Minutes after Sergeant Barry announced the Herc was coming up on Cold Corners, Nimec felt its skis deploy with a thump. Then it made a sharp left turn, and the level white spread of the airfield swelled into his window.
On the ground at last, Nimec unbuckled, zipped into his parka, shouldered his bags, and went about exchanging farewells with the airmen.
The wind was staggering as he descended the exit ramp to the field. A downscaled version of Willy, it had a more modest complement of personnel shuttles and freight haulers waiting to meet the plane. Also present was a small welcoming committee clad in the ubiquitous cardinal-red survival gear. It seemed colder here than at McMurdo, and the party’s members wore full rubber face masks that rendered them indistinguishable from each other. Nimec saw somebody he guessed was its leader step toward the plane ahead of the rest.
Nimec had taken about two steps toward the shuttle bus when that same person rushed over and swept him into a tight, eager embrace.
“Pete.” A woman’s voice through the mask, muffled but familiar. And close against his face. “God, I’ve missed you something awful.”
Nimec’s surprise dissolved in a flash of happiness. He smiled openly for the first time in hours, ignoring the raw sting of the wind on his lips.
“Same here, Meg,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.
EIGHT
Gorrie was stopped at a rusty old pump at a little service station south of Newtonmore, working its hose toward the rear of his hatchback, when another driver pulled up on the opposite side of the island, exited his Vectra, and went around to stand alongside him.
“You’ll want to let me piss in your tank before filling it from that pump,” the man said. “Healthier for the engine, guaranteed to be more economical.”
Gorrie waved the fuel nozzle at a paper coffee cup on his trunk.
“No, thanks,” he said. “But you ought to make that bloke in the convenience shop a like offer before he puts up another pot of spew.”
“Really?” The man broke into a grin. “Well, I’ve got news, it’s already done. What else you think you’ve been sipping right there?”
Gorrie grinned back at him.
“How’ve you been, Conall?”
“You mean before or after motoring fifty kilometers through the fog?”
“Och, you’re reminding me of Nan,” Gorrie said. “I’d expect you’d be grateful, consider it a holiday to be rescued from your shoebox office in Dundee.”
Conall snorted. “Got me on that,” he said.
They extended their hands, shook vigorously.
Gorrie opened his gas tank door, unscrewed its cap, inserted the fuel nozzle, and squeezed the handle, feeling in vain for a lock to hold it in the “on” position. It would have been nice if his coffee were drinkable, he thought. Conall hadn’t griped for nothing. The weather was indeed drearily foul, with occasional plops of rain and soft hail coming out of the smoky gray mist.
The pump’s sluggish dial readouts were turning behind a scuffed, grime-smeared glass panel.
“All right,” Gorrie said. “What have you brought to make me happy?”
“And violate enough of the Procurator Fiscal’s rules to get me fired from my job several times over?”
“That too.”
Conall reached into an inside pocket of his leather car coat. He took out a cardboard floppy-disc mailer.
“Here you go,” he said, passing it to Gorrie. “Preliminary lab results on your fallen peach and her husband.”
Gorrie nodded, stuffing the mailer into his own topcoat.
“Appreciate it,” he said. “Don’t suppose you had a chance to give the files a look.”
Conall shook his head.
“Afraid not,” he said. “But I hear the coroner’s ready to confirm the deaths a murder-suicide, issue a report that’ll put the inquiry to a fast and easy rest.”
Gorrie considered that a moment, then shrugged.
“We’ll see, brother-in-law,” he said, and finished gassing up.
“What about my redhead?” asked Gorrie.
“Aye, that’s where you have yourself a piece of something to match the weather,” said Conall. He took the gas pump and held it out like a pointer. “An interesting case.”
“And?”
“Report is nae finished.”
“Conall — come now. Not a hint?”
His brother-in-law leaned back on the blue fender of his car and shined an idiot grin. Then he began pumping fuel into his Vectra.
“I suppose this will cost me a pint or two around Easter,” offered Gorrie finally.
“I was thinking of those fine cigars ye had at Christmas.”
“That was Fennel had ’em, not me.”
“Fennel and you are close as stones in a castle wall.”
“I’ll send my sergeant after the report.”
“The sergeant you complained had flown off to Paris for a job hunting art thieves? The lass who has not been replaced despite your crying buckets of tears to the superintendent.”
“Not to the superintendent.”
His brother-in-law smiled. “Ten cigars.”
“Two. They’re five pounds apiece.”
“I suppose you’ll find out soon enough through official channels.”
“Three.”
Conall returned the nozzle to the pump. “Truth is, the lab report won’t tell you anything, save the T4 is more than a wee bit high, above 37 ug/dLs. Very high, that. She had a great deal of phenylephrine hydrochloride in her stomach as well. Now, if you cared to get technical—”
“Conall, you’re irritating my nerves,” said Gorrie. “What does it mean?”
“Five cigars?”
“I’ll see what I can do about the cigars, lad. I’ll do my best.”
“She had no thyroid. She was taking artificial thyroid hormone because she’d just had her thyroid taken out. Cancer, I suspect.”
“And?”
“Well, she took too much of it, you understand. The hormone. That’s the T4. You’ll have to fish out the medical records, but the thinking is she forgot what she was doing and took two pills a day instead of one, two or three times. And then she took the cold medicine and it gave her a stroke. Far too much of that too. Small dose together might even have killed her, but here there was no chance. Some people have no sense when they’re medicating themselves.”
“Stroke?”
“Aye. Bad luck. Sort of thing they warn you about at the chemist. It could also be suicide, I guess. But it’d be a very clever way to do it — too clever. Easier to get a gun like the Mackay woman.”
“Getting a gun is not that easy for most of us,” noted Gorrie. They hadn’t been able to trace the weapon, though he’d put DC Andrews back on it three days before.
Conall shrugged. “More than likely it was an accident. Medicine was taken off the market a year or two ago.”
“Matched the type on the floor?”
“I believe that will be the report.”
“Do you ha’e anything else for me, laddie?”