The Family

by P. R. Black

  ‘Nothing you haven’t seen before,’ she mumbled.

  ‘By the time you calmed down and got to sleep, it was 2 a.m. So I crashed out on the couch. Luckily, I know to bring an overnight bag when you call me up in the middle of a lapse.’

  ‘“Lapse”. I don’t like that word.’

  ‘It’s an excellent chapter title for last night’s farce. As good as I can think of.’ A high colour had crept into his normally pallid cheeks, and he fiddled savagely with his cufflinks. ‘Look, I’m not going to lecture you. But I think you should come back to meetings with me.’

  ‘I’m fine, Aaron. Honestly. I feel better already. I had a bad night. I should probably have gone home after work, but I came off the rails. Part of me wanted to come off the rails. I started and couldn’t stop. You know the drill.’

  Aaron drained his coffee and threw on his suit jacket. He fished around in his pocket. ‘Here. They’ve got a new number. In case you decide to go back without me.’

  ‘I told you – I’m not into the praying and spiritual stuff. Does nothing for me. Plus… I’m in control.’

  ‘Not from where I was standing. Are you joking?’

  She let that stand.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘You got work today?’

  ‘I do. I’ve got to give the boss the good news.’.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right thing for you? All that dead time?’

  ‘Without a doubt,’ she said coldly. ‘And it won’t be dead time, I can assure you. I’ll be busy.’ She checked her watch. ‘Why are you up so early, anyway?’

  ‘So I could make sure I’d got you into some sort of fit state. This is old territory for me, remember.’

  Becky bit the side of her mouth. ‘Thanks, Aaron.’

  He smiled and patted her on the shoulder. ‘De nada. Take care. Give me a call. Think about coming to the next meeting. You’re always welcome. And good luck with the boss.’

  As soon as he was gone, she switched on her laptop and checked her work emails for something from the police. She knew how it would be worded, its banal rhythms:

  A 45-year-old male was found unresponsive in the street at approximately 10.30 p.m. He is believed to have suffered an assault, and was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead. Officers are looking for a woman aged in her late twenties to early thirties, five foot eight, with long shoulder-length dark hair…

  But there was nothing. He’d got up. He’d let it bleed. He’d gone home. Perhaps he’d had some explaining to do to his wife. And perhaps, if there was some grand plan in the universe, no harm had truly been done.

  ‘But that is that,’ she whispered to herself. She spread her fingers and watched them shake. ‘That is definitely that, for now. That’s you and me finished, Mr Gin.’

  With a little bit of time to kill and a pressing need to think about something other than what had happened the previous night, she crossed to the back room. There was no bed in there, just a table and chairs and an extendable lamp bent out of shape. Dominating one wall was a map of Europe. On the desk lay a folder filled with printouts from the international news wires and even newspaper cuttings. She had circled one printout, taken from the AP wire two days before.

  Russian police draw blank over Gursky family disappearance.

  MOSCOW: Mystery surrounded the disappearance of the Russian oligarch Maxim Gursky and his wife and daughter as they drove to an airport 150 miles outside Moscow. Gursky, a controversial figure who made his fortune in steel and other commodities before expanding into pro-Russian media channels, had been driving with his family a short distance from his rural retreat to an airfield where his private plane was ready to take him to a media awards dinner in Stockholm. But Gursky, 51, his wife, Emelda, 34, and daughter Bella, 12, never arrived, and no trace has been found of the high-spec Mercedes they were travelling in. Rumours abound that Gursky had Russian mafia connections. Other commentators have theorised that Gursky had become overly critical of the Russian government of late, with some wondering if the media baron was pushing for a regime change, culminating in a possible tilt at the presidency himself. However, police have said that there are some indications that Gursky had been suffering from depression, and notes that were left at the family home hinted at a possible tragedy.

  Next to this was a scanned copy of an old newspaper cutting. The scan was so good that the ingrained texture of the yellowed newsprint had been faithfully represented in the printout. It was only a short news-in-brief paragraph.

  Family horror in Orkneys

  Police have ruled out foul play in the case of a family found dead at their remote home in the Orkney Islands. Officers said they are not looking for anyone else in connection with the case.

  She double-checked a locator graphic on her phone, then turned to the map of Europe. She took a coloured pin and stuck it in the rough location of the Russian disappearance.

  There were several of these, now, dotted around Europe. Becky studied the map for a moment more, then gathered her things for work.

  *

  Him

  The girl refused to take her hands away from her eyes. Covering her face was the first thing she had done when he had taken the bonds off. She had made no attempt to escape from the room – only to escape the sight of him.

  They were in a portable builder’s cabin. He had lit some candles, eschewing the brutal strip-lighting.

  Outside the window, torchlight flickered, lending the dark trees a febrile animation. Worse than that was the sound; a suggestion of music or singing.

  He drew up a seat and sat in front of the girl. ‘Are you thirsty?’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Mama?’

  ‘Mama’s safe, now,’ he said. ‘She is in good hands.’

  She pressed her hands tighter against her eyes and shook her head. ‘Are you going to hurt me?’

  ‘I’m not sure. That depends on how you answer my next question.’

  Slowly, the girl peeled her hands away from her eyes. Then she flinched.

  The mask leered at her from the gloom, its rotten yellow surfaces burnished by the candlelight. ‘How would you like to go on an adventure?’

  5

  Becky had expected a day of general calamity while her hangover remained on life support, but the Skype connection on her computer at work was pixel-perfect.

  Andrei from the wire service in Moscow was younger than Becky supposed, with short spiky hair, glasses and a thick-lipped smile. He might have looked perfect as a student in the mid-eighties; she could see him on a bicycle, trailing a scarf.

  ‘Becky! How nice to see you!’ He waved. ‘Always nice to put a face to an email address!’

  ‘Ah, likewise. I’m not bad, Andrei. Nice of you to agree to this.’

  ‘Not a problem. You want to know a little more about Mr Gursky?’

  ‘Colourful character, I take it?’

  ‘That would be correct. Well, he has always been involved in the steel trade, so he has always been linked to unsavoury people. Mafia, in particular. But he enjoys the spotlight. Many feel he would have a natural home in politics. Always presentable. A confident man, that’s what we would say.’

  ‘Lots of enemies, then?’

  ‘Oh, for sure. It would be odd to get to that position in life and not upset anyone.’

  ‘The police don’t seem to have any leads or clues.’

  ‘No, and that does seem odd. It’s as if they want Mr Gursky to go away.’

  Becky tapped her notepad with her pen. ‘This is why I wanted to talk to you about him. I always hear rumours of allegations that he was involved in criminal activity – but there’s never been anything concrete. Can you say what some of these were? I promise it’s off the record.’

  ‘Well…’ Andrei looked uncertain. ‘Mr Gursky is… or maybe was, we should say… extremely litigious. So no stories made it out either at home or abroad. But Mr Gursky was apparently linked to human trafficking, prostitution… there were hints that he was into darker things, stil
l.’

  Becky sat up. ‘Darker things?’

  ‘Again, I must say, this is the stuff of gossip in a bar. There were rumours that he had very odd tastes. That he was involved in some sort of sex ring, very dark things, murders, even. He is a very rich, very media-conscious, very charismatic white man, so as you can imagine this opened up many opportunities for exploitation over the years, were he to be involved in anything like that.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve had a few of those sorts in our country.’

  ‘There was nothing to link him to any of the rumours, and something mentioned in silliness has a way of turning into a full-blown rumour by word of mouth, even in the digital age. There was a story about a pay-off for a girl from Volgograd, but it disappeared quickly enough. I have to say we never found anything of a sinister nature whenever we investigated him. That’s not surprising, as any inquiries about Mr Gursky tended to hit a brick wall. There is very little about him in any public records – tax offices, employment invoices, things of that nature. When you have billions in the bank, it’s quite simple to click your fingers and make anything awkward or unsavoury disappear.’

  ‘Strange that his family vanished along with him. Any chance they’ve simply tried to escape? Maybe there were financial problems he had to get away from, legal issues…?’

  Andrei shook his head. ‘None that we know of. He was flirting with political ambitions, but making him disappear would have been an outrageous move – too much even for our current government. They would have engineered something they could easily deny, like a plane crash, if that was the motive. A disappearance is a big question mark no one wants to have hanging over them.

  ‘Also, we think that if Gursky and his family were going to vanish, they would probably have taken the private plane that was fuelled up and waiting for them – there would have been nothing to stop them. Once they were out of Russia it would have been a simple matter to disappear from there. But they didn’t. It seems a strange way of going to ground. Surely the first priority would be to leave the country. I think they were abducted, Becky, and we probably won’t see them again. As to why – who knows?’

  ‘One other question for you, Andrei, and it may seem a little strange – are there any monuments in the area where Gursky disappeared?’

  ‘Monuments? What do you mean?’

  ‘Ancient things – like cairns, stone age settlements, or standing stones?’

  ‘Not that I know of. There’s a lot of forest though. Unspoiled forest, apart from the road. Going back thousands of years.’

  *

  Becky carefully punched in the number she’d taken from the book of general contacts in the library section.

  A calm, sober voice with a very heavy accent answered on the second ring. ‘Five-three-two-one.’

  ‘Hi there, would I be speaking to Chief Inspector Colin Raeside?’

  ‘Retired, yes. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘Ah, hello, just the man I am looking for. You don’t know me, but my name’s Becky Hughes. I’m a journalist, and I’m researching a story that took place on the island.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘Yes. It relates to the Sloan family. Would that case be familiar to you? It was way back in 1984.’

  ‘Sloan?’ There was a slight faltering in the voice, the first sign that Becky was talking to an old man. ‘Sloan, you said, is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  There was a deep sigh. ‘Listen, there’s not much to be said about the Sloan family. I get these calls, now and again, and I’ve never appreciated one of them.’

  ‘You were the senior investigating officer on the case at the initial stage, is that right?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘So you knew the island well, and a lot of the people on it?’

  ‘I’m an Orcadian. Born and bred,’ Raeside said, stoutly.

  ‘As they died on your patch, you must have known about the Sloans, then?’

  ‘Not much. I think Mr Sloan might have contacted us once about the young dafties tearing up and down the road on moto-cross bikes, and we put a stop to it. That was all.’

  ‘You didn’t meet them socially, maybe at church, or a community event?’

  ‘No. The islands are funny that way. Some people come here so they can be cut off. That’s the goal. And you get people going the other way – teenagers who’ve grown up here, desperate to leave, to get to the mainland, to start a life where there’s more people. The Sloans didn’t just come to Orkney for peace and quiet. They wanted to get away from everything – down to their neighbours. I gathered that Mr Sloan was some kind of survivalist. Thought a nuclear war was coming, and he could ride it out up here with us. Growing his own food, keeping his own livestock. Only it didn’t work out.’

  ‘Do you know what happened?’

  ‘Just what you read from the inquest, no doubt,’ Raeside said, tartly. ‘Something went badly wrong. What was left of their four walls would tell you if they could, nobody else. Maybe Mrs Sloan decided that life wasn’t for her, and she wanted out. Maybe the kids weren’t adjusting. Or maybe it was this great big time bomb that had always been ticking away in his head. We’ll never know for sure. What we do know is that he murdered his family, then killed himself.’

  ‘No sign it might have been any outside agency? Made to look like murder-suicide?’

  ‘Oh, love, the amount of times I’ve heard that one. You think we’d have missed that? You reckon we’re still to discover forensics up here, or something? It was open-and-shut. There was no one else around. Sloan lost the plot, that’s all there is to it. I’m tired of people trying to link it to something it wasn’t. It’s happened before, up here. I hope to Christ it never happens again.’

  ‘There wasn’t any suggestion of wife-swapping, something going wrong there? Murky, organised stuff among the islanders? That’s the rumours I heard.’

  ‘Fairy stories. People making something out of nothing. They see an island, they meet islanders, they imagine things. There’s no truth to that at all.’

  ‘Officers from the mainland took over the investigation quite soon afterwards, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, as if from behind the teeth. ‘And our conclusions were identical.’

  ‘It’s been very difficult to get hold of the final report from the fatal accident inquiry.’

  ‘Well…’ Raeside coughed. ‘It’s true there were elements that people didn’t want to get out. That was on the grounds of taste and decency. The sheriff at the time made an order not to release certain details, but there’s nothing unusual in itself about that.’

  ‘What details exactly?’

  ‘The sheriff ordered them sealed, so they’re sealed. Now, there were some politicians who would rather have kept the whole thing quiet. No use upsetting people, giving the islands a bad rep, that kind of thing.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. They didn’t succeed. The inquiry’s conclusions were correct. They tallied in with ours. Whatever you’re trying to find here, it simply isn’t there.’

  Becky wrote ‘politicians’ on her pad, in longhand. Then she said, ‘Another question… It’s hard to tell from the maps that are online, but didn’t there used to be a stone circle near the Sloans’ farm?’

  ‘Yeah. Not much of a stone circle, mind. There’s a theory that some lunatic made it themselves in the fifties, rather than cavemen or whatever. Most of it’s been vandalised or fallen over by now. Overgrown.’

  ‘And would this have been close to the Sloans’ farm? Like, walking distance?’

  ‘You’re the journalist. Come up here and investigate.’ The line went dead.

  *

  Jarrod had turned his corner of the office into a cosy little nook that Becky secretly envied. He lived in the IT station, a bank of desks that had once been staffed mainly by men in their twenties, always vaguely grubby, always vaguely threatening. On Saturdays during the football, it had turned into a
total zoo, grown men shrieking and clutching themselves before the big screens. Any time she’d had to venture over there to speak to someone directly, Becky had felt uneasy. Thanks to the general direction of the newspaper industry and the wider economy, the IT station was something of a ghost ship, now. One or two heads were dotted round the desks, but now it was a lonely place.

  Jarrod’s corner had a few band pictures up, though he was surely closer to 30 than his teenage years. Cacti spiked the top of his desk, on either side of a framed black-and-white picture of a girl with a deep dimple in her chin and her fringe cut square across her forehead. Jarrod was tall and very good-looking, with a clear brow and long, unruly dark blond curls that reminded Becky of wheat. He had the look and demeanour of a rock star, and many people thought him aloof. But Becky knew for a fact that he was simply shy, a face badly out of sync with the personality behind it.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, startling him. ‘I want to say thanks for that copy you ran off for me – works like a dream.’

  He turned sharply, pulling off a set of headphones and pausing what he’d been watching on his computer. ‘No worries… Yeah, good material, that.’

  ‘No security alert, no online scan prompt, no flashing lights and alarms… nothing. Foolproof. Only your friendly neighbourhood pirate knows for sure.’

  ‘Well, yeah. I think I said we should keep it on the QT, though?’

  ‘Oh sure, mum’s the word. Something I wanted to pick your brains about, though…’ She wheeled a chair towards him and sat down. Their knees almost touched, and he visibly recoiled. ‘I guess you know your way round certain things. You’re just about the best in here.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘Ah, don’t be coy, Jarrod. You’re the only person who seems to actually care and get stuff fixed.’

  He shrugged, struggling to make eye contact. ‘It’s a job.’

  ‘I wonder if you could help out with one or two things I need to check.’