Coffin Road (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Gunn made a half-hearted attempt to clear away the mess on his desk to make a place for the good doctor’s interim report. He shared his office with DC Smith, who was out on a job, and it was his chair that he offered to Dr Kimm when he came in. He had heard the roar of the motorbike out in Church Street, but had not associated it with the imminent arrival of the psychiatrist from the Western Isles Hospital. Until the man entered wearing his leathers, a helmet under one arm, the other holding out his report.

‘I knew you were in a hurry for this, Mr Gunn, but it will take me some time to produce a detailed report. This is just a digest, a summary of my findings.’

Gunn glanced over the printed sheets and his heart sank. This would not be light reading. ‘Maybe you’d like to give me a quick verbal,’ he said optimistically.

The doctor glanced at his watch. ‘I’m hoping to get down as far as Leverburgh today,’ he said. ‘Taking the Golden Road. The forecast’s good, but I want to leave myself time to get back before dark.’

‘Doesn’t have to take any longer than you want it to, Doctor. Just a thumbnail sketch of your conclusions.’ He knew he wouldn’t have a chance to wade through the report, interim or not, before his meeting with the CIO, and he didn’t want to face him without all the details at his fingertips.

Dr Kimm laid his helmet on Smith’s desk and unzipped his jacket. ‘Well, Mr Gunn, it is a good job that this psychiatrist is also trained in basic psychology. You got two for the price of one.’ He grinned, but Gunn didn’t see the joke. ‘Your man, for want of a better way to describe him, has no physical injury, no brain damage to explain his memory loss.’ He paused. ‘He is suffering, in my opinion, from dissociative amnesia.’

‘Dissociative . . .’

‘It’s one of a number of dissociative disorders, which also include multiple personality disorder. Which was interesting, given your account of the patient having spent eighteen months here pretending to be someone else. Dead or otherwise. I’m not so sure I would go so far as to say he was suffering from MPD, but he does display some elements of OCPD.’

Gunn frowned. ‘Which is?’

‘Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Which you mustn’t confuse with OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is anxiety-based. The patient in this case shows a certain preoccupation with orderliness and perfectionism. Excessive attention to detail. He would want to be the boss in any given situation, but would not make a good team member.’

‘What does any of this have to do with losing his memory?’

‘Well, I explain all that in my report, Mr Gunn. But it’s all associated.’ He grinned. ‘Or, in his case, dissociated.’

Gunn looked lost.

Doctor Kimm said, ‘A joke.’ He leaned forward. ‘We had a good long chat, Detective Sergeant, your suspect and I. I learned a lot. Not his name, or his job, or where he lives. But about him. His personality. Who he is, in that sense. He displays mild symptoms of OCPD and anankastic personality disorder. That doesn’t make him mentally ill. Lots of us show those kind of symptoms to a greater or lesser degree. But it’s his very personality that has forced him to shut out the events that led up to, and caused, his memory loss. A trauma of some kind, that he is simply unable to process in relation to himself. So he has just removed, or dissociated, himself from it. And the only way he has of doing that is by blocking his memory of it. And himself.’

‘You mean he’s doing it on purpose?’

‘No, no, no, no. It’s quite involuntary.’

Gunn scratched his chin. ‘No chance he’s faking it?’

The doctor shook his head. ‘Impossible to rule it out, but I don’t think so.’

Gunn leaned back in his seat and sighed. None of this was going to be easy, and he found himself almost glad to be able to hand over accountability to the CIO. ‘Do you think he killed that man out on Eilean Mòr?’

‘I have no idea, Mr Gunn. You might have evidence to suggest that he did, but I suspect that you don’t, since you are asking for my opinion.’ He smiled, and rubbed his hands together, as if washing them of all further responsibility. ‘But here’s the interesting thing.’ He reached for his helmet and stood up. ‘The patient himself believes that he might have done it. In fact, he is scared that he did. Which might very well be what is blocking his memory of the whole thing.’

Gunn stood up, too. ‘Will it ever come back to him? His memory.’

‘It could come back in the blink of an eye, Mr Gunn. Or it might never return. Or he might start remembering bits, fragments, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which will eventually enable him to put together a picture of what happened.’

‘Treatment?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘None, really. Hypnosis might help. It might not. But I can’t give him a pill that will restore his memory, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s his subconscious that has turned the key in the lock. And it’s only his subconscious that can unlock it again.’ He beamed. ‘Interesting case.’ And he glanced out of the window. ‘Sun’s shining. It’s going to be a lovely ride down to Harris.’

*

The CIO was younger than Gunn. He had been a newly promoted Detective Constable at Inverness when Gunn first met him. A smug little bastard who was going places and knew it. Though Gunn, then his senior officer, had still been tasked with drying him behind the ears and preventing him from getting unwittingly tangled up in the ropes. But Gunn’s ambitions had never extended beyond returning to his native Stornoway and providing a safe and stable environment for raising a family. And so, while Gunn remained a Detective Sergeant, Jimmy ‘The Hammer’ Chisholm, as he became known, leapfrogged him up the ranks and was now
his
senior officer. Which Gunn found quite hard to swallow. Although Chisholm himself had no difficulty in hammering the point home.

He looked up from his desk as Gunn came in. There was no smile, no acknowledgement that they had not seen each other for nearly two years. His face was leaner than Gunn remembered, his nose more bladelike. And Gunn was pleased to see that he was losing his hair while Gunn’s still grew in thick abundance.

‘George.’ It was DCI Chisholm’s only acknowledgement. And even that rankled. He had once been
Jimmy
to Gunn’s
sir
. Now it was the other way around. The desk in front of him was strewn with reports. ‘Clear enough from the pathologist that it was murder,’ he said. No preamble. ‘We still don’t know who he is?’

‘Afraid not, sir.’

‘What are we doing to find out?’ Meaning, what was Gunn doing.

‘As you know, sir, his photograph has been in all the dailies, as well as on BBC and STV. It’ll be in all the periodicals before the week’s out.’

‘And down south?’

‘
Crimewatch
is running an item this week.’

‘Nothing from fingerprints or DNA?’

‘I think I might have told you if there were, sir.’ Gunn beamed as if he was making a joke, but Chisholm’s glare made it clear he recognised insolence when he heard it.

Gunn said, ‘We’re still awaiting a report back from the lab to learn if the victim had any skin from his attacker under his fingernails. If there is, then we’ll know soon enough if there’s a match with the suspect.’

Chisholm leaned back in his seat, stroking his chin with pensive fingers, and looked at Gunn reflectively. ‘Why do I have the feeling you don’t think there will be?’

Gunn lifted his eyebrows in surprise. ‘I have no idea, sir.’

‘DC Smith seemed to think you were quite sympathetic to our suspect’s story.’

‘Oh, did he?’ Gunn filed that one away for later retribution. ‘I just happen to think he’s telling the truth, as far as he knows it. But that doesn’t mean he’s not our killer. Borne out by the report from the psychiatrist.’

Chisholm looked up, interested. ‘You’ve spoken to him?’

Gunn nodded and dropped Kimm’s interim report on Chisholm’s desk. ‘That’s a holding report on his findings.’

Chisholm opened the folder and ran his eye down the first page. Gunn saw his jaw clench and eyes widen almost imperceptibly before he looked up. ‘Tell me what’s in it.’ And Gunn was glad he had persuaded the psychiatrist to delay his run down to Harris for the verbal briefing.

‘According to Doctor Kimm, he’s suffering from dissociative amnesia.’

‘And what’s that when it’s at home?’

Gunn said smugly, ‘It’s one of a group of disorders, sir. Psychological. There’s no physical reason for his memory loss. No injury. The psychiatrist believes that he is blocking a trauma of some kind.’

‘The murder of our man on Eilean Mòr.’

‘Very possibly. The suspect has no memory of committing the murder, but is afraid that he did. The memory loss is a way of dissociating himself from the act. Assuming that he did it.’

Chisholm looked almost impressed. ‘And do we think that he did?’

‘Well, that’s the problem, sir. We have no physical evidence to tie him to the murder. We can’t even prove that he was on the island at the time, although he himself admits it’s a possibility.’ Gunn sucked in air before he continued. ‘As you’ll see from my report, he was living down on Harris under an assumed identity for eighteen months prior to the murder. The identity of a dead man, as it turns out. So neither he, nor I, have the least idea of who he actually is.’

‘So we have a victim and a suspect, neither of whom we can identify, and no evidence whatsoever linking one to the other?’

Gunn shifted uncomfortably. ‘Well, there is one thing, sir. We found a bunch of scientific and beekeeping equipment in the suspect’s shed down at Luskentyre. He claims not to know what any of it is doing there, but both he and the victim have bee stings on the back of their hands.’ And he could see from Chisholm’s expression that the DCI was as nonplussed by this as he was himself.

Chisholm sighed and looked again at the psychiatrist’s notes, but it was clear to Gunn he wasn’t reading them, and he suspected that Chisholm was wishing they had sent someone else to take charge of this case. Finally he looked up. ‘So should we detain him or not?’

‘Well, given that we only have one shot at that, sir, it might be better if we didn’t. Since we have no actual evidence to link him to the crime. Apart from charging him with driving without a licence, we don’t have a single reason to hold him.’

‘Then you’d better find one pretty damn fast, George.’ And Gunn noticed that the
we
had morphed to
you
. A case of dissociative responsibility, he thought wryly. ‘And I don’t want him leaving the island until he’s been either cleared or charged.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

If anything, it feels even stranger to be chauffeur-driven home by a uniformed police officer than it did being taken away the other morning under suspicion of murder. But there is no more clarity now than there was then. The fact that they have let me go does not mean they think I didn’t do it. They just can’t prove it. That much is clear to me, at least. But I am none the wiser. About anything. About who I am, why I am here, or whether or not I am a murderer.

They have warned me not to leave the island, and since I am forbidden to drive my car, I am effectively under house arrest in a cottage whose owner wants rid of me as soon as possible.

Still, there is a comfort in seeing the beach laid out ahead of me beyond the dunes, beach grass blowing in the wind. That white Highland pony is still grazing there, silhouetted against the startling blue of the sea behind it, and a sky glowing red and grey beyond that. Long strips of dark cloud almost obscuring the sun as it dips towards the horizon.

I think Mrs Macdonald has some kind of radar installed in her house, or a long-range listening device. Because there she is at the window as we turn down over the cattle grid on to the metalled parking area behind Dune Cottage. Watching. I see the net curtain fall to obscure her as I get out of the car and glance across the road in her direction.

My car sits where I left it, and the constable gets out of the driver’s side of his own and says, ‘Detective Sergeant Gunn has asked me to take your car keys, sir.’

I go into the house, which is not locked, and find my keys hanging on the hook just inside the door. I remove my car key from the ring and step out again to hand it to the policeman. He nods and gets into his car to drive off without another word.

I go back inside to close the door and lean my back against it, eyes closed. The nightmare goes on.

The house is a mess as I wander through it, the detritus of the police search lying about the place like so much debris washed ashore by the same sea that dumped me, semiconscious and without memory, on the beach.

I feel compelled to tidy up, to reintroduce at least some order to a life in chaos. And I wonder if perhaps the psychiatrist is right, and that I do suffer to a greater or lesser degree from some kind of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. If I knew myself better, I might have been able to confirm that diagnosis.

In the back bedroom, I come across the wrecked remains of the coffee table whose glass was smashed the night I was attacked by an intruder. And I wonder why I didn’t tell the police about what happened that night. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I suppose I knew that, since there was no way of proving it, my whole story might only have been made to sound even more ridiculous. How often it is that an awkward truth is easier to dismiss than a comforting lie.

It is dark by the time I go outside with a stout screwdriver to prise off the strip of wood the police have used to seal the garden shed shut. I don’t want Mrs Macdonald’s radar to alert her to what I am doing, so I pull the door closed behind me before turning on the light.

Looking again, with fresh eyes, I see how ordered it all is. How I have arranged shelves and hooks to accommodate different, though associated, items. My first impression of seeing it the other day was of something quite random, almost chaotic, but I realise now that there is a logic at work. Even if I am not quite sure what it is. I look at the neat row of microtweezers and scissors lined up beside a standing microscope with twin eyepieces and a stage plate. Next to it, a cardboard box filled with tiny, tapering plastic tubes, sealable at one end with flip-over tops.

What was I looking at through this microscope, and why would I require such tiny tweezers? I bend over the microscope and put my eyes to the lenses, and suddenly I see it. A bee in sharp focus on the stage plate, brightly lit. With the scissors and tweezers, I am carefully opening up its head to tease out the brain and drop it into one of those tiny plastic tubes.

That fleeting flash of recollection is like an electric shock, and I step back, recoiling in surprise. I am both scared and energised. It is the first real fragment of returning memory. No matter how perplexing, it is a step towards discovering who I really am. But also a step into that dark cloud of obscurity that hides the truth of what happened to me, and what I might have done, that night out on Eilean Mòr.

I hear my name called from somewhere outside and I am startled out of the moment. I recognise Sally’s voice and then the sound of the door opening into the cottage. I quickly turn out the light in the shed and step out into the dark, closing the door behind me and fixing it shut as best I can.

As I hurry up the steps and into the house, Bran barks excitedly and rushes to greet me, paws up on my chest, very nearly knocking me over. I am almost as glad to see him as he is to see me. The one living creature in my life who trusts me unreservedly. I make a great fuss of him, then look up to see Sally standing framed in the arch that leads to the sitting room.

She is watching us with a curiously neutral expression on her face. How often in these last days I have wanted to hold her. To feel the comfort and warmth of another human being. To feel loved and wanted, and not just by a dog. But something, even in the way she is standing, places a barrier between us, and I know instinctively that she will not be that source of warmth and comfort tonight.

I gaze at her in the half-light of the living-room lamp that she has turned on, and feel pangs of both lust and regret, and I remember running my hands through her silken, cropped hair, her naked skin next to mine. In the bedroom along the hall. In the tiny, cold chamber at the top of the tower in St Clement’s Church.

‘The police were asking about us,’ she says.

‘You and Jon?’

‘You and me.’

I nod. ‘Gunn said you denied we were having a relationship.’

‘Did you tell him about us?’

‘No. He already knew. Didn’t seem any point in lying about it. He said he asked you in front of Jon.’

‘Yes.’ She gazes at the floor for a moment, then back at me. ‘He’s been behaving pretty strangely ever since.’

‘You mean he didn’t believe you?’

‘I don’t know. We never spoke about it after the cop went. But he’s being cold and distant.’ She pauses. ‘I think we should stop seeing each other.’

I am not sure why, but I am devastated by this. Sally is the one person I trust. The one person I have felt able to tell everything. Without her, I know I will be utterly, overwhelmingly alone. ‘Why, Sally? Why? You said it was as good as over between you and Jon.’

‘It is.’

‘Then why would we stop seeing each other?’

She takes a deep breath. ‘Because I have no idea who you are, Neal.’ She almost laughs. ‘Neal. I don’t even know if that’s your name.’

‘It’s not.’

A slight frown creases her eyes.

‘Neal Maclean is dead.’

And now they open wide. ‘Then who the hell are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Hopelessly alone in my ignorance, as I knew I would be.

Her jaw seems to set, a hint of defiance in it. ‘And that man they found on the Flannan Isles . . . Did you kill him?’

I close my eyes and hold them shut for what seems like an inordinate length of time, before opening them again to see that she has not moved a muscle. ‘It is almost impossible for me to think that somehow I have it in me to take the life of another human being. But I think I probably did.’

*

The dark of the night outside seems profound. Tangible, enveloping, as if it had simply wrapped itself around me. In my bedroom, the only light comes from the luminous hands of the bedside clock. I have left the side window on the latch, and I can hear the wind and the ocean. And, in the room, the sound of Bran’s heavy breathing. He is happy to be back with me, oblivious of my misery, and has fallen easily into a deep sleep. I feel his legs kicking from time to time as he dreams, perhaps of chasing rabbits across the dunes.

It is hours since Sally left, and I can’t sleep. For fear that I share this body I inhabit with a killer.