by Alex Walters
She turned into the cul-de-sac where she lived, still with her head down, and almost ran headlong into the figure standing outside the shared house.
‘Oh, Jesus, sorry. Didn’t see you there—’ She looked up, and took a breath.
It was almost as if her thoughts had conjured this up. The figure was standing, motionless, head tipped forward, clad in a heavy-duty black cagoule. She could barely make out the features in the shadow of the hood, but she’d known as soon as she raised her head.
‘Christ, what the hell are you doing here?’ she said.
‘Waiting for you.’ As if it was the most obvious thing in the world. As if it wasn’t so many years.
‘But how the hell did you know—?’
‘Where you lived? I was just lucky. Came across it.’
‘But—’ She couldn’t make sense of it. She might have expected a call or maybe a friend request on Facebook. Not this.
‘I didn’t have any way of contacting you beforehand. Just the address. So I thought I’d come out on the off-chance you might be around.’
‘You’d better come in,’ she said, aware she sounded grudging. All this would do was stir it up again, bring out those same demons from the corners of her head. ‘You must be soaked.’
‘I’m OK inside this. It’s designed for Manchester weather. Look, I don’t want to intrude. Wondered if you fancied grabbing a bite to eat somewhere. My treat. We can chat. Catch up. Then I’ll bugger off and leave you alone.’
She’d realised, even as she made the offer, that she really didn’t want to go into the house. It was as if it would bring everything, all that history, inside. That it wouldn’t be a refuge, but just another place contaminated by the past. Anyway, it wasn’t every day that someone offered to take her for dinner. The way things were going, it would be a long while before she could afford to eat out herself. She raised her rain-drenched face. ‘I’m not exactly dressed to go out,’ she said, ‘unless the drowned rat look became fashionable when I wasn’t looking.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of anywhere posh. Just a pub or something.’
‘We’ll get even wetter walking there.’
‘I’m parked just round the corner. I can drive us somewhere then drop you off back here when we’re done.’
‘Aye, why not? Like you say, we should catch up. It’s been a hell of a long time.’
‘It has that. All kinds of stuff gone on. I’ll tell you about it. Let’s get on before you get any wetter. Car’s only a minute or two away. Follow me.’
‘But what the hell are you doing down here?’ she called.
‘Long story.’ There was a parked van, with the passenger door standing open. ‘Here, get out of the wet.’
For a moment, unexpectedly, she felt a shiver of unease, a cold finger down her spine that had nothing to do with the rain leaking into her thin overcoat. But she could think of no reason to refuse.
She climbed into the car, relieved to be out of the driving rain.
***
It was nearly eight when McKay finally left the office. Helena Grant had managed to beg, steal and borrow resources from every part of the division. They had a decent-sized team now, working out of the MIR and a couple of overflow rooms, camped on the phones, taking statements, collating intelligence, crunching data. Most of it was routine stuff, trawling through the list of addresses and contacts that Mrs Scott had left for them, calling individuals who had known Katy Scott during her time in Culbokie and Inverness.
Scott’s identity had been announced to the media that evening, along with a couple of the most recent photographs they’d been able to obtain. Since the story had appeared on the local news, they’d had a steady trickle of calls from people claiming to have information. Most were nothing more than attention seekers, old school-friends or past acquaintances who had some vague half-memory of having encountered Katy. Little of this was likely to be of real value, but it was the necessary leg-work. McKay had similarly been liaising with the communications team at Greater Manchester Police to organise an appeal for information on the local news there.
They’d still made no progress in identifying the second victim. She hadn’t shown up on the police databases. They’d found a few possible matches on the national missing persons database, but so far those had led nowhere. They’d issued a description, complete with reference to the distinctive tattoos, and had received a few calls but none yet sounded promising.
They were still at that relatively early stage in the investigation when you can sense a genuine buzz of enthusiasm among the team. It was hard and monotonous work, but they still felt that, sooner or later, some real lead would emerge. But he knew this energy could be sustained only for so long. Within a few days, if they still seemed to be getting nowhere, the enthusiasm would start to wane. The leads would become less numerous and less promising; the work would become routine; the team would start just going through the motions in the vague hope that something would turn up. If they reached that point, McKay’s challenge would be to lead them through it, keep the promised land in sight as they trudged through the investigatory desert. It wasn’t something he was looking forward to.
He spent the last half-hour tidying up various administrative loose ends and checking through his e-mails. McKay was happy to cultivate his reputation as a maverick, but he knew as well as anyone the importance of professionalism in this work. You could be as brilliant as Sherlock Holmes, but nobody would thank you if the prosecution fell apart because you’d screwed up the evidence or hadn’t followed due procedure. By eight, he decided to call it a night. A couple of the team were still on the phones or tapping away at their keyboards, so he gestured that they should follow his example before long. It didn’t do anyone any good to end up knackered on a case like this, where it looked like they were in it for the long haul.
At home, Chrissie was curled up on the sofa, watching a cookery show on the TV. A half-empty bottle of white wine was sitting on the floor. ‘You’re earlier than I expected,’ she said, in a voice which suggested that this wasn’t necessarily a welcome development.
‘Done what I could,’ he said.
‘Stew’s still in the oven. I had mine earlier. Potatoes in the saucepan on top. You’ll need to heat them up.’
‘Thanks. I’m starving.’ Stews of various kinds were Chrissie’s default supper these days. He couldn’t blame her. His working days were as erratic as ever. A stew would sit in the oven without spoiling, or without spoiling too much, as long as he wasn’t ridiculously late.
He’d told her not to bother cooking. He enjoyed cooking himself—he often did it at the weekends—and would have been content to rustle up something when he got in. But she insisted that this was her contribution. These days, she only worked a couple of mornings doing administration for a local medical centre so she had plenty of time, she said. In his worst moments, McKay felt it was simply another way of punishing him, a way of ensuring he owed her something, however trivial. A way of making him feel guilty on those nights when he arrived back too late and the food was dried out and inedible.
Tonight, it was fine. He reheated the boiled potatoes, spooned out a decent helping, and poured himself a glass of red wine from the resealed bottle on the side. There’d been a time, after it had happened, when both of them had been knocking back the booze too much. McKay had always been a serious drinker. It had been part of the role profile in his early days in the job—a few pints and chasers after work alongside the chain-smoking and the crap fast food. In his mid-thirties, McKay had realised he was well on the way to participating in the grand Caledonian tradition of a coronary before the age of forty, so he’d made an effort to knock it on the head. That was when he’d given up smoking, cut back heavily on the drinking, and started to think about eating some food that was green without being mouldy.
He’d more or less kept it up ever since. But both he and Chrissie had found their alcohol intake creeping up as they tried to come to terms with what had happened. Mc
Kay had reached the point where he could easily knock back half a bottle of Scotch in an evening without noticing. Chrissie had hit the wine. It had taken him a month or two to realise what was happening, and then he’d made the effort to stop. These days, he limited himself to no more than one or two glasses of wine. Chrissie, he thought, was still drinking too much, but he wasn’t about to try to tell her so.
He slumped himself on the sofa next to her, the plate of food on his knee. On the television, a chunkily-built bald man was expressing doubts about the flavour combinations in the dish he was tasting.
‘How’s it going?’ she said.
‘Slowly, but we’re making progress.’ He rarely talked about his work with Chrissie, except at the most superficial level.
‘I saw it mentioned on the news. Didn’t say much, except that you’d identified the first victim.’
‘Aye, some poor lass from Culbokie. Well, originally. She’d been living in Manchester.’
They both sat in silence for a few minutes. Chrissie’s eyes were fixed on the TV screen where one of the contestants was struggling with an unsuccessful chocolate fondant. McKay munched through the stew and potatoes, occasionally pausing to take a sip of wine.
‘What are we going to do, Alec?’ Chrissie asked.
‘How’d you mean?’ Though he knew full well.
‘About us. We can’t go on this way.’
‘Can’t we?’ He felt, already, as if he were being coerced into a row. His instinct was to clam up, play dumb, but he knew that would only make matters worse.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, you know we can’t. Every sodding night sitting in silence because neither of us knows what to say.’
‘So what do you suggest?’
‘We need to talk about it. We need to talk about what happened.’
‘We’ve talked about it. Endlessly. We just go round in circles.’ Except, he thought, that generally you end up blaming me, and I end up blaming you. And not even because we really do blame each other, probably, but just because we’re each trying to offload our own guilt.
‘Maybe it’s time we thought about professional help.’
‘Professional help?’
‘You know, counselling. Couples counselling. That sort of thing.’
McKay felt himself bridling. Chrissie had suggested this before and he’d always resisted, maintaining it was all just woolly bollocks. But he knew, really, that he disliked the idea of someone, some stranger, sticking their nose into his head. Trying to tell what he was thinking. But that was maybe just because he was afraid of what that might be.
‘If you like,’ he said, now, grudgingly. He felt a tightening in his chest even at the prospect. ‘We could give it a go.’
‘It might help.’
‘If it’s what you want.’
She banged her glass on the coffee table, spilling wine on to the polished surface. ‘For Christ’s sake, Alec, it’s not what I want. It’s what might be good for us. For our marriage.’
‘I’ve said I’ll do it, haven’t I?’
‘Aye, in the same way that you might have agreed to having your bollocks removed without anaesthetic.’
‘Well, what do you expect? I can’t pretend to be comfortable with the idea. But if you think it’s the right thing to do—’
‘It’s not what I think. It’s what we both think.’
‘I think it’s time we faced facts, Chrissie. It wasn’t either of our faults. It was just one of those things.’
‘How can you say that? About your own daughter? “Just one of those things”?’
‘Oh, Christ, you know what I mean. There’s nothing either of us could have done.’
‘We could have given her a reason to stay here. We could have stopped it ever happening.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Chrissie. She left home. She grew up and she flew the fucking nest. It’s what children do.’
‘Not if you give them a reason to stay. She walked out the first chance she got.’
‘And could you blame her? The way we were. The way we still are.’
There was a prolonged silence, both of them conscious they were on the verge of saying things they were likely to regret.
Finally, Chrissie said: ‘She died, Alec. She fucking killed herself because she wasn’t here. Because she had no-one. Because she was on her own in a big city.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Chrissie. We don’t know that. And even if she did, we can’t begin to speculate why she did it. She suffered from depression. We knew that. We just didn’t realise how serious it was.’
‘We should have fucking realised,’ she said. ‘We should have known. We were her fucking parents, for Christ’s sake. We should never have let it happen.’
‘But—’ There was no point, he thought. We both know, objectively, there was nothing we could have done. Not then. Not by the time it happened. What we don’t know—what we can never know—is whether we could have done something before then. Whether we could have done more to help her. We tried. We did our best. But maybe, as it turned out, our best just wasn’t anything like good enough. ‘Look, you’re right,’ he said. ‘Let’s give it a go. Let’s try the counselling.’
‘And you think that’ll do it, do you?’ Chrissie said, bitterly. ‘You really think that’ll be enough to wash all this away?’
He held himself back from pointing out that it had been her idea, that just a few minutes before she’d been attacking him for his reluctance to accept it. This wasn’t about reason. This was about working through fears and emotions that neither of them fully understood.
‘No,’ he said, finally. ‘No, I don’t think that. But we’ve nothing else, Chrissie. It’s all we’ve fucking got.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
To McKay’s surprise, early the next morning he received an e-mail from DI Warren of Greater Manchester Police. ‘Everything I could track down,’ it said, simply. ‘Hope it’s some use.’
There was a zip file attached containing a number of documents. McKay clicked on a couple. As far as he could see, Warren had sent, in scanned form, the full contents of Katy Scott’s file. There wasn’t a lot, and most of it related to her being reported as missing. Statements from her landlord and from the neighbour who’d first raised concerns about her absence. Statements from a couple of other neighbours in the same converted house. Nothing that, at first glance, seemed likely to shed much light on the case other than providing a few more contact names and addresses.
Still, it was good of Warren to take the trouble, particularly to do it personally. Given that the two forces were now liaising on the case at senior level, it was possible that some pressure had been placed on him to be co-operative. McKay didn’t much care as long as it achieved the desired effect.
Helena Grant turned up later in the morning to do a walkabout among the troops. Afterwards, she sat herself down in McKay’s office. Horton was out somewhere conducting an interview.
‘You’ve a decent bunch there,’ she said.
‘Aye, I’m happy. Mostly your efforts, that. I can see you’ve pulled a few strings to get people released.’
‘Called in a few favours,’ she said. ‘But people are usually keen to help in a case like this.’
‘Must be causing a few jitters out there,’ he said. ‘Killer on the loose and all that.’
‘Media are starting to stir it up a bit,’ she agreed. ‘And it won’t get any better. We’ve set up a press conference for this afternoon. Update on progress.’
‘You want me there?’
She considered. ‘Plan is for the chief super and me to lead it,’ she said. ‘Some of that lot are very good at adding two and two together and getting twenty-five.’
‘I’ll stay out of it, then,’ McKay said. ‘You know me. Someone starts talking shite, I’m likely to tell them.’
‘Aye, Alec,’ she said. ‘And that’s why they’ve never made you chief media officer, I’m guessing.’
‘I don’t have the face for television,’
he said. ‘That’s the only reason.’
They spent an hour or so working on the statement that she was going to make and brainstorming the questions that might be thrown at her. At the end of it, McKay said: ‘Jesus, Helena, I’m awful glad you like doing this stuff. This is your game, not mine.’
‘Horses for courses. If I can keep the media sweet—well, sweetish—I’m more than happy to do it. We want them onside in this one if we can. This is one where we really do need whatever information we can get from the public.’
‘We’ve fuck all else at the moment, other than a few names and addresses.’
After Grant had gone, he went back to the material Warren had sent up. The statements from the landlord and neighbour were both pretty bland—largely ‘she kept herself to herself’ stuff. The neighbour had noticed she wasn’t around because her mail had been building up and had mentioned it to the landlord. The landlord had been trying to gain access to the flat to conduct a maintenance check, and in the end had let himself in. He’d found the place deserted, but looking as if Scott hadn’t expected to be away. There was food rotting in the fridge, a bottle of curdled milk left out in the kitchen, the bed left unmade. It was at that point he’d decided to report her absence to the police.
The police had checked through the mail, but, other than a couple of bills, it had been largely junk. The flat had been treated as a potential crime scene and examined thoroughly, but there were no clues as to where or why she might have gone. The landlord and neighbours had had little knowledge of Katy Scott’s family or friends, and—until the discovery of her body—it had not been possible to track down her next of kin. They’d found some payslips from a couple of local bars where she’d been working, but the owners and staff there knew little about her personal life. She was friendly enough, they said. Occasionally went out for a drink with the other girls, but no-one had got to know her very well. She’d just drifted into the place, rubbed along well enough, and then drifted out again. When she hadn’t turned up for work, nobody, including the bar managers, had thought much of it. It was that sort of job. People were here today and most likely gone tomorrow.
