Later that day, Michael Vlismas was arrested for the murder of Carina Novak and for the aggravated assault of Whitney, Ruby, and the third student whose name was not released to the media.
To her relief, Eulalie was told that her testimony would not be needed at trial. It was too vague and unreliable. It had been dark when she had seen him and besides, they had enough physical evidence against him to convict him several times over.
It was only when the investigation was finished and the long wait for a trial date had begun, that Eulalie made a discovery.
She missed it.
“I felt alive when I was hunting him,” she told her grandmother on the phone. “I felt purposeful and energized. Now that it’s all over, I just feel flat. I loved the puzzle of it – the slow untangling of the knots and the unravelling of the mystery. What am I going to do now?”
“You’re going to be glad that you have found a possible career direction,” said Angel.
“In law enforcement? I’m not sure I want to be a police officer.”
“You can work out the details later. For now, just enjoy the fact that you have found something you love doing.”
The next morning, Eulalie went to the student affairs office and changed her major to criminology. She kept psychology as one of her minor courses, but she was no longer merely interested in the workings of the human mind.
It was the criminal mind that fascinated her.
Donal
Remus Selkirk got a hero’s welcome when he returned to the storeroom after his conversation with Inspector Petrick and Sergeant Shortridge.
Constable Burns was delighted - Donal cautiously optimistic. They made copies of the recording and sent it off, with a detailed covering letter, to all the main media outlets in Scotland and the United Kingdom. They targeted both the mainstream media and the tabloids.
The response was disappointing.
A couple of gossip magazines ran the story, but their impact was so low, and their credibility so compromised that they were easy to ignore.
Then the Daily Mail ran a sanctimonious piece about the squandering of taxpayers’ money, and the online comments almost crashed their website.
A day later, The Scotlander got hold of the story and it began to gain traction. Soon, prominent talk shows and news programs were discussing the issue of corruption at a local level in Scotland’s police stations.
While this was going on, Inspector Petrick and Sergeant Shortridge hung onto their jobs, insisting that they were innocent until proven guilty. Donal began to worry that the whole thing would blow over without any action being taken against them. It was just a matter of time before the media turned their attention to the next scandal to come along and forgot all about them.
Then the District Inspector announced that a full investigation would be instituted into the finances of the local division under the control of Inspector Petrick. An independent audit would be conducted, this time by a different auditing firm to the one that had been giving the division a clean bill of health for the last few years.
Within a week of this announcement, Inspector Petrick and Sergeant Shortridge tendered their resignations. Donal heard that they were arrested before they even got home that night.
After that, everything went quiet. Donal had been vindicated in every possible way, but his life had not changed at all. He still hadn’t graduated from the training program. He was still unemployed and spending his days working through his Open University courses.
The birth of Remus and Catriona’s baby boy was a joyful highlight at this low time in his life. He couldn’t get enough of the baby, spending hours holding him, rocking him, and walking him to give his sister a break. He loved the feeling of the baby’s warm weight in his arms, and the smell of his fuzzy head.
It was just when he was wondering how he was going to make his next month’s rent that the phone call came.
“It’s Detective Inspector Adam Pollard here,” said a voice. “I’m calling from New Scotland Yard in London. Am I speaking to Donal Macgregor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve been following the way you broke the corruption case at your local division, Trainee Constable Macgregor. Very impressive indeed. We believe you have the makings of an excellent detective. You would be wasted in uniform, Macgregor.”
“I’m still on suspension, sir.”
“Irrelevant. That will be lifted immediately, and you will graduate as an officer. We would like to offer you the chance to train as a full detective here at New Scotland Yard. You are studying towards a degree, are you not?”
“Yes, sir. At the Open University.”
“You will have to complete that before you finish your detective training. Whether you choose to return to Edinburgh or remain in England, we believe you would be an asset to the force. Your integrity, your refusal to be intimidated by authority, your ability to plan and execute a sting operation – those are all the attributes of a first-class detective. So, tell me, Macgregor, would you be interested?”
Donal’s brain raced to catch up with his emotions, which were galloping out of control. “Yes, sir. I’d be very interested indeed.”
“Good. We’ll arrange for you to graduate from your current course. You will have to write the final exam, but I’m sure that won’t be a problem. You have already passed the other requirements. Then you must arrange to relocate to London as quickly as possible, so you can start with the new intake of trainees here in January. I look forward to meeting you, Macgregor. I’ve heard all about you from Sergeant Burns. He has a lot of respect for you.”
Donal knew that Burns had reconciled with his wife and accepted a promotion to Sergeant now that Tina Shortridge was awaiting trial.
“I couldn’t have done it without Sergeant Burns, sir. He and my brother-in-law, Remus Selkirk, did the real hard work in carrying out the sting.”
D.I. Pollard laughed. “That’s another quality of a good leader – you give all the credit to your team. Welcome to plainclothes work, Macgregor. I have a feeling it will suit you down to the ground.”
Donal thought so too.
HUNTED
Prologue
Eighteen years ago
“Don’t go far,” said Rosa. “It’ll be dark soon. You need to get back for your evening chores.”
The children groaned. “You’re not our mother, Rosa.”
“Don’t be bossy, Rosa.”
“We know, Rosa!”
The small girl with the wild black hair and big eyes beckoned to her friends. “Come on! We must hurry so we can get there and back before Rosa tells on us.”
The thirteen-year-old looked insulted. “I’m not going to tell on you. I’m just saying.”
“Let’s go, Eulalie.”
The three little ones disappeared into the forest, leaving Rosa shaking her head. She wouldn’t have minded going with them, but being three years older, she had more duties to perform around the village.
The boys, Rael and Sami, were cousins. Eulalie was their friend and partner in crime. It had been her idea to play in the dried-up riverbed. It wasn’t exactly forbidden, but the adults discouraged them from going there because there were soft places in the mud that could suck in the unwary and make it difficult to pull oneself free.
Eulalie had said that they shouldn’t worry because she would know where the soft places were and stop them before they stepped into one. Rael and Sami accepted this without question. It was a talent she had - to know about danger before it arrived. Some people were good at hunting, or fishing, or baking. Eulalie was good at sensing danger. As long as they were with her, they would be safe.
They walked for a long time to get to the old riverbed. The sun had moved by the length of one ten-year-old thumb by the time they got there. It was hard going. The undergrowth was thick in places – so thick they had to take to the trees to get over it. If there had been adults with them, they could have cut through the undergrowth with their large, curved knives. But children were not
allowed such things, which was very unfair.
Sami and Rael fantasized about the magnificent sword fights they could have if only the adults weren’t so ridiculously cautious.
As they approached the riverbed, Rael couldn’t resist the urge to lecture the other two.
“You can see what happened here. The river used to curve along there.” He indicated with his hand the curve of the old riverbed that opened out just in front of them. “It twisted and twisted and twisted, until one day there was only a thin neck of river bank between the loops of the bend. It probably happened when the river was flowing strongly just after the rains. The river burst through the narrow neck to join up with itself on the other side. So now the river was straight again, and the bend became a little lake next to it.”
He indicated the remains of the old ox-bow lake that had once been there.
“But without the river to feed it, the lake dried up. This probably took several lifetimes to accomplish. And now we have this soft mud to play in.”
Eulalie and Sami rolled their eyes. It was their moral obligation to mock him, even though they had found his explanation interesting.
“Thank you, oh wise one.” Eulalie bowed low before him.
“Have they invited you onto the Council of Elders yet?” Sami put out a foot to trip his cousin as they walked. “I can’t imagine why not.”
The boys tussled, then they let out a couple of yells and ran to throw themselves at the squishy mud.
The mud was fun to walk in, but Eulalie found she didn’t enjoy rolling in it quite as much as the boys did. And she really didn’t like getting it in her hair. She preferred to sit on a rock and poke around in the mud with a stick looking for treasures.
Anything that fell into the mud was preserved forever.
The best thing Eulalie had ever found was the corpse of a bat, perfectly petrified and preserved. She loved to look at it and examine every detail, from its little claws to its leathery wings and tiny eyes. One did not always find such perfection, but there were insects and worms too that provided endless interest to the ten-year-old mind.
There was a feeling like lightning in her head and her ears began to buzz. She looked up quickly.
“Stop!” she shouted at Sami. “There’s a soft patch in front of you. You must go around it.” She picked up a light, flat stick and threw it to him. “Put that down to mark the place and make sure you don’t step in it.”
Sami caught the stick and laid it carefully on top of the mud. Not once did it occur to him to doubt her word. Eulalie had a talent and that was that.
If he had been inclined to think about it, he might have decided that it made up for the fact that she had no parents. Sami knew they had run off – away from the village – when Eulalie had been a baby. She had no brothers or sisters either, but plenty of cousins. She was being raised by her grandmother, Angel, who was on the Council of Elders along with her son, Eulalie's uncle.
Orphans were unusual in the village, but not unheard of. A child that was orphaned was absorbed seamlessly into the family structures of their kin. No child of the forest knew what it was like to feel unwanted or out of place.
“Hey!” Rael called excitedly. “Come and look at this.”
The children spoke to each other in Guillaumoise – the language of their village. It was a strange dialect – a mixture of French and ancient Swahili, with a smattering of Hindi. It was incomprehensible to outsiders.
“What is it?” Sami was drawing patterns on his arms with the mud.
“I don’t know. There’s something stuck in the mud here. Come and look.”
Eulalie got up reluctantly. She had just found a big worm that might turn out to be a small snake.
“Look at this.” Rael crouched in the mud. “At first, I thought it was a stick, but look how smooth and pointed it is. It goes so deeply into the mud that I can hardly move it.”
The other two stretched out their hands to feel the object. They agreed that it was impossibly smooth – far too smooth to be a stick or a branch.
“We have to get it out of the mud,” said Eulalie.
It was easier said than done. It took the children twenty sweaty and exhausting minutes to pull the thing out of its muddy home. They pulled, and they rocked, and they heaved until it slid away from the mud.
When it was out, they saw that it was about twelve feet long and curved. It was made of a smooth, dense material that was brown in color, even when the mud had been rubbed off with river water. It was heavy to lift. It would take all three of them to get it back to the village.
“We have to take it back and show everyone,” said Sami.
Eulalie pulled a face. “The adults will just take it away from us if we do.”
“I agree with Sami,” said Rael. “We have to show someone. We will get the credit for finding it, but there’s no way we can hide it or keep it safe. And it’s too heavy to play with.”
So, Eulalie agreed. The children picked it up and held it over their heads as they walked. Then they got tired and held it in the crooks of their arms. It took them until nearly nightfall to get back to the village. They had earned a scolding, but the long, curved thing caused such a sensation when they arrived that the scolding was forgotten.
Most of the village came out to examine the tusk of a creature that had fallen into the mud of the riverbed and died ten thousand years earlier.
Chapter 1
“How did this happen?” asked Eulalie.
Her secretary hung her head.
“I need an answer, Mrs. Belfast.”
“I don’t know why you think it was me.”
“Who else could it have been? I caught you red-handed.”
The secretary shuffled her feet.
“Mrs. Belfast, this situation didn’t come out of nowhere. It was facilitated by someone, and I strongly suspect that someone was you.”
Eulalie looked down at the situation, which currently had its furry butt planted on her left shoe, making it impossible for her to walk.
“All this time I thought you were feeding the feral cats in the neighborhood, and you were just feeding this creature. You lured it here with food and encouraged it to make itself right at home. Do you know where it slept last night? On my bed. That’s right. I woke up clinging to the edge of the mattress because this animal had stretched itself out and taken over the entire bed.”
Mrs. Belfast dropped the humble secretary act. “He’s not an ‘it,’ young lady, he’s a ‘he.’ And he has a name.”
“Oh, really? So, he just marched in here and told it to you? ‘Hi, my name is Whiskers’ or whatever? Or did he have a collar on? Wait, did he have a collar on?”
Eulalie examined the cat hopefully. “If he had a collar, he probably had an owner – an owner that we could trace.”
Mrs. Belfast gave her a narrow-eyed look. “No, he did not have a collar on and he did not tell me his name. I gave him a name. He turned up here a couple of weeks ago looking sad and thin…”
“Thin?” Eulalie snorted. She looked pointedly at the spreading hips of the cat as he remained planted on her toe.
“Thinner,” Mrs. Belfast amended. “But definitely sad. He reminded me of that story about the bear who turns up at Paddington Station with a note attached to him saying ‘Please look after this bear.’ So, I called him Paddington. Paddy for short.”
“The point,” said Eulalie, “is that I don’t want a cat. I’ve never had a cat. I’m not a cat person. I wouldn’t know what to do with a cat. You need things for them. And stuff. I don’t even know what that is.”
“I’m glad you asked.” Mrs. Belfast reached behind her desk and pulled out an astonishing collection of things and stuff.
“Here is his basket.” She held up Exhibit A. “It has a toweling lining that he likes. And here is his scratching post. We can put that at the back in the kitchen. I got him a litter tray that can stay upstairs in your apartment, but he probably won’t use it much. He likes to spend time in the
courtyard out back, and to go visiting around the neighborhood. Here’s his catnip mouse that he loves to chase. He keeps losing it under bits of furniture, but I can generally find it. We should get him microchipped at the vet. And we should get him a collar with a disk saying, ‘Eulalie Park Private Investigator,’ so people will know where he belongs.”
As she dropped the mouse on the floor, the cat leapt off Eulalie’s foot and began to chase it around the reception area.
“Mrs. Belfast.” Eulalie put her hands on her hips. “It is quite clear to me that you are besotted with this cat. Why don’t you just take it to your house to live with you? I won’t mind a bit, I promise.”
“It’s not as simple as that, dear. He doesn’t want to come home with me. I tried. He wants to stay here. He wants to be your cat. And besides, I promised your grandmother.”
She said the last part of the sentence in a whisper.
“Aha!” said Eulalie. “I knew it! I knew Angel was behind this. Why doesn’t she take the damn cat herself if she likes it so much?”
“She seems to think you need it.”
“Does she indeed. Well, then she can…”
“Oh, look! Here’s Chief Macgregor. He must want to speak to you.” Mrs. Belfast greeted the arrival of Queen’s Town’s chief of police with every sign of relief. “Doesn’t he look lovely in that blue shirt? It really brings out his eyes.”
Eulalie turned to look as Chief Macgregor crossed the road towards their front door. She had to admit he cut a fine figure with the early morning sunlight playing on his hair. He was tall and well-built, and carried himself with an air of authority. He had a hawkish cast to his countenance that called to mind his Scottish warrior ancestors.
He and Eulalie had been spending time together lately, although their relationship status could only be described as uncertain.
“Good morning, Mrs. Belfast.” Chief Macgregor greeted his former secretary as he came into the office.
“Good morning, Chief Macgregor.” She all but batted her eyelashes. “I hope you are well on this fine day?”
The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries Page 76