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‘God, I needed that.’ Shifty wiped the froth from his pint off his top lip, smiled and let loose a happy belch.
They’d given us a pretty decent table – for quarter to ten on a Friday night – by the window, looking out across the road to the big Victorian glass slug that was Oldcastle Railway Station. All lit up and glistening in the rain. A row of taxis sitting outside it, their drivers huddled in a bus shelter, smoking fags. Working on cancer and hypothermia all in one go.
‘A toast.’ Alice raised her large Shiraz. ‘To not dying in a serial killer’s basement!’
I clinked my Irn-Bru against her glass, then Shifty did the same with his pint and we all drank.
‘Speaking of which.’ Shifty held his hand out, palm up in front of me.
‘What?’
‘You know fine, “what”. The photos you traumatised Satsuma Joe with, back at the supermarket. They’re evidence.’
‘I forgot I had them, OK? We nearly got crushed to death and washed out to sea. And since when do you care about evidentiary procedures?’
‘Since Professional Standards decided to make me their special little project. Now hand them over.’
I turned in my chair, picked my phone off the windowsill – attached to its new charging cable, stealing the restaurant’s electricity. Battery now at a whole ten percent.
‘Ash, you can’t keep stuff like that.’
My phone went back on the windowsill. ‘You can have them when I’ve taken a copy.’
‘It’s not—’
‘What, you’re going to bail before your starter arrives and hotfoot it back to the station with them?’
He frowned for a moment, then shrugged those wide shoulders of his. ‘No point letting good food go to waste.’
Didn’t think so.
Alice helped herself to a breadstick, the words coming out in a wave of crunching and crumbs: ‘Do you think Bear would let me do some behavioural evidence analysis for DI Malcolmson?’
‘Our Glorious Leader? Without a cost centre to write it to?’ Difficult not to laugh at that. ‘Not a chance in hell.’
‘What if I did it in my spare time, though?’
‘Then you’re undermining a potential revenue stream.’
She scrunched herself up and fluttered her eyelashes at me. ‘Pleeeeeeeease?’
‘You’re a grown woman in your thirties, don’t do that.’
‘Pretty pleeeeeeeeeeeease?’ Really hamming it up now, hands clutched sideways under her chin, brown curls cascading either side of her beaming face.
‘OK, OK.’ Anything to make her stop.
‘Good.’ She shifted her cutlery and napkin out of the way and made come-hither gestures. ‘Let’s see the photos, then.’
‘Sure you want to do that right before you eat?’
‘The iron’s hot, we might as well strike with it.’
I snapped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and eased the photos from my pocket. Still connected to that mouldy piece of string by the tiny clothes pegs.
Shifty winced. ‘You could at least’ve put them in an evidence bag!’
‘Crushed to death and washed out to sea, remember?’ I laid them out in front of Alice, one after the other, putting them closer together, so they’d all fit in two lines. ‘And if it wasn’t for us, no one would even know they existed. So don’t be a dick.’
Eleven Polaroids. Each one showing the last horrific moments of some poor sod’s life.
Shifty bared his teeth. ‘Jesus …’
A row of creases formed between Alice’s eyebrows as she frowned at the pictures. ‘Victims are male and female, so maybe Gordon Smith’s bisexual, because there’s always a sexual element with this kind of serial killer, even if it’s not expressed at the time with the victim present, because what’s the point of killing someone if you can’t fantasise about it before and afterwards? Of course maybe it’s death that turns him on and he’s really only torturing people to heighten his and …?’ She looked up at me, eyebrows raised.
‘Caroline. Smith’s wife was called Caroline.’
‘Thank you.’ Back to the photos. ‘He might be doing it to heighten their arousal. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had sex on that mattress in the basement, right after they killed someone, or even while their victims were dying. They’ve gone to all the trouble of abducting and torturing someone, who needs Viagra when you’ve got a rush like that – the power of life and death, someone screaming in agony while you—’
‘OK.’ Our waiter appeared behind her, looking about as comfortable as a dedicated hipster can when forced into a red-white-and-green waistcoat, dress shirt, and non-ironic bowtie. ‘I’ve got an insalata caprese, antipasto misto platter, and a garlic bread with mozzarella?’
Alice wheeched her napkin over the Polaroids before the waiter could recognise what they were. Pointed at Shifty. ‘Garlic bread, Ash is the antipasto, and I’m the salad.’ Taking the plate from him before he could interfere with the horror show currently taking place beneath her napkin. ‘Thanks.’ Then knocking back three big gulps of wine, finishing the glass and holding it out for the waiter. ‘And can I have another large Shiraz, please, actually better make it a bottle, no point messing about, is there? That’ll be great, excellent, mmmmm, this all smells delicious!’
The waiter’s smile looked very uncomfortable, squashed between his handlebar moustache and big beard, as he backed away from our table like it was a rabid dog. ‘Yes, wine, definitely.’ And he was gone.
She passed her plate across the table to me. ‘Can you look after that? And don’t eat my mozzarella. Or my tomatoes. Or basil. Actually … don’t eat any of it.’ Then peeled her napkin back, exposing the bloody images again. ‘These were from one side of the shackles, weren’t they?’
‘The string closest the stairs.’ Somehow a platter of mixed meat didn’t seem all that attractive, not when the Polaroids were sitting there. ‘All I could get.’
‘I wonder if there’s a “before” and “after” for each of the victims? One wall is them alive, the other is them dead. With sex and torture in the middle.’
Great wafts of garlic oozed out of Shifty’s starter as he tore a big bite from his huge slice of cheese on toast, white strings looping from his mouth back to the bread, like the ones in the basement. Mumbling through his mouthful. ‘You think he rapes them?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. I worked on a case in Boston once – got to go over as part of an exchange programme, it’s a really nice city, lovely people, but by God it’s cold in winter – anyway there was this guy, Chuck Reich. He would abduct men, tie them up, and stab them, but not because he was trying to kill them, he’d stab them in the stomach or the thigh or the buttock and use the holes he’d made to … you know … pleasure himself. It was the screaming he liked the best. Maybe Gordon and Caroline were like that?’
Yeah, I definitely didn’t want the cold meat any more.
‘You never told me about Chuck Reich.’
Alice shrugged at me. ‘He swore, if he ever got out, he’d come after me and I didn’t want you to worry.’ She stared down at the photos again. ‘Anyway, it was years ago, I’m sure he’s a lot less angry now, and it’s not like they’re ever going to release him, is it? Not after what he did to his lawyer …’ She glanced up at me. ‘It’s OK, you can start eating, I won’t mind.’
Nope. Pushed my plate away.
Eleven murder pictures on one side of the shackles, eleven on the other. Which meant twenty-two victims over fifty-six years, the last of which had to be quite a while ago, going by the mould staining those Polaroids.
‘So, why did Gordon Smith stop killing?’
‘Oh, Ash,’ her smile was small and sad, ‘what makes you think he’s stopped?’
I left the engine running, heaters and blowers on full, as Alice escorted Shifty to his front door. The pair of them wobbly as newborn foals, keeping each other upright. Honestly, they were about as much—
A muffled rendition of the Buffy theme burst into life in my pocket and I dragged out my phone. Took the call. ‘Rhona?’
‘Not too late is it, Guv? Only I got some info for you on Leah MacNeil.’
Outside, Alice was helping Shifty find the keys to his tiny house: a two-up two-down at the end of a curling cul-de-sac in Blackwall Hill. The kind of place that must’ve looked quite stylish when it was thrown up thirty years ago, on the wrong side of the railway tracks, and left to rot ever since.
‘Let me guess – no one’s bothered their arse?’
‘Bingo. I’ve rattled some cages and jammed my boot up some bumholes, so at least they’ll start looking. Oh, and I managed to dig a bunch of stuff up on the mother, Sophie MacNeil, too. Suicide, sixteen years ago. Poor cow was only twenty.’ A slurping noise came down the phone. ‘Granny Helen was in HMP Oldcastle at the time, for battering some drug dealer to death, so two-year-old Leah goes to live with the next-door neighbours. Temporary custody, by the look of it.’
Interesting …
‘And Child Protection were happy with that? The Smiths weren’t related to her, why didn’t she get put into care?’
‘No idea. Can find out, if you like, but you’ll have to wait till Social Services get in, Monday morning.’ More slurping, the words after it mumbled around whatever Rhona was eating. ‘Anyway, I say “poor cow”, but Sophie wasn’t exactly a choirgirl. We’ve got three arrests for possession with intent, two warnings for fighting, one six-month stretch for assault. Chip off her good old mum’s block, that one.’
Alice and Shifty finally got the door open, and he stumbled inside, leaving Alice to wobble on the top step all alone.
‘And Leah’s been a chip off her granny’s, too. Mostly assault, some petty theft, possession – didn’t have enough blow on her to count as dealing, so the arresting officer let her off with a caution – and one theft from a lock-fast place. Guess your mum throwing herself off Clachmara Cliffs screws you up.’
That was a relief, to be honest. At least now we knew Sophie MacNeil hadn’t ended up in Gordon Smith’s private graveyard.
‘They know why she did it?’
‘Oh yeah. She left this reeeeeeealy long, rambling suicide note. There’s a copy in the file. You want me to read it out to you?’
‘Not particularly.’
Alice did an about-face, nearly crashed into the jagged crown of an un-pruned rose tree, and staggered back towards the car. Moving like she was on the deck of a rolling ship.
‘It’s all boy trouble, and not wanting to be pregnant again, and not being able to cope, and everything being so hard. Six pages of it.’ Slurp. ‘Looks like it’s been written by a drunken spider too.’
It took Alice three goes to get the door open and collapse into the passenger seat. She pulled her chin in, grinned, then let free with a diaphragm-rattling burp. ‘Par … Pardon … me.’
‘Thanks, Rhona.’
‘Nah, no trouble. I was twiddling my thumbs here anyway. The joys of nightshift.’
There was some fumbling with the seatbelt.
‘Ooh, you hear about the post mortem? Your physical evidence guru, AKA: the Pinstriped Prick, says Lewis Talbot was strangled with some sort of silk rope. Maybe a curtain tie, or something from a soft-porn bondage starter set. Don’t know about you, but that sounds like an evolving pattern, to me. He’s getting more sophisticated.’ Slurp, slurp, slurp.
‘What on earth are you eating?’
‘Bombay Bad Boy, Pot Noodle, nightshift lunch of champions.’ An extra-long slurp for effect.
‘You’re disgusting.’
A laugh, then she hung up, and I slipped the phone back into my pocket.
Turned to look at the wobbly wreck in the passenger seat, still fighting with the seatbelt.
I took the end off her and clicked it home in the buckle. ‘You planning on throwing up at some point?’
Alice stuck two thumbs up.
‘Wonderful.’
My life just kept getting better and better and better …
7
Rasping snores perfumed the air with garlic, wine and the sour taint of vomit, as I placed the washing-up bowl on the floor beside Alice’s bed and tucked her in. Then ruffled the fur between Henry’s ears. ‘You look after our stinky drunkard, OK?’
He stared back at me with his shiny button eyes, then lowered his head onto her ankles again, curled up on the floral-print duvet.
I clicked the light off. Took one last look.
OK, so she probably wasn’t going to throw up again. Because, let’s face it, there couldn’t be much left to throw up. Two bottles of wine, plus the large glass of red she’d had while we were waiting for our starters, plus the three brandies she’d downed instead of dessert, and half of Shifty’s rum-and-Coke when he wasn’t looking. No wonder she’d spent the last half hour evicting everything she’d eaten since breakfast.
Silly sod.
Could it really be nine years? Nine years of trying to keep her safe, while we went after murdering arseholes. Nine years of watching her drink herself to death, and clearing up after her. Nine years of violence and killers and pain and horror …
Great. Well done, Ash. That wasn’t depressing at all, was it?
Alice wasn’t the only silly sod in the place.
I closed the door to her room. Took my mug of tea back through to the lounge.
Had to hand it to Jacobson, he’d actually got us a nice place to stay, instead of the usual manky B-and-Bs. And on Shand Street – very swanky. High up, too: a fourth-floor, self-catering, two-bedroom flat in a new six-storey development, perched on the blade of granite that pierced the heart of Castle Hill. The panoramic windows looked out over the jagged remains of the Old Castle, its tumbledown walls and stone stumps lit up in shades of yellow and red, and beyond that the land dipped away in a tangled ribbon of streetlights. The wide black expanse of Kings River separated them from the regimented roads and houses of Blackwall Hill on the right and Castleview on the left – with the Wynd rising up behind it.
It was almost pretty.
But then Oldcastle always did look better in the dark.
Especially if you couldn’t see Kingsmeath.
Sitting on the floor, by its charger, my phone let out the ding-buzzzz that announced an incoming text.
The number wasn’t recognised, but the message made it clear enough:
Mr Henderson you promised John you
wood email that footageage to me!!! Don’t
make me regret thrusting you.
Autocorrect strikes again.
Might as well get it over with.
Mother’s business card had gone limp from its stint in my damp pocket, but I dug it out anyway and sent her everything we’d filmed in Gordon Smith’s basement, even the duff bits. Then unplugged my phone and settled into the squeaky leather couch.
Pressed play.
Footage was shaky, but the camera lingered long enough on each Polaroid to capture most of the details. The young blonde woman on one leg, in a park. The brunette on a beach. The young guy in a beer garden. The old man and younger woman, looking awkward on a putting green … Then more. And more. All those people, smiling and alive. Then all those people in life-ending agony.
By my count there were sixteen people in the ‘before’ pictures, and twenty-two in the ‘after’ ones. Couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if most of the first lot were in the second. Not all of them, though. And there were definitely people getting tortured who didn’t have ‘before’ shots.
I went back to the start and pressed play again.
Park; beach; beer garden; putting green; then a man in his mid-twenties and swimming shorts, reclining on a sunlounger, chest and shoulders a painful shade of scarlet, raising a half-coconut with a wee paper umbrella and straw sticking out the top. Two young women, wrapped around each other – one red-haired, the other blonde – caught in the act of laughing, bent nearly double in front of one of those coin-operated binocular things you got at seaside piers. A happy couple, slightly blurred, waving at the camera as the carousel horses they were sitting on galloped past. A teenaged boy wearing a Manchester United top, grinning out of the photo, hot dog in one hand, can of Coke in the other, bunting in the background. A young woman, sat astride a bay pony, crash helmet on, polo shirt and jodhpurs, knee-high riding boots, beaming like this was the best ever day of her life. Rather than the start of the last one.
Clearly, Gordon Smith liked his victims young. The only person over twenty-five was the old guy on the putting green. But then he probably wasn’t the target. The young woman he’d been caught so awkwardly cuddling was.
Next: a smiling young woman in an ugly orange-and-brown one-piece swimming costume, face covered in freckles, mousy-blonde hair tucked behind an ear, rolling sand dunes behind her. Then a young man dressed in a smart suit and academic gown, mortarboard on his head as he posed on the steps outside a pillared portico, what had to be a degree clutched in his …
Hold on a minute.
I rewound the footage, back to the ugly swimming costume, and hit pause.
She looked … familiar.
Well, familiar-ish.
Broad forehead, wide mouth with lots of teeth, long straight nose sitting on a heart-shaped face. A touch overweight. Not conventionally pretty – not someone people would stop to stare at in the street if she walked past – just a normal person, whose luck ran out the moment this photograph was taken.
Maybe she was one of the faces from the other set of Polaroids? The ‘after’ pictures, with their bruises and slashes and blood and screaming. Maybe that’s where I’d seen her?
I called them up and flicked through … yup. There she was.
A hard cold lump turned deep inside my stomach.
How could anyone do that to someone? How could that get your rocks off?
But there was still something else.
Damn.
My jacket lay draped over one of the dining chairs, parked right in front of the radiator, in an attempt to dry the soggy thing out. The framed photo Helen MacNeil had given me still lurked in the side pocket.
The glass was misted with condensation, but a tea towel took care of that.
Two women in the photo: one was Helen MacNeil, smiling for once in her life, a large muscled arm draped across the shoulders of her teenaged granddaughter. It was clearly taken in a photographer’s studio – the mottled backdrop and professional lighting was evidence of that – but while her gran had put in a bit of effort, Leah MacNeil had opted for ripped jeans, a black denim jacket speckled with patches and badges, and a T-shirt for a band I’d never heard of. Wearing so much makeup it looked as if she’d been decorated.
But she had the same heart-shaped face as her grandmother. The same long sharp nose. The same broad forehead. Her hair was dyed a rich purply-blue, but the mousy-blonde roots were clearly visible.
She wasn’t the young woman in the Polaroids, but the family resemblance was obvious.
Damn it. God, sodding, damn it.
‘You were supposed to have killed yourself …’
Maybe it was a coincidence? Someone who looked like her?
I scrolled through to Rhona’s number and pressed the button. Listened to it ring as I placed the photo frame on the coffee table, facing me.
Then, ‘Guv? If you called up hoping to hear me eating again, all I’ve got’s a—’
‘Sophie MacNeil. Where’s her body?’
‘Eh?’
‘Her body, Rhona, if she killed herself, where is it?’
‘Guv, is something wrong?’
‘Yes.’ Finding it difficult to keep my voice calm and reasonable. ‘Now where’s her bloody body?’
‘Hold on.’ Some rustling. ‘Is it something I’ve done? Because if it’s … OK, here we go. Procurator Fiscal’s judgement was that Sophie MacNeil’s remains were washed out to sea. Never recovered. But the suicide note was enough to—’
‘Buggering hell.’
‘Guv?’
‘Sorry, Rhona, got to go. There’s a call I need to make.’
Rain lashed at the patrol car as we left the bright lights of Logansferry behind and headed out the Strathmuir road. Blue-and-whites flickering, turning the downpour into sapphires and diamonds as they rattled against the bonnet and windscreen.
Mother slumped in the passenger seat, face sagging, scrubbing at her eyes. ‘Why me? Why does crap like this always have to happen to me?’
‘Yes, because this is all about you.’ I shifted in the back seat, sat behind the driver because I wasn’t an idiot. ‘How do you think Helen MacNeil’s going to feel?’
The driver, a spotty-faced lump of gristle in the full Police Scotland black with matching accessories, sniffed. ‘Might be a comfort for her: finding out her wee girl didn’t commit suicide.’
My hand tightened around the head of my old walking stick. ‘Is that what you think?’ Knuckles aching as I squeezed the polished wood.
Mother groaned. ‘Come on, Mr Henderson, he didn’t mean anything by that.’
‘You think it’s comforting to find out your daughter was tortured and murdered by a serial killer?’ Getting louder with every word. ‘You think that’ll be an excuse for a party, maybe? Get out the karaoke machine and HAVE A BASTARDING SINGSONG?’
The moron behind the wheel went pink, lips pinched tight together in silence.
‘He doesn’t know, Mr Henderson. He’s young. And a bit thick. Come on, deep breaths.’
I thumped back in my seat. ‘Don’t see why you needed me on this anyway.’
‘Because you’ve got some sort of weird rapport with Helen MacNeil. And things are hard enough as it is.’ Mother seemed to deflate a couple of sizes as darkened fields flashed by the windows. ‘We had to do a risk assessment and now the SEB are refusing to search the basement. They won’t even go into the house. If this was any normal deposition and crime scene, we’d have big plastic marquees up by now, spotlights, generators; there’d be a specialist team digging the garden up and another one going through that kill room with an electron microscope.’ A shudder. ‘But it’s not a normal crime scene, is it? No, of course it isn’t, because if it was, some DCI would’ve waltzed in and wheeched it off me by now. It’s an utter crapfest, so no one else will touch it with a six-foot cattle prod!’
She had a point.
‘What am I supposed to do, Mr Henderson? If I put people in harm’s way and something happens, I’m screwed. If I don’t put them in harm’s way, I’m not doing my job, and screwed. Either way: screwed.’ She slapped both hands over her face again and smothered a small scream.
‘You finished?’
A small bitter laugh jiggled out of her. ‘Probably. Top brass have been trying to get shot of me for six years now, well, this’ll be the perfect opportunity.’ She turned in her seat and scowled at the driver. ‘You want some career advice, Constable Sullivan? Never have a heart attack on O Division’s dime, because if you do the bastards will treat you like a soiled nappy full of radioactive poop!’
PC Sullivan, quite sensibly, kept his mouth shut.
There was hope for the boy yet.
A small village flashed past, the streets empty, the trees thrashing in the wind, overflowing gutters spilling small lakes across the square.
‘You hear anything back from N Division?’
Mother sagged even further. ‘They sent three patrol cars to Smith’s brother’s croft. No one there.’ Her mouth turned down, lips puckered, like she was sucking on something bitter. ‘Said it looked like no one had been there for years. All abandoned and manky. No Gordon Smith. Wherever he’s disappeared to, it isn’t there.’
A Mobile Incident Unit sat in the middle of the potholed road, about two houses back from the warning fence, lights blazing out in the darkness. It wasn’t one of the swanky new ones, either – little more than a grubby shipping container done up in Police Scotland livery with a mobile generator chuntering away behind it.
