That was all he needed to say—he’d learned long ago that playing on people’s vanity was the quickest way to get a foot in most doors, and it had worked again here. The watchman let them both in through the sanctuary gate and Alan followed him up a slope to a small maze of birdcages and pens. Several of the cages had birds in them—a haughty osprey, a sleepy owl and some raucous geese all marked their passing. But the man was right—when they arrived at the pen where the swans had been kept, there was nothing to see—no sign of any struggle or break-in at all.
“There was no damage?”
“Not a bit. The lock was still in place, still locked shut—or so they told me. It was as if the birds had been spirited away.”
The man made a quick movement with his hand—Alan spotted it, although it had been done furtively, almost on reflex—a sign against the evil eye. Alan only knew it because his old granddad used to do it when talking about one particular Tory MP, but it had once been common, in older, less enlightened, days.
“What do you think happened?” Alan asked.
The man wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“There’s always been stories about these parts,” he said, almost a whisper. “You can’t swing a cat round here without hitting a haunted castle or a fairy wood or a bogle’s cave. There are some things that can be explained—some things you shouldn’t look at too closely. That’s all I’m saying.”
The man turned his back—it seemed that particular conversation was over. Alan left the front of the pen and walked its circumference. There were no fresh footprints or scuffmarks on the ground, just a thin deer trail that led off from the south end up to the hill at the back. He pointed at it and called back to the watchman.
“They could have taken the birds out this way?”
“They could—if they were daft. It’s a sair trek up yon hill, and a longish way to the nearest place to park a truck. And you’d need a truck, what with six angry swans to contend with. Them birds are a handful at the best of times.”
“They could have drugged them?”
“I suppose so. But even then, six swans would make a hefty weight to lug up these hills and through the bogs in the hollows. My guess is they had a truck where you came in—in the car park—nobody would even notice at night, there’s next to no traffic round about here after ten.”
Alan walked a few yards up the deer trail, in the chance that there might be something that had been overlooked, some clue that might give him a fresh break in the story.
That’s when it happened. Later he’d try to rationalize and explain, but for now he was lost in a moment that seemed to go on forever. The watchman was talking, but Alan only heard a drone, like the buzz of a bee at a window. The deer track seemed to widen and spread. The landscape before him opened out to a verdant vista looking over blue cliffs that fell in sheer slabs of rock into a turquoise sea foaming with white horses. High to Alan’s right a tall cluster of stone buildings perched on a rocky outcrop, while in front of him the path wound in a serpentine track along the cliff top through tall lush grass. He felt wind in his face, tasted salt spray and smelled summer flowers.
Something dark rose up from a cliff face in the distance and took flight on black wings, impossibly large.
A child cried.
“I’m lost, Mammy.”
Alan stepped forward—and looked down to see only the thin deer path wending its way up the hill.
“Are you okay?” the watchman asked, and it took Alan several seconds to realize he had been asked a question.
What the hell was that?
He tasted salt spray at his lips. Somewhere in the distance a swan barked. A cloud covered the sun, a dark cape falling on the loch.
Like huge wings.
Alan’s heart thudded in his chest and at his ears, and his hands trembled as he walked, almost ran, for the safety of his car, leaving an astonished watchman gaping at his back.
* * *
He almost crashed three times on the way back towards the city—the third time coming so close to calamity that he pulled off the main road after crossing the Forth Bridge and parked in the truck stop on the south side. His hands shook, whether from the adrenaline from the near misses, or from the memory of the impossible landscape, he could not tell. He only knew one thing for sure. He needed coffee; he needed a lot of coffee.
The rough-and-ready atmosphere in the truck stop eatery quickly grounded him back in reality, and two large mugs of coffee soon had the near misses on the road fading to a memory. His hands still shook, but not as bad as before. Real life filled in around him as his reporter instincts kicked in and he listened to snatches and fragments of conversations, sifting for golden nuggets to use later.
The television high in the corner had its volume turned up, and the truckers had to almost shout to be heard above it. But that didn’t stop them making their feelings plain.
“If I caught that bastard first, he’d never see the inside of a cell.”
“They should hack his balls off with a rusty pair of shears and leave him to fester.”
It was only then that Alan realized that the story—his story—had been playing on the television all through his coffee intake. He turned his attention to the television, but soon spotted that there had been nothing new to break since he left the office earlier that morning—two girls taken, still missing, and police seemingly baffled. There was no mention of swans or of anything at all untoward going on at the bird sanctuary.
That memory was proving resistant to any fading. He only had to close his eyes to recall it, clear as day in full color.
What the hell was I looking at?
He remembered a story, years back, about a supposed fairy ring in Peebles that, under investigation, had proved to be made by underground fungi that might, or might not, have been sending hallucinogens into the air in their spores. But Alan’s head was clear, he was thinking straight.
And drugs don’t explain away the missing girls, or the missing swans.
He finished his coffee and put his questions away to the back of his mind—they’d be back later, he knew that, but for now he had a story waiting for him back in the city, and if he didn’t get on it, somebody else would.
As he got in the car and started up the engine he heard the voice again, clear as if she were sitting in the passenger seat.
“I’m lost, Mammy.”
He drove back into the city with the radio turned up full.
7
Grainger was almost happy when a report came in at lunchtime of another missing girl—at least it gave him something to do beyond shouting at junior officers and avoiding the press.
Although there would always be juniors to shout at, he wasn’t going to be able to avoid the media for much longer. The new call had come from Edinburgh Castle. At this time of year it would be packed with tourists from all over the world. A missing child in the castle premises wasn’t in itself a rare occurrence—mostly they turned up after having got lost wandering among the warren of rooms and different levels that made up the old fortress. He knew from experience that this was probably another one of those cases—but he couldn’t afford not to be seen to be investigating—the media was after him already, and any scent of blood in the water would turn it into a feeding frenzy.
He couldn’t get the number six out of his head. Fife C.I.D. had revisited the bird sanctuary that morning, but had nothing else to report except for the fact that “a man from the papers” had been sniffing around earlier—the story was going to hit the headlines soon enough.
Which was why he was now in the squad car—in the passenger seat having let Simpson take the driving duties again—inching their way through heavy traffic up the Mound towards the castle esplanade.
“There’s no report of any blood or feathers, boss,” Simpson said. “I don’t think this is our man.”
“Let’s hope not,” he replied, and fought off the urge to roll down his window and curse at the clearly lost driver of the car in front o
f them.
It took them another ten minutes to get to the top end of the Royal Mile and that only brought them to the tail of a snaking queue of coaches waiting to get onto the castle esplanade. By that time Grainger was ready to hit something—or someone.
“That’s enough,” Grainger said. “Park it anywhere you can. We’ll walk up. I need the air anyway.”
Simpson obliged. They left the squad car and went up the last stretch on foot, giving Grainger plenty of time for a smoke—and a good look at the chaos around the castle entrance. Two officers had stopped anyone getting in or out. Coaches, drivers, tour guides and tourists were all shouting from both sides of a makeshift barricade.
Amid all the noise a thin, well-dressed woman stood to one side, weeping silently into a handkerchief.
Grainger went straight to her.
“When did you last see your daughter?” he said.
The woman stiffened at the sight of him, as if recognizing authority.
“Up near the gun battery,” she said. “We were waiting for the one o’ clock salute and when I turned round she was gone and…”
That was all she could manage. The tears started again—too many for Grainger to cope with.
“Get her away from here and find somebody to look after her,” he said to Simpson. “And get some more bodies out and about. Find that wee lass, before this turns into another media scrum.”
He left Simpson to it and walked up into the castle proper. He had to show his badge to the guards at the main gate, and he asked then if they’d seen a girl in distress. He got nowhere fast.
“I see far too many kids on this duty, sir,” the young guard said. “Dancing about, prodding us, trying to look up the kilt, and making faces to get us to smile. I stopped paying attention to any of them months ago.”
On his way up the steep walk to the main body of the castle he saw three uniformed officers questioning the crowd, letting them move down to the esplanade after talking to them. There was more of a semblance of order up here—at least someone had done a job properly.
The scene around the guns was the same as it ever was—tourists snapping photos of bored soldiers who, like the guards down below, were forced to stand to attention and suffer as idiots shouted at them. The reek of cheap perfume and suntan lotion was enough to make Grainger consider lighting up another smoke, but a squeal from the parapets quickly put paid to that.
“There’s sumfink dead down there,” a London voice shouted. Grainger was close enough to be one of the first people on the scene. He leaned over the parapet and looked down onto the small cemetery that was reserved for the army dogs that worked and died here in the castle. Something black lay among the now bloodstained stones, and he didn’t have to look too hard to know what it was.
They had another brutalized swan—and another missing girl.
* * *
“Look, somebody had to have seen something,” Grainger said. “Find them.”
They were back in the office. Two hours had passed since they left the castle, and they were no further forward. They couldn’t find a single witness who had seen the girl after she let go of her mother’s hand. None of the soldiers on duty had anything to add. Grainger had again asked for all the CCTV footage available, and given the size of the castle and the amount of security deployed there, someone was going to be busy for a long time watching it all. But Grainger already knew they’d find nothing—he felt it in his gut. This perpetrator wasn’t just smart—he was toying with them.
Now that they had three girls missing—and the concomitant rise in workload from having three crime scenes to process, interview and monitor—the team was stretched to the limit. But Grainger’s request for more staff fell on deaf ears. The D.C.I. was adamant.
“Get me a result—find one of the girls, or at least be able to tell me how they were taken—until then, do your job. Diligent police work is what’s needed here. Put our team to work.”
The D.C.I. hadn’t said it—he hadn’t needed to—but Grainger knew that the case could be taken away from him at any minute. Every new missing girl just hurried the moment along when he’d no longer be in charge, no longer have a chance to make a difference to the outcome. To Grainger’s surprise, he found that he cared.
He left Simpson to organize a rotation of officers for going through the castle security footage and went outside for some air and a smoke. Even from here, in the quiet courtyard at the rear of the building, he heard the hubbub from the front entrance. It sounded like every press van and news reporter in the country was out there, all clamoring desperately for any scrap of information they could get and not caring how they got it. They’d already had to deal with reporters trying to pass themselves off as coffee or pizza delivery boys and security at the front door had to be tightened to ensure that any member of the public trying to get in was not just another snoop trying it on. What with that, the constant round of interviews—none of which came to anything—the stark fact of the missing children, and a distinct lack of sleep, Grainger felt himself unraveling at the edges.
He sucked smoke and let his mind drift. On the far side of the courtyard he looked into a busy office of administrative workers, all bent forward peering at computer screens.
Worker bees.
That set off a new strain of thought, about birds of a feather flocking together, and he was snapped back to the memory of the dead swan among the tombstones. Before he could dispel that image, his sight blurred and the scene in front of him shifted.
He stood on a high cliff, a stiff breeze at his back threatening to overbalance him. Away to his right the sun was going down behind a high, rocky outcrop, bathing a huddled group of tall stone dwellings in an orange light that made the stone shine. A wide pathway snaked away ahead of him through tall grassland, meandering along the edge of the cliffs to a mountain range in the far, misty distance.
What the fuck is this?
He still tasted the cigarette at his lips, but on turning into the wind he also smelled flowers, and grass, and the salt tang of the sea. Behind him, seen as if through a fog, he could just make out the doorway that led from the office to the courtyard, but even now that was thinning and fading into near invisibility.
“Hey!”
He stepped towards the entrance. Something caught his gaze, something big and black coming up the cliff towards him on massive wings. He stumbled, reaching out for the door as a black shadow fell over him like a cloak. His hand touched the door handle.
And he turned, looking out over the courtyard. One of the workers looked up from her desk, saw him there and smiled—a smile that turned to a frown when she saw the look on Grainger’s face.
He almost fell back into the safety of the station. Just before the door swung shut behind him he heard a voice cry out, as if from far way and into the wind.
“I’m lost, Mammy.”
8
Reports of a fourth missing girl came across Alan’s feeds in the late afternoon. This one had been taken from the back garden of her family home in Leith just after three. The police had the place locked down tight too fast for anyone to get a whiff of the story—but the news had moved on anyway. Individual tales of loss and grief were being swamped by the idea there was a serial abductor on the loose. It had gone national—international even—filling most of the available news slots in all media and spilling over into heated discussions on the social networks.
It was no longer Alan’s story—half the paper’s team was on it now, including the lead reporters. That left Alan with only his hunch that the swans were key to the whole thing, and George Dunlop trusted him enough to let him run with it—for the evening at least.
“Get me something nobody else has got.”
If only it were that easy.
For want of anywhere else to start, he went back to his swan research, this time covering the whole of Scotland and going back a year at a time.
He finally got a hit in 1996 in the Daily Record.
“David
Galloway, (19), was arrested today in Airdrie and charged with animal abuse, namely the slaughter of four swans that were found dead in the Hunterskill Quarry near Cambuslang last week. Reports initially suggested a possible animal attack, but Galloway was found to have the wings of the swans in his possession at the time of his arrest.”
Alan felt the tingle that told him he was onto something. Ten minutes later he had David Galloway’s history laid out on this laptop screen, and by now he knew—he was most definitely onto something.
He spent the next hour on the phone to a variety of medical personnel, relatives and police officers. He finally got what he wanted by using John’s name as leverage. An underhanded tactic, but if it didn’t break the story, John didn’t have to know, and if it did, John would be happy to hear of it. Alan was given an address—a popular bar in the New Town—and told to be there at eight.
* * *
He arrived fifteen minutes early. He took a beer to a corner seat and sipped at it while watching the patrons. Most of the talk seemed to be of the abductions, and there was a lot of theorizing and proselytizing taking place—but nobody seemed to have any firm clue as to the abductor’s motives, beyond the general agreement that whoever was doing it was an evil fuck.
His contact arrived at eight on the dot. Alan got a beer for the man and sat down opposite John Weir, a retired sergeant from the Lanark constabulary. He was a burly chap in his sixties, with the look of a hard man who’d let himself go a bit as the years advanced. He also, judging by the speed it was disappearing, liked his beer. Alan decided to get straight to the point before he ended up having to shelf out more cash.
“You worked a case—the David Galloway case—back in the nineties in Airdie, didn’t you?”
Weir took a deep slug of beer before replying.
The Exiled Page 4
