The Night Hunter (12 page)

She glances at me to see if I am offended.

‘She did not run off with Mark Laidlaw.’ I defy them to contradict me.

Half an hour later Billy and I are sitting in the weak sunshine outside Tony Macaroni’s on Byres Road, watching the traffic. He’s having a latte and a cigarette and I’m warming my hands on an espresso, thinking about that little ankh and what it might mean. No mementos of any of the other girls had been sent back. But Billy still likes his theory that someone has read that Anderson is now heading the enquiry into the two bodies and the abductor now has a name to send the ankh to. The obvious conclusion is that the abductor is saying,
I have Sophie too
. Costello agrees with the theory and I’m now starting to doubt myself about the ankh ever being there. If my memory is right and I did see it there then the only obvious conclusion is that somebody in the house sent it. So I must be wrong.

Billy, however, is following my train of thought a bit too closely. He pulls a face, dropping his head so that I have to look at him. He regards me with a stare that could burn out the sun; I get that feeling again that nobody would have lasted long under his interrogation.

‘Elvie, I haven’t known you long but I know you well enough to understand that you have a strange kind of brain, you miss every nuance in conversation. You have to look to see if you upset people, you stare people down constantly.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, knowing that I do.

‘But you have a very good memory. You changed your story in there. I am trained to spot a lie. You did see that ankh in the drawer. She wasn’t wearing it when she went missing, was she?’

I stare him down, and he points a finger at me like he has caught me out. ‘Did you send it?’

I say nothing.

‘So you didn’t. If the ankh was still in that house then someone there sent it.’

Billy takes a few long puffs of his cigarette, thinking. He is looking up the street as if he is waiting for a bus. ‘People have many reasons to lie, Elvie. I don’t doubt that you have the best of intentions, but you should ask yourself if keeping secrets from me is the best thing for Sophie.’

‘I’m not keeping secrets from you.’ Not only from you.

A young man walks past, dressed in paint splattered denims. He is carrying a bag of chips, a newspaper folded under his arms. The headline reads something about the Night Hunter; The Victim. There was the webcam picture of Lorna falling, captured in free fall, her limbs spiralling, trying to grab the night air.

‘Great,’ says Billy, and sighs and turns to look at me. ‘Look, I am the best detective not on this case,’ he smiles softly. I think that his instinct is telling him he is treading on difficult ground here. As an interview technique it is working, he has excellent skills in reading people. I should learn from him. I want to release myself from the burden that Sophie has put me under. This nightmare will not end; Sophie said what she said but that was in a different space and time, and the past is another country. Maybe the best thing I can do for Sophie is tell the truth. If Gillian is where Sophie is then surely I owe it to them. If not, then Sophie is just muddying the water.

Billy lights another cigarette. He appears almost uninterested as he says, ‘You do need to trust me.’ He slowly puts his arm round me. Anybody watching would think he was straightening my jacket on the back of the chair, but it is the closest to a cuddle that I can remember.

Half an hour later he is following me into the depths of the Goblin Market. On the way over in the car I told him the story of the two sisters in the poem, Lizzie and Laura. I think he gets what I am trying to say. There was one sister who wanted everything out of life, and the other sister who had to stand back and pick up the pieces. There had been promises made and promises broken, but the sisters stayed together.

When we reach the bottom of the garden, we are alone. The lily with its huge plate leaves lying on the pond is still here. Billy is wandering around looking up at the steep walls above us, gazing at the flowers. It is a beautiful day down here, as if the sunshine has been trapped. Dappled daylight plays on tapestry wings of the butterflies, neon flashes shoot across the water to land on the leaves, tracking the iridescent bodies of dragonflies.

For a moment it is deathly quiet. A shiver runs through me; this could be a dangerous place. I am alone with Billy, but there is no danger here. I know I could kill him as easy as I could snap a twig.

‘I’m thinking about the brothers Grimm, that story where the wee lassie gets her feet cut off so she can get rid of her shoes. I bet that was written in a place like this. Bloody creepy.’

I sit down now on the bench seat, exactly where I had sat before. I try not to imagine evil little goblin eyes watching me, bony little goblin hands pulling the ferns aside, knowing where Sophie is but not telling me.

Billy sits down on the bench beside me. ‘So did Sophie go of her own free will?’

My heart misses a beat but the word trips out of my mouth. ‘Yes.’

‘Fuck!’ He exhales loudly and looks up to the sky.

‘But she was going to meet me back here, last Thursday midnight …’ I can hardly bring myself to say it, but Billy says it for me.

‘She never turned up, did she?’

‘Soph was adamant that she wanted nobody but me to know. It was our secret.’

‘Why? Why would she do that, causing all this pain? If it was because of Mark, she’d just say,
I’ve met a bloke, he’s married, I’m going to shack up with him, like it or lump it
.’ He thinks for a minute. ‘So she thought about it very carefully and decided she had no option but to get away. So who was she running from?’

I have no answer.

He closes his eyes and rubs them with the palm of his hands, making them redder than ever. He changes tack. ‘If you knew Sophie was coming back, why did you need to defer from uni?’

I ignore the question. ‘We need to find Sophie.’

‘You are very focused, very black and white.’

‘That has been said before. Sophie was in glorious Technicolor and I was in black and white. I see things with clarity. We need to find her.’

‘You put a lot of trust in each other.’

‘You need to understand the debt I owe her; she gave me my life. She noticed that I don’t see the world as other people do. She was always three steps in front of me, giving me lessons, showing me the way. She taught me it as a scientific exercise, she was specific.’

‘So what’s up with you?’

‘Do I have a label, you mean? How about Autistic? Asperger’s? They have labels for low achievers and high achievers, mediocre achievers. One day it might pop into someone’s head that we are a variation of the norm. We are different. We have always walked among you but now we get noticed and labelled and told that we need
help
. It used to make my dad’s blood boil.’

‘That’s the bloody Gettysburg address for someone with communication issues. But you’ve been like that all your life. Not held you back any, has it? It was something else that made you defer uni for a year.’

I ignore him again. ‘We need to find Sophie. And Gillian.’

‘And to do that I’ll be the judge of what is relevant. The rules of your strange wee life do not apply here.’ He stares at me. ‘It’s not all about you.’

This is a big decision. One I have already made. ‘It was March the twenty-first, a Wednesday. She phoned me at the hospital. She sounded frightened. It was the same way she sounded when she told me Dad had died. I thought something might have happened to Mum. But then she said she couldn’t go home and had lost her keys to my flat. I was busy, but I told her where I kept the spare.’

Billy nods but says nothing.

‘I didn’t think anything more about it. I just thought I would go home and she’d be sitting watching the TV, drinking a bottle of wine and dozing on the settee. It was about three in the morning when I got back. A patient with end stage cancer had come in. He died within an hour of being admitted. I watched him die, the physiological process of life was coming to an end. That’s all. I had to experience it.’

‘The fact that you were there, that’s all that matters. And Sophie?’

‘As soon as I opened the door of the flat I knew there was something wrong. The flat smelled wrong, it sounded wrong. The only noise was the bath running. She didn’t hear me when I came in. The lights were not on, she was sitting in the bath, fully clothed.’ I paused for a minute.

‘And?’ The
fully clothed
meant something to him.

‘The bathwater was pink, really nice shades of pink. Like the petals of a flower, red in the middle, fading to pink, and the folds of her skirt were billowing up in the water.’

‘Had Sophie been attacked?’

‘Yes.’

‘Raped?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Fuck!’

‘She was bleeding. She wouldn’t talk. Silent. Wanting to be alone. Not wanting to go back home. She wouldn’t answer any questions. She just sat in the bath, filling it, emptying it, filling it again. I didn’t know what to do.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I handed her a pink dressing gown. I went back to the hospital.’

‘Christ! And after that, how was she?’

‘Haunted.’ It strikes me that he does not ask if I know who did it. ‘She kept out of my way. Then she asked me to come here. I thought she was going to tell me what it was all about, but instead she told me she needed to get away. But she promised to meet me here on the last day of May, at midnight.’

‘She didn’t turn up.’ Billy is quiet again.

I see the row of weights in my mum’s kitchen, Mark Laidlaw raising his hands to me. I’m not easily scared, but I was scared of him.

Billy’s chain of thought echoes mine.

‘If you think Mark Laidlaw raped her then we need to tell Costello. We have no complaining victim so it’s not easy. When these girls were taken, where was he? Has he been …?’ He pauses, looking at me. ‘But you’ve already thought this through.’ Then he says, ‘But you’re not thinking that Mark has abducted her … because … because your logical mind is telling you something else. Because you know for a fact that Mark and she are not together, don’t you?’

‘There was a sighting of Mark, on the eleventh of April, on CCTV.’

Billy rolls his head round until his neck cracks. ‘Means nothing, Elvie.’

‘I know he doesn’t have her because he came looking for her, and he wouldn’t have come looking if he knew where she was, would he? But I didn’t tell him anything; she was running to get away from him. I scared him off.’

‘I’ve no doubt you did. But maybe she ran into somebody much worse.’

After stopping to restock Billy with fags we get to the site office of Parnell’s Glasgow builders’ yard, which is little more than a glorified Portakabin. We are supposed to pick up Charlie and take him up the road to Ardno. It’s going on for five and the yard is busy. I’m sitting at a desk near the window with Charlie on my knee, looking across the yard. Charlie’s drawing the tractors, the back actors, the fences, the dogs beyond. These are Alsatian guard dogs ready to go out on night patrol at the building sites, sites that are now a treasure trove of all kinds of scrap metal, bricks and unmixed concrete. All valuable on the post-credit crunch black market. Two German Shepherd dogs are pacing the fence; their constant movement is hypnotic. I wonder if there might be a register of guard dog breeders that might know about those Russian dogs.

Mary is looking pale. The ball went on to three in the morning and she hasn’t yet recovered. As the wife of one of the main sponsors, she had worn the most expensive dress, and she spent all night being looked at and hating every minute of it.

They had got a last-minute babysitting service to look after Charlie, as my assistance was ‘needed in a murder enquiry’, as Billy put it. Seemingly Parnell had initially refused but Billy had gone into negotiation mode. Parnell had melted in the spirit of public service once Grandpa Cop had phoned him from Argyll, telling him the same story that Billy had. Except that his was official.

Alex Parnell and Billy are now talking like old friends. They have found some colleagues in common, old cops who now work for Parnell’s security company. Once they start on football they are blood brothers. They both support Rangers, they are men in mourning. Mary is sitting on the edge of a table that carries a model of something not yet built. She is not listening but looking out the far window, her mind miles away.

‘Are you OK with that, babe?’ asks Parnell.

Mary jumps at the sound of his voice.

‘I was saying that we need to let Elvie help out as much as she can. You can cancel all your arrangements and take care of Charlie, can’t you?’

I wonder what arrangements she could possibly have.

Mary looks terrified for a minute.

I say immediately but as casually as I can, ‘We can work it, Mary, don’t worry …’

‘No, she’ll be fine,’ Parnell snaps.

‘Whatever. I’m not happy that there might be some weirdo wandering around Argyll flinging young women out of cars. Anything Elvie can do to help, we have to let her.’

Billy picks up on her discomfort. ‘The cops don’t need her twenty-four seven, Mr Parnell. And I think you might be happier knowing that Elvie is up at Ardno with Mary. I don’t think Mary should be alone in that big house.’

Mary smiles at him; it’s a smile of cracked china.

‘I don’t think she should be left alone, full stop. Buying a dress that shows every bruise she got when she walked into the swing. That whopper on her leg. Every time she stepped forward, instead of flashing a nice bit of thigh she looked like she’d gone five rounds with a kick boxer. Bloody embarrassing.’

Billy glances subtly at me and then Mary; he knows.

Mary ignores her husband and keeps her eyes on some builders tramping the mud in filthy boots and high-vis jackets. They are messing around, joking. One is whistling ‘It’s Now or Never’, very badly. She has that distant wistful look on her face. I think she’s in more pain than she is admitting. Then a faint smile, brief and flitting, appears on her face, like a flash of sunshine on an overcast day. She is recalling some happy thought that is at the edge of her memory. Her smile is there and gone in an instant.