Logan opened the lid to reveal two large brown envelopes, neither one sealed at the end.
“This is exciting, isn’t it?” Shona whispered, bouncing her stool closer. “It’s like being a detective.”
“I am a detective,” Logan reminded her.
“I know, but like a proper detective,” Shona said. “Like Sherlock Holmes. Or Batman.”
“Don’t get me started on Sherlock bloody Holmes,” Logan warned. “The arsehole,” he added, then he turned his attention back to the case and the envelopes contained within it.
The topmost envelope was the thicker of the two, and as good a place as any to start. He prised the flap open and looked inside, then tipped the contents onto the worktop before them.
A dozen or more Polaroids slid out, face down on the worktop. He picked one at random and flipped it over. It wasn’t the best picture. It was a little out of focus, and taken from behind a tree.
It showed a familiar Range Rover parked up in a lay-by at the side of a road. The driver—Oberon Finley-Lennox—wasn’t in the front seat. From this angle, he didn’t seem to be inside the vehicle at all, in fact, although the way the sun was catching the back passenger side window made it difficult to be sure.
The next photo showed the car driving up to the spot, and this time Oberon was clearly visible behind the wheel. There was another car there, too. A much smaller, less ostentatious one. A Ford of some kind, Logan thought, though the framing of the photograph cropped out many of the identifying features.
Shona turned over the next picture. The Range Rover again. The driver’s door was open, and Oberon was out of the car, standing beside it. He was smiling—a big, broad, happy grin that made him look five years younger than the man Logan had met earlier that day.
“Who’s he?” Shona asked.
“He’s an MSP.”
“Tory?”
Logan shook his head. “Freedom UK.”
Shona snorted. “Please tell me they abbreviate that on the campaign posters.”
“It’s pronounced ‘fook,’ apparently,” Logan replied.
“Haha! No, it isn’t,” Shona scoffed.
She turned over another photo. In this one, Oberon was not alone. They regarded it in silence for several seconds.
“Maybe she’s his daughter,” Shona proposed.
Logan turned over the next picture. “Fuck. I hope not,” he remarked.
“Yeah, that would be inappropriate behaviour, right enough,” Shona concurred.
This picture had been taken up close through the back window of the parked Range Rover. The seats had been folded flat, and a blanket had been spread out in the bed-sized space that this had created.
The blanket was not the only thing that had been spread, either. The young blonde-haired woman who had popped up in the previous photo now lay on her back with Oberon on top of her. Neither one was fully naked, but they were well on the way, and the MSP’s big hairy bare arse took up about a third of the image.
“She’s noticed him,” Logan said.
“I mean, sure, it’d be hard not to, what with him grinding away on top of her like that,” Shona said. “Not the sort of thing that’s easy to remain oblivious to at the best of times, never mind crammed in the back of a car, roomy as that particular model may be.”
“No, I mean she’s noticed the camera,” Logan said, indicating the face of the woman in the photo. He’d thought her wide eyes and shocked expression had been related to the goings-on inside the car, but then he’d noticed that she was looking straight down the lens.
They turned over the other photos in quick succession, hunting for the next part of the story that was unfolding before them. It seemed, however, that this was the last image in the sequence.
Most of the others were quite damning in terms of Oberon Finley-Lennox’s reputation and relationship, but that final one was damning in a whole different sense.
The woman, whoever she was, had spotted the photographer—presumably Bernie—at the window. From the look on her face, she was a half-second away from screaming. And not in a good way.
If she knew Bernie was there, then so did Oberon.
He would know that if those pictures were shared, then his dirty little secret would get out. Given his party’s big push on Christian values, he would’ve known that the publication of these photos would’ve destroyed him. His career and his marriage would be in ruins.
What would a man like him do to ensure those things didn’t come to pass? How far would a man like him go to protect everything he’d built?