‘I’m sorry, I’m not the person to speak to about that,’ Monica said. Karen stared back at her, nodding, eyes wide. But Monica could tell she wasn’t really taking the words in.
‘We just want to ask you a few questions about Sebastian. You reported him missing two weeks ago?’
‘I just thought that he could have been in trouble,’ Karen said finally.
‘How long exactly was he gone, before you reported him missing?’ Crawford asked, chipping in for the first time.
‘I’m not sure.’ Karen’s eyes went to the thick carpet between her feet.
‘You’re not sure?’ Monica replied, trying to keep her voice soft. ‘That’s unusual, not to know when you last saw your husband.’
‘Sebastian … Sometimes he goes on business trips for days at a time. I thought he’d forgotten to tell me. He’s a very busy man.’
‘Who was the last person to see him?’
‘His last appointment was at head office, a meeting there with his sister.’
‘When was that?’
‘Friday the nineteenth of April. It’s marked on the calendar.’
Monica nodded. She knew that Sinclair’s credit card had last been used at a petrol station on the way out of Inverness, the morning of 19 April. Seven days before Karen formally reported him missing. Taking a week to report your husband missing? It was a red flag for Monica. But Karen did seem vulnerable. Maybe she had genuinely thought he was away on business?
‘Did he text or call after that?’ Monica asked.
‘Text?’ Karen repeated the word as if it were some new curiosity. ‘Oh, no. I don’t … have a phone.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just don’t like them. If anyone needed me they could always pass a message through Sebastian. Or come to the house.’
Monica nodded slowly because this was another red flag of a different kind. Did Sebastian Sinclair coercively control his wife? Prevent her from contacting friends and family?
‘Sebastian didn’t want you to have a phone?’ Monica asked, probing a little further.
‘I just never needed one,’ Karen snapped back, arms folded tight now. Monica could see that there was no point pushing the question for now.
‘There was nothing about Sebastian going missing in the local press?’ Monica asked, changing tack. ‘Why’s that?’
‘I don’t know about any of that,’ Karen said. ‘Heather told me she’d handle it.’
Monica thought about it for a second. Was Sebastian Sinclair a workaholic? Controlling but distant from his wife? Closer to his sister? Clearly they now needed to speak to Heather Sinclair. Currently the last person known to have seen Sebastian and who possibly kept his disappearance out of the press. Even if the body turned out not to be Sinclair’s, Monica’s experience told her that something wasn’t right here. And if the body was Sebastian Sinclair then where had he been for those missing three weeks? Dolohov estimated the body had been dead and in the water for only a few days. Had Sinclair been hiding from someone? Or was he being kept somewhere?
‘Does Sebastian have any enemies? Anyone who has a grudge against him? He must have rubbed up against a lot of people in his business,’ Crawford asked, seeming to echo Monica’s thoughts.
‘I don’t know about enemies, any of that side of things …’
‘I know you don’t work for the company, but did he ever mention anything. Any difficult relationships? Any troubles with business? Difficult clients?’
‘That’s not my area. I’ve always been a homemaker.’
‘And you send your son to boarding school, is that right?’ Monica said, catching a sense of another little fracture in the woman’s life. A homemaker, a mother whose only son was elsewhere.
‘It’s better. To get the best start in life. A lot of people would kill to have that opportunity for their children.’
Monica heard Crawford’s phone go off in his pocket. His ringtone was now the song ‘Tainted Love’ by Gloria Jones. Monica glanced at him in irritation. He searched his jacket, mumbling an apology. He found the phone after a few seconds then stepped away to the other side of the room, holding it to his ear.
‘You said that you didn’t get on with Sebastian’s family? How did the pair of you meet?’ Monica asked, hoping for another little fragment to flesh out her portrait of him.
‘At a dance. I was only fifteen. My brother set us up, said he’d be perfect for our family.’
‘Were they close? Your brother—’ She felt Crawford’s hand on her arm. Caught the intense expression on his face as he held the phone out to her. DC Maria Khan’s name was on the screen. She mumbled her own apology to Karen and held the phone to her ear.
‘DI Kennedy? We’ve found something.’
Monica stood and turned away from Karen Sinclair. She walked out to the hall, shielding her mouth as she spoke.
‘More of the body?’
‘It’s another one.’ She could hear the shock in Khan’s voice. ‘Cut just like the first. Only …’
CHAPTER 16
Annabelle stared at the screen of the iPhone for a long, long time. Willing ‘O2-UK’ to reappear. It never did of course, and finally the voice in the back of her head piped up, If you don’t switch it off you’ll drain the battery, then you’ll have no chance of getting help.
It was obviously the right thing to do. But it was only when the agony in her leg grew and became almost unbearable that she finally switched it off and lay back on the pillow. The concussive pain continued to throb behind her eyes, panic threatening to well up alongside it when she considered her situation. She had to get out of here. There had to be a way. Very slowly, taking care not to move her leg, she turned her head to the side. The first thing she noticed was the smell. The deep mustiness was still there, but she realised now there was another smell under it. A solvent smell. Glue? Looking at the room in the weak light from the lamp, she had a clue as to where this smell was coming from. The floor of the room was covered by the deep shagpile carpet that her hand had run through, and the ceiling was concrete, but the walls were covered in a strange patchwork of carpet scraps. As if someone had collected a variety of sample squares and glued them together.
‘Why would anyone decorate walls with squares of carpet?’ Annabelle whispered to herself. To muffle the sound of screams? But the squares only ran halfway up the walls. Above that was bare concrete. Maybe it was a kind of insulation? This seemed to make more sense. If whoever was keeping her here was genuinely worried about her making a noise wouldn’t they have gagged her? Or worse put that hideous mask on her? She tried to ignore the memory of the thing and peered further into the gloom towards the door. It looked to be made of thick metal. Not unlike the door to a bank vault. Beside the door, just inside the room, was the kitchen chair the person had sat on. Next to her low bed there was a small table with the lamp. Apart from that there was nothing else. No windows, no other way in or out.
She swore under her breath, feeling the tears welling up again. She bit her index finger hard because she had to think. She had to do something.
Well, it can’t be helped. She remembered Miss Albright saying the words. It was when Annabelle had told her how sad it was that the older woman couldn’t accompany her and Mr Pepper out for a walk to a distant park on a particularly sunny day. The idea of her stoicism felt somehow comforting, even if it carried a sad reminder that Mr Pepper was probably waiting impatiently by the door for her now. Miss Albright had started referring to the dog as Annabelle’s Little Brother. Secretly Annabelle liked the feeling of being part of a little family with the old lady and the dog.
She squeezed her eyes tight shut and tried to imagine she was back home in her flat in London. About to go downstairs, to take Mr Pepper for a walk to the cafe where she volunteered. As she pictured herself opening the front door out onto the street, another memory broke in.
Opening the door into the kitchen as a child just as Dad threw a mug, the tea splattering over the tiles behind the c
ooker. He was shouting something at Mum. After a moment her mum turned, saw Annabelle, saw her tears. Her dad’s red face as he stormed past her. The fear in her mum’s eyes as she reached for Annabelle, squeezing her shoulders to suppress her daughter’s upset. Don’t be silly, Annabelle, don’t make a fuss! There’s no need to cry! Annabelle nodded at her mum’s panicked face, forcing the upset away, forcing her eyes to dry.
She took a deep breath. Trying very hard to replace the memory with a picture of Mr Pepper, she imagined his head bobbing with excitement, pink tongue hanging out.
‘I promise I’ll come back,’ she whispered. As if somehow, hundreds of miles away, the little creature might hear her and be soothed by the idea. ‘I promise I’ll come back.’ There had to be some way out of here, it had to be possible.
Her leg. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She went swimming twice a week during the mid-afternoon quiet time at the pool and sometimes used the cross trainer at the gym there. Maybe she could still walk on her leg. Maybe she could find a way to make a run for it?
She stared down the bed to her right leg. Well, it can’t be helped. It was concealed under the scratchy dark blanket. Slowly she reached down and started to pull the material to the side. She noticed first that her thigh was bare. She was wearing an old nylon nightgown. This meant someone had undressed her, taken her clothes, then put the gown on her. Normally this idea would have been monstrous in itself, but now she accepted it with barely a second thought. Encouraged by her new-found boldness she pulled harder and the blanket fell away.
Below the knee her leg was bruised purple. Swollen to almost twice its normal size. She tilted her head for a better look, and that was when she noticed the bolt. A piece of shiny metal sticking out of her leg at the ankle. She took a deep breath, her eyes glued to where the metal entered her skin, her brain scrambling to make sense of this new horror. Beside it there was a row of dark stitches. The leg was strapped between two slats of wood in a sort of splint.
Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks? She tried wriggling her ankle. Screaming agony shot up her leg. She sank back on the bed, squeezing handfuls of the blanket, screwing her eyes tight shut against the pain.
She took deep sucking breaths, trying desperately to find the point where the pain would become bearable. In her distressed state the sound of the latch being drawn back barely registered. She didn’t realise the door was opening until the person was standing almost right beside her.
CHAPTER 17
Monica smelled the man’s body before she saw it. Snagged on the roots of a tree at the edge of the river. The right arm was gone at the shoulder, the left at the elbow, and the left leg at the groin. This body was further up the river, a more remote location about fifteen miles upstream from the first one, towards Glen Affric. Where the River Beauly was still called the Glass.
As she moved closer to the body, Monica reflexively switched to breathing through her mouth rather than her nose. An old trick from one of her colleagues in a forensics department in Glasgow. The idea that she might be sucking particles of death into her mouth and onto her tongue wasn’t exactly appealing, but it did seem to lessen the ripe stench of decomposition.
She glanced at Fisher, who was standing a few feet away at the edge of the cordon beside Khan. The two detectives had been following up on house-to-house inquiries in the area and were the first to respond when the call had come in. Fisher had his hands on his hips, already dressed in a white Tyvek suit. The angry bruise on his right cheek edging to yellow under the frame of his glasses. He seemed in his element as he helped control access to the body until the forensics team arrived. Back to the precise and ambitious man Monica had first worked with the previous year.
She stood and zipped her own suit closed, trying to forget how absurd she must look with her arms poking out of the too-short sleeves. She pulled on the hood, then gloves. Glanced around to take the location in properly for the first time. It was close to another one of the small hydro power stations, downstream to her left across a pool of dark water. Behind her the old stone bridge crossed the river upstream. The body was hooked up among a mess of roots that had been exposed as the bank was eroded from beneath the tree.
‘Who found it?’ she asked Khan, remembering her own lonely early days as a young detective and feeling an impulse to include the new member of the team.
‘Someone from a walking club, ma’am.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘It was a woman who spotted it first,’ Khan said. ‘But there was a group of them.’
‘He must have been here at least a couple of days,’ Fisher cut in, perhaps irked that Monica had been questioning Khan rather than him. ‘The river level was higher until the day before yesterday, when it dropped rapidly. I called and spoke to someone at the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency – they take regular water-level measurements. He couldn’t have got caught up in the roots if the water was this low.’ She nodded and made a mental note of the information.
The body was in an awkward position and approaching it meant stepping down off the bank and standing on a narrow rib of rock in the fast-flowing river. The water made sloshing, gurgling sounds as it passed close to Monica’s feet. She peered at the body, stained by the sediment that had stuck to it. More than anything it looked like something born of the earth returning to nature. She took another step closer on the rock, wondered for a moment how mentally unhealthy it made her: that she could view a probable murder victim’s body in such a morally neutral way. The head was folded back, facing upstream and smeared with mud, hanging upside down over a branch so the chin pointed to the sky. Brown hair hung down in short, dried-out straggles, mirroring the shape of the roots the body was caught among. One of the roots had lodged the mouth open in a silent scream, the eye sockets empty. A crow got here first, Monica guessed with a shiver.
The stump of the left arm was stained with dirt. She crouched closer. Small pieces of gravel were embedded in the raw flesh of the wound. And her mind served up an image: someone scrambling with a bloody stump. Using it to drag themselves desperately while one leg was missing, making walking impossible.
She stepped back, edged along the rock rib to view the body from the other side. The remaining foot was cut and torn. Had he tried to escape from the river? A theory popped up: a gangland executioner slowly dismembering the two men with a saw, finally dumping them in a river. Watching as they tried to claw and drag themselves out with their remaining limbs. Probably filming it for someone’s edification or as a warning.
It was possible. But something about it didn’t quite fit for her.
She turned back to Fisher, who had ventured closer and was now staring gravely down at her from the bank, seemingly less perturbed by proximity to the body than Khan or Crawford.
‘That’s two middle-aged men in one week. We need to look into anyone who fits the same profile, anyone missing. And can you track someone down to ask about the river flow? Someone who can estimate the likelihood of the two bodies being found so far apart if they were dumped in the same place at the same time?’
He nodded. ‘Seems a long way for the first one to have gone, if they went in at the same time?’
It did, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. She turned back to the body, glanced around the scene again. Something about it seemed too perfect. The way the body was caught up there among the roots. She remembered the first body: it had been right by the side of the fisherman’s shelter. Waiting for them. This one was clearly visible from the path across the river. The spring sky was overcast with thick grey clouds, like a lid enclosing the valley and the mountains. She felt spits of icy rain on her face and hands but also strangely calm. Maybe the first time she’d really felt so calm and focused since her last case all those months and troubled nights before. Here, staring at a dead man’s face.
Were you drowned first? she wondered. Then placed here for us to find? She looked at that face. And those empty eyes stared back with only dark infinity
as a response.
CHAPTER 18
When Annabelle finally registered the sound of the door and opened her eyes the person was standing over her.
Looking up, Annabelle saw only a hooded featureless head. They don’t have a face! After a second her mind realised the person was also wearing a dark veil. Annabelle stared at that veil. Feeling the unbelievable horror of the situation blossom. This is the part where you’re raped. This is the part where you’re murdered. She clenched her hands into fists under the cover. Tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out.
‘You’re probably wondering why I haven’t shown you my face.’ Annabelle lay frozen. ‘The Doctor said you should rest so I didn’t want to alarm you. I’ve felt a bit embarrassed …’ The speaker paused and Annabelle waited, almost afraid to breathe. ‘Should I tell you?’
‘Either way,’ she finally managed to croak, her voice barely audible.
‘When I was young they thought I was a girl … up until I was twelve. It was pretty obvious then that I was a boy. I’ll show you my face if you like. It’s just you might find it strange.’
Annabelle took a breath then let the air leave her lungs. Whatever she had expected the person, the man, to say it definitely wasn’t this.
‘You think I’m weird, don’t you?’
She shook her head quickly. ‘No, no, of course not! I’m probably the weirdest out of everyone …’
He looked silently down at her for a long time. Then finally seemed to accept her reply and reached inside his hood, began unfastening the veil. She was transfixed. What kind of face would be horrifying enough to fit with this place? The Elephant Man? Something worse? He untucked the veil from behind his head, tugged it free.
His face was normal. Good-looking even. He was young, in his mid-twenties, slightly older than her. The kind of person who’d serve you a coffee in Starbucks and leave little mark on your day. Annabelle felt an incredible flood of momentary relief.
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