, you see the tourists every day. Nothing they like better than a bit of atmosphere — that’s why the ghost walks are so popular. You wanted some of that for the Warlock.’
‘No secret there,’ Mangold said. ‘It’s why I was having the cellar renovated.’
‘That’s right... but think what a boost you’d get if a couple of skeletons were suddenly discovered under the floor. Plenty of free publicity, especially with a local historian stoking the fires...’
‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at.’
‘The thing is, Ray, you weren’t seeing the bigger picture. Last thing Stuart Bullen wanted was those skeletons coming to light. People were bound to start asking questions, and those questions might lead back to him and his little slave empire. Is that why he slapped you about a bit? Maybe he got the Irishman to do it for him.’