by Caro Ramsay
Over the meal, both Wyngate and Mulholland had come up with good stuff, shame that it showed they were talented at desk-bound information gathering and therefore proving Police Scotland’s theory that they were better kept in an office and out of harm’s way. She would help them out as much as she could. Sometimes cops needed to be on the ground and doing, not sitting reading and phoning. And whatever else she was up to, Dali recognized that; the need to do something and not sit back and wait until the irreversible happened.
And Mulholland was quick. She had mentioned Malcolm in passing and now Costello was sitting outside the house of Malcolm Haggerty aka Harry Fucking Styles, where he lived with his mother Abigail and his father George. The older half-sister, Mary-Anne or Mary-Jane or something like that, Mulholland could never recall double-barrelled first names, didn’t seem to be living here anymore. The villa, in its highly desirable area, had belonged to Abigail’s first husband, Oscar, and he had died in mysterious circumstances. That had perked their interest as they leaned in to rip the naan breads apart. He fell and hit his head when working in the garden. He had been a little dizzy and came in to sit down until he felt well enough to go back out again, feeling a bit groggy. The next day he had gone sailing, as per usual, and he had never returned. Mulholland had given them that potted history, gleamed from all the media clips online on his phone as any member of the public could. Mary-Anne or Jane had been about six at the time, Abigail had then remarried and had Malcolm presumably.
She burped loudly, glad that she was alone in the car. Dali had paid for the meal, she was so pleased that Wyngate had asked for a night off from babysitting and made the effort to come along. Mulholland had no bother telling Elvie as she would be at work anyway, stuck in a hospital listening to some surgeon being sarcastic to her. Dali had continued the conversation, interested in the pictures of Orla, but more interested in the picture of the woman now known as Miss Bluecoat. She had lifted the photographs up, looking at them sideways as if changing the angle would give her a better view of the pregnant woman’s face. Professional interest? Professionally too interested? At one point Mulholland had cottoned on that she was gently interrogating the woman who was paying for their meal. He had then kicked Wyngate under the table when Wyngate had tried to change the conversation, hurting his own leg in the process.
Somebody, she couldn’t recall who, probably Wyngate, had mentioned Grahamston, the old village underneath Glasgow. Maybe that was where the women had gone. And they had laughed. Dali had nodded her head and took a sip of her Kingfisher lager.
The evening had moved on as these informal occasions do, the conversation flowed. Wyngate as a younger officer, driving kiddy’s electronic cars round a cash and carry as he waited for the paperwork to come through for a break in. It had been a police car, a New York cop car and he thought it might be the only chance he got. Dali said she would have loved that, but her arse would have got stuck. Mulholland told the story of telling drunks that if they were sick in the car, they would be made to eat it. They never did after that threat, they always asked to get out. Then the three of them looked at Costello, who paused, then she asked Dali about the horrors of her job. Dali laughed a hearty laugh and told them too many to mention. Kids, six of them of the same family, all under eight years old, being left in the house while the parents went to the pub and the eight-year-old making a very good job of looking after his siblings, two of them still in nappies. And that wasn’t occasionally, for a couple of hours. It was all day, every day. It ran the gamete from that tragedy to trendy fucking women in the west end, still breastfeeding their ten-year-olds and the cops having to tell them ‘not at the school gate’ and the subsequent fallout of mothers’ rights issues blowing up in their face, missing the point of the eight-year-old changing the nappies. They had enjoyed Dali’s foul-mouthed rant about that, and she had looked at Costello waiting for her to contribute a story of her own, Mulholland had said something like, So come on Costello, do your worst.
She had sipped her water and asked Dali, as the silence at the table began to strain the happy atmosphere, why she was actually here, sitting with them. And what was it she wanted. Really wanted.
She knew that Mulholland and Wyngate had exchanged a glance, thinking that she had lost the plot.
Dali had taken another sip of her Kingfisher thinking about lying, saying something disingenuous or hiding behind confidentiality. She had looked round her and pushed her plate away slightly, dabbing her mouth with a napkin.
Off the record, this goes no further.
The way the other three lent in was comical.
Costello, you know the way you felt after you walked away from the Kissel case.
Oh yes I do.
It doesn’t go far enough does it, we should have stepped in sooner and that wee boy would not have died that horrid death.
Costello now remembered how Dali had looked at Wyngate, the only one of them to have children that young. He had flinched; his mottled skin had gone a little red which was as close as he got to fury.
Then Dali had told her story. They had ordered more drinks, delaying their goodbyes, some tacit agreement that this wasn’t to flow past them, this was happening right here and right now. Dali had got a fiscal involved after a woman she knew couldn’t have a child, did just that. Diane Speirs? Dali had shaken her head. Diane had tried to say that it was a private adoption, but she wasn’t so sure, the story didn’t quite add up. And Dali had referred it up to Archie Walker and at that minute she had pointed to Costello, your Archie. Costello began to see the cogs in the wheels, not connected yet but somehow all trying to come together to make the machine work, and then they would see it all.
There was no way she could sleep after that.
Then after half past ten, Costello dropped Dali off at her large rambling house, with her five kids and no husband on the scene. A Merc stood on her driveway. She was a professional doing her job, and was harvesting them for information, as any concerned professional would.
Her parting shot was that she was at a conference in Edinburgh for the next two days, she had kept her hand on the door of the car as she explained, ‘You might be interested in what our subject matter is. It’s about the increase in the number of young girls coming through our maternity units, pregnant, receiving adequate care but then disappearing before we have sight of the child.’
‘I think I see what you are getting at.’
‘They are, well they tend, to be Roma. They have a very different culture, a healthy child is a thing of value, something that can be sold. Maybe we are not so far away from that culture ourselves but for different reasons. Everything in this life is a commodity, everything has a commercial value. So keep me posted, DI Costello.’ That was delivered with her death stare.
Costello couldn’t shake off the thought that she was having her strings pulled. But she wasn’t sure by whom.
And now she was here doing her bit, watching out for something she knew in her bones was going to happen and she was going to use the wee bit of power she had to stop it, if she could.
She watched the upstairs lights of Malcolm’s house go off, a curtain being pulled in an upstairs room, a small face at the window. Costello dropped her driver’s window to see better, the face was joined by a hand, a wave. Then the window opened and a black trainer appeared, an ankle, a bit of trouser reached out, toe pointed to search for the flat roof of the bay window below. Then a light came on in the downstairs hall, the leg was retracted. Costello closed her window, kept her head looking straight forward, as though keeping her gaze on the house. She glanced at the clock, half eleven. She had parked on the other side of the road, but she could see the full view of the front of the house from here.
The front door opened, Malcolm’s dad walked out, round the sightline of the monkey puzzle tree, right in her direction. He had known she was there.
Then she saw the patrol car pulling up behind her.
So not only did they know she was here, they were
not happy about it.
As she got out the car, showing her warrant card, and after a quick check of her credentials, they asked her how the Waterside abduction was going and if her stake-out here was part of it.
‘Not yet,’ she answered vaguely. Their offer of backup was politely refused, their offer of violence to whoever had taken the kid was rejected because of the length of the queue. So that was how it was being perceived. Sholto had been taken and probably murdered already. The four-hour rule. She hoped Roberta had not got wind of that.
And she was trying desperately not to think, ‘Why him? Why Sholto?’
She got back in her car and drove off slowly, slowing down when she thought of the Porsche she had caught sight of the previous night, but now it was nowhere to be seen.
She looked in the mirror, monkey puzzle right enough.
EIGHT
Thursday 12th October
At her desk, Valerie sat down and checked the time. Half seven, she was red-eyed from another sleepless night, exhausted from the concentration of driving to work as if she was sober, worn out, nerves pulled to the thread, thinking about the decisions she was about to make. Ruining somebody else’s life, ruining her own. She looked at the files in front of her, three cases of child abuse. Did it ever stop? A man battered his daughter’s face against the wall and then asked which finger she wanted him to cut off. And then cut off a different one. That file was thick, too thick. He shouldn’t have been allowed out after the first time, after the story the first daughter told. What was the point of putting them in prison, if the only lesson they learned was how to avoid getting caught the next time?
And why were they allowed the keep having children if all they did was abuse them? She was angry. What was the point of doing the job if she made no difference at all? Maybe she was wrong in trying to save all those kids at risk. The courts moved slowly, many children slipped through. Too many abusers given a second chance. Maybe she should try to save one, or two. Or three, but do it herself and make sure that it was right.
Sometimes she fantasized about getting hold of an AK 47 and working her way through a list.
She had about an hour to make some tough decisions, she lied to herself. The decision had already been made. Everything in life had consequences. But she could not stand aside and do nothing. She had, she thought, given much of her life, her time, her marriage and her personal happiness to this career. And for what?
‘“In My Defens God Me Defend”,’ she muttered as she pulled out the beige file and ran through it again, the bile rising in her throat. She could destroy it. She could destroy the entire case, all the documentation. And just walk away. They would piece it all together eventually but by then it would be too late. She knew at first hand the perpetual chaos the fiscal’s office worked in. She could cover her tracks easily enough, even drunk as she was now, she was still able for any of them. They were overworked and understaffed. They would search for the paperwork and not find it, have a second look through the computer system and then move onto something easier.
She turned to her computer. The disc was already in it, burning away, leaving no trace. As she sat there the algorithm was writing random data over all the sectors on the disc. It wouldn’t come back to her, there must be no trace near her.
She did allow herself a smile at the thought of that social worker, with her big happy face telling her godfather about a case that he promptly passed to her, thinking it would interest her. And it had been with her for every minute of every day for the intervening couple of years. A woman who could not have a child, had had a child. A difficult thing to prove but the crux of the matter was that the baby she had must have come from somewhere.
That case had moved along with Valerie Abernethy watching it every step of the way. Easy from her viewpoint in Edinburgh, while the woman in question lived down in Dumfries. She had the hard copy. She ran her fingertip over it, reading it again, anybody watching would think she was doing her job, diligently and well, when it fact she was ensuring that she had memorized everything she needed to know. Again, and again, feeling the panic arising inside her as she heard the disc whirr on and on. Rubbing out her old life like an advancing tide smoothing out footsteps in the sand.
She heard the door to the outer office open, a little squeak that could have been anything.
Or nothing.
Then footfalls coming towards her.
Heart thumping, she closed the file over, pretending to copy down an important detail on a Post-it note, thinking fast now. She folded the file papers, too big, too bulky, the photograph would not fit without being folded over, it would look odd.
She lifted her water bottle, popped off the cap and took a long gulp, letting the vodka run down her throat. She had been up most of the night, thinking about Alfred, missing him in her bed, his little warm body lying over her ankles on top of the duvet. But he had given her a way out, if the plan all worked out, they would want to know where she was going and why – maybe with the traumatic loss of the cat, the final straw after her marriage break-up and the rest of her trauma. They might draw their own conclusion and think that she had let her depression, her addiction and her loss get the better of her.
Which was exactly true.
But not the loss that she had let them believe it was.
She walked to the outer office, eyes down on the files she was carrying. She felt she was walking stiffly, trying to look natural and sober while doing something she did a hundred times a day. The outer office was strange, cold without the phones ringing and the background chit-chat at the hub of the water cooler. Strange shadows fell on the carpet tiles, there were sounds outside of Edinburgh wakening up. Metal shutters being raised, engines running. Quickly, she fed the sheets into the shredder, one at a time, trying not to look over her shoulder. When it came to the photograph she made a point of letting the shredded strands run through her fingers, mixing them up just a little more.
She returned to her office, leaving her door open as she sat down at her desk and began to type. Then stopped. Then started again. Then stopped. Suddenly she swore and swiped her briefcase from her desk with a single blow of her arm, sending it flying onto the carpet where it stood like a little tent in an abstract patchwork field of papers and files.
She dropped her head into her hands for a few moments and took a deep breath.
Then she took her water bottle, another flick, another mouthful of the vodka.
She saw her colleague come into the outer office and she tried to close her office door with her foot but had left it too late. Now it would now look awkward and obvious. Bill Nelson smiled at her, said, Hi. You are in early. She lifted the phone handset, pretending she was on a call. He walked away, the smile cut from her face the minute he turned from her line of vision.
‘It’s Valerie Abernethy here,’ she said to nobody.
All the while she was aware of Nelson, moving around in the outer office, looking at the small pile at the bottom of the shredder, daring himself to have a closer look.
Costello had come into the office early, she had put a note through the door of Mrs Armstrong to make sure Mrs Craig was up and out of her bed OK. They knew she sometimes had to do that when work called. So at seven in the morning she was sitting quietly with a cup of tea and some chocolate-covered cornflakes, and the side of a box of chocolate biscuits somebody had handed into the station at Christmas. They were out of date now so she had thrown them out, then pulled the box lid back out the bin, to be drawn on.
There was already a note on her desk, from some top brass she had never heard of. George Haggerty was complaining about harassment.
Good for him. She hadn’t even started yet.
She took a drink of her tea, tired, wishing that small amount of caffeine in it would help to wake her up. She had been awake most of the night, thinking about Dali and Wee Polly, thinking how ineffectual a social worker may be in the chaos they had to work in, certainly in the office that served this area. It was
always somebody else’s job and they were never in that day, usually off sick. With stress.
But they were both so fed up with cleaning up the aftermath of domestic violence, when they would be better preventing it.
It had been a good night, a very good night. She had phoned Anderson again this morning, his phone still turned off. She had pressed her own to her lips and thought, wondering if he was spending the evening with Andrew Braithwaite or with Sally Braithwaite. It wouldn’t be the first time Anderson’s zip had taken him very close to trouble.
She sipped her tea to contemplate. One tantalizing piece of evidence they needed was that second pay-as-you-go number, a red light that sat at the back of her mind and niggled. James Chisholm was another man whose zip was going to get him into a lot of trouble. However his one saving grace was that no huge amounts of money had gone through any of the Chisholm’s bank accounts, so she presumed, Sholto had not been ‘sold’ by either of his parents.
She picked up a blue pen and drew a line, on the lid of the biscuit packet. Baby Sholto, where was he? With some woman who had given birth to a Down’s syndrome child? And where was she? Or was he taken for another reason? Baby Sholto, Little Moses, Wee Polly, the tiny trio. And they were all linked in some way.
But she couldn’t see how.
Little Moses had appeared from nowhere. All the Down’s syndrome births for the last three months in the Argyll and Clyde Health Board had all been tracked down and were all present, correct and accounted for including the one that Drew at the hospital had been worried about. Drew?
Andrew?
Friend of James? They played at the same tennis club. She googled Dr Andrew Braithwaite, and smiled as his image flashed up. Younger, slimmer but still him. She stood up and added him to the wall. Andy and Jimmy were up to their necks in this.
Little Moses’ DNA had been taken, it wouldn’t be long until the results were back and that might give them something, even a familial blueprint. Have any female members of your family been pregnant recently? And now Wee Polly, what was going on there? They had checked over with the dirty squad, they had their feelers out in case the babies were being taken for some paedophile ring. The intelligence said no. If this was a sophisticated abduction ring, they would know about it and Costello would be locked in a room being interviewed by overweight men who she would never get to know the name of.