Dark Flight (14 page)

‘I did it myself.’

Bill caught Malchie’s hand, silencing it.

He tried to pull away, then let the hand go limp.

Bill had a closer look at the diagonal cross between his thumb and forefinger. It was roughly done, more like a scar than a tattoo. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Nothing. It means nothing.’

‘This shape was painted on the inside wall of that building.’

‘So?’

Bill suspected that Malchie had spent his entire life talking like this. A mixture of belligerence and defiance. Malchie fought because he knew no other way to live. Everyone was out to get him, and he was out to get them back.

His mother sipped at her mug of tea, taking pleasure at not being the one on the receiving end for a change.

Bill took a moment to glance over Rhona’s statement. Malchie went back to his drumming. Bill could have cheerfully chopped off his hand had a machete been available.

He stood up. Malchie regarded him with empty eyes.

‘Your mate’s here.’

The look clouded with concern.

‘Let’s hear what
he
has to say.’

‘Nothing!’ Malchie shouted at Bill’s back. ‘Fuck nothing!’

Danny was out of the toilet, but looked like it might not be for long. His face was pasty under the freckles, his hand cradling his stomach, his breathing laboured.

The room was airless and smoke-filled. Danny
Senior was drawing on a cigarette as though it was his last, sucking every last drop of nicotine and associated carcinogens with it.

Bill threw open the window and a Baltic breeze swept in.

‘Hey. That’s fucking freezing!’

Bill gave the fag a pointed look.

Big Danny took a last draw and stubbed it out as though the ashtray were Bill’s face.

The blast of fresh air brought some colour to young Danny’s cheeks and he was breathing easier. He moved his stomach hand to his pocket and sat up in the chair, throwing swift questioning glances at his father.

These two had had no chance of a private confab between home and the police station. And they hadn’t been left alone since they got here. Bill had made sure of that.

‘So what do you know about the round building on the waste ground, Danny?’

It wasn’t what the youth expected to hear.

He paled, then went red.

He shot his father a quick look.

‘Nothing,’ he managed.

‘The CCTV caught you drinking and smoking nearby and . . .’ he gestured to Rhona’s statement, ‘assaulting a female scene of crime officer.’

Young Danny rushed in. ‘She said she was looking for plants . . .’ then tailed off, his stupidity reflected in the threatening look doled out by his father.

‘Stupid wee git.’ Big Danny shook his head in disbelief. ‘Takes after his mother.’

‘Danny, listen very carefully. There is a small boy missing. His mother and grandmother were murdered. We think he might have been taken to that building, so it’s very important you try to remember anyone you’ve seen hanging round there.’

Even Big Danny drew himself up at the word
murder
.

‘You don’t think he had anything to do with—’

Bill interrupted his worried words. ‘Well, Danny?’

The youth opened his mouth and shut it again, like a dying fish.

Bill raised his voice. ‘Well, Danny?’

‘I seen a white van, that’s all.’ Then it came pouring out like verbal diarrhoea. ‘I said to Malchie, maybe there was stolen stuff we could get, sell for drink. We waited until the van went away and then we tried to get in, but it was locked. There was this smell, this fucking awful smell.’

‘And?’

‘And nothing. We couldn’t get in.’

‘When did you see the van?’

‘Friday afternoon.’

‘Did you see it after that?’

‘Naw.’

‘Do you remember the number plate?’

‘I didn’t give a fuck about the number plate.’ Danny had grown braver with his confession, but not for long.

‘Right.’ Bill made a big show of looking at Rhona’s statement again. ‘Now let’s talk about this sexual assault charge.’

THE FRONT DOOR
of 10 River Road was opened by a young woman in her teens, with very straight long blonde hair. She wore jeans with slits across the thighs and a cut-off top that exposed a diamond belly-button stud. A child of about three peeked out between her legs. He had a Postman Pat van in his hand.

Janice gave him a smile and he looked up quizzically at his mum.

Janice showed her ID. ‘Detective Constable Janice Clark. We’re looking for a missing boy.’ She offered the photo of Stephen and the woman examined it with interest. ‘We believe he has been in this area. Have you seen him?’

She looked sorry to have to say no. ‘There’s no coloured kids around here except for the Sikh family, and they’ve got two little girls.’

‘What about a white van hanging around the waste ground?’

She gave a snort of laughter and smiled cynically. Her teeth were pearly white, as though she had had them painted.

‘The council put up that sign about fines. Fat lot of good that did. The vans are queuing up here at weekends.
If the council have got CCTV footage, they’re doing nothing with it.’

Janice thanked her and left. As the door closed there was a wail of anguish from the child and some soothing words of comfort from the mother.

The next three residents of River Road said much the same. No one had seen Stephen or any black kid. They moaned about the dumping, were angry that nothing was being done about it.

‘No niggers here!’ one large tattooed man told her in no uncertain terms, like an echo of the Reverend Ian Paisley shouting, ‘No surrender’. Janice didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when he shut the door in her face.

The last house on River Road sported a smart patio table and chairs and pots of multicoloured primroses. When she rang the bell, a dog gave a high-pitched bark. She could see its thin dark body behind the glass.

She checked the name on the door as someone came wheezing through the hall. Janice waited for Mr Martin to get his breath back before she posed her question and showed him the photo.

‘Never seen the lad and I walk the waste ground a lot with Chippie here.’

‘Have you seen anything suspicious in the area, apart from the dumping?’ She didn’t want to go into all that again.

He gave her a sharp look. ‘Kids hang about the old farm, drinking and smoking dope. There’s nothing here for them any more. No jobs now the steelworks and mines are gone.’

Janice brought up the subject of the white van and he thought for a moment.

‘There was a van near the concrete building with the funny roof. I thought it was odd. They usually dump on the old Kenmuir Road or at the farm. Is the van something to do with the missing kid?’

‘Could be. When did you see it?’

‘Monday. Aye, it was definitely Monday. I didn’t feel like going out, my chest was that bad. But Chippie here kept on at me.’ He looked fondly down at the whippet sitting at his feet.

‘What time was that?’

‘Teatime. Five o’clock.’

‘You don’t remember the registration number, do you?’ It was a forlorn hope.

‘As a matter of fact I do. I thought I’d report it to the council. I tried, but I kept getting that press button one for this, two for that. I got confused and gave up.’

Janice couldn’t believe her luck. Who said house-to-house took up too much time and produced nothing?

‘S 064 OXO. I remembered it because I’m sixty-four and I like a cube of Oxo in my mince.’

Janice could have kissed him. ‘Thanks, Mr Martin.’

‘Nae problem, hen.’

Janice called in the registration number to the police station, for it to be traced. She had messed up with Dr Olatunde; this might improve her standing with the boss. She had two streets left to cover. By the time she’d done them, there might be some news,
a name and address back for the owner of the van. That might bring a smile, however grim, to DI Wilson’s face.

She had made mistakes before. They all had. But the DI had never stripped her down like that, made her feel and look stupid. Anger was something he kept for the criminals. She didn’t like what was happening to him. She didn’t like the change in their relationship. It made her feel inadequate and not up to the job.

After giving her report she asked to be put through to the DI. He listened to her news, then without altering the tone of his voice told her to meet him right away at the Nigerian Church of God on Maryhill Road.

If she’d expected congratulations she was let down. It was the DI’s way to encourage his team whenever possible. Turning up a number plate on a suspect vehicle in a murder hunt was just such an occasion, she’d thought.

Janice bit back her disappointment. Half the reason she enjoyed the job was because of her superior officer. Something was very wrong with DI Wilson and she would never be able to ask what it was. She said her goodbyes to the rest of the door-to-door team and headed for the car.

Through the railway bridge she could see the distant incident tent. The bridge had been sealed off so no one could look down on the scene of crime officers methodically searching the waste ground.

Mr Martin had taken to the river bank with his whippet. He was tossing a stick and waiting for
Chippie to bring it back. A young mother with an empty pushchair followed a wobbly toddler across the grass. On one side of the bridge, normal life ticked on; on the other side, life was anything but normal.

CASTING A FOOTWEAR
impression in the soft soil around the entrance to the altar building had been tricky. She’d mixed the standard 800gms of dental stone with 300mls of water, hoping the consistency wouldn’t prove too thin. The liberal use of hairspray sealed the impression, preventing the casting material from damaging the finer details. It took half an hour in situ to set, then overnight air drying in the lab before she could begin to clean it.

Rhona moved the fine brush delicately over the surface. Too heavy a hand could remove the detail she needed to preserve.

She already had a test print from the small trainer found near the altar. A layer of water-based ink painted on the sole had produced an imprint in acetate. The child’s partial print in blood from the kitchen and the dust one from the gate sat side by side with the imprint from the actual shoe. She had examined them in detail. Because her test impression hadn’t been produced while being worn, it was lighter, but the random damage characteristics were identical.

The trainer belonged to Stephen.

She laid down the brush and fetched the scene of
crime prints for the adult shoe. The distinctive pattern of the sole identified by searching 3,500 sole patterns of 220 brands in the Solemate database, was the same. Of three areas of damage from casual wear on the waste-ground impression, two were visible in the same locations on the partial print from the kitchen.

The man entering the cylindrical building on the waste ground had walked through Carole’s blood in the kitchen.

He had brought Stephen to that place and taken him away again. Whether Stephen was dead or alive, she couldn’t tell.

Rhona had kept her mind solely on the job up to this point. As she wrote up her findings, the soft Irish voice of the previous evening crept back. She instinctively knew that Kitty Maguire was telling the truth. She was Sean’s wife. A wife he had never alluded to in all the time they had known each other. Secrets. Secrets and lies. She silently admonished herself. She too held secrets. McNab was one of them. But you could not burden each new relationship with a confession of past failures.

Once, sitting in a restaurant, she had overheard a couple at the next table. A woman in her thirties spoke to an older man as a friend, perhaps even her father. ‘I have sixteen years of failed relationships behind me,’ she’d said.

It had been a startling admission, spoken in a resigned manner, with lost hope at its core.

An echo of her own personal life until she met Sean . . . or until last night, before the phone rang. Their
relationship had survived many things, including imagined and actual infidelity on both sides. It had never had to face a wife.

‘I love you.’ The unexpected announcement had stunned her. She had not reciprocated, thinking it prompted by loss and alcohol.

Perhaps Sean had foreseen that his father’s illness would bring more than just death into their lives.

Death in many ways was her life. Violent death. It was a morbid thought. She shivered, feeling a sudden cold draught from nowhere.

Judy had returned the finger bones. ‘They give me the creeps,’ she’d admitted, which was strange coming from someone for whom the study of old bones was as much a passion as a profession. Rhona ran her eyes over the detailed report that had come back from GUARD.

The bones were the answer to everything. Why Carole and her mother were murdered, why Stephen was taken, why Abel had been killed.

They had revealed their owner’s age and gender and where the eight-year-old boy had grown up.

That boy, according to GUARD, had been Abel.

The bones were defleshed using a knife
, Judy wrote,
its tiny surface cuts visible under a low-magnifying microscope. The same knife cut the three striations on each bone. Imperfections along the blade left their identifying marks. No peroxide was used to whiten them
.

The cross cut on Carole’s back suggested the same knife that killed her and her mother, had stripped the bones clean. In Dr Sissons’s opinion there had been
only one attacker. And he had taken his knife with him to use again.

Rhona’s imagination was already generating the next scenario. The one that included Stephen.

A missing child was everyone’s child.

A murdered child became your own.

The odds that Stephen was still alive had been falling with exponential speed. If only she had been faster about identifying the trichomes, swifter at finding the locations of viper’s bugloss, searched the waste ground earlier, they might have found Stephen instead of his shoe.

If. Such a small word. Such big consequences.