Whisky From Small Glasses (39 page)

‘Now, now, Inspector Daley, I’d expected so much more from you.’ Seanessy looked down at him. ‘Your airhead wife – yes, an easy conquest. I’d thought you were going to be an altogether tougher nut to crack.’

Daley heard the whine beginning to rise in pitch again. He felt a certain surprise; despite the pain and convulsions he was suffering, he had remained conscious and was fully aware of what was going on around him. And he could move his leg. He knew the whining noise was the weapon rearming another charge.

With all the strength he could muster he kicked his leg out, catching Seanessy on his knee and knocking him backwards. With huge effort he managed to force his right hand to work. This arm was trapped under him because of the way he had fallen, which meant fortuitously that his hand was only inches away from the wires inserted into his left arm. He
strained, little bursts of light exploding in his vision. The rubberised coating of the jacket he’d got in Firdale had somehow reduced the voltage of the taser. He ripped the wires from his arm with a cry, then leaned heavily on his right arm, determined to be able to stand and face his attacker.

Suddenly Seanessy looked panicked. He had fallen backwards and had dropped the weapon, which was squealing now on the ground beside him. He was groping at a small pouch that was attached to the waistband of his trousers, while at the same time trying to force himself off the ground with one arm in much the same manner as Daley.

The detective managed to get to his knees, and with the very last strength he had left, forced his large frame forward on top of the older man, who was still struggling with the pouch. Both men gasped simultaneously. Daley felt his muscles loosen – the enforced cramps the taser had initiated were fading – though he knew his body was still not entirely his to command. He managed to pick himself up and straddle his opponent.

He could see the fear in Seanessy’s eyes. Daley lifted his arm, ready to send a fist into Seanessy’s face. ‘Where is she, you sick fuckin’ bastard?’ It was almost as though someone else was shouting. As his fist connected with Seanessy’s face he felt a sharp pain in his left thigh. Looking down, he grimaced at the sight of a hypodermic syringe sticking proudly from his leg. He tried to lift his arm to dislodge it, but could not. A smile spread across Seanessy’s face. Then Daley lost consciousness.

22

He came round abruptly, like someone being thrown into a pool of cold water when fast asleep. Strangely though, he was unable to move. He could feel – he knew – he was being dragged. He could see the blue of the sky showing through the evaporating haze of mist, but despite every effort he could not move so much as a muscle. Without warning he was thrust roughly to the ground, his head bouncing off a hard surface. Whatever he had been drugged with dulled the pain, but his eyes still pricked with the tiny lights he associated with being concussed.

Seanessy’s face was above him. ‘I thought a city boy like you would appreciate drawing his last few breaths of sea air.’ He was grinning insanely at the detective, a wisp of hair flopping over his eyes, his freckled face lobster pink. ‘Oh, and you might like to take a last look at that bitch of yours.’ Daley felt himself being pulled up by the hair. He was facing a tiny harbour; they were on what seemed to be a little jetty.

‘Look down there.’

Daley felt his head being thrust forward, a hand clasping the back of his neck. The water in the bay was clear, the sunlight reflecting off the sandy bottom. Daley tried to focus. There was something, something in the water. It was a body.
He recognised arms moving gently in the swell, like seaweed on the tide. The drugs had made his sight blur, but he could see enough to know that the body had no head. He retched, unable to expel the vomit from his mouth. He felt himself being flung back onto the hard surface of the jetty, again banging his head, the force of it sending vomit splattering from his mouth. Images of the floating corpse, Liz’s face and Fraser’s body lying on the pier at Kinloch all flashed through his mind.

Someone was speaking to him. The words were hard to understand at first, but gradually he began to make them out as his head cleared. ‘I have her head, you know. It’s back at the cottage. Do you want me to get it?’ Snot was flowing from Seanessy’s nose, insanity written all over his features.

Liz. Liz was dead. Daley could hear his own scream – half anger, half fear – echoing around the bay.

‘I was made a fool of all my life by
idiots
, cretins who weren’t fit to lick my boots.’ Seanessy’s rage was volcanic, palpable even through Daley’s drugged and diminished senses. ‘Standing in front of
imbeciles
, trying to impart some knowledge to them as they called me the most awful names and laughed at me.’ Daley could smell the tang of the sea mixed with the stench of his own sick. ‘And those snooty bastards – like your stupid wife – taunting me with her big tits and tight jeans. Me! Their intellectual superior! Even my own daughter became one of them: useless, ruined with drugs, profane.’ White spittle was caked at the corners of his mouth. ‘Now they’re all dead, and soon, very soon, you will be too.’

Daley saw Seanessy reach behind his back. The silver flash of a large blade filled his field of vision; it was like an old
butcher’s cleaver, with two improvised handles at either end, covered with electrical tape – a hand-held guillotine. He struggled to make his limbs move, to do his bidding: nothing. He was paralysed. Having come into contact with so much violent death in his career, he had always wondered how the victims felt at the point of extinction. Did your life really flash before your eyes, or was the fear of imminent death such an all-encompassing, visceral experience that it excluded everything else? He knew the drugs were affecting him – the fact that he couldn’t move bore witness to that – but now that he knew he was going to die, he felt a strange detachment as to his own fate. What hurt, what gnawed away at him, was the thought of his beautiful wife having met with this grim end. He had failed her as a husband, as a human being, and even as a police officer.

Daley stared up at his executioner, silhouetted against the patchy blue sky. He could smell the overpowering stench of stale sweat. Seanessy was straddling him, the cleaver held between both hands, like someone about to force down an explosives detonator. Beads of Seanessy’s perspiration dripped onto Daley’s face.

‘I’m not in the habit of despatching conscious victims, Mr Daley, but I want you to feel the pain of death for both you and your whore of a wife.’ He leaned back on his heels and raised the blade in front of his face. Daley could only feel his fingertips clawing uselessly at the rough surface of the pier. This was it; he was going to die.

There was a noise – a metallic snap – followed by a dull impact, like the sound of an axe biting into a damp log. At the same moment, a shaft of sunlight glinted through the dispersing mist, highlighting Seanessy’s face in grim detail.
His right eye had exploded in a shower of blood and gore, replaced by a sharp metallic point. He didn’t scream, didn’t even move. His mouth gaped open, whereupon a torrent of blood oozed over his bottom lip and down his chin. Still upright, straddling the detective, he dropped the blade, which landed heavily on Daley’s chest, causing him to exhale sharply. Slowly, like a building being demolished, Seanessy’s lifeless body fell forward, his forehead catching Daley on the chin. Above them, another figure was silhouetted against the sky: Hamish, a nail gun in his fist.

‘Aye, I’m sorry I let things go so far, Mr Daley. It’s jeest you’d said that you’d be takin’ care o’ everything. I wisna sure whether or no’ ye had a master plan on the go, that I couldna fathom. I take it ye need a hand?’ He smiled down at the recumbent police officer.

‘Off . . . Get this bastard off me,’ Daley managed to whisper. ‘He killed Liz.’ He felt a sob rise from his throat.

Hamish rubbed his chin. ‘No, he didna,’ he said. ‘She’s up in the cottage – oot for the count, right enough, but no’ deid. I checked her pulse myself.’ He walked to Daley’s side and, sticking his boot under Seanessy’s body, kicked it aside. A loud klaxon sounded. The lifeboat roared into the tiny harbour. ‘Here’s the cavalry, Mr Daley. Aboot as much use as a ha’penny watch.’ The large orange and blue lifeboat was entering the tiny harbour.

23

Daley had never attended so many funerals in such a short space of time. Judging by what had been found in Seanessy’s cottage, they were lucky not to be attending many more. Pictures of schoolgirls – their faces circled in red pen – from throughout his time as a teacher in the local school plastered the walls. The smiles of the two dead girls were almost obliterated by thick black crosses. They had been the unlucky ones, or was it that the others had been lucky?

A criminal psychologist reckoned that Seanessy had bottled up his resentment over decades, that the dam had simply burst when he retired. It seemed likely that his hatred of his mocking adolescent pupils had been heightened by the debauchery and premature death of his own daughter. Whatever the truth was, it had died with Seanessy on Abb’s Skerry.

Izzy Watson’s funeral was first. Her widowed husband Michael had shaken Daley by the hand, his blond-haired son hanging on to his father’s trouser leg. The child looked wary and sad, as though he grasped something of what was going on. Daley mumbled the usual platitudes, hoping he was showing the correct level of empathy. In truth, he had spent every day thanking God that Liz had survived her ordeal at
the hands of the deranged Seanessy. She had bravely insisted on accompanying him to the burials of the other victims as a show of solidarity with them and their families, and an unspoken offering up of thanks for her delivery from evil. Daley looked at her now. No signs of the torment she had gone through were visible, bar a small scratch on her cheek, even now fading under the adroit application of make-up and the brief passage of time. His heart swelled with love and relief. She was still subdued, didn’t have the old spark in her eyes, and he knew it would take time for her to recover, if in fact she ever did.

The next day, it was Janet Ritchie’s funeral. MacLeod was at the service, accompanied by two prison officers. He had been remanded in custody after a speedy investigation by the discipline branch, instigated by Superintendent Donald, who himself was present at this service. Daley was sure that he had only attended to see MacLeod’s shame, however, he decided to say nothing. Officially, Daley was still on sick leave, but he had kept in touch with Scott and the rest of the team. They had remained in Kinloch to tie up the loose ends of the Seanessy case and launch a serious investigation into the drug-smuggling ring responsible for Fraser’s murder. Daley frequently found his mind wandering to the circumstances surrounding the killing of the affable young DC. In fact, he found it hard to think about much else.

It was the morning of Bobby Johnstone’s funeral, and Daley was back in the CID office at Kinloch. He had been the headless corpse floating in the tiny bay of Abb’s Skerry. His head had been recovered from the lean-to shed where they had found Liz, unconscious and half naked, but alive. The
place had looked like a butcher’s, and it had been obvious that the young fisherman had been killed that day, most likely as Liz lay next door.

‘It’s like wading through custard here, Jimmy.’ Scott was chewing on a fried-egg roll, the yolk of which was dribbling down his chin. ‘There’s nae doubt aboot it, they’re a tightknit bunch doon here an’ no mistake. Still, I’ve no’ had tae go shoppin’ wi’ the wife fir nearly three weeks, so every cloud . . .’ He shrugged, then cursed as some yolk landed neatly in the middle of his tie. Instantly, Daley remembered Archie Fraser and, unusually, could think of no witty remark.

He had spoken to Camel briefly after the service, offering him his condolences. The normally chirpy young man was withdrawn and sullen. To be expected perhaps, as he was still under investigation for his purchase and use of illegal drugs. It was obvious that he saw Daley as the enemy as well as the man who had failed to save his brother.

Daley was about to leave the office when Donald appeared, a vision in sharp creases and gold braid.

‘Can I have a word with you, Jim?’ Donald was affecting his most gushing tones.

‘All right.’ Daley looked pointedly at his watch. ‘Liz is down at the County having a drink with Annie and the staff, and we’ll be driving up the road soon.’

‘I will only take up a moment of your precious time.’ Donald already had Daley by the arm and was steering him towards the door, his smile positively unctuous now. ‘Quick chat, then you can hit the road.’

They walked in silence along the corridors of Kinloch Station to the office that had once belonged to the disgraced Inspector MacLeod. Donald waved Daley towards the
visitors’ chair as he removed his cap and placed it carefully on the coat stand. ‘Now,’ he said, adopting an expression of consolation, ‘how are you both getting on after your . . . ordeal?’ He leaned forward in his chair, and for a brief moment Daley thought he was about to clasp his hand in a gesture of sympathy.

‘You know how it is, sir. It’s taking a bit of time. Liz is doing OK. She’s my priority at the moment.’ He left a pause in the conversation by way of emphasis.

‘Absolutely. You do the right thing.’ Donald stroked his chin, a thoughtful look on his face.

‘If you have something to say, sir, I would appreciate that we get on with it. As I mentioned, we’ve got a long drive ahead of us.’

‘Quite so, Jim, quite so.’ Donald opened a file on his desk. ‘You’ve been off sick since the incident?’ He looked at Daley who nodded. ‘Mmm.’ More chin stroking. Just as Daley was about to interject, Donald closed the file and patted it in a gesture of finality.

At last, thought Daley.

‘I’m going to be blunt, Chief Inspector.’

Suddenly Daley was full of trepidation.

‘I can’t afford an asset like your good self to be idle for much longer. It’s the usual madhouse up the road, and I know you’re fully aware of the extra manpower we’ve had to divert here.’ He raised his eyebrows as Daley nodded silently, fully aware that an announcement of some import was forthcoming. ‘I want you to spend some more time down here. Let’s call it a temporary transfer.’ He smiled guilelessly.