by Caro Ramsay
Given their history, one false move and she’d be in front of a tribunal so she knew she was walking a line. At the end of the day, no matter the political correctness of the situation, Dali was a civilian not a police officer.
‘OK, I’ll drop you in a mo, I just need to get back to this.’ She waved her phone.
‘No problem, I’ll get on with this paperwork.’ She started to reach into the back of the Fiat to get her bags, no mean feat for such a large lady.
Costello got out the car and perched on the bumper, aware of the Fiat rocking a little as Dali moved around inside, arranging the bags, retrieved from the back seat onto her stomach to be rifled through. All Costello’s messages were from Mulholland, the single call was from Anderson. There was no update on the Sholto case. Was it worth doing a media appeal and suffering the tsunami of nutters it would bring in? Had Orla sold her baby for money? Holding off for the highest bidder? Was that why she had kept her pregnancy from others? Had one other woman done the same, then given birth to Moses, a Downs baby, which necessitated a switch and then Sholto Chisholm came on their radar?
That degree of organization was frightening. But it made sense.
She phoned Mulholland first. He suggested, again, that they should get together as they had something she might want to see. She accused him of withholding evidence. He said nothing, letting his silence do his bargaining for him. She took a deep breath and asked him if what he knew informed them of what had happened to Orla Sheridan.
He admitted that it did not. Then told her what he had seen.
She ended the call. Nobody knew what happened to Orla. She went down a street and disappeared. The most watched society on the face of the planet, and a woman can disappear. There was another woman, very pregnant followed by a pregnant pause, Mulholland had laughed at his little joke. Two women.
She thought about paying them a visit and seeing for herself. Then if they were at it she could give them a slap. Might as well add physical assault to racism.
Costello turned back and opened the car door, Dali didn’t seem to have got anywhere with her paperwork. Friends close and enemies closer. ‘Do you really need to be back in your office or are you allowed out to play a little longer.’
Wyngate was watching the CCTV recorded from the camera at the end of Sevastopol Lane. He couldn’t help but feel heartened by this. The behaviour of a pregnant woman in a blue coat was only mildly questionable but it was mysterious. Even watching her made him feel he was getting his career back. This was what he had joined the police service to do. He knew he wasn’t tough like Costello, and that he didn’t possess Anderson’s sensitive intelligence or Mulholland’s unbreakable self-confidence, but he had been well-trained in computer intel and he was very determined. Oh yes, Police Scotland had spent a fortune training him, then side-lined him in a job that was little more than telesales. He looked at the clock, wondering if Costello was going to come over and see for herself. Mulholland was moaning their old DI sounded as though she was still a sulky-faced bitch and pondered if Archie Walker, the fiscal, was still involved with her or if he had taken up a less traumatic pastime, like juggling tarantulas. Wyngate was slightly kinder about Costello, he had a respect for her, whereas he thought the Mulhollands of the world would always have it easy, with their casual charm and charismatic smiles.
He had enjoyed himself on the murder team, something he couldn’t admit to himself until he was faced with the boring banality of the job he did now, a time before he had to tell people how to plot a timeline of a crime. Obvious stuff.
He was following Orla on the tape, half listening to his colleague moaning about why should they do this at all as it would only go upstairs and be taken from them.
‘We get the ball in their half, then they score. Always the bloody same.’
Wyngate watched, marking the time, making notes on his pad in front of him, then typing the number of the next camera, asking for the footage. Slowly street by street he traced her journey, watching her as she walked with flat shoes and big hair. She was easy to follow. He glanced up at the map, and where she was likely to go. Into a shop or a café or a hotel, a bar, could be any of them down in that part of the city. He printed off the screen grab of her last sighting, lifting it from the printer his eyes still on the monitor. It had moved on, another minute, the camera caught sight of the very pregnant woman, with her waddling, shuffling walk. As he watched she put her hands in the small of her back then hoisted the strap of her shoulder bag up once more, and continued on her slow way. Wyngate empathized, recalling the hours he spent rubbing his wife’s back. He had three wee kids, he knew about sleep deprivation from the second child, a charmingly rotund little beast who survived on three hours sleep in every twenty-four hours in ten-minute batches. He watched her waiting to cross Brown Street, still heading west. He switched the camera, typing in the code for the camera he knew would pick her up on the opposite side of the road, and saw her. To his surprise she was indeed turning to walk down Sevastopol Lane, not lost, she walked confidently. She knew exactly where she was going. The camera lost sight of her as she went deeper between Wright’s Insurance and the Old Edwardian Building. There was nothing else down there, as far as Wyngate knew, it was just the old service lane between two buildings. He could see the big electronic bollard in place to allow deliveries but no flow of through traffic. He typed in the coding for the cameras on Inkerman Street, and watched, curious as to where she was going, hoping that somebody was waiting for her in a car, or in a taxi.
But there was no taxi there.
He watched, waiting, realizing that she hadn’t appeared.
The first set of CCTV had been right.
He went back to the previous camera, checking the times, speeding through the time lapses until half an hour had passed.
Still nothing.
Where did she go?
He ran the tape back and forth, looked at other screens, at other angles. But she had disappeared off the face of Glasgow. Then as he was watching, he noticed something odd. Three seagulls suddenly took flight, not easy flight but a panicked and hurried flap of wings. What could frighten a Glaswegian seagull? Wyngate had always thought they were bulletproof. He sat moving the image back and forth until he saw something on the upper edge of the film, in the air. Another seagull? But it didn’t appear to be moving. Wyngate held the point of his pen to the small object hovering in the sky above the building. He closed in on it as far as he could. Was it a drone? He picked up the phone, phoning the three businesses in the vicinity, finding out which, if any, had ordered a drone, and he would bet it had a camera on it.
Wyngate brought Mulholland up to date, trying not to sound smug as he pointed out the drone and replaying the section of tape when the birds took flight. 11.27 a.m. precisely.
Mulholland raised an eyebrow. ‘We are doing the work on this, let’s call Costello again.’
‘I am doing the work on it. Did she say she was coming over?’
‘Not in so many words but we could put her off. You call her and tell her we are still looking.’
‘No, you call her.’
‘You do it.’
In the end they tossed a coin.
Costello had just finished a call that confirmed how little movement there had been on the baby abduction when her phone rang again, she mouthed an apology to Dali who was still in the car, on her own mobile catching up on some business herself. She listened to Wyngate carefully, phone in her right hand, the palm of her hand up to her left ear to block out the noise of the council truck that had chosen this very moment to pick up the rubbish. She had to ask him to repeat the bit about the loud noise, something that made the seagulls take fright.
‘OK, OK. So, track down the film from the drone first,’ Costello said, then added, ‘sorry I know you are doing that already but I’m still here with Dali. I think I’ll call Anderson.’
‘Why? Do you think we can’t move this forward on our own?’ Wyngate’s voice was a little tremul
ous.
‘Just in case we need the back up of a DCI, I’d rather have one I can bully.’
Wyngate breathed out down the phone.
‘Gordon, this is more than a daft girl leaving her kid in the pub and doing a runner. We had Sholto yesterday and Polly today. I can’t make out the connection but I’m sure there is one. Get on with the drone film and have a good look at James Chisholm’s phone records.’
‘Mulholland is on that.’
‘Good.’ She cut the call then bent down and smiled at Dali through the car window. She waved back, she was still on her phone. Costello wondered who to, and maybe she had not been so clever in getting out of the car in the first place.
She dialled and waited.
Anderson was curt. ‘What is it Costello. I am very busy.’
‘Yes, so am I.’ She reeled off the events of the day, ending with the mysterious disappearance of two women down Sevastopol Lane. ‘That’s the lane that runs between—’
‘The Blue Neptune and the Old Edwardian.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Why are you telling me?’
Costello was confused. ‘I am telling you that because I want Mulholland and Wyngate back on board, on my team.’
The end of the line went quiet. ‘I thought you were telling me because of where they were last seen.’
‘Sevastopol Lane?’ Costello’s brain tried to backtrack, she had missed something but then she had it. His reaction had given him away, that slight defensive pause, the fact he hadn’t volunteered it. ‘Are you familiar with that location? The lane and Inkerman Street? Have you had a case there?’
‘I am there right now.’
‘The file you had under your arm at the water cooler?’
Silence on the phone. ‘Just send me a picture of the girl that went missing.’
‘Orla? We are not sure that she has gone missing, we just don’t know where she is. It’s Wee Polly who has gone missing.’
‘Send me a picture of Orla anyway. If I am your DCI then that is an order.’
She refused to say goodbye, her turn to let the pressure behind her silence build up.
‘I am offering to help but leave it with me. And don’t nag at me.’
‘OK,’ she said, wondering what he was really trying to tell her.
Colin Anderson was thinking about Sally, how one event could shape an entire life. She hadn’t rejected the idea of getting involved in the SafeLife campaign, saying she would mull it over but she’d need to talk to Andrew, but wouldn’t it be great to catch up. She had picked the phone up there and then and asked her husband – ‘Guess who is on his way?’
Andrew; the man who had won the heart of the best girl in the gang. Anderson hadn’t realized he was so distracted until his third U-turn. He ripped the satnav from the dashboard and pulled the BMW into the yard of the Braithwaite’s smallholding, set off a B road outside Blanefield. A wooden sign nailed to a tree had the word ‘Milestone’ painted on it, the ‘e’ had been elongated to create ‘Millstone’. The sign was illustrated with the outline of a small owl. Colin Anderson drove the BMW slowly across the yard, manoeuvring his way round water-filled potholes and mounds of manure. There was no hard standing in the yard, so he drove as close to the half-demolished porch as he could, parking beside a battered, rusty jeep. He couldn’t make out any proper front door, or garden. It was a mish mash of outbuildings, all in various states of dilapidation, all single story, all honed from the same beautiful grey stone. It looked as cold and unwelcoming as a bitter north wind.
He got out the car and looked around, seeing land, grass and more grass, but he could get a better sense of the layout now. The smallholding was built in a square and through the arch in the wall that faced him, he could see the cobbles of the courtyard, an old water trough and on the far side a vine was trying to grow along the top of the wall. The thick grey brown of the trunk showed how old the plant was, yet it had made little headway with the lack of sun and the coldness of the winter. And no matter how much time passed, it was never going to get much further. Colin Anderson knew how it felt.
The small house was heavy with the sense of past days, good times and old memories. The twisted ivy that crawled over the tree trunks, smothering them, was doing much better than the vine. That sweet smell of mulch and humus scented the still air, there was a backing track of flies buzzing and melodic birdsong from somewhere high in the trees, not visible to him.
He approached the old porch, a ramshackle hut of slatted wood, badly painted in white. The whole carcass was rotten and flaked, cracked open and cream-coloured mushrooms blossomed on the rumpled felt roof. The door lay at an angle, leaning on its top hinge. The glass panel in its upper half was smoky with dirt and condensation. The Braithwaites must be very sure that anybody pulling into the driveway would be either heard or seen. But even then, Anderson thought that Sally would have insisted on more security, after everything she had been through. Even for her peace of mind, there should be a gate, a lock, a door.
Five Rottweillers.
But he was proved correct as the door shuddered, the bottom catching on the concrete floor. As it slowly screeched its way open, Anderson had clear sight of the whitewashed wall of the main building. Hanging on the wall by its front wheels, was an old message bike. It made him think immediately of Sally riding around on her bike in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow, the last week of the summer lectures at university. When they were young, and drunk. The bike had ended up in the fountain. They had all ended up in the fountain. He saw the frame of the man appear through the gap in the door, filling it. Andrew Braithwaite was still a bear of man, a gentle giant. Colin had liked him then, and he hoped he would like him now.
‘Long time, no see. How are you? Sally told me you were on your way over.’ Braithwaite held out both hands, open in a gesture of true friendliness. ‘Bloody hell, you look old.’ He laughed and punched Anderson on the upper arm.
‘I think a good look in the mirror might sort that out, Andy.’
And they were right back in the zone again, back in the park, back in the day.
‘Come on through,’ Braithwaite said, gesturing that Anderson should follow him. ‘Don’t worry it’s quite safe.’ He tapped the side wall, sending a few flakes of plaster to the ground, and the bike rattled alarmingly on its hook. Braithwaite let out a low growl as he walked past it. ‘We’re not quite condemned to the hard hats yet.’
Anderson followed, stepping over a broken Dyson and a few odd wellington boots, into the warmth and patchy darkness of the long narrow kitchen. It looked awful, and smelled wonderful, somebody had been baking recently, the smell of cinnamon and scones filled the air.
‘Take a seat.’ Braithwaite removed his specs, folding them into the V-neck of his shirt.
Anderson sat down, comfortable in the domestic war of the functional and the filthy. He felt disloyal as he relaxed. Disloyal to Helena’s super clean state-of-the-art white and black marble kitchen, or his own at home – a family kitchen with a bulging laundry basket and a fridge door covered with drawings by the kids. Pictures that had been there for years. Pictures too precious to be taken down and put somewhere safe. There was a huge, uneven wooden table, surrounded by ten or twelve wooden chairs, each of them sported a different coloured cushion fastened with little ties round each upright, the end dangling and frayed like they had been chewed by canine teeth or teased by feline claws.
The kitchen itself ran the whole length of this part of the smallholding, an Aga sat along the long wall, not the cosy, clean and comfy Aga of the detached bungalows down in the village of Blanefield. This was a working Aga, paint-scratched and peeling, the top plates burned the colour of stewed tea. In front of it, a small red rug lay twisted on a floor that was little more than a collection of cracked terracotta tiles, the colour of the parched earth of a long hot summer.
On the walls, open shelves covered the old brick walls and as he looked round, Anderson watched a ginger cat jump from the win
dow sill, onto the bottom of the open sash window, skilfully balance itself on the narrow wood, then slip down the inner glass and meander over to see if anybody had filled up his food dish in his absence. He failed to hide his disappointment and looked at Braithwaite, mewling like violin being tuned.
‘Bloody thing, always wanting fed. There’s acres of woods out there full of small tasty things running around, but he wants a tin of tuna.’
‘My dog prefers ice cream to dog food. But then so do I,’ said Anderson. ‘This is some place you have here. Are you doing it up?’
Braithwaite threw the empty can of tuna towards a swing bin, the lid resting on the rubbish underneath. ‘I would like to say that was the case but we have been in here for a decade or more. Sally inherited the place and we have learned to live with it. We keep intending to do stuff, turning it into a small spa and exercise studio—’ he absentmindedly rubbed his huge belly as he said this – ‘but I think we might be better waiting until it all falls down around our ears and we are forced to do something.’ He looked round, a gentle scrape of his honey-coloured beard, his eyes looking at the spidering patterns of damp ingress. ‘Yeah, but it will be fabulous when we get the money together.’
Anderson was surprised by that. He had remembered Sally and Andy as a couple that money would never be a problem for, although he couldn’t recall exactly why he had that impression.
‘I’ve seen the set up at the Blue Neptune, that must be worth a bob or two.’
‘Oh to see that you’d think we were bloody rolling in it. But that is Sally’s problem; too bloody soft.’
‘She runs the gym there.’
‘And takes classes.’ Braithwaite was rubbing his knee now, conscious of early rheumatic change. ‘But she’s so soft she runs it like a drop-in centre for fat people, doing classes for nothing and a one-hour class means they hang round for a couple of hours and then go downstairs for lunch.’