‘Back the way you came?’ Anna asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘So, was the tractor there then or not?’

  Glen stared straight ahead. He blinked and his forehead creased and uncreased. He looked genuinely to be testing his memory. Finally, apparently defeated, he turned to his wife. ‘Tessie?’

  ‘I didn’t notice,’ she said in a small, frightened voice.

  ‘When did it happen?’ Glen demanded of Jo. ‘When was she run over?’

  Anna answered for her. ‘Between three and four, we think.’

  Glen rubbed his mouth with his hand and looked about the yard, bothered now. He cleared his throat. ‘It wasn’t there,’ he said. ‘It can’t have been.’

  ‘Do you remember, or is that a conclusion you’re drawing?’ Anna asked.

  He looked at her hard in the eye, his chin jutting. ‘I remember,’ he said. ‘But when we got back, I went up to see Dad. He was exactly where we’d left him. Hadn’t moved. I swear to that. Someone took the tractor and did that to Ellen. Whoever took it did so while we were out, and it wasn’t my dad.’ He jabbed a finger for effect. ‘Get it?’

  ‘You’ll both need to make statements about where you were and when,’ Anna said, when the moment had passed and they were calm again. ‘You’ll state what you remember and what you don’t. There’s no room for conjecture,’ she added. ‘And there’ll be no lying, or you’ll make serious trouble for yourselves.’

  Glen looked thunderous then turned his head and nodded.

  ‘Right,’ Anna said, business-like to change the mood. ‘The tractor key. Show us where you keep it.’

  ‘Through this door here,’ he said, and made for a low ratty-looking wooden door in the side of the barn.

  ‘Let me, please,’ Anna called, stopping him in his tracks.

  She snapped on forensic gloves then grabbed the metal knob handle and twisted it. The wooden door screamed in protest as she pushed it firmly open, and somewhere birds flapped in a panic. Then she stepped inside.

  It was a big place, half in shadow, half lit by morning light filtering in through gaps in the roof. Rusting junk filled the place: old machinery, piles of wood, bricks, and all of it clogged with vegetation. Jo stepped through the doorway after her, then Glen joined them.

  ‘Up there to your right,’ he said, and they turned their heads.

  There was a single shelf at head height. Old paint pots complete with dribbles filled the shelf. A hook under the shelf was empty.

  ‘That’s where the key goes,’ Glen said.

  ‘The only one, or is there a spare?’

  ‘This is the spare,’ he said. ‘Main one’s mine and it’s in the house. There’s the honesty jar, look.’ He nodded at the dirt floor. ‘And the bottle Bill left me.’

  The jar was big, the kind used for pickling. Anna bent and peered inside. There were a couple of ten pounds notes in there, plus a fiver and some coins. She lifted the whisky bottle by its neck. It was a twelve-year-old Laphroaig single malt, dusty and wearing a trail of cobwebs, as if it had been sitting in that spot for some time, which seemed strange.

  ‘This looks expensive,’ she said to Glen.

  He peered closely at it.

  ‘I’d take it inside, if I were you,’ she said.

  ‘Best kept out of the house,’ Glen said gruffly, eyes averted.

  Anna nodded, understanding. ‘Maybe someone would take it off your hands,’ she suggested.

  He nodded.

  ‘I think that’s us,’ she said to Glen.

  He said nothing but led the way back out of the barn to where Tess waited, hair tugged by the wind and hugging herself as if she was cold.

  Something – a movement over the fields – caught Anna’s attention.

  Jo had seen it too. ‘That’s Dr MacCorkindale’s car,’ she said.

  Anna sensed Glen stiffening beside her.

  They watched as the dark-blue car made its way along the edge of a field, then turned left, then right until it was heading for the farm.

  Glen grumbled something to his wife. Tess looked anxiously at Anna.

  ‘We’d like a word with the doctor first,’ Anna said. ‘Then we’ll leave you to it, okay?’

  Glen nodded, unhappy but accepting.

  He and Tess went towards the front of the house to wait for the car to pull into the yard. A man got out. The doctor looked to be in his fifties. He was tall and slim, with neat greying hair and wore a stylish grey suit. He went into the back of the car and brought out a medical bag.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Anna Vaughan,’ Anna said as she approached him.

  ‘I can imagine why you’re here,’ he said drily, then called across the yard, ‘Hello, Glen. Hello, Tess.’

  The pair nodded but didn’t speak.

  ‘Dr Vernon MacCorkindale,’ the man said to Anna. ‘William Cameron is a patient of mine.’

  ‘Could we have a quick word, doctor?’

  ‘So long as it is quick,’ he said.

  ‘Over here, perhaps?’ Anna suggested and moved away from the farmhouse. The doctor followed her.

  ‘Go on then,’ MacCorkindale said when they were out of the Camerons’ earshot.

  ‘William Cameron was known to drive his son’s tractor about the lanes here,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Despite a dementia diagnosis?’

  MacCorkindale lifted his chin a little. ‘Such a diagnosis wouldn’t automatically prevent a person from driving. There does come a point where safety – the driver’s own and the public’s – means a person should stop.’

  Anna turned her eyes on the house, imagining the old man swaddled in his bed in that sour-smelling bedroom. ‘I just saw him,’ she said. ‘He seems very frail.’

  ‘As would you be if you were eighty-eight with a serious chest infection,’ MacCorkindale said sharply. ‘He’s had it for two weeks.’

  ‘And have you seen him regularly during that period?’

  ‘Every two to three days. One of our locums saw him at the weekend – on Sunday, I think it was. Glen and I talked last week about admitting his father to the hospital in Lochgilphead – I’m sure he won’t mind me telling you that. It was a difficult conversation. Glen understood what it might mean.’

  ‘That he might not come out again?’

  He nodded. ‘We talked about what William would want if he were able to make the decision. We decided he’d prefer to be at home should he… decline. Now—’ he narrowed his eyes ‘—why don’t you just ask me what you want to know and I can get on and check on my patient.’

  Anna took a deep breath, conscious of Glen’s and Tess’s eyes on them.

  ‘How likely is it, in your view,’ she said carefully, ‘that Mr Cameron was out driving his tractor yesterday afternoon?’

  ‘On a scale of one to ten?’ he said, sarcasm heavy in his voice. ‘How about zero?’

  ‘I see. Well, thank you.’

  ‘Sorry if that’s disappointing,’ he said, and smiled unpleasantly.

  ‘Not at all, Doctor.’ She smiled unpleasantly back. ‘Was Ellen McIver one of your patients too?’

  ‘She was,’ he said, demure now. He cleared his throat. ‘I was sorry to be called to such a scene.’

  ‘We’re grateful you attended,’ Anna said, ‘and for your identification. Unfortunately, we can’t make her identity public until we’ve spoken to her niece. How well did you know her, Doctor?’

  ‘I saw her… I don’t know, a couple of times a year. She kept well. Some joint issues latterly. How sure are you this was deliberate?’

  ‘It’s a suspicious death,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He was silent for a few seconds. ‘How could it be anything else? Look, Ellen could be difficult,’ he went on. ‘She had a “knowing” way about her. As in, she liked to know things – and for everyone else to know she knew them, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘She made a complaint about you, I believe.’

  He lifted a half-amused eyebrow. ‘You know about that, then? It didn’t get anywhere. Our practice manager can be very persuasive. Ellen came to see me a week ago, as it happened – as if the complaint had never taken place. She asked me some very odd questions, about other patients. Of course, I wasn’t about to tell her anything.’

  ‘Questions about what?’

  He’d said too much and regretted it, she could tell. He made a pantomime of checking his watch, an expensive-looking thing. ‘I really must get on,’ he said.

  ‘I’d like to come and see you,’ Anna said, adding meaningfully, ‘When you have more time to talk.’

  He looked displeased at the thought, perhaps annoyed at himself too. ‘Very well.’

  ‘How do I reach you?’

  ‘At the Harbour Surgery in Tarbert,’ he said tersely. ‘Actually, I’d rather you came to the house. In the village. Baldrishaig House, up the hill behind the pub. Now, if you don’t mind?’

  He left them and crossed the yard. Tess hurried to join him and the two slipped into the house. Glen made to go after them.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ Jo muttered.

  ‘Not quite,’ Anna said, then shouted, ‘Mr Cameron, before you go?’

  Glen stopped at the door of the farmhouse. He wheeled round, his mouth curled into a snarl.

  Anna strode over, Jo at her heel.

  ‘Who do you think did this?’

  ‘Don’t ask me.’

  ‘It must be one of your friends or neighbours. Someone who knows where the key is. Knows how to drive the thing.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said.

  Anna eyed him carefully, meaning her gaze to unsettle him, but he merely stared back, unmoved.

  ‘Was it you, Mr Cameron?’

  He froze, his eyes growing wide with alarm. Then he mugged amazement and barked out a sharp, unconvincing laugh. ‘Me?’

  ‘It was your tractor.’

  ‘Why would I?’

  He looked genuinely disgusted at the accusation, but it was worth a further push.

  ‘She’d complained about your dad, hadn’t she?’ she said. ‘Said she was going to report him – and you – to the authorities. Said he needed to be locked away for his own good – and other people’s safety.’

  He blinked and swallowed. ‘So?’ He looked sick, pale and shaken. ‘Doesn’t mean I’d kill her, does it? Look, all I care about is how long I have to wait till I get my tractor back. I need it around the farm and that. It’s an expensive machine.’

  ‘It won’t be for some time, I’m afraid,’ Anna told him. ‘It’s likely we’ll need to take it to Glasgow⁠—’

  ‘Oh, what?’

  ‘For our road policing colleagues to examine it. Biologists too – you saw what state the wheels were in.’

  ‘How long, then?’

  ‘I can’t say. I’d suggest you try to hire another tractor in the meantime. And maybe you should think about being more careful with the key in future.’

  He glared at her.

  ‘One more thing,’ she said breezily, ignoring the contempt on his face ‘we’ll need to take your fingerprints so they can be compared to any we find in the tractor’s cab.’

  ‘But of course my prints’ll be in it. They’ll be all over it. It’s my tractor!’

  ‘We know that,’ Anna said. ‘It’s other people’s prints we’re interested in.’

  ‘I see.’ His lip curled in anger.

  ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Cameron,’ Anna said.

  9

  Anna drove them from the farmyard and stopped in a passing place a few hundred metres from the farm’s front gate. She cut the engine and wound down the windows, letting sea-smelling air blow into the car. The lane, like the farm, was on a little rise, and from here they had a view of flat fields stretching down to West Loch Tarbert, of the lattice of hedgerow-lined lanes zigzagging between them, and of the woods that marked the back of the village. West Loch Tarbert, the long narrow fjord that cut east to west across the trunk of the peninsula, almost severing Kintyre from the mainland, looked impossibly blue this morning. The navy-and-white Islay ferry was heading east along the loch, making for its port at Kennacraig, black exhaust torn by the breeze from twin red chimneys.

  ‘How busy is the beach?’ Anna asked Jo.

  ‘Not very.’

  ‘Even in July?’

  ‘People don’t know about it, unless they’re local,’ Jo said. ‘Locals use it for dog walks, mainly. Not a lot of people come here on holiday.’

  It made sense. There were holiday homes in Knapdale, but not as many as on other stretches of the west coast. There were certainly no holiday parks, with caravans and yurts and the like.

  Still…

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Jo asked, turning to consider Anna’s profile.

  ‘That it was such a risk,’ Anna said. ‘Yesterday afternoon, in the bright sunshine, just down there, someone ran over another human being in a large, noisy tractor, not once but twice, maybe three times. That person then dumped the tractor in a ditch and went on their way. No one saw it – not as far as we know, but they might have done – from Slipway Cottage, from the beach or over the fields.’

  Jo gazed out over the landscape. ‘Yeah, it was some risk, all right.’

  ‘It tells us something about the murderer, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That it’s someone who’s mad?’

  ‘Or desperate. Or a gambler. Someone who saw their chance and took it.’

  Jo frowned at her.

  ‘Say you were using the tractor anyway,’ Anna explained. ‘Say you’re one of the names on the list Glen gave us. You’re driving it. Then you see your nemesis – Ellen – coming towards you. You look about. No one else is in sight, and so you cause “an accident”.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But you don’t kill her first time. So you have no choice but to finish the job, probably in a panic. You know it will look like murder, so you ditch the tractor… and run.’

  Anna visualised the interior of the cab, the wheel, the levers. ‘Have you ever driven a tractor?’ she asked Jo.

  ‘Never.’

  ‘I’m wondering how hard they are to drive. Do you need to learn or is it so simple anyone could do it – especially if you can drive a car?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Jo said. ‘If it wasn’t one of the people on this list, then they’d still need to know where the key was and how to operate the thing. They’d need to be able to drive it well enough to reverse it, to turn it in a narrow lane. I’m not sure I could do it, not without someone showing me.’

  Anna nodded. ‘We need to get prints from those three people who use the tractor. I take it there’s a livescan machine at Lochgilphead police office?’

  Jo nodded.

  ‘Ask your colleague there to phone the people named, along with Glen Cameron himself, and ask them to come in for elimination purposes. Of course, we’ll want to talk to each of them ourselves in due course, but for now their prints are a priority.’

  ‘I’ll ring Karen at the station when I’m back in the village,’ Jo said.

  Anna was quiet for a minute.

  ‘I’m thinking about what we know of Ellen now,’ she said. ‘Two people – Bill Robertson and Dr MacCorkindale – have told us she liked to “know things”. Bill said she talked about people not knowing “what was going on under their noses”. The doctor said she even asked him questions about his other patients. Was it something she knew that got her killed? But again, why would a killer act so rashly and in such an exposed spot? You know, Jo, that’s got to be at the heart of this.’

  As she drove back into the village Anna felt her phone vibrate in her breast pocket: messages, perhaps a voicemail or two.

  She pulled in to the side of the road, opposite the village hall, turned off the engine and pulled out her phone. There were missed calls from Nick, a voicemail and a text, sent half an hour ago:

  Mum’s not here. I think she left in the night. Can you call me asap?

  ‘Everything all right?’ Jo asked.

  ‘No,’ Anna said, eyes locked on her screen. ‘I need to make a personal call. Stay here, will you?’ She got out of the car and dialled Nick.

  He answered immediately, as if he’d been waiting, phone in his hand.

  ‘Oh, thank God,’ he began. ‘Did you get my messages?’

  ‘Yes. Any sign of her?’

  ‘No, nothing.’

  ‘Has she taken her things?’

  ‘That’s just it – her case is still in her room, but her bag’s gone. I haven’t looked in the wardrobe.’

  Anna thought for a second or two, weighing probabilities.

  ‘There’s no need to panic,’ she said. ‘Maybe she went for a walk. Maybe she’s gone into Glasgow, to meet someone – one of her online friends.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He didn’t sound convinced. ‘What if she found the tickets?’

  ‘But they were in your jacket pocket. Where did you put your jacket last night?’

  ‘In our room.’

  ‘Look, I’m sure she’s fine. She isn’t vulnerable.’ Just unhinged and unpredictable, she wanted to add, but bit her tongue.

  ‘I’m working from home this morning,’ he said, ‘but I’m supposed to go into work at lunchtime. We’ve got a client meeting. Maybe I should cancel it.’

  ‘You could. But look,’ she said, softening her tone, ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up. It’s annoying, though.’ She sighed. ‘Like she knows what we were planning… But how could she? Look, the signal here’s crap. Text me and I’ll call you back when I get a chance.’

  ‘I will.’

  They said their goodbyes and she put the phone back in her breast pocket, then took a moment before getting back in the car.

  Jo eyed her warily, phone in her hand. ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Family stuff,’ she said gloomily. ‘What’s new?’

  ‘The appeal for information is up on Facebook,’ Jo said and handed her phone to Anna.

  Anna read the simple statement, live on Police Scotland’s main webpage:

  Officers in Knapdale, Argyll, are appealing for information after a possible hit-and-run incident in Knapdale, at Baldrishaig, south of Kilberry, yesterday afternoon (Thursday 17th July) between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., which has resulted in the death of an elderly female resident.