Dead and Gone (5 page)

The guest in room 21 at the Golden Bear Hotel in Netherdale paced his room, glancing at his watch frequently. She was late. That was unlike her. It only served to increase his excitement. He heard a discreet knock at the door. Just like her, always cautious. Soon, she would be in his arms, in his bed, all discretion gone.

He opened the door, and blinked with surprise – and dismay.

It wasn’t her. It was someone else. It was the last person he expected to see – or wanted to see. Surprise turned to shock as he glanced down, then shock became pain, sharp, searing pain as the visitor lunged forward, again and again. The first blow penetrated his chest, as did the second and third. He reeled back into the room, turning in desperation to escape the wickedly sharp knife blows.

His assailant grabbed the guest’s hair, jerking his head back, exposing his neck for the final cut. The knife slid across the victim’s throat. He died instantly.

The attacker watched impassively as blood splattered the walls, the ceiling, the floor. He stared at the body, no trace of pity or remorse in his eyes.

Entering the bathroom, he dropped the weapon in the basin and washed his hands and face.

In the wardrobe he found a suitable jacket to cover his bloodstained shirt. He walked to the door and hung a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the outer knob, before closing it and heading for the back stairs. Better not to scare the other guests. It might put them off their dinner.

He left the car park and half an hour later negotiated the series of hairpin bends towards the summit of Stark Ghyll. It was dark, his attention wholly on the road and its precarious route up the mountainside. Now in the early dawning of the day, he barely noticed the view. Although magnificent at any time, the prospect from his location was breathtaking. Despite its splendour, despite there being no traffic to distract him, he stared in complete oblivion. The road was little more than an ancient drovers’ track that had been covered in tarmac. Unclassified, and all but unused except by the locals, many were unaware of its existence. On reaching the top, where the road straightened out as if to reward the driver for having overcome some hidden challenge, he pulled in to the wide grass verge at the side of the road and stopped the engine.

His eyes were unfocused, his thoughts elsewhere. A suspicious police officer might have assumed the glazed look in his eyes to be the result of the amount of drink he had taken, but that would have been less than wholly accurate. With the window open, the air was fresh and crisp. The driver shivered, but not from the cold. He shivered at the thought of his children. He conjured up mental images of them, each of the three in turn. Like a gatecrasher at a private party, the image of the woman intruded and he could not dismiss it, no matter how hard he tried to evict her from his mind. Eventually, he succeeded in part, refusing to dwell on that topic too long. The memory was too recent, too raw, too sickening.

Betrayal was a word he had come to hate, and yet, in his mind it summed up everything that had happened to him. He didn’t stop to consider how much he had contributed by his own actions to his misery and despair. There was a bitter irony to him finishing up here, so close to where all his troubles had started. Bishopton: the very name sent a chill through him. Bishopton – the home of Big Investments – a lot of good it had done him. Onto a winner; a sure thing, they’d said. He’d lost everything.

Betrayed then by his employer, a man he had mistakenly trusted to stand by him when things got tough. Even when
the signs of trouble ahead were unmistakably clear, he hadn’t thought for one moment that the man he called his friend would sacrifice him on the altar of expediency. How wrong could he be?

Then there had been the betrayal of those he thought of as his close friends. They had vanished like flies in December, at a time when he needed their support.

Worst of all, the betrayal had been that of the woman he loved; the woman he thought loved him. Discovering her affair with a man he loathed had been bad enough. Facing her with this knowledge had made bad far worse. Hearing her admit to her infidelity and recognizing a total lack of guilt, shame or embarrassment had been dreadful. And when she told him how much she enjoyed her liaison and stated her intention to continue it; that had been the last straw.

Desperate to free himself from a situation that had become intolerable, he had taken a reckless gamble with money he could ill afford to lose. Ignoring the gambler’s maxim of only staking what you won’t miss, he had plunged deeper and deeper into the mire of debt, ever hopeful of one slice of luck to reverse his fortunes. That didn’t happen; all his foolhardiness achieved was to advance the unstoppable march of the inevitable.

Now, sitting on the summit of Stark Ghyll, he stared at the dale set out below. Over to the east, early morning mist gave the promise of a beautiful day to come. It hung over the land bordering the River Helm, all but obscuring the towns of Netherdale and Helmsdale. It was a strange sensation to be above the mist, almost like flying at an altitude above cloud level. Elsewhere, to the west and south, the fields and woods provided a widely contrasting pattern of colours and shapes, like a badly designed patchwork quilt thrown over an enormous bed.

He reached for his sole companion. The whisky bottle was already half empty; he had downed most of it since reaching his destination from the hotel. Prior to that, it had been the rented cottage. He laughed and shook his head. A week’s break ‘for the sake of the kids’ had taken the last of his meagre hoard of cash. His wife was unaware of quite how desperate their plight had
become. Unaware – or uncaring? He wasn’t sure which, and it no longer mattered. That way, he had been able to pretend that things were somewhere near normal.

Normal? The word made him laugh aloud again. He took another deep swig from the bottle, then a second, then a third. After that he lost count. His mind went further back, to all that he had lost. ‘Downsizing’ they called it, and ‘the inevitable and regrettable outcome of the recession and the nation’s severe economic woes’. Glib phrases that concealed the misery that was to follow. With no job, no income and no prospects, events had followed with unstoppable force, like an express train out of control.

At some point in the next few hours, bailiffs would enforce the repossession order on their family home. ‘Take it,’ he muttered to himself, ‘take the bloody lot. Why not, I’ve lost everything else. Except the car,’ he added, almost as an afterthought, ‘you can’t have that. I need it.’

As if spurred into action by the thought, he started the engine and engaged reverse gear. He manoeuvred slowly and carefully until the car was at right angles to the single-track road. Inching the vehicle back, he was conscious of the drainage ditch behind him. He must take care not to let the rear wheels slide into that. It would be the anticlimax of all time.

He shifted the gear lever into neutral and examined the land beyond the road. There was a broad verge of sparse moorland grass. He remembered the previous time he had come up here. Sheep had been grazing on that verge. Luckily they had moved on since then. Beyond the verge was a rotting post-and-rail fence. Beyond that; nothing.

He engaged first gear, revved the engine, let the clutch out and pressed the accelerator. The high-powered saloon surged forward, gaining momentum rapidly as it raced across the tarmac, the broad swathe of grass, and demolished the wooden fence. For a brief second the huge machine soared forward through the clear morning air, until gravity dragged it down, sending it tumbling end-over-end as it fell. It struck the rocky
limestone slope once, twice, three times before coming to rest, its roof crushed against an outcrop of rock close to the base of the sheer cliff.

The noise of the collisions echoed through the early morning silence like a series of gigantic gunshots. After the engine died, the only sound was the alarm call of a pair of grouse, their slumbers rudely interrupted.

The farmer gave his wife a cheery wave as he pulled the Land Rover out of the yard and set off along the winding country road. He turned the volume up on the Land Rover’s radio. He wasn’t a particular fan of the music being played, but it served to mask the constant rattling and banging from the empty livestock trailer he was towing. He hummed along to the tune. He was looking forward to the next couple of days. Spring lambs had been fetching a record price at auction recently. A trailer-load should fetch him somewhere in the region of £4,000. Better to get those that were ready to market now before supply became more plentiful and the price dropped accordingly. He would start with the flock he grazed on Stark Ghyll. He had checked them over the previous day and knew they were in good condition.

It took him a quarter of an hour to reach the summit. As he swung the Land Rover round the final bend, with the trailer protesting loudly, the farmer automatically glanced to his left, to where the flock had been grazing. He wasn’t surprised to see that they weren’t there. Experience prepared him for the fact that sheep wander. His glance didn’t at first register that there was anything amiss, but when he took a second, closer look, he noticed the broken fence.

He stopped the vehicle and stared at the splintered railings with the huge, yawning gap in the middle, his face registering both alarm and dismay. His first thought was that something had panicked his sheep and they had crashed through the fence to a certain death below. The area was popular with the RAF as a place to train pilots in the art of low flying. He muttered something extremely impolite about the aerial branch of the
armed forces and got out of his vehicle to investigate. If he’d lost this flock, or even part of it, it would be disastrous. He hurried towards the cliff edge.

He was halfway across the grass verge when he saw the tyre tracks. Once again, his thoughts went immediately to his flock. There had been increasing numbers of livestock theft cases reported recently in the farming press. Then he saw the direction of the tracks and a sick realization hit him. He reached the edge of the precipitous slope and peered cautiously over. Two raw, jagged scars across the rocks gave him his first clue, and then he saw the car, or what remained of it. Upturned like some giant dead insect, wheels twisted at impossible angles; the bodywork so battered it was impossible to discern the make or model. He felt certain whoever had been inside the car could not have survived such a fall. He reached into his pocket and took out his mobile.

The signal was poor, but he managed to get through to the emergency operator, and with some difficulty passed his message.

‘What service do you require?’ he was asked.

‘That’s a good question. Ambulance, I reckon, although a hearse might be more appropriate. Maybe fire brigade as well; and mountain rescue. There’s a car gone over the edge on the summit of Stark Ghyll. It’s fallen a few hundred feet, and it’s in a lousy spot to get to.’

The farmer gave his name and agreed to wait at the scene for the emergency services to arrive. He ended the call and walked slowly back to his vehicle, staring morosely at his trailer. There was no need to hurry. One thing for sure, he couldn’t guarantee to be taking any lambs to mart this day, and that meant they wouldn’t be accepted for the following day’s auction. Then he thought about what he’d just seen and his gloom vanished. He was a hell of a sight better off than the poor soul inside the car. He tried his mobile again and rang home. His wife answered and he could hear the kids bickering in the background; all reassuringly normal. He told her what had happened, and,
uncharacteristically, ended the call by telling her he loved her. He wasn’t sure why, but for some reason it seemed the right thing to do.

Mike Nash was usually first to arrive in the CID suite at Helmsdale police station. He had been in his office a little over twenty minutes when Sergeant Mironova walked in, bearing two coffee mugs. Nash looked up from the report he was reading concerning a drink-fuelled fight outside one of the pubs in the town the previous weekend. ‘Morning, Clara,’ he greeted her. ‘All quiet last night?’

Mironova had been on call. ‘Yes. At least I wasn’t dragged from my bed in the early hours; in fact there’s nothing to report. It was a lot quieter than it is at the moment downstairs. There’s a real panic on. From what I can make out somebody’s gone off the road at the top of Stark Ghyll.’

‘I don’t give much for their chances,’ Nash commented sombrely. ‘It’s a heck of a drop. Is that all you know?’

‘Except that Jack Binns is trying to organize an ambulance crew, emergency doctor, the fire brigade and mountain rescue, in between talking to traffic division and putting air-sea rescue on standby, together with the air ambulance.’

‘If it’s at the top, just reaching the vehicle is going to be a nightmare, let alone recovering anyone inside it. Still, it’s not something we’re going to be involved with, so we’ll leave it to others to sort out.’

Nash was fond of warning his colleagues about the dangers of tempting fate, ‘invoking Sod’s Law’ as he referred to it. This time, it seemed that he had ignored his own advice. Something that Mironova was to remind him of later.

The farmer had been waiting for what seemed like an age before a set of flashing lights signalled the imminent arrival of an emergency vehicle. It proved to be a Volvo estate car from the police traffic division. Any remaining faint hope the farmer might have entertained that he would somehow be able to load his lambs
into the trailer and take them to market soon began to disappear after the officers surveyed the crash scene.

‘This road will have to be closed to all but emergency vehicles,’ one of the officers stated. He glanced around. ‘That shouldn’t cause too many problems, though. You’ll be needed to give a statement as to what time you found the car, and what weather, road and traffic conditions were like at the time.’ A faint smile flickered across the officer’s face as he mentioned traffic conditions. This was obviously part of a well-rehearsed script. ‘You’re the nearest we’ve got to an eyewitness to the accident.’