The Loch Road

The call came at 5:47am.

Melissa had been awake since five. She had not set an alarm. She had not needed to for months. She lay in the dark and listened to the radiators tick and to the loch road outside, which was empty at this hour, which was one of the only things she liked about October.

Her phone lit up. Rob.

'We have one,' he said. 'Northern shore. Dog walker.'

'Which stretch?'

'About four hundred metres past the old boathouse. Near the reeds where the burn comes in.'

She knew it. She knew every four hundred metre stretch of the northern shore, the way people know their own street.

'On my way,' she said.

The north shore road was empty at this hour, which was one of the only things she liked about October. In summer the loch road was clogged from seven in the morning with campervans and touring cyclists and families who had driven six hours from Manchester and couldn't understand why the lay-bys weren't bigger. In October it was just the road and the water and the dark coming off the mountains on the far shore. She drove faster than she should have. Kinloch slid past on her right — the closed shopfronts of the high street, the yellow windows of the early bakery, the locked gates of the marina with its masts standing silent in the mist. She had grown up in this town and there were days when she did not want to have grown up in it.

* * *

The bakery was already lit at four in the morning when Melissa drove past it on the way home from the loch, after Mrs Sutherland's dog had gone in and come out and gone back in, after Diana Morse had been found in ten centimetres of water with a photograph in a plastic bag in her pocket.

Mackenzie's. Or Mackenzie & Son, Artisan Bakers, now, with the new sign, dark grey with thin gold lettering, sourdough loaves that cost £6.50, but at four in the morning it was still Mackenzie's, still the same bell above the door with the same slightly cracked tone, still the same smell, still the same woman, or a woman, behind the counter, flour on her forearms, hair tied back.

She had grown up with that smell. Her father had bought rolls on a Saturday morning, always warm inside the paper bag by the time he got home, the paper slightly translucent where the butter had soaked through. She had eaten them at the kitchen table with her father in his size eleven shoes and her mother who had called and said: your father is in the garden and he is not moving.

Now, at four-thirty in the morning, after a body in the shallows, after a thin file, eleven pages, five names, four not located, she stopped. She did not intend to stop. She turned off the loch road at the Flats without quite deciding to, same as she had turned off at the Flats at eleven the other day without quite deciding to, the habit of turning off at the Flats when she needed to think.

She parked on Wallace Crescent, three doors down from where Callum Keith had lived, ten years old, who felt the cold worse than the others, and she sat in the car and looked at the house she had grown up in, at the far end of the crescent, identifiable from here by the porch her father had added in 1992 — a lean-to of PVC and corrugated perspex that had seemed like luxury at the time and now looked like what it was, but it was the best he could do, and he had done it thoroughly, in the way he was thorough about things he wanted to make sure she found.

She got out. She walked to the bakery, which was already open, though it did not officially open until six, because bakers start at four if bread is going to be ready for six.

The woman behind the counter looked up, surprised, then not, because police at four in the morning in Kinloch were not surprising after a body in the loch.

'DI Mackay,' she said. 'I heard.'

'You heard,' Melissa said.

'Everyone heard. Mrs Sutherland told her daughter, her daughter told the co-op, co-op told everyone. Diana Morse, in the shallows. Ten centimetres. Not drowned.'

'Not drowned,' Melissa said.

The woman put two rolls in a paper bag, same kind of paper bag, warm already, though it was only four-thirty and the rolls had just come out.

'On the house,' she said. 'For... for finding her.'

'Thank you,' Melissa said.

She took the bag and went outside and stood on the pavement with the warm bag in her hand and the loch road empty and the high street closed shopfronts and the yellow windows of the early bakery and the locked gates of the marina with its masts standing silent in the mist, and she thought about Diana Morse, who had watched nature documentaries at the time her son would have come home from school because it was something to do with the hour that had otherwise become unmanageable, and who had kept a cheap ballpoint pen in a drawer for thirty years, and who had gone to the northern shore in October because she had found something and wanted to see it in daylight.

She ate one roll standing there, warm, butter soaking through paper, and thought about Callum Keith, ten, three doors down, who felt the cold worse than the others, and about her father's porch, PVC and perspex, luxury at the time, and about size eleven shoes and blocky capitals and MELISSA on three sides of a shoebox, thorough in the way he was thorough about things he wanted to make sure she found.

Then she got in the car and drove home and slept four hours and was back at the station by seven, with the thin file, eleven pages, and the thick file, forty-one pages, and the warm paper bag translucent where butter had soaked through, and the knowledge that a town that had lived alongside darkness for thirty-seven years was about to have to learn how to carry something it had not known it was carrying.

She parked behind the patrol car and followed the torch beams down to the water.

There were two uniforms and a woman in a waxed jacket with a small dog clipped to her belt loop. The woman was standing back from the scene with the composure of someone who had made a decision to be composed and was holding to it. Melissa noted this. She noted the dog, too — old and watchful, no longer interested in the body, no longer pulling.

'DI Mackay?' one of the uniforms said. 'This is Mrs Sutherland. Found her at about five-thirty. Walking the dog. Dog went in, came out, went back in. She went to see.'

Mrs Sutherland was sixty, maybe, hair tied back, wellingtons, the kind of practical clothing that suggested she walked this shore every morning regardless of weather. She did not look away from the loch when Melissa approached. She looked at the water.

'I didn't touch her,' she said. 'I thought I shouldn't.'

'You were right,' Melissa said. 'Can you tell me what you saw?'

Mrs Sutherland told her, in short, clear sentences, the way people do when they have decided to be useful. Time, place, tide, dog's behaviour. She had not seen anyone else. No boats. No lights. The loch had been flat.

Melissa thanked her and asked a uniform to take her details and to make sure she got home and that someone called later. She watched Mrs Sutherland walk away, dog at heel, both moving with the careful gait of people who had seen something they would need time to process.

Then she turned to the body.

Diana Morse. She would learn the name later that morning, but in that moment she was a woman in her sixties, face down in the shallows, dark coat spread around her, hair fanned in the water. The water was very clear, very cold, very still. The kind of still that made the loch look like it was holding its breath.

She crouched. She did not touch. She looked.

The back of the coat was wet but not torn. No obvious signs of struggle on the bank. Reeds flattened where the body had come in, or been placed. The waterline was low. October low. In summer this spot would be a foot deeper.

She thought about Marcus Hale, though she did not yet know his name. She thought about a boy who could name birds from their calls. She did not know why she thought about that, not yet.

Rob arrived, breath visible in the cold.

'Thought you'd be here,' he said quietly.

She stood. 'We need Bell,' she said. 'And we need to keep this tight. No press until we know who she is.'

'Already called Bell. She's on her way from Inverness.'

She looked at the body again, then at the loch, which was beginning to show the first grey light of morning on its surface, the mountains on the far shore still dark.

'She didn't drown here,' Melissa said. 'Not in ten centimetres of water.'

'I know,' Rob said.

They stood there for a moment, both looking at the water, both thinking about what it meant that a woman was in the shallows of a loch that had given up four boys thirty-seven years ago and had kept them ever since.

‘

The loch gives nothing back.

What you find at the shore, it left there on purpose.’

— Old Kinloch saying

What the Loch Gives Back

The dog found it first.

Hamish was a Border terrier of advanced years and poor temperament, and he had been pulling at the lead for the last ten minutes with an urgency that Margaret Dunbar recognised as different from his usual bolshiness. He wasn’t chasing a scent. He wasn’t after another dog. He had locked onto something at the water’s edge and he was pulling towards it with a focused, low-bodied determination that made her stomach go cold before she could say exactly why.

It was ten to six in the morning. October, which meant dark and getting darker as the mist came off the loch in long grey curtains. The path along the northern shore was lit by a single lamp post two hundred metres back, its light reduced to a suggestion by the time it reached her. She had a torch in her coat pocket — she always brought one in October — but she hadn’t needed it until now.

She needed it now.

She switched it on and let Hamish pull her the last few metres to the water’s edge, and then she stopped.

For a moment she thought it was a coat. People left things on the shore sometimes — jumpers, shoes, the occasional jacket with a phone still in the pocket, which was always depressing in a particular way. Then the torch beam caught the colour of skin at the collar, and the specific way the shape lay in the shallows with the water moving gently around it, and she understood that it was not a coat.

She said ‘oh’ very quietly.

Hamish was straining forward, nose to the ground. She pulled him back and bent and clipped his lead to her belt loop so that both her hands were free, which she thought later was the right instinct even though she couldn’t have explained it at the time. Then she stood up and made herself look properly.

A woman. Face down in maybe four inches of water, the loch lapping gently at her sides. Dark coat, good quality by the look of it. Grey hair fanned out around her head, moving with the water. Her arms were behind her back. Margaret moved the torch beam along them and saw what was holding them there: something wound around the wrists, dark with water, not rope. Thinner than rope. She moved the beam further and the shape of it clarified in the light.

Fishing twine.

Margaret Dunbar had lived in Kinloch for sixty-one years. She knew what fishing twine looked like.

She stepped back from the water, took her phone from her pocket, and called 999.

Melissa Steed was already awake when the call came through.

This was not unusual. Sleep had been arriving late and leaving early for the better part of six months, and she had stopped fighting it somewhere around August. She had learned instead to treat the hours between three and six as a kind of grey country she moved through, making tea, reading case notes, standing at her kitchen window watching the loch change colour as the dark thinned. Her flat was on the third floor of a converted Victorian terrace on the east side of Kinloch, and from the kitchen window she could see a strip of water between the rooftops, black at night and gunmetal grey at this time of morning, and on clear days a distant suggestion of the far shore. She had bought the flat partly for this view and had never quite admitted that to herself.

Her phone lit up the countertop at 5:48am.

She looked at the screen before she answered. It was DS Rob Firth, which meant it wasn’t administrative. Rob didn’t ring at 5:48 in the morning to discuss paperwork.

‘Rob.’

‘Boss. Body on the north shore. Uniform are there, no paramedics yet. Caller says it’s a woman, hands bound. I’m on my way.’

She was already moving to the bedroom for her coat. ‘How long?’

‘Ten minutes. Maybe twelve.’

‘I’ll beat you there.’

She ended the call and stood for a moment in the bedroom doorway, coat half on, looking at nothing in particular. Hands bound. She finished putting the coat on, found her keys on the hook by the door, and went out.

The north shore road was empty at this hour, which was one of the only things she liked about October.

In summer the loch road was clogged from seven in the morning with campervans and touring cyclists and families who had driven six hours from Manchester and couldn’t understand why the lay-bys weren’t bigger. In October it was just the road and the water and the dark coming off the mountains on the far shore. She drove faster than she should have. Kinloch slid past on her right — the closed shopfronts of the high street, the yellow windows of the early bakery, the locked gates of the marina with its masts standing silent in the mist. She had grown up in this town and there were days when she drove through it like a stranger, seeing only its surfaces.

She parked behind the patrol car and followed the torch beams down to the water.

There were two uniforms and a woman in a waxed jacket with a small dog clipped to her belt loop. The woman was standing back from the scene with the composure of someone who had made a decision to be composed and was holding to it. Melissa noted this. She noted the dog, too — old and watchful, no longer interested in the body.

She stepped around the uniforms and crouched at the water’s edge.

The loch was doing its thing with the mist. It was impossible to see the far shore or the sky above it, which gave the scene a quality of enclosure, as though this stretch of water and this body and these few metres of dark shore existed in a space entirely separate from everything else. She had felt this before on the loch and she didn’t like it. There was something about the scale of the water and the way the mist sat on it that made the world feel abbreviated. Small and cold and without exits.

She looked at the woman in the shallows.

Fifties. Well dressed, or had been — the coat was good, the shoes were good, and people who ended up face down in lochs at five in the morning usually weren’t wearing either. Grey hair. Both wrists bound behind her back with fishing twine, tightly, professionally. No obvious wounds from this angle but the body would tell her more. There was something in the positioning that bothered her beyond the obvious: the woman was too far into the water. The shore shelved gently here. If you fell or were placed close to the edge, the water at that depth wasn’t enough to drown in. Which meant she had been put here after death, not before. Which meant she was killed elsewhere and brought to the loch’s edge, which meant this was a disposal and whoever had done it either didn’t know or didn’t care how easily the body would be found.

Or they wanted it found. That was the other option. She held the thought at a distance and let it sit there without committing to it.

The younger of the two uniforms came and stood near her. PC something, she’d seen him at the station but hadn’t caught his name. Young enough that this was probably the first one he’d stood over without knowing what to do with his hands.

‘No ID on her, ma’am. We didn’t touch anything.’

‘Good.’ She stood up, knees protesting quietly. ‘Get back to the perimeter. I want this whole stretch taped off — twenty metres either side, ten metres back from the shore. And get the woman’s details before she goes anywhere.’

‘Yes ma’am.’

She heard Rob’s car before she saw it — the particular way his exhaust sounded on the cold air, slightly rough at idle, he’d been meaning to get it looked at for months. She listened to him park and walk down the slope and come to stand beside her without looking away from the body.

‘What are we thinking?’ he said.

‘I’m not thinking anything yet.’

‘No.’

They stood together in the particular silence of a scene. Rob was good at silence, which was one of the reasons she’d been glad when he was assigned to her. A lot of detectives felt the need to fill it. Rob understood that a scene needed to be heard as much as seen, and that the hearing took time.

After a minute he said: ‘Hands.’

‘Yes.’

‘She wasn’t killed here.’

‘No. She was left here.’

‘There’s a difference.’

‘There is.’

The mist shifted. Just slightly, just for a moment, and for a few seconds the far shore of the loch appeared — dark hills against a slightly lighter sky, the first grey suggestion of dawn behind them. Then the mist closed again and it was gone.

The forensics team arrived at half past six.

While she waited Melissa had walked the shore in both directions, torch at her feet, looking for anything the body hadn’t arrived with. She found a crushed beer can fifteen metres north, old enough to have a ring of rust around the opening. She found the stub of a fishing rod where someone had planted it in the bank and forgotten it, or abandoned it. She found a child’s wellington boot, left sole up in the heather, bright yellow, which stayed with her longer than it should have.

She found nothing that belonged to the dead woman.

Forensics set up their lights and the shore became a different place — white and harsh and procedural, the mist retreating slightly as though embarrassed by the brightness. She watched them work. There was comfort in watching people who knew exactly what they were doing, who had a procedure and followed it without drama. She had felt this since her first scene. The chaos that brought you here replaced by a different order, painstaking and methodical, and in that order a kind of respect.

She was standing near the shore tape when one of the forensics officers, a woman named Glenys who she’d worked with a dozen times, stood up from beside the body and raised her hand in a small beckoning gesture.

Melissa crossed the tape, gloved and suited, and crouched beside her.

‘Inside left pocket,’ Glenys said. ‘Sealed in a plastic sleeve. I haven’t opened it.’

She looked. A small clear sleeve, the kind people used for photographs. Visible through the plastic: the edge of an image.

‘Can you—’

Glenys had already tweezered it open. She lifted the photograph out with care and held it where Melissa could see.

A group photograph. Black and white, though that might have been the light, or the print itself. Five boys ranged along what appeared to be a lochside wall, the kind of rough stone wall that ran along the northern shore path. They were dressed for the weather — anoraks, jeans, one in a football shirt that looked too thin for the time of year. The oldest was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, the youngest closer to ten. They were squinting against something, sun or wind. None of them was smiling properly, the way people don’t smile properly when someone has told them to smile.

She turned her attention to what had been done to the photograph.

In red ink — a biro or a fine marker, applied by a steady hand — four of the five faces had been circled. The circles were small and deliberate, not frantic, not aggressive. Careful. As though someone had sat down with this photograph and considered it at length before marking it.

One face was uncircled.

On the back of the photograph, visible through the plastic, three characters had been written in the same red ink: ’87.

She looked at the circled faces. She looked at the one that had been left alone.

She became aware that neither she nor Glenys had spoken for a while.

‘There’s no date on the sleeve,’ Glenys said. ‘But the photograph itself looks old. The print quality. I’d guess early nineties at the latest, could be older.’

Melissa straightened up. The shore lights were very white. The loch beyond them was invisible.

‘Bag it,’ she said. ‘Full chain of custody from your hands. Don’t let it out of forensics until I’ve spoken to you.’

‘Understood.’

She walked back to Rob, who was standing at the tape with his hands in his pockets and the look on his face he got when he was trying not to speculate before the facts were in. She liked this about him too.

‘Photograph,’ she said. ‘Five boys. Four faces circled in red ink. Nineteen eighty-seven written on the back.’

He said nothing for a moment. Then: ‘Circled how. Like —’

‘Like they’re marked. Not crossed out. Circled.’

He looked at the loch. ‘So whoever put it there—’

‘Either put it there themselves. Or it was on her and whoever killed her knew about it and left it anyway.’

‘As a message.’

She didn’t answer that. Not yet. She turned and looked back at the body, now surrounded by forensics, now lit and documented and numbered, now beginning the long process of being understood. A woman in her fifties, well dressed, hands bound, a sealed photograph of five boys in her pocket. One face uncircled. Four marked.

The mist had come back in while she wasn’t watching. The loch had disappeared again. There was only the shore and the white lights and the cold coming off the water, and the particular feeling she’d had since she crouched over this woman for the first time, which was not exactly intuition and not exactly dread, but something in between.

She had felt it before. It meant the case was going to cost her something.

She was already too tired to decide if that would stop her.

By seven-thirty the body had been removed and the shore team was completing the scene documentation.

Melissa had taken a statement from Margaret Dunbar, who gave it without drama and with a precision that suggested she had been running it through her head since the moment she’d made the phone call. She had been on the north shore path at approximately five forty-five. She walked Hamish here three mornings a week, always this route, always this time. She had not seen anyone else on the path. She had not heard a car. She had not noticed anything unusual until Hamish began pulling towards the water.

‘Does he often do that?’ Melissa had asked.

‘Hamish does what Hamish likes,’ Margaret said. ‘But not like that. Not like something was wrong.’

Melissa gave her a card and told her someone would be in touch. She watched her walk back up the slope towards the road, the old terrier trotting beside her with the look of a dog whose morning had been more than adequate.

Rob appeared at her elbow. ‘Woman’s been identified. Forensics found a key fob in her coat — hotel key, the Kinloch Arms on the high street. Manager confirmed a Diana Morse, checked in three days ago. Address in Edinburgh. No emergency contact listed.’

‘Diana Morse.’ She said the name aloud in the way she always did with new names, feeling the shape of it.

‘Fifty-eight years old. Retired. Manager says she’d been staying a week before this, left, came back again. Paid cash both times.’

Melissa looked at the loch. The mist was thinning now as the light came up, and she could see the far shore for the first time, dark and still, the mountains above it touched with the first grey of morning.

Cash. No emergency contact. Came back again.

People who paid cash and listed no emergency contacts were either very private or very cautious, and there was usually a reason for one or the other. People who left and came back were either ambivalent or afraid to commit, and those were different things that led to different places.

‘Run her through the system,’ she said. ‘Full background. And I want to see the hotel room before anyone else does.’

‘Already asked them to hold it.’

She nodded. They stood another moment in the early light. The loch was very still.

She thought about the photograph. Five boys, 1987, and four circles drawn in red ink by a steady, deliberate hand. She thought about the one face left uncircled — the oldest boy, she thought, or perhaps the second oldest, it was hard to be certain from the image. She thought about what it meant to circle four out of five. What it meant to leave one alone.

She thought about the fishing twine on the wrists, which was not the detail that most people would have taken from this scene, but which had lodged in her since the moment she’d first bent her torch over it. Fishing twine was specific. It was the material of people who worked the loch, or who had grown up around it. It was not the material of a stranger. It was the material of someone who knew this water.

Rob said: ‘What are you thinking?’

She said: ‘I’m thinking we’re going to be here a while.’

He absorbed this. ‘How long a while?’

She looked at the shore. At the numbered markers where the body had been. At the loch beyond, wide and dark and finally clearing as the morning came up over the mountains.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘But I want you to pull the cold case files when we get back.’

‘Any particular case?’

She had her hands in her pockets. The cold off the water was getting into her knuckles. She’d left her gloves in the car.

‘Nineteen eighty-seven,’ she said. ‘Missing children. There were five of them.’

He went still the way he did when something landed hard.

‘I know the one,’ he said, quietly. ‘Everyone in Kinloch knows that one.’

‘Pull it anyway. I want to see what’s actually in it.’

She turned and walked back up the shore towards the road. The mist was lifting properly now, rolling back across the water in long pale sheets, and the loch was opening up beneath it — vast and grey and cold, the far mountains hardening into definition, the surface unmarked and still.

Whatever the loch knew, it wasn’t saying.

It never did.

—

End of Chapter One

DARK WATER

Book One of The Hollow Coast Series