by LJ Ross
* * *
Ryan’s bald statement was met with an astonished silence.
“You think there aren’t people like that, out there in the world?” he said. “Ask yourselves, why do people go to Africa and stalk lions, or elephants, then post pictures of themselves online sitting smugly beside the dead carcasses?”
He swallowed revulsion, at the thought.
“It’s not so different,” he said softly. “Here, we’re sitting in an enormous open landscape, filled with tumbledown houses and pele towers, woods and caves. Better yet, hardly anybody comes out here, other than the army, who stick to a schedule that they helpfully post online. If somebody had a mind to, they could put all that information to use, and live out their worst fantasies.”
“If there is somebody out there doing that, why would they let the lass run into the line of army fire? If makes no sense, from their point of view,” Phillips argued.
“I agree, and it was a stumbling block to my theory,” Ryan said. “That is, until I checked with Major Jones, who told me that the planned schedule of live-fire training for Thursday and Friday was altered, late on Wednesday.”
“That’s true,” Malloy said. “I checked all the details of the advance planning stages, as part of the report I’ll be submitting to DAIB.”
Ryan nodded, then leaned back against the wall and folded his arms.
“It’s conceivable that whoever we’re looking for didn’t check for any recent updates to the scheduling, particularly as things usually run like clockwork around here. It’s possible he or she was taken by surprise, too.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying? You reckon we’ve got a long-term operator on our hands?”
“I think it’s a very strong possibility, Frank. Whoever it is knew how to choose the perfect victim, and managed to lure them or entrap them without fear of discovery,” Ryan said, ticking things off each of his fingers. “He or she must have a holding cell of some kind; a safe place he takes them to, before he releases them out onto the moors, where he can chase them like a hound. This place is remote, but he’d need somewhere he can be completely confident his quarry won’t escape before he’s ready.”
“They’d need to be mobile,” Faulkner said. “Presumably, they’ll have already taken the time to stake out places to pick up their quarry.”
Ryan nodded.
“Yes, I think they must have it down to a fine art, by now. I don’t have any evidence yet, but I’m going to theorise that the person we’re looking for has killed numerous times before.”
“Do you think they’re army personnel?” Malloy asked, and was almost afraid of the answer. In her line of work, she’d met men and women who’d cracked; gone off the boil, or whatever you wanted to call it. She’d seen their vacant, glassy-eyed expressions as they’d described killing a vulnerable woman or child during an active tour, hoping that people such as herself would not think to investigate.
But they did, and she would.
She believed in a code, just as much as Ryan did.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said, honestly. “It’s possible they’re ex-military, and they know the terrain well.”
Malloy paled slightly, thinking of the headlines that would be splashed all over the news, once word got out.
“Earlier today, I started looking back over old Missing Persons reports,” Ryan continued. “Experience teaches us that, at the start of their killing careers, serial killers tend to hunt for victims geographically far away from where they live themselves, although still close enough, or familiar enough, to allow them to move freely and make a quick getaway if need be. As they grow in confidence, the geographic circle gets smaller and smaller, until they get so complacent that they snatch victims who live practically on their own doorstep.”
“We don’t know that we’ve got a serial on our hands yet,” Phillips said.
“No, but when you look at all the factors I’ve mentioned, it’s a solid possibility. Why else kill Layla Bruce in that way? If she was pushing drugs, or got caught up in something bad, organised gangs don’t waste their time or energy hunting people over hill and vale. They’d have killed her, execution-style, and dumped the body or buried it somewhere we’d never find it.”
Phillips had to admit that was true.
“If someone’s been operating for a while, surely they would have come to our attention, by now,” Malloy said.
“Not if they’re very careful,” Ryan said. “In fact, there’s no reason they ever would have come to our attention, until they miscalculated the dates of that training exercise. Even then, there was at least a fifty-fifty chance somebody from CID would have come along and written it all off as an accidental death, then shoved the file in a drawer, somewhere. But they made another serious error, which was to shoot Layla using their own rifle, rather than allowing the soldiers to do the work for him. It would have been safer, and smarter, not to use their own bullet.”
Outside, the skies finally opened, and rain began to patter gently against the window panes. To Ryan, it represented the beat of a battle drum, and he turned back to face his small army of troops.
“I want a list of all missing persons within a fifty-mile radius of here, going back over the past ten years,” he said. “I want another list of all known red-light districts within the same radius, and we’ll need to liaise with local police teams to get the most up-to-date information, on that score. We’ve got a killer who thinks they own the map, so let’s make ourselves a new one.”
* * *
It was raining.
The woman could hear it, somewhere outside, and the distant pitter-patter brought tears to her eyes.
All around her was darkness, an endless black hole of stagnant air that smelled of old faeces and something much, much worse.
It smelled of death.
At first, she had wondered whether this was where all the bad people went, when they died. Had she been so terribly bad in her life, that she deserved to spend an eternity in such a place?
And he—the person who’d brought her here—perhaps he was the devil. Maybe he was her punishment for every trick she’d ever turned, every drug she’d ever taken, every time she’d fallen from grace.
She wasn’t dead yet, but she knew she would die in that place, and that nobody would mourn her passing. There would be no search party reported on the six o’clock news, nor any tearful messages from the pillars of her community—for she had no community.
She only had herself, which was how it had always been.
She leaned her aching head back against the damp stone wall and listened.
She could still hear the rain.
She must be alive.
CHAPTER 19
The Bruce family lived in a smart bungalow overlooking the golf course in St Boswells—a village in the Scottish Borders known chiefly for being a stopping point along St Cuthbert’s Way, which was a sixty-two-mile pilgrimage trail connecting the Scottish town of Melrose and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland. Ryan and Phillips made the journey from Otterburn through a steady fall of rain, and then sat for a moment by the kerb with the windscreen wipers swooshing back and forth, to gather their strength for the emotional ordeal that lay ahead.
“Never gets any easier, does it?” Ryan murmured.
“Nope,” Phillips said, roundly. “Wine gum?”
“No thanks.”
They watched the windscreen wipers for another minute or two in companionable silence, while Phillips chomped on his wine gums.
“It scares the hell out of me, when I think about how their girl was only seventeen when she left home, or went missing. That’s only seven years older than Samantha is now.”
Ryan nodded.
“Not that I have much experience of this first-hand, but I’ve heard that the main job of a parent is to worry constantly.”
Phillips snorted.
“You’re not wrong. Sam asked me the other day if she c
ould walk down to the corner shop for a bag of sweets on her own, and I was worried sick. It was just normal, though, when we were kids.”
Ryan thought back to his own, highly regimented childhood as the son of a high-ranking British diplomat and thought that there was a time when he would have given all that he owned for the kind of freedom Frank had enjoyed.
“You’ll find the right balance, Frank. You and Denise seem to do it as naturally as breathing.”
Phillips gave him a startled look.
“I—well, thanks, lad. It doesn’t always feel that way.”
He paused, wondering whether to ask the next, highly personal question on his mind. Sensing his indecision, Ryan smiled and took pity on him.
“Not yet,” he said.
“What?”
“The answer to your question is, ‘not yet’,” Ryan repeated. “Anna and I are looking forward to being parents, one day, but there isn’t any mad rush. Also—”
He hesitated, unsure whether to discuss matters that were so close to the heart. Then again, Frank was more than just his sergeant, or his friend.
He was family.
“The fact is, Frank, we’re not sure whether Anna will be able to have children.”
Phillips put a hand on his friend’s arm in silent support.
“I’m sorry, lad,” he said quietly. “It was insensitive of me to ask. I never thought—”
“No, neither did we,” Ryan said, and his lips twisted. “Keep your fingers crossed for us.”
“Fingers, eyes and toes,” Frank promised.
Ryan nodded, and let out the breath he’d been holding.
“Right, shall we get this over with?”
“Howay then,” Phillips said, reaching for the door. “Age before beauty.”
* * *
Margaret Bruce had the hollow-eyed look of a woman who hadn’t slept in four years.
When she answered the door, she looked between the two detectives and clutched a hand to her throat.
They knew, Ryan thought. Mothers always knew, long before he said the words
“Mrs Bruce?”
“Stuart!” she called out to her husband, who’d been sitting reading a paper in the living room.
“What is it, love? Who—?”
“Mr and Mrs Bruce?” Ryan held out his warrant card. “I’m DCI Ryan and this is my colleague, DS Frank Phillips. We’re from Northumbria CID. May we come in?”
He saw the conflict on the woman’s face; the fleeting, hopeless thought that, if she refused them entry, it would delay the rest.
“Come in,” her husband said quietly.
Both men stepped inside and wiped their feet on the mat.
“You’d better come through,” Stuart Bruce said, as his wife began to cry silently.
Ryan felt a burning at the back of his throat, a tight ball of emotion he kept under rigid control. It was not his place to cry with these people; that wouldn’t help them to recover from the loss of their daughter.
Once they were seated on the sofa, Ryan said the words.
“I regret to inform you that your daughter, Layla, was killed yesterday morning. Please accept our sincere condolences for your loss.”
The words were trite and formal, but there were no better ones. He’d tried them all.
Margaret’s shoulders began to shake violently, and she let out a gut-wrenching sob. From the corner of his eye, Ryan caught the stiffening of his friend’s shoulders and knew that Phillips too was fighting his own battle against a rising tide of emotion.
Margaret’s husband drew her body towards him and they clung together for long minutes, while Ryan and Phillips waited, feeling horribly voyeuristic.
“How?” she managed to whisper. “How did she die?”
“Our enquiries are ongoing, Mrs Bruce, but your daughter was killed during a night-time, live-fire tactical training exercise at the Otterburn Ranges.”
Ryan drew out a hand-written card, signed by all the officers from the 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and left it on the coffee table.
“The Army will be contacting you separately but, in the meantime, they’ve asked me to convey their deepest sympathies.”
“Was she a soldier? Had she become a soldier?”
Ryan looked into her desperate eyes, and wished he could give her something to cling to. He wished he knew how Layla Bruce had spent her days, but he didn’t, and it was unlikely now that they ever would.
“No, she wasn’t a soldier,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mrs Bruce, but we’re still in the early stages of our investigation. We understand this is a very difficult time for you, but if you can spare us a few minutes to talk about Layla, that would be enormously helpful to us.”
“We haven’t seen Layla in four years,” her father said, and by the pallor of his skin, he seemed to have aged at least ten years since he first answered the door. “We hardly knew our daughter, anymore, detective.”
“I understand you filed a Missing Persons Report, back in March of 2015?” Ryan prompted.
Margaret and Stuart nodded.
“She hadn’t come home for three days,” her mother explained. “That was the worst it had ever been, and I was beside myself. When I went into her room later, I found one of her backpacks missing, and she’d taken some things away with her. The police said that, because she was over sixteen, there wasn’t much they could do.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Ryan murmured, and made a mental note to look up the name of the officer who’d handled their case. “Did Layla have a boyfriend at that time?”
Margaret let out an ugly laugh.
“Oh, aye. About ten of them.”
“Was there anyone special, or anyone who concerned her?”
They shook their heads.
“She never told us anything like that,” Margaret said. “She was very secretive.”
Ryan paused to consider how best to frame his next question.
“Did Layla have access to a computer, or a laptop?”
They shook their heads again.
“Well, I mean, I’ve got my computer in the study, but she didn’t use that much. She did have a phone—you know what kids these days are like.”
Ryan and Phillips nodded.
“Do you remember the names of any of her boyfriends?” Ryan asked.
“There was one lad,” Margaret said. “He was a sweet thing, used to come around almost every day to help her with her studies.”
Once again, Ryan and Phillips maintained a professional front, even if they queried what ‘helping with her studies’ had actually entailed.
“Do you have his name?”
But Margaret began to weep again, and Ryan knew she would soon reach the point where she no longer heard the questions he was asking.
“Why don’t you tell us a bit about when she was little?” Phillips suggested, to change the focus. “What did she like to play with, what were her favourite bands and all that?”
“She was a happy little girl with blonde plaits,” her father said, and then brushed tears from his eyes. “I don’t know when she started to change. Maybe fourteen, or fifteen? I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“She liked Westlife, and High School Musical. She had one of those banners, from the movie. It’s all still there, in her room,” Margaret whispered. “You can go in, if you like.”
They thanked her, and followed Stuart along the hallway to a bedroom at the very end, which had been locked.
“She doesn’t like anything to be moved around, or changed,” he warned them.
“We understand, Mr Bruce. Thank you.”
They stepped across the threshold and into a dusty lilac bedroom that had once belonged to a girl in her mid or late teens. There was a single bed with a purple cover, and a pile of young teen fiction books on the bedside table. Dozens of printed photographs had been tacked to the wall, their colours now faded with age, and posters of various pop bands had been stuck to the remaining walls in a haphazard fashion.
/> Phillips opened the wardrobe door to reveal a rack full of nice clothes and shoes, all carefully washed and pressed. On the shelves, there were trinkets from family holidays at home and abroad; everything from musical boxes to tiny figurines of prancing horses.
“It looks like she had a lovely childhood,” Phillips said. “Why would a girl like that leave home?”
“I don’t think we’re speaking to the right people,” Ryan said, and tapped a picture of Layla grinning beside a girl of the same age. On the back, she’d inscribed, ‘Me and Tammy at Kielder, June 2014’. There were more photographs of Layla with the same girl, in a variety of settings.
“Aye, she’s the best friend,” Phillips agreed. “Let’s see if we can find out her full name, and where she lives now.”
* * *
Tammy Crichton still lived with her parents, only a few streets away from the Bruce household. Ryan and Phillips spent some more time with Layla’s family but, when it became clear they needed their own space to grieve, they made a respectful retreat.
Serendipitously, Tammy was the one to answer the door when they knocked on the enormous brass knocker carved in the shape of two giant golf balls.
“Sorry, Pearl isn’t home,” she said, operating on automatic pilot. Her mother was captain of the ladies’ golf team, which made her de facto head of all things gossip-related in the town, and it was a running joke in the Crichton household that they might as well replace the front door with a revolving one.
“We haven’t come to see her—we’ve come to see you, actually. It’s Tammy, isn’t it?” Ryan asked, and began to fish out his warrant card.
“Oh, my God—oh, my God,” she said, in quick succession. “First of all, let me just say, it’s ridiculous that Ally would call the police over something so trivial. I’ve already told her, I’ll pay for a new air-con system, for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t like I broke it on purpose!”
“We’re not here to discuss property damage, either,” Phillips said, in his best fatherly tone. “We’re from Northumbria CID, and we want to talk to you about your old friend, Layla Bruce.”
