Murder On Skye by Daniel Sellers

Author:Daniel Sellers [Sellers, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Noir Crime, City Life Fiction, Mystery, Heist Thriller, Suspense
ISBN: 9781835268292
Publisher: Joffe Books
Published: 2024-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

6.48 p.m.

Joe’s brother Kev had texted again to say Joe was looking and sounding a lot brighter. The line on his Covid test was fading.

Sitting at her kitchen table, Lola stared at the words and wondered whether it would be wrong to not reply.

She was reading a new text — this one from Anna, saying she’d got them an appointment with Duncan Gaunt’s stepdaughter Beth Grayling the next morning — when her phone began to buzz.

She groaned aloud.

‘Trouble?’ Sandy asked, coming into the kitchen from the dining room, where he was finishing some paperwork.

‘Maybe. I’ll need to take it.’

‘No problem.’ He ducked back out of the kitchen.

She put the phone to her ear, said her name and was met with a barrage of sobbing.

‘Slow down, Aileen,’ Lola said. She eased herself onto one of the chairs at the kitchen table, while Sandy closed the door softly behind him. ‘Take a deep breath and try to tell me what’s happened.’

She could hear the young woman breathing in panicked gasps.

‘It’s happened,’ Aileen Mackinnon said. ‘It’s Craig . . . He . . .’

‘He what?’ Lola said. ‘Take your time.’

It took a minute or so before she got the crying under control.

‘My Uncle Donny called five minutes ago. A parcel came for Evie. But it didn’t make it to the house — thank God! It was baby clothes! Designer ones. Now do you see what you’ve done?’

It took several minutes, but Lola wearily pieced the story together, scrawling notes on a pad.

It seemed a parcel had arrived at Portree’s mail sorting office, addressed merely to Evie Mackinnon, courtesy of the delivery office in Portree, with a winsome message written on the back pleading for a postal worker to help it find its destination.

Staff at the sorting office had wondered if the intended recipient might be the young woman who lived with Donny and Jessie Mackinnon at Skaravaig, though they didn’t know her as Evie. They’d passed it to a postman called Tom Clark, who’d had every intention of delivering it in person — but he’d spotted Donny in Glendale, a few miles away. He’d collared the old man and shown him the parcel. Donny, already on the alert, took it from Tom and opened it there and then, finding inside it a toddler’s fancy outfit — a tweedy suit for a boy of Hamish’s age. There’d been a message inside, which read: For the wee man, Love from Auntie C.

Donny had driven up the hill to where he knew he’d have a signal and called Aileen. He’d read the message to her, and she’d confirmed she and Evie had no auntie whose name began with C.

‘“C” — it’s him!’ Aileen cried to Lola. ‘Don’t you see?’ She was getting angry now. ‘He’s mocking us. It’s his way of telling us he knows!’

‘Where is the outfit now?’ Lola asked.

‘In the bin in Glendale! I told Uncle Donny to get rid of it as soon as he could. I didn’t want Evie seeing it.’ She stopped.

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