by Caro Ramsay
Costello forced herself to look back at the bodies. Back at the one with the flashes of red fabric. The rope had cut into a slim ankle. There was one black shoe. Clean, high-heeled.
‘Which one? Which tarot card?’
‘The Hanging Man.’
Vik closed the phone. He had never heard Costello’s voice so clipped, a sure sign she was upset. They had found Bernie and Sammy in the worst possible way. Eoin had slipped his surveillance. Again. It had all gone very wrong.
He couldn’t sleep now. After Costello, Wyngate had called him; the underlying message was clear: be on your guard. Vik couldn’t help his mind racing. Everything going on here, including the horror on the bridge, started with wee Angela all those years ago. The butterfly effect. Fully awake now, he spent a few minutes Googling her name, Grandpappy’s name with both spellings and Vancouver. After ten minutes he caught sight of the name Amy Lee in the Richmond News, a five-year-old whose mother had gone missing. He scrolled past the picture of a smiling brunette holding a child in her arms. Judy Westland had gone out for the weekly shopping and not come back. Her estranged husband, James Westland, was not available for comment. Amy Lee was being looked after by her grandmother, Edie Cohoon. The date was 15 June, 2004.
For some reason the family had then moved east to Manitoba. He looked at Google maps. They had moved a thousand miles.
Then he Googled Amy Lee Westland, Robert Cohoon and Edie in Manitoba 2006. Nothing there, but Amy’s name came up in the yearbook of St James Ravenscraig School a year later, somewhere called Thompson, Manitoba. And there was a picture of the children in that year in the Thompson Citizen. He flicked over a few editions of the paper. Another woman found murdered, strangled.
Then Amy Lee had moved to Ramsay in Calgary.
He lay down and stared at the wooden ceiling for a long time, thinking about Amy Lee emailing at midnight because she didn’t want Grandpappy to know she was looking into his past.
He wondered what secrets Grandpappy had.
The incident room was empty, cold, even in the mid-summer sun. The team were being interviewed about what had gone wrong. Batten knew they had done nothing wrong; they had been outplayed. He had pointed out that Sammy’s card was black – he had pointed it out but not pushed the point home. She shouldn’t have been allowed to walk about on her own. But Sammy was an intelligent, experienced police officer. She trusted somebody – Bernie?
So Batten was back in his default position, hiding behind the computer monitor at Costello’s desk watching Jimmy’s interview while nursing a huge mug of black coffee. His eyes were tracking backwards and forwards. His hand nudged the mouse to stop, play, stop, play, rewind. He had headphones on and he appeared to be listening and watching intently.
He was looking at a room which could have been a dining room. The Dewars were sitting round a table with Eoin and Isobel on either side of a younger Jimmy.
A female voice said, ‘Sometimes it’s easier if you draw what happened.’
Jimmy nodded, chin sticking out, teeth biting down hard, twitching. All signs of inner turmoil. His mind was trying to remember things he would rather forget.
‘Only if you want to, Jimmy,’ Isobel said with a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
‘Are you up for this? It would be really helpful. Here’s a map of the island. It’s not very good, I’m afraid.’
Jimmy smiled, looking at the piece of paper. He was handed a pencil, the film kept running. Jimmy smoothed out the paper on the table top and lifted the pencil.
‘Just draw on it where the Dreamcatcher landed on Snooky Bay.’
He pointed the tip of his pencil on to the paper, looking up for reassurance.
‘Yes, that’s Snooky Bay, there’s the folly wall … the narrows are down here, I’ve put them in blue to help.’
Jimmy leaned forward and drew something, with the tip of his tongue out.
When he finished, ‘So then the four of you climbed the folly wall?’
He nodded.
‘So draw that then.’ He did.
‘And where did you go afterwards?’
‘We went,’ he drew as he spoke, ‘round the bottom of the cliff round here, round the path, Callum and I …’
‘Yes, Callum and you. Did you stay back for some reason? Where had Robbie gone?’
‘Robbie was round here with …’
‘With Warren?’
Jimmy nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Then you walked round the pathway following Robbie and …’
‘He was hitting him.’
‘But what did you see, Jimmy? I know it’s difficult, but what did you actually see?’
Jimmy was still for a moment, the pencil poised over the paper. ‘I was looking at the cliff, I heard noises. Robbie made a noise, crying. I saw Robbie on the ground and Warren had this stone, he was hitting him like this …’ Jimmy raised his hand high in the air and brought it down violently.
The ferocity silenced them; the only noise on the video was the hum of the camera.
‘Then?’
‘He looked up and saw me.’
‘And?’
‘I ran … He chased me … But he …’
The pencil hesitated, then the tears started. The boy started to scream and howl. The paper was torn and the table was overturned as the boy fell to the floor, curling himself into a ball.
The screen went blank.
Batten pulled a polythene A3 size folder from Costello’s desk. In it was the piece of paper that showed a rough outline of the island, and the narrows marked on one side, the loch on the other. A wavy outline of a small canoe parked against the curved line. Pencil point driven through. The rest of the paper had been crumpled, then carefully straightened.
He rewound the film, just enough to see the boy curled on the floor. He could see Isobel’s shoes and her knees, legs bent ready to kneel beside her son.
He rewound the film again.
To the phrase ‘And what did you actually see?’
‘I was looking at the cliff, I heard noises. Robbie made a noise, crying. I saw Robbie on the ground and Warren had this stone, he was hitting him like this …’
‘Then?’
‘He looked up and saw me.’
‘And?’
‘I ran, he chased me … But he …’
The boy started to scream and howl.
The film broke, then restarted.
‘But you and Callum got to Snooky Bay?’
On film, Jimmy nodded: a female hand was seen handing him a handkerchief. ‘But Warren was faster – did you see him get to Callum?’
‘I managed to get to the boat. He couldn’t … I couldn’t save him.’ The cries became louder, the film stopped again.
Batten was now back in his own office at the university. He had been there all night, fuelled by strong black coffee and, if he was honest, a sense of guilt. He had got something very wrong. He was looking at things that were difficult to look at but were still easier than suffering the raw pain and anger in the main office at the station. He had left the team to lick their wounds. And assuage their guilt. Batten had seen many pictures of violence, death by violence, and it was never easy when it was children. Children killed in war zones, those images on the TV he could accept. But somehow children dying a violent death in their own home always hit him hardest. Something about that juxtaposition of them being killed in a place where they should feel at their safest, somewhere where a parent should protect them.
After watching the video of Jimmy’s interview he turned to the post-mortem and the scene of crime DVDs. He started with Robbie, who was found dead on the highest part of the northerly bay, far from the water. He was lying on his back, the pale shingle underneath him clumped with blood, eyes closed, his left hand raised, right arm across his body. His injuries so much worse than the other boy. It had taken time, Batten thought. Was that rage on McAvoy’s part because Jimmy had got away? Robbie had tried to fend off his attacker. His brown hair covered the site o
f the actual impact. They had not found the murder weapon, but the report said it was probably a stone from traces found deep in the wound. Callum’s attack had been quicker, but just as fatal. McAvoy knew he still had to deal with Jimmy. Batten flicked over a few more photographs, trying to think like a ten-year-old boy on his holidays, on his adventures. Callum had been timid getting into the boat with the other three, maybe not keen to go with Warren. Yet in the film taken a few weeks before, Warren was filling the boy with confidence. Maybe the boy felt more confident with the others there; Jimmy, the older boy, and his pal Robbie. The three musketeers.
Psychology was a science and the rules of science were confirmed by the anomalies, but there were no anomalies here.
He flipped to the other folder with the pictures of Callum. Lying on his front, his hair parted at the site of injury. His left temple had been hit with a blunt instrument by a right-handed person. He was found on the beach near Snooky Bay. Batten kept flicking through. Not looking at the boys now but at the surrounding area, the landscape. There was something troubling him, something that somebody had said, but he was tired and couldn’t connect the ideas. He stood up and slid his jacket on, bumping his head on the bottom of the bookshelf. He swore loudly and sat back down, rubbing his bald head as his fingers felt the blood. He looked at his crimson fingertips, scalp wounds always bled like hell. He got up and turned to the small sink in his office, sticking a white paper towel over the wound, then he sat back and watched the crimson stain spread. He thought about the ruffle of Warren’s hand on the boy’s head. That was the anomaly. Trust turning to violence so quickly, with no precedent. The precedent pointed elsewhere.
With his free hand he picked up the phone.
O’Hare was having his usual busy morning. His attention was currently on a young man, as yet unidentified, but as he had lots of distinguishing features it was just a matter of getting him on the database. He couldn’t be any more than twenty-five and he was dead from a single punch. Unintentional, O’Hare was sure, nothing more than larking about by junkies with insufficient motor control to fall over safely. He waited until his assistant pulled together the fingers of the deceased left hand, to get the sense of the letters tattooed on each finger. H-I-L-D-A. He asked for a photograph, the camera flashed. Then O’Hare’s phone rang. He muttered an obscenity. That would be somebody else telling him how to do his job.
Wyngate lifted the phone slowly when it rang. He couldn’t take, or pass on, any more bad news. He swallowed hard then identified himself. He heard Vik’s voice and listened in silence for a couple of minutes.
‘Sir?’ Wyngate called over to Anderson.
‘If it’s not good, don’t bother.’
‘It’s good. It’s Vik, something about an eyewitness who was staying at the Lodge on the Loch Hotel that night. The night the boys were killed.’ Wyngate covered the mouthpiece, as the rest of the room fell silent.
Anderson took the phone.
A quarter of an hour later, Batten had arrived nursing a sore head and they were all sitting around the computer as the screen filled with darkness. They were on speakerphone to Vik’s mobile at Inchgarten. The image swung back and forth, the light line of the opposite shoreline, a few islands dotted about. The camera moving so fast, Costello held on to the desk. It settled on a few dots, the focus changed, zoomed in, and then moving again.
‘How long have you had this?’ Costello spoke into the phone.
‘Less than twelve hours.’
‘And you got it enhanced, in that time? You’re talking pish.’
‘Not if you get a rich American to pay for a digital expert to get out their bed. He’s only done half but you have to see this. Now watch and marvel,’ said Vik, watching the same film in the lodge. ‘See there, wait, he goes back over it. About thirty-four seconds in …’
‘Hardly Steven Spielberg, is he?’
‘Any more camera wobbling and I’m going to be sick,’ said Costello. ‘Couldn’t watch that Blair Witch shite.’
‘Just wait … There … Do you see that yellow dot in the darkness? I think that is the wee inflatable, dull yellow like the casing I found in the old boathouse on Inchgarten Island.’ Elvie’s voice loud and clear across the speakerphone.
‘And there is somebody aboard rowing,’ said Anderson, peering at the screen.
‘Paddling,’ corrected Elvie.
‘Same thing,’ muttered Anderson in bad grace.
‘So he’s moving away from the island, going …’
‘North,’ said Elvie, ‘he’s come off the top of the island. Then the image moves to the south, to the deer, the deer leaving the water.’
The film showed the beautiful, ghost-like forms, white in the dark air. Then the deer moved off to the north and the phone camera caught the yellow boat. There was a movement, then stillness and the camera moved away.
‘You need to replay that bit, back to the deer,’ said Elvie’s disembodied voice. ‘Then pause on the yellow object.’
‘What is he doing?’
‘Escaping. That is Warren McAvoy escaping.’
Anderson looked at the board then dropped his head on to the desk, feeling a sense of relief at something concrete.
‘So he was heading off the island from the boathouse. Jimmy had some start on him; he had already pulled the Dreamcatcher far enough away for Warren not to catch him.’
‘It wouldn’t have taken him any time at all, young like that.’ Batten showed a crumpled piece of paper on the screen. ‘Here’s a bad drawing of Inchgarten Island, cliff at the north end. Rocky beach at the east side, the side that faces into the narrows and over to the lodges. Nobody ever lands their boat there as the water is very unsafe, there’s a big shelf under the water. Swim three feet from the shore and you are in three feet of water. Swim six feet away and you are in twenty feet of water. Round at the south side, the beach is sandy and sloping, so that is the preferred landing point, Snooky Bay. The handmade boathouse was here, on the west side. Robbie’s body was found here, near the base of the cliffs at the north; Callum’s was found here on Snooky Bay, the second boy to be killed. So Warren kills Robbie then chases Jimmy and Callum round the west side of the island, found Jimmy was getting away on the Dreamcatcher but attacked Callum on the beach. Then Warren goes back the way he came to the boathouse to try and escape on the raft. Can we prove any of that?’
‘No,’ said Anderson. ‘But we don’t need to. Technically, we are not investigating that, are we? We are investigating the deaths of Bella, Eddie, Bernie, Patty and Sammy. Now we know that Warren got off the island, we just have to find the bastard.’
Suddenly there was a voice from nowhere. ‘No.’
They jumped as the single word floated round the room. They had forgotten about the couple at Inchgarten, listening in.
‘Elvie? What do you mean, no?’ asked Anderson, getting up, ready to ask Mitchum to launch a manhunt.
‘The folly is in the way.’
‘They must have climbed over it. Callum was found on the beach and Jimmy got away on the boat, both on this side of the folly.’
‘The boys could have got through,’ said Elvie. ‘But Warren couldn’t.’
‘Well, you got over it.’
‘On the way out, yes. But I couldn’t get back that way. Nobody can. I had to swim the long way round. The wall is too high, too smooth to climb. The ground is lower on that side. The boys would have gone through the arrow slit.’
‘But Jimmy did. Surely if Jimmy did then Warren did. The size of them …’ Anderson was dismissive, but as the words left his mouth he thought about how tall Peter could grow in a year.
Elvie’s voice was calm, patient. ‘He wouldn’t get through it now, he’s too tall. But this was then, when he was smaller. He’s lying. Warren could not have got back to Snooky Bay.’
Costello was running through the facts in her mind, thinking that the world had gone crazy. They had watched one half of a film that proved McAvoy’s guilt. Anderson was now trying to
get the second half enhanced, which might prove his innocence.
She took three Ibuprofen for her headache. Bernie’s brother had been on the phone wanting answers as to why his brother wasn’t better protected. Sammy’s mother had collapsed at the news. The brutality of it was on the front of every newspaper. Mitchum was talking about taking them off the case, but that would be admitting errors had been made.
Somebody somewhere was laughing at them.
She washed the tablets down with a mouthful of tea and started nibbling a chocolate digestive. She opened the medical files of Robbie, Callum and Jimmy, part of a pile Batten had dumped in front of her, wee Post-it notes sticking out here and there. Batten had looked sunken cheeked as he had asked her to look at the injury history of the boys, and the dates.
To her eyes, Robbie Dewar’s medical records were perfectly clear. A victim of violence. Fractures, marks, burns and bruises told their story. Most often they were present on the summer holidays when Warren was about at Inchgarten. Jimmy, the bigger boy, was maybe able to fight back and had suffered less.
It was all circumstantial. Everything was well explained: the burns while messing with the fire, the weals from branches and twigs whiplashing him as he ran through the trees. Happy boys, playing boys’ games. Nobody ever got injured playing a computer game.
Why did nobody say anything? Perhaps it was a case of three boys trying to keep the peace. But one of them would have spoken out, surely? Had it gone from Warren killing the boys and now the guilty parents were fighting back? And Daisy raised the rain to help them? Costello was so tired, she would believe anything. But would they have kept quiet if it was a parent? The silence was more understandable then. Did the boys suffer when they were not in contact with Warren? She picked up her jacket and left, ignoring Anderson’s warning about not going anywhere on her own.
Costello spent an hour talking to the guidance teacher at Jimmy’s old school. She was in no doubt that the boy was troubled. Everything had been put down to what he had witnessed that summer’s night twelve months before. As Isobel had admitted, he was both bully and being bullied.
