Devil in the Detail (Scott Cullen Mysteries) (6 page)

"Who would have been the last person to see Mandy?" asked Bain.

"My wife put her to bed at nine last night," said Gibson.
 

"Do you have any idea how she got out of the house?" asked Bain.

Elaine furrowed her brow. "That's the thing," she said. "We've no idea how it could have happened again."

"Again?" asked Cullen.

"Well, yes," replied Elaine, turning to look at him. "She has run away many times before."

"How many times are we talking here?" asked Bain.

Elaine shrugged. "Twenty? Maybe more?"

"Where would she go?" asked Cullen.

Elaine sniffed. "She would usually go to Susan Russell's," she said, "her best friend."

Cullen scribbled the name in his notebook. He glanced over and saw Caldwell was furiously scribbling everything down in shorthand. "Does Susan live locally?" he asked.

"Just round the corner," she said, "on Aberlady Lane. There's a path that runs down the back of the houses, she usually took that."

"I understand that your daughter is mentally handicapped?"

Bain frowned at Cullen - Lamb clearly hadn't told him.

Elaine wiped her eye. Gibson clutched her hand tight. "Yes, Mandy was handicapped," said Gibson. "We used to live in Edinburgh and... Well, she was a bright young girl, smarter than most at that age." He gave a big gulp. "She was run over by a bus one day. She was lucky to survive. She was in hospital for months and months. After she was released, we decided to have a new start. I worked at Alba Bank in the centre of Edinburgh, but I transferred through to manage the branch here. I was burning out - my career was taking me across the entire branch network across the UK. I was exhausted all of the time, away from home four nights a week. Working weekends once every two months. When Mandy's accident happened, it made Elaine and I reappraise our lifestyle. Elaine left her job to look after Mandy."

"I'm sorry." Elaine left the room, her hand clutched to her face. Gibson watched her go. They heard the back door slam.

"I'm sorry," said Gibson, pinching his brow. "This has hit my wife hard."

"I understand," said Bain, "I'm sure it must be very hard for you both." There was no sympathy or empathy in his voice, just the same even tone that Cullen had heard him use so many times in situations like these.

"Believe me, it is."

Bain nodded. "What about your son?" he asked, pointing towards Thomas. "Was he up late or anything? Could he have let someone in?"

Gibson violently shook his head. "Absolutely not," he said. "Thomas was early to bed last night, as with every Sunday." He looked over at the boy. "Tell them."

"I was in bed at half nine," said the teenager, in a deep voice. "I was reading my Kindle."

Bain nodded then paused for a few seconds. "Is it possible that Mandy could have been abducted?" he asked.

Gibson's forehead creased in thought. "I don't think so," he said. "I mean, I don't think anybody came in the house last night. I'm a really light sleeper and I would have heard."

"Could it have been a kidnap attempt?" asked Cullen. "You obviously have a lot of money - expensive house, expensive cars. You're a bank manager, which is a job that can lead to extortion. We need to consider the possibility that your daughter was abducted due to your position."
 

Gibson sat back on the sofa, reclining it slightly. "Being a branch manager is not like it used to be," he said. "It's a sales role these days. I manage product targets and some very junior staff. I don't have autonomy to give loans or mortgages on the golf course like in some sitcom. That's all handled centrally. There's no big safe or bank vault that only I can access."

Cullen noted it all down. The look on Bain's face didn't make him want to press it any further at that point.

"After you noticed Mandy wasn't there, what did you do next?" asked Bain.

"It's all a bit of a blur, really," said Gibson. "I remember looking around the house, in the attic, around the garden, in the garages. Elaine made me go up to the Russells' to see if she'd gone there again. But she hadn't. That was when we decided to call the police."

"And the body turned up an hour or so later?" asked Cullen.

"I'm afraid so, yes."

"And it definitely is Mandy?" asked Cullen.

Gibson exhaled. "It is," he said. "I was up there this morning. I saw her body."

Bain shot a look at Cullen. "What did you do yesterday?" he asked.

"In the afternoon, we went to the East Links Country Park by Dunbar," said Gibson. "Mandy loved patting the animals." He looked at Thomas. "Her poor brother was bored to tears by this, of course, but we wanted to keep poor Mandy happy. He spent the afternoon playing Angry Birds on his phone. We then had our Sunday dinner, roast chicken with all the trimmings. Mandy's favourite but she could never manage to eat much of it."

"And before that?" asked Bain, stroking his moustache.

"We went to Church."

"As a family?"

"Indeed."

"Is that the Church of Scotland on the High Street?" asked Cullen.

Gibson smiled. "No, we're no longer members of the Parish there," he said. "We attend the God's Rainbow group."

Cullen had noticed a rainbow on a building on the High Street.
 

"Never heard of it," said Bain.

Gibson's eyes suddenly lit up. "It takes elements of Christianity and Judaism and exposes the truth in all of the Gospels," he said. "It teaches us a way to live our lives in the modern world."

"How big is this group?"

"It is just based in Garleton at present," said Gibson, "though we do have plans to expand."

"We?"

"Well, yes," said Gibson. "I am training to become a minister in the church. I feel that I have incurred sins in my profession as a banker. I need to cleanse them more substantially than I do with my one-on-one sessions with Father Mulgrew. I want to take our word to the world - Father Mulgrew intends to move away from this parish and set up in another town. East Linton is the favourite."

"And is Father Mulgrew the minister at this God's Rainbow?" asked Cullen.

Gibson paused for a second. "Father Seamus Mulgrew is the head of our church," he said, "if that's what you mean."

Cullen obtained an address for Mulgrew and the church.

"And did anything unusual happen during the service?" asked Cullen.

Gibson twitched. "No, it was perfectly normal, I'm afraid."

Elaine Gibson reappeared at that point, her face flushed. She was accompanied by the dog, its tail wagging furiously - it ran over to Cullen and started sniffing at him. Elaine sat down next to her husband and cuddled in tight next to him. "I'm sorry," she said. "This is proving a bit too much for me."

"I understand," said Bain. "Can I ask both of you if there is anyone who you think would have wanted to harm your daughter?"

Gibson screwed his face up and let out a sigh. "Define what you mean by harm," he said, almost in an undertone.

"Mr Gibson, your daughter has turned up in a shallow grave three miles from her house," said Bain, "can you think of anyone who would wish to do that to her?"

"The only person I could even consider as being responsible for this would be Jamie Cook," said Gibson.

"Charles," said Elaine, her eyes wide. "Robert and Wilma are our friends, how could you consider accusing their son of that?"

"I could accuse that boy of bloody anything," said Gibson. He looked at Bain. "He is the local problem child."

"Is he capable of murder?" asked Bain.

"Capable of anything," said Gibson.

"Anybody else?"

Gibson shook his head slowly. "We make sure that we don't wrong anyone," he said. "Jamie makes sure that he wrongs everyone."

Elaine Gibson had shrunk back in the sofa, almost disappearing from sight, or so Cullen felt.

"Fine," said Bain. He checked his watch. "I'm expecting some Scene of Crime Officers around here soon."

"Is that strictly necessary?" asked Gibson.

Bain nodded. "We need to be extremely rigorous with this investigation," he said. "We can't rule anything out at this stage. I'm sure you want your daughter's killer to be brought to justice."

"Yes, but we are a family in mourning," said Gibson.

"There'll be plenty of time for that later," said Bain. "Right now, the priority is looking for any telltale signs of intrusion in here. As it stands, we do not know how your daughter disappeared from her bedroom."

"I told you," said Gibson, "she probably ran away."

"I'm not a man that takes probably for an answer," said Bain.

Cullen almost shook his head in disbelief. If ever there was a police officer that enacted entire vendettas on the flimsiest of premises then it was Bain.

"Fine."

Bain looked over at Elaine Gibson. "Would your son be able to show DC Cullen here around Mandy's bedroom?"

Cullen pulled the curtain aside and looked out at the garden. Mandy's room faced to the back of the house, looking south. The ground sloped up from the house to the Hopetoun monument, a local landmark that could be seen all the way from Edinburgh.

He checked the window, shut tight and locked with no sign of the key. He faced back into the room.
 

Elaine Gibson stood in the doorway, arms folded, looking as if she was going to break down again at any moment. Cullen didn't particularly want her or her son with him at that point, but he had to follow Bain's instructions.

"Do you know where the key to the window is?" he asked.

"It's in the safe in our room," she said. "It's still there, I have checked."

Mandy's room was bigger than any bedroom Cullen had ever been in. It was decorated in pink and looked more like it belonged to a six or seven year old. There were rainbows and trees stencilled on the wall in thick paint. There were a few My Little Pony posters on the wall. Cullen's younger sister had the dolls when they were kids in the 80s - he'd recently read about them becoming popular again, particularly with a weird faction of adult men.

A lamp sat on the bedside table, still on. The bed had clearly been slept in - the purple duvet was pulled back, revealing the crumpled pink bed sheet with a purple pillow. The rest of the duvet was covered in teddy bears - most of them were Disney-branded.

"You put her to bed last night?" asked Cullen.

Elaine nodded. "She was like a five year old," she said. "She used to need a story to get her to sleep. She could sleep through anything."

"When she gets out, is she sleepwalking?" asked Cullen.
 

"No," she said. "She seems to be awake and fully aware of what's going on. There were a couple of times when she escaped and we caught her. She ran off down the lane and we didn't catch her until the Russells' house. I'm sure you can imagine how difficult it was with that happening in the middle of the night."

"How long has she been doing this for?"

"It's going back a couple of years," she said. "Maybe eighteen months."

"It's not exactly normal behaviour," said Cullen. "Do you have any idea why she was doing it?"

Elaine glared at him. "Since her accident, Constable, she has not exactly been normal." She exhaled loudly. "We have been to behavioural psychologists about it. Nobody could get to the bottom of it."

"Could you give us the names of the people you spoke to?"

She frowned. "Why?"

Cullen smiled. "You heard my boss downstairs," he said. "With a case like this, we can't rule anything out."

"I'll see what I can find," she said.
 

"What have you done to stop her getting out?" he asked.

"What haven't we tried?"

"Have you put a lock on her door?"

She closed her eyes. "My daughter is not some animal in the zoo."

"So how did she escape then?"

"She was very mischievous," she said. "She would steal a key and hide it from us."

Cullen noted it down.

"Is there anything else?" she asked.

Cullen took a long look around the room. Her school uniform sat on a chair in front of a dressing table, her small leather satchel hanging off the back.

"Let's get back downstairs," he said.

*

In the cool January air, Elaine Gibson opened the gate and led them down the path. She was wrapped up tight in a big ski jacket, a thick scarf wrapped around her neck.
 

Bain had instructed them to retrace Mandy's likely steps - Cullen felt as though he was marking time. Although it seemed to Cullen like overkill, they were accompanied by Caldwell, Thomas Gibson and ADC Law.
 

The small lane ran from the midway point in the arc of Dunpender Drive to the end of Aberlady Lane, just off Aberlady Road, the main road out of Garleton on the west side of the town. Six foot tall wooden fences lined both sides of the lane. Cullen could only just see across the tops into the immaculate, sprawling gardens on either side - a large green lawn on the left, a pebbles and decking affair on the right. The tarmac pavement underfoot was a mush of rotten leaves, no doubt dropped months previously from the now-bare oaks that lined the path, set in a few feet worth of bare earth. It had been raining all day and had just recently stopped, the grey clouds still ominously cruising overhead.
 

"Is this the only way?" asked Cullen, as they slowly walked on, keeping eyes open for anything useful.

"It's the most direct way," said Elaine. "You could go down the main road and double back, but it's a long way round. The other way is around the park, but this is the quickest way to the park."

"We usually walk Monkey this way," said Thomas, his expression unreadable.

"Is Monkey your dog?" asked Law.

"He is," he said. "Mandy named him." He turned away from them.

Cullen saw a right-angled twist in the path ahead. A gate lay straight ahead of them.

"Does this path lead to the park?" asked Cullen.

"It does," said Elaine. "It ends up at the top of Aberlady Drive and there's an entrance to the park there. We let monkey off there."

"And you caught Mandy running away down this path?" asked Cullen.