“Your granddaughter,” Logan said.
It was a deductive leap into the abyss, but also the only way this made sense. Why would this woman help a relative stranger and local headcase in his attempt to murder a child? How would she get mixed up in such a plot? What would she possibly have to gain?
Besides, someone had helped tie both the then Bernie the Beacon’s arms to the Westerly Wellness gate. Someone had picked him up after his protest and driven him ‘out towards the lighthouse.’
Or, to put it another way, out towards Kathryn Chegwin’s house.
It was a stretch, yes. But there was very little he’d been more certain of in his life.
There wasn’t much reaction to the statement from the woman on the front step, aside from a slight thinning of the lips and a rolling back of the shoulders. Nothing to confirm Logan’s suspicions, but no denials, either.
“Alan’s your son, isn’t he?” Logan pressed. “That’s why he came here. His ex-wife mentioned that you were going to move when they first started living together. You moved here. That’s what brought him up this way. You. And you’ve been plotting together this whole time. Pretending not to know each other. Pretending that you weren’t mother and son. And for what? So you could steal a wee girl? So you could kill her?”
“It weren’t nothing personal. Not on the little ‘un. Weren’t her fault. It was her father who needed punishing. It was him who couldn’t be let to get away with what he’d done. That weren’t right. Not one bit of it. And we weren’t going to kill her, neither. Of course not. We were just going to give him a scare, is all. Maybe get him to confess to what he’d done.”
“She almost died,” Logan said. “He tried to throw her into the bloody water.”
Kathryn gave a shake of her head. Firm. Adamant. “No. You’re wrong.”
“I assure you I am not,” Logan said. “And what about the body? The homeless guy?”
“I don’t know anything about that,” the woman insisted.
“Who did that? You or Alan?”
“Neither. I don’t know what you’re on about. That weren’t us.”
“You burned a man alive!” Logan roared.
Kathryn roared right back. “He wasn’t alive! He was already…”
Her voice dried up as she realised what she’d said. She started to say something else, to take it back, to change her tune.
But then, with a sniff, she smoothed down her coat, and picked up a small suitcase that sat on the step beside her.
She locked the door. Checked it. Placed a hand on the old wood and kept it pressed there for a moment, like she was calming some skittish animal.
“Right, then,” she said. She fixed her gaze ahead at the BMW standing at the end of her path. “No use in us standing around here all day. Let’s get off before the rain comes in.”
Logan looked up at the mostly blue sky. The earlier cloud had all but burned away.
“You think it’s going to rain?” he asked, escorting the woman up the path towards the waiting car.
“It’s never far away,” Kathryn said.
Logan motioned to Taggart to stay where he was in the back. “No,” he said, opening the front passenger door for Kathryn. “No, I don’t suppose it is.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Things fell into place quite quickly over the next few hours. The team had two confessions to work with, plus a statement from Jameelah. Add in Logan and Tyler’s own eyewitness accounts, and a successful prosecution was looking like a certainty.
There hadn’t been a lot of forensic evidence to salvage from the girl. There had been no sexual assault. Logan had felt a tingling at the back of his eyeballs when he’d been given that news, but had gritted his teeth and given just a single nod of relieved acknowledgement.
Her parents had arrived at Fort William in a remarkably short space of time, the team down south having sorted a helicopter to bring them straight up.
DCI Grimm, the SIO on Jameelah’s case, had accompanied them. His facial scars had been noticeable during his telly appearances, but they were considerably more prominent in the flesh, and Tyler had let out an involuntary, “Fuck!” at the sight of him, before scurrying off and trying to make himself look busy.
“Detective Chief Inspector,” Logan said, dipping his head in acknowledgement of the other man.
DCI Grimm mirrored the gesture. “Detective Chief Inspector.”
And that was the end of that conversation.