He turned his back on the circus and went back to watching the forensics team work.
2
Alan Grainger knew that he was onto a big story when he saw the detective inspector lean over the balcony and look down.
Big Brother is watching me. It’s a missing kid for sure. And they think it’s murder—there’s no other reason for John to be here.
His paper had sent him out on spec—someone heard from someone that there might be a story brewing somewhere in the Albert Flats, and that a kid might, or might not be missing. It was enough on a slow news day for Alan to be dispatched with a notebook, phone and camera. As the junior reporter on a bust city news-desk, he often got sent out only to return empty-handed having pursued a rumor to no avail. This was no rumor—he’d known that even on the way down from the city center when he was passed by both the van of the largest radio station in Scotland, and a crew from the BBC.
And now he was here there was no way to get close. And with other television crews arriving and the crowd growing ever larger and more vocal, there was little chance to get any kind of story that wasn’t going to be the same one everyone else got.
Alan had one thing on his side, but it was a big one—local knowledge. Both brothers had been born and raised only a few hundred yards away from the spot where he stood. On another day, another time, they might even have been part of the crowd, standing around waiting for news, hoping that it wasn’t anybody they knew that was in trouble. At yet other times, they, or their small gang of friends and conspirators, might even be hiding from the law—and Alan had a good idea where anyone in that situation today would go. He walked away from the crowd and out of the shadow of the block of flats, leaving part of his past behind to go in search of more of it.
He couldn’t turn around in this area without dredging up something from where he normally kept it well buried. That corner was where two older lads pelted him with stones as he cycled past, that doorstep was where John beat seven kinds of shite out of the same two lads later the same day, that lamppost was the one he’d hit on his first driving lesson. The hearse had come this way the day Mam died. Too many memories—too few of them happy ones. He put his head down and tried to keep his mind on the job.
The streets wouldn’t let him. The brothers had a rough time growing up, but no rougher than anyone else who had to live in the area—only two miles from the city center of the Athens of the North but far more than that in terms of wealth, privilege and attention. Big castles, festivals and picturesque streets were all very well, but they meant nothing in the day-to-day lives of folks down here—they might as well be on Mars. Alan knew that when he was fourteen, and knew it even better now. Time was he’d wanted to join John on the force—but that would have meant spending more time in places like this than he could handle.
As a junior reporter he mainly worked on small stories, and rarely beyond the shiny facile glamor of the town center. Today was an exception—George thought he’d been doing Alan a favor sending him to his old home turf —Alan thought of it more like a sentence.
Two left turns and a right after a hundred yards took him under the main railway line to Glasgow, where the road opened out into a warren of small business units and factories. That wasn’t why he’d come this way—his goal was right in front of the largest factory gate. The Railway Tavern was the local boozer frequented by most of the residents of the Albert Road flats when they had any money in their pockets… and was the place anyone would head for if they didn’t want to speak to the police.
Alan hadn’t been inside since his late teens, almost ten years ago—it hadn’t changed much. The carpet looked to be the same one as back then, worn thin enough to show the floorboards beneath in many places. Battered tables and chairs were dotted around the main lounge. It was a large barn of a place that would be heaving and sweating on any given weekend night or full of bingo-playing pensioners midweek. But now, on a quiet afternoon, there were only a handful of locals lined up on high stools along the length of the bar. In days gone by there would have been a cloud of smoke hanging over them, but now the air was clear, and only an open door out to what was euphemistically known as a garden showed where the hardened smokers would be lurking.
Conversation stopped as Alan walked in, and everybody turned to look at him, then just as quickly looked away and went back to their drinks.
They thought I was the police.
One of them looked a bit more startled than the others had, and he also looked away faster than the rest. Alan took the stool to the man’s left and sat at the bar.
Softly, softly, catchee monkey.
“Pint of heavy,” he said when the barman came over. He didn’t offer to buy a round—there was no sense in showing his hand too early. The barman looked like he might say something, that he might have recognized Alan, but his attention was called away to the other end of the bar and the moment passed.
Alan sipped at the beer and tried not to look too interested in the man beside him. He was a small, wiry man with a mop of black hair that hadn’t seen a comb in a while. Thick black eyebrows hung over deep sockets, eyes so dark as to look black in the dim light in the bar. Alan didn’t know him, or at least didn’t remember him.
That works both ways.
Whoever he was, the man was taking to the drink as if he meant it. He downed a double Scotch in one, took a large gulp of lager, and ordered another of each.
“Steady on, Frank. It’s a bit early for you,” the barman said as he passed over the drinks.
The man—Frank—laughed bitterly.
“Too early? It’s too late; it’s far too late. I’ve seen things this day I’ll never forget—there’s not enough booze in the world for that.”
“Catch a swatch of your missus in the shower, did you?” the barman replied with a laugh, but Frank wasn’t for rising to the bait.
“Just keep the whisky coming,” he said. “I’ll decide when I’ve had enough.”
Alan’s nose for a story was tingling, but there was a rhythm to these things, and he still hadn’t matched himself to the beat of the mood in the bar. He kept quiet and listened. But he was also aware of the need for urgency. If he remembered this place, he was sure John would too—it was only a matter of time before either John himself or some of his officers turned up.
To begin with, the talk along the counter was of bookies and horses—the television above the bar showed the three-thirty race from Ayr, and while it was on the bar filled with shouting and curses. Nobody won.
“I knew it wasn’t my lucky day,” the barman said, and that prompted Frank to speak for the first time in a while. He’d knocked back several doubles by this time, but his speech was still clear.
“You don’t know the half of it, boy. What I saw on them stairs…”
His voice tailed away. Alan let the barman ask the question.
“Come on then, Frank. Don’t leave us in suspenders. It’s obviously got to you—you’ve been white as a sheet since you came in. What did you see?”
“That’ll cost you a wee goldie,” Frank said, smiling.
The barman shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, and moved to turn away.
Alan took a chance.
“I’ll get you that nippy sweetie,” he said. “Two even, if you tell me what you saw?”
Frank turned and looked him in the eye.
I’ve moved too soon.
“Trust me, lad,” Frank said. “You don’t really want to know.”
“It’s about that row at the flats? I used to live over that way. I saw all the cops when I got here. What’s going on?”
At first he thought he had indeed made his move too soon, but the barman brought Frank a double, Alan paid for it, and another beer for himself—and Frank leaned over to speak so that only Alan could hear.
“I saw the blood,” Frank started, then immediately stopped to take a gulp of the Scotch. Alan knew better than to interrupt with another question just then, and Frank obliged by con
tinuing. “In the shadows it looked black, like the feathers. Everywhere they were, all over the landing. The bird’s body was there on the steps too—what was left of it. It looked like somebody had stuck a firework up its arse and set it off. But that’s not the worst of it.”
Frank paused, downed his whisky, and looked expectantly at Alan. This was yet another ritual the journalist knew only too well. He motioned the barman over.
“Another for Frank, here,” he said, and made sure that Frank saw that there were plenty of notes in his wallet as he paid.
“I shouldn’t be talking like this,” Frank said. “I don’t know you from Adam.”
Alan leaned forward.
“I’m with the papers,” he said. “There’s two hundred in it for you. And your name never needs to get mentioned. I just need to know what you saw.”
He’d gauged the man right. Frank’s eyes never left the wallet.
“Money first.”
Alan slipped a wad of notes from the wallet and passed them over, taking care that no one else in the bar noticed. Frank made them disappear just as quickly, then downed the whisky fast, as if afraid it might be taken from him. Only then did he speak again.
“There were handprints—red hands—all over the place. Too wee to be anything but a kid’s.”
“And?” Alan asked. “That’s not much of a story for two hundred notes, is it?”
“There’s not much more to tell,” Frank said. “The mess of feathers was a swan, I think—too big to be a crow anyway—and it was torn to buggery with bits of it lying everywhere.”
“And the wee lassie?”
Frank went pale.
“I never saw any lass,” he said, and turned away, as if to say that the interview was now over.
“Two hundred gets me more than that, surely?” Alan said quietly. “There’s something else, isn’t there? A dead swan isn’t enough to make you turn to drink like this.”
Frank called the barman over and ordered two doubles. He paid with one of the notes he got from Alan, and passed one of the glasses over to the journalist.
“Just one thing then,” he said. “Have a drink with me first, then I’ll tell you. You’re not going to believe me anyway.”
Alan sipped at the whisky—he couldn’t afford to start in on the hard stuff this early in the day—and waited. The booze was finally starting to take its hold on his companion—Frank’s eyes had lost some of their focus and his speech slurred.
“It was when I got to the top of the stairs—that’s when I heard her.”
“The wee lassie?”
“I’m not sure. It was a wee lassie. I heard her, clear as day, but there was nobody there. I looked and I looked but there was nobody there.”
The door to the bar opened and Alan knew his interview was over. John and his sergeant stood in the doorway.
“What did you hear?” Alan asked as the detectives walked over towards them.
“She kept saying the same thing, over and over,” Frank replied before diving back into his whisky. “Help. I’m lost, Mammy.”
3
Grainger figured that Alan had got more of the story than they would. It hadn’t been a big surprise to see his young brother chasing the story—but it wasn’t something he needed to be happy about. But Alan was his own man—he’d made that plain on their last few meetings. The brothers moved in different social circles in any case. They hadn’t spoken for several months, and even then it had only been to pass the time of day. Grainger knew more about his D.S. than he did about his brother these days, and that was the way Alan seemed to want it. Any camaraderie they’d had in their youth had dissipated and faded, until brotherhood was little but a word to either of them.
Ma would be disgusted with us. We both know it. And both of us are too pigheaded to do anything about it.
It was an old wound, one that festered in long, lonely nights when he let the whisky talk. He put it to the back of his mind and focused.
Grainger remembered O’Hara just fine—a wee man that liked to think he was tough. He carried an ivory-handled flick knife and showed it off to anybody that looked remotely likely to buy him a drink. He was a blowhard of the highest order—but Grainger didn’t have him pegged as an abductor of wee lasses, and when he looked in the man’s eyes and saw the fear there, he knew there was a story to be had, maybe even a clue.
Unfortunately Frank O’Hara had started to slump even as they asked their first question. Just about the only thing he seemed to remember was the phrase he’d heard called out in an empty stairwell, and it was clear it was something he’d keep remembering for a while to come.
“Help. I’m lost, Mammy.”
Somehow it sounded more frightening coming from the mouth of a middle-aged drunk.
“Is there anything else, Frank?” Grainger said. “You know me—I’ll not be telling anybody you were speaking to us.”
But Frank was gone. He buckled from the waist and his upper body fell forward onto the bar. Grainger had to steady the man to stop him falling in a heap on the floor. The barman looked on—he didn’t offer to help. None of the other patrons so much as flinched.
It’s not as if falling over drunk is rare in these parts.
Grainger had a last look around for Alan, but the younger man had already scuttled off, and the D.I. wasn’t looking forward to seeing the papers the next morning. This case already had all the signs of being a huge media clusterfuck, and it was early days yet. He expected to be right in the middle of it sooner rather than later.
“Is there anything else, Inspector?” the barman asked.
Grainger fought down the urge to take a drink—one would lead to several and if he wasn’t careful, he’d join Frank in a stupor. Appealing as the idea was, there was a lost lassie to be thinking of. She came first.
“Maybe later,” he said to the barman, and they headed for the door. Nobody watched them leave.
“What now, boss?” Simpson asked as they went out into hazy sunshine. “Back to the scene?”
Grainger stood silent for a bit before deciding.
“No. I’ll head back to the station. I’ll need to see those forensics reports ASAP. You make sure we’ve as many officers as we can spare searching the area—every bit of waste ground, every empty flat, every rubbish skip. We need to be the ones that find the wee lass first.”
He didn’t say it—he didn’t have to, the words had been there since the call had first come in.
Dead or alive.
He watched as Simpson headed back under the archway towards the flats. The car was back there in the parking area, but Grainger needed to think, needed some space. He walked—heading along the pedestrian pathway that ran alongside the railway track, making his way back towards the city center. By taking this path it would take him an extra half an hour to reach the station, but there were questions that he knew he would be asked—questions that as yet had no answers. He needed time to think on how he was going to frame his responses, as punching the first reporter that asked a stupid question wasn’t an option he could allow himself.
Mostly he was thinking about the swan—anything that stopped him from thinking about small dead girls was welcome.
The presence of the bird’s mangled body was the thing. On every case there is one thing to focus on, an incongruity that would lead to the case breaking open and becoming understandable. The black swan was it this time, but as yet he couldn’t see why. He wished he’d asked Simpson to start a line of inquiry on the bird, and walked faster, putting more effort into it. He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach that refused to yield to exercise. Now it wasn’t just one missing girl he was thinking about—it was a flock of black swans.
And a girl for each of them.
* * *
The squad room was nearly empty when he got back to the station. There were only two men present, Jim—temporary secretary and general dogs-body, and Constable Wilkins, who was on office duty due to a broken leg.
“Any new
s?” Grainger asked, but he could see by Jim’s face that nothing had changed for the better.
“I’ve been fielding the calls, boss,” Jim said. “About a hundred so far.”
“There’ll be more,” Grainger said, and dropped into a chair. “Has the guv’nor been asking for me?”
“Not yet,” Jim replied.
“He’ll be giving me just enough rope to hang myself,” Grainger said. “That way, if I cock up, he stays squeaky clean.” He turned to make sure the D.C.I. wasn’t standing behind him. “See—I’m getting paranoid already.”
“Haven’t seen him for half an hour, boss,” Jim replied. “I think he’s in with the superintendent.”
Grainger groaned.
“That’s all I need—the golfers ganging up on me. What about forensics?”
“They called five minutes ago. You should have an e-mail.”
“Anything interesting?”
As a temp, Jim wasn’t supposed to access some of the more sensitive parts of the office system, but Grainger knew better—and Jim knew that Grainger knew. The man smiled ruefully.
“The footprints in the blood are the same size as those of the missing lass. And someone ripped a swan apart with his bare hands. That’s about it; there are no fibers, no hair and no prints. The blood work is going through but it’ll be tomorrow at the earliest before they get back to you on that.”
“In other words, sweet FA. How about witnesses—anything come in?”
“Most of the officers are still going door to door. I’ll collate the reports for you when they get back. But there have been no reported sightings. Do you want to arrange a press conference?”
“Too early—or too late—in either case, now’s not the time. I’d best read that forensics mail for myself before anything else.”
The Exiled Page 2
