The Exiled (4 page)

* * *

The short walk to the station felt like a hundred miles. Simpson had to tell him twice that it was another missing child—another girl.

“The mother’s in a bit of a state—they’ve got her in the waiting room and she’s been sedated. We’ve got the trains stopped and the station locked down, but there’s no sign of the girl. There’s just the dead bird and…”

Simpson tailed off, but Grainger scarcely noticed. Two was starting to look like a pattern.

How many more?

They had to push their way through a crowd of indignant commuters to get across the station concourse and into the walkway that led to the platforms. Grainger’s cop instincts kicked in.

“Get statements from this lot; find out if anyone saw anything,” he said to Simpson. “Make it quick and get this scene cleared ASAP. Then get onto the station manager about their CCTV footage. And I want forensics down here on the double.”

Simpson nodded and left him to it. He walked down the steps onto the platform where in comparison to the noise up above, everything was deathly quiet. The commuters had already been cleared from down here. Across the rails on the eastbound platform people were lined up three or four deep, all just standing, staring at where three officers stood outside the waiting room. Just to the officers’ left the door to the men’s lavatory lay open.

All three of the officers looked like they’d rather be anywhere else but here.

Grainger ignored them and headed straight inside—any hesitation and he might not have managed it at all.

Like most public lavatories in busy stations it stank of piss, shit and vomit. He couldn’t go too far inside as to do so would be to contaminate what was obviously another crime scene; blood coated the floor and walls, black feathers lay strewn everywhere. One of the sinks was filled with the ravaged body of another black swan. The head and beak, torn cruelly from the neck, lay on the shelf below the main mirror, staring straight at Grainger, as if accusing him. He didn’t see any wings—although he was in no mood to look too closely.

Several small-sized footprints danced across the tiled floor, bloody and smudged. But there was no sign of a girl.

4

Alan’s social network twitched at the same time as he finished writing up his article. His excitement was growing with every word—his first front-page story, a case that was getting bigger by the second and to top it all, the perfect headline had fallen into his lap in the bar. He thought the day couldn’t get any more interesting.

Then he saw what was going on at Haymarket Station.

Alan’s online network was geared to just one purpose—to keep him ahead of breaking news stories in the city. He was on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google Plus and YouTube, following commuters, other news sites and official broadcasts, with audible alert systems set up to notify him of hotspots and peaks in traffic. He visualized it as his own little spiderweb, with him at the middle, waiting to pounce.

And now a bit of the web had thrummed. He scrolled through screeds of Twitter posts, out-of-focus videos and photographs of the ongoing scene at the railway station, trying to figure out what was going on. His nose for the story twitched on seeing one man’s short video clip, presented straight to camera by an overexcited twentysomething.

“I just wanted to go to the lavvie, but the place was bowfing; black feathers and blood everywhere. It’s a fucking disgrace, man.”

Not long after Alan started watching, the feeds went into overdrive with a new scene. Scores of pictures and video feeds turned up all showing the same thing—Alan’s older brother, John, walking onto an empty platform and going into the men’s lavatory.

There’s been another one.

Alan’s first instinct was to grab his camera and notebook and head for the station, but he knew the place would already be locked down tight, and that he was unlikely to get much of anything that other reporters wouldn’t get first. But he had the angle that the others hadn’t latched on to yet. There had been blood and feathers at both scenes. The police knew that, and he knew that. He had a head start on the competition.

It’s time to see if that’s enough to get the full story.

* * *

Instead of heading out to the scene, he went online and started digging.

In the next half an hour he learned more than he needed to know about Black Swan events, the Roman poet Juvenal, the history of Western Australia and swan upping. None of it seemed to have any relevance at all to the case at hand, but he filed all the links and downloads on his pin drive, just in case.

He tried a new tack. He searched for recent news reports mentioning black swans in the city, and when that came up blank, widened his search, first to the suburban towns, then wider afield up and down the East Coast.

Just when he thought he was getting nowhere fast, he found it. It was only a small article, in one of the Fife free papers, but his blood ran cold as he read it. It was from that morning’s edition.

“Six rare black swans vanished yesterday from a pen in the Lochside Bird Reserve near Loch Leven, where they were being held pending release to the wild. Police suspect the theft to have been organized on behalf of a specialist breeder, but as yet no suspects have been identified.”

Six.

* * *

“So, should I include it?”

Alan stood at the door of the editor’s office. George Dunlop sat at his desk, glowering.

“Have you talked to C.I.D… tried your brother?”

“Why?” Alan asked.

George looked at him.

“You don’t get to check your conscience at the door, son,” he said. “There’s a wee lassie involved—maybe two. If we can help, we have a duty to do so.”

“I know that,” Alan said, “but—”

“No buts, lad. Tell them what we know—they can decide what to do with the information.”

“They won’t answer,” Alan said. “I just get a secretary telling me nobody’s available for comment.”

“So we don’t even know if they’ve made the connection yet?”

“If it even is a connection.”

“You’re too long in the job to be naive, son. Of course it’s a bloody connection. It’s the why that’s important. But if we run it before telling them and they don’t know about it, we’ll never get anything else out of C.I.D.” George sighed and looked at his watch. “I’ll need to make the decision soon. Keep trying to get through to them. If that fails, we’ll run with what we’ve got. Any confirmation that there’s a second victim?”

“Nothing on that yet either,” Alan replied. “But we should at least mention it. Let the punters join the dots for themselves.”

George nodded.

“If we don’t, you can bet your arse every other bugger will. Get something to me in the next hour—and keep an ear to the ground. We might need to move fast if the story breaks ahead of us.”

Alan went back to his desk and added a couple of paragraphs about the situation in Haymarket. He didn’t explicitly link the event with the missing girl from the Albert Road flats, but, as he’d said, the punters were going to be able to join the dots easily enough. While typing he kept one eye on the feeds. White-suited forensics scientists were working the Haymarket crime scene now, watched over by a couple of bored-looking constables. Speculation on Twitter was rife—people had already joined the dots with no prompting required, and rumor was that there was a pedophile ring operating in plain sight under the C.I.D’s noses. Public feeling was getting ugly, and there was as yet no confirmation that there even was a second victim.

John will be getting shit coming down on him from a great height.

They hadn’t spoken much recently, but John had seen him in the bar earlier, and knew he was on the case.

If I don’t tell him, and he finds out, there’ll be hell to pay.

Alan tried phoning the station again but he didn’t even get as far as the secretary. All he got was an engaged tone. He tried three times in the next hour to no avail.

At ten p.m. George decided to run with what they had—leaving out any speculation about the black swans. Alan didn’t leave his desk. He had a feeling this story was just getting started. His gaze kept returning to the Fife newspaper article—and that one word in particular.

Six.

5

At the same time Alan was trying to get through to him, Grainger was nursing a splitting headache, mainly brought on by staring too hard for too long at out-of-focus CCTV footage of the Haymarket platform. He’d played the same scene, over and over, for hours now, and still couldn’t make head or tail of it.

The camera shows the platform—it’s a busy evening rush-hour, but even so the little girl is clearly visible, standing very still, holding her mother’s hand, obviously somewhat awed by the hurry and press of bodies as trains arrive and depart.

Then something catches her attention. She turns, staring at the open door to the men’s lavatory. The CCTV footage is too grainy to make out the details, but Grainger is pretty sure what she’s looking at. It’s a swan’s head, peering around from behind the open door, bobbing and lifting in that too-cute way they have that entices folks to feed them.

The girl looks up at her mum and tugs at the woman’s sleeve, but Mum doesn’t notice, intent on reading the arrivals board above them. The girl frowns, turns back to see that the swan is still there…

And she lets go of her mother’s hand.

It takes the woman maybe ten seconds to notice that the girl has gone. In that time the small figure walks into the dark shadows beyond the lavatory door and is lost to sight. A short, stocky man walks into the lavatory shortly afterwards and leaves straightaway, a look of disgust on his face.

Things happen fast. The woman checks the waiting room, the platform, then finally the lavatory. That’s when the screaming starts, and everything becomes a blur of action.

Grainger kept watching the footage. Nobody went in or out of the lavatory that couldn’t be traced.

Some time in that ten-second gap between her letting go of her mother’s hand and the woman noticing it, the little girl—and her assailant—vanished off the face of the earth.

* * *

Interviewing the mother had been a trial in itself. The woman was almost too distraught to speak, and when she did, it was in a painful, sobbing whisper that brought unbidden tears to anyone who heard her, no matter how hardened they thought they might be. D.S. Simpson ended up asking most of the questions, although she herself struggled with her emotions throughout.

And in the end they got nothing beyond what they saw on the CCTV footage.

“I only let go for five seconds,” the woman—Mrs. McGuire—sobbed. “What happened to my wee lassie?”

Grainger had no answer—not for Mrs. McGuire or for the clamor that was rising fast from both the media and from his superiors.

Forensics from the station lavatory proved every bit as baffling as the results from the Albert Road flats. Yet again the missing child’s footprints were found in the blood—which more than probably came from the swan—and yet again there were no stray hairs or fibers. Their only clue, if it could be called that, was the torn remains of a black swan.

And again, the wings were missing. That fact at least gave some forensics that might be useful. The wings of both dead swans had—in contrast to the carnage wrought on the bodies—been removed with surgical precision.

Somebody wanted to keep them. But why?

That was another question that needed an answer sooner rather than later.

And now that some of the adrenaline had worn off and his brain was working, he found himself thinking more and more about the thing—the swans. When he went out for a smoke around midnight—out the back, in the enclosed courtyard where the press boys couldn’t corner him—he found that D.S. Simpson had been thinking along the same lines.

“I might have something on the swans, boss,” she said as he lit up a cigarette. She finished her own smoke and lit another from the smoldering butt before continuing. “There was a robbery out in Fife last night—six swans. Six rare black swans.”

Six? Bloody hell.

He managed to keep his composure. “Any details?”

Simpson shook her head.

“I’m getting the D.I. in Fife out of his bed as we speak. He’s to call me in ten minutes to fill us in. But his D.S. said there were no real clues—the birds were taken from the sanctuary at Loch Leven and—”

“Let me guess? It was as if they vanished into thin air?”

Simpson nodded.

“Somebody’s pulling our chain here, boss,” she said.

Grainger grunted in reply.

“A bloody magician. That’s all we need. And we’d better hope we find those wee lassies fast, because I’ve got a feeling that if we don’t, there’s going to be four more for us to look for.”