Secret Sins: A Callie Anson (39 page)

‘Macduff.’

‘M-A-C-D-U-F-F?’ Neville spelt it out, looking at Danny with a nod.

‘Aye,’ Angus Hamilton confirmed.

Danny’s fingers moved on the keys; he shook his head
disappointedly
.

That was no good, then, but Neville wasn’t ready to give up. ‘How about friends? Did you say she had a friend called Kirsty?’

‘Aye, that’s right.’

Danny tried it, then shrugged.

‘Any other ideas?’

Neville heard a voice in the background. ‘Mr. Hamilton, could I speak to DI Stewart?’

The phone was evidently handed over, because the next voice he heard was Mark’s. ‘How about Buster?’ Mark said.

‘Buster?’

‘Her teddy bear. According to her dad, she loves that bear.’

Danny was already tapping it in; he lifted his head, grinning from ear to ear. ‘Buster?’ he said. ‘Bingo.’

‘Bayswater. Change here for the District Line,’ said the tannoy.

Bayswater? How could it be Bayswater? That’s where she’d come from, not where she was going.

Alex scrambled out of the train as the light dawned. Circle Line. That meant it went in a circle, all the way round. She’d somehow ended up going the wrong way—probably because she’d come back from Edgware Road and was on the other side of the tracks. There must be another platform.

She surveyed the signage. Yes, the eastbound platform was on the other side, over the bridge. Eastbound, towards King’s Cross.

‘Piece of cake, now that we’re in,’ said Danny smugly, as if he was the one who’d come up with the password.

Full marks to Mark, Neville said to himself. Clever bloke.

‘I always look at the e-mails first,’ Danny went on. ‘These days, that’s where everything’s happening. If there’s nothing interesting there, I can check her web browser. See what sites she’s visited and what she’s bookmarked.’

With a few deft taps of the keys, Danny had the e-mail program open; Neville stood behind him where he could view the screen.

Danny pointed with his finger. ‘Here’s the list. The last e-mail she opened came in yesterday afternoon. From Jack.’

Jack? The phantom boyfriend? Jilly had been so insistent that there was no boyfriend, that Jack was a figment of Alex’s imagination…

‘The subject line is “Getting 2gether.” 2-gether. Get it?’ He clicked to open the message.

‘Oh, crikey,’ said Danny, reading it aloud, translating from text-ese. ‘“Hey Sasha! I want to see you! Let’s get together. Tonight, okay? Paddington Station under the clock. I’ll be there at five! You wear something red! Me too.”’

‘Oh. My. God,’ said Neville, adding for good measure, from somewhere out of his distant past, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph.’

‘No,’ grinned Danny. ‘Jack.’

King’s Cross—at last!

Alex got off the tube train with a real sense of
accomplishment
. She’d made it! She felt as if she were halfway to Scotland already.

King’s Cross station seemed vast, cavernous, yet swarming with people. It appeared that a great many people were escaping from London today—dragging suitcases, hefting backpacks. Going home for Christmas already?

That, Alex realised with a great swelling of joy in her breast, was precisely what she was doing. Going home for Christmas. She would find her mother and they would be together. For Christmas and always. Together in Scotland. Home!

She had to queue for the ticket machine, and when she finally got there and punched all the right buttons—child, single, Edinburgh—she was dismayed. The fare was in excess of
forty-six
pounds, and she had less than forty pounds in her pocket. Not enough. Close, but not enough.

If she hadn’t got this far, and with such effort, she might have given up at that point.

But her mother was was waiting for her. Longing to see her, as Alex was desperate to be reunited with her. Alex struggled against tears of frustration and disappointment, resisting any admission of failure. She would
not
give up. She couldn’t. Not now.

Abandoning the ticket machine, she headed for the platforms to see whether there were the same sort of barriers in place that
the tube had, the sort which required you to put a ticket in the slot before you could get through.

But, she discovered, that was not the case. Ticket-checking at the platforms was manual, done by one or two fairly
lackadaisical
guards. Stern signs advised travellers that travelling without a ticket was a criminal offence, punishable by a stiff fine, and warned that tickets would be checked on board.

Well, she would just have to risk it.

She walked along until she found the next Edinburgh train, due to leave in about a quarter of an hour. Alex stood close to the entrance to the platform, waiting and watching.

A large family group approached the platform: mother, father, a gaggle of three or four children. Alex sidled up close to them; the father waved a fistful of tickets in the direction of the guard, and the guard in turn waved them all through. Alex casually attached herself to them, and in an instant she was on the platform. Safe. So far.

She followed them into a carriage, just in case anyone was watching. There she discovered that most of the seats had little printed tickets in the headrests, indicating that they were reserved for particular people. The family had evidently booked two facing rows, on either side of the aisle; while they stowed their baggage and settled themselves into their seats, Alex checked the reservation tickets. They were booked for various segments of the journey, some all the way from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, and others to or from Peterborough or York, or another point along the line. Alex found a pair of them, in the row behind the family, booked from Doncaster to Edinburgh. She slipped into the window seat; that would be okay for at least part of the way. When they got to Doncaster, if not before, she’d have to move.

Neville took a deep breath. A very deep breath. ‘There are more e-mails from this Jack, I assume?’

‘Oh, lots.’ Danny pointed to the in-box list, then to a folder labelled
Jack
. In fact, he seems to be about the only person she writes to, apart from someone called Kirsty.’

‘Her best friend in Scotland.’ Those should be pretty
harmless
, though it was possible that Alex might have confided in her best friend about Jack, so they were potentially useful as well. ‘Can you print them out for me? Everything. All of them.’

‘No problem,’ said Danny. ‘Anything else you need,  Guv?’

Neville sighed. ‘I don’t suppose that machine can tell you who Jack is, and where we might find him?’

‘Oh, it probably can.’ Danny patted the top of the computer with a self-satisfied smirk.

‘How can it do that?’

‘Well, it should be a fairly simple thing to trace the e-mail address he uses, through the ISP. Internet Service Provider,’ he amplified at Neville’s blank look. ‘They’ll have registration details. We’ll track him down, all right.’

‘Can’t people open anonymous accounts? Or use false
information
?’

‘Possible,’ Danny admitted. ‘False information, certainly. But e-mails leave trails. Not a lot of people know that. Every computer has a unique address, and leaves a unique footprint. So eventually we’ll find him.’

Eventually might not be good enough. A lurch in Neville’s stomach reminded him that a little girl was out there somewhere, possibly not with a teenage boy but with a man who had set up a meeting, intending her harm. ‘Wear something red’—bloody hell. Was that what a boyfriend would say?

And he, Neville, had discounted the danger she might be in, just because her stepmother couldn’t believe she might have a boyfriend. Jilly Hamilton might, potentially, have a lot to answer for. But so might he.

He didn’t look forward to telling Evans.

Evans, hell. Evans was a piece of cake compared to his other dilemma. How on earth was he going to tell Angus Hamilton?

Yolanda spent most of the morning tidying up the house. At least she called it tidying in her own mind, though it was more like industrial cleaning. Eli, she reflected, had many sterling characteristics, and she loved him dearly, but she had always recognised that cleanliness was not one of his priorities.

A week’s worth of washing-up awaited her in the kitchen, filling the sink and spilling onto the work surfaces. It was like an archaeological excavation, revealing a history of meals
consumed
: crusty baked beans, dried egg yolk, bacon grease. Lots of fry-ups, then; that was Eli’s main culinary speciality, though his expertise didn’t extend to cleaning up after himself. There was additional evidence of ready meals and take-aways, including a plate so badly stained with curry remnants that Yolanda gave up and binned it as irretrievable.

She didn’t mind the cleaning up, though she sighed and rolled her eyes at each additional piece of evidence that Eli hadn’t lifted a finger for a week. In a funny way, it was soothing work, distracting her from thoughts of Rachel and the unsatisfactory state of the investigation. She enjoyed making order out of chaos, in her home as in her job.

When she moved to the bathroom, Yolanda sighed yet again. Eli had been trimming his moustache over the basin, she inferred from the scattering of little black hairs on the porcelain.

Black hairs. There was something about black hair that had been niggling at the back of her mind.

She suddenly remembered: Rachel cradling her baby. A tiny girl with black, black hair.

Blond Rachel and her black-haired baby. What was wrong with that picture?

Callie had switched off her mobile during the
Christingle-making
session; she turned it back on as she went up the stairs to her flat and saw that she had a message from Marco.

‘Hey, Callie, I’m really sorry about last night,’ he said. ‘Really, really sorry. And I don’t know yet whether I’ll be free tonight
to see you. This case I’ve been called in on—well, it’s a difficult one. A girl has gone missing. I’ll tell you more about it later.
Ciao, cara mia
.’

She slipped the phone back in her pocket and looked at her watch. At their staff meeting on Thursday, Brian had asked her to do the hospital visits on Saturday, so she’d need to get on with that. With all of the cold weather, it seemed that quite a few of their parishioners, particularly the elderly, had succumbed to nasty bugs and were in need of a bit of pastoral comfort. At the back of her mind was the thought—the hope—that she might be able to meet up with Frances for a quick bite of lunch or at least a cup of coffee in the hospital cafe.

First, though, she ought to have enough time for a brisk walk round the park with Bella. Peter said he’d taken her out earlier, but it couldn’t have been for much longer than a few minutes.

Bella was more than willing. The sight of her lead sent her into even greater ecstasies than the sight of Callie herself had done. Callie clipped the lead onto Bella’s collar, then wrapped herself up in a warm scarf, hat and gloves while Bella wriggled with impatience at the door.

They were halfway round their customary route on the fringes of Hyde Park when Callie’s phone rang in her pocket. ‘Oh, blast,’ she muttered, tucking Bella’s lead between her knees and pulling her gloves off with her teeth while fumbling for the phone. ‘This had better be important.’

‘Callie?’ said Morag Hamilton’s voice, sounding tremulous and upset.

‘Morag!’

‘I’m so sorry to bother you. But something…dreadful…has happened.’

‘Oh, Morag. What is it?’ Callie’s mind leapt to all sorts of possibilities and scenarios. Mugging? An accident? It had been less than thirty minutes since she’d seen her.

‘I’ve just been on the phone with the police. My
granddaughter
— my wee Alex—has gone missing. There’s nothing I can do. But…’

‘I’ll be there,’ Callie said instantly. ‘I’ll be with you just as soon as I can. In a few minutes.’

Bella was looking at her expectantly.

‘Do you mind if I bring Bella?’ Callie asked. ‘I’m in the park, and can get to you sooner if I don’t have to take her home first.’

‘No, I don’t mind. Of course I don’t.’

Callie shoved the phone back in her pocket, pulled on her gloves, and took up the end of the lead. ‘Come on, girl,’ she urged. ‘Let’s run!’

The train had stopped at Peterborough, where a few people got out and a few more got on. Now they were passing through flat, frozen fields, some still with a covering of snow. Alex sat by the window, watching the landscape as it flashed by.

In the space between the seats she could see the family, and at the moment they were more interesting than the scenery. The youngest child was fussing; the dad was trying to distract it with a colouring book. The mother reached up to the overhead luggage rack and hauled down a cool-bag, which she began to unpack on the table between the facing rows of seats. A flask, some cups, small cartons of juice which she passed out to the children, helping where necessary to puncture the tops with the little bendy straws.