The Exiled

by William Meikle

  THE EXILED

  William Meikle

  First Edition

  The Exiled © 2014 by William Meikle

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

  Broken Sigil

  Clockwork Dolls

  Night of the Wendigo

  The Hole

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

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  For family and friends back home in Scotland,

  where a piece of me will always be.

  Acknowledgements

  Once again, many thanks to the team at DarkFuse, for their professionalism, good humor, and their unfailing ability to make me look good.

  1

  “I hate it when it’s kids.”

  John Grainger didn’t reply. He felt the same way, but talking about it wouldn’t make it any better—at least not this early in the case, when they didn’t know what they were dealing with. It didn’t stop D.S. Simpson though—she liked to talk more than she liked to listen, a fact that, in Grainger’s opinion, meant she’d never be a really great copper. But if she was talking, it meant he didn’t have to, so that was fine by him too.

  The call had come in ten minutes ago, and Simpson had driven them, siren blaring, through city traffic to get here, but there was already a crowd gathered between them and the crime scene, blocking the street and hemming the cars in. Simpson leaned heavily on the horn to get people to move, and gave the finger to a scruffy woman who banged hard on the car’s hood as they inched past.

  “Did they say how bad it was, boss?” the sergeant asked, then had to push the horn again to get three kids, all with phones raised in the air taking photographs, to move aside.

  “It’s bad,” Grainger eventually replied, two short words that said all they needed to regarding the situation they were about to walk into.

  Simpson sensibly didn’t ask him to elaborate—she might have got more cursing than she bargained for. Grainger already knew that the Albert Road flats were rough enough in themselves without adding endangered kids to the mix—a sixties housing experiment that turned to shit before the decade was out. It had festered ever since, into a warren of damp apartments where working people tried to eke out a normal existence against a daily backdrop of junkies, petty thieves and alcoholics—in some cases all three at once. It had been Grainger’s patch ten years before, and he’d never been happier than when a promotion had taken him away to the C.I.D. and a city center desk. He’d only been back twice in all that time—both for murders. As they drew into the rubbish-strewn parking bay on the north side of the block of flats, he was hoping against hope this wasn’t another one.

  * * *

  Once they got out of the car they had to push their way through the jostling crowd—an angry mob looking for someone, anyone, to vent their frustration on. The uniformed coppers were taking the brunt of it; a cacophony of verbal abuse that was frightening in its intensity.

  Grainger nodded at Sergeant Irvine—a man he’d known since he was a young copper himself. The burly man smiled back.

  “Do you fancy your old job back, John? We could do with some of that Grainger muscle for ten minutes.”

  Grainger clapped the man on the shoulder.

  “Another time, Alec,” he said. “When there’s fewer folk and more beer involved. I could get some more men down from our station if you need them.”

  Irvine laughed.

  “I’d never hear the end of it. No, it’s under control, for now. Just don’t go starting any new fights.”

  “You know me, Alec,” Grainger said.

  “Aye. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise,” Irvine replied. His booming laugh followed them as they made for the crime scene.

  “It’s over this way, boss,” Simpson said as they neared the building.

  “I know,” Grainger replied, pushing past her. “It’s not as if they’ve remodeled the place recently.”

  The only thing new about the flats since his last visit was that the filth had spread further. Multi-colored graffiti covered the walls on the way up the stairs—gang slogans in the main, and mostly obscene. Dirty-faced kids lined the hallway, cursing and shouting at the two cops as if they were the perpetrators of whatever had happened here, using the same foul language that was getting used below in the car park. The kids might not know what all the words meant, but they knew just fine how to use them on coppers. Grainger kept a tight rein on his temper, a trick he’d learned from necessity during many previous trips up this same stairwell in his days on the beat.

  A young constable, pasty-faced and visibly trembling, stood at the top of the stairs as they reached the second-floor landing. Grainger sent him away.

  “Get yourself a cup of tea and a cigarette, son,” he said. “We’ll take it from here.”

  A white-suited forensics team was already on site and had marked out the crime scene in tape, blocking them from getting any closer. Grainger knew better than to try to cross the boundary.

  “What have we got, Jim?” he called out.

  A man stood up from where he’d been examining the ground. It was only then that Grainger saw the blood—far too much of it, smeared across the floor and walls as if someone had coated both hands with it and produced a manic finger painting.

  The forensic scientist walked slowly over to where Grainger stood.

  “I won’t shake hands,” he said. He wore a pair of latex gloves, and carried a small, soft brush. “You don’t know where they’ve been.”

  Grainger and Jim Fallon went way back; they’d worked many cases together, and polished off as many bottles of single malt while setting the world to rights. Grainger knew that the scientist was as meticulous about his work as he was fastidious about his clothes—if there was anything to be found here, he was the perfect man for the job. At that moment the older man looked tired and wan, but his eyes showed a hint of determination.

  “It looks like most of the blood came from the swan,” he said. “But we won’t be sure until we get to the lab. There are small footprints, all over the scene. The kid was running about in it for some time. But as to where she went after that…”

  “Back up a bit. What swan?” Grainger said, and saw the surprise in the scientist’s face.

  “Nobody told you?”

  Grainger shook his head. Fallon pointed off to where the stairwell met the second-floor balcony. Another white-suited figure knelt there over something black and bloody. Grainger struggled to make sense of the scene—looking at a puzzle he couldn’t quite fathom. Finally it resolved itself into the scattered remains of a dead swan, one of the black kind—they had a name of their own, but Grainger couldn’t immediately bring it to mind. A yellow beak lay off to one side, having been torn away from the head. One foot and a red chunk of meat from the rest of the leg lay three feet away. Now that he knew what he was looking for he saw bloody feathers strewn the length and b
readth of the stairwell. There were no signs of the wings.

  “What the fuck happened here, boss?” Simpson whispered at Grainger’s side.

  “I was wondering the same thing,” he said. He looked to Fallon, hoping for an explanation, but knew by the look he got in reply that he was going to be disappointed.

  The forensics man shrugged. “A six-year-old girl has gone, and a swan has been butchered,” he said. “Beyond that, we don’t know yet.”

  Simpson spoke up again.

  “Are we absolutely sure the girl’s been taken? She hasn’t just run off?”

  Fallon grimaced, as if in pain.

  “When I got here, the officer on the scene said the family were convinced she’d been snatched. The father was here a few minutes ago and he looked genuinely distraught. That’s about the sum of what I know about the girl—you’ll have to ask one of your men.”

  I hope to God we’ve got our stories straight on this one—the press will have a field day if we don’t.

  “And what about the swan?” he asked Fallon. “How was it killed?”

  The scientist looked over his shoulder at the crime scene.

  “It wasn’t so much killed as torn apart. Brute force and savagery it looks like. But I’ll know better when I get a closer look back at the lab—if I ever get there.”

  Grainger knew this dance all too well.

  “We won’t keep you then. Just let me know as soon as…”

  Fallon nodded again, and echoed Simpson’s earlier remark.

  “I hate it when it’s kids.”

  “We all do.”

  The scientist went back to work. Grainger stood there for long seconds, taking in the scene, trying and failing to get a mental picture of what might have happened. The swan—what was left of it—was in too many pieces. And some of the bits were missing—a jigsaw that might never get solved. He raised his gaze from the ground to the wall and immediately wished he hadn’t—the first thing he saw was a bloody handprint, perfectly formed—and far too small to be an adult’s.

  Simpson eventually broke the silence.

  “What now, boss? The family?”

  Grainger nodded, had one last look at the scene to etch it on his memory, and turned away. The young constable at the top of the stairwell hadn’t left his post.

  “I thought I told you to take a break, lad?” Grainger said.

  “Aye, sir. But if there’s a wee lassie missing, I want to be here. I…”

  He looked pale again, and his gaze kept drifting to the bloody carnage on the landing, then just as quickly sliding away.

  “If you’re going to spew, son, do it over the railing. Better that than contaminate the scene.”

  The constable managed a thin smile.

  “I was here first, sir,” he said. “And when I saw the blood, I thought…”

  Grainger patted the man on the arm.

  “I remember how it was, lad. I remember all too well. Where’s the family?”

  “Along the landing, number twenty-three.”

  The constable pointed down to their left. Floral tributes had already started appearing along the balcony floor and railing.

  “A bloody kid is missing and they’re all acting as if she’s dead already,” Simpson said.

  Grainger kept quiet. He knew the odds were against them. Chances were that the people laying the flowers were indeed right in their assumption—they were most probably looking for a body, not a child; they just hadn’t admitted it yet.

  * * *

  The door to number 23 hung open. A small gang of kids of various ages hung around on the small balcony as if afraid to enter. The apartment itself had too many people inside for its size, all of who seemed intent on shouting questions at the two detectives as they made their way through a cramped hallway to the main living room.

  “Have you caught the bastard yet?” was the most common, and the most polite. Some of the others would have made a dockside porter blush. Fuelled by booze and anger, the mood was just as ugly as that of the crowd down in the car park. Grainger pushed through without speaking. A youth, barely out of his teens, thought it might be funny to grab at Simpson’s breasts as she went past—he almost paid for it with a broken wrist.

  “Away and get your mam to put some ice on that, son,” Grainger said as he let go. “And that’s the only warning you’ll get—mess with a police officer again, and I’ll have your balls in a basket.”

  The walk along the rest of the short hallway took place in silence.

  * * *

  The living room was quieter than the hall had been seconds before. The missing girl’s parents sat on a tattered leather sofa, staring emptily into space. A crowd of people mingled around them, most of them drinking beer straight out of the can or large measures of liquor from grubby glasses, and talking in hushed whispers while trying not to look too pleased that it wasn’t their child that had been taken.

  Grainger knew this dance too.

  “Right,” he said, raising his voice. “If you don’t need to be here, leave now. If you saw the child before she went missing, D.S. Simpson here will take statements in the hall. Otherwise, get out and let us do our jobs.”

  The apartment emptied. Nobody stopped to speak to Simpson—Grainger hadn’t expected any would—and less than a minute after speaking he was left alone with the parents. They didn’t look to be in any mood for questions.

  That makes three of us.

  The wife—a small dark-haired woman in her early twenties, barely more than a child herself—surprised him by speaking first.

  “Her name’s Ellie. She’s not the kid or the child. Her name’s Ellie.”

  Grainger nodded.

  “I’m sorry. No offense intended. Just tell me when you last saw her.”

  “She was out on the landing from early this morning,” the woman said. Her voice was flat, devoid of emotion as if all life had been drained from her. “I heard her singing about ten o’clock, some nonsense about a wee man. I shouted her in at half-past… and she wasn’t there. She just wasn’t there.”

  The husband started to cry, softly at first, tears leaking down his cheeks, but he couldn’t contain it. He was soon sobbing, as miserable as any man Grainger had ever seen. If the wife noticed, she didn’t show it. She kept talking, but it sounded like she was relating something she’d been told rather than reliving a memory.

  “I shouted and shouted. Then a mannie started yelling about a dead bird and a lot of blood and then…” She went blank, as if someone had switched her off. “And then I don’t remember.”

  “So, somewhere between ten and half-past was when—”

  “When? When what?” the husband shouted, suddenly animated. “What happened to my wee lassie? Where is she? And why are you here, when you should be looking for her? And…” He too went blank, his plug pulled.

  This was another dance Grainger wished he didn’t know. There was little more to be learned here—not while the wound was still bleeding. He took out a business card and put it on the coffee table in front of the couple.

  “We’ll have a man outside your place here until we find her. Anything you need, just ask him, or ring me.”

  They didn’t acknowledge him, didn’t so much as twitch as he stood and left.

  Simpson was alone in the hall, and followed him out.

  “They don’t look like they had anything to do with it,” she said once she was sure they were out of earshot.

  “Liars are easy to spot,” he said. “Unless they’re really good at it, and over the years I’ve met a few experts. I’m taking nothing for granted—and neither should you.”

  * * *

  Grainger returned to the crime scene.

  The forensics team was still there, meticulously collecting and cataloging evidence. Simpson stood at his side as they watched them work, attempting to spark a conversation about what the family had told him. Grainger wasn’t really seeing or hearing—his mind raced, trying to formulate a timeline, looking for inco
nsistencies, wanting to make the jigsaw fit together even though he knew in his gut that there were still pieces—crucial pieces—missing. Finally he let Simpson through his filters.

  “What first, boss?” she said.

  “Find out who this mannie was that found the bird and the blood,” Grainger said. “We’ll need to talk to him fast. And find out if we’ve got a picture of the lass. If not, see if we can get one and get it circulated. We need to nip this in the bud before the papers get a hold of it.”

  “Do you think she’s still alive?” Simpson asked.

  He shook his head.

  “I’m willing to bet at least some of that blood is hers. So get to it. We’ve got a killer to catch.”

  Simpson left without questioning him further—she might talk too much, but she also knew when to shut up. That made her a good sergeant, especially so when one of Grainger’s moods hit him. There were days where he’d happily strangle the next person who brought him a form to sign or a request for stationery or any of the other petty crap that stopped him from doing what he did best. And Simpson knew it, acting as the buffer between him and the drudgery that came as part and parcel of modern police work.

  Grainger went to look over the balcony and his spirits took another tumble—nipping the situation in the bud was no longer an option; there were three different sets of reporters in the parking area below, and one, the television crew, looked to be setting up for a long stay. He wanted a smoke, but his political instincts, such as they were, were enough for him to guess the nature of the press reports if he so much as looked like he wasn’t giving the case his full attention.