In reality, the sides kept falling together, closing the top of the bag so that anything falling onto it would slide right off and land on what, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, Tyler was going to go ahead and call ‘the carpet.’
After some experimentation, both detectives reluctantly came to the same conclusion. Someone was going to have to hold the bag open while the other knocked the bird off its hook with the stick.
“I don’t mind what one I do,” Tyler announced. “As long as I’m not holding the bag. I’ll die. I mean it, Hamza, I’ll actually die.”
“You won’t die!” Hamza retorted. “I don’t even think you can die, given that you’re still here after everything that’s happened to you.”
“This would do it. Holding that bag would finish me off,” Tyler insisted, his voice a low, nasal drone now that he’d shut off his nostrils. “You hold it open, I’ll knock it in.”
Under other circumstances, this might have called for a, “Said the actress to the bishop,” type response, but neither man was in the mood. The stakes were too high, the smell was too bad, and this entire exercise had already taken them far longer than anticipated.
Hamza grimaced, squatted, then grasped the handles of the bag and pulled them apart to create the widest possible landing zone for the maggot-infested bird carcass to drop into.
“Ready?” Tyler asked.
“I don’t know. Is that under it?”
“I think so, aye,” said Tyler from halfway across the caravan. “I can’t see from here.”
“Then get closer.”
“You get closer!”
“I am bloody closer! I’m right under the fucking thing! Just… go. Do it. Go.”
Tyler raised the metre-long stick he’d found, clutching it right at the end to maintain the maximum possible distance from where the action was. Unfortunately, the stick was quite heavy, and holding it in this way offered him almost no control over it whatsoever. It flailed around above Hamza’s head, clunked against the ceiling, then caught the bird a glancing blow that sent half a dozen maggots raining onto the floor below, missing the bag by several inches.
“You need to go left a bit,” Tyler said.
“I can… Get off, you creepy bastard!” Hamza slapped frantically at his arm. “I can see that, thanks. Be more careful.”
He slid the bag a little to the left, covering the maggots that had landed there. Another of the grubs fell from the bird and hit the bottom of the bag with a thack that made Tyler drop the stick in fright.
“Christ!” he ejected, covering his head with his arms. He peeked beneath an elbow, saw that the bird was still hanging there, then quickly tried to cover his overreaction with some reassuring words. “Right, everyone just relax. Calm down.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” Hamza hissed through gritted teeth. “I’m not the one who threw the stick away. I’m just…” He sighed, shook his head, then sprang upright. “Right, bollocks to this,” he announced, snatching up the bag.
He covered the bird with the bag from below, clutched the handles together in one hand at the top, and unhooked the feet with the other.
The DS gave a little cry of triumph as the bird fell into the bag, then he thrust it out to Tyler, who was closer to the door.
“I don’t want it!”
“Just get rid of it!” Hamza insisted, forcing it upon him.
After a moment of soul searching, Tyler took the bag by the handle, ran to the door, and launched it with an underarm throw that sent it sailing high into the air.
He and Hamza both watched as the dead bird tumbled out of the bag at the apex of its flight, fell more or less straight down, then landed on the bonnet of Hamza’s car with a sound that was both heavy and wet.
“Oh, well,” Hamza said, shooting the DC a withering sideways look. “Thanks a fucking bunch.”
“I panicked,” Tyler admitted.
“You couldn’t have just sat it on the ground outside like a normal person?”
“I mean, in hindsight…” Tyler said, then he dusted himself down and fixed the Detective Sergeant with one of his more charming smiles. “Anyway, mission accomplished. Good teamwork there.”
“Teamwork my arse,” Hamza muttered. He turned his attention to the rest of the caravan, and the conspiracy theory chaos that spread like a rash across its walls. “Now, let’s get cataloguing this stuff, or we’ll be here all bloody night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Ardnamurchan Lighthouse, according to Sinead’s local trivia, was the most westerly building in the whole of the United Kingdom. It wasn’t quite, as some believed, the westernmost point—that honour belonged to a fairly nondescript area of coastline a few miles to the south—but there wasn’t much in it.
And besides, that stretch of jagged rocks wasn’t accessible by road, and didn’t have a cafe, so who cared about a few feet of difference?
Kathryn Chegwin had been right about the road. It was probably no more twisty and turny than the stretch up until that point had been, but given that the detectives’ stomachs and inner ears had already suffered such prolonged abuse on the first part of the drive, it felt much worse.
“Did they no’ have straight lines in the old days?” Logan had complained, as they’d rounded the umpteenth up-and-over bend. “This feels like some sort of bloody punishment.”
If the road was the punishment, though, then the destination was the reward. The sun was setting as they crested the final hill and saw the lighthouse rising from the shore before them, silhouetted against the swirl of oranges, reds, and purples that burned across the sky.
The lighthouse was under renovation at the moment, according to one of the constables back at Strontian. It was supposed to have been completed months ago, but some sort of industrial dispute had brought it to a standstill. Now, the straight line of its silhouette was broken up by scaffolding and flapping tape.
Still, despite the extra clutter, all thoughts of travel sickness, dead men, and sex cults were soon forgotten as that view wheedled its way into every corner of Logan’s headspace, forcing him to look—just look—at the sheer bloody majesty of it.
So enraptured was he, in fact, that he almost missed the next bend, and had to frantically course correct when the BMW’s front wheels brushed against the verge at the side of the track, wrenching the wheel in his hands.
“That is pretty stunning,” Sinead remarked. She, too, was mesmerised by the sky, and its reflection rippling across the sea, that she didn’t seem to notice the car’s near miss with the roadside ditch. “It’s almost worth the drive up.”
Logan nodded. “Aye,” he confirmed. “It almost is. What do you think, Taggart?”
From the back seat, the dog woofed what Logan took to be his approval.
“Good boy,” the DCI said, then he crawled around yet another bend and eased down the accelerator. “Now, let’s go find these dirty hippie bastards we’ve heard so much about.”