by Caro Ramsay
There was no pain. Just a bubble of ruby red that turned into a crack of crimson, that formed a rose that veined and spread to give a cerise collar on the perfect white skin.
It was raining by the time the police gathered, covertly, in the cobbled junction of Elean Street, Elean Lane and a very narrow walkway called the Potters. Kirkton was making himself very obvious, walking up and down, a slight march rather than a leisurely stroll. They had not wired him. Colin Anderson, in a beanie hat, was watching the doorway of the antique mall, doing a good impersonation of a hungry husband waiting for a wife to take him to dinner. Costello was studying the menu in the door of the Cambodian restaurant, giving her a good side view of the area. She thought she could see a couple of members of the tactical deployment team, but maybe not. They should not be obvious.
Batten had assured them that it would not come to that. Blondie was angry, she wanted to be heard and their best weapon was to listen. He pointed out that this was a public place, obvious, with no easy get out. His reason for this was that this was her end game, she wanted to finish it here. They just had to make sure that the end was on their terms not hers. He had suggested that Blondie had a previous rapport of some kind with Anderson, something so slight it had meant nothing to him but had significance for her. So he needed to work on that. Batten had spent a couple of hours with Anderson going through tactics, the deployment team had kept to themselves, Mitchum being the liaison back and forth, only telling them what they needed to know. Costello was wired and had a baton. They both had a camera, they both had Kevlar. Slash proof but not stab proof. The jury was out about hypodermics.
Anderson was watching Kirkton, knowing that he should feel a degree of pity for the man, but couldn’t quite shrug off the feeling that the politician had brought this on himself. There was something he was not saying, some reason why he didn’t want Anderson on that cold case team. And had that made him a target? Well, they would get his daughter back and sort out the devil in the detail later.
Anderson was keeping an eye on the garage diagonally across from him. Costello was watching the antique arcade behind him. She looked like a tourist waiting for a friend, caught out by a Glasgow downpour and amusing herself by looking at all the menus.
Anderson saw Costello go walkabout, casually taking in the doors of the garage, the single door that was almost rotten away. She then looked down the cobbled lane, a wine merchant and two hairdressers, a shop for vintage clothes – all their wares pulled tight under a canopy for the forecasted cloudburst. It was strange to watch people walk about, looking at the sky. Costello herself was looking at the big roller doors, covertly looking at the rust, seeing if they had been opened recently. They hadn’t.
Whoever Blondie was, she knew the city well. This was somebody who had spent a lifetime walking round here, Costello mused.
Anderson coughed. Costello strolled back to her position at the restaurant, hidden from anybody coming down the lane. Kirkton had reacted to something. Costello saw him turn. There was a subtle flow of a signal from the couple who were eating chips in the doorway of the printers, to the man talking to nobody on his mobile phone, to the older man reading the menu in the window of the Italian restaurant then to a joiner fixing a lock on a door of an office. He spoke into a radio clipped on his collar. The rain got a little heavier, everybody moved on.
A few nods. Everybody in position. One radio directive. Seven answers. Nobody was going to get out of this building, no matter how she was dressed.
Then Kirkton moved, a definitive step to the side. A door had opened welcoming him in. He closed his umbrella, shaking it out before he entered through the door with the rotten lower planks.
The door closed.
Taking a deep breath Anderson signalled to Costello. ‘Let’s do it.’
Costello took a last sweeping look round the crossroads and hoped that those who should have been watching were watching.
Anderson opened the door. Costello followed him into the small outer office. Kirkton was standing in the middle, trying to be brave but they could see the relief in his eyes.
‘The door was open,’ he said.
‘The door was opened,’ Costello corrected, looking round her, ‘for you, so there is somebody here.’ She looked at him with a degree of suspicion, for a moment she wondered who was following who. Her hand rested on her baton. Then she recognized the scent in the air, above the stink of damp and rotting wood, were the high notes of Fracas.
‘What now?’ Kirkton asked.
They were standing in a tiny wood panelled hall. The single door in off the lane was battered and old. There was another door, a small dusty desk. An old Pirelli calendar on the wall, browning and curled. There was no natural light at all, except some filtering through from the slightly open door and a small glow from somewhere else, but the shadowing patterns were confusing.
‘I guess you should go in, that’s the way the sign points.’ Costello held her mobile phone in her hand, and opened the door slightly. ‘We will be right behind you, working towards a safer society. Couldn’t possibly leave you alone in a place like this. Anything could happen to you.’
Kirkton stood his ground. For a minute Anderson thought he was going to bluster.
Then the room darkened.
The three of them stood, knowing that they were not alone but their company was not in this reception area. Anderson tried the light switch. Nothing happened. The door that led into the main part of the garage opened with the same slow squeak that is a cliché in any horror film, but is truly blood-curdling in real life. It moved with more strength than could be caused by a breeze. In the dark. A gentle light came on in the room beyond. Anderson could hear Costello breathing and felt her fingers curl round the bottom of his jacket just to make sure they didn’t lose each other. Or if one took a syringe stab, the other one would know. There was a sharp clunk, deafening in the silence. That was the door behind them locking.
‘What was that?’ asked Kirkton, the voice coming from the blackness behind Anderson.
‘Our escape route,’ said Costello. There was the noise of movement, shuffling of feet, as Costello told the politician to stay close.
They all jumped as the discordant harmony of funfair music started. Barrel organ deafeningly loud, small bright lights started dancing in the darkness. Head splitting volume, the colours disorientating. Costello extended her baton. Nobody was coming near her with a hypodermic without getting a battering.
‘Theatre people,’ muttered Anderson, by way of explanation of the macabre sideshow. He pointed to a rotating disco light in the ceiling. Cheap. Simple. The music quietened, to that of a child’s music box somewhere in the next room where the music would always be just out of their reach. Anderson felt behind him for Costello’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. He was going to walk forward. Costello dropped the baton onto its wrist loop, and switched on the phone torch.
She heard Kirkton mutter one word. ‘Tania.’
The three of them walked forward into a narrow corridor with several doors on the left, a big mirror to the right, reflecting them moving slowly in a single line, second rate Keystone Cops. There was a door open at the end, to the right, to the area behind the mirror. Anderson tried to get his bearings, that would be to the mechanics bay.
They went through, three of them; Anderson in front, Costello at the rear. The circus music was louder here, more flashing lights in bright colours spun past them, faster and faster. Anderson thought they were in some house of horror cakewalk.
This was pure theatre.
Anderson had paused with his back against the black painted wall of the old garage and he pointed at the row of tea chests banked up high, decreasing in number as they went towards the front, forming a theatre, an auditorium.
Auditorium. The club where Blondie had been in 1999.
Tea chest. Just like Mr Hollister.
They edged along the narrow gap. The seats appeared to be occupied but the only light in the room we
re the dancing flickers that kaleidoscoped around the room, making it difficult to work out shapes with any precision and making it impossible to ascertain any movement. Or if anybody was there at all.
In the front, beyond the lights, was darkness, too black to be merely the absence of light. That was the backdrop of a stage.
Costello kept her back to the solid concrete wall, thinking about going back and closing that door that left them exposed. All those films she had seen, the good guy at the back copped it first.
They moved in timid single file along the narrow gap between the wall and the tea chests. Costello swung the narrow beam of the torch around, picking out shoes and bits of legs and trousers of an audience that were deadly still and deadly quiet. The air was cold and rank. Sitting in the middle of the lowest row of tea chests sat a figure blocking the light from the stage beyond. The silhouette was a circle on a box. Perfect round hair on a pair of narrow shoulders. Costello caught the sight of jet black hair and a handle. Then the flash of a white bony hand raised in mid-air, playing a silent piano, a mosaic as the kaleidoscope colour whizzed round them, flinging bright patterns on the wall; reds and yellows. Like a roundabout. But they were standing still.
She could make out, in the flickering, the Duchess in a deep pink evening gown and her rolled up black hair, the lights tinkling and glinting off her tiara. Or her crown.
Costello swore quietly.
In the back of the Italian restaurant they were following the images on two laptops, relayed from the cameras on Anderson’s jacket and Costello’s lapel. The command had all kinds of earpieces, talking quietly to each other but not to the two detectives who had gone into the garage.
Batten and Mulholland were watching the same feed at the station, both anxious. Costello was wearing a wire and had two panic buttons, but Batten had told them to be as unobtrusive as possible. If the images through the lightshow were what they appeared to be, Blondie was putting on a show for them.
Once she had her say, she would be a different creature.
Mulholland watched until he saw the stage in the old garage. It was a hidden corner of the West End with tiny antique shops and a couple of very good restaurants that he could no longer afford. He knew the area, he should have been there, but they thought him unfit because of this leg and his fracture that kept fracturing. So they trusted that arsehole Wyngate now. Wingnut Wyngate with his sticky out ears and his little rucksack that went everywhere with him. Mulholland looked round at the coat stand. Wyngate’s anorak was gone but his rucksack was still there. He had gone back to the dentist. Anderson was fed up with him and Costello having a ‘who has the sorest face competition’.
He stood at the whiteboard, looking at the stills from the various videos and the CCTV screen shots. The picture of Kirkton that Costello had put up on the board. A victim now surely that Tania had gone missing. Mulholland turned back to make sure that Wyngate’s rucksack was still there, then phoned Graham downstairs, confirming that the constable had left but not yet returned. Mulholland phoned Wyngate’s phone. Switched off.
So he was held up at the dentist. Nothing more. Trust him to be away when all the excitement was going on.
He settled back to look across at the footage streaming in, just colours and lights, but the movement of the camera suggested someone walking slowly. Both trackers said the same, Anderson and Costello were moving and were still together.
He wished them well and looked at the photograph of David. He reached out and touched it, his fingertip on the boy’s cheek. He hoped he was there, alive. His mother had not been told of the operation today; she couldn’t be trusted on social media and there was a media blackout. He looked at David’s hair, spikey, high up off his forehead. And then James Kirkton with his big floppy fringe like a poor man’s Boris Johnson. The picture had caught him with that tic of his, third finger of the left hand pulled through his hair like a snowplough. He had seen that before.
The circus music stopped, the barrel organ wheezed to silence.
The soaring strains of Madame Butterfly filled the room. Darkness fell. The swirling lights slowed and slowed, spinning to a standstill.
For a moment Anderson held his breath, he flicked his eyes down to the small camera, hoping it was still working.
Then a voice, quiet and perfectly harmonic with no distortion through the sound system, asked them very politely to ‘Take a seat. All of you.’
‘Well, she knows fine that we are here.’
‘I think she knew that all along. And I don’t think she is going to mind a bigger audience than she invited. Theatre folk never mind that, do they?’
Kirkton, now in-between the other two, hissed at them. ‘If this, any of this, means that I will not get my daughter back then …’
‘There will only be one person responsible for you not getting your daughter back. And right now, she’s calling the shots.’
Madame Butterfly got a little louder. A spotlight settled on one empty tea chest, crudely rigged up to look like a chair with red velvet cushions. The seat was next to the Duchess’s wheelchair.
If it were for James Kirkton, then the member of the Scottish Parliament had the best seat in the house.
Costello said quietly into the ear of James Kirkton, ‘Go and take your seat.’
As the politician did so, a single spotlight danced around him. Anderson tried to look up to the stage, to see if there was somebody present. Not all of this was pre-recorded. Kirkton’s every movement was being illuminated and there was no way that could have been predicted unless there was a motion sensor motor on the light. This technology was impressive, and beyond the profile they had of Blondie.
Had they got this wrong?
However, the light followed Kirkton and only him. Leaving us in the dark, thought Anderson, hoping the words were not significant.
The music changed to a song Anderson vaguely recognized. He recognized the female voices. Abba. When they sung the lyric ‘Happy New Year’, Kirkton nearly jumped out his seat, looking around him. Feral fear now gripped his face, all thoughts of his daughter had gone. He was up, ready to leave.
Costello gripped Anderson’s upper arm.
‘I saw that.’
The red curtains rose inch by slow inch. The music dampened down, but the bass remained full and throbbing as if somebody had closed a thick door over, creating a barrier.
It took a moment but Anderson recognized the scene that had been expertly painted on the backdrop on stage. He had looked at it often enough in the last twenty-four hours. And he had seen it in the cold case file. The small alley at the back of Ashton Lane; Lillybank.
Mulholland looked at the photograph on the wall for a long time. He had seen that, in motion, recently, that weird tic of Kirkton’s. He ran the CCTV over in his mind. His memory trying to reach for the colour but not getting it. It would only come back to him in black and white. Was it from the CCTV footage from 1999?
He looked around him, there was no free computer in the room. The hub of the tactical squad had taken over so he walked over to Anderson’s office, pushed at the door to see if it was locked. It rarely was. He then sat at his boss’s desk and fired up the computer, logging in. He glanced at the photographs in their silver frames; Claire and Peter, both growing up so fast. Vik felt very old.
Then he started to search for the files on the CCTV footage of 1999, Byres Road. The old nightclub near where Oran Mor was now, what had it been called? Auditorium? He pressed play and watched. Anderson’s file only held the edited highlights, starting at the point when Blondie walked into view, the tall man beside her with his arm over her shoulder. She moved to one side. He moved the other way. They laughed. Mulholland wondered if they said bread and butter when they joined hands again. The man’s black fringe fell forward and he swept it back over his forehead. Third finger left hand.
Tania Kirkton walked on the stage, eyes open, mouth open. She was drooling. Her walk was ungainly, slow and mechanical. Her elbows held high, her ha
nds swung as her body moved in response to the tension of the fine wires that ran up to the darkness. On her head, brilliant gold in the lights, was a blonde wig, bob cut. Kirkton moved towards the stage.
The music stopped instantly.
Tania stopped moving, only her right hand, dangling free shook a little.
Batten was right, Blondie wanted to have her say. They had to listen and watch.
Anderson narrowed his eyes, trying to see what was behind the curtains. He could hear a gentle grinding, like fine meshed gears. Was this some mechanical system, ran by a computer in synch with the music?
Or was that too high tech for her?
He looked back at Kirkton. The politician’s demeanour had changed, as if some new and terrifying realization had just dawned upon him.
He knew what all this was about. ‘Tania’ was now standing up. The crude noose that ran under her chin to the top of her head pulled her face up so she had sight of her select and noiseless audience. Anderson could see someone else lying on the stage, curled behind her, on a piece of backdrop painted as a back doorway. Tania looked into the audience and saw her own father. Tears rolled down her face, her eyes red and swollen, her nose puffy she tried to shake her head. Pleading.
In desperation.
In pain.
Anderson watched, hating himself for hearing Claire’s small voice in his head, distressed about the bullying. Tania was the victim now. And he despised himself for the little quiver of pleasure he felt.
He concentrated on the horrific tableau being created in front of him, trying to figure out how many people were there. Did Blondie have an accomplice? If so, which one was the dangerous one?
Another figure hobbled on from stage right, a mechanical clunking accompanying every lift of his leg, left and right being dragged up by the knee. His feet not touching the ground in a slow motion parody of Irish dancing. Then Anderson looked up at the hair, the bruised and bloodied face. The ill-fitting leather jacket swung round him, puckered at the collar where the underlying wires, now weight-bearing, pulled taut. He recognized the face, Gordon Wyngate. He heard Costello swear behind him. The strains of Agnetha and Frida, singing about a world where every neighbour is a friend, echoed round the walls.
