I smiled, seeing them reunited. My team and I had done that. We’d made a noticeable, positive difference in their lives. It was a good feeling.
Fletcher and I sat down across from them, and I found I wasn’t sure where to begin. “Finn, how are you?” I asked.
He wiped his nose with his hand. “Good.” He had a quiet, shy voice, and I wondered if that was natural or a product of his kidnapping.
“My name is Callum, and this is Tara. Do you remember us from the other night?”
Finn nodded. His nose was red, but there was no sign it’d been broken when he was abducted.
“I know this has been very scary, but I was hoping you could tell us what happened. Do you think you're up for it?”
“I guess so,” Finn said.
Dunnel passed me a handheld recorder before retreating back to his chair.
“Do you mind if I record this?” I asked, looking at Ainslee since Finn was a minor.
“That’s fine,” she said.
I pressed the red button on the side of the device and placed it on the table between us. “This is DCI Callum MacBain and DI Tara Fletcher speaking with Finn and Ainslee Wair,” I said for the record. “Finn, would you mind taking us through what happened on Tuesday?”
Finn looked up at his mother, and she nodded encouragingly for him to begin. He shifted in his seat and wrung his hands, and it took him thirty seconds to figure out how to start. “I said goodbye to my friends and left school to go to my music class with Ms Taggert. Did you meet her? She’s very nice.”
I nodded. She was very nice.
“I always cut through the alley behind school,” Finn continued. His voice trembled, and he gave Ainslee a hand to squeeze. “This van stopped at the end, and these three people jumped out. They had these dark masks on, and they--” He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.
“Does he really need to do this?” Ainslee asked, despair plain in her voice.
“I’m afraid we do need his statement,” I said apologetically. “It’s better that he get it down now while it’s fresh so he can rest rather than dredge it up later.”
“Hey, buddy, you’re doing great,” Fletcher said to Finn. She sat forward in her chair and rested her elbows on her knees, so their faces were level. “I know this is hard, but you’re being so brave.” She glanced at Dunnel and me. “Do we have any toys or anything? Something to help comfort him?”
“The Rabbit comforts no one,” Dunnel said and shivered.
I’d seen the Rabbit once, and it had given me nightmares. It used to be a Peter Rabbit toy, but one eye was missing and the other replaced by a blood-red button. The thread of its mouth and whiskers had been picked out, leaving behind the shiny black nose, and its fur had been rubbed off in patches so that fabric the colour of dishwater showed through. Reilly and I had hidden it in the far reaches of evidence lockup to protect the station from the evil spirit no doubt lurking inside. Dunnel was correct when he said the Rabbit brought comfort to no one.
Fletcher gave Dunnel a confused and slightly frightened look. She had yet to see the Rabbit. It was an initiation all rookies had to go through at some point or another. “Ignoring that,” she said and turned her attention back to Finn. “As I was saying, if you’re brave a little while longer, maybe your mum will take you for ice cream? How does that sound?”
Finn cracked one eye open and looked at Fletcher seriously. “I like ice cream.”
“Who doesn’t?” Fletcher said.
Now that she’d mentioned food, I realized I was absolutely starving, and my stomach gave a growl that I was sure everyone in the room heard.
“You were saying that a van blocked the alley?” I prompted.
Finn nodded. “They came right at me. I didn’t know what to do. They grabbed me. I got so scared, and I tried to get away. One of them dropped me, and I hit my nose.” He touched the tip of his nose and winced as he remembered the struggle. “They threw me in a van, and put duct tape on my hands, and they wouldn’t tell me where we were going. We drove for a long time. I don’t know how long, and then we got on a boat.” A couple of tears slid free of his eyes and down his cheeks.
“Did you ever see this man, Thomas Holden?” I asked. Dunnel had the American’s mugshot in a folder, and I held it up for Finn to see.
“No. Not until last night.”
“Would you be able to identify any of the people you did see?”
“Maybe.”
Fletcher helped me lay pictures of everyone we had in custody as well as the picture of Elias that Lena had given us. Finn leaned forward and looked them all over with the kind of sombre intensity only children possess. He was able to identify eight of our twenty-four suspects, including Elias, Sarah, Harris, and the man with the squashed nose, also known as Jonas.
“This woman,” Finn pointed at Sarah, “put me on a video call with some guy. I didn’t understand what they wanted, and then they moved me up to this bedroom. They mostly just left me there after that.”
“Did anyone hurt you?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
“No. They kind of ignored me. There was a TV in the room. That was nice. And a couple of books. And they brought me food three times a day.”
That was something at least.
“I think that’s all we need,” I said, glancing at Fletcher and Dunnel to make sure they had no other questions. “Thank you both for coming in today. I know this was hard. I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through this week, but I want you to know that we caught the guys. They won’t be bothering you again.”
The five of us stood up, and Ainslee held out her hand to me, though it turned into a bone-cracking hug. “Thank you,” she whispered in my ear.
I squeezed her back in reply, and when she released me, she had tears in her eyes that she quickly wiped away. She took Finn’s hand. “What do you say to the nice inspectors?”
“Thank you,” Finn chirped obediently, and Fletcher and I waved goodbye as Ainslee led him towards the door.
She paused in the frame, though, and looked back at us. She hesitated there, weighing whether or not she actually wanted to ask us what was on her mind. “My ex-husband… he was involved in this, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “He helped us find Finn, but he wanted his involvement kept quiet.”
“Do you know where he is?” Ainslee asked, her voice thick.
“No,” I answered honestly.
“Do you think he’ll come back?”
“Do you want him to?”
She thought about it for a long time, her face twitching as it cycled through emotions. “I honestly don’t know.”
Twenty-Eight
Alec MacGowan stood outside Ainslee Wair’s home exactly one week after he had helped MacBain and Fletcher rescue his son. He was trying to work up the courage to knock on the door or at least drop off the letter he had written and rewritten and rewritten again, but he found that his feet were rooted to the spot beneath an old oak tree, and all he could do was stare at the house.
Escaping the police-riddled island had been less harrowing than this. The building had been empty of Holden’s goons, and he’d gotten lucky going out the back door rather than the front as MacGowan’s team had everyone backed up by the door, taking the kidnappers down as quickly as they could. Alec scooted around the overturned chest on the floor and stepped outside to find the whole island lit up with bright white lights, making it nigh on impossible to hide.
He used the confusion to run for the dock, hoping his pontoon hadn’t drifted too far from where he’d left it. One of the officers spotted him, firing over his head, but the man named Elias tackled him and then disappeared into the water. Alec ran all the way to the end of the dock and leapt off, hitting the frigid firth with a splash that was lost amongst all the shouting.
It took him ages to find the boat. It had drifted closer to the island but to the left, so at first, Alec overshot it, his eyes searching the dark for the dull gleam of the hull. He
began to tread water as he looked around. The first fingers of panic tickled his spine as he realized he might run out of strength before he found it.
Luckily, he caught sight of the island’s lights reflecting off something in the water to his left, and he found the pontoon boat a couple of hundred metres away. He decided to cut straight across to Tain, though he knew the police would be all over the town. He beached the boat on the shore and stayed well clear of the flashing red and blue lights as he found another car to hotwire to take him back to Inverness.
The smart thing to do would be to head down to Edinburgh or even further south to England and disappear for a while, but he wanted to make sure his family was okay.
So there he stood. Outside Ainslee’s house. Unable to take a single step closer.
There were so many things he wanted to say, so many things to apologize for, that the weight of where to start sat so heavily on his shoulders it drove his feet deep into the damp ground. He pulled the letter from his pocket and looked at it. It had taken him five pages to explain, but he still wasn’t sure if he had covered it all or if his words even made sense. He sighed. He’d written Ainslee’s name on the outside of the envelope, but he longed to form those syllables on his lips, to taste the way they sounded.
He hadn’t the courage.
But he also couldn’t leave without doing something.
Alec knew Ainslee and Finn were home. He’d watched them return from the grocery store, though his dark clothing helped hide him in the shadows of the gathering evening. The two of them went inside, closed the curtains, and didn’t come out again. He would have given just about to be in there with them, comforting his son, but he lost that opportunity long ago. It broke his heart.
He slipped up to the front door and gently slid his letter through the mail flap. The metal creaked and groaned as he pushed it open, and the envelope hit the floor inside with a thwap. Alec slunk away again, wishing he could see through the door to make sure Ainslee picked up the letter. He would just have to hope.
Alec hid himself within the bushes beneath the living room window. On that night, on the island, he’d thought his heart would break when he saw Finn in that room. He’d been pale and wide-eyed and trembling like a leaf in the wind. Alec needed to see him again, in the present, to make sure that he was really okay.
There was a gap in the curtains over the window, just wide enough for him to crane his neck out of the bush and peer into the room beyond. He got his eye into place just as Ainslee stood up from the couch and walked towards the front door to check the mail. Alec could see a very narrow slice of the room through the drapes, but it was enough to spot Finn curled up on the couch, his face illuminated by the paused movie on the television.
Relief flooded Alec because Finn looked like he was alright. There was colour back in his cheeks, and his curls had some spring again, and there was even a small smile on his face. Alec’s mistakes hadn’t ruined his son’s life for good.
Ainslee reappeared in the archway to the living room, Alec’s letter in her hand. It was unmarked but for her name, and she looked it over in confusion.
“What is it, Mum?” Finn asked. Alec could barely hear his voice through the glass.
“A letter,” she answered, turning it over to open it.
“From who?”
Ainslee’s hand flew to her mouth as she recognized the handwriting within, the envelope fluttering to the ground forgotten. Alec was suddenly sure that he’d made a terrible mistake. Ainslee sank to the couch beside Finn as she scanned the first page of the letter. A tear slipped down her cheek.
Alec couldn’t move until she’d finished the whole thing. He needed to see her reaction. She lowered the papers to her lap, eyes brimming, shoulders trembling, as she covered her mouth with her hand.
But Alec thought he saw her smile first.
Twenty-Nine
Between Lena’s band rehearsal and my endless paperwork wrapping up the case, it took us a week to find a time to go out for dinner finally. I had to get statements from Haruto, Collins, and Fawkes about the attack on them. Only one of their assailants, the woman with the dark hair, had been taken in the raid on Holden’s estate.
Fletcher and I asked Haruto what we should do with the Viking cache once it was no longer needed as evidence, and he suggested we send it to the National Museum of Scotland down in Edinburgh for safekeeping. He said scores of scholars and medievalists would want to study what we’d recovered. Rickerson came in to tell his tale as well once he heard that we’d taken down Holden’s operation. I was certain that with all those testimonies, we would get something to stick to the man, even with his high-powered team of lawyers.
Then, very suddenly, it was the day of my date with Lena. In a moment of weakness and error in judgment, I texted Fletcher and asked her to come over a couple of hours beforehand. She had better style than I did, though I would never tell her that to her face.
I regretted it the instant I opened the door and saw her broadly smirking face.
“Is somebody nervous?” she crowed.
I tried to swing the door shut, but she stuck her foot in the crack and let herself into my apartment.
“Fine, yes. I’m nervous,” I admitted. “It’s just… it’s been a long time coming, and now, it feels like there’s so much pressure on it.”
We’d made the plan two days ago, and ever since then, I’d been on edge, hyper-aware of the impending event. It was like knowing there was an exam coming up that you hadn’t studied for.
“Look, the biggest thing to remember is to just relax,” Fletcher said as she pushed past me and went looking for my bedroom so she could both invade my privacy and sort through my clothes.
“Easier said than done,” I pointed out. “How do you do it? Your first night here, and you had a date.”
“I did already know her,” Fletcher pointed out. She made her way upstairs and poked her nose through various doors until she found my room. I was glad I’d actually made the bed this morning and put away the laundry I did last night. She threw my closet open, rubbing her chin as she looked over my shirts. “Do you only own dark colours?”
“Yes.”
“Honestly, same. You and Lena have that light-dark foil going on, and that is so cute.”
Fletcher threw three shirts, two jackets, and two pairs of pants at me and had me try on several combinations and berate them around for her before she finally decided on the classic black trousers, blazer, and white shirt.
We went downstairs, and I made tea, setting a half-empty package of biscuits on the table that Fletcher immediately dug into. My phone dinged just as the kettle finished boiling, but I didn’t check it until after I poured water over the tea bags.
It was an email from Martin with a subject line that was just an exclamation point. Intrigued, I opened it up. “Callum,” it read. “I finished analyzing that photograph you sent me, and holy shit, man, this is awesome. I’ve determined that your sister found something totally new and never before seen. I’ve compared it to every other Nessie photo to see if I could figure out what ‘misidentified object’ it is, but I haven’t been able to match it up with anything. It’s totally new. I said that already. Anyway, I think you should send this to every newspaper ever, but I know you won’t do that.
“But what I really want you to take a look at is in the bottom left corner. There’s some kind of reflection in the water. I’ve blown it up as best I can, though it's still kind of hard to make out. I expect you to keep me in the loop with EVERYTHING you find, you got me? Everything.”
I went to find my laptop, so I could look at Martin’s enlarged photo on a larger screen. By the time I got back, Fletcher had eaten all but two of the Bourbon Creams, and I took them away from her so I could eat them myself.
“Martin found something on the picture my father took,” I explained, and she scooted closer to peer over my shoulder as I opened up the thumbnail.
It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking
at since the picture was blurry from being enlarged so much. I saw my father’s reflection on the water. His head was a silver blur ringing the square of the camera, the rest of his body a dark blur. Another humanoid shape stood just behind him, some kind of long stick held in their raised arm.
I picked Lena up in my newly repaired car, and we drove to Enrico Ristorante, one of Inverness’s higher-end Italian restaurants, as I’d promised her Italian that night on the island. She looked as nervous as I felt, dressed in a flowy red dress. We hadn’t seen each other, hadn’t spoken other than by text, since everything went down, and the weight of that hung between us. Neither of us seemed to know how to breach it.
“How are you doing, really?” I asked once we were seated at our table. The restaurant had a wide open layout, mostly lit by candlelight so that the corners were shrouded in shadow. The whole room felt like it was moving through space, each table and its candles a star amid the dark. Though the effect was rather dreamy, I felt bad for the servers trying to navigate and work within the dimness.
“I honestly don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve been trying everything that happened and everything that I… that I did. Ainslee asked to see me, but I haven’t been able to work up the courage to see her.”
“Maybe it would help both of you,” I said.
“She pulled Finn from my class.”
I winced. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
We ordered drinks as our server swung by the table, and as soon as he was gone, Lena buried her face in her hands. “I just feel so guilty!”
I hesitated for a second and then reached across the table and took one of her hands. “You did the right thing in the end. Maybe that’s what counts.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Elias was just such a presence. It was hard not to go along with him.”
Buried Secrets (DCI MacBain Scottish Crimes Book 1) Page 22