Hamza watched Herbert Gibson driving off in his van, his wheels finding every available pothole as he crawled away from the station at a sedate and definitely legal pace. He had a long drive ahead of him to get back to his parents’ house in Mallaig, given that the investigation had shut the road on the route he’d usually have taken, forcing him to take the long way around.
He had been told to report into the Mallaig Police Station on the way home. There was no way of forcing him to, of course, and no real point in sending him there. Still, he’d agreed, and if he thought the local constabulary was keeping an eye on him, then he’d be less inclined to flap his trap about everything that had happened.
Word didn’t just travel fast in small communities, it grew arms and legs. An accidental death became a murder, became a massacre, and soon tensions and suspicions were running high, and accusations were being thrown around like monkey shite.
Turning back to the station, Hamza spotted Sinead walking sideways into the car park, her arms stretched wide to accommodate the enormous corkboard she was carrying.
“That shop’s amazing,” she remarked, peeking out around the side of the board. “They’ve got everything.”
The station at Strontian was unlikely to be their permanent base of operations, but they’d be using it for the rest of the day, at least, and—depending on the direction the case took—possibly longer.
The room they’d claimed wasn’t really designed with detective work in mind and was instead mostly used for storing traffic cones, archived paperwork, and a single riot shield that had been propped across two chairs and now served as a makeshift coffee table.
It was lacking many of their usual resources—a window, for one—but the one Sinead could not tolerate them living without was a Big Board.
Up in Inverness, and even in the smaller station at Fort William, they had their pick of Big Boards. Sinead usually settled on a big rolling whiteboard, as she could both stick things to it, and write directly on the surface itself.
She’d gone to the Strontian village shop in the hope of maybe finding some large sheets of paper to stick to the wall in their newly-claimed Incident Room, but had instead found a corkboard so large she could barely carry it.
“I managed to get an artist’s easel, as well,” she said, as she dragged the board past Hamza. “To stand it on.”
“Nice one,” Hamza said. He looked her up and down. “Where is it?”
“I’m not a bloody octopus,” Sinead pointed out. She raised her head over the top of the board and smiled at him. “I said you’d come and collect it.”
“Oh, you did, did you?” Hamza said, drawing back his shoulders. “Are you forgetting which of us gives the orders around here, Detective Con—”
“Aye. Jog on and get it,” Sinead replied, and Hamza smirked.
“Fair enough,” he said, slipping his hands into his pockets and strolling out of the car park. “But it had better be bloody paid for!”
“This is it.”
The officer who had eventually identified herself as Constable Suzi Tanaka pointed up a slope to where a dilapidated old touring caravan stood half-hidden by weeds and tall grass. It was a filthy, crumbling midden of a thing, propped at the front with bricks and broken planks, and blackened with what Logan first thought was fire damage, but realised upon further inspection was just years of weathering left unchecked.
Curtains were closed in all the windows. At least, he thought so, but the green moss and yellow scum staining the acrylic made it almost impossible to see for sure.
The caravan, Constable Tanaka had explained, belonged to a local ‘character’ who went by the name Bernie the Beacon. He had moved to the area eight to ten years earlier—nobody could quite remember when he showed up or where he came from—and he was notable for two reasons.
Firstly, he was a forager who never spent a penny on food, and existed solely on what he could find in nature, in other people’s bins, or splattered on the road. He’d often be found in the bar of the Salen Hotel—he did spend money on drink, it seemed—crowing about his favourite roadkill recipes.
The second notable thing about him was that he was a lunatic.
That was how the locals described him, at least, and while Constable Tanaka didn’t feel qualified enough to put a label on the man, she had to admit that he was an odd one.
His oddness manifested itself in some quite particular ways—beyond the eating dead animals from the side of the road thing, that is.
The simplest way to describe him, if not perhaps the most accurate, was a conspiracy theorist. He believed the government was out to get not just him, but everyone, and that they were poisoning the water, the food supply, and the air itself with ‘microagitators’ designed to cause brain cancers and birth deformities.
He did not, as his tab at the Salen Hotel would testify, believe they had done anything untoward to the alcohol supplies.
He believed Wi-Fi was causing sterility in children and senility in the elderly.
He believed the Earth wasn’t just flat, it was a box, inside which lived an Illuminati-style cabal of lizard people who were secretly running the whole show.
He believed an awful lot of things, it seemed, most of which anyone in their right mind would dismiss as a load of old shite.
Despite the natural scepticism of both locals and any visitors to the area who made the mistake of getting into conversation with him, for the past few years, Bernie had been producing a quarterly newsletter he called ‘The Beacon,’ which he claimed shone a light on the everyday deceptions of the government, the machinations of the evil lizard race living beneath our feet, and the dangers of high speed internet access.
It also usually contained a recipe for pheasant, venison, or—depending on what recent pickings had been like on the B roads around Acharacle—badger.
The publication was generally well-received in the area, though not for the reasons Bernie may have hoped. It was routinely mocked and derided, and occasionally spoofed with counterfeit editions that were no more or less ludicrous than the real thing, and so completely pointless as an attempt at satire.
“And he hasn’t been seen since when?” Logan asked, regarding the caravan like it was something toxic. Which, given the state of it, it probably was.
“Ten days. Two weeks. Thereabouts,” the constable said. “It’s hard to be sure with Bernie. Your mind sort of shuts him out when you see him. Pretends he’s not there, sort of thing. It’s a form of self-preservation, I think. If you make eye contact, you’re basically inviting him to come and talk to you, so most people round here just instinctively try not to see him. Easier all round.”