The Night Hunter (5 page)

‘I spend most of my time in the kitchen,’ she said as we both stood at the doorway, looking at the big room, the huge window with the trees and the loch and the mountains beyond. It seemed a very wild world out there.

‘Kitchen then?’ I suggested.

Mary was the young mother of a hyperactive four-year-old stuck miles from nowhere. We gelled quickly and soon found common ground. She was keen to tell me that she had walked away from uni too. I mentioned I was going back, she said I was lucky. She had been doing English literature. I told her about Sophie’s love of Christina Rossetti and she actually got excited. Her old life came back to her like a train.

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Sure.’

‘What is your actual name?’

‘Elvira. If the second kid had been a boy he’d have been Elvis, so I took the hit so that my brother could be called Grant.’

She suppressed a giggle.

We also liked silence. We could walk down the road to the loch to sit on stones, saying nothing but perfectly happy in each other’s company. I began to sleep, began to rest. I began to eat. The running became joyful, not punishing. The stress decreased, the adrenaline rush in my veins less frequent.

I realize, as the majestic house rolls past, that I have been better since I came here.

The crunch of another bad gear change breaks my train of thought and I register that Eric has been talking to me. ‘Pardon?’

‘I said, it’s an impressive house, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’ My radar had a moment to tune in this time. He had designed the house and I should be complimentary. ‘It’s a work of art. Where is your croft from here?’

‘Building site, you mean. It’s miles back, way back down the Rest, past Succoth and up the other side, the Loch Lomond side.’

He drives carefully up the narrow lane. The gates of the Ardno house are big and forbidding, but all I see are the strange shadows, and their secrets.

I notice that Eric has the same keypad to open the electric gates as me. His is much more worn than mine, but his code is different. So not only does the gate computer note ‘when’ but also ‘who’, such is the security needed for a millionaire’s wife.

He does not pull up at the front of the house but drives round to the entrance to my flat, which sits above the formal dining room. I can make all the noise I want doing my exercises because the dining room is never used. The headlights flash on the western perimeter wall that still bears the scars of the last storm; it looks like a gap-toothed smile. The builders haven’t been for days, and the last time I saw them they were too busy talking to Mary about building Charlie a tree house to be bothered fixing the wall. I notice that the Shogun is not here.

Eric sees me looking. ‘Mary is at the flat in Glasgow with Alex.’ He pulls the Land Rover to a halt but keeps the engine running as his fingers drum on the dashboard. ‘Do you need any help?’ he mutters.

‘No, I can manage on my own, thanks.’ A few spots of rain start to dot the windscreen.

He looks at the sky, a look of concentration on his face. ‘If you need to chat, in the next few days? I mean, Mary will be in Glasgow a lot. Call me if you need anything. I mean, after tonight. Not that … Well, you won’t, will you … What about a bit of dinner, Loch Fyne? I might even show you round the croft.’

It’s quite a speech for him. I nod and thank him.

I go up the stairs and press the buttons for the entry code to my flat, dumping my stuff in the hall before I turn to wave goodbye to Eric. He’s been watching me, making sure that I got in OK. He waves back and I close the door before picking my bag up and nipping upstairs to my kitchen. Before I unpack I press the button on the instant water heater and put some fresh coffee into a cafetière. Five minutes later I’m sitting on the outside step, high up over the garden with a soft blanket draped round my shoulders, sipping a mild Colombian blend and letting myself get wet in the summer rain. I think back on the day and the previous night, wondering what other Goblins are shadow-dancing in the garden, what else is going to happen before I can make sense of it. Everything is unreliable. Dad died, Grant blamed himself. If I’m honest, I blame Grant too. Did that stress spark my illness? Do I blame Grant for that as well? Grant certainly blames us for the mild knee problem which has become the root of all the evil in his universe. My mum gets lost in a bottle and Rod and I pick up the pieces.

Where does that leave me?

I should be here sitting with nothing on my mind at all, except my missing sister and what she might be going through. And what the woman who fell from the sky had already been through.

At moments like this I yearn for the times when I had things to think about apart from Sophie. If that makes me selfish then so be it. Tomorrow will start a whole new round of interviews and I must stay one step ahead. Maybe if I’d said something earlier, maybe if I’d told them the truth straight away – that Sophie had gone of her own accord – if I had not kept Sophie’s secret, then she might be back here with us now. But I didn’t have a crystal ball. I sat for hours at the Goblin Market, on the log by the lily pond, from midnight right until the dawn, waiting for her before I gave up and drove here.

I have no idea what has happened to her.

I have no idea what to do.

I look round at the hills, the rolling summit of Ben Ime in the distance. The closer pointed crag of Ben Lochain. Right on the back doorstep is Cruach nam Mult lying like a sleeping puppy. It makes me think – the hills are unchanging but I am not. I am a transient in the world; we all are.

It is gone six o’clock when I finally crawl into bed. Every night before I go in search of sleep I look through my photographs. These are just for me, not for the press or the police or the Facebook page where everything is food for public digestion. I have seen these images so many times, but I relish them as others enjoy seeing a close friend. There’s the one of me and Dad digging the garden. Another of Soph and me on a swing, she’s about ten or so. Then again on the same swing aged twenty, very drunk. Second last is an informal shot at someone’s wedding with the family as it is now. Rod at the helm, Mum holding on to him, Grant looking blond and blue-eyed, Sophie his female double at one side, me the raven-haired geek at the other. We are like bookends. Then three of us at Soph’s birthday meal for the family – that was the twenty-ninth of March – the week before she disappeared. Hindsight focuses the mind but I now realize that Soph hardly ate anything that evening. Grant acted drunk long before he was, and Mum acted sober long after she was drunk. I ignored both of them. In a paper clip I have two pictures that Belinda from Boadicea had taken at Soph’s party on the thirty-first. I wasn’t there. Soph only invited me to her social events safe in the knowledge that I would never go. I’d rather put staples in my toes than sit and listen to her pals talking about nail extensions and child protection orders. Soph loves company whereas I don’t see the point of other people.

I didn’t need all that, I had Sophie. We had each other. We were Lizzie and Laura.

I put the photos back in the drawer and lie back, staring out the windows waiting for sleep. When I do close my eyes, the dream is waiting. The little night-time goblin that comes out from the shadows to mess with my head is now showing me a film of Sophie in the bath in my flat, bleeding. Her head turns away as I try to speak to her, then she dissolves in the water, laughing, then screaming. Sophie is there one minute, gone the next.

It’s me screaming, of course. I wake myself up and a glance at the clock confirms I have been asleep for all of five minutes. I crawl out of bed to go to the toilet, where my stomach retches and retches, trying to get something out of nothing. Just bile. I need to eat to be sick. I need to go out for a run; my veins feel like they are bursting.

I open the bathroom cabinet and look at my medication. I should be taking it to control these symptoms until the tests are complete, but I’ve cancelled the appointment because I’m not taking any of this stuff; I need to be strong. In the mirror the changes are obvious. I should face the fact that I need help.

But Sophie needs my help more.

To fetch one if one goes astray.

I pull on my running socks and trousers, my top and my Nikes, then head out down the road to the loch side where I can watch the seals bobbing their heads through the water as I run. On a good day I’ll tackle the lower slopes of Cruach nam Mult but today is not a good day. At the water’s edge the air is deathly still. It is cool in my lungs and my legs loosen as I wind through the bracken on the lower slope. I feel weightless and supercharged. This is what it does for me; I become another being when I run the hills in the early light. Everybody else is somewhere other than here.

One hour and fourteen minutes later, I come out of the shower and sink on to the sofa with a strong coffee and a Pro Plus. The TV is on with the sound turned down low. I like looking at the moving pictures. It’s like having company without having to listen to any crap.

I watch a rerun of some cop show with subtitles as the sun creeps its way across the carpet. I am in a dwam rather than asleep, the adrenaline is melting. The cop show ends and the two leads drive off in their car having caught the bad guys. It freezes on a still of them doing a high five. A subtitle comes up to tell me that there is music playing now. The TV screen changes to the seven-thirty news bulletin, the doom and gloom economy and a bit of football gossip. Then the Scottish news. Alex Salmond is the lead story. Some blue-haired coffin dodger is jabbering on about her pension, her mouth moving nineteen to the dozen while her teeth try to keep up. The colour of her lips matches her hair colour, a sure sign of insidious heart failure, so by Christmas she’ll no longer be dodging her coffin, she’ll be lying in it. Then I recognize the Rest and Be Thankful in a long panning shot. A library picture of the rockfall site. I flick up the volume a little …
expect delays, an incident related to a missing person
.

I lean in closer. It doesn’t say how the body was found. There’s that same picture of Lorna Lennox, smiling her Ali McGraw smile.

The newsreader is an eternally optimistic girl with black hair and a bobbing head. She’s trying to tone down her lust for life as the picture of another woman fills the screen; she says there might be a link to the disappearance of Gillian Porter. I used to think women who went missing were stupid and should have taken more care, but that was before last Thursday, before Sophie failed to turn up at the Goblin Market. They show old footage of a press conference, a long table, Gillian’s mother tearfully reading a statement. Gillian’s husband leans over to the microphone to add something he has written, his hands trembling. He’s appealing on behalf of their two kids. The four people at the table are showered in the flashlights of a hundred cameras. Then the camera pans out and I see him sitting on the far side, wearing an ill-fitting suit, speaking into a microphone with a voice that could grind concrete; a granite-faced man who has seen everything and been impressed by none of it. His hair was darker, shorter then. The skin was still pink so this was before his liver packed up with the drink. The sign underneath him says DCI W. Hopkirk of Strathclyde Police; he was the chief investigating officer in the missing person enquiry.

The Private Investigator.

Mr Slip-on Shoes.

An hour of Googling William Albert Hopkirk tells me he achieved some kind of status when he found two missing children. Another link to a picture of a girl with dark, corkscrew hair, her murder unsolved. I recognize her: she was killed while she was at Glasgow uni the year before Sophie went, which means she must have been there about the same time as Mary. I recall her name before my eye catches the small print. Natalie Thom. She was murdered as she walked through a Glasgow park at midnight. I thought then that it was a stupid thing to do.

I still think it now.

The voice that answers the phone is raw Woodbine. It’s half seven in the morning. He says one word.

‘Hopkirk.’

I say, ‘McCulloch.’

He doesn’t miss a beat. ‘How are you doing, hen?’

‘Sorry to call you so early.’ Sophie always says politeness opens doors.

‘I don’t sleep. I bet you don’t either.’ I’m listening for the sounds behind his voice – he’s not at home, he’s outside somewhere. ‘We need to talk, you and me.’ Then he asks me if I’m
still up at Parnell’s house.
So he knows that much about me.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Can you get away?’ There’s a muffled tap; I guess the phone has been moved from one hand to the other to check the time.

It’s a Saturday, Mary is in Glasgow. There won’t be a problem. ‘Yes.’

‘Can you meet me today? What about Dunoon? I can get the ferry over, you can drive round. About one?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know the Henry the Eighth Tearoom?’ He hears my snort. ‘So you do.’ It’s his first show of humour.

‘The Henry the Eighth Tearoom is full of old gits with bladder issues.’

‘Yeah, I know. That’s why I blend in.’

By a quarter to two I am sitting outside the Henry Eighth Tearoom in Dunoon. The little resort town sits right on the Cowal peninsula and is reputed to have the second most vulnerable economy in Scotland. A scabby seagull picks at the leftovers of a fish supper and gets a mouthful of newsprint which has more fibre than any of the locals ever get.

I park Mary’s two-seater silver Merc on the opposite side of the road with the window open slightly. It’s conspicuous but the Polo is still with the police and the Shogun is with Mary in Glasgow. Mary won’t bother; she hates the Merc as much as she hates all the cars Parnell buys her. It’s five to when Mr Slip-on Shoes comes waddling round the corner in his disgusting baggy jogging bottoms, which are four inches too short so the world can see his white socks. The waist elastic is still fighting to contain the swollen belly that protrudes and flops as he waddles. He’s wearing a faded Fred Perry shirt and the bobbles on his burgundy fleece are visible from the opposite side of the road. The scent of old nicotine carried on the wind might just have been my imagination. He looks like a jakey just out the hostel and looking for a bin to rake through. As a disguise, it’s a good one.