“And that, aye,” Sinead said. “But you’re good? Both of you, I mean? Together?”
Logan nodded. “Yes. If you must know, it is. We are. Good. We’re very good.” His lips thinned and he gave a half-shrug. “I mean, she’s still getting to grips with everything that happened. She’s been visiting Olivia. Just… I don’t know. Being there for her, I suppose.”
“That’s good of her,” Sinead said. “There a court date set yet?”
“Not yet,” Logan said. “Not for her, anyway. With her age, and the lack of any real concrete evidence against her, I reckon she’ll walk away with a slap on the wrist.”
Sinead nodded. “Tyler and I reckoned the same, yeah. She should be grand.” She fixed her gaze on a spot ahead, trying to combat the creeping nausea. “But Shona’s fine, though? No… long-term effects of what happened?”
“Eh, no. No. Not that she’s mentioned,” Logan said. “Why, has she said something to you?”
“No. No, just. You know. Like I said yesterday… What we went through, it was pretty rough. It’s still rough, some days worse than others. I know what it’s like for me, and I’ve had more than my fair share of trauma before all this. I’d just… I’d hate to think she was struggling.”
Logan side-eyed her. “Aye. Aye, I’d hate to think so, too.” He tapped his fingers on the wheel for a while before continuing. “Tell you what, when we’re done on this case, you have your talk with Tyler, and I’ll have one with Shona.”
“Deal,” Sinead said. She glanced down at her notepad, but didn’t let her gaze linger there for fear the act of reading in the moving car would make her throw up. “So, this MSP then…”
“Don’t tell me what party he’s with, for God’s sake,” Logan said before she could go any further. “I don’t want to unduly prejudice myself before I meet him.”
“Makes sense,” Sinead replied. “He’s not actually the constituency MSP. He got in on the list vote.”
“So, no bugger voted for him, then?” asked Logan, whose grasp of the workings of the Scottish Parliament’s electoral system was tenuous at best. Although, to be fair to him, no more or less so than anyone else’s, and he was, in this instance, broadly correct.
“Aye. He wouldn’t have been named on the ballot paper. Just the party.”
“Which I don’t want to know.”
“Which you don’t want to know,” Sinead confirmed. “Do you want to know his name, though?”
Logan slowed the car as he realised a rise in the road was about to become a sudden dip on the other side. He wasn’t fast enough on the brakes, though, and for a moment he, Sinead, and Taggart all felt weightless, then gravity kicked back in, leaving their stomachs floating somewhere in the air behind them.
“Jesus,” Sinead wheezed.
“This bloody road,” Logan muttered, then he gave Sinead the nod. “Aye. You’d better give me his name, at least.”
“You sure?” Sinead indicated a turning up on the left. “He’s just up here, by the way.”
Despite there being no other cars on the road, Logan clicked on his indicator. “Aye, I’ll need to know his name if I’m going to talk to him.”
Sinead shrugged. “Right, well, you asked for it. It’s Oberon Finley-Lennox.”
“Shut up. It is not!” Logan said, briefly tearing his eyes from the single-track road ahead.
“Honestly. It is.”
“That’s not an actual person’s name. No one is actually called that. No one real.”
“I hate to tell you, but I’m afraid you’re wrong on that one, sir.”
Logan tutted. “Great! Well now I know what party he’s with, don’t I?”
“It might not be the one you’re thinking. He might be in… the Greens.”
They turned into the driveway of what looked like a Manor House, and almost ploughed straight into the back of a Range Rover Westminster that stood proudly on the cobbles.
“Aye,” Logan grumbled, glowering at the car. “The Greens, my arse.”
Oberon Finley-Lennox, one of seven Regional MSPs for the Highlands and Islands, was taking breakfast in his study when the detectives arrived. His wife, a woman in her fifties who was wearing a twin set and pearls and a full face of makeup, despite the fact it was barely after ten in the morning, had initially looked like she was going to set the dogs on them when she’d clocked them coming up the path.
Logan had seen or heard nothing to indicate that the family possessed dogs, and yet, he’d never been more sure of anything in his life. Big bastards of things, they’d be, custom-bred to scare off the riff-raff.
It was only once they’d both showed their warrant cards, and she’d had a thorough check of the details, that she relaxed, relented, and ushered them through to where her husband was enjoying his Eggs Benedict over the morning papers.
To the best of Logan’s knowledge, he’d never met an ‘Oberon’ before, and yet, if he’d had to describe one, the description would’ve matched the man sitting in the leather chair now, blinking in surprise as he smeared the last of a toasted muffin through a sludge of egg yolk and hollandaise sauce.
He had the clear, tanned complexion of someone with plenty of money to spend on self-care and foreign holidays. His hair sat uneasily on his head, like it didn’t quite belong there. Not a wig, Logan thought, but maybe implants of some sort. He might be balding, but he was damned if he was going down without a fight.
Like his wife, he seemed overdressed in a light blue shirt, crisply pressed navy blue trousers, and shoes so polished that the detectives could see the underside of the table reflected in them. He had a napkin tucked into his shirt collar, but Logan would put money on him having a tie on underneath it.
He was well presented, and yet he looked a bit like someone was trying hard to polish a turd. The skin may have been tanned and blemish-free, but it was slack and heavy. It made his eyes droop, and folds accumulate below his chin.
His ears gave the impression that they hadn’t stopped growing yet, and had no plans to do so in the immediate future. It wasn’t just that they stuck out from the side of his head, it was the amount of space they occupied on it. They were so large they gave the impression that the rest of him was attached to them, instead of the other way around.
Still, given what genetics had saddled him with, he’d done a decent job of making the best of it.
“Marjorie? Who are these people?” the MSP asked, staring at Logan, but not addressing him. It was a polite enquiry, not a demand, though Logan got the sense that it wouldn’t take much for it to become the latter.
“They’re with the police, dear,” his wife explained, pulling her burgundy cardigan more tightly closed. “They want to ask you some questions.”