“I don’t want it!”
“Just get rid of it!” Hamza insisted, forcing it upon him.
After a moment of soul searching, Tyler took the bag by the handle, ran to the door, and launched it with an underarm throw that sent it sailing high into the air.
He and Hamza both watched as the dead bird tumbled out of the bag at the apex of its flight, fell more or less straight down, then landed on the bonnet of Hamza’s car with a sound that was both heavy and wet.
“Oh, well,” Hamza said, shooting the DC a withering sideways look. “Thanks a fucking bunch.”
“I panicked,” Tyler admitted.
“You couldn’t have just sat it on the ground outside like a normal person?”
“I mean, in hindsight…” Tyler said, then he dusted himself down and fixed the Detective Sergeant with one of his more charming smiles. “Anyway, mission accomplished. Good teamwork there.”
“Teamwork my arse,” Hamza muttered. He turned his attention to the rest of the caravan, and the conspiracy theory chaos that spread like a rash across its walls. “Now, let’s get cataloguing this stuff, or we’ll be here all bloody night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Ardnamurchan Lighthouse, according to Sinead’s local trivia, was the most westerly building in the whole of the United Kingdom. It wasn’t quite, as some believed, the westernmost point—that honour belonged to a fairly nondescript area of coastline a few miles to the south—but there wasn’t much in it.
And besides, that stretch of jagged rocks wasn’t accessible by road, and didn’t have a cafe, so who cared about a few feet of difference?
Kathryn Chegwin had been right about the road. It was probably no more twisty and turny than the stretch up until that point had been, but given that the detectives’ stomachs and inner ears had already suffered such prolonged abuse on the first part of the drive, it felt much worse.
“Did they no’ have straight lines in the old days?” Logan had complained, as they’d rounded the umpteenth up-and-over bend. “This feels like some sort of bloody punishment.”
If the road was the punishment, though, then the destination was the reward. The sun was setting as they crested the final hill and saw the lighthouse rising from the shore before them, silhouetted against the swirl of oranges, reds, and purples that burned across the sky.
The lighthouse was under renovation at the moment, according to one of the constables back at Strontian. It was supposed to have been completed months ago, but some sort of industrial dispute had brought it to a standstill. Now, the straight line of its silhouette was broken up by scaffolding and flapping tape.
Still, despite the extra clutter, all thoughts of travel sickness, dead men, and sex cults were soon forgotten as that view wheedled its way into every corner of Logan’s headspace, forcing him to look—just look—at the sheer bloody majesty of it.
So enraptured was he, in fact, that he almost missed the next bend, and had to frantically course correct when the BMW’s front wheels brushed against the verge at the side of the track, wrenching the wheel in his hands.
“That is pretty stunning,” Sinead remarked. She, too, was mesmerised by the sky, and its reflection rippling across the sea, that she didn’t seem to notice the car’s near miss with the roadside ditch. “It’s almost worth the drive up.”
Logan nodded. “Aye,” he confirmed. “It almost is. What do you think, Taggart?”
From the back seat, the dog woofed what Logan took to be his approval.
“Good boy,” the DCI said, then he crawled around yet another bend and eased down the accelerator. “Now, let’s go find these dirty hippie bastards we’ve heard so much about.”
The dirty hippie bastards in question were not difficult to find. It would’ve been almost impossible to miss them, in fact, the way they all stood in a line just beyond the off-limits lighthouse, their fingers interlocked as they joined together to face down the setting sun.
It was the chanting that had first drawn the detectives’ attention. They were all at it, though none of them seemed to be chanting the same thing, or at the same speed or volume. The effect was like trying to listen to ten different radio stations at once, none of which were playing anything worth listening to.
One man stood apart from the others, facing out to sea. He was giving it laldy on the chanting front. Both his arms were raised above his head, and he was touching various fingers together to form shapes with his hands that presumably meant something to him and his followers, but told Logan nothing aside from the fact that this man was clearly a twat.