by Susan Hill
Twenty-nine
He sat at the desk and the short queue of book borrowers shuffled slowly forward. Between them, they brought back twelve books and went off round the shelves to pick more. Lee Russon stamped and wrote down names and put the books on the trolley to re-shelve at the end of the session.
He liked books. Well, some books. He also liked this room because it was quiet and orderly and there was something about the atmosphere, as if, for the time being, and only in here, thoughts of anger and violence and revenge and drugs and drink and desperation faded a bit. It wasn’t true that nothing and nobody could get to you in here but it felt true. It was chapel for those who didn’t do God.
A couple of men were sitting down to look through books, a third was standing reading. Two came in. The blind bloke who came for his Braille books that had to be specially ordered and reserved. And Gerry.
Anyone thought twice and then again about getting across the prison officer called Gerry Moon. He was six foot seven, worked out in the gym two hours a day, had never been known to crack a smile. His reputation went ahead of him.
He changed with one of the others, Normanton, another misery. But there were always rumours about Normanton, involved in whatever drugs were being passed round, and SIM cards.
Gerry Moon was down hard on drugs. He had a nose for them, a sixth sense, and when he found them, the prisoner’s feet didn’t touch the ground, Moon would have him by the scruff of the neck straight to the governor. The governor loved Moon.
Normanton went out. Moon looked round the room. Everybody was suddenly deep in a book, head down. Moon folded his arms and stood by the door. Lee put a couple more books on the trolley. Nodded in Moon’s direction.
‘Checkout, please.’
‘Taking these?’
‘Thanks, and I think I’ll have that back, the one I brought in, there … think I’ll read it again.’
Lee took the Dick Francis off the trolley and handed it over. ‘Got another four or five of his though.’
‘Read them all.’
‘Tried Lee Child?’
‘He write about racing?’
‘No. But they’re great reads.’
‘I’ll just have this for now.’
One by one, they checked out and left, books under their arms. Two more came in. Gave Moon a look.
‘Just checking these in, don’t want any more thanks.’
‘You? You never stop reading, what’s up?’
‘Being transferred Friday. Silverdale Open.’
Moon had stepped forward. He was listening.
‘Good on you, mate. See you then. Best of luck.’
Two were left, one head down to a book laid flat on a table. He had barely looked up since he had been there. The other was running a finger along the spines of the History shelf, not seeming to read any of the titles, just running to and fro.
‘Ten minutes,’ Moon said.
‘Yes, boss. I’ll just get these out.’
Russon took the trolley and began to put books back in their places, slowly. The finger-runner went on doing it. The reader at the desk turned a page. Lee put back a copy of The Name of the Rose in the Crime section. Hesitated. Moved it to Historical Fiction. Hesitated again. Waited. Moved on.
Andy McNab, ever popular. He reached Fantasy Fiction. Terry Pratchett. Some couldn’t read him, some couldn’t get enough.
‘Guards! Guards!’ He read the title out loud with a short laugh. Paused. Then without glancing round, swift and sure with practice, he took out an envelope from his pocket and slipped it between the pages of the book. Set it back on the shelf. Moved on to the last two books, re-shelved them and returned the trolley to its place behind the checking-in table.
Moon was still standing there, arms folded.
‘TIME.’
The two readers scuttled out. Russon signed out of the staffing rota with the date and time, and followed without glancing at the prison officer.
Moon waited until the room was empty, before going over to the book containing the envelope, and extracting it. He folded it, put it into his pocket, switched out the lights, left and locked the library door.
He only lived a couple of miles from the prison and he always cycled. That night, as he did every so often, he posted Lee Russon’s envelope in a letter box, on his way home. His remuneration would come sometime later and would not be traceable.
Thirty
‘Simon?’
‘It is.’
‘My God, you have a signal – or have you left the island?’
‘Who is this? You’re very faint – the line isn’t good.’
‘Kieron.’
‘That’s better. Sorry. Morning, Chief.’
‘I think you can drop that, we’re not on duty. How are you?’
‘OK. In the thick of something, which started off by being just sad but probably routine and turns out to be sadder and definitely not routine. Interesting.’
‘I’m calling to ask how you’re getting on with the Kimberley Still files. It’s warmed up a bit on that front.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve not done much … this other thing has got in the way and I’ve had Sam staying with me, as you probably know.’
‘Isn’t he there now?’
‘No. Went two days ago.’
‘Went where?’
‘I thought to you. No?’
‘Not as of this morning.’
‘Oh Christ. Well, don’t say anything to my sister.’
‘As if. He’s probably just taking the scenic route. Any chance of getting into the files soon? It would be good to know what your thoughts are, see if anything comes up that looks wrong.’
‘I will. Not a lot more I can do here. I’ve talked to everyone on the island and drawn a blank.’
He cooked himself a fresh mackerel with mashed potatoes and tinned peas, fresh vegetables being in short supply now. While the fish was baking, he sat at the kitchen table with a glass of Malbec and went over everything he could remember about Sandy. That she had in fact been ‘he’, and a completely unaltered ‘he’ at that, had surprised him, as it seemed to have surprised Iain at the pub. Sandy had never dressed up much, but when there had been a ceilidh she had danced as a woman, and looked and dressed as a woman entirely convincingly. He tried to picture her now. She had never worn make-up but that was true of most of the island women. Her hair had been a slightly dry-looking blonde, not apparently dyed. She had been tall but not exceptionally so, and she had had no mannerisms that he recalled that pinned her especially to either sex. But then, you saw what you expected to see. What had her features been like? The only image he could call to mind was of her dead, on the beach, and then when he had seen her on the pathologist’s table.
He had looked down at her and seen the Sandy he had remembered. Yes. Her. The features had been … what? Neutral? There had been no noticeable facial or bodily hair, unusual for a female, but when he’d mentioned it, the pathologist had said there were traces of oestrogen in the blood, which indicated that Sandy had been taking female hormones. Nothing else.
All he had was a name. Sandy Murdoch. For Alexander? Alexandra? The whole name could have been a fake. She had had a slight Scots accent but had that been as a result of living on the island or of being Scottish?
He had absolutely nothing to go on.
He took the potatoes off the boil. Any day now, Police Scotland CID would arrive and take over the case. They had the resources to find out more about Sandy, but it wouldn’t be easy. And when they did, might they be near to discovering who had killed her and why? He would hand over everything he had found out, which was precious little, and they would get on with it, and he had no problem with that, except that he had liked Sandy, what he had known of her, and he felt a personal, rather than a professional, desire to find out what had happened to her.
After he had eaten he went to the Kimberley Still archive files which Kieron had sent and which he had barely glanced at. They had been scanned and zippe
d, but once he had opened them, he saw that they would take him many hours to read. He cleared his mind of everything to do with Sandy’s murder, made a fresh pot of coffee and settled down.
He finally went to bed at three the next morning, and only then because his eyes were raw after reading on-screen for so long. He was still going over details of the case as he fell asleep and the moment he woke, to a gale and heavy rain lashing down on the cottage, it filled his mind again.
He needed to get back to the computer but he was conscious that he was in more pain than usual from his arm socket. He had breakfast, did his twenty minutes’ hard exercise routine which he had evolved for days of seriously bad weather, took painkillers and read the incoming news and messages. In just over a month he would be at the clinic to have the permanent prosthesis, in which a new arm would be bolted onto the remaining bone. He had been told that when it was fully functioning, the advantages would be many and the difference between it and his old, living arm much narrower. He was withholding judgement but he smiled at the thought of visiting Taransay again to show the bionic arm and its magic properties to young Robbie.
The gale howled like a banshee. There would be no ferries in or out today but he had plenty of supplies. For now, too, he had an Internet signal and in any case, he had downloaded the Kimberley Still file.
John Wilkins, who was senior investigating officer when the girl disappeared, had retired and moved to Spain. Reading carefully through his reports, Serrailler became more and more uneasy. Yes, many of the right pieces had been put into place straight away but he quickly formed the opinion that Wilkins had stuck to his view, that Kimberley would probably turn up, for far too long. True, she was a young woman of twenty-five and the clock was not presumed to be ticking down as quickly if she had been a child. In those cases, the window during which the child could still be alive was small and focus on that possibility was intense. After forty-eight hours the chances of a child being found alive shrank rapidly, partly because they were unlikely to have disappeared of their own accord. Kimberley might well have done so.
The investigation had focused firstly on the immediate areas of her workplace, SK Bearings, and her home. But then the SIO had sent patrols out beyond Lafferton, to anywhere in the surrounding villages and the countryside around a young woman might conceivably have been gone – or been taken. He had also clearly had a passion for leaflets, which had been handed out in so many places it seemed unlikely that anyone in Lafferton had failed to receive one. The other works buildings adjacent to SK Bearings had been searched, more leaflets spread about.
As he read, he scribbled every so often in the notebook on the table beside him and the notes were sometimes underlined, they became more frequent, the underlinings and question marks and capital letters spreading like a rash.
Work colleagues.
Public areas adjacent.
CCTV.
Taxis in nearby rank.
Vehicles inc motorbikes.
Fiancé.
Home life.
Neighbours.
Other relatives.
Regular evening activities – classes. Leisure. School.
College of FE.
The gaps in the investigation process, small gaps and gaping holes, were too obvious. And all the time, Wilkins had been assuming they were searching first and foremost for a girl who was alive and who had been abducted and was being held or, more likely, had gone off somewhere.
He broke at noon, and looked out of the window. Great banks of fast-moving cloud and rain were sweeping across the landscape but the wind had veered slightly so that the weather was no longer hurling itself directly at the cottage.
When he returned to the computer, he skipped forward to read not more police but newspaper reports, and primarily those local ones in which friends, work colleagues and family members had been sought out and asked to give their opinions, feelings, fears.
‘I can’t believe she’s gone off by herself.’
‘Kim would never do that, she just wasn’t a girl who would skip off on some train or bus out of the blue.’
‘She was always perfectly happy. She liked her job, she was very happy with Rick, they were starting to talk weddings – whyever would she go off?’
‘Someone’s taken her, of course they have, but the police seem to think they’re going to find her alive. I just can’t see it.’
‘She had Rick, she was probably just going to meet him. Of course she wouldn’t get off with another man, just on the spur of the moment like that.’
‘Surely to God someone somewhere saw her … surely someone saw something.’
‘Grown-up people don’t just evaporate in broad daylight in the middle of a busy town.’
The national press had picked up on the dissatisfaction with the police investigation. DCI Wilkins had issued a bland, jargon-ridden statement and things had continued for a further week. By then, Simon was feeling a mounting frustration. He had to remind himself that the case was five years old, that everything had changed, most of all the personnel involved. SK Bearings had closed down, he knew that from a more recent investigation of his own, and the site was now a small shopping complex, with offices above. Two lanes led to the cathedral, one to the main square, a side road led to the fire station and opposite that was St Michael’s Park and the children’s playground. Another factory next to SK Bearings, which had made cheap children’s clothing, had closed the same year and been demolished and a couple of blocks of flats stood in its place.
Simon sat, drinking a mug of tea and going over the whole area in his mind. He knew it well. He had gone through the lanes and side streets almost daily on his way to and from Cathedral Close, where he lived. He had eaten at his favourite Italian restaurant at the end of Dulcimer Street more times than he could remember, had bought milk and newspapers and other bits and pieces from the solitary all-purpose corner shop left in Lafferton, had used the Adelaide Road Park as a cut-through at the end of a run.
He vaguely remembered Mrs Marion Still, but he had only had a cursory knowledge of the case. Now, as he went through everything slowly, sometimes scrolling back and rereading, making his notes, he was catching up. Within twenty-four hours, he would be as familiar with its every detail as if he had run it himself. Except he would never have run it so badly.
The interviews with Kimberley’s mother, fiancé and work colleagues were done by various members of the investigating team and on the whole they were fine, though Serrailler would have pursued one or two lines of questioning further, and that of Rick, the fiancé, was perfunctory. Her immediate boss at SK Bearings, Wendy Peak, had confirmed that she was an excellent worker, a girl liked by all, and added that if anyone in the place had problems or ‘a wild streak’ which might have made her run away, Kimberley Still was absolutely not that person.
The young woman she worked with closely, Louise Woods, had said simply, ‘She never said anything to me about going off, and I think she would have.’
Eventually, the SIO had had to turn his attention away from the focus on finding Kimberley alive. Dead ends were everywhere. The search for her had extended well beyond Lafferton, to the old airfield, to two quarries, to barns and stables and a boarded-up farm and a recently closed pub. Woodland, moorland, waterways had all been searched without a trace or even a mistaken identity.
Only then did Wilkins put out an all-media plea for urgent information, with photographs of the missing girl and the solemn statement that ‘we must now face the strong possibility that Kimberley will not be found alive. But even if she is not, we must and we will leave no stone unturned in our search for this young woman, about whose safety we are increasingly concerned.’
The rain had stopped, though it was still blowing a gale. But that might be the status quo for days. Simon put on boots and a heavy outdoor jacket and headed for the hills that led eventually to the single-track road across the island from west to east. He walked fast, he climbed steadily, he had his head down against the w
ind, and he went over and over the case of Kimberley Still. The Chief had said it was probably ‘stone cold’. But already, even without having read the last third of the archive, Simon knew that it was not. Before even addressing the possible involvement of Lee Russon and any possible case against him, he knew the whole investigation needed to be reopened.
Thirty-one
Sam could think of better uses for the cash Simon had given him. So he had hitched lifts for the first two legs of the way back, defying every warning he had ever been given, but the lifts had been fine, both in lorries, one from Glasgow to Birmingham, from where Sam had walked some miles, until he found the next one heading south. Each time, he had slept in a comfortable enough bunk at the back, eaten in transport cafes and at roadside pull-ins, and talked a certain amount to the drivers. He had then been stuck for another lift for almost a day, before getting himself within ten miles of home. From there, only vaguely aware that it was five thirty in the morning, he had telephoned his mother.
‘You smell feral,’ Cat had said on meeting him. ‘Have you eaten?’
‘No.’
She sighed and drove on to the next service station, where Sam ate a double full English breakfast and she bought a paper, had coffee and did not try to chat.
Sam seemed to have grown taller in the weeks since she had seen him, and his face was thinner. He was indeed feral, his hair needed cutting with shears rather than scissors and he had a rather patchy beard. But he was here, safe, well, sitting opposite her and she did not now mind at all that he had got her out of bed before first light.
‘How’s Simon?’ she asked when his plate was finally empty and he was on his second mug of strong tea. Sam leaned back and gave a sigh.
‘That was great, thanks. Si … he’s OK. I think his arm bothers him a bit. He didn’t say so but you know.’
‘He’s due to get the new one fitted soon. Apart from that?’
‘Well, he must have told you about the woman who turned out to have been murdered, not a suicide.’