Crime (7 page)

You’d felt a disturbing weight settle around your limbs as you’d looked up at the wall clock at around 9 a.m. It was now over twenty-four hours since Britney had gone. You opted to give those stinging eyes a rest, head to the Stockbridge Deli and get another black coffee and call up George Marsden. You were on friendly terms, having got drunk together after a DNA-testing training course in Harrogate several years back.

—White van, was it? George casually asked after you’d explained the crime in broad brushstrokes. Refusing to confirm or deny this detail as a smile pulled at your features, you hoped your silence didn’t speak too many volumes.

You seemed to get immediate pay-off from the break when you returned to the footage. Once again Britney stepped out of her stair, turned, but this time you noticed that she seemed to give a half-wave; a furtive acknowledgement to someone approaching from her right. An enhancement of the image confirmed this impression. The person was out of shot but would be heading into the stair. You looked at the list of names of the neighbours. Then you loaded up the sex offenders register and the image of Tommy Loughran leapt out at you.

When you got down to the Hamil family’s house with Notman, it was discovered that Loughran was the man just beyond camera range. He’d been walking his dog yesterday morning. And he was the people’s choice, with votes cast in brick through his shattered window, and campaign graffiti dubbed on his wall:

NONCES DIE

The security guard, an old flasher, was an ex-alco turned Christian teetotaller. He carried the air of the sinner who had repented with gusto but still expected more retribution before the slate could hope to be wiped clean. Such was Loughran’s masochistic self-loathing, you figured that he could easily have been induced to admit that he’d committed the crime. The only problem was that after taking his dog home and seeing Britney leave for school, he boarded a crowded bus to a cinema, where local students had started a morning movie club. The transaction on his Bank of Scotland card and the film theatre’s records indicated that Loughran was watching the Werner Herzog documentary
Grizzly Man
. You recalled how the movie – about a self-righteous, liberal environmentalist, eaten by the creature he was trying protect – was a hit in the police canteen. Remembered Herzog dismissing the subject’s claims of the spiritual superiority of the bear. In the face of the beast, the German film-maker saw only ‘the cruel indifference of nature’. — What do you think the message of that film was, you’d asked the bemused Loughran.

Billy Lumsden, a janitor at Britney’s school who regularly talked to the girl (although he talked to most of the kids), was late for
work
on the day of the disappearance and was taken in to assist the inquiry. You learned that his marriage had broken up the previous year, when he’d left his wife and their three kids. Lumsden had already been suspended for being intoxicated on duty, and he confessed to you his feelings of loneliness and despair. The compassion you experienced for this man shocked you in its intensity. What if Lumsden was the beast? But he seemed so broken, so quietly desperate. Then it was established that his mother had suffered a bad fall at her home. Neighbours and a local shopkeeper verified his presence four miles away at the time of Britney’s vanishing.

The case continued to seep under your skin. The clock was ticking. The disappearance of a child was harrowing enough. But it was also showing you how the vulnerable were lining up to be devoured by the criminal justice system. The potential for miscarriage was so strong everywhere. It sowed a sickening moral relativism into your psyche, spreading a rash of doubt and uncertainty. You steeled yourself with the thought that
somebody
had taken Britney. She couldn’t have just vaporised into the misty air in those three minutes she turned the corner into Carr Road out of sight of Stella and Andrea. Somebody was evil. And you vowed that you were going to get them.

The starting point had been checking out the men who came into contact with the girl, at school, home and work, and slowly eliminating them from the investigation. Britney’s biological father was off the list; long estranged from the family, he was on an oil platform in the North Sea. One man remained unaccounted for and, chillingly, he’d vanished around the same time as the child. They couldn’t find her grandfather, Ronnie Hamil, at his flat in Dalry. Neighbours informed you that this was nothing new; Ronnie could vanish for days at a time when his giro arrived. It had been Gillman who had cottoned on to the grandfather connection first. — That cunt’s up tae something, he’d sneered over a photograph of Ronnie with Angela and the girls. — Auld Gary Glitter.

You put everyone in the team on a full-time search for Ronnie Hamil. All squad cars were instructed to be on the lookout for him. His tenement flat was staked out around the clock. The team spent hours visiting his haunts: the bookies, the off-licences and
the
bars of Dalry and Gorgie Roads. But you declined to join the hunt. Try as you might, you couldn’t stop yourself pursuing another avenue. — I’m heading off to do some snooping around, you’d informed Bob Toal.

Toal had given you his trademark lemon-sucking look. He knew you were up to something. Somehow you’d suspected this wasn’t going to be a typical child sex case; a bubbling in your innards told you that the trail wouldn’t lead to a traditional British nonce. You’d studied the mugshots of every paedophile on the register: the priests, schoolteachers and scoutmasters; the pervert uncles, opportunistic stepfathers and twisted blood-fathers with their arrogant and chilling rationalisations. Nobody fitted the bill. It seemed an American-style crime, or rather the kind of crime of US fiction, as you supposed that real American crimes were like British ones. But it was culturally American: a lone drifter, a predator, not driving across long and lonely interstate freeways over a vast continent, but shuffling along in a white van through crowded, nosy Britain.

What you did was drive to the airport, surreptitiously boarding a lunchtime flight to Gatwick, then jumping on a train down to Eastbourne, where George Marsden now lived. He’d resigned after the Nula Andrews case and now installed security systems and offered advice to nervous retirees. George had never struck you as a maverick. Ex-forces, Royal Marines; had fought in the first Gulf War. A straight-backed divorcee with a rugby player’s build, a floppy head of thick grey hair and sportive smile that suggested he wouldn’t spend too many lonely nights. With his pressed trousers and freshly laundered shirts, everything about him suggested steadfast adherence to procedure. Except that when he’d seen the evidence and it didn’t add up, he’d lost faith.

Over espresso in a café, you and George watched his prospective clients amble along the seafront as he explained that Ellis had been the town bad boy back in Welwyn. A charismatic and sly young man, he wasn’t a hard case, but was somehow able to get tougher souls to do his bidding. Ellis had several offences, mainly burglary, but there had been one charge of rape, dropped through lack of evidence. While there was nothing to link him to minors,
he
was easy to detest; the sort of shitbag that every community manages to produce. Nobody, police or public, would lament him being banged up for a long time. Nula Andrews was the opposite: small, frail, elfin-faced, an innocent looking much younger than her twelve years. You recalled the picture of her they’d circulated, and those blazing doe eyes that blitzed into the psyche of the British public. Nula was on her way to help her aunt with some decorating. She was easy to cast as Little Red Riding Hood to Ellis’s Big Bad Wolf. So Robert Ellis became the most hated man in Britain: a Huntley, a Brady. And, in a sickening fashion, he did make an unsolicited confession of sorts.

But whatever Ellis was, he was not guilty of this crime. George Marsden was having none of it and honour compelled him to resign, ending his police career on a sour note. He had a troubling belief in right and wrong. If it was religion, it wasn’t the insurance policy stuff most people took out by nipping to church on Sunday. So George talked through the Nula Andrews case with you: the similarities and differences to Britney. Then you’d discussed Stacey Earnshaw, snatched near Salford Shopping Centre. — It wasn’t Ellis, he said emphatically.

Every city produced its share of Ellises. Bob Toal was anxious to see if any in Edinburgh could be linked in some manner to Britney. He himself had cried wolf about retiring for years and now that his compulsory date loomed, he wanted to do so on a high. Some sections of the press, which had originally crucified Ellis, now, in light of Britney’s case, had started to hint at a grave miscarriage of justice. The public, meantime, were doing what the public will do in such instances: clamouring for a body.

You hadn’t told a soul about the Eastbourne visit and feared the phone call that might force the truth, but received nothing other than routine messages informing you Grandad Ronnie’s whereabouts still hadn’t been uncovered. Guilt was beginning to strike hard; you felt you should have been knocking on doors and sitting in cramped vans on stake-outs with the others. You’d fallen asleep on the plane back to Edinburgh, not fully waking up till you picked up the local newspaper at an airport stand to see Britney’s face, with a vibrant, insolent grin, staring at you. Tomorrow
it
would go national. You took a taxi back to your Leith flat, in a new development by the docks. You were planning on speaking to Toal about the Ellis case. Then you realised that in your tiredness you’d neglected to switch on your mobile after coming off the flight. There was a message from Trudi and two from your boss. — Think we’ve got our man, Ray, he’d chirped in the last of them.

You were sure you knew who this was, but when you headed down to HQ you were surprised to find Ronnie Hamil still missing and a youth called Gary Forbes in custody. Forbes had confessed that he had taken Britney, killing her and burying her body in woodlands in Perthshire. Then you looked at Bob Toal, now utterly despondent; between leaving that message and you joining him, Toal’s confidence in this arrest had completely evaporated. It wasn’t surprising; Forbes was an idiot, desperate for attention. A gangling, introverted young man, he was obsessed with murders and serial killers and kept scrapbooks documenting their deeds. You’d watched this sad, socially neglected teenager revel in his faux bad-boy status. He was already clearly fantasising about the crazy women who would write and visit him in prison. Worst of all, though, was the way your investigative team were desperately stretching him to fit the template. Seizing on pathetic anecdotes; the neighbour who claimed he’d tortured a budgie, the young cousin who’d sustained a bad wrist-burn at his hands.

— Is this the best we can do? you’d asked. You looked around at the faces in the office; Harrower, Notman, Gillman, Drummond, McCaig.

Toal, meanwhile, sat in an ulcerous silence.

— We can comb the Highlands at this halfwit’s instigation and we’ll just be wasting manpower, Bob, you’d said. — Let’s get him to show a couple of cops where he’s supposedly hidden the body, then charge him with wasting police time.

— Yes, Toal snapped grimly, scarcely moving. — Get on to it, he’d said to Gillman, nodding curtly. The others took their cue to leave. Toal shut the door behind them, his expression and body language warning you to brace yourself. — Where in hell’s name have you been? Why did you have your phone switched off?

— You’re not going to like this.

Toal hadn’t moved a muscle.

— I flew down to Gatwick and met George Marsden. He was investigating officer on the Nula And –

— I know who the fuck he is, Ray, Toal had spat. — He’s trouble! Then your boss shook his head in disbelief, — You took off down south to meet a bitter ex-copper, a civvy, when your team are looking for a missing girl and a prime suspect? I’m disappointed in your judgement, Ray. Very, very disappointed.

You’d wanted to discuss Welwyn and Manchester, but it wasn’t the time. Anybody who had made a serious study of the latter case would have seen that there was no way Robert Ellis could have kidnapped Stacey Earnshaw. And the evidence tying him to Nula Andrews was highly contentious. But it meant taking on senior police officials and judges. It wasn’t a war you felt you could even start at this point, let alone hope to win.

Toal was incredulous. — Do you know that Ronnie Hamil’s still missing?

— We’re doing everything we can to find him, you’d said, shabbily.

— No. Your team are doing everything they can to find him. Toal’s voice was getting high and excited. — You won’t solve this case dicking around in Welwyn Garden City or Manchester. It’s the family that’s the key, mark my words! Find Ronnie Hamil, Ray!

You nodded meekly at your boss and looked forward to another long night.

Day Two

5

Two Ladies

THE LUNCHTIME TRAFFIC
is light on the freeway, as Lennox sits next to Ginger, who has been uncharacteristically cowed and silent. This suits him; he feels good that somebody else is feeling bad. He’s exhausted, but he’d been glad to see the dawn fill the room, delivering him from his sweating torment. He shakily recalls one of last night’s tortuous dreams. He was on Ginger’s balcony. Inside the apartment, through the glass, the grinning Mr Confectioner with a frightened Britney, who then became a terrified Trudi. Lennox’s own mother Avril sat in a chair watching, like she was almost encouraging the Nonce. Lennox had pulled at the door but it wouldn’t slide open. He pounded the glass till both his hands bled. When he looked behind him there was no balustrade on the balcony. And the veranda area had shrunk to become a small ledge.

A horn blares, tearing him from his thoughts.

— Spastic! Ginger roars, as he zooms in front of a big truck that dazzles Lennox with a magnificent chromium blast of reflective sunlight. He turns to Trudi in the back. — Was I out of order last night?

— No, not at all, she says, a little too emphatically. — You were great hosts and it was a good night out, I’m just suffering a wee bit now, with the jet lag and everything.