by Lin Anderson
‘What’s wrong?’
‘The Procurator Fiscal’s decided there’s enough evidence to proceed against the DI. He’s been suspended until the case comes to court.’
‘My God.’ Rhona’s heart plummeted. ‘And McNab?’
‘He got off with a warning.’
‘Is Bill there?’
‘They sent him home.’
Once Bill had been charged, the Fiscal would have wanted to remove any possibility of access to case papers and witnesses. Bill would have been told to leave immediately. Rhona could imagine the scene and the reaction of his colleagues. Anger welled up in her. The whole thing was hideous. She contemplated calling Bill at home, then decided to leave it for now. He needed to be with his wife and family. Margaret was his strength. He would need her more than ever now.
‘Is McNab there?’
‘He went out after the announcement. I don’t know where to. You could try his mobile.’
‘He’s not answering. If he calls in will you get him to phone me?’
‘I’ll try,’ Janice promised.
Rhona snapped her mobile shut and threw it into her bag. She’d been thinking about Magnus’s career and all the time Bill’s was coming to an end. A conviction for assaulting a prisoner in custody could see him at worst dismissed, at the least dropping a rank and being moved out of CID altogether.
She glanced at her watch. It was after six. McNab could be anywhere and was more than likely drowning his sorrows. She’d smelled whisky on his breath yesterday in the café. He’d been alert and definitely not drunk, but she suspected he was using alcohol to get him through the day.
Magnus came in, carrying cutlery. ‘What’s happened?’ he said when he saw her face.
‘They’ve charged Bill with assault and suspended him.’
He swore under his breath. ‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But there were mitigating circumstances.’
‘They know all about those,’ Rhona said bitterly.
‘What about McNab?’
There was no love lost between the two men, but you wouldn’t have known from Magnus’s concerned expression.
‘He got off with a warning.’
‘What do you want to do?’
Rhona had already accepted there was little she could do. ‘I’ll keep trying McNab’s number. Meanwhile, we eat, if that’s OK, then talk about Emma.’
The microwave pinged in the kitchen.
‘Not home-made, I’m afraid,’ said Magnus ruefully.
Rhona didn’t care. She suspected the food would stick in her throat anyway.
They sat together at the table and he produced a bottle of red wine to go with the casserole. ‘You can always leave your car here and take a taxi back.’
Suddenly Rhona didn’t want to spend the evening alone worrying about Bill and McNab. ‘I’ll do that.’ She gestured to Magnus to fill her glass.
Magnus didn’t talk as Rhona made an attempt at the food. It was tastier than she’d anticipated and better than the meals she had in her own freezer.
‘Local Italian restaurant,’ he told her. ‘I ask them to freeze some for me.’
‘Beats my supermarket buys.’
Magnus refilled her glass.
‘Wine’s good too. Let me guess. Italian?’ Rhona glanced at the label.
When she’d cleared her plate, Magnus put on coffee and brought through a plate of biscuits and cheese. All very civilised, she thought, realising how much she had missed sitting down to a meal with another human being instead of the cat.
They’d finished the wine, so Magnus brought a bottle of Highland Park and two glasses to the coffee table. Rhona checked her phone one more time before she settled into the armchair. The alcohol had taken the edge off her horror at the news of Bill’s suspension. Her usual reaction when something bad happened was to find a way to fight back, and throughout the meal her brain had been doing just that, running endless scenarios where she might yet intervene to help Bill. At the same time she knew that as soon as Bill decided to go down this route there was nothing anyone could do. McNab had made it plain enough that he’d been the one responsible for the assault, and even that hadn’t helped.
‘Hey.’
Magnus’s voice broke into her reverie.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. Bill’s your friend.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘What happens now?’
‘They’ll bring in someone to take over his caseload, including this one.’
‘Do you know who?’
‘I’ve got a pretty good idea.’
Detective Inspector Geoffrey Slater had been parachuted in once before. He hadn’t endeared himself to DS McNab or the rest of the team then, and was unlikely to do so now, especially in view of McNab’s state of mind.
‘And I’m not sure he’ll be interested in Emma’s stories about other bodies.’
‘So a replacement DI might not sanction a search of the loch?’
‘Time and money on the whim of a kid?’
Magnus looked worried. ‘I didn’t want to say anything at the time, in front of Emma or her mother, but I got the feeling we weren’t the only ones in that part of the wood.’
‘I never saw anyone.’
‘Neither did I.’
‘So?’
‘I caught a scent that seemed out of place.’
Magnus’s highly developed sense of smell had become legendary during the Henderson case, proving to be both a blessing and a curse.
‘It’s amenity woodland,’ Rhona reminded him. ‘It’s open to the public.’
‘I know.’
‘Which means anyone can walk there.’
‘But why trail us?’
‘You actually think someone was following us?’
‘I’m not sure. I think it’s a possibility.’
She tried to recall whether she’d had any sense of this. Emma and Magnus had been in the lead, she at the back. Surely if someone had been following them, she would have noticed?
‘There weren’t any cars parked when we came out, or when we arrived,’ she said. ‘I suppose someone could have entered the woods elsewhere, seen us and followed out of curiosity.’
Magnus didn’t look convinced.
‘How come we never heard anything?’ Rhona asked.
‘If they moved when we moved, we wouldn’t have heard them.’
They’d made plenty of noise as they walked, plus Magnus and Emma had kept up a running conversation. Rhona herself had been preoccupied with both the video recording and her thoughts.
‘I took a video en route,’ she said. ‘I can check, see if it picked up anything.’
‘Yes, do that.’
Rhona, unconvinced, changed the subject. ‘What else did you learn from Emma?’
‘She told me her father died when she was small. They used to live in Glasgow, but her mum wanted to move to the country.’
‘Did she say why?’
‘She said her mum feels safe there.’
‘Safe from what?’
‘That’s what she didn’t want to tell me. She didn’t want to talk about Nick either.’
‘Did Emma really remember the loch or did she just come on it by chance?’
‘I thought she was just wandering about at first, then she suddenly said she remembered hearing running water.’
‘She never told McNab she’d been near water,’ mused Rhona.
‘She was frightened and probably concussed that night. I don’t think she remembered until she began to retrace her steps.’
‘Or she made it up when she saw the place.’
‘She talked about it before we found it,’ said Magnus firmly.
‘Did it ever occur to you that Emma visited those woods before the crash?’
‘She says she hasn’t. They haven’t lived in the cottage for very long.’
‘This still doesn’t expla
in the drawing.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ he agreed. ‘And I don’t think Claire will be keen for us to question Emma again.’
Claire sat alone in the sitting room, staring into the fire. Emma was no longer moving about upstairs. She imagined her daughter sitting on the bed, staring into the darkness. Claire didn’t dare go up the stairs. She didn’t want to hear that humming noise again. She didn’t want to open the bedroom door and find the child like that.
She took refuge in the kitchen, switching on the radio to fill the void of silence. The constant stream of news that dominated the airways between four and six o’clock didn’t distract her. She’d hoped that the excursion through the woods would prove to the police that this was all a product of Emma’s imagination. Instead the opposite had happened.
She took a pizza out of the freezer and began to unwrap the cellophane, her hands shaking. This had gone far enough, she decided. She would not let her daughter be interviewed again. But what if there was something in that loch in the woods? What if they did find another body?
She slid on to a chair, the partly unwrapped pizza discarded on the table. The crushing pain was back, weighing so heavily on her chest she could barely draw air into her lungs. She fisted her hands, pressing the nails deep into the palms, concentrating solely on the discomfort that brought. The knife she’d used to pierce the cellophane lay discarded on the table near by. She stared at it, willing herself not to reach out. She tried to move her mind to a good place. A place where she’d been happy. She conjured up Emma’s tiny face, hours old. The feeling she’d had nursing her child, Dougie, the proud father, by her side. The image brought calm for a few moments.
She rose and walked to the sink. The nail marks on her palms showed up as four crescent moons. She turned on the tap and carefully washed her hands, soaping them well before rinsing. In the background, the forecast promised that the bad weather would return, with blizzards expected over the Christmas period. As if on cue, flakes of wet snow began to hit the darkness of the windowpane, dissolving immediately to trickle their way down the glass.
The police would not disturb them over Christmas, whatever they found in that wood. She turned her attention to the window in her mother’s house. Maybe she’d overreacted, fuelled by her underlying fear and her daughter’s vivid imagination. Perhaps her mother had had the window replaced without telling her? There had been nothing else in the house to suggest an intruder, she reminded herself. Nothing except Emma’s story about the writing on the window, and that didn’t prove anything. Even if Nick had gained entry to the bungalow, there was nothing there to point him here, to Fern Cottage. She needed to remain strong and calm for Emma’s sake.
Claire dried her hands and drew the curtains.
25
He took refuge in his workshop. He was too agitated for the garden, or the greenhouse. Plants reacted to his anger. It was better to be among inanimate objects.
He closed the workshop door behind him and switched on the light. In here the splintered gleam of broken glass reflected his mood.
He’d been working on a new stained-glass window for the local church. An American benefactor, one of the great diaspora, had offered the money to replace the current painted window, whose picture was fading. It was not the only project on the long two-and-a-half-by-three-metre work table. There was another, but it was his alone. For the paid job he’d merely to follow the design pattern dictated by the benefactor.
He bypassed the American job and went immediately to his newest project – the memorial to the child. He had long since learned how to disguise an image among abstract swirls and contours of coloured glass. It would take an eye as keen as his to discern the flow of white-gold hair, the rosy flush of a child’s cheek.
Above the table, wall racks held his store of twenty-by-twenty-centimetre art glass. In a variety of colours and textures, it had been created by the careful addition of metals and salts; cobalt oxide for blue, green created by chromium oxide, red made ruby by the addition of twenty-two-carat gold, cadmium yellow, sulphurous amber, white arsenic and finally the purple stain of manganese. He loved to think about the essence of the glass before he chose his colour and texture. Even within each sheet the refraction of the glass differed, because of the density of colour.
He gazed lovingly at the work in progress. He had chosen opalescent glass for the girl’s hair. The result, he decided, resembled oil flowing on water. It seemed appropriate somehow.
He’d known as soon as he saw the child that he had chosen well. Her hair was just as he’d imagined when he found the hairbrush in her bedroom.
It had been easy to mingle with the funeral party that followed the old woman’s ceremony. A disparate group of people from various eras of the deceased’s life, they barely knew one another.
He’d hung around the entrance as the group filed in for the service, easily identifying the child, watching her get into a car with a man and a woman. The woman he’d presumed to be her mother, the tall man perhaps the mother’s current partner. The male presence had concerned him. Alone, the girl and her mother were vulnerable, but with a man to protect them …
He’d followed the car, expecting them to attend a funeral lunch before going home, but they’d surprised him by driving to the wood.
Why go back there?
He’d learned the truth near the pool. It had been the child who’d desecrated the grave, and she was looking for another.
The knowledge had shocked him more than the memory of that night when the car had hurtled towards him, shattering his peace of mind for ever. It was no longer only the woman he had to fear. The greatest threat now came from her daughter.
Had the man not been with them, he would have finished it there, beside the deep, dark pool.
He selected a piece of ruby-red glass and used the diamond wheel to score it, releasing the rigid surface tension and showering his hands and the surrounding surface with a myriad of invisible fragments.
He fetched some copper foil, stripped off the adhesive backing and wrapped it round the edge of the three small pieces he’d cut. The red droplets would be tricky to solder into place, but he was excited by the prospect.
He brushed the workbench, feeling the sting where minute shards had punctured the skin. He went to the sink and turned on the tap, placing his hands in the flow and watching as the stream of water turned pink with his blood.
The work had calmed him. He could concentrate now on what had to be done. Now that he knew where they lived, it would only be a matter of time before he cleared up the mess.
26
McNab was drunk. Not mean drunk, nor swaying or slurring drunk. The alcohol he’d consumed had made him as brittle as glass, his despair almost tangible.
He had finally returned her call shortly before midnight. Rhona was sitting by the fire in semi-darkness, watching the flickering screen of the television with no desire to go to bed and lie awake.
She had suggested he come round, preferring to know where he was tonight. In his state of mind she feared what might happen, and at least here he could sober up before he had to face his colleagues tomorrow.
When she opened the door, her first instinct was to embrace him. Only then did Rhona acknowledge how truly worried she had been.
‘Dr MacLeod. You haven’t done that for a long time.’
She drew back to find him observing her with just a hint of the old cynicism.
‘You’re drunk.’
‘No, but I plan to be very soon.’
She led him into the sitting room. He sat down on the sofa and pulled out a half-bottle. When Rhona attempted to suggest he’d had enough, McNab held up his hand to silence her.
‘Michael,’ she said gently.
He looked surprised, then smiled a slow smile. ‘I like it when you call me that.’
Rhona held her tongue.
He took a deep swallow. ‘They’ve suspended him. I got a fucking warning and they suspended my boss. And there’s fuck all I
can do about it.’
‘You can give evidence in court. They’ll call you as a witness. You can tell them what really happened.’
McNab wasn’t listening. ‘I phoned Ms Morris. Stupid bitch told me to leave it to the disciplinary inquiry.’
‘She was only doing her job.’
‘Only doing her job! If Henderson got half a chance he would do Ms Morris like he did the others. And she’s defending the bastard.’
‘Not defending, representing.’
‘Would you defend him, after the way he assaulted you?’ McNab’s look seemed to go right through Rhona. He was no fool. He knew what had happened to her didn’t come without repercussions.
‘I’m fine,’ she lied.
He gave her a twisted smile, his expression one of disbelief. ‘Like hell you are.’
He rose and faced her square-on. His green eyes were glittering in anger, his skin pale behind the auburn stubble. He smelt of adrenalin and whisky and male sweat. He searched her face.
‘Let me guess. You can still smell the bastard. I bet you shower all the time just to get rid of his stink.’
Rhona felt the blood drain from her face.
McNab wasn’t finished. ‘You haven’t been with a man since he got to you, right? That’s why you and the Irishman are over?’
Rhona’s anger rose to meet his. How dare he come here and tell her what she felt? How dare he remind her how dirty and violated and frightened she still was?
‘That’s none of your business.’ If her hands hadn’t been so tightly clenched she would have hit him.
Suddenly he registered her distress, and lifted his hand as though to touch her face. When she flinched, his own face creased in pain. ‘I’m sorry. I should never have left you that day. I should have known.’
‘So what happened was your fault?’ she railed. ‘Lisa was your fault. Bill was your fault. What about Magnus? Was what happened to Magnus your fault too?’
‘Fuck, no! That was all his own fault!’
There was a moment’s silence as they both digested his reply. He placed his hand on her arm, tentative and reassuring. Rhona didn’t step away this time.
