certainly isn’t,’ Ava agreed, walking to the postmortem suite door before removing her cap and gloves and depositing them in the bin. She reached out to hug Ailsa. ‘How are you keeping?’ she asked, stepping out of the sterile suit.
‘You mean for an old person?’ Ailsa grinned.
Ava tutted at her.
‘I’m fine. Less stressed than either of you, I’m guessing. I’m glad to hear Luc’s taken some time off. When did you last get a holiday, girl?’
Ava laughed. Ailsa, a friend of her parents from years back, would never cease to refer to her as a child no matter how old she got or what rank she was.
‘I’ll take a break soon, I promise. We’ve finally appointed a new detective inspector, so that should ease things a bit. We’ll head out to Tantallon now. Anything in particular we should be searching for?’
‘It’s a needle in a haystack, but I’d like to get a look at the missing fingernails. They might just be harbouring a few cells that’ll paint a fuller picture,’ Ailsa said.
‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Ava warned. ‘It hasn’t been treated as an active crime scene by forensics. What do you say, Luc? Are you up for a night-time stroll along the castle walls?’
‘Perfect end to a perfect holiday,’ Callanach smiled. ‘I’ll get my coat.’
Stopping off at the police station, Ava and Callanach grabbed wet-weather gear, more substantial flashlights than were in the boots of their cars, and notified the control room of their plans. By the time they’d driven the thirty-odd miles east from the city centre towards North Berwick, taking the winding lanes from the main road to the tip of the coast with due respect for the rain and wind, it was just past midnight.
They sat quietly in Luc’s car, having bypassed the car park at the end of the lane in preference for parking directly outside the entry booth-cum-gift shop. Looking across at the vast curtain wall that had once shielded the inner grounds of the castle from marauders, they listened to the increasingly thunderous rain.
‘I came here for a weekend to do an archery course as a child,’ Ava smiled. ‘By the end of the first day, I thought I’d fallen in love with the instructor.’
‘What happened?’ Luc asked.
‘Oh, you know, like most crushes you have when you’re ten and your instructor’s twenty-five, it ended when he patted me on the head and said I’d tried really hard, then his bleach blonde girlfriend turned up in her miniskirt and my heart broke into a thousand pieces.’
‘Are you over it yet?’
‘Well, I still feel butterflies in my stomach when I see a man holding a longbow but other than that, I think I’m through the worst. Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked.
‘No. It’s simple statistics. How many people have inhabited this earth and died? Surely we’d be overrun with restless spirits if that was the case.’
‘Cynic,’ she replied. ‘I thought Frenchmen were supposed to be romantic.’
‘Is that what you brought me here for? Romance? I’m not sure looking for a recently deceased man’s nails in a wall qualifies as a date.’
‘Idiot. If this were a date, I’d be wearing my good socks,’ she grinned, leaning forwards to look to the top of the castle walls. ‘But for what it’s worth, I agree with you. William Wordsworth wrote, “I look for ghosts; but none will force their way to me; ’t is falsely said that there was ever intercourse between the living and the dead.” Isn’t that beautiful?’
‘I’m sure it is, but I may be having trouble directly translating it. My English is still pretty literal and most words only have one meaning.’
Ava frowned in confusion momentarily, then closed her eyes and shook her head in mock disgust.
‘Forget it, Romeo. If that’s the best you can do when I’m providing a backdrop of poetry, you should probably just keep quiet.’ She zipped up her waterproof and tried to open the door, the wind slamming it back hard against her shin as she went to exit. ‘Ow! For fuck’s sake!’ she growled.
‘Yup, you’ve got all the poetry tonight,’ Callanach said. ‘Let me get that door for you.’ He exited and jogged round to offer her a hand up as she rubbed her bruised leg. ‘Are you sure you want to do this now?’
‘No, but the way this storm’s rolling in, if there is anything to see it’ll be gone before morning, so it’s now or never. Come on.’
They went through the visitor centre, where some unlucky local uniformed officer had been stationed with an employee to allow them access, and walked towards the front entrance of the castle, still imposing even in its semi-ruined state. A gale was buffeting them from the north and the rain was only a degree short of freezing. Ava pulled up her hood and shook long dark brown curls of wet hair from her eyes.
They took the wooden footbridge over the old moat and entered through the arched doorway of a greenish brick structure. Below them and to the right, encompassing an area of loose fallen rocks and part of the moat, was a section of crime-scene taping. Beyond that, they were met with slippery cobblestones before the castle grounds opened up ahead of them. In front, a grassed area led to cliffs that crumbled into the sea. A fierce whistling echoed around the ancient structure and it was easy to see why visitors had imagined ghosts there, stepping back hundreds of years in time. It was clear that no attacker could have approached from the direction of the sea and also that Ava was right. Suicide in the direction of the cliffs would have been the much more obvious option.
Luc saw Ava pointing towards an internal doorway and they went inside to find a spiral stone staircase with little to assist their climb other than a rope attached to the central wall. He followed close behind her, watching her footing, fighting his desire to reach up and steady her. Ava wasn’t the sort of woman who wanted or needed much help, but that didn’t make it any easier for him to switch off how protective he felt of her. She’d become his closest friend in Scotland, which wasn’t always simple given that she was also his boss.
Ducking under additional crime-scene tape, they moved to a level paved outcrop with a visitors’ information board. The section was wide, easily three foot across, and level enough to have stood safely, if not advisedly on top of the wall, overlooking the bridge and the moat. Above them, higher walls blocked some of the wind but none of the rain.
‘Apparently, this is the fore tower. When exactly did our man fall?’
‘He was found at the bottom of the wall when staff got in this morning. The castle doesn’t open until 10 a.m. at this time of year and the door we came through is locked at night. We won’t know what time he fell until Ailsa completes her report and estimates time of death, but it was between about 7 p.m. and 8 a.m. They have cameras at the visitor centre, which we’ve checked, but they don’t give a good enough night-time picture for us to see anything,’ Ava shouted over the wind.
‘He
