will be on the next plane leaving Toronto for the UK .”
“A very wise decision, Mr. Quinn. It will save us a great deal of trouble.”
After hanging up, I completely fell to pieces.
Six
I’ve never particularly enjoyed flying. There’s the interminable waiting at the airport, then there are the planes themselves: claustrophobic, noisy and uncomfortable. Between connecting flights, I had too many hours alone with my thoughts, none of them even remotely good. Angus’s death was clearly on my shoulders.
Immediately after getting off the phone with the Scottish detective, I’d called my travel agent. In short order she’d booked me on a flight to Manchester, with a connection on to Glasgow which would get me in at eight a.m. the following morning.
Regina’s first reaction to the horrible news had been a desire to accompany me, and I only just talked her out of it. If what we were surmising was correct, the bad guys could quite possibly still be around and on the watch for her. If they identified me, then there wasn’t much we could do, because I had to go.
Everything that day took on an air of unreality. The last time I’d felt this detached from normalcy was five years earlier when my brother Bobby had suddenly passed away. No one expects a brother to die of a massive heart attack two days before his fiftieth birthday. My reaction to my mum’s call had been the same: I’d taken the first plane.
Some people never learn.
***
Far too early the next morning, I got into my hired car with a heavy heart and headed west for the Calmac ferry dock at Gourock. My mood was not improved by the fact that I’d have to brave crossing the Firth of Clyde yet again. The day was fine and clear, though, and I spent the twenty-minute ride with hardly a lurch of my stomach. That didn’t stop the dread creeping up on me as the boat neared the end of its journey.
One of the ferry employees pointed me in the direction of the police station. I’d already arranged to meet Detective Chief Inspector Campbell at eleven a.m., which gave me time to find a café for a spot of breakfast, nothing more than a bap and a cup of tea, since my nerves were completely on edge.
DI Campbell turned out to be a tall, slender man as overly fussy in person as he’d sounded on the phone. I gauged him to be in his midfifties, although that could have been due to the fact that he seemed so bloody dour.
He didn’t greet me particularly warmly, considering that I’d flown across the Atlantic on short notice to try to help him. He did offer me coffee, though, which I accepted, although I don’t often drink the stuff. A good-looking female constable brought it in, then sat down in the corner with a pad and pen. Campbell took almost no notice of her.
“Now tell me, Mr. Quinn, about your relationship with Angus MacDougall.”
“Angus is... was one of my oldest friends. I was a member of a band when I was younger, and Angus was our road manager.”
“The name of the band?”
“Neurotica.”
My statement elicited no reaction from Campbell, but the constable taking shorthand looked up inquisitively.
“And what was the purpose of your visit earlier this week?” he asked next.
“I had to come over to look at an instrument I was considering purchasing, so I also took the opportunity to visit my old friend. I arrived a week ago Thursday, stayed with Angus for a few days, then borrowed his car to drive down to Birmingham to purchase the instrument and visit my mum. I drove back on Monday and left early on Tuesday morning.”
He was silent for a moment. “I will ask you again if you had reason to suspect that your friend was in any sort of trouble.”
“No,” I answered perhaps too quickly, then stopped to consider. “What sort of trouble do you mean?”
“Did he have financial problems?”
Shaking my head, I answered, “No. He bought his house outright, and his needs were very simple. If he required money, he only had to hire out again as a road manager. Angus had a very good reputation in the business. Any number of bands would have hired him if they knew he was available. He’d done that often in the past.”
“What about drugs? Did he have a drug problem?”
“No. Angus was very anti-drug. Why do you ask?”
Campbell looked down at his hands. The office was obviously not his. I felt certain that his own would not have had so much as a paperclip out of place, and I doubted if a backwater such as Dunoon would have warranted its own Detective Inspector anyway. Considering its close proximity to Glasgow, he’d probably been brought in from there. Consequently, Campbell seemed ill at ease.
Finally, he looked up. “I’m going to take you into my confidence. Certain bits of evidence have come to light since we spoke yesterday, and they have led us to believe the people who visited Mr. MacDougall on Thursday evening are involved in the drug trade.” Campbell fastened his eyes on mine. “In light of that, would you like to revise what you just told me?”
“No. I wouldn’t. Angus had nothing to do with drugs of any sort.”
“Excuse me if I find that a little hard to believe. After all, he worked in the pop music business—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted, “to hear most people talk, you’d think we...they did nothing more than get wasted and defile young women. Well, I was there, and yes, there was some of that to be sure, but most of us took our job seriously, and you can’t play well when you’re wrecked. Angus’s job was very tough, and he couldn’t have done it either, if he’d had a drug problem. What makes you think Angus’s killers were part of the drug trade?”
“As I said, various bits of evidence. Things that were done. We have a national computer database where we can input facts we discover and it will tell us if this sort of thing has been reported before. In your friend’s case it has. Three other unsolved murders. These were criminals who came to his house. If you’re telling me the truth, why did those particular people come there? It’s that question I most want the answer to.”
“What in God’s name happened? You keep hinting around, but you haven’t really told me anything.”
Campbell considered for a moment, then came to another decision and abruptly stood. “Constable Dickson, could you see aboutgetting one of the pool cars to drive us out to the MacDougall place?”
“Right away, sir.” Dickson closed her pad with a snap and left the room.
***
The weather and the drive out to poor Angus’s place was a far cry from my last trip there. The roads were completely dry, and as a passenger, I could watch the scenery go by. The cold, clear air, cloudless sky and distant vistas gave me a lot to look at, but I cannot say I enjoyed the trip.
A road block had been set up at the beginning of the one-lane road to Angus’s.
“Can’t have media vans clogging a one-lane road, can we?” Campbell said as
