Deathly Wind

chapter twelve

The mouth-watering aroma of fried kippers greeted Torquil as he came down to breakfast the following morning. The Padre was standing by the Aga reading the latest edition of the West Uist Chronicle. He sighed and handed the paper to his nephew.

‘Calum has been busy,’ he announced. ‘He sails close to the wind a lot of the time, but he may find himself in a spot of trouble with this.’

Torquil sat down and spread the newspaper on the table beside his place setting. There was a large photograph of the two wind towers on the Wee Kingdom and the headline: WIND OF DISCONTENT.

The article that followed it was one of Calum’s rants:

The threat of wind farms in the Hebrides is now a reality. The self-styled ‘laird of Dunshiffin’, Mr Jock McArdle, has steamrollered the local crofting community on the Wee Kingdom. These ugly wind towers are each about fifty feet tall and have been erected on the common grazing ground adjoining the late Gordon MacDonald’s Wind’s Eye croft. The new owner of the Dunshiffin estate, of which the Wee Kingdom is a part, has gone against the local wishes and put his ill-conceived plan into action.

The West Uist Chronicle says that this plan is ill-conceived because the legality of erecting these wind towers on common grazing ground is in doubt.

Torquil lifted the paper as his uncle handed him a plate and put the skillet of kippers on a cooling board in the centre of the table.

It’s not too bad as an article,’ Torquil said. ‘I guess he’s just echoing local opinion.’

‘Ah, but he then goes on to get a bit personal about McArdle and he calls his employees “henchmen”. Not content with that he accuses them of intimidatory tactics, and mentions again about them throwing his camera into Loch Hynish.’

Torquil picked up his knife and fork and began to eat as he continued to read.

‘It’s the article on the next page that I meant though,’ Lachlan added, as he poured tea.

Torquil turned to the inside page and saw the photograph of the body of Liam Sartori lying below the causeway. The face had been digitally blurred, but beneath the photograph was the headline: HAVE THE KILLER EAGLES STRUCK AGAIN?

There was a blown up insert at the bottom left of the photograph, featuring a golden eagle swooping on some prey.

‘Good grief, he’s gone mad!’ Torquil exclaimed. And he read:

The body of a man, believed to be in the employ of Mr Jock McArdle, the new owner of the Dunshiffin estate, was found face down in a rock pool yesterday below the causeway to the Wee Kingdom. Our reporter saw the body and informed us that there were unmistakable talon marks across the dead man’s face. He was able to confirm that these are identical to those found on the body of Mr Kenneth McKinley, who died in a climbing accident in the Corlins last week.

Two deaths! Both with talon marks! Isn’t it time that someone did something?

‘The bloody fool!’ Torquil exclaimed. ‘What’s he playing at? It’s bad enough that he’s published a photograph of the poor chap’s body but to write that drivel. It is as if he is inciting some idiot to go hunting for eagles.’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘Blast Calum and his inflated ego. Why does he feel he has to sensationalize everything?’

‘And there are a lot of hotheads around,’ agreed Lachlan. ‘But he’ll get flak from people like Nial Urquart and the bird lovers.’

‘Damn!’ Torquil cursed, as he pushed his plate aside. ‘That’s all I need with a murder investigation on my hands.’

No sooner had he said it, than his mobile went off. Morag’s name flashed on the view screen.

‘Torquil have you seen—?’

‘Aye, Morag. I’ve got the Chronicle in front of me. Calum Steele is a prize idiot.’

‘He is that,’ Morag agreed. ‘But I didn’t mean the Chronicle, I’ve just been watching the tail end of the early morning Scottish TV news before I take the kids to the minders. Kirstie Macroon has just done a piece on the “Killer Eagles of West Uist”, and she had a tele-interview with Calum. We may be in for an influx of reporters and sensation seekers.’

Torquil groaned.

‘I’ve got everything teed up for first thing though,’ Morag went on. ‘The Drummonds and Ralph McLelland are coming in. I thought we’d have the briefing in the recreation-room at the station. I’ll have it all ready for when you get in.’

Superintendent Lumsden had left a message with Morag for Torquil to telephone him as soon as he set foot in the building.

‘I think his gout must still be playing him up,’ Morag said with a grimace that told Torquil exactly the sort of reception he could expect when his superior officer answered the telephone. And indeed there were no pleasantries or preliminary banter: the superintendent just went straight for the jugular:

‘Why the hell is it always the same with you, McKinnon? Do you set out to embarrass me with the chief constable? Why do I always seem to hear about what’s happening on West Uist when I look at the TV news? Killer eagles for goodness sake! Have you no control over that numskull reporter Calum Steele?’

‘The freedom of the press, Superintendent Lumsden,’ Torquil returned.

‘Bollocks! Why didn’t you let me know about this?’

‘I was going to contact you this morning, sir. I knew nothing about this story until I read the newspaper this morning. In fact, it may be more complex than the report on the TV.’

There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the telephone, and then slowly, Superintendent Lumsden growled, ‘Go on, McKinnon, surprise me.’

Torquil took a deep breath. ‘I was going to contact you this morning, sir, after my meeting with the police surgeon. Doctor McLelland did a post-mortem last night.’

‘And?’

‘We haven’t had the meeting yet, sir. But there is a strong possibility that the man’s death was more suspicious than we thought.’

There was an interruption on the other end of the line and Torquil heard someone else talking in the background, and then Lumsden replying to them.

‘Right, McKinnon, spit it out, I’m going to have to go. I’m about to take a call from the laird of Dunshiffin.’

‘It may have been murder, sir.’

Torquil winced as the superintendent howled down the other end of the line.

‘Right! What a bloody fiasco! Have your meetings Inspector, then report back to me straight away. Meanwhile I’ll see what your laird wants.’

‘He isn’t my laird, Superintendent—’

But the line had gone dead.

When she heard the phone being replaced, Morag popped her head round Torquil’s office door. She sympathetically smiled at him. ‘Everyone is here. Are you ready to start? I’ve got the tea and biscuits ready.’

The atmosphere was subdued in the recreation-room, because everyone was conscious that PC Ewan McPhee, the big wrestling and hammer-throwing champion was no longer with them.

Torquil began by informing them all about the Scottish TV early news programme and about Calum Steele’s piece in the Chronicle.

‘Aye, but what I can’t understand is that anyone would listen to the wee windbag’s theories,’ said Douglas Drummond.

‘Och, it is because he is a man of letters and not an ignorant fisherman like you,’ replied his brother. ‘Or like me, for that matter – even though we both beat him in the Gaelic spelling contests when we were all at school. You remember them, don’t you, Piper?’

Torquil grunted assent and brought the twins to order by clapping his hands and standing up. ‘What Calum has done – is done!’ he said. ‘But although he has made the national news with his talk about killer eagles, it actually looks as if there is a more sinister killer abroad than an eagle. It looks as if there is a murderer on West Uist.’

He gestured to the local doctor. ‘Ralph, would you give us a summary of your post-mortem findings on the body of Liam Sartori?’

While Torquil had been speaking Ralph McLelland had been plugging his laptop into the station projector.

‘I’ve done this as a Power-Point presentation,’ he explained. ‘That way I can show you each stage of my examination, from the initial finding of the body by the causeway, through my preliminary external examination of the corpse, the post-mortem dissection, and the pathological and microscopic specimens that resulted from it.’

He looked at Morag. ‘Can we pull the blinds?’

And a few moments later with the room in partial darkness he pressed the home button on his laptop and a photograph of Liam Sartori lying on the rocks by the causeway flashed onto the wall.

‘As Torquil has just told us, the media have drawn attention to the so-called talon marks on the face of the dead man.’ He pointed a laser pen at the wall and indicated the livid lines on the face with the little luminous red arrow. ‘Quite clearly, if these are talon slashes then they lead us to think that they are the same marks that we so recently saw on the face of Kenneth McKinley.’

‘And are they, Ralph?’ Torquil asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ the doctor returned, changing the slide with the touch of a finger, to reveal the body of Kenneth McKinley and the deep gashes on his face. ‘What do you think?’

The others all craned forward to look.

‘I am not sure,’ said Wallace.

‘Isn’t there some test that will tell?’ Morag answered.

‘I honestly don’t know – yet,’ replied Ralph. ‘I’ve never come across a death as the result of an attack by a bird of prey. But the point is, it could have been. And we also have to ask several questions. First, could he have fallen off the causeway after being attacked by a bird, and then risen stunned from a knock on the head? Could he have then staggered forward to fall face first into a rock pool and drown?’

‘What makes you doubt that, Ralph?’ Torquil asked, already aware of Ralph’s findings.

Ralph moved to the next slide.

‘This!’ he said emphatically.

And they found themselves looking at the naked back of Liam Sartori, as he lay on the metal post-mortem table in the cottage hospital mortuary. Ralph directed the luminous arrow of his laser pen to a discoloured area that started between the dead man’s shoulder blades and ran up to his neck.

‘In my opinion this mark was caused by a foot,’ Ralph said. ‘You can see petechiae, tiny pinpoint haemorrhages dotted around and the spreading purple discolouration. This would be consistent with a foot having been stomped down hard on him – and maintaining pressure for some time. Possibly holding him underneath the water surface of that rock pool.’

‘You mean after he had staggered there?’ Wallace asked.

‘Except that we think he was dragged there, rather than staggered there,’ said Torquil. And he described the position of the dead man’s collar, the disturbed shingle where he had fallen.

‘Here’s a photograph of how we found him,’ said Ralph. ‘Bearing in mind that the Padre had pulled him out of the pool, yet the position of his collar would be hard to explain.’

He then ran through a number of slides detailing the morbid anatomical dissection. Despite herself Morag felt decidedly queasy and had to look away. The Drummonds, well used to gutting fish and removing vast amounts of entrails nodded with interest and sipped tea.

‘As you can see there, I am squeezing water from the lungs. But the question is, did that water get there before or after he died?’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Douglas Drummond.

‘Well, the presence of water in the lungs doesn’t by itself tell us a lot. It could have got into his lungs after he was dead.’

Wallace slapped his hand on the table. ‘Gosh, I see what you mean. It could have been made to look like he was drowned.’ Then he eyed the police surgeon doubtfully. ‘But how else could he have died?’

‘From this,’ said Ralph moving the slide to a photograph of a human brain resting in a large stainless-steel dish. Once again he manoeuvred the luminous red arrow of his laser pen to highlight a large clot of blood that had formed over the left temporal area. ‘That could have killed him, although I think it may have just been enough to stun or knock him out. He could have sustained it in a fall, but equally, he could have been hit and then fallen.’

It is not easy, this science of yours, is it, Dr McLelland?’ mused Douglas, his voice full of respect and awe.

‘Did you do a diatom test, Ralph?’ Torquil asked.

‘I did, and here it is.’ And with a press of the button the wall was illuminated with a microscopic section of what looked like bubbles in a mush of red pulp. All over the field were small dots of a greenish hue. ‘Those bubble-like structures are alveoli, the air pockets in the lungs, and those little dots are tiny unicellular organisms called diatoms. The water in the rock pool sample I took is full of them. This slide shows that they are present both inside and outside the alveoli. That implies that his heart was beating for some period of time after he was in the water. The diatoms have been inhaled and have entered the bloodstream. I have other samples that I have yet to analyse, but if I find them in other organs it is pretty conclusive that he drowned.’

‘And with that strange bruise on his back it looks as if he may have been held under,’ suggested Torquil. ‘But he was a big bloke. Would it have needed a lot of strength to keep him under?’

‘Not necessarily,’ returned Ralph. ‘His blood alcohol level was high enough to have anaesthetized half of the fishermen in West Uist.’

‘Huh!’ said Wallace Drummond, doubtfully.

Torquil crossed to the whiteboard that was usually used to keep darts or table tennis scores and picked up the marker pen.

‘All right, we have a suspected murder victim,’ he said, writing the name Liam Sartori on the board and enclosing it in a box. ‘What do we know about him?’

‘He worked for the new laird,’ Wallace Drummond suggested.

Torquil nodded, wrote the name Jock McArdle nearby and enclosed it in a circle. He joined the box and the circle with a line. ‘What else?

‘He was from Glasgow. Not much taste in clothes,’ said Douglas.

‘He had a run in with Calum Steele,’ said Morag.

Torquil added Calum’s name and circled it.

‘And he had a run in with Ewan,’ Morag added.

Torquil turned and stared at her in surprise. ‘Did he now? When? I didn’t know about that?’

Morag coloured. ‘Sorry, Torquil. I thought I had told you. I’ve just – I mean I had – things on my mind. I’ll get the report book.’

She got up and went through to the main office, returning after a few moments with the large loose-leaf ledger. She put the book down on the table in front of Torquil and thumbed back the pages.

‘Here it is. Early last week, a couple of days before he … was last seen. Ewan cautioned him and his companion, a Danny Reid, about messing about with a motorboat in the harbour. When he approached them they did not realize that he was a police officer and started giving him lip. You know what a gentle giant he is—’ She bit her lip, and went on. ‘Anyway, he showed them his warrant card and they just kept on being abusive and derogatory about West Uist, and about being the new laird’s right-hand men. Then one of them tossed a cigarette end into the gutter and Ewan gave him the option of picking it up and taking it home or being run in there and then.’

Morag grinned as she recalled the scene of him telling her about it. ‘When he began rolling up his sleeves – to use Ewan’s words – “he fair scuttled down and picked it up”. But Ewan thinks they went off muttering about getting him back.’

Torquil tapped the marker pensively on the table then turned and added Ewan’s name. He hesitated a moment, then enclosed it in a box. ‘We will use a box to indicate that Ewan is … also dead.’ He sighed and drew a line between the names. Then he added the name Danny Reid, circled it and drew interconnecting lines with Liam Sartori, Ewan McPhee and Jock McArdle.

After a moment he wrote the word ‘dog’ near Jock McArdle’s name and enclosed it in a box, and underneath it wrote the words ‘suspected poison’, followed by a question mark.

‘Right, now let’s focus on the Wee Kingdom for a minute,’ he said. ‘Liam Sartori had been there, delivering letters, as I understand it; Lachlan told me about it. And the letters were all legal documents on behalf of the new estate owner, Jock McArdle, informing the crofters that he was going to have wind towers erected on the common grazing land adjoining their crofts.’

Ralph had been quiet since his presentation. Now he interjected, ‘I am guessing that it is the same letter that the laird himself delivered to Rhona at the hospital!’ His normally calm visage turned stern. ‘I have every reason to believe that was the trigger for her heart attack.’

Torquil nodded, then turned and under the heading of Wee Kingdom added Rhona McIvor’s name, which he duly boxed. He turned to Morag. ‘We’ll need a copy of that letter.’

Morag had been making notes. ‘And I expect we’ll need to interview all of the crofters.’

Douglas Drummond snorted. ‘Aye, the ones that are still alive.’

And Torquil wrote the names as prompted by Morag: Alistair McKinley, Megan Munro, Vincent Gilfillan, all of whom he enclosed in circles. And then Gordon MacDonald and Kenneth McKinley, who received boxes.

‘What about the family?’ Morag asked.

‘Good question,’ replied Torquil adding their names alongside the other members of the Wee Kingdom community. Instead of a box or a circle he drew a large question mark beside their names.

As Torquil began making notes about the respective post-mortem findings on Liam Sartori and Kenneth McKinley, and then linking their names with the word EAGLE followed by a question mark, Wallace Drummond verbalized the growing anxiety that they had all been feeling ever since his brother’s earlier comment. ‘There seem to be an awful lot of folk’s names in boxes on that board!’

Torquil moved to another part of the board and made similar notes about the contents of Ewan’s notebook. He wrote the words: GUNS, BOND, FAIR FANCIES HIMSELF, then on another column KATRINA, FAMILY and WIND.

‘SAS, camouflage clothes and guns,’ mused Torquil as he tapped various entries on the board with the marker pen. ‘And all that slug goo that was found in Kenneth McKinley’s stomach – it all adds up to a rich fantasy life, I think. So BOND may have been James Bond! He saw himself as some sort of secret agent, it seems.’

Morag snapped her fingers. ‘Maybe that’s another link with Katrina Tulloch, the vet? Maybe he fantasized about her?’

Torquil circled Katrina’s name, adding lines to Ewan, Kenneth McKinley and the poisoned dog.

‘It is a spider’s web you have there, Piper,’ said Wallace.

‘You are right, Wallace,’ Torquil mused. ‘But where is the spider?’