Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3)

by Jennifer Young

  ‘DCI Riley is the worst kind of policeman. Yes. Fortunately, most of us aren’t like that. Don’t worry about it. Everything will be fine.’

  But it wouldn’t be fine. Actions have consequences, events ripple through lives and cause more events. And I couldn’t help thinking of Eden, although this hell was one of ice instead of fire.

  Chapter 16

  It was the blue lights, searing the landscape as they tore up the valley a mile below the farmhouse, that alerted Cas to the fact that the moment of discovery had come, as he’d known it must. Quivering with indecision, he stood at the bedroom window, where could get the best view, and watched as the lights disappeared around a corner. It could be anything. It could be a road traffic accident, or a farmer fed up of an out-of-control dog nipping at the heels of his pregnant sheep. But he knew it wasn’t. It was something far more serious than that.

  He should phone Dougie, but he blanched at the thought of the reception he’d receive. Better not to do that until he knew what he was up against. Still in two minds about the right course of action, or whether there was any course of action that might be considered right, he ran down the stairs to where Celina was curled up on a chair in the living room, watching the telly. ‘I need to nip down to the café for half an hour. I won’t be long.’

  She looked up questioningly. When she first came, she used to ask if she, too, could go down and visit the café, but by now she must understand why it was impossible. ‘Is there anything you need me to do while you’re away?’

  ‘The usual. Stay quiet and don’t make yourself visible if anybody comes.’ He tried to lighten the advice with a smile, make a joke of it. But if it ever had been a joke, it wasn’t any longer. The situation, as he’d known it would, was becoming deadly serious and now he had to keep his nerve and let the storm pass over his head. You couldn’t hide the results of your mistakes, but you could dissociate yourself from them. ‘Stay safe. I’m used to having you around. It wouldn’t be the same without you.’

  A look of alarm crossed her face. ‘But why—?’

  ‘Just joking.’ He laughed over-loudly to convince himself that it was a joke, but once he was out of the house he ran the few steps to his car and jumped in. There, common sense prevailed. A sense of urgency was damaging if you rushed into things without thought; they’d learned that already. He drove slowly down the road, turned towards the blue flashing lights, and forced himself to drive towards them, slowing as if he were any old rubber-necker. A white Fiat 500 was parked by the side of the road, a police car behind it, a couple standing next to it with their backs to him. Any hope that it might have been pulled over for some misdemeanour receded as a second police car came up behind him.

  He pulled over for it and then, bottling the challenge, took advantage of the fact that it had stopped in the middle of the road to execute a neat three-point turn and drive back down the hill. As he did, he stopped the car at the side of the road for a moment to fish out his phone and snatch a couple of covert photographs, trying to look neither furtive nor afraid.

  *

  He was in the café for a couple of hours, sitting in the window pretending to go through some paperwork, sipping occasionally at the long black coffee that Lidia kept topping up for him. He’d have a monumental caffeine hangover by the evening and he wouldn’t sleep, but there was a bigger headache awaiting him and a lot more reasons for a restless night. At least the caffeine offered him some kind of a prop as he kept a nervous eye out onto the street. Somewhere up on the hill, events were unfolding, and a chill at the back of his neck threatened him. He needed to know, but if anyone ever told him, then for certain the game was up. But the silence was already crucifying him.

  After half an hour, he saw the thing he’d been hoping wasn’t true. Up on the hill, he’d had a glimpse of the couple standing by the Fiat and he thought he’d recognised them. Now, there they were, out on the street, getting out of the car and heading — thank God — into a rival establishment across the road. There was no doubt in his mind who they were.

  It didn’t take a genius to work out what had happened. Dougie had dumped the kid’s body in the stupidest possible place, and somehow that couple had come back and found him. Now there was a body and two witnesses, far too close to the farm for the comfort of Cas’s conscience.

  When the couple came out of the café again, he ducked into the office for security, waiting there until he could come out and see that the car had gone. By then, the café was empty.

  ‘I’d better get up the road.’ Shuffling his papers together, he deposited them on the desk in his office and left Lidia and the rest of the staff to the clearing up. On the threshold of the café, fortune tormented him once more as a police car, with Nick Riley in the front passenger seat, turned down from the road up towards the farm.

  Left with no option, Cas lifted a hand in greeting.

  The car pulled up, and Riley jumped out. ‘I’ll walk down to the station. Won’t be a moment. Carry on without me.’ And he slammed the car door. ‘Cas. I thought I saw your car up on the hill.’

  Cas swallowed. The chill intensified, but Riley’s expression was of the sunniest good nature. What did that mean? ‘Yes. I saw you had something going on.’ Would it be too obvious to ask what it was? Or would he attract more attention by a lack of interest? ‘Looked serious. An accident?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’ Riley’s shrug was as noncommittal as his expression.

  ‘I thought it best not to linger.’ Clenching his hands in his pockets, Cas fought the urge to run a finger round the collar that suddenly seemed too tight. ‘Didn’t want to get in your way.’

  ‘I wish more people were that sensitive. But as it happened, I wanted a word with you.’

  ‘Sure.’ Cas looked over his shoulder at the café, as Lidia turned the sign on the door to Closed. ‘We can go in, if you like.’

  ‘No, it won’t take a minute. I just wondered if you happened to be out last Saturday afternoon, in the storm, and if you did, whether you saw anything up on that road.’

  ‘Saw anything?’ Thoughts choked him. He’d seen a lot of things. In the end, he snatched at a half-truth. ‘There wasn’t a lot to see. I did drive up from Blairgowrie, as it happens. Just got caught in the beginning of the storm. But I didn’t see anyone. Nobody else would be so stupid as to be out when they didn’t have to. I would have been up much earlier if I hadn’t been delayed.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  Jesus. Why hadn’t he spent some of the last two hours working out what he might say to the police? ‘Must have been four-ish.’

  ‘You saw nothing?’

  ‘You couldn’t see anything much. There were a couple of sheep on the road near Kirkmichael. That was all.’

  ‘Okay. That’s all I need to know just now. I may want to have another chat to you about it later on, if that’s okay.’

  ‘I’ll be in the café all week. Just let me know when.’

  ‘Okay.’ Riley turned away, his eyes narrowing against the low sun. ‘I’d better get on. No peace for the wicked.’

  Cas watched him go, making sure the detective was out of sight before he turned away himself. Dougie had been right after all, and he should have taken some kind of pre-emptive action against that couple as they slept in the cottage, thinking themselves safe. But it was too late now. And anyway, he wasn’t — yet — afraid enough of his business partner to step over the line between right and wrong at his behest.

  Chapter 17

  ‘Did you ever come across a DCI Nick Riley?’ Marcus, stopping at the coffee machine for a well-earned shot of caffeine to get him through the remainder of the morning, had been waiting for a chance to catch a moment with Nerissa. Her phenomenal memory was by no means the least of the weapons in her armoury, and DCI Riley wasn’t a man to pass by without leaving an impression.

  She wrinkled her brows at him. ‘Up in Perthshire? Oh God, yes. I was thinking about him this morning, in fact, when I was catching up wi
th the latest instalment of your adventures. I go out of the office for a couple of days, and when I come back you’re in all the papers.’

  ‘What?’ He couldn’t hide his dismay. ‘What papers? Why?’

  ‘Not by name, but a dead body does tend to appeal to the headline writers. And somehow, you don’t seem able to avoid trouble.’

  She was in a good mood, something that happened increasingly less these days. ‘Looking for trouble is my job.’

  ‘Looking for trouble is one thing. Attracting it is quite another.’ She ran her finger up and down the panel of buttons on the machine, unusually indecisive. ‘I rarely find myself in a position when I don’t need a double shot of coffee at this time in the morning. I should make the most of it.’

  ‘It won’t last.’

  ‘No, it never does. But at least it gave me time to flick through some of the papers. On which note, if you have five minutes to chat, then I can find time, too, and I can explain. But we’ll talk about DCI Riley first, since he comes into it as well.’

  Marcus waited until she’d extracted the paper cup from the machine and followed her into her office. ‘When did you come across our friend Riley? Or should I guess?’

  ‘I’ve had dealings with him in the past. And in fact, more recently. I find him ambitious, arrogant, and over-promoted.’

  ‘That’s a high-octane combination.’

  ‘Indeed. I’m only thankful he isn’t typical, though quite how he reached the rank of inspector escapes me, and exactly how long he’ll last in the force, remains to be seen. But that isn’t my province. I’ll have to let someone else deal with the mess he’s in the process of making.’ She waved him to a chair. ‘Sit down. I don’t need to ask what you thought of him. You obviously met him at the weekend.’

  Marcus rarely had time to sit in Nerissa’s office. The pressure of the job was so great that he was only ever in there for a rapid-fire, stand-up briefing. ‘Much the same as you. I found him patronising and offensive.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re a junior officer to him, you see. He has no respect for subordinates and so, of course, he earns no respect from them. That’s something he doesn’t understand. And I expect he’ll have heard something about you and what happened in the G8.’

  ‘Yes. he mentioned that, though God knows what he might have heard.’

  ‘You know how it is. There’s always internal gossip, even if there’s never anything official.’

  Riley’s long, cold stare and outright hostility had rankled, though Marcus knew they shouldn’t. ‘I’m hardly a threat to him.’

  ‘No. But many officers quite like the idea of undercover and intelligence work, without really having much of an idea of what it involves. I expect he’ll have heard that you had something to do with the G8 policing, though he can’t possibly know what it was. And no doubt he’ll have persuaded himself that it is far more prestigious than anything he does, and more exciting than it actually is.’

  Marcus spared a thought for his daily grind of computer work, of internet searches, of hours wasted trawling through the dark web, and allowed himself the grimmest of smiles. His time was spent chasing up people who knew nothing, interspersed with the occasional triumph he was unable to brag about. ‘He wouldn’t like it as much as he thinks he would.’

  She opened her desk drawer and began rooting around in it. ‘Of course not. But intelligence work always sounds so glamorous. He probably thought you needed to be put in your place. What did he make of the case? That’s the other thing that will have upset him. You’ve probably guessed that he’s the man I spoke to last week about your little adventure in the blizzard.’

  Marcus considered. That made sense. ‘The one who pointed out that there was no evidence at all, and that I’m an unreliable witness?’

  ‘Yes. One of the least impressive officers I’ve ever met. However, he’s the man in charge of the case. You have to work with him. In fact, I think I might call him and suggest that you’d be quite a lot of use to him with your skills in digging into the deep dark innards of people’s computer histories.’ She found what she was looking for in the drawer. ‘This is what I wanted to show you.’

  Marcus took the newspaper she held out to him. ‘Today’s?’

  ‘Yes. Riley is quoted extensively on the discovery of the body. It’s a masterful exposition of saying nothing about the actual death, but it sets enough hares running to distract from it. I’ll give him credit for that. You and Bronte get a mention in it.’

  Marcus scanned the article. The reference to himself and Bronte, he was glad to see, was brief and unspecific. ‘The body was discovered by a couple visiting Pitlochry from the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh,’ he read out. ‘No names. I’ll take that.’

  ‘I thought you would. There’s nothing in the article on the cause of death. The post mortem was still to be carried out at the time of writing. Death to be treated as unexplained in the meantime. And then that bit at the end, where he goes on about local crime and migration?’

  Marcus skipped to the end; after all, he knew all there was to know about the discovery of the body. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Nick Riley, of Police Scotland, dismissed suggestions that the body was a victim of foul play. “There is a serious localised issue with crime in this area of Perthshire, but it’s burglary and housebreaking. The police are concentrating on finding the perpetrators.” Is he suggesting this kid was a criminal?’

  ‘That seems to be the implication.’ She shrugged. ‘They don’t know who he is, and no-one’s been reported missing. The Nick Rileys of this world make the connection there, to a man on the run.’

  Marcus kept reading. ‘DCI Riley refused to rule out a connection between the discovery of the body and the murder of pensioner Roberta McIlreath, who was found dead in her home two weeks ago after apparently disturbing a burglar. “There is a clear spike in crimes against property, resulting from an influx of eastern European immigrants,” he said. “We cannot rule out the fact that the two may be connected. All options are open in investigating this unexplained death”.’

  He tossed the newspaper down on the desk. ‘That’ll go down well with his boss.’

  ‘Yes. And there’s a long-established Eastern European community in that part of the world — they’ve been there since they built the hydro schemes. I don’t imagine they’ll take kindly to it, either. At best, it’s tactless.’

  Marcus tried his best to be fair. ‘Perhaps it’s naivety on his part.’

  ‘We can’t afford that at his level. Thank goodness, I don’t have to deal with it. What’s your gut feeling?’

  ‘You can’t go by your gut. You need facts and evidence. Don’t you ever listen to our colleague Nick?’

  ‘He has a body that he can’t identify, and he has your story about how it came to be there.’

  ‘But to him, that’s just a story.’ Marcus sighed. Nerissa, at least, never disrespected her juniors to their faces, and always appeared to take them seriously. ‘For what it’s worth, I think there’s something very wrong about this. I think he might be faced with the victim of a perfect murder and he doesn’t see it.’ He thought about it again, about the two men driving off in the blizzard. It might have been two more murders, if it wasn’t for Providence. He got to his feet. ‘I’d better get back to work.’

  ‘I suppose I had, too. I’ll keep you informed if I hear anything,’ she said with a sigh, ‘because I don’t imagine anyone else will bother.’

  Chapter 18

  ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  Celina turned back from the window to where Cas stood in the doorway. Outside, the sky was blue, the wind rippling the grass, but the setting, so attractive to so many people, held no appeal for her. You could get bored of beauty very quickly when it trapped and isolated you. That was another thing experience had taught her.

  ‘Of course. What is it?’ It was important to make sure that Cas didn’t get bored of her, at least until she found an alternative — though quite what alternati
ve there could be, when he kept hold of her passport and she had no money, she couldn’t quite work out. Jan, frustrated, had made a break for it, and he must have got away because he hadn’t come back. If he had got away, he hadn’t told anyone where he’d come from. Maybe, somehow, he’d make his way back to Poland. Maybe he’d found himself another job.

  Maybe, in his conviction that they’d made a bad call and there was a better place for the two of them elsewhere, he was right, but he hadn’t talked to her or offered her a chance to go with him. In his heart, did he trust her so little that he believed she wouldn’t come? She loved him, and of course she wished him well, but she couldn’t forgive him for leaving her.

  Cas prowled across the living room and back again, before sitting down in his preferred armchair, a deep frown on his face. Sensing that something disturbed him, that there was something going on he didn’t know about, or didn’t understand, or didn’t like, she crossed the room and stroked the back of his neck with a courtesan’s fingers. Just for a moment, he relaxed under her touch, then shook her off. ‘Thanks. That helped.’

  ‘Something’s wrong?’ Normally she wouldn’t question him, about anything, because questions only caused trouble. Today, she dared. It wasn't because she was afraid, for herself or for the others; Cas wasn’t hard, and he treated them well enough. It was because, to her own surprise, his obvious unease bothered her. ‘Let me help, if I can.’

  He had a newspaper in his hand, folded over, and he tapped a forefinger on a single column of dense black type. Celina spoke no English — not a word. She couldn’t even recognise the name of the godforsaken place they’d fetched up in, so the heavy print, unrelieved by even a picture, meant nothing to her. She looked at him questioningly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I know. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t the newspaper report. It’s something else.’

  Something, she thought, that was connected to the newspaper. ‘Go on.’