The Night Hunter (23 page)

‘Eddie?’ I ask.

‘Eddie Underhay, he works for Parnell as well. He’ll be on your list, I’m sure. He’s been at the house at Ardno, doing a wall repair, lives in Glasgow but has a chalet about forty miles up the coast near Portencross. Ailsa View, I think it’s called. He was putting in some extra insulation and I gave him a hand. A bit of work, a few beers, a curry.’

Billy and I exchange glances.

‘And does Eddie have a wife?’

‘Somewhere, but she’s not … on the scene, as you might say.’ McTiernan hands the envelope back firmly. ‘Nice bloke.’

‘So you might have been working there and touched this envelope, then Eddie might have put it in the bin and someone took it out again?’ I suggest.

‘I’ve no idea. But that’s the only time I recall using red stain on pine. It’s not my thing. Wood is beautiful as it is, don’t you think? Some things are better left as they are.’

We drive in silence up the coast, a sign that Billy is thinking about something. It is bitter cold in the shade, deceptively warm in the sun. The car stinks of fags. I open the window, which gets stuck halfway down. Eventually we arrive at Portencross Castle.

‘I think we’ve come too far. Do you not think we should tell Costello?’

‘We’ll make sure of our facts first. Has this Eddie guy ever seen you at Ardno? One look at your face and he won’t have forgotten it.’

‘Cheers. Do you do a lot of this confidence-building work?’

‘It’s all part of my charm offensive.’

‘Minus the charm. Just the offensive. Stop and ask this guy for directions to Ailsa View.’

A weather-beaten man is texting from his tractor seat with a bright-eyed collie beside him. He points us back down the road. ‘The chalet park is about two miles down there, on the other side of the road,’ he says. ‘What is it with that place? You’re the second lot this week.’

Billy feigns a lack of interest. ‘So who was that then?’

‘Why, who are you two? They were better dressed.’

‘We’re working for Partickhill CID.’

I notice the slight nod at the truth but the farmer shrugs as if it is nothing to do with him. ‘They were cops as well. They had a better car.’

‘A car? Not a four-by-four?’ I ask.

The farmer looks at me, so does the collie. ‘No, it was a car. Noisy exhaust. Two men, middle-aged. What can I say?’ He turns his attention back to his phone as it buzzes in his hand.

Billy executes a very bad three-point turn in the narrow road and nearly gets stuck in the ditch. I get the feeling tractor man is enjoying Billy’s bad driving.

The only indication of the holiday park entrance is a wooden archway among the trees. We drive in over speed bumps made of logs. The chalets need a good coat of varnish but it looks pleasant enough if you like spending your summers as a midges’ buffet. A few cars are parked, three dogs are tethered to stakes in the tiny front gardens, an old woman is weeding. I can hear Radio 2 from somewhere, there’s a smell of fried bacon. It’s nothing flash, just comfortable.

As the car drives along the dirt track Billy whistles the theme from
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
.

He stops the car in a space marked ‘visitors’, and we get out. Each chalet has space to park one vehicle. Billy indicates that we should go round the back of the chalets.

‘Are you James Bond Secret Squirrel after all? Walking down the main drag will look a damn sight less conspicuous than you coughing and spluttering your way through the undergrowth like some kind of asthmatic pervert.’

‘OK.’ But he is rattled.

‘Look, you’re an old git out for a wee donner – a quiet stroll in an old gits’ paradise. Look as if you’re thinking about buying a chalet. Keep in plain sight. I’m going to skulk about the way us fit young things can.’

And I do.

It takes me forty-five minutes, moving high on the hill, stopping every now and again to look through the trees at who’s about. There aren’t any people here of working age. They’re all older. It’s nearly four pm on a Saturday. I might recognize Eddie from the time he’s been up at Ardno.

The site straddles a small river, and there’s a rather shaky wooden bridge. None of the mobile homes can come across here, so there must be another way in. I look back up the main drag to see Billy chatting away to someone with a similarly well-nourished beer belly. A cigarette is offered from one to the other. Billy seems to be asking about the site, the man is waving his hands about. I move on down to the road to cross the bridge. Then I see the last chalet; the lie of the road means that it is much closer to the sea than the rest. Its front window is almost on the road, making it very difficult for anybody to see in.

Easy for them to see out.

The door is on the far side. It has the same little veranda arrangement the others have. Then I notice the patchwork of wood, due to recent restaining. I walk past the chalet into the field beyond where there is a wall where I can sit. From here I can see any movement from the corner of my eye.

My phone bleeps. It is Billy texting me.
I see you, I’ll keep going down to beach to look in front window.

I stay put for ten minutes. Then I see him, a daft fat figure on the beach skimming stones in the water, old enough to know better.

My phone bleeps again.
2 people, 1 sitting, 1 moving about.

I wait for another few minutes, looking around as if I’m waiting for somebody. I see a man put his head out cautiously. A small dark-haired man. He starts whistling something badly –‘It’s Now or Never’. I’ve heard that before. At Ardno, while he was fixing the wall. His fat mate has the limp. This is the wee skinny one. And that wall never got fixed. He knew the house was vulnerable; he had his way in and out.

His back is to me, I can take him easily. I climb off the wall, stretch my quads, my eyes fixed on him. I give him a slow count of ten. He looks up and down, and leans back in to open the door a bit wider. A slim female steps out, dressed in black, dark hair, her hand bandaged.

Mary.

I work out the line of attack. The eyes, the balls, the knees. But I don’t. I retreat, trying to make sense of it. She looks well, even though she’s walking with a slight limp. He grips her elbow, but I’m too far away to see how tight that grip is. He brings her down the steps with his arm locked on hers, keeping her close. A holiday park, this is a good place to have her. No one would think of looking here.

My phone beeps.
Is it her?

Yes
.

Is she OK?

Think so.

I’ll call Costello.

I turn away, keeping my eyes on the sea, the bright, bright sea, and away from the road above me. I am confused. I think I could get her right now, but what would that mean for the others? This could lead us to them. I take a deep breath and wait. We have Mary. I know there’s another caravan park at the bottom of the Rest and Be Thankful. Is that where they are? Or are they around here? Does he move them about? Or has he moved them since Lorna nearly got away? Then I do turn round, some instinct telling me that what I am seeing is not what I want to see. Mary has big dark glasses on, to protect those blue eyes so sensitive to the sun. Then I realize that it is not what I see, but what I hear.

She is laughing.

She sounds happy.

Two hours later Eddie Underhay is in the back of a police car. One team of police are interviewing the residents while the other is searching for any sign of the other women. Mary has been taken away by two female police officers. I tried to read the look she gave me from the back of the car. Betrayal? Pity?

I am still sitting on the wall, Billy is beside me. Costello doesn’t know what to do with us so we are stuck here like two naughty gnomes.

‘Why was she being so nice to him? She was laughing with him.’

‘Stockholm syndrome?’ suggests Billy.

‘Or have we have misjudged this from the start?’

‘They’ve found the ransom money in that wee hut that houses the electric meter, so the guy was half a million up on this. That’s all the evidence you need. Remember Mary’s diary – you said yourself. She has an A-level in compliance, that woman. She’ll do anything that makes other people happy,’ Billy argues. It all adds up to him.

‘And never try to get back to Charlie?’

‘Do you buy the fact that she left her kid to run off with her fancy man? I buy that one even less.’

‘But the way she was laughing …’

‘Stockholm syndrome, I tell you. Oh shit, here’s the main man.’

Anderson is walking over, carrying a plastic envelope containing a big Jiffy envelope. He raised it as he approaches us.

‘Before you start, there was a farmer down in the field in a blue tractor. He said two guys in a loud car were asking for directions to this place last week. Might be something or nothing, but don’t accuse us of not telling you everything. Those guys were nothing to do with us.’

‘Have you found any trace of anyone else? Of Sophie?’

‘We’re going through the place forensically, inch by inch. If there is something there, Elvie, we’ll find it.’

I catch his look up into the hills. ‘They could be anywhere up there and nobody would ever find them.’

‘Who is he? This Eddie person?’ asks Billy.

‘Eddie Underhay. He’s worked for Parnell Engineering for two years, no previous that we can find. But he’s had access to Parnell’s building sites, to Mary, and I’m sure if we look close enough we’ll find that he had access to the other women as well.’

‘Gillian Porter’s mum had an extension put in,’ I say. ‘It has Eric’s signature porthole window. The Parkes’ neighbours …’

‘Who?’

‘Neil Parke. The boy with the hair? Their neighbours were having work done in the house, you recall the skip? Well, he might have been working there and seen the Parke girl coming and going.’

‘Oh.’

‘And Lorna had had a training pool installed.’

‘You should check if one of Parnell’s building companies did that,’ Billy adds. ‘Or sub-contracted it.’

‘Fuck,’ said Anderson quietly. He pulls out his mobile and starts chattering down it.

‘Right,’ he ends the call, ‘Mary is in hospital. Can you come round to Partickhill for a statement this evening? Any more of this and you two will get your own parking space.’

‘Is Edward Underhay the Night Hunter?’

‘Who knows?’ says Costello. ‘He’s saying nothing, absolutely nothing. Lips as tight as a cat’s arse.’

We are sitting in the nice interview room at Partickhill. It has comfy foam seats that are so low and deep that Billy has to sit forward or his feet don’t touch the ground. It makes him feel slightly vulnerable.

‘Parnell has gone on record as saying that he gave the original ransom demand to the lab,’ Anderson tells us. ‘The DNA result flagged up on our system. He also paid the ransom money. So you are with us up to that point. He claims he knows nothing about the two guys in the loud car. The theory is that Eddie or a friend of his picked the money up and then brought it down to the chalet, where we found it in the wooden shed that houses the electricity meter. Bloody stupid place to leave it. It was locked at the front but there was an unsecured panel underneath. He obviously thought that nobody would look there.’

‘So that’s all it was? The kidnap of a rich woman for ransom?’

‘Yes, and he nearly got away with it.’

I notice that they are all looking at me.

‘What they’re saying, Elvie,’ Billy says softly, ‘is that this has nothing to do with the abductions of any of the other women.’

‘But he must have known them. Maybe that’s why he’s saying nothing, he doesn’t want to incriminate himself.’

‘No ransom was asked for any of them,’ Anderson points out. ‘You said yourself that the MO was totally different. The timing, the way she was taken from the house. He wasn’t stalking her the way the Night Hunter stalked the others. He simply took his chance when he knew the wall was down. He chatted to Mary, he had it all set up.’

‘Half a million’s not a lot of money. And what was he going to do once he set her free? She knew him!’

‘Maybe he was going to kill her?’

‘Big step for a brickie.’

‘Agreed, and he wasn’t that bright. Parnell thinks that Underhay was disgruntled at being passed over for promotion and the credit crunch wage cut he suffered, so he took the law into his own hands. He maybe sensed Mary might see his point, and she is certainly not reading the riot at him.’

‘Could be a case of Lima syndrome, where the kidnapper falls for the victim, or Stockholm syndrome which is the other way round,’ Costello chips in. ‘They were stuck in that wee log cabin for long periods of time together. Mary is a clever woman and she would have talked to him, agreed with him, tried to keep herself safe. But she’s saying nothing to us. Traumatised. PTSD. Must have been a picnic after living with Parnell.’

‘So Underhay is saying nothing and she’s saying nothing?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So how do you know what was going on? Has she seen Parnell?’

Costello gives me a hard, flinty look. She is trying to tell me something she cannot voice.

‘She hasn’t seen him yet, and she says she doesn’t want to.’

I sit there, less than convinced. Costello’s theory does not fit well with me, but then how well do I know Mary? The way she was laughing with her kidnapper, the way she shuts up whenever Parnell raises his voice. Maybe I don’t know her at all. Where did she go when she was supposed to be at book group? The compliant Mary would not have kept that diary; she had already grown into someone else.

‘And Mr Parnell for his part has taken Charlie to the hospital but has agreed not to see his wife. She will stay at the private hospital until she is better. She’s been offered counselling, but so far she is refusing it. We have done everything we can.’

‘Does she have an injury to the back of her leg?’

‘No, she does not. Elvie, stop it. This has nothing to do with Sophie.’

Billy touches my arm on the way out.

‘You can’t just do nothing, not now.’

I look at Billy and his look tells me that nothing is exactly what he is going to do.