‘Give us a chance, haven’t even interviewed anyone yet!’
‘Only I thought, with the deductive thing you did at the bar? You know, when we first met?’
Roberta stopped in the middle of the track and turned to give his arm a good hard punch.
‘Ow!’
‘You didn’t actually believe all that Sherlock Holmes nonsense, did you? You arrived at the hotel in your uniform, you laminated wanknumpty! Isawyou.’
He stood there, staring at her, wearing the kind of expression a small child does when you tell them Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist and their gerbil isn’t off living on a lovely farm, it’s dead and flushed down the toilet.
She hit him again.
‘Ow!’
‘Come on.’ Roberta squelched off, but he stayed where he was. And when she looked over her shoulder, he was still there, staring after her, sort of hunched in on himself.
Oh, for God’s sake...
Her shoulders slumped. Then she turned and stomped back through the mud, till she was standing in front of him again. ‘All right, all right – I’m sorry I called you a wanknumpty. OK?’
His face doubled down on the spanked-puppy look. ‘We’re not going to catch the killer, are we.’ Said as a statement, not a question.
Might as well throw him a bone, I suppose.
She forced a cheery tone into her voice. ‘Ofcoursewe are, because we’re the good guys!’ This time the punch on his arm was a lot more gentle and playful. ‘See?’
He deflated even further. ‘We’re going to bumble along, messing things up, till the real police get here from Inverness and take over.’
Roberta took hold of his shoulder with her free hand and gave him a squeeze. Spelling it out, nice and slow: ‘We – will – catch – the – killer.’
He looked down at his feet and nodded,clearlynot believing her. But at least this time when she scuffed off he slouched along beside her. Sighing with every third step. Like the massive pain in the jacksie he was.
She stepped around a puddle. ‘This dodgy goldmine, was it just the locals got burned, or was it Sir Whatsisname’s mates too?’
‘Probably.’ Voice flat and miserable. ‘Well, maybe some of them. You don’t screw over yourrealfriends, do you?’
‘True.’
But that was typical of the landed gentry, wasn’t it? Why rip-off your posh mates when you could stick it to the working class instead? Make the peasants pay for your champagne-and-caviar lifestyle whiletheystruggle along on Buckfast-and-sliced-white.
The path turned left up ahead and – hold on to your sweat-soggied arse-munchingly uncomfortable Brazilian pants – that pair of stone pillars with the wrought iron, ‘SKIRIVOURCASTLEHOTEL’ above it hove into view.
About bloody time.
Twenty feet past that and it was the castle’s turn, lurking there in all its rain-lashed ugliness.
Roberta squelched towards the gloomy pile, frowning as something stirred in the depths of her brain. Something... ‘You ever readMurder on the Orient Express?’
McKinnon shrugged. ‘Nah, I don’t really do books. The Sarge is your man for that kind of thing, loves his crime novels.’
‘Pin back your lugs and learn something, then.’ She stopped, looking up at their very own blot on the landscape. ‘InMurder on the Orient Express, this slimy American gets bumped off and Hercule Poirot has to figure out who did it. Only it wasn’t justonemurderer, theyallkilled him – everyone on the train.’
‘Aye...’ PC McKinnon pulled a face. ‘Seems a bit far-fetched. I mean, it’s hard enough getting four people to agree on where to go for dinner, can you imagine getting a whole train-load to do it about murdering someone?’
Philistine. ‘It’s aclassicof modern literature.’
‘You’d be there all year!’ He counted the points off on his fingers. ‘To get anything done you’d need to elect a chairman, which means setting up a voting system, then there’s regular meetings, somewhere to meet, agendas—’
