Secret Sins: A Callie Anson (45 page)

‘What were you doing in Rachel’s bedroom?’ Neville demanded. ‘You’re supposed to be at home. Shagging your husband, remember? That’s what I told you to do.’

‘Never mind that.’ With admirable brevity and conciseness, Yolanda told Neville what she had discovered.

Five minutes later, Neville put the phone down and turned to Cowley, who was hovering close by, unashamedly listening to every word on Neville’s side of the conversation.

‘Well,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Well, well.’

‘Tell me!’

‘Seems our Rachel has a lover! And it’s a short step from that to a motive for Trevor’s murder.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Cowley.

‘And that gives us a clear indication of the murderer, as well. We’ve got a ways to go to prove it, but I think we’d be justified in arresting Rachel as an accessory, at the very least. With any luck she’ll finger the bloke, and we’ll be home free.’

Cowley grinned. ‘Arrest her now?’

‘As soon as she’s ready to leave hospital.’ Neville waved at the phone. ‘Give them a ring, will you, Sid? Ask them to let us know when she’s going to be released.’

‘It’s your battery, all right.’ A nice young man with a Geordie accent confirmed Morag’s diagnosis.

‘But I don’t understand,’ Morag said. ‘She got us this far. All the way from London.’

‘The battery must have been pretty low, though. As long as you kept going it was all right. But when you stopped—you didn’t leave your lights on, did you?’

‘I’m afraid we did.’

The young man shook his head. ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world. How long have you ladies been here?’

Callie looked at her watch. What time had it been when they’d stopped? ‘I’m not sure. A few hours.’

‘We had a kip,’ Morag added.

‘Well, I’ll soon get you back on the road,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I can give you a jump. How far are you going?’

‘Kelso,’ said Morag.

‘Oh, that should be fine. But before you think about going any further than that, you ought to look into getting a new battery.’

Neville sent a PC round to Yolanda’s house to collect Rachel’s laptop, then indulged in another mug of coffee before Cowley re-appeared. ‘Guv, another phone call.’

‘Phone call?’

‘To the hot line,’ Cowley expanded. ‘I think you need to talk to this woman, Guv. She says Alex Hamilton is in Scotland.’

‘Scotland? Bloody hell.’ Neville frowned sceptically. They’d had dozens of calls from all over the country, including the Channel Islands, reporting sightings of the missing girl. Why should this one be any different?

‘Talk to her, Guv,’ Cowley repeated. ‘I have a hunch about this one.’

So Neville rang the woman, who had given the number of an Edinburgh hotel.

‘They left a newspaper outside of the door this morning,’ she said. ‘Complimentary.’

‘Yes?’ Neville tried not to sound impatient.

‘The little girl. The girl who’s missing. There was a photo. I thought she looked a bit familiar.’

You and a few hundred other people, Neville said to himself.

‘My son Henry,’ she went on. ‘When he saw the photo, he went all quiet. That’s not like Henry. Not really. You’d understand if you knew him.’

Fortunately, thought Neville, he had been spared that pleasure.

‘Then, after a while, he told me. That girl was on the train with us yesterday. The train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh. She got on with us, he said. She was sitting behind us. And she got off when we did.’ 

Neville tried not to let himself get excited. Why should he believe Henry? No doubt the kid was just looking for attention.

His mother must have had the same reservations about his motivation. ‘Finally,’ said the woman, ‘I got the whole story out of him. He didn’t want to tell me. Said it was a secret, that he’d vowed not to tell.’

‘A secret?’

‘He noticed that she—the girl—got on with us. I mean, she pretended she was part of our family. Then she went to the toilet when the ticket collector came into the carriage. Henry figured out that she didn’t have a ticket. So he…well, he blackmailed her. Told her he’d keep her secret, if she gave him twenty pounds. He showed me the money. Two ten-pound notes. Now
that
,’ she added, sounding exasperated and a tiny bit proud, ‘is like Henry. If you knew him, you’d understand. He’s telling the truth.’

Thank you, Henry, Neville said to himself with rising elation. You miserable little toe-rag of a blackmailing grass. Then, when he’d finished the call—had, in fact, spoken to Henry himself and been convinced that he was indeed telling the truth—he turned to Cowley with a grin which was simultaneously relieved, jubilant and bemused. ‘Scotland!’ he said. ‘Bloody hell, Sid. The kid’s in Scotland!’

Within a few minutes they had received confirmation of this from what they considered a more reliable source: the woman at the Edinburgh Tourist Information office, who had seen the photo in the morning paper and was unshakeably certain that the missing girl had been in on Saturday afternoon, asking for
information
about buses to Kelso, in the Borders area. She had also, the woman added, sought directions to the nearest McDonald’s.

‘Kelso? The Borders?’ said Neville with a frown. ‘Why there?’ He had only the vaguest of ideas where the Borders were, but it didn’t sound like they were anywhere close to the Highlands, and that was where he would have expected her to go. To her old home, to her best friend Kirsty.

‘What about the mum?’ Cowley suggested.

‘The mum! She’s in some sort of care home, isn’t she?’

Cowley got out his notebook and flipped through. ‘Here it is, Guv,’ he announced. ‘Lochside, Kelso.’

‘Sid, you’re bloody brilliant!’ Neville could almost have hugged him at that moment. ‘Let’s get on to the police up there. We’ll have her in no time.’

When they were back on the road, and nearly to the Scottish border, Callie got out her mobile and rang Brian. He didn’t seem bothered—or even particularly surprised—to hear that she wouldn’t be at church that morning because she was enroute to Scotland. ‘I’ll manage just fine,’ he said.

That was a relief.

She ought, she knew, to ring Marco and tell her what they were doing. But what if he were really angry with her? She’d prefer to tell him face to face; she’d leave it for a bit and see what happened.

And then there was Peter. She’d rung him on his mobile on Saturday afternoon to let him know that she and Bella were with Morag. He would have expected her to be home last night, though, and was probably worrying about her absence. Callie looked at her watch: it was still way too early to ring Peter. His regular Saturday night gig meant that he rarely surfaced much before noon on Sunday.

It had been the road signs which had made Alex uneasy. At first it was fine. The nice man who looked and sounded so much like Granddad had driven out of Edinburgh and headed south, towards Lauder and Jedburgh. At some point they’d swung off on a smaller road signposted to Gordon and Kelso, so that was fine as well.

Then they’d got to Gordon, where they turned, and suddenly there was no further mention of Kelso on the signs.

‘Where are we going?’ Alex had asked. ‘Isn’t Kelso the other way?’

‘Just a bit of a detour,’ he said, turning his head to smile at her. ‘Don’t worry, lassie. I’ll get you to Kelso. I’ll look after you.’ Then he took one hand off the wheel and reached over to stroke her hair. It was the lightest of touches, and the briefest, but she jumped as though she’d had an electric shock.

A few minutes later he’d pulled into a petrol station along the side of the road. ‘Just running a bit low,’ he said. ‘I’ll fill up, and I’ll get you a bag of sweeties, shall I?’

‘No, thank you,’ she said stiffly. Her mother had told her never to take sweets from strangers. Not even ones who looked and sounded like Granddad. She’d also told her never to get into cars with strangers. Why hadn’t she remembered that an hour ago?

He got out of the car and used the petrol pump, then went towards the little shop to pay.

As soon as he was inside, Alex opened the car door and jumped out. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew that she couldn’t stay in that car any longer.

Instinctively she headed away from the car, away from the petrol station, looking for cover.

A few houses straggled along the side of the road. Cottages, really. Holiday lets, probably, and this wasn’t the holiday season. At any rate, there were no lights on in any of them to indicate that they were inhabited.

Away from the lights of the petrol station, it was very dark. Well, thought Alex, that might not be a bad thing. If she couldn’t see very much, then neither could he, and at that moment she knew with certainty that she didn’t want him to see her. Not even if he reminded her of Granddad.

Fueled by adrenaline, she headed for the nearest of the
cottages
and circled round to the back of it. Stumbling over some shrubbery, she bumped—literally—into a dilapidated sort of shed, half falling down. An old garden shed or perhaps a wood store, she thought.

Its door was hanging off the hinges. Alex pulled the door open and slipped inside, tripping over something on the floor. A pile of split logs, she perceived by feel. Carefully she eased her way round the logs and pressed herself into the corner of the shed, gasping for breath.