Cold War

THREE

As he emerged from his eighteenth-century estate outside Rosmarkie for his daily predawn walk, Ewie B. Cameron, whose fifth great granduncle was the eldest son of Sir Ewen of Lochiel of the Highland Camerons, could feel nothing of the legendary courage and fierceness of his ancestors, but only an awful nervous gnawing in his stomach that had worsened throughout the long, long night.

If the documents that plant supervisor had slipped him proved authentic…

No, no, he thought. Their authenticity was beyond question. He could not seek an out for himself by playing the willful fool…

If his interpretation of them proved accurate despite their many cryptic references, verifying the supervisor’s story…

And if the plant’s key stakeholders could not then provide an acceptable accounting of the transactions… which Ewie knew would be nearly impossible given their flagrant violation of Scottish and international regulations…

If, if, if…

Ewie reached the end of his private lane, where a holly hedge screened his lawn from the narrow country road rolling past, the brightness of its berries muted now in the crepuscular light. Stepping onto the shoulder of the road, he turned left against whatever traffic might happen by at this early hour, and strolled toward the stone embankment where it was his habit to do some leg stretches before intensifying his pace. The morning was cold but not at all blustery, with just enough bite to be invigorating. Though Ewie was prone to be an abstemious sobriety of temperament, it was the sort of weather that would usually lift his mood like the fine mist curling off the mature Archangel firs that rose a hundred feet into the air on either side of him.

Today he was only wishing the twist in his gut would slacken a bit, so he could summon the appetite for a minimal breakfast.

For if the evidence Ewie had obtained was what it seemed on its face, the apprehension he felt about this evening’s meeting was as nothing compared to his dread of its broader consequences. Indeed, his first impulse had been to keep the information to himself until he conducted a quiet personal investigation. But that would have been imprudent. Say word of the alleged goings-on at Cromarty Firth leaked in the meantime? Say his informant grew impatient and brought the hard copies elsewhere — another council member, an Energy Authority constable, some damned English bureaucrat with the Department of Trade of Industry? Lord knows, the man might even rashly trot off to the press. Were his own prior ken revealed, Ewie knew his reputation would be compromised. Or worse. He might well be patsied and have to forfeit his council post. Face civil and criminal prosecution.

It was a mad predicament he’d been tossed into. Absolutely mad.

Ewie had been walking for several minutes, bogged in thought, when he noticed that he’d almost missed the embankment. He frowned at his distraction and stepped off the dirt shoulder for his routine warmup exercises.

Standing close to the rock, he leaned against it with his forearms, rested his head on his hands, then bent his right leg forward and extended the other straight back, holding the stretch until he felt it in his left calf. Then he changed sides. After about a minute, he put one foot up on a projecting ledge and, hands on his hips, bent his knee to relax the hamstring and groin muscles…

Perhaps, Ewie thought, he should have shied away from the plant supervisor. Declined to attend their clandestine meeting at the pub, or at least refused to accept the envelope he was handed under the table. He could then have claimed ignorance with honesty. He was no hero. No warrior chieftain like his namesake Sir Ewen, seventeenth clan chieftain, slayer of the last wild wolf in Scotland, and Jacobite rebel who fought beside Bonnie Dundee at Killiecrankie, where it was said he’d torn the throat out of a ranking English officer with his bare teeth, drinking his blood as it pulsed from the wound. Nor would Ewie compare himself to his great and renowned forebear Major Allan Cameron, founder of the bold 79th Highlanders, which was later renamed the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, and then merged with the Seaforths to become the Queen’s Own Highlanders.

Ewie was simply Ewie. An estate legatee, resolute bachelor, and minor elected official appointed to the Land and Environment Select Committee, which reported to a policy committee, which in turn was under the higher control of a strategic committee of the district council. His usual issues of concern were sewage improvements, road and bridge repairs, traffic-light placements, and such. Ewie did not pretend he’d inherited the brave disposition of his forebears. Did not share their combative propensities. He was proudly content to have his fabled lineage charted in the social registry, and the family crest and tartan displayed on his mantelpiece.

Finished with his warmups, Ewie tarried by the ledge as the lights of an oncoming vehicle slid over the rise up ahead, on his side of the road. They glanced off the blaze-orange windbreaker he always wore on his morning rambles, a precaution that made it easier for motorists to spot him. The small Citröen that appeared moments later was familiar, belonging to a pretty young woman who owned the bakery just over the Kessock bridge. She slowed as she came closer, pulled out toward the opposite lane to give Ewie a comfortable berth, and exchanged a mannerly wave with him in passing.

Then the road was again empty. Ewie got on with his walk, feeling physically looser, and hoping he’d eased some of his mental tensions as well. But his thoughts soon drifted back to what he’d learned from the plant supervisor, and they were accompanied by unrelieved distress and anxiety.

It would have been easy for Ewie to rebuff the fellow with a smile, a shrug, and a polite tip of his glass before any secrets were divulged. Easy to shut his eyes to the whole scandalous deal. So why on earth hadn’t he?

The answer, Ewie knew, was that he was stuck with an inconvenient sense of responsibility. Both as public servant and citizen. The plant at Cromarty Firth employed almost fifteen hundred people from Black Isle down the coast to Inverness, and accounted for perhaps twenty-five million pounds per year in local wages, with millions more filtering into the economy through secondary commerce — a full thirty percent of the Gross District Product. At present the core workforce was involved in decommissioning prototype fast breeder reactors built in the 1950’s and ’60’s. But with the site a top contender for an experimental JET tokamak fusion laboratory, revenues had the potential to double in the next ten years.

If the disclosures were true, however…

That word again, Ewie thought.

If.

If they were true, it was not only the expansion that would be threatened, but Cromarty’s very license to remain operational. The UK Atomic Energy Authority constabulary would shut down the plant in a blink, sending the area’s economic prospects into the deepest of holes.

Ewie started up a moderate incline with brisk strides and rhythmic swings of his arms. He wanted to get his blood circulating, and the oxygen flowing into his lungs. Wanted beyond all else to clear his head.

As he neared the top of the rise, Ewie heard another vehicle coming toward him. A commercial rig, judging from the rumble of its wheels. He reached the downhill side and saw that it was a giant tub of a Unimog. The truck was moving well in excess of the speed limit with its brights on.

Startled, blinking from glare of the headlamps, Ewie stepped further onto the shoulder. The truck kept hauling along as if it were on a speed course. Ewie was sure the driver had his gears in fifth.

Ewie decided to let him go on by before resuming his walk. Probably the driver was some ass who’d fallen behind schedule making a delivery to Inverness, and meant to catch up with the clock by hurtling along this quiet stretch of blacktop with no thought of his or anyone else’s safety. Ewie had a mind to memorize his tag number and report him to the police when he got home.

By the time Ewie realized the Unimog had swerved directly toward the shoulder where he was standing, it was too close for him to get out of the way. Blinded by the headlamps, his ears filled with thunder, he reflexively cast his hands front of his face, thrusting his body back toward the wooded area lining the road.

A split second before the front end of the cab mashed into him, Ewie began to shout something that was part question, part curse, and part expression of fear and anger. But the loud roar of the engine drowned out what little of it escaped his lips, and then everything was over for him, all over, his life crushed out, the truck plunging on down the road, away toward the mainland, the blood spatters on its massive fender unnoticeable to anyone who might chance to see it pass in the semidarkness.

They were lying in bed, the husband on his back with the quilt pulled to his bare chest, his wife on her side atop the quilt, facing him, her right hand flat on his stomach. Her nightgown, a flimsy strip of lace-edged silk, revealed far more than it hid. Slung across his body, her right leg was long, toned, the flesh of its thigh smooth and creamy white.

Inspector Frank Gorrie of the Northern Constabulary, Inverness Command Area, was thinking he might be envious of the fellow she was snuggled against, if only his gaze hadn’t climbed above the generous swell where the nightie did not quite manage to cover her breasts.

She had a beautiful figure.

Gorrie did not know about the face, would not know until he saw a photograph of her as she’d appeared in life. Most of it was gone, blown away by a.38-caliber bullet, and there was blood all over the rest. The shot that killed the husband was cleaner, a single entry wound in the middle of his forehead. Probably he’d been asleep when it was fired, never knew what hit him. His face was tranquil, eyes closed. There was a dash of foam at the corner of his lips.

Gorrie could see that the pillowcases were soggy and red under their heads, under the pistol clutched in the woman’s left hand, her finger curled around the trigger, its short barrel thrust into what remained of her mouth.

Standing at the foot of the bed, Gorrie experienced a brief twinge of guilt that had nothing to do with his appreciation of the dead woman’s comely shape. In police work, you noticed what you noticed. The best and worst in people often rubbed up close, and he would not damn himself for being human. But whatever had happened to the couple, or between them, their intimate connection was a strong thing in the room, and Gorrie suspected his discomfort came from the peculiar feeling that he’d somehow intruded upon it.

He turned to the young constable at the door behind him. “What’s the crack on Drummond from the Child Protection Unit?”

“On his way. Someone from Social Work’s coming with him.”

Gorrie motioned to the left, where they’d found the couple’s infant son in his nursery adjoining the master bedroom.

“Baby’s quiet. You sure he’s okay?”

“Aye, sir. We—”

In the outer hallway, the woman who’d discovered the bodies was working up to another fit of teary hysterics. Her name was Christine Gibbon, and she’d identified herself as the best friend of the looker in the tidbit nightie, stressing in the bluntest of terms that she’d held an absolute loathing for the man of the house and gone out of her way to avoid contact with him whenever possible.

“More of a bawler than that little one, she is,” Gorrie muttered under his breath. “But let’s hear what you were saying… ”

“We found some formula in the kitchen. Nappies in a closet near the crib. Robertson gave him a change. And he’s got him on the bottle right now.”

“Four boys of his own, dabbing the piss off a rashy tossel must be nothing new.”

“Aye. I’d suppose.”

Gorrie released a sigh.

“All right, you’d best get somebody in here with a camera,” he said. “Capture the moment, as they say… not that I expect either of these sweethearts’ll be sending the other any endearments next Valentine’s Day.”

The constable smiled feebly, nodded, and left the room. Gorrie noticed he hadn’t once glanced at the bed. No great wonder. With the low violent crime rate in Inverness, and this his first year with the Force, he’d most surely never encountered anything comparable to the scene in this room.

Gorrie looked down at his spiral notepad, flipped to a clean page, and was about to add a few words to his notes when Christine Gibbon resumed her emotional narrative to the officer he’d stationed in the hallway. Gorrie perked an ear. No telling whether she’d come out with something he hadn’t yet heard.

“I told Claire a hun’red times…”

Claire Mackay, the wife, Gorrie thought.

“… a hun’red time’s over ’n more, you want to count, that she’d be doin’ herself a favor by leavin’ the bloody mutt…”

Said mongrel dog being Ed Mackay, the husband. Gorrie had needed to coax the Gibbon woman into giving his name in her initial statement, as she’d insisted the very utterance of it would rot her tongue.

“… to his drinkin’ and erse-chasin’, but I couldn’t get her to listen. See how he provides for me an’ the baby, she’d say. If it weren’t for him I’d still be in the lands, she’d say. Got to forgive him his weaknesses, and so on, and so forth. Well, I say good riddance to the besotted radge, an’ keep your sympathy for Claire…”

Never mind that it was her mate who appeared to have been the victim in what was shaping up to be a murder-suicide case, Gorrie thought.

“… poor girl, she’d been better off in that cramped old flat we used to share when we was single. What good’s his high job at the plant to her now? Or this high place, in the end tally…”

Gorrie frowned at her latest repetition of what had become a tedious song. The “high place” was a suburban bungalow with a nice plot of green here on Eriskay Road, a short jaunt from the city center. The “high job,” taking Christine Gibbon’s comments backwards, was a supervisory waste-management position at the Cromarty Firth nuclear power plant over on Black Isle.

“… tell you, officer, I knew it would come to tragedy. Better they’d gone their separate ways. I’m not one for dirty talk, but this man was one adulterous shit. Always figured he’d take a hand to Claire when he was in one of his moods, though I can’t claim she declared it out and open. He’d got her so mousy intimidated, she kept everything bottled inside. And now the bottle’s broke. What she did, she was pushed to do. Pushed, you can be confident. A hun’red times I told the poor girl…”

As she dissolved into sobs, Gorrie phased her out, thinking there wasn’t much more of relevance to be gotten from her. Hearsay aside, Christine Gibbons’s account could be trimmed to a paragraph. She’d come to her friend’s bungalow this morning in her automobile, the two of them having planned to strap the tyke into a carriage and go shopping down by the Ness. Because Mr. Mackay would occasionally take a ride to the plant with one of the other site-workers, it did not strike Christine as unusual to find his car in the drive. At any rate, she’d knocked on the door and got no answer. Knocked some more, no answer. Then she’d rung the bell. Still no one came to the door. All the while she could hear the child crying inside the house, which caused her some growing disturbance. After another ten minutes of knocking and bell-ringing, Christine let herself in with a spare key Claire had given her to use in a pinch, and called out from the entry hall, again without response. With her opinion of Mr. Mackay being what it was, and no sign of Claire, and the baby shrieking its lungs out, Christine’s concern led her toward the nursery, at which point she passed the open bedroom door, was confronted with the sight of the two dead bodies, and rushed to phone the police, something she could not afterward recall having done in her trauma.

The rest was distraught babble, and a free-flowing tirade of slurs and accusations against the deceased Mr. Mackay.

Now Gorrie clicked the tip back into his pen and glanced out the bedside window. A newly arrived trio of official vehicles had joined the line of police cars that had preceded them into the front drive. A patrol cruiser led the pack. It was followed by a forensics van, and an ambulance. None of them had its flasher or siren on. The damage was done, they were in no hurry, why stir up the entire neighborhood?

Gorrie watched the patrol car’s driver and passenger doors swing open to break the horizontal orange stripes painted across both sides. Watched Robertson and a female social worker exit the car and start toward the house. Then he shifted his eyes to the ambulance at the rear, and watched the emergency medical technicians leave their vehicle for what was no longer an emergency at all, but rather a nasty cleanup job.

Gorrie frowned again. The evidence would be collected and examined, the bodies taken to the morgue for autopsy, and the child passed on to relatives or foster care, depending on who was or wasn’t out there in the world for him. Gorrie and his constables would conduct their follow-up inquiries of family, friends, and acquaintances. And when the case report was filed, his instincts told him it would be written up as an explosive domestic incident, the tale of a marriage gone as bad as they got, its last act an eternal mystery to everyone but the two who’d played it out here in the cold, violated intimacy of its setting.

Better they’d gone their separate ways indeed.

Feeling the sudden need for a breath of fresh air, Gorrie turned from the bed and went outside the house onto the lawn.