by Helen Fields
He fired off the document to Lance with a note to forward it, not mentioning any names. Lance would know what to do. Then he followed it up with a text to Ben.
‘Document on way. Your help appreciated. Can’t give any in return.’ Callanach wondered again about the programmer’s motivation for helping, then decided it wasn’t his problem. A reply buzzed through in less than a minute.
‘Will take a look. Wasn’t expecting return favour. Be less cynical.’
Callanach laughed out loud. Be less cynical. How was he supposed to do that? The only people he felt able to confide in were a journalist and a suspect. Ava’s judgement was off. Everything about her life was alien – even the choice of bar for the impromptu engagement party, so unlike her preference for pubs with fireplaces and overused leather sofas. Had she changed so dramatically, or had Callanach never really known her at all?
He tried to settle with a glass of wine, flicking on the television to drown out the din in his head, but all he could feel was the ghost of Ava’s head on his shoulder. Fragments of conversations from when they’d first met. Times she’d joked with him, sided with him. When he’d opened up to her and found someone utterly without judgement or bias. Long nights spent talking about nothing, sharing treasures from their childhoods. A day fishing when she’d taught him to cast a line. He’d flicked it clumsily and caught it in her hair, spending the next half hour getting the hook out and patching up the scratch below her ear. He remembered the slender curve of her neck, her lightly tanned, smooth skin. And the moment when he’d brushed his fingertips downwards releasing her hair, both of them silenced in the midst of their chatter by the unexpected, intimate contact. Ava had shaken her head suddenly, as if waking up, reaching for the rod and busying herself with clearing up. But she hadn’t met his eyes for several minutes after that.
The glass of wine he’d been holding flew from his hand and smashed against the wall before he’d even realised he was going to throw it. He stormed across the room away from the shards of glass, slamming his fist down on the desk. The drugs he’d been intending to throw away were still there. He pushed two tablets from the plastic and swallowed them.
The shower was cold when he stepped in, the shock welcome. Comfort wasn’t what he was looking for. Conscious of how wrong his plans were, he dressed and walked across the hallway. Bunny opened her door almost immediately.
‘Luc, I was wondering if you’d come in yet. Are you hungry? I’ve got loads of stuff in my freezer. And my new couch has arrived. We should toast it with something bubbly. You all right?’
Callanach stepped through the doorway, his eyes locked on Bunny’s. She was wearing a denim shirt, tied at the front, with a miniskirt. He reached one hand out slowly, flexing his jaw, breathing in deeply as the first wave of liberating endorphins hit his system. Hooking one finger inside the knot of her shirt, he tugged it hard, both loosening the knot and pulling Bunny towards him. She raised an eyebrow and laughed nervously, but allowed herself to be pulled into his arms.
‘I never thought you’d be interested,’ she said as he began kissing her neck, pushing his hands into her hair, running the tip of his tongue along her collarbone. ‘Did you want to go somewhere more comfortable?’ she asked.
‘Okay,’ he said, letting her lead the way into the kitchen where Bunny took a bottle of Prosecco from the fridge and grabbed two glasses. Callanach poured the drinks and walked into the lounge, getting comfortable on the couch. Bunny clinked her glass against his and smiled.
‘I’ve been hoping this might happen,’ she said. ‘I did wonder the day that lady came to your door. It was the way she looked when I talked about you. I figured you two must have had something going on.’
Callanach realised she meant the day Ava had come looking for him. Ava never had explained what she’d been doing there.
He took Bunny’s glass from her hand and kissed her, crushing his lips against hers, sliding one arm around her shoulders. Silencing her, and forcing the image of Ava from his mind. Tilting her head to one side, she ran her tongue around the edge of his lips. He pushed the shirt off her shoulders, undoing the few buttons that held it in place, dropping it to the floor as she peeled his shirt from his body. He wrapped his legs around hers, shifting their bodies sideways and moving his hand to her groin. She closed her eyes, lifting her chin, tipping her head over the arm of the sofa, panting softly as he touched her. He could feel the drugs working, reigniting the maleness he’d grieved for so long. Bunny ran a hand down the outside of his jeans and clutched the hardness there. This time he wouldn’t fail.
Bunny lifted her head back up as he began to undo his jeans, putting her hand lightly over his.
‘Shall we slow down?’ she asked. ‘We’ve got all night. And this isn’t really very comfortable.’ She picked up their glasses, handing Callanach his and sipping from hers. He did his best to mask the frustration on his face and smiled as they drank. ‘So what made up your mind?’ Bunny asked. ‘I was about to give up hope that you’d noticed me. That first night when you got my power back on, I couldn’t believe I was living opposite you. My mates joke about stuff like this happening – you move into a new building, the guy opposite just happens to be gorgeous and has an amazing job. And he’s single. I’ve been telling everyone about you.’
Callanach sat up, feeling his coccyx and ribs complain. He’d been able to ignore the pain until now, the sensation of grinding in his lower back, the stabbing around his lungs when he rolled over.
‘Do you think you could make it to dinner Friday night? There’ll be eight of us. We could have a takeaway here then go to a bar.’
‘I don’t know,’ Callanach said, downing the overly sweet liquid and placing his glass on the table. His groin was throbbing as hard as he could ever remember, as if a spring had coiled and was building up an unstoppable force. But his head was thumping. There was a growing itch inside him, accompanied by a rising tide of panic that he might end up out of control.
‘Shall I put some music on?’ Bunny asked. ‘What do you like?’
He knew he had to leave. Bunny was a good person. Not his kind of person, but sweet and well-intentioned. He’d come here without thinking it through. The shameful truth was that he’d come here to use her.
‘I have to leave,’ he said, head hammering and lower back protesting as he got up.
‘You could stay here tonight,’ she said, reaching for his hand.
‘I can’t. I have work early in the morning.’
‘Stay a while longer. We could watch a movie?’ she asked. Callanach saw the plea in her eyes, the disappointment. He’d been a complete bastard. The least he could do was let her down gently.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he said. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘Friday then? With my mates. It’ll be a laugh. You’ll like them.’
‘I think I’ll be working. You know how it is.’ He put his shirt back on, not bothering to button it up. His body was burning, as if it had become one single organ, pulsating, ready to burst. He kissed Bunny on the cheek.
‘I understand,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll be here if you change your mind. That’s what good neighbours do, isn’t it?’ She tried a smile, failed and hid her tears by pouring herself a fresh glass of Prosecco. Callanach left.
Inside his flat, he headed straight back to the shower cursing his selfish destructiveness. Bunny hadn’t deserved to be the target for his attempt to repair himself. She’d been more graceful in defeat than he’d had any right to expect. And now he’d made life awkward where he lived. Don’t shit where you eat, wasn’t that the rule?
He was left with the crawling sensation that his body had been invaded by a creature demanding to be fed. It should have been cause for celebration. His body was working again, and yet he couldn’t face the prospect of having sex with Bunny. She was attractive, bubbly and sweet, but not what he wanted. He’d imagined, after all that time, that the prospect of having sex at all would have been sufficient. But it was a fa
lse god. He hadn’t arrived there through free will and the power of his mind. He’d overwhelmed his body with chemicals, tricking his brain. And now he was stuck in pharmaceutical limbo, waiting for the drugs to wear off before he could rest. There would be no easy resolution to his impotence. Drugs had fixed his dysfunctional body but the root cause was in his mind and he wasn’t a single step closer to fixing that.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He awoke at 7 a.m. tasting chemicals, and went straight to make coffee. Last night was a half-drawn sketch in his mind and he chose not to fill in the blanks. Some things couldn’t be mended.
He checked his messages to make sure there had been no attacks overnight. It seemed Edinburgh’s lollipop ladies were safe. There had been extra units on duty overnight in case of any incidents. Superintendent Overbeck wouldn’t like accounting for the overtime, but that was her problem. Once the murders were resolved, if the chief wasn’t coming back, Callanach had already decided that he’d be looking for a post elsewhere. Anywhere in the world that would have him. Except France, of course.
When he heard buzzing, his first reaction was to check his phone for texts. Only when that came up blank did he remember there was a second mobile in his flat. He hadn’t realised it was still switched on.
‘I have something. Will call at 10 a.m. Pen and paper ready.’
Ben had obviously spent his night more productively than Callanach. He checked his watch. He had two and a half hours to kill.
* * *
The answer to filling that expanse of time was waiting in an almost feral pack outside the police station. The cameras were set to roll as he walked in, questions were fired, lights flashed. No hope, then, of concealing from the murderers that they’d figured out the role of the graffiti.
Every major newspaper and television channel was represented. What sickened Callanach was the sense that what they needed now was an actual lollipop lady victim to complete their story. He liaised with the press office and composed a statement. As he left the Police Scotland media team to deal with it, he recalled his promise to give Lance the first reveal when the story broke. It was close to 10 a.m. Lance would have to wait a few more minutes until he’d finished speaking to Ben. Callanach grabbed a notebook, then retreated to his car and waited for the other mobile to ring.
‘Where are you?’ Ben asked.
‘In my car,’ Callanach said. ‘Do you have something?’
‘Only numbers, as yet,’ Ben said, ‘but it’s a start. I’m sending you an image now. Have a look.’
Callanach opened it, not that it made much sense.
‘La 55.95741075489907/Lo -3.19568574178561.’
He put the phone back to his ear. ‘Got it, but I have no idea what I’m looking at,’ he said.
‘Those are GPS coordinates. That location is exactly where the lollipop lady graffiti appeared,’ Ben said. Callanach scribbled notes. It hadn’t occurred to him to look up the GPS coordinates. The positioning of the graffiti had always seemed more casual than that. ‘I typed in every possible description of the graffiti sites and trawled the net for road names, GPS, any search term I could think of. The only match was the coordinates,’ Ben continued.
‘For all the graffiti sites where the victims’ professions were listed?’ Callanach asked.
‘I found coordinates for four of the graffiti sites in the city,’ Ben said.
‘In what context?’ Callanach clarified. ‘Was it a website or search engine?’
‘Nothing so simple,’ Ben laughed. ‘I was trawling chatter on the darknet. The part of the internet that exists only for people to do things unseen. Most computer users don’t even know it’s there. Precious few are able to access it.’
‘So you’ve found the people sharing the coordinates then?’ Callanach stopped writing, closing his eyes. This was the moment he’d been waiting for. A real break. The point where he could finally be sure there would be no more victims on the mortuary table.
‘All I have at the moment is a heavily encoded website, with restricted access and invitation-only usability. The reason the GPS coordinates got a hit is because they’re numerical. My software picked up the fact that the numbers had been bounced around in exactly that order. It’ll take more work to get in deeper.’
‘You have to show me,’ Callanach said. ‘If this turns out to be the only evidential trail, then I need to be able to follow it myself.’
‘Too risky,’ Ben said. ‘You know I’m being followed and what they’re capable of. You have a career to think of, Detective Inspector. I can’t believe DCI Edgar’s boys left you without issuing some sort of threat.’
‘That’s not important. You need to explain this to me in detail,’ Callanach said.
‘It’s easier to slip out unseen during work hours. Meet me in three hours. I’ll text you the address. Tell Lance to bring his laptop so I can leave you any files I find in the meantime.’ Ben hung up. The text came through immediately. It was a city centre address in an area Callanach knew, although he didn’t recognise the name of the cafe.
Back in the incident room, Callanach found his squad watching the television. On the screen, an elderly lady could be seen regaling an interviewer with tales of her former career as a lollipop lady outside one of Edinburgh’s largest junior schools. The graphics at the bottom of the screen declared her to be Gladys Talthwaite, eighty years of age. She had retired years earlier but her brain was obviously as active as it had been in middle age. The interviewer was milking it for all it was worth.
‘So how do you think they’ll be feeling now, Gladys, those women who spend their working hours making the city roads safer for our children to pass?’ the interviewer asked.
‘I should think they’ll be terrified, dearie, don’t you?’ Gladys said. ‘In the war, we faced these sorts of enemies and we rallied. Of course back then, we had communities where everyone knew each other. A stranger in your road stood out a mile. Nowadays no one has a clue what’s going on in the house next door.’
‘What was it like being a lollipop lady? Can you describe the most difficult aspects of the job?’ the interviewer continued, keen to get her tear-jerker back on track. Any more talk of the war and they’d be losing their audience.
‘The proper terminology is crossing guard, in fact,’ Gladys corrected the interviewer. ‘I suppose the drivers could be impatient. Some didn’t want to slow down. I once saw a woman drive right over a duck who’d had the temerity to be crossing the road with her ducklings. She didn’t even stop.’
‘And did you ever feel threatened or as if your job might have made you a target?’
‘No, my love. Who would want to hurt a lollipop lady?’ Gladys replied with a slight giggle.
‘And what would you say to the man or woman who wants to hurt one of your former colleagues, if they were listening now?’
‘I’d tell them to do the decent thing. If they want to spill blood, they can spill their own. Turn the knife on themselves,’ Gladys said. The interviewer looked off to one side, putting one hand to her earpiece.
‘Bet she wasn’t expecting that answer,’ a uniformed officer chipped in.
‘Or their gun, or whatever they’ve got handy,’ Gladys continued. Callanach stared at the screen. Gladys was tiny. The enormous interviewee armchair made her appear child-sized. Her hair was entirely white, her knuckles bent. And the vitriol she was venting illustrated exactly how most of Scotland was feeling at the moment.
Finally the interviewer cut in. ‘And the police. What advice would you give them about dealing with these offenders? Detective Inspector Luc Callanach gave a press conference just this week. What suggestions do you have for him?’
‘Oh I know who he is, pet. He’s French. And look how they behaved during the war. Rolled over and let Hitler walk all over them for the most part!’
A black frame appeared followed by an unscheduled advertising break. You could almost hear the panic in the broadcast control room. Advising the murderers to kill themse
lves was shocking, but the anti-French racism was a step too far. Tripp switched off the television.
DS Lively stood up from the desk he’d been perching on.
‘I rather liked her,’ Lively said grinning. ‘I’m getting coffee while DCI Edgar’s cyber-wank crew are out on their raid. Last time I tried to approach the coffee machine, I found one of those tosspots putting coconut oil into their cup. I asked if it was for laxative purposes and the wee pish gave me a lecture on fat absorption.’
‘How long are they going to be here, sir? The sergeant’s right. They’re a pain in the arse to have around,’ Salter said.
‘As long as it takes, I guess,’ Callanach said.
‘No more than another week, I heard,’ one of the uniforms called out. ‘One of them was on the phone to the place they’re staying last night.’
‘Never mind the cyber crime unit,’ Callanach said. ‘Start running searches for any crossing guard who might be of special note – won an award, been celebrated by their community – that sort of thing.’
‘Already tried it, sir,’ Salter replied. ‘Got hundreds of results. Children drawing their local lollipop person in competitions. Schools nominating their lollipop person as an outstanding community member. Any crossing guard who had been in the job for more than a decade was invited to a special ceremony last year. You wouldn’t believe how much Edinburgh celebrates its road-crossing safety technicians.’
‘So no shortlist, then?’ Callanach asked, rubbing his eyes. Nobody bothered to answer. He left his team to their work and went back to his office.
Edgar’s squad were closing in on Ben Paulson who was just starting to prove useful. Callanach had a straightforward choice. He either warned Ben about the raid – completely illegally, of course – thereby protecting his own investigation, or he kept quiet and let possibly his only lead disappear without a trace. He tried to keep the memory of what Edgar had done to him out of it. Instead, he wondered what advice he’d give a colleague who came to him with the same dilemma. He knew very little about Ben, and there was still a question mark over his motives. Perhaps this was exactly what the hacker had banked on – Callanach feeling beholden or reliant so that help would be available whether he asked for it or not.
