Terry’s voice dropped and she stared evenly at him. “No, it’s about trust, Steve. It’s about openness. It’s about not treating me as if I’m a child. All you had to do was mention at some point that you had something going on that might just interrupt our time together. Fucking hell,” she exploded again. “What about common courtesy?”
Steve thrust his arms into his jacket and grabbed his coat. “I’m a senior police officer. People need to contact me out of hours.”
“Mr. Indispensable. You don’t want a lover, Steve. You want an audience.”
He shoved phone and pager into his jacket pocket and made for the door, shaking his head. “I don’t fucking believe this.”
“You should have told me, dickhead,” she shouted, her anger directed as much at her own impulsiveness as his taciturnity.
His only reply was the slam of the door as he walked out. By the time he got to his car, his hands were still trembling with the adrenaline surge of pure rage. “Fucking unbelievable,” he muttered under his breath as he threw himself into the driver’s seat. He switched on his pager. Five messages. Steve cursed under his breath as he scrolled through. Two from Fiona from late last night. One from Neil just before eleven. One from Neil a few minutes after six. “Shit, shit, shit,” he said, as the last message revealed itself. The Assistant Commissioner had paged him over an hour ago.
He turned on his phone and called his home number, then keyed in the combination that would release his messages from the answering machine. Fiona again, requesting an urgent call back. Neil, announcing he’d decided to stay on Coyne all night, just in case. Neil again, reporting that he’d handed over to Joanne and would be at the Yard if he was needed for an arrest and search. And a message from the AC, saying he was expecting Steve’s call.
He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to calm down to the point where he could make his case for the arrest of Gerard Coyne. After a minute of deep breathing, he decided he was as ready as he’d ever be. He’d just have to lie and say his pager battery had died without him noticing. The hour he’d lost probably hadn’t made much difference. But it could have done.
As he dialled the AC’s number, he felt a pang of regret. He’d had such high hopes for him and Terry. And, as usual, it had crashed and burned.
He could only hope he’d have better luck with Coyne.
Four hundred miles away, Sandy Galloway was picking at a bacon roll in the canteen at St. Leonard’s. He’d been waiting for Fiona Cameron for almost two hours, and he wasn’t best pleased. The woman had been at panic stations when she’d rung him the previous evening, but now she couldn’t even be bothered to make their appointment on time. She hadn’t even left a message for him, either with force control or at the reception desk of her hotel. The hotel that his budget was paying for, he reminded himself crossly.
He’d spoken to Sarah Duvall, as he’d promised. He’d watched the end of his cop show, then called her at Wood Street. She was a bright lassie, that one. She’d gone through the discrepancy between Redford’s statement and what the Dorset police had found in some detail. She’d explained why she’d initially been uneasy, then ran through the reasoning she’d gone through since. It had clearly stilled her qualms, and he was inclined to think she had jumped the right way.
Which meant, of course, that Fiona Cameron was barking up the wrong tree altogether. Galloway was just fed up that she hadn’t bothered to keep him informed of her plans.
It had never occurred to him to check the fax machine that sat behind the secretary’s desk in his outer office.
FIFTY-THREE
The directions were carved in her memory like a grave inscription. “Take the A839 out of Lairg.” Back out of the town centre, across the narrows of the River Shin before it opened out into one of the two inlets at the bottom of the loch. Down the river bank for a short distance, then a turn west, a rounded hillock on her right. Fiona checked in her rear view mirror that Caroline was still behind her.
“About a mile out of the town, you’ll see a track on the right signed Sallachy.” Yes, there was the metal led track. Conveniently, there was a phone box on the other side of the road. Fiona pulled up and pointed exaggeratedly to the kiosk. Caroline gave her the thumbs-up and gestured at her watch, overtaking Fiona, to park right by the phone. Fiona checked the time. 9.37. She had an hour. Moving off, she swung hard right to make the turn.
“Carry on up the track (it’s pretty rough going, you’ll appreciate why I’m lending you the Land Rover) for about five and a half miles.” She did as instructed. The road, which soon became a rough track of loose stones and hard core, ran about forty feet above the loch side, with scatterings of trees on the steep shore. On her left, a conifer plantation lined the road, stretching up the hill until the flattening of the ridge stole the horizon. But Fiona, now completely focused on the task ahead, had no eye for the beauties of the landscape around her. She passed a handful of cottages as the plantation came to an end in exposed heather-covered hillside. There was no sign of life, other than a thin thread of peaty smoke emerging from a chimney.
After a mile or so, the road began to climb and the trees began again. But this time, instead of regimented rows of conifers, there was a mix of trees. Rowans, birches, alders and tall clumps of contorted Scots pine grew in the apparently random chaos of a well-managed wood that was cut off from the road by a high deer fence with occasional tall wooden stiles.
Abruptly, the trees ended on a bend. Ahead was a ravine, crossed by a sturdy-looking wooden bridge with tubular steel rails on either side. “You cross a river gorge, the Allt a’ Claon.” No mistaking it, she was on the right track. Halfway across the bridge, Fiona slowed to a crawl and looked down fifty feet of craggy rock to the river’s rough and tumble below. It was flowing fast through the channel it had cut itself, bursting into white foam as it hit the boulders that had fallen into its path. Cut off from the sparkle of sunlight by the high walls of its gorge, it gleamed the dark cloudy brown of unpolished amber.
Fiona let in the clutch and carried on, the tension in her body transferring itself to the hands that gripped the steering wheel like claws. “There’s a left turn up ahead, which you take.” She took it, wrestling the wheel as the Land Rover protested at the loose shale under its wheels. Time to move into four-wheel-drive, she thought, carrying out the operation Lachlan had demonstrated. The Land Rover juddered slightly, then the wheels gripped more tightly and she was moving forward easily over the rough surface.
“About half a mile up this track, there’s another left turn. The track takes you back across the river ravine on a rope bridge. It’s a lot stronger than it looks, but better not go faster than five miles an hour.” Fiona made the turn and approached the bridge, a construction of narrow wooden planks suspended on rope cables anchored to thick poles on either side of the gorge. Her heart pounded. It looked far too fragile a construction to bear the weight of the Land Rover. She had to trust Kit’s words, however. She rolled to a halt by the start of the bridge and carefully engaged first gear. Then at little more than a walking pace, she edged forward. The bridge creaked ominously as it took the full weight of the vehicle, but although she felt its sway beneath her, it held firm as she slowly advanced over the thirty-yard width of the gorge.
When she regained solid ground, she let out the breath she hadn’t even been conscious of holding. She took her clammy hands off the steering wheel and wiped them on her thighs. “Fuck, I hope I’m right about this,” she said out loud. “And I hope I’m in time.”