There wasn’t enough table space in the Strontian station for Sinead’s current needs, so she sat cross-legged on the floor, ten piles of paper spread out in a semi-circle in front of her, all within stretching reach.
After his bumper lunch and the subsequent walk, Taggart had found a corner of the room to lie down in, and was now snoring softly, his legs occasionally twitching as he dreamed some doggy dream.
Splitting the newsletters up into years had seemed like a decent method of breaking the daunting mass of paper into more manageable bite-sized chunks. Doing so also came with the unexpected side effect of giving her an insight into Bernie’s production schedules over the years.
He’d started slowly—two issues in the first year, each just a single sheet of A4, printed on one side.
The next year, he’d gone bigger. Four issues, each still just a single sheet, but now double-sided. The print on the reverse was upside down, so you had to flip the paper vertically rather than horizontally when you were turning the page. Sinead wasn’t sure if this was a deliberate style decision, or an error on Bernie’s part. The fact he had done it four times suggested the former, but then again, he hadn’t done it again in the eight years since, so it may have been an accident.
The next two years were bumper ones, with eight and twelve issues respectively. These ranged in page length from two to six, and were fixed together with three or four staples down one side to form a sort of spine.
That had been the peak of his production, and it had fallen away to just a handful of issues each year.
Until this year. This year, he’d put out seven—more than the past two years combined, and there were still a few months left until the year was out. Something had driven him to throw himself into the newsletter with renewed enthusiasm and vigour.
But what?
“Hiya.”
Sinead looked up from the piles of paper to find the male PC leaning against the doorframe. He smiled at her, and her heart missed a beat.
Just not in a good way.
“You alright down there?” he asked, padding into the room.
He didn’t move like PC Jason Hall had. Not exactly. But there were enough similarities—the swing of the arms, the little smirk on his face—that brought him to mind, all the same.
“I’m fine, Constable…”
“Just call me Chris. Chris Miller.”
He was dressed for the outdoors, with his high-vis jacket and cap still on. The closer he came, the larger he loomed, and Sinead suddenly felt very vulnerable sitting down there on the floor. She looked over to the corner, but Taggart was still fast asleep. Not that the dog would be able to do much, anyway. Maybe in a year or two, but not yet.
She glanced at the floor around her, searching for a weapon. She almost felt bad about it. The constable had done nothing wrong—nothing to warrant getting a baton to the knee, certainly—and yet her instincts were screaming at her to defend herself. To protect herself. To fight back before he landed the first blow.
But, short of the newsletters, there was nothing within reach, and she wasn’t sure that a paper cut would be enough to dissuade him from whatever he was planning to do.
“I hear you had a sheep incident,” the PC said, that smile still fixed on his face.
“Eh, aye,” Sinead said. She kept an eye on him as she clambered to her feet. Her legs tingled as the blood flow returned. “They were all over the road outside the hotel.”
“That’s a pretty regular occurrence round here. They get everywhere. Same with cows. Not so much pigs, you don’t really get a lot of pigs around here.” He looked ahead at the far wall, his eyes darting left and right. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a pig. A real pig, I mean. Have you ever seen a pig?”
“Eh… aye,” Sinead said.
“Alright. Good. Glad one of us has,” Chris replied. He indicated the paperwork spread out on the floor. “Busy?”
“Um, yes, actually,” Sinead said. She had backed up against the desk, and a hand was now exploring the desktop in search of a weapon of some kind. Something blunt and heavy, ideally, but she’d take sharp and pointy if she had to. “So… I should probably get on.”
“Want a hand?”
Sinead shook her head. “It’s fine. I’m fine. No. Thanks.”
Chris’s smile faded. Sinead’s fingers locked around the handle of a hole punch.
“Oh,” the constable said. “It’s just… well, it’s pissing down, and Suzi’s put the kettle on. We thought we might be able to make ourselves useful. It’s a lot of reading.”
They both looked over at the door as Constable Tanaka stuck her head around the frame. “Tea or coffee? Who’s having what?” she asked, then she held up a pack of Tunnock’s Snowballs to seal the deal. “And I’m assuming I’m just emptying these onto a plate and throwing away the box?”
“Sounds good to me!” Chris said. He turned back to Sinead, his smile returning. With Suzi there, the smile seemed different. Not sinister at all. “So, you want some help?”
Sinead looked from one constable to the other, then down at the bundles of paper on the floor. “Aye,” she said, her heart rate starting to drop back down from triple digits. “Why not?”
Hamza and Ben hadn’t been given a full Incident Room to use during their visit, and had instead been shunted into a small side office that overlooked the building site at the back of the Fort William station.
The large Tesco superstore that had been promised for out the front of the building had long-since been cancelled, although the road sign on the approach to the junction outside still insisted it was there somewhere.
Once that project had been called off, the land had been earmarked as the site for the new local hospital—a state-of-the-art jewel in the crown of the Highland NHS, which had similarly failed to materialise. It was definitely coming, the powers that be insisted, there was just no saying if it was coming this year, this decade, or indeed, this century.
The land out the back had seen some serious development in the past few months, though. What had been a big patch of waste ground between the polis station and the medical centre was now home to houses and blocks of flats, all at various stages of construction.
They’d sprung up quickly. Looked quite nice, too.
Ben sat at a seat by the window, watching a couple of guys strolling around on the scaffolding of one of the taller blocks of flats. One of them was clearly the gaffer. You could tell by the way he pointed at things and gave instructions, rather than doing any of the actual work himself.
“What a lazy bastard,” Ben mumbled, then he turned away from the window, took a sip of his tea, and indicated the computer Hamza was typing away at. “You got that thing going yet?”
“Eh, aye. Well, yes and no. I’m into HOLMES, but it’s slow.”
“It’s always slow.”