Dark Suits and Sad Songs (23 page)

‘As my faither always said: look after your knife, an’ your knife will look after you,’ said the old fisherman as he handed the penknife to Scott.

‘Aye, the very thing,’ said Scott. ‘This spike thing will dae the job.’ He inserted the little tool into the lock, twisted it a couple of times, grimaced, stuck his tongue out, then after a small click, relaxed and handed the knife back to Hamish. ‘Be my guest, DS Rainsford,’ he said, swinging the door open. ‘There’s mair tae life than what you learn in the police college, son.’

Rainsford frowned and ducked through the low door of the caravan.

It was dark inside, so Scott pulled open the curtains to reveal the cramped interior. There was a bench seat under the window that extended along the walls on three sides. In the middle of the floor sat a small table with two chairs, to the left of which was a gas fire, built into a unit which provided cupboard space and shelving, on top of which was a framed photograph of a small yacht.

‘That’s that poor soul Cudihey’s boat,’ said Hamish. ‘I’m certain o’ it. Whoot a gentleman he was, tae. No’ feart when it came tae doling oot the amber nectar.’

Despite the dank feel, Scott noted that little or no dust covered the surfaces, and a week-old copy of the
Herald
was folded on top of the bench. ‘No’ long since there was somebody here,’ he said, picking up the paper.

Rainsford was making his way along the length of the caravan. There was a small galley kitchen with a two-ringed cooker nestled neatly between the cupboards, the surfaces of which provided worktop space. A white plastic kettle sat beside a tiny microwave oven and a jar of instant coffee. There was a tiny sink and a fridge, which was switched off. Rainsford opened the cupboards one by one, finding only a half-empty bottle of whisky, a few tins, a bottle of ketchup and three packets of instant mash.

Rainsford did a quick check of the toilet but, as in the rest of the caravan, found nothing of interest.

A final room sat at the end of the corridor. Rainsford opened its flimsy door. ‘Eh, Sergeant Scott, I think you’d better take a look in here.’

29

Daley hadn’t been prepared for how he would feel, not prepared at all. As if being back in Liz’s company after so long wasn’t enough, the tiny child he was holding elicited feelings within him he’d never known existed.

‘Can’t you feel it?’ asked Liz. ‘Don’t you just know that you are holding your own son?

Daley couldn’t speak. His day was being bookended by death and birth. Unfortunately, he was much more accustomed to the former. Of one thing, there was no doubt: this child had its mother’s eyes. He stared, mesmerised, at the tiny bundle in his arms.

‘Oh, Liz,’ was all he could say.

Covering the wall behind the caravan’s bed, photographs of varying sizes were pinned. Mostly, they were of the stretch of beach outside. The others, apart from one, were of a ship – taken from many angles, distances, and, by the looks of the differing overhead conditions, over an extended period of time. In the very centre of the collage, one image – the largest – was framed by everything else. A young woman, with long blonde hair, smiled at the camera.

‘That’s Kirsteen Lang,’ said Rainsford. ‘I saw her picture
on an email from Edinburgh yesterday, after she was killed in an RTA. She worked with Cudihey.’

‘I’m no’ sure he just thought o’ her as a work colleague,’ said Scott. He had picked something up from the floor, in the narrow gap between the bed and the window, and held it up to show the other two men.

‘Tae think,’ said Hamish, a look of horror on his face, ‘I spent a maist convivial evening aboard that Cudihey’s boat, no’ thinking for wan second that he was a sexual deviant.’ He shook his head in disgust.

Scott examined the item with distaste; he was holding a flaccid inflatable rubber doll, artificial blonde hair sprouting from its head, and an enlarged photo pasted across its face, the mouth cut away to allow the pouting ‘O’ of the doll’s lips to poke through. Again, Kirsteen Lang’s features were unmistakable.

‘You’re a fair-weather friend, Hamish. He was a real gent wae a good pouring hand a couple o’ minutes ago,’ said Scott. ‘I’m all for good working relationships, but this is taking things too far,’ he continued, laying the sex toy on the bed.

‘What’s that stuff in its nose?’ asked Hamish.

‘I think we can safely it’s not a summer cold,’ replied Scott, grimacing.

Daley cradled the child; he didn’t want to hand him back to Liz.

Her mother had been in the house when he arrived and, needless to say, his reception had been frosty. Liz’s parents had never been keen for her to marry a policeman, whom they considered to be beneath their social status. The events of the last few months had done nothing to improve
this relationship. On his arrival, Liz’s mother had simply glared at him, picked up her handbag, and left without another word.

‘How is Mary Dunn?’ asked Liz.

‘Do we really want to go there now?’ replied Daley. ‘It’s not as though you haven’t had
friends
during the course of our marriage, is it? Do you want me to enquire after their collective health?’

She looked at the floor. Daley had never seen her look so run down. Her hair was lank, and she was wearing leggings and a loose white T-shirt that bore a stain on the shoulder. He was used to the woman who looked as though she had sprung fully formed from the pages of a glossy magazine; this transformation was unexpected.

‘I’m sorry. I don’t want you to take pity on me, but this has been one of the hardest times of my life. I don’t know what I would have done without my mother, I really don’t.’ Liz burst into tears.

‘Listen, I know it’s been hard. It’s been hard for me, too.’

‘Then why wouldn’t you believe me? Why have we been miles apart, living separate lives, when this should have been the happiest time of our lives!’

‘You know why, Liz,’ said Daley, trying to calm the baby who was starting to object to the raised voices. ‘Let’s be honest, we hardly had the perfect marriage, did we?’

‘I thought you were happy.’

‘No, you thought that I would put up with anything because I loved you so much; you relied on it.’ He rocked the baby in his arms.

‘And do you? Love me, I mean?’

He paused, and was just about to answer when the little
bundle in his arms produced a sound he wouldn’t have thought possible from one so small.

‘Here, give him to me.’ Liz gently took the baby and held him to her breast. Despite himself, Daley thought his heart would burst.

After a few moments he replied. ‘Yes, of course. I’ll always love you.’

‘You don’t even know his name.’

‘No . . . I’m sorry.’

‘Moonrise.’

‘What? Moonrise? Really?’

She stared at him for a few heartbeats, then a smile lit up her face. ‘You tit, did you honestly think I’d call him that?’

‘Well, if I’m honest, I didn’t know what to think. I never . . . Well, we never spoke about it.’

‘I was waiting to talk to you about it. I have been calling him something, though.’

‘What?’

‘James.’ As she said the name, James Daley stopped crying and buried his head into his mother’s breast.

He looked at Abdic, asleep in the chair, his head lolling forward, and thought back to the first time he’d seen his face.

The large, squat man grabs him by the scruff of the neck. He is pulled from a line of bedraggled men; some crying, others praying, the rest silent. They are standing above the pit they have just dug. They are standing above their own graves
.

His captor drags him over to a man with grey hair, smoking a cigar, his uniform adorned with medals and insignia. Words are exchanged; harsh words, in a language he doesn’t understand. Without warning, he is flung to the ground
.

He manages to pull himself up just as the man with the cigar barks the order, and the guns fire. The ragged men, with whom he had stood until only a few minutes ago, fall backwards, or drop to their knees
.

One man, young, wearing a football top, is twitching on the ground, both hands held above his body, shaking uncontrollably, like someone left out in the cold. A soldier walks over to him, takes a pistol from his belt and calmly shoots the man through the head. He shivers no more
.

It is then he realises that the huge man who had pulled him away, Pavel Abdic, has just saved his life
.

He tried to force the memory from his mind. When he didn’t concentrate, these memories always surfaced; they played in the background, on an endless loop in his head, just waiting for him to pay attention.

He hated chance. His instructions kept changing, which made him feel uneasy. So many parts of this job were out of his control, and he was powerless. He felt that he was hurtling towards a conclusion, a final outcome he could do little to alter.

He watched two girls as they walked along the leafy street, chatting to each other as they passed large houses, all with ample gardens and drives, sporting two, sometimes three cars. It was strange how careless some people were with what was most precious to them.

He waited until the girls walked past his car, as he pretended to do something on his phone. He turned to the backseat and said, ‘Pavel, I will tell you when it is safe to leave the car. Until then, remain where you are.’ He started the engine.

The girls wore shorts and T-shirts, their legs and faces
pink from the summer sun; both were carrying tennis racquets. Staying a safe distance behind, he followed them until they reached the tennis club at the edge of the village, where one of the girls stopped and waved her hands in the air. For a second, he thought that somehow he had been spotted, but the pair were merely fooling around.

When the girls were only a few strides from the entrance, he shouted to Pavel. ‘Now! Go!’ He could see two people on court, one of whom stopped and stared as the two men rushed from the car towards the teenage girls.

One of the girls screamed, but was silenced by a punch in the face from Pavel. The other girl, who had tried to run, was caught and pulled back as she attempted to duck out of reach. The couple on the tennis court were shouting and running towards them. He looked up to see Pavel pull a handgun from his pocket, and the girl nearly struggled from his grip. A cloth soaked in chloroform over her mouth and nose quickly made her limp in his arms.

Pavel grabbed the girl from him and pulled her into the back of the car, while he jumped in and started the engine. It had all taken less than thirty seconds. He looked in the mirror as he gunned the car along the road; the other girl lay on the pavement, being helped by one of the tennis players, while the other talked into his mobile phone.

He sped out of the village until he came to a lay-by, where a nondescript white van waited. They exited the car, Pavel with the unconscious girl in his arms.

Quickly, the van pulled away. In the back, Alice Taylor lay for a few minutes before she began to move, lazily, as though rousing from a deep sleep. As she opened her eyes, disorientated by the motion and the gloom, she peered at
the huge man sitting opposite her. Her screams made him laugh.

Daley sat in the living room, feeling less at home than ever. Liz had taken the baby upstairs to his cot. He could hear her talking gently to the child through the white monitor on the table. He felt elated and terrified at the same time. He had promised himself not to give in to the emotion of being a parent until he was sure that he actually was one. Yet here he was sitting in this room, listening to his wife soothe the child that bore his name, the child that she swore was his, to sleep. Gradually, James Daley’s cries became happy gurgles and then a soft snore; all the time, Liz was humming a quiet tune.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. He noted Brian Scott’s name and answered.

‘Jim, where are you?’

‘At home, in Howwood. Listen, Brian, I’ve got some bad news. Sarah MacDougall was murdered at Cornton Vale this morning.’

‘I know. I found out about an hour ago, poor lassie.’

‘I’m sorry, mate. I’ve discovered a few things. Something’s not right, not right at all. I don’t want to say anything on the phone, just . . . don’t trust anyone. I’ll brief you when I get back.’

‘Things are moving on here, as well.’ Scott told Daley about Cudihey’s caravan, conveniently near the map coordinates they had discovered, and about its unusual contents. ‘Aye, but there’s worse,’ Scott continued, as he heard Daley express his surprise. ‘Alice Taylor’s been kidnapped.’

‘What? How is that possible? I thought they were being guarded at their home.’

‘Aye, so they were. Turns oot, Daddy thought it was all right for her to go and stay with a friend for a couple of days. Since nobody else would know where she would be, he didnae think it was a problem.’

‘Fuck’s sake. Where did this happen, Brian?’

‘Aboot twenty miles fae where you are now. I’ve got the number here of the investigating DS.’ Scott passed the number on to Daley, who wrote it down in his notebook.

‘OK, I’ll take a trip out and look at the scene and see what they’ve got, then I’ll come back down the road. I should be back by, oh, eight, or so,’ said Daley, looking at his watch.

‘Nae bother, I’ll see you then.’

‘And Brian, keep all of this as quiet as you can, do you know what I mean? And watch your back. Don’t trust anybody, I mean it.’

Liz walked into the room just as Daley was finishing the call.

‘Don’t tell me – you can’t stay,’ she said, sitting down heavily and holding her head in her hands.

‘I’ve got to go, Liz. You know how it is,’ he said, remembering the last time he’d said those words, only a few days before.

‘I want to come to Kinloch. Not today, but soon. I want us to be a family, Jim.’

He looked at her. ‘Yes. I want that, too.’ He’d said the words before he could stop himself.

Alice Taylor whimpered as the van bumped over rough ground. She kept telling herself to stay calm, to take things in, to remember. Even though her hands had been tied, she could still see her watch; they had been travelling for just
under three hours. Occasionally, she had been able to glimpse patches of sky, or trees and buildings, between the headrests and through the windscreen of the vehicle. Even so, she had no idea where they were, or even in which direction they were travelling. She found herself saying a prayer which she repeated over and over again until it became a mantra: please help me, please help me.