‘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.’