Pp. 1–3
To Whom It May Concern
You’re not afraid of doing bad things. You’re afraid of getting punished for doing them.
No, not me, you say.
Really?
Okay, think about it like this.
It’s your lunch hour. You’re thirsty, but you forgot a drink. The vending machine is broken, and the nearest shop is a fifteen-minute walk. You’ve already lost ten minutes because Sheila from accounts wouldn’t shut up about free-range chicken salad, so by the time you reach the shop, you only have forty minutes left. Even if you hurry, that will only give you twenty-five minutes to eat once you get back to the office. Wouldn’t it be easier to grab a bottle of Coke from the shelf and walk out of the shop rather than wait in line while some old biddy pays the cashier in 1p and 2p coins and the young mother after her remembers she has to grab one more box of nappies and the schoolgirl who’s next and should probably be in class right now is too busy reading Heat magazine to move up in the queue?
Wouldn’t it be ten times easier to take what you need and leave the shop? ’Course it would. But you don’t.
Why?
Because store security would chase after you, give you a warning. Maybe even phone the police, who might give you a pat-down just to make sure you weren’t nicking something worth more than 90p. Might even ban you from the shop or arrest you.
So you don’t do it. But you would if you could.
That’s only a bit of light shoplifting, you say. That’s not a serious crime. That’s not like murder. You’d never murder anyone.
(Everyone thinks they’d never commit murder.)
And I’d say, even if you wouldn’t get in trouble?
And you’d shake your head and talk about morals or throw in God for good measure.
And I’d say, isn’t fear of getting in trouble with God fear of getting in trouble? And maybe you’re an atheist so you care fuck-all about God, but still, you say, you wouldn’t do it.
Why?
Because, you say, you’d feel guilty. And that guilt would eat you up until you were so desperate for the pain to end, you’d turn yourself in because then it wouldn’t be a punishment. It would be relief.
The police will tell you it’s not your fault. They want you to believe that. You’re young and attractive and the whole world is in front of you, so they say it right to your face. It’s not your fault about Callum. Like they want to believe there’s good in people. They should know better.
But what if you could kill someone and not get in trouble and not feel any guilt? What if you could take a life as easy as taking that Coke from the shelf?
Think about it.
Really think about it.
I’ll wait.
You’ve got a specific person in mind, don’t you? A celebrity, a politician, a coworker. Maybe a friend. That one person that makes you think the world would be so much better off without them.
Yeah.
That one.
See, I knew what you were thinking because at their heart—and the police know it—people care about nothing except themselves. Given the choice, they’ll always take the easy way out. The way without guilt. Without pain.
Face it. People aren’t really very nice.
(Except Callum. He was a nice person. Maybe that’s where he went wrong. Maybe if he hadn’t been so nice, he’d still be breathing.)
I’ve always known that people were shit. However, it wasn’t until I got older that I realized there are three different kinds of shit. I learned it from a ghost story. Well, not a ghost story per se.
More like monsters.
The story goes that there was once a Scottish laird, an owner of a manor in the Highlands, who bred a pack of wolf-dogs to protect his property. These were large, terrible beasts with coarse gray fur that got matted with blood whenever they ate. But they could be playful and loving so long as they got their way. One night the laird had a guest and, to honor him, a fine cut of venison was prepared. To appease the pack, the laird gave each dog some of his meal. The guest, famished from the long journey, refused to relinquish a single morsel of his own meal despite the laird’s request.
At the end of the night, the guest retired to bed, only to be woken a short time later by someone breathing in his ear. He opened his eyes to admonish the maid for disturbing him, but it was not the maid’s eyes he saw. Before he could scream, the pack leapt and tore what was theirs straight from his belly.
And that’s people.
People are the tired guest or they’re part of the pack or they’re the laird. The laird I’ve always thought was the worst because he knew what the pack might do, but did he try to contain them? Distract their attention? Make provisions to protect his guest’s life? No. In the story I was told, he hid deep in the manor. More concerned with what might happen to him than what might happen to another.
So that’s what I know about people. People hide and people cheat and people lie and people only look out for themselves because people are shit and very few deserve better.
And Callum should’ve known this. This was the story he used to tell. But now, I guess, it’s mine.
This is, word for word, what I had sent The Inverness Courier. They never printed it. Apparently, they felt it was “inappropriate” for an obituary. But I put it here, at the beginning, because this is what I wanted you to read first. Before I tell you what they did to him. Before I tell you what I did to them. I want you to understand that I know which of the three I became. What I want you to think about is very simple.
Which one are you?
Contents
Friday
1
2
Friday Night/Saturday Morning
3
Saturday
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
One Month Later
12
Acknowledgments
FRIDAY
1
Hollis
A sudden onslaught of rain splattered the windshield, drowning out Bon Jovi. Hollis Drummond swerved back and forth on the single-lane road, fumbling to find the wipers on the unfamiliar car. Refusing to stop living on a prayer, he turned up the volume and belted the chorus as he finally hit the windshield wiper lever. But unlike Tommy and Gina, he had no clue if he was halfway there because his phone was no more than a black brick. Hiring a car without GPS for a five-hour drive to the Isle of Skye, followed by a thirty-minute ferry ride, followed by another thirty-minute drive on a mostly uninhabited island, thinking he could rely on said phone, might not have been his most brilliant idea, he decided as he jiggled the cables.
The charger was attached to the phone port, the other end plugged into the car, but his mobile was not charging. Probably hadn’t been since he picked up the car in Inverness. Disconnecting and reconnecting the cable did nothing. He thought about ringing Linda for the directions, then remembered the dead phone was the reason he needed the directions in the first place. Timing his movements to the percussion, he tossed the useless thing onto the passenger seat. The road led only one way anyway.
The headlights illuminated the rocky landscape as he continued north, highlighting a patchwork of browns and dull greens, the vibrant purples and yellows of heather and gorse now out of season. Hollis liked the colors as they were. They reminded him of the brown and gray streets of Manchester, those he’d plodded up and down for so long and which, come Monday, he would see from a new angle. No uniform pressing for PC Drummond this weekend. A new pair of suits awaited him along with polished black shoes and a red tie with a subtle Manchester United watermark logo—a gift from Linda. It might’ve been thanks to his blind luck with the Marcus case, but he’d finally done it. The lads had taken the piss, of course. Hollis Drummond—mid-forties, the phrase “pushing fifty” just around the bend, his dozens of exams taking up a whole drawer in the filing cabinet—had finally made detective. He’d pretended it wasn’t that important, joked that some people needed to age like fine wine (or stinkin’ cheese, someone had blurted out). They tried to embarrass him by taunting him about his new partner, Khan, being ten years his junior and already a DS. If Hollis were lucky, they said, he’d be promoted to DS right in time to be pensioned off. Hollis shot back by saying Khan’s success had something to do with him being Asian.