The Night Hunter (13 page)

‘Was that your fault, you monkey?’ I jiggle Charlie on my knees, and his pen scribbles on the paper. ‘Were you going too high on the swing? I’ve banged into that pole more than once, when he does that,’ I say, adding credence to his story.

‘Did you break the swing?’ asks Billy.

I flick him two fingers from behind Charlie’s head.

Parnell closes the paperwork on his desk. ‘And now there’s another girl, isn’t there? Do they know who she is yet?’

‘We’ll find out who she is, don’t you worry about that,’ says Billy. It sounds mildly like a threat.

T
he hands of the clock show it is quarter past six. I look again, thinking that I have slept well, then realize it is half past three and I am wide awake. The bedroom at Ardno is too warm, even with all the windows open. I listen to the noises outside: the odd bark of a fox, the rustle of faraway trees. Rod phoned last night with his usual update of ‘sightings’ and the useless chit-chat from the Find Sophie Facebook page. He did have a contact for me to ‘follow up’, as he put it. I told him to tell Avril, but he said that the woman had already been to the police and they had been polite but dismissive about the report of the dog. I went into scan mode when he told me that Mum had a wee fall in the bathroom but had not broken anything, then that Grant had got very drunk in the Eaglesham Arms and the barman had got punched. The police were called and Rod explained they were getting help for the boy. He asked what I thought. I muttered something about we all had our crosses to bear and my brother should man up. Rod said I was a tad unhelpful at times. I asked for more details about the woman on Facebook.

When I wake I’m still thinking about Rod and what Billy had said. Our lives all turned for the worse when Dad died. All the blame going in circles, like Eric’s perpetual motion machine. But Rod? Rod had been my dad’s best pal, and my dad was no fool. My mum, on the other hand, is an idiot. The one thing that troubles me is that Sophie did not want to come home. It had taken her nearly two weeks to make the decision to run, a long time for a decision but a nanosecond to plan a new life. Soph was very susceptible to Mum’s plaintive cries about needing her family around her; she couldn’t have stood up to the barrage of emotional blackmail if she’d said she was going. I thought of Sophie, lying in her bath of blood, in pieces – whatever it was, she’d felt she couldn’t say anything to anybody.

But ‘home’ has nothing to do with Mark Laidlaw. And has everything to do with Rod. Deep down I know that ankh was in the drawer. Have I got this wrong? Everything had been black and white. It was all timed and precise, logical. Now I am dancing on quicksand.

I recall the meeting I had on that Wednesday at the uni. The meeting itself had gone as well as I expected. My sister was missing. The uni gave me a deferment for a year due to my excellent academic ability. My tutor said that it was early days yet and I could rejoin in the following October – that gave me about sixteen months. As he said those words we both knew that he was talking about more than Sophie. He was talking about my health and the fact that the medication was not working. Of course it wasn’t, I wasn’t taking it.

That was the day I left the uni building and walked down to Byres Road, to the car park where I’d left the Polo. I knew there was someone walking behind me; I could smell the sweet, piney aftershave. That was the eleventh, six days after Sophie went out running. Even now, I can recall the conversation word for word. He asked me where Sophie was then immediately said that I was nothing like her. He was that stupid, stating the obvious. I told him I didn’t know where she was. Even if I did, he would be the last person I would tell. He then assured me that she would be in touch. He gave me his mobile number, thrust it into my hand. I looked down and noticed that the fingers curled around mine were bruised at the knuckles. He was a powerful man and I guessed that he had probably hit someone recently, and that someone was female.

That conversation was public. He had already been seen on the CCTV standing at the corner of Byres Road and University Avenue. The lights there take ages to change. If Costello or Anderson look at the next camera, the one that covers the car park, they will see me talking to him for a few minutes. I am easy to spot on camera, dressed all in black, looking like a bad tranny.

The foxes are calling to each other outside my window, weird noises like goblins having a party.

When
did
Lizzie become Laura’s keeper?

When did Elvie become Sophie’s keeper?

It has always been that way. At school, I could sense trouble and I sensed it one day when Soph walked past me to go to the loo. She gave me a funny look, and three other girls followed her. By the time I got in there, they were dragging her across the tiled floor by her hair. One of them, one with stupid make-up, started moving towards me. So I decked her and she hit the tiles. The other one stepped over to have a go at me but thought better of it and knelt down beside her pal, stroking her on the back as blood and snot ran down her face. The third one, the brains of the outfit, stepped back. Sophie, red-eyed, got unsteadily to her feet and I frog-marched her out of the loos.

Now I realize that moment established the pattern of our lives.

I turn in my bed and try to surrender to sleep. It is not easy. I see Sophie in my dreams. She is trying to get out of the bath, but I’m holding her down, holding her under the red, red water.

I wake up. For the first time, I think of her as dead.

The satnav on Billy’s phone takes us on a long tour of Bearsden. Once we know we’re in the street where Anita Parke lives with her husband and two kids, we get out and walk. This is four-by-four and golf club country, high hedges and very neat lawns. The people who live here could spend all morning reading the broadsheet Sunday papers without getting them in a fankle.

‘This is it.’ I point at an ivy-clad house. An old but immaculate BMW sits on the drive.

‘Hang on a mo …’ Billy is looking in a skip that is parked in the street.

‘Surprised they allow that here.’

‘Probably rent it out to some immigrants. I want a look through, you get great stuff in skips in posh places.’

He has a rake through, showing me a Debenham’s carrier bag, but I am looking at the old detached villa with ivy veining over the walls. The house next door is a carbon copy, but with less foliage, and the front garden bears scars of works vans, two piles of chips blocking the drive.

He opens the bag and has a good look. ‘Two Alistair MacLeans and three Catherine Cooksons!’

‘Bit advanced for you, no pictures.’

The Cooksons are discarded to lie back among the bits of broken cistern and soggy wallpaper. He hums as he makes his way up the garden path. ‘Great book,
The Satan Bug
. Did you know that MacLean …’

I ring the doorbell, cutting him off in mid-sentence.

‘Detective Inspector Hopkirk? Please come in.’

Billy corrects the woman so quietly that a bat with a hearing aid would have had trouble hearing him. ‘Thank you, Mrs Parke, it’s about that message you left on the Find Sophie Facebook page.’

‘Yes, do come in. You’ll want to speak to Neil.’ She shouts up the stairs while pointing us in the direction of the sitting room. I climb over the two bikes that are leaning against the wall in the hall, noticing the tray full of muddy shoes on the carpet. Including Nike running shoes.

A teenage boy with shoulder-length hair enters the room, closely followed by a fit black spaniel. The boy folds himself into a leather easy chair and his mum sits on the arm beside him as the spaniel does a round of tail-wagging and nose-poking.

The boy glances at Billy, rotating his wrist in a gesture of casual nervousness; the rubber band on his wrist shows his support for ending world poverty. Forgetting her son is a teenager, his mother pats his knee subtly. Being a teenager, the boy grunts and recoils.

The woman smiles. They are very alike, both slim, both dark-haired, both with big brown eyes and thick arched brows. Both carry themselves with an inner confidence, strong and straight.

‘Mrs Parke, we don’t really want to waste your time but we contacted you because we need to have a wee chat with Neil about the night of the twenty-ninth of March. It was a Thursday.’

‘You know that we’ve been down to the station and we’ve already said …’

‘Best to get it from the horse’s mouth,’ says Billy. ‘You said that someone had told you to speak to DI Costello?’

‘Yes, but I never got to speak to him.’

‘Her,’ corrects Billy.

‘It was someone at the golf club – he’s a police officer – and he said that … well, my husband said that maybe we should report the incident. Well, it was nothing really, but my son here … Would you like a coffee?’

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

Five minutes later we are sitting round the table, a gentle thump-thump from underneath as the dog slaps his tail on the carpet. A mug of hot coffee sits in front of Mrs Parke and Hopkirk, Neil and I are each drinking a glass of ice-cold water.

‘So – in your own words,’ says Billy to the boy.

Mrs Anita Parke looks a little uncomfortable for the first time. ‘Go on, Neil, tell them what happened.’

The boy rolls his eyes upwards, bored with the story already. ‘I was out running,’ he states simply.

‘It was nearly dark,’ explains the mother.

Billy looks at me as if I really am a cop and should start taking notes. My look back tells him what I think of that idea. But we do get the point. It was dusk.

‘And where was this, Neil?’

‘In the woods to the back of the house.’

Billy nods, as if he roughly knows where the boy is talking about. ‘Do you run on your own?’

‘Yeah.’ He manages to pull the word out to four syllables.

‘And this was …?’

‘Thursday the twenty-ninth of March. The day after Granny’s birthday. Callie ate some bad chicken and couldn’t get off the loo,’ said Neil with boyish delight.

‘His sister,’ his mum says.

I point to a photograph on the wall, a face framed with the same thick dark hair, large eyes under arched brows.

‘She still lives with us, she’s twenty-one.’ Mrs Parke answers my next question then moves uncomfortably on her seat. She knows where this is going. She has known all along but didn’t want to believe it.

Billy lets the silence lie for a moment then asks, ‘So Neil, what happened? Exactly.’

Neil pulls a face. ‘Well, I was running through the woods and I heard a noise. I turn and there’s this big dog coming up behind me. It was bloody enormous.’ He puts his hand out, indicating how high.

Billy nods. ‘Write that down, McCulloch? This might be important.’ He hands me his notebook and pen. I start doodling. ‘So what happened then?’

‘Well, I’ve stopped, turned round. It was still coming. I was shitting myself …’

‘Neil!’

‘Hey Neil, I’ve been that scared too,’ Billy says to him, inviting confidence. ‘So what kind of dog was it?’

‘No idea. Much bigger than him.’ He points underneath the table. ‘I know dogs but I’ve never seen anything like that. Just as I thought it was going to jump on me the man called it back, and it just turned round and trotted away.’

Billy’s voice is very steady as he asks, ‘Neil, what was the man like?’

‘Nice, apologetic, like he knew he’d given me a fright.’

‘So he talked to you?’

‘Well, no.’

‘So how do you know he was nice?’

Neil thinks for a moment, looking at his mum, confused. ‘Well, he kind of waved, he was kind of looking at me once he got the dog on his lead.’

‘How close was he?’

Neil looks round. ‘Maybe as far as the house over there.’

I don’t need to look over my shoulder to know that the distance is too great for a good ID.

‘There was nobody else about?’

Neil shakes his head, ‘Not that I saw.’

‘Can you describe this man?’

‘Not really.’ Neil shrugs. ‘He was just this bloke really.’

Billy looks around as if he’s plucking ideas from the air. ‘White?’

‘Yes.’

‘Younger than seventy? Older than seventeen?’

Neil smiles, and the dark downy hair at the side of his mouth creases to a crescent-moon shadow. ‘I get it – yeah, he was really old, like forty or something.’

‘Ancient really,’ agrees Billy, nodding slightly.

‘And he had on glasses, sunglasses, he looked like a complete dick with those specs on.’

‘Neil!’

‘No, really!’ The boy is animated for the first time. ‘He had this really stupid tracksuit thing on. This skip cap, like he was some wannabe rapper. And he was so old!’

‘Did you see his face?’ asks Billy.

Neil considers this, his eyes narrowing a little as he thinks. ‘I kind of couldn’t, with the glasses and the hat and everything.’

Classic.

‘And then? Did he turn away and walk back the way he came?’

‘Yeah, and he took his big dog with him.’

I am looking at the picture of his sister. ‘When you go out running, do you tie your hair back?’

‘Aye.’

‘She goes running too, doesn’t she? Same place that you went, Neil?’

‘Yes.’

Billy pauses before asking the next question, following my chain of thought. ‘So, Neil, the man called the dog back once you had turned round?’

Neil nods. ‘Yeah.’ It was another long-drawn teenage effort.

Billy asks, ‘Neil, can you do us a favour? Can you stand up and turn around slowly, please?’

Neil looks at his mother for reassurance.

‘Go on, pet,’ she says.

The boy senses the change in the atmosphere and slowly stands up, flicks his hair back. He turns around slowly, a slim build, five feet five, a wave of sleek back hair curling into his collar.

‘Thanks, Neil.’

I say, ‘Mrs Parke, we might send a colleague out to have a wee word with your daughter and,’ I show Neil my phone. ‘What about that dog? Does that look like the one that you saw?’

Neil looks closer, he is concentrating. ‘Yes, that’s it. It wasn’t quite that colour, it was a bit darker.’

Billy and I stand up, moving towards the door. Mrs Parke leans forward and says in a low voice that cracks with emotion, ‘Neil met this Night Hunter man, didn’t he?’

‘Night Hunter?’ asks Billy innocently.

‘That’s what the papers are calling him. He takes women, and they don’t come back alive.’

‘Maybe your kids can go running on a treadmill, just for now,’ says Billy.

Mrs Parke’s mouth forms a perfect O; the corner of her eye waters a little as she realizes what might have been.