Flotsam and Jetsam

FOUR

Lachlan had slept fitfully, which was unusual for him. When dawn broke he rose, did his ablutions and dressed before going downstairs to collect his clubs from their usual place in the hall. Alongside the wall a line of oil-stained newspapers protected the parquet floor from the assortment of carburettor components, oil filters and gears. They were all part of the ongoing project that he and Torquil were engaged in, to rebuild an Excelsior Talisman Twin Sports motor cycle.

His gaze hovered lovingly over these for a moment, and then he gave a start as he noticed something move in the shadows beyond the stripped-down carburettor.

‘Goodness!’ he exclaimed, after taking a sharp intake of breath. ‘I forgot we had a new lodger.’

Crusoe looked out from the clothes basket that Torquil had placed at the far end of the hall and began furiously wagging his tail.

‘At least you are not a noisy yapping wee chap,’ Lachlan said, squatting and giving him a pat. ‘That is a point in your favour right enough. Are you ready for a walk?’

Crusoe was instantly on his feet, his tail thrashing back and forth so much that it was literally wagging his body. Lachlan clipped the lead to his collar then slipped the loop over his wrist. Shouldering his golf bag he let himself out of the manse. Together they scrunched their way down the gravel path to the wrought-iron gate, then crossed the road to the stile that led directly on to the ten-acre plot of undulating dunes and machair that was St Ninian’s golf course.

‘We will walk over to the second hole then give you a wee test. If you can sit quietly each time I play a shot, then maybe I will be happy about you staying a bit longer with us at the manse.’

When they arrived at the tee Crusoe gave a soft bark and then as the Padre raised his finger to his lips and dropped the lead on the ground, he lay down and wagged his tail uncertainly.

Lachlan filled and lit his pipe. ‘Good boy,’ he nodded approvingly. ‘It is looking as if you have had some training in dog manners,’ he said with a grin. Then he pulled out his two wood and teed his ball up. ‘Now for the acid test. Quiet on the tee while I drive off.’

After a couple of his usual waggles he swung easily and the ball took off like a rocket and arced down the fairway into prime position for his second shot. The dog lay still and did not make a murmur.

‘Hmm, maybe you’ve had a bit of gundog training. I certainly have never seen you on the course before so it is not a golfer that has trained you. You are a bit of a curiosity, Crusoe, my wee friend.’ He picked up the bag and picked up the lead. ‘We will play the second and the third, then we will go to the church where I will say my prayers.’ He winked at the dog, who appeared to be listening to his every word as if understanding. ‘That will include a prayer for you. Then we will play the eighth and ninth and get back in time to fix breakfast for Torquil.’

A couple of rabbits suddenly darted out of a cluster of gorse bushes and ran zig-zagging towards a nearby bunker. Crusoe barked three times and strained at the leash.

‘Stay!’ Lachlan snapped.

To his surprise, the dog instantly sat down.

‘I am afraid that there would be no good chasing them, even if I let you off the lead. By the time you got to the bunker they would be down their burrows and I don’t want to risk you getting stuck down one of them.’

Crusoe gave another bark, causing a flurry of movement over on the Padre’s left. He grinned as half-a-dozen sheep broke into a run.

‘And even though you are a collie, you will have to remember that dogs are not allowed to chase the sheep on the golf course.’ He pointed the stem of his pipe at Crusoe. ‘These sheep are precious, you see. They nibble the fairway grass down and make the course playable. They are our greenkeepers.’

Crusoe wagged his tail and looked after the retreating sheep but showed no sign of wanting to give chase. Lachlan scratched his chin. Crusoe was proving himself to be quite an enigma. Although he was still little more than a puppy, yet he had been trained to keep still and not to chase sheep. It was something he would tell Torquil about.

Torquil had slept like a log until his mobile phone roused him at seven. He answered it in a semi-doze, but when he heard his girlfriend, Lorna Golspie’s voice he was instantly awake. Their conversation was typical of those still in the first flush of unbridled fresh love. At Lorna’s news that she would be coming home for five whole days in a week’s time his spirits had soared. Indeed, they soared so high that he rose, showered and prepared a breakfast of fried herrings in oatmeal before the Padre and Crusoe had returned.

‘Oh Mo chreach! Oh dear me!’ Lachlan exclaimed as they entered to the mouth-watering smell of the fish sizzling in the pan. ‘Now this is a sight, Crusoe. My nephew is up and cooking breakfast with a smile on his face, and it is not even a pipe practice morning for him.’

Crusoe gave a small bark and a big wag of his tail.

‘Lorna is coming home for five days next week,’ Torquil volunteered. ‘I don’t know how she has wangled it with Superintendent Lumsden. I am so chuffed I am going to the cave to compose a piece to welcome her home.’

Lachlan washed his hands then sat down and unfurled his napkin. ‘Ah, so it is an unscheduled pipe practice morning then! Will you be taking the dog? I have to say that I have been impressed with his patience so far. He sat and watched me play each shot and didn’t want to chase the ball. He even wagged his tail when I hit a good shot.’ He grinned. ‘He was not quite so impressed with my putting though.’

Torquil laughed. ‘Aye, it is curious that anyone could have been so cruel to him. I would like to get my hands on whoever cast him adrift like that.’

‘Well, if it is any help, I would say that someone had started to train him as a gundog.’ And he explained about the way that he lay down on the tee and about how he did not want to chase sheep. ‘It sounds like he could belong to a farmer, or a crofter somewhere.’

Torquil frowned as he ladled fish on to his uncle’s plate. ‘I kept the cord that he was tied up with. I will be examining it later. There was something very curious about the knots. I didn’t recognize them at all, and I have been messing about in boats all my life.’

Lachlan attacked his breakfast with gusto. ‘And speaking of curious things, we came on one as we left the church. We went out through the cemetery to the eighth tee. There were fresh flowers on the grave of that lassie, Heather McQueen.’

Torquil stopped with his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘The girl who drowned in Loch Hynish last year?’ He suppressed a shiver at the thought. The loch was one of the island’s beauty spots with its crannog and ruined castle in the middle, yet it held sad memories for him.[2]

‘Aye. The curious thing is that whoever put those flowers there must have done so last evening or night. They definitely were not there when I showed Kenneth Canfield the grave yesterday.’

Ewan was due to take the catamaran Seaspray out for a round of the island’s coastline later in the morning. Since that meant that he was more time-limited than usual, he decided to borrow Nippy, his mother’s forty-year-old Norman Nippy 50cc moped, so that he could fit in a bit of hammer practice before he had to pick up the Seaspray from its harbour mooring. Borrowing Nippy was not something that he did lightly, for a 50cc moped was not the ideal vehicle for a self-conscious six foot four-inch hammer-throwing police constable. He was aware that he cut a slightly comedic figure and tried to ignore all of the winks, nudges and smirks as he went along.

Fortunately, there were not too many people on the road at seven in the morning, apart from the local shopkeepers and the market folk who were all up and about, setting up for the day’s trade. He rode along Habour Street nodding right and left to several of them.

Then the unexpected happened.

‘Hey! Look out, you silly billy!’ He cried as a canary yellow camper-van shot out of Weir Street and skidded for several feet as the driver slammed on his brakes. It stopped a yard over the halt line. Ewan had instinctively swerved and narrowly managed to swing round the front of the van just in time. He drew to a halt by the kerb, dismounted and switched off Nippy’s engine. Hoisting the machine easily on to its stand he walked back as the driver slowly wound down his window.

‘Ah! Sorry,’ the man blustered. ‘You are the – er – the hammer chappie, aren’t you?’

Ewan eyed the two men appraisingly. Unlike the last time he had met them they were both smiling, albeit nervously. They both seemed embarrassed and concerned that they had almost knocked him off his moped.

‘Aye, we are really sorry, Officer,’ said the stocky, surly-looking one with the ear-ring who was sitting in the passenger’s side. ‘We are just anxious to get off to a place called the Wee Kingdom. We heard that there are sea otters off the coast there.’

‘Eyes peeled!’ Ewan said emphatically, causing both men to stare back at him in confusion. The truth was that he had verbalized the words that Torquil was forever telling him.

‘Eyes peeled?’ the driver repeated.

‘Aye, you need to keep your eyes peeled,’ Ewan told him firmly. ‘That is what a good driver needs to remember. It doesn’t matter if it is on one of those fancy motorways that they have on the mainland, or one of these back streets in Kyleshiffin. You have to be prepared for anything.’ He gave them both one of his sternest looks. ‘Please do not think of us as a bunch of yokels. We respect the law here on the island – and we impose it!’

The driver nodded. ‘Understood, Officer. And we’ve learned our lesson. We’ll have our eyes peeled from now on.’

Ewan gave them a final steely look then returned to Nippy to continue his journey up on to the moor.

Five minutes later he was doing his series of warm-up exercises. Then, after another five minutes he was whirling his hammer round and round before letting it fly up, out and away over the moor in a pleasingly long parabolic path to disappear in the heather. He grimaced at the splash of its landing, for there was always a chance of him losing it. But fortunately, its pole was sticking up in the air; a decided advantage that the Highland hammer had over the ball and wire design of the Olympic hammer.

He immediately started to pace out the distance, a grin spreading across his face as he did so, since it was a big throw.

‘The porridge is working well today,’ he mused to himself, as he reached the spot where his hammer was protruding from the other side of a tussock of gorse and heather. He reached over thigh high gorse and prepared to pull the hammer out of the bog. He grasped the handle and tugged so that it came away with a sucking, squelchy noise.

But, as it came out, so too did something else. A hazy cloud of midges suddenly rose from the bog and within moments Ewan was enveloped.

‘Away with you all!’ he cried, running backwards a few paces and almost tripping up. ‘This new deodorant I have on is supposed to repel you little scunners.’ He slapped himself where he felt bites and scratched his mane of hair. He turned and lifted his hammer so that he could beat a hastier retreat. Then he noticed that the ball was covered in a thick red fluid. He winced.

‘Ugh! Blood?’ he asked himself. ‘Don’t tell me I managed to land it in a dead sheep or something?’

Gingerly he crept back towards the tussock, waving his free hand for all he was worth to try to cut a swathe through the midge swarm. He peered over the gorse and then gasped in horror.

A man’s body was lying face down in a bog pool, the brackish waters of which had been turned dark red by blood that had oozed out from a nasty head wound.

Ewan felt bile rise in his throat, for it was an ugly sight. He recognized the clothes only too well.

‘My God! I killed him with my hammer!’ he muttered, as he stared at the blood-soaked ball that dangled from its pole, then at the crushed head injury.

He stood for a moment in total shock, oblivious to the innumerable bites of the midge swarm.

Cora had been almost dead on her feet by two o’clock in the morning when she and Calum had finally written up all of the articles and columns for the special issue of the West Uist Chronicle. Although it was officially a twice-weekly newspaper, whenever Calum felt that a special was needed, he duly produced it and the good folk of the island readily paid up and avidly read the extra gossip. Some weeks it was a daily event.

The main news that Calum wanted to impart related to the events surrounding the calamitous Flotsam & Jetsam TV show the previous evening. This in itself would not justify a whole paper, so he had shown Cora how to produce copy at the drop of a hat. To her delight he had allowed her to contribute, by writing up about the vandalism at the Chronicle office, as well as a short column about Crusoe the abandoned dog that Torquil McKinnon had found. He had been encouraging in his comments about her flowery style, which somewhat sweetened the bitter pill that she was forced to swallow as he slashed her 2,000 word article to a mere 1,000 with a few strokes of his blue editorial pencil.

‘Brevity, lassie! That is the thing that you must concentrate on in a local paper. When you are the editor of a paper then you can let your literary juices flow freely. Until then, be concise, accurate and pithy. Like me!’

Cora had taken his words and his editing on the chin. She was determined to make a success of her journalism and was sure that her great-aunt Bella’s advice to listen and learn from Calum Steele made great sense. She recalled the old lady telling her that although Calum Steele could be a puffed up little pipsqueak, yet he had a knack for telling the news. She remembered the exact expression she had used to describe his journalistic manner: ‘He could speir the inside out of a clam!’

Cora had laughed at her great-aunt’s use of the vernacular, for the word ‘speir’ actually meant to ask, to badger, rather than to use a weapon. Effectively, Calum could hector someone so mercilessly that they would give him a story as if their life depended upon it.

When Calum had insisted that she go home at two o’clock she had gone with some reluctance, promising to return by seven at the start of the new day. Calum had bartered for eight, which he thought would give him an extra hour to recover from the very large whisky that he had mentally promised himself once he had completed and printed the special issue, then mobilized his paper boys.

As it happened, it was three large whiskies, so he was in a deep sleep when Cora mounted the stairs in a state of great excitement at eight in the morning with a copy of the Chronicle bought from Staig’s.

‘My first ever proper published story!’ she cried, mounting the stairs three at a time. ‘Oh thank you, Calum! Thank you!’

‘Wh-What!’ Calum stammered, blinking and fumbling to find his wire-framed spectacles which had fallen astray when he had slumped back on his camp-bed. He held up his hands to stop her further advance, as if she was a bounding puppy about to hurtle herself at him. ‘Look, Cora lassie, you are making a habit of this.’

Cora giggled. ‘Of what? Seeing you in bed?’

Calum squirmed with embarrassment. ‘Ah – er – don’t be cheeky, lassie. I’ll have you know that I—’

‘I was just kidding, Calum.’ She replied. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell Great-aunt Bella.’

‘Tell what to Miss Melville?’ he asked quickly, his eyes wide open in alarm behind his spectacles.

‘That you like to drink whisky so early in the morning.’

Calum looked at her in shock. ‘What are you talking about, lassie? I never drink too early. I drink a bit late sometimes. What is late to a journalist may seem early to someone else.’ He wagged his finger in admonishment. ‘If you want to be a good journalist, you have a lot to learn. I insist on accuracy from my staff, Cora.’

He stood up and hiccupped. ‘So, how about a cup of tea and then I will treat you to a really good greasy breakfast at the Friar Tuck Café?’

Cora grimaced. ‘That’s kind of you, Calum, but I am a bit of a vegetarian, actually. And I never eat anything greasy, not even chips.’ Then she gave him one of her sudden smiles. ‘But I’ll put the kettle on for a cup of tea.’

And before he could take in what he considered her admission of food heresy, she disappeared into the kitchenette.

‘That was a great article you wrote, boss,’ she called out. ‘That Dr Digby Dent will have a horrible headache when he wakes up. I expect he will feel such a fool.’

‘Aye, it is always best to avoid a hangover,’ Calum replied with a yawn, as he massaged his own aching temples.

His mobile phone went off and he answered it automatically.

When Cora came in a few moments later with a couple of mugs of steaming tea she found him listening to a voice on the other end, his jaw hanging open and his eyes staring into space.

‘Up on the moor, you say? Aye, I will go straight away. And so who are—?’

He frowned then looked in consternation at the phone.

‘Tea!’ Cora said, handing the mug to him.

He shook his head and reached for his yellow anorak. ‘No time, Cora. Grab those helmets, we have work to do. You were almost right about Dr Dent and his head. He would have a headache – if he was still alive to feel it. He’s been found up on the moor with his head bashed in.’

Cora’s face went ashen and she dropped the mug of tea at his feet.

He was about to mumble something about his good carpet when she pitched forward in a dead faint on to his camp-bed.

The chain of communication had clicked into action straight away. Ewan had called Morag on his mobile, then she had contacted Torquil and set the ball rolling.

Torquil had been the first on the scene, zooming up the hill from Harbour Street on his Bullet, with Crusoe peering out of one pannier and his pipes from the other. He had been intending to go to St Ninian’s Cave to try out a new piece that he had been working out in his head ever since Lorna had rung that morning.

He was only a few moments ahead of Dr Ralph McLelland in the Kyleshiffin ambulance. It was not a purpose-built vehicle, but an ancient converted camper-van which had been donated by a former laird of Kyleshiffin. They had both been briefed by a pasty–faced Ewan McPhee, who looked wretched and cold, with vomit stains down his T-shirt and numerous blotches about his head and neck.

‘I didn’t mean to do it, Torquil!’ Ewan said. ‘How was I to know that he was lying there in the heather? I … I….’

Torquil patted his shoulder. ‘Of course you didn’t know that, Ewan. Now just calm down. Here,’ he said, handing him Crusoe’s lead, ‘you look after the dog while we have a proper look.’

Crusoe was snapping right and left at invisible midges.

‘Aye, the midges are bad this morning,’ Ewan said, as he took the lead and led them over towards the tussock of heather and gorse where the body lay.

He explained that upon recovering from his initial shock he had hauled it out of the bog to see if he could try resuscitation, but it had been all too clear that the man had been beyond such help. Even so, he had placed him in the recovery position.

‘Strange that the midges don’t seem to land on him,’ Ewan remarked. ‘They just home in on us.’

Dr McLelland knelt beside the body, ignoring the fact that brackish peat water had soaked into his corduroy trousers. ‘It is because they only feed off the living. They are attracted to the carbon dioxide that animals breathe out.’

‘I didn’t know that, Doctor McLelland,’ Ewan said.

‘Nor did I until the other day; Doctor Dent here told me himself.’

Torquil said nothing, but watched as the doctor opened his bag and pulled out his stethoscope and an ophthalmoscope. He knew from experience that he would perform his examination strictly to the letter, leaving nothing to chance and risking no error in his analysis.

The doctor was one of Torquil’s oldest friends. Along with Calum Steele, the three of them had thought themselves to be like the Three Musketeers when they were attending the Kyleshiffin School under Miss Bella Melville’s watchful eye. Then they had grown up and gone their separate ways: Torquil to study law and become a police officer; Calum to throw himself into journalism; Ralph to study medicine. After graduating from Glasgow University Ralph had fully intended becoming a pathologist and had studied forensic medicine and medical jurisprudence, until his uncle had suddenly died. Family loyalty had then overcome personal academic ambition and he returned to West Uist to take over the old boy’s medical practice, as well as his post as honorary police surgeon to the West Uist Division of the Hebridean Constabulary. On several occasions in the past his forensic skills had come in very handy.

‘So can you give an estimate on how long he has been dead?’ Torquil asked, as he looked over Ralph’s shoulder.

‘Hard to be precise,’ he replied pensively. ‘What with the chance of accelerated rigor mortis if he had been in this cold peat water for any time, it could be as little as two hours or as long as twenty-four.’

‘You … you mean that I didn’t kill him with the hammer?’ Ewan blurted out.

‘No, you definitely did not. He has been dead for a good while,’ Ralph replied. ‘I don’t think that your hammer even touched him. It just happened to land in the bog beside him. It looks as if he fell and bashed his head on this jagged rock here.’ He pointed to a blood-soaked rock that was protruding from the pool. ‘As I say, he could have been here for a whole day.’

‘Except that he was in police custody last night,’ Torquil said. ‘You must have heard about the rumpus he created on the Flotsam & Jetsam TV show that they were filming?’

Ralph looked round and shook his head. ‘I was out on an emergency case all evening. The devil’s own job I had in stabilizing the patient.’

‘Well, we didn’t release him until ten-thirty,’ Ewan volunteered. ‘Morag reckoned he had sobered up enough by then.’

Ralph bent over the dead man’s lips and sniffed. He clicked his tongue. ‘I’ll need to check his alcohol level when I do the post-mortem. Assuming you want a post-mortem, Torquil?’

‘Are you able to say how he died?’ Torquil asked. ‘Not meaning to be facetious, Ralph.’

‘I would guess that he’d gone for a walk up here on the moor, still inebriated, and tripped and bashed his head. Could have been the head injury that killed him, or he could have drowned in the bog.’ He pushed himself to his feet and gave a thin, humourless smile. ‘But that is not my brief, is it? It is only my initial opinion. I would need to do a post-mortem to determine the cause of his death.’

They all turned at the sound of a click. Calum Steele and Cora Melville were standing a few paces behind them. Calum had a digital camera in one hand and his customary spiral notebook in the other. He was gripping his pen between his teeth.

‘Calum! What do you mean by sneaking up on us like that?’ Torquil snapped. He knew only too well that his friend was full of journalistic guile having fancied himself as an investigative reporter since his schooldays. Despite his portly frame, when he sensed that a story demanded it, he could move with the stealth of a cat. And when he was in his investigative journalist mode, loyalty and friendship came second best to the prospect of a scoop.

‘Just answering a tip-off, Inspector McKinnon,’ Calum replied, immediately moving to a professional footing. ‘So, as I understand it, you have found Dr Digby Dent dead on the moor, seemingly having fallen and bashed his head, although there is a question as to whether he had been bludgeoned with a Highland hammer.’

Ralph scowled at Calum. ‘If you have been eavesdropping for long, Calum Steele, then you will have heard me say he was not hit by Ewan’s hammer.’

Calum shrugged as he handed the camera to his pale-faced assistant. He jotted a couple of words in his notebook. ‘OK, so then he may or may not have drowned after falling and bumping his head, but as I see it there is a crucial question that has yet to be answered.’

Torquil eyed his friend suspiciously. ‘And what question is that, Mr Steele?’

‘Upon what basis did the West Uist Police deem that is was safe to release him from custody? You see, from where I am standing it seems certain that if he had been kept in custody he would still be alive right now.‘He drew a line under his last note. Some folk might use the N word for that. Negligence, I mean.’

He looked his best friend straight in the eye.

‘Would you care to make a statement to the Press, Inspector McKinnon?’

Wallace and Douglas had been out in their old fishing boat, earning their living by catching herrings, just as their father and his father had done before them. They were returning with a good catch and appropriately high spirits.

‘Look to starboard,’ Wallace called above the engine noise. ‘It looks like old Guthrie Lovat is out in his Sea Beastie.’

‘Aye! We haven’t seen him about these waters for a while.’

Wallace gave a blast on the boat’s horn and they both waved.

The Sea Beastie had at one time been a common sight about the island until Guthrie had become famous. At least, that was how many of the locals described his change to become a recluse.

Guthrie Lovat stepped out of his cabin, his luxuriant beard catching the wind. He screwed up his eyes and, with a hand over them to shield them from the sun, he peered back at the Drummond twins. Then, recognizing them he waved back.

‘How is the beachombing going?’ Wallace called across.

‘Pretty fair,’ Guthrie called back. ‘But it could be better!’ He lifted his left arm and gestured to his wrist, as if pointing at his watch. ‘Can’t stop though. I need to get out to the Cruadalach Isles.’ He waved again then went back into his cabin. There was a roar and the Sea Beastie accelerated away.

The twins waved after him.

‘A man of few words, eh?’ Wallace remarked.

‘Aye, a surly bugger and no mistaking. Maybe he’s on a par with that Dr Dent fellow.’ Douglas grinned.

The brothers laughed, for they had found the whole Flotsam & Jetsam débâcle utterly hilarious.

Wallace adjusted their course and they headed in the direction of Kylshiffin harbour.

‘It is a funny thing, Wallace, but shouldn’t our esteemed PC Ewan McPhee be out and about in the Seaspray by now?’ Douglas remarked.

Wallace guffawed. ‘Aye, he should. But the big galoot might have slept in again.’

‘Or maybe he lost his hammer up on the moor again?’

‘I can just imagine him up there now, getting bitten to death by the midges.’

At this they dissolved into another fit of mirth.

Cora was not sure how she felt. She had never seen a dead body before and although she had not fainted up on the moor she had found the whole encounter most embarrassing. They had returned to the Chronicle offices where Calum had immediately set about preparing for yet another special edition.

‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Cora?’ he asked, as he tapped away on his laptop. ‘Real cutting-edge journalism. And what a follow up to last night’s story. The readers will love this.’

‘But aren’t you worried about upsetting Inspector McKinnon and the others?’

‘I am a responsible journalist, Cora. I am not in this for popularity. It is my responsibility to present the facts to the reading public.’

‘But are you serious about saying there was police negligence?’

Calum heaved a sigh and swivelled round in his chair. ‘There is nothing personal in this, Cora. Torquil will understand that.’

‘But he looked sort of – well – uncomfortable.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘As if you were betraying him, sort of.’

‘Havers, lassie!’

‘And PC McPhee looked so upset.’

‘A man in police custody was set free and is found dead hours later, Cora. If they had kept him he would be alive now.’ He pushed his wire-frame spectacles further back on his nose. ‘Look, I want you to help. While I am writing this up and setting up the issue I want you to go and interview Sergeant Driscoll at the station. She was the duty sergeant last night. While you are there, you can also make enquiries about what progress they have made about the break-in at the offices here.’

‘Do I have to?’ Cora pleaded. ‘Surely they won’t have any news.’

‘Of course they won’t. But that’s not the point, is it?’

‘And the point is?’

‘To keep them on their toes and show them that the Chronicle means business. Now off you go, I have a phone call that I need to make.’ He winked at her as he reached for his mobile. ‘It will do no harm to let Scottish TV know that we’re on to a big story.’

The yellow camper-van turned off the coastal road and took the dirt track up to the row of derelict, crofters’ cottages. It swung round behind them so that it was unseen from the road.

‘Come on, Craig,’ said the driver, the leaner of the two. ‘The sooner we get the stuff stashed the better.’

Once outside Craig cursed. ‘Huh! I’m not so keen on this place, Tosh. It’s us that takes all the risks.’

‘Don’t start that again. We do what the boss tells us to do.’

‘The boss! I’m getting fed up with him too.’

The crunch of a foot on gravel made them both spin round, their eyes open in alarm. Craig’s hand darted inside his jacket to the heavy object that he kept hidden there.

‘So you are getting fed up with me, are you?’ a voice snapped.

‘Craig was just joking, boss,’ Tosh replied with an uncertain grin.

‘As if I give a toss! Just tell me. Did you do it, and did you make sure no one saw you?’

Craig and Tosh glanced nervously at each other then the one called Tosh nodded. ‘Aye, we did it all right.’

Neither of them fancied telling their boss about their encounter with PC McPhee.