Tyler glanced furtively at the knot of men standing by the helicopter with Shona. They had the wiry frames and weathered faces of experienced Highland climbers, and the air of authority that came with knowing exactly what they were doing.
“What, me, boss? With that lot?” the DC asked. “Won’t I just, you know, get in the way?”
“Probably, aye.”
“Well, that’s not great, is it? What if I mess everything up?” Tyler asked. “What if I make an arse of it?”
“Oh, don’t worry, son,” Logan said, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “We’d expect nothing less.”
He held up a finger to thwart any further protest from Tyler, then flicked the same digit towards the tent. With a sigh of resignation, Tyler set off back across the heather, dragging his muddy feet behind him.
“You think maybe you’re being a wee bit hard on him?” asked Ben, once Tyler was out of earshot.
Logan mulled this over while he watched the DC go plodding away. “Aye, maybe,” he conceded, then he cupped a hand at the side of his mouth and shouted, “Tyler!”
Tyler waved his arms in panic as he almost lost his footing, then turned back to the older detectives. “Boss?”
“Cheer up, son,” Logan told him. “It might never happen.”
Tyler’s lips moved, but whatever he was saying he had the good sense to say quietly. He gave a double thumbs-up, and set off on his way again.
“There,” Logan said, giving Ben a nod. “That should perk him up no end.”
“Bad day?” Ben asked. He knew the signs. For a man who tried so hard to be private, it was often possible to read Jack Logan like a book.
Logan breathed out slowly, then shook his head. “I was with Maddie.”
“Your Maddie? How did you manage that?”
“Shona,” Logan said. “She arranged it. I didn’t know a thing about it until today.”
Ben looked approvingly over to where Shona seemed to be wrapping up with the Mountain Rescue boys.
“And? How did it go?” he asked. “I don’t see any obvious stab wounds, so that’s encouraging.”
“We were talking,” Logan said. “It was nice. And then some bastard had to go and interrupt and—”
“Eh, is one of you Detective Chief Inspector Logan?”
It was only the near-perfect comedy timing that saved the new arrival from a colossal ear-bashing. Instead, Logan simply muttered something indecipherable below his breath then turned to find a female constable looking up at him.
She sounded… not local exactly. Somewhere near Edinburgh, maybe, or a little further south. She looked to be of Asian origin—Chinese or Japanese, probably. Logan didn’t have a trained enough eye to be able to spot the difference. She wore a high-vis jacket and a questioning expression, and stood with her hands on her hips in a way that suggested she wasn’t planning on taking any shit from anyone.
“You DCI Logan?” she asked again, clearly impatient for an answer.
“Depends who’s asking,” Logan said, and there was an automatic downturn at the corners of the constable’s mouth, like she’d heard too many similar answers from arseholes in the past, and was quite frankly sick of it. So filled with disdain was the expression, in fact, that Logan followed it up with a somewhat more professional response. “I mean, aye. That’s me. What do you need?”
“I don’t need anything,” the constable said, apparently none-too-happy with the suggestion. “I might have something you need, though.”
Logan shot Ben a sideways look and raised an eyebrow, silently questioning who the hell this woman was.
“And what might that be?” he asked.
“The body. Your man out there,” the constable said. “I think I might know who he is.”
CHAPTER SIX
Hamza watched Herbert Gibson driving off in his van, his wheels finding every available pothole as he crawled away from the station at a sedate and definitely legal pace. He had a long drive ahead of him to get back to his parents’ house in Mallaig, given that the investigation had shut the road on the route he’d usually have taken, forcing him to take the long way around.
He had been told to report into the Mallaig Police Station on the way home. There was no way of forcing him to, of course, and no real point in sending him there. Still, he’d agreed, and if he thought the local constabulary was keeping an eye on him, then he’d be less inclined to flap his trap about everything that had happened.