Crime (2 page)

— I’m still thinking periwinkle for the bridesmaids, Trudi says without looking up from the magazine, — but I don’t want Adele upstaging me. Then she turns to him in real fear. — You don’t think –

Ray Lennox feels a surge of emotion as he recalls a picture of Trudi as a young girl, on the mantelpiece at her parents’ house. An only child: the couple’s one shot at immortality.
What if anything were
–

Another jag of trepidation rising in him. — Trudi, I’d never let anybody hurt you, you know that, don’t you? he announces in desperate urgency.

Her eyes expand in the stilted horror of the soap-opera heroine. — You think she’s pretty, don’t you? Don’t even try to deny it, Ray, it sticks out a mile.

Trudi thrusts her breasts out towards him and he sees the ribbing pattern of her tight brown sweater curve almost implausibly in a way that once aroused him. A few weeks back.

She wants to be the perfect bride. Like wee Britney Hamil might have dreamt of
.

He grabs her, hugs her close, breathing in her perfume, the fragrance of the shampoo in her hair. Something in his throat is choking him. As if a foreign object is wedged there. His voice so thin he wonders if she can hear him. — Trudi, I love you … I …

She squirms in his grasp, wriggles free and pushes him away. For the first time on the flight, her searching eyes engage with him. — What’s wrong, Ray? What is it?

— That case I was working on … that wee lassie …

Her head shakes vigorously and she puts a shushing finger over his lips. — No shop talk, Ray. We agreed. You’ve to get away from the job. That was the plan. That was what Bob Toal said. If I remember correctly his exact words were: Don’t even
think
about the job. Don’t
think
. Have a good time. Relax. The purpose of this vacation is to relax and plan the wedding. But you’re drinking again, and you know how
I
feel about that, she exhales, protracted and peevish. — But it’s what you wanted, and the mug that I am, I reluctantly agreed. So relax. You have your pills for anxiety.

It occurs to Lennox that she’s used the American term ‘vacation’ instead of holiday. The word clatters around in his head. To vacate. To leave.

But to go where?

Where did you go when you left?

The stewardess arrives with the drinks service. Trudi orders a white wine. A Chardonnay. Lennox gets in a couple of Bloody Marys.

Trudi settles back in her seat. Her head tilted to the side. Voice cooing, in sing-song manner. — All jobs are stressful in this day and age. That’s why we have vacations.

Again!

— Ver’ near two glorious weeks of sun, sand, sea and the other,
she
nudges him, then sulks, — You
do
still fancy me, Ray? And she does that thing with her breasts again.

— Course ah do. Lennox feels a constricting of the muscles around his chest and throat. His windpipe has become a straw. He is trapped; hemmed in beside the window, far too small to offer escape into the oblivion of sky. He looks at his crippled, bandaged right hand, a bag of broken knuckles, phalanxes and metacarpals. How many more would go, how long would it take for both fists to be pulped trying to punch a hole through this plane? Between him and the aisle sits first Trudi, then a blade-faced older woman, spare-framed, with bony hands. Probably ages with his own mother. He breathes in the dirty, dry recycled air of the plane. The old girl’s skin is like melted plastic. Like it has been dried out by the air conditioning. There are orangey blotches. He wonders how many hours an eight-hour flight aged you. He didn’t want Trudi to know that he’d only brought a few pills; that he was planning to stop them in Miami.

Trudi drops her voice. — I’ll do it if you want, Ray. If it’s what you
really
want …

He raises the plastic beaker to his mouth and sips at the vodka. His hand trembles. Then his body. How many paltry measures from those little bottles will it take to stop this, to make it go away? — The thing is … he manages to cough.

— … because I want to please you
in that way
, Ray, I really do, she implores, perhaps a bit too loudly as she’d had a few drinks at the airport bar and with the wine and altitude they are digging in. She turns to the old dear sitting next to her and exchanges saccharine smiles followed by a greeting.

Lennox thinks about the crime. At his desk the morning he heard and –

Trudi’s elbow digs his ribs. Her voice now a low whisper. The faintest of downy hair on the top of her glossy pink lips. — It’s just that it shocked me at first. It was trying to reconcile the fact that you’re a normal, red-blooded, heterosexual male with you wanting to be …
penetrated
in that way …

Lennox fortifies himself with another swig of the Bloody Mary. It’s all but gone. — I never want you to do anything you’re
uncomfortable
with, he says, pulling his features into a shallow smile.

— You’re a honey, she kisses him on the side of the face, the kiss of an aunt, he thinks. She holds open
Perfect Bride
, at a page displaying, in several script styles, the same announcement of a fictitious wedding. — What do you reckon about these for the invitations? Her big nail thuds down on a blue script in Charles Rennie Mackintosh style.

Glancing at them, Lennox thinks, with mild parochial resentment, of Glasgow. — Too Weedgie. He then points at the Gothic illustrations. — I like this one better.

— Oh my God, no way! She gasps and laughs, — You are totally bonkers, Raymond Lennox! These are like funeral invitations! I’m not the Bride of Frankenstein. She raises her eyes and fills her wine beaker. — Just as well you’ve got me organising this wedding. I dread to think what kind of a joke it would be if it was left up to you. She turns to the old girl whose cheery, intrusive smile is beginning to nauseate Lennox. — Men. Honestly! Good for nothing!

— I’ve always said it, the old girl adds encouragingly.

They cluck enthusiastically over the contents of the magazine and Trudi’s ecstatic descriptions of her dress, as Lennox adjusts the seat to its stingy recline, his eyes growing heavy with sleep. Soon his mind is drifting back to the crime. His thoughts are like a landslide; they seem to subside and settle, then before he knows it they’re off again, heading for the same downhill destination. The crime. Always plummeting inexorably towards the crime.

You got the call that morning.

At your desk in that small, utilitarian office in Edinburgh’s police headquarters at Fettes. A frosty, late-October Wednesday, your sad African violet plant on the window ledge struggling in the meagre light and cold, as the noisy central heating, set to come on late for economy purposes, clattered and cranked into reluctant action. Preparing a case for court. Two youths cabbaged after drinking all day: one had stabbed the other to death in a flat. Something was said and taken the wrong way. A threat made;
a
counter, the escalation. One life ended, the other ruined. All in the time it took to buy a pint of milk. You recalled the murderer, stripped of bravado-giving intoxicants, in the interview room under the fluorescent lights; so young, broken and scared. But this case hadn’t bugged you. You’d seen so many like it.

What got to you was the phone call, at around eleven fifteen. A uniformed cop, Donald Harrower, telling you about a seven-year-old girl, Britney Hamil, setting off for school at 8.30 a.m. and never arriving. The school had reported the absence to her mother, Angela, just before ten, who, after phoning some friends and relatives, had called the police half an hour later. Harrower and another officer had gone out to speak to the woman, as well as Britney’s teacher and some neighbours and schoolmates. Two older girls had seen her walking down the street ahead of them, but when they turned the corner a few minutes later, Britney had vanished and they’d witnessed a white van speeding away.

— The girls, Andrea Jack and Stella Hetherington, were the only witnesses and the white van was the only vehicle they recall seeing in the vicinity, Harrower had explained in his adenoidal tones, — so I thought you’d like to know about it.

The words ‘unmarked white van’ crackled through your brain in static. That great British archetype: always trouble to a polisman. You’d thanked Harrower, thinking it was unfortunate his dour, taciturn aspect often shielded a thoughtful diligence from his bosses. The van compelled you to go straight to your boss, acting Chief Superintendent Bob Toal, and request to investigate the disappearance and potential abduction of a child.

You worked with Harrower, talking to neighbours, friends, the school staff and children whom Britney might have passed en route. And Angela. You remembered the first time you set eyes on the child’s mother, on her way out to the local shopping centre. She’d been due at her cleaning job in the Scottish Office that afternoon, but explained that she’d taken time off to look after her other daughter, Tessa, who had food poisoning. She was the eleven-year-old sister who normally accompanied Britney to school. Instead of asking Angela to hold on, something made you want to walk with her. You followed her around Iceland, as she
filled
up on cheap burgers, fish fingers, oven chips and cigarettes. Found yourself judging her every purchase, as if they made her not only complicit in Tessa’s poisoning but also in Britney’s vanishing. — Isn’t she a little young to be walking to the school on her own?

— I was gaunny take her, but Tessa started being sick again, really chucking it up. Britney … she didnae want to be late. Telt me she was a big girl now. Angela fought back the tears as she pushed her shopping trolley down the yellow neon-lit gangways. — It’s only five minutes’ walk, she pleaded. — You will find her, won’t ye?

— We’re doing everything we can. So Tessa was ill this morning?

— Aye. I took them oot tae that burger bar last night, the yin at the centre. For a wee treat, then tae the pictures, at the multi-plex tae see the new Harry Potter. Tess came doon wi it in there. Ah mind ay Britney bein that sad that we had tae go hame …

— Right, you had said, feeling then that missing a film might be the least of the girl’s worries.

Leaving Angela back at her flat, you walked the walk to the school and found that it actually took fourteen minutes. Out the housing scheme, past the Loganburn roundabout, round the corner into Carr Road (where Britney vanished), and alongside a long, stark brick wall, behind which sat a disused factory. Then, round another corner, a block of tenements and the Gothic black-railed gates of the Victorian school.

Everyone at Police Headquarters knew that the next few hours were crucial, the something-or-nothing time. An alert call was made to all cars to be on the lookout for the girl and the driver of an unmarked white van. But as morning rolled into afternoon there was no news, and outside of Andrea and Stella, the girls walking behind Britney, only a couple of neighbours – a Mrs Doig on her way to her work, and a Mr Loughlan out walking his dog – could specifically recall seeing the girl that morning.

You went back to Bob Toal and asked if you could put a proper investigation team together. In the era of sex-crime awareness a missing child was big news and the media-savvy Toal quickly
concurred
. — Take Amanda Drummond, he’d said, — and Ally Notman.

You expressed gratitude. Drummond was thorough and had good people skills, while Notman had an engine on him and knew his way around data management. Like you, he had an Information Technology degree from Heriot-Watt University, but you were envious of the more efficient way your younger charge put these skills to use.

Then Toal had added, — And Dougie Gillman.

You felt the air inside you ebbing away. There had been a serious personal fallout with Gillman a few years back. But you said nothing, because it was personal. You’d keep it off the job.

You got Harrower and another reliable copper, Kenny McCaig, out of uniform. You commandeered an office at Police HQ and started your formal investigation. McCaig and Harrower continued knocking on doors. Notman examined speed camera and CCTV footage to identify any white vans tracked in or around the vicinity of Carr Road at the time, pulling out possible registration numbers, checking the list of owners against the Vehicle Licensing Agency’s database in Swansea. Drummond and Gillman took a forensics team out to give the bend on Carr Road, where Britney had vanished, a good dusting down. Neither forensics nor IT were the forte of Gillman, an old-school street cop, but he’d coldly followed your order.

As for you, you busied yourself with the ‘register’: the database of sex offenders. Seeing who was out, who was on parole and who was under surveillance; who was considered to be high-risk and low-risk. You’d clicked through the mugshots that Wednesday in your office, as the light declined in the drizzle over the Castle Hill, calling Trudi and telling her that you’d be late meeting her at the Filmhouse. When you got there, you’d coughed out an apology. — Sorry, babe, shit day at work. This weather doesnae help.

She didn’t seem to mind. — Thank God we’ve got Miami to look forward to!

But you weren’t looking forward to anything. You’d felt a building tug of unease from Harrower’s call; through your job
you’d
learned to define evil not just as the presence of something malign, but the absence of something good. Experience had taught you that the only misfortune worse than a having loved one murdered was for them to vanish without their fate ever coming to light. The torment of uncertainty, where the heart pounded each time the doorbell or phone rang, and desperate, hungry eyes devoured every face in every crowd. The inevitability of the cherished person’s death could be mentally reasoned, but it was harder to stifle the soul’s defiant scream that they lived on. But were they coming home or had they gone for ever? After time spent in this hellish limbo, any news, no matter how searing, was welcomed beyond the endless waiting and searching. In Britney’s mother, lone parent Angela Hamil, you saw a woman slowly drowning in this terrible madness.

By that evening you all knew that somebody had snatched Britney. The next day Toal decided to go public and give it to the newspapers. If the situation couldn’t be managed, then the news had to be. The later editions of the
Evening News
in Edinburgh carried a smiling, wholesome-looking picture of the girl that would become iconic. Adults would gaze at their children with a tender ache, giving strangers a suspicious glare. The term ‘like an angel’ was used a lot in the press. You recalled her grandad saying that.