Now She’s Gone: An absolutely gripping crime thriller

by Alison James

  Giles tried to reach for her hand, but she jerked it away. ‘No. Don’t.’

  Eventually, when her breathing had slowed, Rachel looked up and asked, ‘Where are you going? The sleeper train left an hour ago, and there are no flights until at least 6 a.m.’

  ‘I’m getting a cab to Glasgow Airport, and then I’ll crash out there until the first Dublin flight leaves.’

  ‘You’re going to Dublin?’

  Giles nodded, then came towards her again and put his hands on her shoulders. This time she didn’t resist.

  ‘Rachel… you and I had such a good thing going. This doesn’t need to be the end does it? It’s not like I actually did anything… as soon as I knew what was going on I left, I swear to you.’

  She shook her head slowly, and carefully removed his hands from her shoulders, placing them at his sides.

  ‘You know it’s the end, Giles. After this… I can’t. Because there’s another thing that’s come out of tonight: I have to always put my own son’s wellbeing first. Joe has to be my priority. There’s just too much at stake.’

  * * *

  Rachel didn’t mention Giles Denton’s sudden departure to Brickall.

  The following morning the two of them and Sillars stood together at the front desk in Gayfield Square to watch the custody sergeant charge Will MacBain with one count of causing or inciting provision by a child of sexual services and two of possessing indecent images of children, and to release him on police bail.

  Will looked ghostly pale. His hair was greasy and he had two days’ worth of stubble on his chin.

  ‘Do you understand the charges?’ the custody sergeant asked.

  He shook his head. ‘What’s this “inciting sexual services” bit? I don’t understand that.’

  ‘We’ve evidence that you were involved in organising the parties at 21 Grange Loan Terrace and 141 Hellebore Drive,’ Brickall said gruffly. ‘At which several teenagers were assaulted, at least one of whom – Niamh Donovan – was underage.’

  ‘I didn’t do any of that. That’s a lie.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have your chance to prove that in court,’ Rachel told him. ‘Meanwhile we will be carrying out further investigation.’

  ‘So I’m allowed to go home now?’

  Sillars shook her head. ‘No you are not,’ she rasped. ‘Because of the nature of the charges, and because there are underage children in the house, you’ll have tae make other arrangements. We need an address where you’ll be staying before you can be bailed, and it has to be somewhere where you’ll have no contact with anyone under the age of sixteen. Otherwise it’s a bail hostel for you.’ She turned to Rachel. ‘I’ll get Tulloch to chase up Child Protection’s assessment on the MacBain kiddies. And we need to arrange an interview with the wife as soon as possible.’

  ‘Hazel had nothing to do with this. Nothing whatsoever.’ Will’s voice trembled. ‘And it’s Angus’s second birthday today. I need to be there for his birthday. I’m no risk to my own children, for goodness’ sake!’

  ‘The evidence would suggest otherwise,’ Rachel said drily. ‘And I’m afraid the law prevents it. You might, at some point in the future, be allowed court-ordered contact under a supervision order.’

  Sillars addressed him again, pulling out her Mayfairs and lighter in readiness for her next cigarette break. ‘But for now it’ll be a condition that you stay away from your home address. Break that, and it’s a stay at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.’

  * * *

  ‘Good result,’ said Brickall chirpily as they walked back to the incident room.

  ‘No. It’s not.’ Rachel was only too aware that she sounded bitter. ‘We’ve still got two dead teenagers and no one being charged over their deaths. And a Latvian girl with her head sliced off. Oh, and another teenager who was almost raped on camera last night while we sat outside eating crisps.’

  ‘Wow – someone got out on the wrong side of the bed this morning.’

  Rachel buried her face in her hands and took a long, jagged breath. ‘Sorry. It was a late night and I’m just extremely tired.’ But without even looking up she knew that Brickall had picked up that something was wrong.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said, more gently this time, ‘Why don’t I get you a coffee, then chase down the cell tower records for MacBain’s phone on the nights the two kids died?’

  DI Sillars reappeared, breathing e-cigarette vapour all over them.

  ‘Your other Latvian’s just arrived in a paddy wagon. He’s down in the cells, awaiting your earliest convenience.’ She gave a cackle, exuding little gusts of vanilla flavouring.

  Rachel beckoned to DC Tulloch to follow her, and they went to the cells on the ground floor. Maris Balodis was in the same male prisoner cell that MacBain had just vacated. He had lost so much weight that the prison sweats hung off him. Only the purple, bruise-like shadows under his eyes remained the same.

  Tulloch led him, handcuffed, to an interview room and fetched him a cup of tea and a sandwich, removing the cuffs so that he could eat and drink.

  ‘Maris,’ said Rachel gently. ‘You’ve heard that Iveta is dead?’

  He nodded, closing his eyes briefly.

  Tulloch pushed a still from the CCTV footage of Grange Loan Terrace towards him. It showed Iveta and the tall man, holding their heated discussion.

  ‘Do you know who this man is?’

  Balodis did not react. He picked up the ham sandwich and examined it suspiciously.

  ‘Is it your friend Andrei?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Iveta mentioned someone called Georgie? Is this him?’

  Balodis nodded slowly. ‘Gjerji.’

  ‘Is that his first name? What’s his surname? His family name?’

  There was silence, apart from the sound of the sandwich being chewed and tea being slurped. It was like interrogating a piece of granite.

  ‘Maris…’ Once the last of the sandwich had been swallowed, Rachel motioned for Tulloch to put the cuffs back on. ‘Iveta was brutally killed by someone, very possibly this man or one of his associates. You’re in prison, and you’ll be in there longer if we add a charge of obstructing a police enquiry. So please – if you know his name, we need you to tell us.’

  ‘Dushku. Gjerji Dushku.’

  ‘And how do you know him?’

  Balodis shrugged. ‘Everyone know him. Is Albanian. Albanians is like… mafia.’ He mimed a throat being slit. ‘Very bad men.’

  * * *

  ‘I’ve got some news,’ Brickall told Rachel when they left the police station in search of somewhere other than the canteen for lunch. ‘About Dolly.’

  ‘I wish Dolly was here now,’ Rachel sighed wistfully, ‘She was a calming influence. Like a therapy animal.’

  They had reached the café where they went on their first visit to Gayfield Square, during the festival. When Dolly had been with them. It was a few weeks ago, but felt a lot longer.

  Brickall ordered a full Scottish, Rachel a toasted cheese sandwich and a pot of tea for them both to share. ‘I heard back from my mate in Auckland – Dolly’s real owner. I told him about leaving Dolly with your mum while I was working and he said he’s happy for your mum to adopt her permanently. Do you think she’d like to?’

  Rachel thought about this for a few seconds. ‘Yes, probably, but don’t you want her yourself?’

  ‘Of course I want her. I bloody love that dog. But you know what it’s like with our hours, and being called out on last-minute jobs… it’s just not practical.’

  ‘Fine,’ Rachel poured them both tea. ‘I’ll have a word with Mum about it. If I ever get five minutes to speak to her.’ She sighed heavily.

  ‘Come on – tell me what’s eating at you. I know there’s something.’

  Rachel took a long, deep inhalation of air. Then she told him that the mystery man they spotted leaving the party early was Giles Denton.

  ‘Fucking hell. I told you there was something dodgy about him. Didn’t I? I told you.’
Brickall was triumphant.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I believed him when he said he didn’t realise where he was going until he got there. I really do. Not that it makes the thing any less over.’

  Brickall narrowed his eyes. ‘Can you be sure though? Can you really?’

  Rachel pressed her fingers into her brow bone. ‘Christ, Mark, how can I be? How can any of us be sure about anyone, at the end of the day? I checked the list of people arrested at the party, and there is someone called Peter Fairlie among them, and I’ve googled him and he is an architect. So Giles’s version of events stands up. But I also know that because of my job, and for Joe’s sake, I simply can’t take the risk. I can’t have anything more to do with Giles.’

  Brickall smiled slightly. ‘You’ve only been a mother for a few weeks and look what it’s done to you.’

  Rachel gave him a weary smile over the rim of her tea cup.

  ‘Seriously though: I’m glad I got to meet your Joe. He seems like a great lad.’

  ‘He is.’ Rachel desperately wanted to change the subject. ‘I’m now wondering if this Albanian gangster had anything to do with Emily’s death. Or Bruno’s. But I just can’t see it somehow.’

  Brickall shook his head. ‘Me either. It doesn’t fit. Slitting the Latvian bird’s throat – yes, absolutely. But I can’t see him fiddling around with spiking drinks with ethylene glycol, which he then returns to a shelf in the MacBain’s garage. In full view of the family and students. It makes no sense. And if a random Albanian turns up in your hall of residence are you really going to sit down and share a glass of Southern Comfort with them?’

  ‘Agreed. It just doesn’t stack up. And why would they want to silence Emily and Bruno anyway, when there’s nothing overtly connecting them to those two students?’

  Brickall stabbed a sausage with his fork. ‘It’s got inside job written all over it. It has to be Will MacBain. It just has to be. He’s the link between the students and those dodgy parties, and everything was at stake for him if they blabbed.’ He grabbed the brown sauce bottle and squirted it liberally over his plate. ‘The only thing that doesn’t quite add up, is that MacBain is into really young kids, but the parties are for much older victims. Some of them almost legal. So why is he bothering? Okay, the organisers could be paying him for providing ‘Young Friends’, but he doesn’t look like he’s into it for the money. His lifestyle’s not exactly flashy: quite the opposite.’

  ‘Ah, I think I know how that might work. It’s all about access.’ Rachel repeated Charlie’s theory about bartering illegal content on the dark web.

  ‘So let me get this straight…’ Brickall drained the last of his tea. ‘Our friend Will the Christian prefers pre-pubescents, so he trades his best-looking teenagers with other weirdos in exchange for material that’s in his area of… specialisation.’

  ‘As I understand it, that’s how it works,’ Rachel said, pouring them both more tea. ‘Pretty Catholic virgins would represent a substantial bargaining chip. The choicest sort of ‘fresh fruit’. And everyone gets their interests catered to without money changing hands. Less chance of being traced that way.’

  ‘And MacBain can’t exactly take his students to the parties himself, so he recruits someone to hand out invites to good-looking kids, and makes sure that the cream of that year’s crop are in the right place at the right time, to receive them.’

  ‘You’d never think it to look at him, would you?’ Rachel said with a shudder. ‘But then so many paedophiles are not what you would expect. I suppose viewing stuff through a screen allows them to disassociate the inner pervert from the straight-acting persona in their day-to-day life.’ Rachel beckoned to the waitress to bring their bill. ‘All of which begs a huge question: how much of this does Hazel know? Will says she’s in the dark, but we can’t take his word for it.’

  ‘Christ no!’ snorted Brickall.

  ‘Tulloch’s arranging to bring her in and ask her once the children have been risk-assessed, so we’ll soon find out. ‘

  ‘I for one can’t wait to see what MacBain’s phone location data tell us,’ Brickall said. ‘Then we’ll nail the fucker.’

  Thirty-Six

  Gjerji Dushku had quite the rap sheet.

  He had multiple convictions for robbery, assault and fraud in various European countries, and was wanted by Interpol for human trafficking. Rachel sat at her desk in the incident room that afternoon scrutinising his mugshot. Despite the ghetto clothing and the boyish appearance, he was actually forty-two years old.

  ‘Excuse me – I’m looking for DI Prince?’

  Rachel looked up into the face of a young woman with a shock of red hair in a fashionable undercut, multiple ear piercings and a diamond stud in one nostril.

  ‘I’m Rachel Prince… and you are?’

  ‘Celia. Celia Pownall. From JOC – sorry, the Joint Operations Cell. Our mutual colleague Giles Denton briefed me a few days ago, and told me you needed urgent help on a case?’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ Rachel coloured slightly at the mention of Giles’s name.

  ‘I thought he’d be here to meet me, but I haven’t been able to reach him on his mobile.’

  ‘Well, your arrival is very timely,’ Rachel said with a smile, avoiding the subject of Giles’s whereabouts. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

  They took cups of coffee to an unused interview room, and Celia set up her computer. ‘I’ve had some of the background from Giles, but maybe you could fill me in a bit more?’

  Grateful for the opportunity to order her scattered thoughts, Rachel described the parties at Grange Loan Terrace and Hellebore Drive and the link with the shadowy figure of Gjerji Dushku.

  ‘Is there any chance you can track him down online?’ she asked, taking a much-needed mouthful of coffee.

  Celia pursed her lips. ‘I can certainly try, but if he’s operating on the dark web he’ll be using a code name, and his IP address will be obscured.’

  ‘I see…’ Rachel reconsidered for a moment. ‘We found a hidden camera at one of the properties, and there’s good reason to believe that videos of abuse are being shot at these parties and traded online. Is there any chance you could track those down?’

  ‘It would be difficult,’ Celia admitted, sipping her own coffee as she opened up a browser. ‘There are various keyword chains we can use, but it takes time, simply due to the volume of stuff out there.’

  ‘Apparently they advertise for staff on a forum called Edinburgh Extra… maybe you could start there?’

  Celia started tapping buttons. ‘Okay, I’ll do a web scrape on the site and run some financial forensics… and it would help to know exactly who the victims are?’

  ‘I’ll get you all the details. Leave it with me.’

  When she returned to the incident room, Brickall was tapping a biro on the edge of his desk, and scowling.

  ‘What’s up, my little ray of sunshine?’

  ‘Something just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Okay, firstly: MacBain’s phone records. He wasn’t at the house on either of the evenings in question. When Bruno and Emily were poisoned. On both occasions he was on the other side of the city.’

  Rachel walked to the whiteboard and took down the photos of Emily, Bruno and Niamh to give to Celia Pownall. ‘Everyone knows that cell-tower pings are unreliable as evidence,’ she reminded him. ‘So we can’t be one hundred per cent certain of that.’

  ‘Which is why I double-checked…’

  Brickall showed her images on his computer terminal. ‘Here… a picture on one of the White Crystal kids’ Instagram account, posted at 21.58 on 7 August this year.’ He showed Rachel a smiling group selfie, showing Will surrounded by students, at the Queen’s Hall auditorium. ‘And I checked through the archive posts on the White Crystal website and found this photo taken on a group outing the night Bruno went missing…’ He showed her a photo taken on a dry ski slope at the Hillend Snowsports Centre. Will, resplendent in a country gent’s wax jacket
, was again at the centre of the shot.

  Rachel sat looking at the images for a few seconds. Marie-Laure Fournier was there in the concert group, just as she’d said. ‘And the second thing?’

  ‘Kirstie Blair and one of our other Honeycomb uniforms tracked down an NPR capture of the MacBain’s car heading away from 34 Campbell Road on the night of the seventh. No passengers, just the driver. At 21.08. MacBain can’t be in both places at once.’

  Rachel shrugged. ‘The time stamp on a social media post is not indicative of when the photo was taken, only when it was uploaded. Maybe he was back from the concert by 10 p.m.’

  ‘Surely the odds are that it would have been later than that? Most evening events don’t end until at least ten.’

  ‘Only one way to be sure – phone the auditorium and find out.’

  Rachel’s phone buzzed with a text. It was from Joe.

  Got a minute?

  * * *

  She stood waiting for him on the steps of Gayfield Square half an hour later. He ambled into view, and the first thing she noticed was the rucksack on his back.

  ‘You’re leaving,’ she observed.

  He nodded. ‘Charlie’s got lectures starting on Monday, and I need to be getting on with finding some paid work. I’m just on my way to the station now.’

  ‘Want me to give you a lift? I can borrow a pool car, or we could grab a taxi.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll walk. Now that I know my way around this place so well…’ He put his rucksack on the pavement at his feet. ‘I just wanted to tell you a couple of things. First: I saw Stuart.’

  ‘And how did that go?’

  ‘Fine. Okay. Like, it’s never going to be like it is with you…’

  Rachel smiled. ‘And how’s that?’

  ‘You know, just natural. Normal. But I’m glad I met him. We’ve made a start, at least.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad. And the second thing?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell Mum and Dad about going to the party.’