“Aye, but you’re, you know, a medical professional,” Logan reasoned.
“Of human beings. Anyway, shut up and let me read,” Shona said. He started to say something, but she placed a finger on his lips to silence him. “‘I have tried to share the truth. I have…’ Jesus, what’s that? Attempted? Attempted. ‘I have attempted to open your eyes to the lies and the deceit,’ spelled wrong, ‘of the lizard men who dwell both below and above. But again and again I am…’” She screwed up her eyes and peered closer. “Jesus, now you’re asking. ‘Routinely derided,’ maybe, but that’s a guess from context.”
“He’s using a lot of words to not really say much, isn’t he?” Logan remarked, but Shona shushed him again.
“‘None are so blind as those who refuse to see, and you are wilful in your ignorance. And so, I take leave of my…’ He’s scribbled out a few things here. ‘And so, I take leave of my responsibility to you. I leave you to the lizards and the liars, and turn at last to my own needs. The guilty shall be met with righteous punishment. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.’” Shona tutted and shook her head. “You’re right. I feel he could’ve written this in one carefully planned sentence.”
Logan frowned. “What, is that it?”
“No, there’s more, but the writing gets even worse. Hang on.” She studied the page in silence for a few moments. Logan picked up one of the other copies, scanned down the page himself, then concluded it was best left to Shona.
He’d just returned his copy to the pile when the pathologist started reading again.
“‘I take my leave of you. They will come for me, for what I am about to do. They will hunt me with their dogs and their…’ God. I don’t… ‘Birds,’ maybe. ‘With their dogs and their birds.’”
“Who will?” Logan asked.
Shona shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not a play. He hasn’t put a list of characters at the start. Just ‘they,’ I think. Whichever individual or organisation that have trained dogs and birds to hunt nutters.”
“We’ve got dogs. The polis, I mean. Not so much the birds, though.”
“Last bit. Here we go,” Shona said, looking down at the page again. “‘I am, and forever shall be, guided by the light. I stand tall. Proud. Erect…’ Sounds like he’s getting a bit saucy there. ‘…before all who have done me wrong. This is my end, and the end shall be as the beginning. A life for a life. A soul for a soul. Death is coming. Slowly.’”
Shona turned the page over, saw that side was blank, then handed it to Logan.
“So, you know, make of that what you will,” she said.
Logan rubbed a hand across his mouth as he contemplated the contents of the letter. “Suicide note?” he pondered, though he didn’t sound convinced. “He’s talking about his end, and about death, and…” He shook his head. “No. It wasn’t that. He was saying something more than that.”
“Oh, he was definitely saying more,” Shona agreed. “Christ knows what, though.”
After taking some more pictures, Logan returned the photocopies to the envelope, and placed it back in the briefcase with the pack of photos. “Maybe I should head back down the road,” he said. “Talk to the MSP.”
“What? No!” Shona spluttered, her eyes widening in panic. She forced a smile, shook her head, then hurriedly tried to explain her outburst. “I mean… it’s a long drive. You’ve been out and about all day, and it’s getting late. You should stay here tonight. Well, not here in this office. But… we could go to yours.”
Logan watched the way the lines in her face moved, and how her hands wrung themselves together. “You alright?” he asked.
“I’m grand!” She grabbed his thigh and shook it playfully. “Just worried about you, you big eejit. You don’t really want to go driving down that road again tonight, do you? Ferry will be off, so you’ll have to go the long road. And you’d have to go get Tyler…”
“Shite. Aye. Didn’t think about that. Another three hours in the car with that bugger.”
“At least!” Shona said. She scoffed at the very suggestion, then shook her head quite forcefully. “No, you’re staying here tonight, and that’s settled! And besides, you owe me dinner for taking fecking ages to open your side of the case.”
“Wait. The case,” Logan said. “That reminds me…”
He picked it up and checked out the digits on the dials. More often than not with combination locks like these, both codes would be the same. They didn’t have to be, of course, but it was human nature for people to give themselves one less thing to have to remember, so nine times out of ten the numbers on both sides would match.
When they didn’t, there was usually a reason for it.
He made a note of the digits - two-four-one on the left, then zero-zero-nine on the right.
“Two-four-one,” Shona said, watching him write. “Isn’t that like a formation, or something?”
“A what?”
“Like a football formation, or whatever you call it? Two-four-one. You know, like five-five-two, or three-one-four, or whatever?”
“Exactly how many players do you think are in a football team?” Logan asked.
“God, how should I know? It’s an awful game. I want to say, like… fifteen.”
“Well, none of those numbers add up to fifteen,” Logan said. “And anyway, it’s eleven.”
“Well, I’m more into the Gaelic football, if I’m honest,” Shona said. “Though, even then, I’m largely indifferent to the whole thing.” She looked down at the numbers in his notepad again. “So, not that, then. Two-four-one. What about, like, a supermarket deal? Like, a two for one deal?”
“What would the double-oh-nine be, then?” Logan asked, then he jumped in before Shona could respond with her Sean Connery impression. “Apart from being licensed to scald, I mean.”
“Oh! Oh! I’ve got it!” the pathologist said, jumping down from her stool. “Two-four-one-oh-oh-nine—”
“Twenty-fourth of October, two-thousand-and-nine,” Logan finished. “It’s a date.”
Shona tutted. “Like, I had it a second before you said it. I want that on record. You might’ve said it first, but I figured it out before you.”
“You did,” Logan said, failing to mention the fact that he’d been leaning towards the date theory since she’d first opened the lock on her side and his had failed to match it.
“But what’s it a date for?” Shona wondered, taking out her phone. She tapped the numbers into a search, and hummed quietly while she waited for the results to come up. “Right, here we are, so…” She flicked her finger across the screen, scrolling the page. “…absolutely nothing whatsoever happened on that date. Like, literally nothing except a new episode of ‘Harry Hill’s TV Burp.’ I can show you a clip of that, if you like?”
“It’d be safer all round if you didn’t,” Logan warned. “More likely to be a date of personal significance, anyway, rather than some big event.”