Duncan had been watching me get ready. Now he put down his sandwich.
‘Doesn’t it bother you? Working with dead bodies, I mean?’
‘Don’t be impertinent, lad,’ Brody said, reprovingly.
The PC looked embarrassed. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean…’
‘That’s all right,’ I reassured him. ‘Someone needs to do it. As for the rest…You get used to it.’
But his words stayed with me. Doesn’t it bother you? There was no easy answer. I was well aware of what many people would regard as the gruesome nature of my work, but it was what I did. What I was.
So what did that make me?
The question was still troubling me as I stepped out of the camper van and saw a sleek silver-grey Saab coming along the track towards the cottage. Drawn by the sound of its approach, Brody and Duncan came out as it pulled up next to Ellen’s VW.
‘What the hell is he doing here?’ Brody asked, irritably, as Strachan climbed out.
‘Morning,’ he said, as his golden retriever jumped out of the Saab after him.
‘Get that dog back in the car!’ Brody snapped.
The retriever was sniffing the air intently. Strachan reached to take hold of it, but before he could it suddenly caught a scent and bounded straight for the cottage.
‘Bloody hell!’ Brody swore, and raced to cut it off.
He was surprisingly fast for a man his size and age. He grabbed hold of the dog’s collar as it tried to dodge past, almost yanking it off its feet as he pulled it back.
Strachan ran up, his face shocked. ‘God, I’m sorry!’
Brody kept hold of the retriever’s collar, suspending its front paws off the ground as it yelped and struggled.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘I’ve said I’m sorry. I’ll take him now.’
Strachan held out his hand but Brody didn’t relinquish his hold. It was a big dog but the ex-inspector held it without effort, gripping its collar so tightly it was starting to choke as it wriggled to free itself.
‘I said I’ll take him now,’ Strachan repeated, more firmly this time.
For a moment I thought Brody wasn’t going to hand it over. Then he thrust the animal at Strachan. ‘You shouldn’t be out here. You or your bloody dog!’
Strachan soothed his pet, keeping hold of its collar. ‘I apologise. I didn’t mean to let him out. I just wanted to see if I could do anything.’
‘You can get back in your car and leave. This is police business, not yours!’
But now Strachan was starting to grow angry himself. ‘Funny, I thought you’d retired.’
‘I’ve got clearance to be here. You haven’t.’
‘Perhaps not, but that still doesn’t give you any legal right to tell me what to do.’
Brody’s jaw muscles bunched with the effort of restraint. ‘Constable McKinney. Why don’t you escort this gentleman back to his car?’
Duncan was looking worried, out of his depth as the two of them confronted each other.
‘No need. I’m going,’ Strachan said. There were twin patches of colour on his cheeks, but he was more composed now. He gave me a shamefaced smile, studiously ignoring Brody.
‘Morning, Dr Hunter. Sorry about this.’
‘That’s OK. It’s just better not to have many people around,’ I said.
‘No, I appreciate that. But if there is anything I can do to help, then please let me know. Anything at all.’ He gave the dog’s collar an affectionate shake. ‘Come on, Oscar, you bad lad.’
Brody watched him lead the dog back to the car, his expression stern and unforgiving.
Duncan began to stammer an apology. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t sure what I should…’
‘No need to apologise. Shouldn’t have lost my temper like that.’ Brody took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from his pocket, clearly still rattled.
The kettle had started to boil in the camper van. I waited till Duncan had gone back inside to make the tea, then turned to Brody.
‘You don’t like Strachan much, do you?’
Brody smiled. ‘That obvious, is it?’ He took a cigarette from the packet and regarded it with distaste. ‘Filthy habit. I gave up when I retired. But I seem to have started again.’
‘What have you got against him?’
He lit the cigarette and took a long drag, exhaling the smoke as if he resented it. ‘I don’t approve of his sort. Privileged types who think because they’ve got money they can do as they like. He didn’t even earn it himself, he inherited it. His family made their fortune in gold mining out in South Africa during apartheid. You think they were so keen to share it with their workers over there?’
‘You can’t blame him for what his family did.’
‘Perhaps not. But he’s too cocksure of himself for my liking. You saw how he was in the bar last night, buying everyone drinks, turning his charm on for Karen Tait. A wife like that, and he’s still got a roving eye.’
I remembered what Fraser had told me about Brody’s own wife leaving him, and wondered if his dislike of Strachan was coloured with envy. ‘What about what he’s done for the island? From what I’ve heard, Runa was going the same way as St Kilda before he came here.’
Brody said nothing for a moment. His border collie had come to look out of the camper-van door, back legs stiff with arthritis. He stroked its head.
‘There’s a story about St Kilda that always makes me wonder if what happened there wasn’t for the best anyway. Before the islanders left, they killed their dogs. All of them. But only two were killed by lethal injections. The rest had stones tied round their necks and were thrown into the harbour. Their own dogs.’
He shook his head.
‘Never could fathom why anyone would do something like that. But I expect they must have had a reason. I was a policeman long enough to know that whatever people do, there’s always a reason. And one way or another it’s usually self-interest.’
‘You can’t think that Runa would have been better off abandoned?’
‘No, I suppose not. Strachan’s made people here more comfortable, I’ll grant him that. Better houses, better roads. You won’t find anyone has a bad word to say about him.’ He shrugged. ‘I just don’t believe in something for nothing. There’s always a price to pay.’
I wonder if he wasn’t being overly cynical. Strachan was helping the island, not exploiting it. And Brody wouldn’t be the first policeman I’d met who’d become so hardened by exposure to the darker face of humanity that he was unable to see there was also a brighter side.
Then again, he might just be a more astute judge of human character than I was. A man I’d once mistakenly regarded as a friend had told me I was better at understanding the dead than the living, and perhaps he’d been right. At least the dead don’t lie or betray.
Only keep their secrets, unless you know how to decipher them.
‘I ought to get on,’ I said.
The cottage didn’t look any more prepossessing by daylight. Darkness had at least hidden the full extent of its ruin and squalor. Its roof was swaybacked and gaping in places, the cracked windows thick with decades of grime. Behind it rose the imposing bulk of Beinn Tuiridh, now visible as a misshapen tumble of rocks smeared with dirty traces of snow.
A corridor of incident tape had been run from the front door into the room where the burned remains lay. The ceiling above them looked on the verge of collapse, although as yet no rain had leaked on to the ash and bones themselves. In the murky light that filtered through the window, they looked even more pathetic than I remembered.
I stood back and considered them, struck once again by the gruesome incongruity of the unburned hand and feet. Still, gruesome or not, the decomposing soft tissue was an unexpected bonus for a fire death. It would allow me to analyse the volatile fatty acids to establish a time since death, as well as providing fingerprints and DNA to help identify the unknown woman.