“What, flashing my ringpiece to the world?” Dave asked. “Nah, you’re alright.”
“Perineum sunning is an ancient Taoist practice,” André told him. He smiled benevolently down at a middle-aged woman with stretch marks on the back of her legs. “Excellent, Sandra. Wider, if you can.”
With some effort, Sandra obligingly hoisted her legs further apart, and grinned hopefully, clearly seeking her coach’s approval.
André kissed his fingers like a proud chef, then continued strolling and returned his attention to Dave. “The perineum—or ‘Hui Yin’— is the gate of life and death. It is a gateway where energy enters and exits the body.”
Dave’s gaze flitted across the exposed rumps and raised legs. “You mean… the arse?”
André smiled, as if fondly recalling a joke. “Yes. If you like. It has many health benefits. It prevents the leakage of chi—or life force energy—from the body. I’m sure you can appreciate how important this is to physical, mental, and spiritual health, oui?”
“Oh, aye. Vital, all that,” Dave muttered, copping another accidental eyeful of Frank’s lightly crisping anus. Having spent the night breathing in what came out of the bloody thing, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was staring down the barrel of a loaded weapon.
“Just thirty seconds of sunshine—or prana—on the Hui Yin is the equivalent of a full day on the rest of the body. It regulates the circadian rhythms, increases your personal magnetism and auric field, and grounds you to the very Earth herself.”
“That all sounds very important,” Dave lied.
“And, as Tony is so ably demonstrating, it provides a boost to the libido, too.”
Against his better judgement, Dave followed André’s outstretched finger until he found himself eye to eye with the erection bearer once more. Tony smiled. Dave, for reasons he would later come to question, saluted.
“Right. Aye.” Dave turned back to André and nodded. He felt like he nodded for quite a long time, in fact. He was working on the basis that the longer he nodded, the further back he could push the inevitable question he knew was coming his way again.
But, alas, nobody could keep nodding forever.
“Would you care to join us?”
Dave swallowed. “What, like…” He indicated the literal group of arseholes before him. “With this?”
“Oui.”
Dave shifted in his wheelchair. “Am I no’ better starting off slow? Like, with a massage, or something? Maybe just, like, some muesli and a singsong?”
“Aha. Non. This is how we start the day here. This is how we energise every morning.”
“Come on, Dave,” Frank urged, raising his head to look at the constable through his widely spread legs. “You’ll love it.”
“Yeah, come on, Dave!” urged Tony, his erection flapping as he spoke, like the tail of an excited dog. “It’s seriously life-changing.”
There was agreement from all corners of the field. Dave looked around at the smiling faces and arses, then glanced over at the road to judge how likely it was that he was going to be seen.
An old woman leaned against the fence a few hundred yards away, eating a banana and watching the show, but otherwise, there wasn’t another living soul in sight.
“Ah, what the hell?” Dave said, sliding out of his chair. “In for a penny…”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
She hadn’t wanted him to leave. She hadn’t said as much—she wouldn’t—but she’d been desperate for him to stay in Inverness. To stay with her. To not leave her alone, not again.
But he couldn’t stay, of course. He wanted to. He did.
But he needed to go. To get on. To unravel the mystery that had been niggling away at him all night since Sinead had got back to him to confirm that Bernie the Beacon and Alan Rigg were the same man.
When they’d uncovered that passport, he’d thought they’d identified their victim. Now, though, he wasn’t sure what to think. It was highly unlikely that the remains in the mortuary were those of Bernie, Alan, or whatever you wanted to call him.
So, whose were they? And where was Bernie?
The accelerant used to burn both the body and the caravan was not an unusual mixture for wild campers to carry with them. Wild campers like Bernie himself.
But, a bit of reading had confirmed, the mixture of turpentine and petroleum jelly was also popular among those living off-grid, particularly in the US. People who had shunned the rest of the world, and formed their own little retreats out of the way, miles from anywhere.
Retreats like Westerly Wellness, perhaps.
Logan and Shona had said their goodbyes, then he’d dropped her at the hospital. She was going to dig out Alan Rigg’s medical and dental records and definitively rule out that the remains were his.
After picking up Tyler, the detectives had set off on the long drive back down the road. Logan had filled the younger officer in on everything that had come up the night before. Tyler nodded, looked thoughtful, and made appropriate noises at the important parts, before eventually admitting that Sinead had told him everything when she’d called him late the night before.
“She, eh, she had a bit of a run-in with that politician guy,” Tyler said, and this time it was Logan’s turn to act ignorant.
“Did she?” Logan asked, feigning ignorance. “How did that go?”
“Eh, alright for her, not so great for him,” Tyler said. He was fiddling with his hands, and Logan knew something else was coming. “We, eh, we had a good long chat.”
“Good,” Logan said. “About…?”
“About what happened. You know. In that farmhouse. She said she wanted to do it face to face, but I think after last night, she just needed to say it, you know? Get it out. I think keeping it in was doing way more harm than good.”
Logan thought back to the conversation he’d had with Sinead here in this car just a couple of days before.
And to the conversation Shona had talked her way out of having just last night.
“Aye. You need to share that stuff,” he said. He side-eyed Tyler, who was gazing out of the window. They were passing Loch Ness again, this time in the opposite direction. The sun was shining. It was, to the casual observer, going to be a good day. “She going to be alright?”
Tyler half-turned. He nodded, but there was no certainty to it. “I mean… I hope so, boss. We’re going to keep talking. I think maybe… I think maybe she’ll need more help than I can give, though. Like… I think there’s some stuff that might be hard to talk to me about. I mean, I’ll listen, obviously, just… I don’t know. There might be some stuff she doesn’t want me to hear.”
“Aye, well. We’ll all support her, son,” Logan said. “Both of you. Whatever you need.”
“Cheers, boss,” Tyler said.
He looked out of the side window again, and Logan made a point of failing to notice the way the younger detective ran the back of his hand across his eyes, or how he took a moment to steady his breathing before clearing his throat.
“But anyway, boss,” Tyler said, bright and chipper once more. “What’s on the agenda for today?”