Ahead of the Game Read online

  “To her boyfriend. Anderson.”

  Logan’s lips drew back in a sneer. “Anderson? Who the fuck is Anderson when he’s at home?”

  “He’s your son-in-law. As of three weeks ago.”

  “Three weeks?!” Logan spat. “She marries some arsehole with a last name for a first name three fucking weeks ago, and I’m only finding out about it now?”

  “She didn’t want you finding out about it at all,” Vanessa said, her voice rising to match his. “And he’s not an arsehole. He’s lovely. Kind. Considerate. He works in banking.”

  “Oh, does he? Does he?” Logan asked. Like Vanessa’s, this wasn’t a real question. Unlike him, she went ahead and answered it, anyway.

  “Yes. He’s got a house just outside London. She moved in at the start of the year.”

  “She’s married and living with a banker she’s only just met in London?” Logan practically shrieked down the microphone.

  “They’ve been seeing each other for a year and a bloody half, Jack. They’ve hardly ‘only just met.’”

  “And what do you mean she didn’t want me finding out about it?” Logan demanded.

  Vanessa replied with the bluntness he’d come to expect from her.

  “Are you being deliberately difficult about this? She didn’t want you knowing because, right now, she doesn’t want you in her life. After everything that happened.”

  Logan remained silent at that. He had no real defence to offer. Given what she’d gone through, he couldn’t blame her for never taking his calls. The truth of it was, he’d stopped trying months ago after a single text had come through from her late one night.

  Leave me alone.

  “She’s happy, Jack. She’s genuinely happy for the first time in… God. I don’t even know. She’ll probably kill me for telling you, but I just… I thought you should know.”

  Logan leaned his back against a fence and leaned the elbow of his phone arm on a post. From where he stood, he could see the Burnett Road Police Station looming just beyond the skip hire place and Scotbake bakery. At a good clip, it was a one-minute walk away. Right now, though, his legs weren’t up for moving.

  “I just… I always thought… Even with everything…” Logan began. He didn’t finish, though. He didn’t know how.

  “I know,” Vanessa said, and for the first time in a long while, there was a slight softening of her tone. “But she’s happy. And that’s the main thing. Right?”

  Logan grimaced—not because he disagreed, but because she was right. Annoyingly, she was right.

  “Aye. That’s the main thing,” he agreed. “So, how—?”

  “I have to go, Jack.”

  She didn’t bother to offer an explanation. She had no obligation to do so, and he had no right to ask for one.

  Instead, he just nodded and forced a smile into his voice. “Aye. Right you are. Well, thanks for letting me know.”

  “You won’t tell her I told you?”

  “Tell her? No. Like she’d talk to me, anyway.”

  There was a pause then. An awkward little blip of silence.

  “She’ll come around, I’m sure. Give her time.”

  “Aye,” Logan said. “I’m sure. Thanks again. You take care.”

  “And you.”

  The line went quiet as Vanessa ended the call. Logan immediately opened his contacts, found his daughter’s name, and tapped it with his thumb.

  It rang twice, and went to voicemail halfway through the third.

  He waited for the beep, spent far too long trying to work out what to say, then hung up without leaving a message.

  “Fucking Anderson,” he muttered, stuffing the phone back into his pocket.

  He had barely gone a few steps when the mobile rang. His heart leapt into his throat as he reached into the pocket again, then the nervous excitement fizzled away when he saw that the name on-screen wasn’t Maddie’s.

  “Tyler,” he said, putting the phone to his ear. “I’m almost back at the office, what’s up?”

  DC Neish’s voice was partly drowned out by the rumble of an engine and the sound of traffic, suggesting he was calling from his car. “Just got word, boss. There’s been a body found down near Invergarry,” he said. “And, by all accounts, it’s an absolute belter!”

  Chapter Three

  “What time did you call that last night?”

  Three hours before Ernie Woodcock’s tour had made its grisly discovery, Bennet Lennon looked up from his bowl of cereal to find his dad, Clyde, standing in the kitchen doorway. It was rare to see him up and about this early, and he had the look about him of someone who had fallen far short of their required sleep quota.

  “Sorry?” Bennet asked, shooting a glance into the hallway behind his dad in the hope his mum might be there to offer support. She was still upstairs getting ready for work, though. Bennet was on his own.

  “I’ll fucking ‘sorry’ you,” Clyde spat. His eyes were ringed with red, but seemed to bulge with barely contained rage. “Half-past bloody midnight you and that bastard were still playing your wee fucking games. I’d a good mind to come in there and skelp the pair of you.”

  “We were quiet,” Bennet protested. Not too forcefully, though. The last thing he wanted to do was set his old man off. He was on a short fuse at the best of times. This early in the morning? After being kept awake late into the night? It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Quiet, were you? Fucking quiet? You call this quiet?” He raised his voice into a monotone shout and mimed pressing the buttons of a video game controller. “Shoot him! Watch out! Blow it up!” Clyde dropped his hands to his side and scowled at the seventeen-year-old at the kitchen table. “Does that sound fucking quiet to you?”

  “We were playing FIFA,” Bennet countered. He dropped his eyes and looked into the half-finished bowl of cereal, no longer hungry. “Sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “Too fucking true. You don’t need to tell me that. Your wee games stop at ten from now on, or I’ll come in there and put my foot up your fucking arse. I don’t care who’s in, you’ll get fucking leathered. Alright?”

  There was no point in trying to negotiate. You couldn’t hold a debate with his dad. If you tried, it became an argument.

  And Clyde Lennon was a big man. He knew the most effective way to end an argument.

  “And next time, tell him not to rev his engine when he’s driving away. What a fucking racket that was. And fix your fucking tie. You’re not going to school looking like that. You’re a disgrace.”

  Bennet didn’t know what was wrong with his tie, but he adjusted it anyway. His dad grunted some form of begrudged approval, then headed for the fridge and took out a can of Strongbow.

  “What?” he asked when he caught the look from Bennet. “It’s my day off, isn’t it?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Bennet replied, rising from the table, cereal bowl in hand.

  “No. Make sure you don’t.” Clyde cracked open the ring-pull, took a drink, then swirled the cider around like mouthwash before swallowing it down. He watched his son rinsing out his bowl, then shook his head in disgust. “Don’t you stand there fucking judging me.”

  “I wasn’t,” Bennet said, not looking back.

  “I work flat-out putting food on the table. The table that I fucking built, I might add. I deserve to enjoy a day off now and again. Or don’t I? Should I just work my fingers to the fucking bone? That keep you happy?”

  Bennet finished washing his bowl and set it on the draining board. He was tempted to point out that his mum was the main breadwinner, and that Clyde spent half his time at the pub, spending most of the income his business brought in.

  He’d been out for a big chunk of the previous evening, for example, and had returned home about twenty minutes before Bennet’s mate, Lachlan, had set off back to the staff accommodation of the hotel they both worked at. Clyde’s complaints about them making too much noise were bullshit, Bennet knew, but he daren’t say that to his face.


  Not if he wanted to make it to school.

  “You do deserve time off. You work really hard. Thanks,” Bennet said, carefully stripping any trace of sarcasm from the sentence. He indicated the door with a nod. “I’d, um, I’d better get going. Don’t want to be late.”

  Clyde clenched and unclenched his jaws, his gaze fixed on the boy like it was laser-guided. Then, with a burp and a wave of his hand, he sent him on his way.

  “Fuck off, then,” he said to Bennet’s back. “And tell your mother to make sure she picks something up for dinner on the way home this time.” He burped again, gave his can a swirl, and said the next part to the empty room. “I’m sick to the back teeth of having to do everything around here.”

  The drive from Roy Bridge to Lochaber High School was just a little over ten miles. At this time of year, before the campers and caravans came along to clog the route, Bennet barely noticed the journey passing. A couple of miles south to Spean, a left turn onto the A82, then a quick shoot down the road. One last right turn at the roundabout on the way into Fort William, and they were practically there.

  Today, though, it seemed to be taking longer than usual. He gazed out the side window, watching the trees trundle past. They were just about to pass the turn-off for the Nevis Range ski resort.

  Just over halfway there, then.

  He’d hoped he’d pass his test before he finished Sixth Year, but with barely a month until his final exams started, and his driving test still not even booked, it looked like he’d have to settle for lifts with his mum.

  Or ‘Mrs Lennon,’ as he had to call her at school. That was the depute headteacher’s suggestion, not hers. Mrs Robertson had come round the house specifically to discuss the matter before Bennet had started high school. He didn’t remember ever seeing his mum looking more uncomfortable as she had when her boss was sitting there in the front room with her husband. Something about those two worlds colliding had made her deeply uneasy.

  It wouldn’t do for Bennet to call her ‘Mum’ in class, the depute head had said. It would undermine her authority.

  Clyde had enjoyed that remark. “Authority?” he’d snorted. “What fucking authority?”

  Bennet felt his ears burn red at the thought of it, even all these years later. The look on his mum’s face. The shame of it. The tears he’d heard her shed in the bathroom later as he’d stood on the other side of the door, wishing he could think of the right thing to say.

  Wishing he could make his dad disappear from their lives for good.

  “You’re quiet.”

  Bennet turned his attention from the passing trees. His mum, Lana, was giving him a sideways look through the thick lenses of her glasses, her eyes flitting back and forth between him and the road ahead.

  “Am I? Sorry.”

  “No need to apologise,” Lana said. He watched her testing out a few sentences in her head before she spoke again. “You should try to ignore him. I mean… Don’t ignore ignore him. He hates that. Just… don’t let him bother you too much.”

  Ah, so it was this conversation again, was it? How many times had they been over this before? Apparently, it was their job not to provoke him, and not his own responsibility to keep his temper in check.

  Just watch what you say.

  Just mind where you put things.

  Just agree. It’s easier.

  Whether it was her intention or not, all her advice always put the blame squarely on Bennet’s shoulders. His father’s outbursts were Bennet’s fault, apparently, because he’d said or done the wrong thing at the wrong time.

  “Why do you always make excuses for him?” Bennet asked.

  “I don’t always make excuses.”

  Bennet turned further in his chair so he was fully facing his mother in the driver’s seat. They were passing the turn-off to Inverlochy Castle Hotel now, where Bennet had a part-time weekend job, carrying suitcases, running errands, and generally doing whatever he was told by rich people dressed in outfits he’d never be able to afford.

  “You do so make excuses,” he insisted. “Every time. You say he’s tired, or he’s having a hard time of things lately, or… I don’t know… some bullshit about his childhood.”

  “He did have a tough childhood.”

  “See? You’re doing it again! Fuck’s sake, Mum!”

  “Benny!”

  “Well!”

  He threw himself around in his seat and went back to the window. Over six years of driving this road almost every weekday, he and his mum had a little running… joke, he supposed, about the trees. It had started on his first day, when he’d sat anxiously hunched in the front passenger seat, dread filling his belly like a dodgy curry.

  “Oh look, the trees are waving you off, Benny,” she’d said.

  And with a bit of imagination, they had been. The leafy branches had been swaying side-to-side on the breeze, creaking and groaning as they’d moved back and forth.

  He’d known they weren’t really waving, of course, but it had made him feel a little better. They’d watched out for it every day since, waving back whenever the wind was high enough to animate the branches.

  Now, the trees stood stoic and still. They didn’t wave him off to school. Not today.

  “Let’s make a deal, alright?” Lana began.

  “Does it involve you finally kicking him out?” Bennet asked, his gaze still fixed on the world blurring by outside.

  “Let’s both decide we’re going to have a good day. We’re going to go into school, and we’re going to love every bloody minute of it.”

  “I’ve got double Higher Maths.”

  Lana winced. “Oof. OK, how about I love every bloody minute of it, and you love every bloody minute of it with the obvious exception of the hundred minutes of Maths, which you are free to hate? How does that sound?”

  Bennet shrugged, then he jumped when his mum prodded him in the ribs.

  “Boop. How does that sound? Is that a plan? Boop. Boop!”

  “Argh! Quit that!” Bennet yelped, as her finger jabbed at him again. A smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth, despite his best efforts to hold it back.

  “I’m not going to stop until you agree. Boop.”

  “Alright! Fine!” he ejected, blocking another finger-poke before it could reach him. “You win!”

  “Do we have a deal?” Lana asked, wiggling her finger back and forth like a snake. “Are you going to love every bloody minute?”

  “Except Maths.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Fine. We have a deal.”

  He sat up a little straighter, and watched as a police car went tearing up the road past them, lights flashing and siren wailing.

  “Someone’s in a hurry,” Lana remarked, as she always did on occasions such as these.

  Bennet watched in the wing mirror until the car disappeared.

  Outside, a breeze had begun to blow, and ten thousand trees waved him on his way.

  Chapter Four

  Logan timed his arrival perfectly. DC Sinead Bell handed him a takeaway coffee cup almost as soon as he’d pulled into the car park on the shore of Loch Oich and got out of the car.

  And it was a proper car he was driving, these days. By which he meant, it was not a Ford Fiesta. After the collision that had written that bloody thing off, he’d stood his ground with Detective Superintendent Mitchell, and she’d finally agreed to give him the keys to something that wasn’t built for someone two-thirds his height and half his width.

  Nowadays, when he climbed behind the wheel, it was of a shiny black BMW X5. It marked him out as polis from a mile away, but he didn’t care. He was able to get in and out of the driver’s seat without the risk of slipping a disc, and he didn’t have to shoogle back and forward in the seat to try to give the vehicle an additional burst of speed whenever he went uphill. He’d take those over a loss of anonymity, any day.

  “Morning, sir,” Sinead said, once he’d taken the coffee cup from her. “Journey alright?”

 
; “A bloody dream,” Logan said, giving the bonnet of the Beamer a loving stroke. He took a drink of his coffee, winced as it burned his lips, then gestured with the cup to where a knot of white suits was assembled around the base of some sort of obelisk. “What’s the story, then?”

  “Male. No ID yet. Group from a tour bus found him just before eleven this morning. Or, most of him.”

  “Aye. Tyler mentioned,” Logan said. He took another experimental sip of his coffee, but more carefully this time. It was still like molten lava against his lips. “He sounded quite excited.”

  “Not every day we get a headless one, I suppose,” Sinead remarked.

  “No. Thankfully not,” Logan said.

  He let his gaze drift away from the throng of activity around the monument, first to the wide, flat water of Loch Oich on the right, then back across the road to a large white and green building that stood almost directly across from where the SOC team were beavering away.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “Loch Oich Food Company. Coffee shop.”

  “Big for a coffee shop,” Logan remarked.

  “Think it’s a house, too,” Sinead said. “Owners live there. Maybe B&B. I’m not sure.”

  “They see anything?”

  “No. Nothing. Tyler’s getting statements from them, but I’d be surprised if they know anything.” Sinead took a drink from her own cup, then recoiled and hurriedly licked her lips.

  “Take it yours is as hot as the bloody sun, too, then?” Logan asked.

  “You can say that again,” Sinead replied.

  They both prised off the plastic lids of the cups. Two clouds of trapped steam rose up like ghosts fleeing the grave.

  “Is Geoff Palmer in amongst that lot?” Logan asked, nodding over at the largely indistinguishable figures in the paper suits.

  “Afraid so, sir,” Sinead confirmed.

  Logan tutted. As if the day hadn’t been going badly enough. Now, he’d have to have a conversation with that bulbous-nosed gobshite.

  Still, at least there was one bright spot.

  “Shona Maguire’s on her way down,” he said, risking another go at the coffee. Taking the lid off had lowered the temperature of the liquid by a couple of degrees, but it still burned his lips, while the steam practically scalded his sinuses.