Huntly wriggled in his seat again, turned nearly sideways. ‘Honestly, I swear this thing wasn’t designed for full-sized human beings. Oompa Loompas, perhaps, but not human beings.’
Alice shrugged when I transferred the scowl to her instead. ‘Well, what was I supposed to do? He annoyed Sheila all day yesterday, and it was Bear the day before that, so now it’s our turn. You’ve seen the roster.’
We finally made it to the other side of the river, swinging around the roundabout and onto Montrose Road, heading east. The sign used to read, ‘WELCOME TO KINGSMEATH ~ OLDCASTLE’S FRIENDLIEST NEIGHBOURHOOD’, but the letters were barely visible under layers and layers of foul-mouthed graffiti.
‘Friendliest neighbourhood’ my arse.
At least the traffic was a bit lighter here — most of it going the other way, trying to get out of Kingsmeath.
Huntly leaned forwards again. ‘So, my dear Dr McDonald, have you a plan for when we visit our first deposition-slash-crime scene?’
Alice fixed a smile in place. ‘I’m going to look at things.’
‘Ah, a very wise choice. I too have “looking at things” in mind.’ Huntly wriggled about some more, setting the tiny jeep rocking on its springs. ‘I know it’s five months since poor Andrew Brennan met his unfortunate end, and it’s unlikely anything will have survived the intervening period and this horrible weather, but we troupers must troupe, must we not?’
‘I say we pull over, chuck Huntly in the river, and swear blind we haven’t seen him.’
‘Ash!’ She shook her head. ‘We’re not throwing anyone in the river.’
‘How about we fill his pockets with bricks first?’
The railway bridge lumped its way across Kings River on thick stone pilings, the heavy metalwork boxy and functional, rather than elegant and sculptured. It started climbing as soon as it made landfall at Kettle Docks, arching over the road in front of us — a lumpen granite bridge that hung with stalactites of rusting steel.
‘No one’s filling anyone’s pockets with bricks!’
We passed through the gloomy archway, and Alice took a left onto Denholm Road. Heading uphill.
The street had probably been quite grand in its day — sweeping terraces of sandstone townhouses, lined with trees and wrought-iron railings — before they built Castle View and all the smart money moved out, leaving this part of the city to the mercy of town planners, council housing, and tower blocks. Now, the once-fancy buildings of Denholm Road were carved up into multiple occupancy flats, stuffed full of people whose benefits wouldn’t stretch to anything less crappy. The trees reduced to vitrified stumps years ago, the railings long gone. The pristine sandstone striped with brown where its satellite-dish acne had rusted away. Blackened by decades of soot and grit and no one caring enough to clean it.
Huntly tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Tell me, my dear ex-Detective Inspector, would you like to place a small wager on my turning something up here that will, as they say in the more excitable crime novels, “blow the case wide open”?’
Kept my eyes front. ‘And would you like to wager that you’ll do something that earns you a punch on the nose before that happens?’
‘Oh, I do like a challenge!’
Alice pulled the Suzuki in behind the crumbling remains of an outside catering van — a boxy trailer, no bigger than four portaloos strapped together, slouching on flat tyres, its wooden walls bloated and peeling. The words ‘SHAKY DAVE’S TATTIE SHACK’ sitting proudly above a serving hatch that gaped like a corpse’s mouth. She pointed at the junction with William Terrace. ‘There’s a way through, over there.’
‘You, my dear, Dr McDonald, shall be the banker for our bet, this rainy day. Here...’ He dug into his wallet and came out with a slithery plastic fiver. ‘This says I come up with some devastating insight into Gòrach’s actions before Mr Henderson deems it necessary to resort to physical violence due to his hyperactive amygdala and sluggish frontal lobe.’
I turned in my seat. ‘Are you asking for a fist in the face before we’ve even left the car?’
‘But of course: I do like to make things spicy.’ A wink. ‘Now, is there any chance we can exit this two-door motorised sardine can before I lose all feeling in my legs?’
‘One punch and you’ll lose all feeling in your everything.’ But I got out anyway and folded the passenger seat forward so he could clamber into the rain like a pinstriped stick insect.
Huntly pulled a rainbow-coloured golf brolly from the rear footwell and popped it open. Standing there, brushing at the damp shoulders of his jacket.
I went back in for the two new-ish umbrellas I’d liberated from the station’s Lost-and-Found. Handed the collapsible one to Alice. ‘Here.’
She pressed the button and it sprung out, the canopy opening with a whooomp. A big smile spread across her face. ‘It’s a ladybird!’ Bright red with black dots, a happy face, and sticky-out antennas that wobbled in the rain. It even had six short dangly legs.
‘Thought you’d like it.’ Mine was a plain black job.
Huntly finished preening, then snapped his fingers. ‘Now, dear colleagues, join me at the crime scene, and witness the glory of my unfettered material-evidence genius!’ Marching off with his nose in the air.
It was going to be a very long day.
10
‘Well, isn’t this fun?’ Huntly hunched under his multicoloured brolly, face all puckered and lined, arms drawn in against his chest as he picked his way through the tussocks of pale-green and yellowy-brown grass and the rain hissed down. ‘Remind me: whose idiotic idea was it to come out here?’
Our patch of waste ground made a gloomy strip, with the back of William Terrace and Denholm Road on one side, and the fifty-foot cliff that separated them from McArthur Drive on the other. The railway line soared above our heads, held aloft on substantial steel pillars painted in various shades of rust-flecked black. So thickly coated that the rivets were barely visible on some sections.
A long line of bare branches stuck up above the garden fences — beech and sycamore, with broom spilling out in dark-green profusion. The grey ranks of dead nettles wrapped around with curled bramble barbed wire.
Be a miracle if daylight ever made its way down here.
What a horrible place to die...
Alice wandered on ahead, her ladybird brolly thrumming in the downpour. Looking up and down, left and right, turning on the spot, then heading off again. Henry sulked along after her, tail down, whimpering and complaining on the end of his leash. Getting soggier and soggier.
‘First observation,’ Huntly pointed at the back of the buildings to our right, ‘the only way you’d know a child was playing here is if you saw them from the windows, there. Or you were here too.’
I shook my head. ‘Alice already said that, back at the briefing.’
‘Has someone done door-to-doors?’
‘No, because not one police officer in Oldcastle has ever worked a murder investigation.’ I gave him the most sarcastic smile I could muster. ‘You muppet.’
‘Very well, I see I shall have to increase my levels of brilliance.’ His arm swept north, following the line of the tracks above. ‘The only entrances to this horrible strip of yuck are where we came in, and up there at Saint Damon of the Green Wood. And it’s not as if you’d use this as a rat run to or from anywhere. So why would you be here?’
Should’ve gone with my first thought and thrown him in the river.