Dark Waters

by G. R. Halliday

  She shook her head to dismiss the memories, strangely relieved again to have the new case to focus on, and took in the fragrant smell of Indian cooking. The flat was cosy warm. A distilled sense of home comfort and security that Angela Kennedy seemed capable of carrying with her wherever she went. An optimism that things would work out well. Monica shrugged her long Harris tweed coat off and hung it on the hook by the door. Angela looked up from where she was sitting at the kitchen table, pushed her glasses up to nestle in her hair and blinked a couple of times as if she needed to check that the person who had just walked into the flat was indeed her daughter.

  ‘I made you curry. You must be hungry?’ Her mum’s hallmark was preparing hearty food then ambushing Monica with it when she came home late. Watching with satisfaction as her daughter ate, as if by keeping her well fed she was contributing in a small but vital way to the smooth running of whatever investigation she might be working on.

  ‘How’s the case going?’ Angela stared gravely as Monica washed her hands at the kitchen sink then settled down at the table. Her tone was that of a fellow professional, eager to discuss different angles and potential theories gleaned from her own ‘research’ conducted on online news sites, detective novels and TV programmes.

  Monica cleared her throat. ‘It’s going OK. We seem to be making progress,’ she said, careful as always, knowing her mum would be thrilled to learn they’d just made a seemingly solid connection between the two bodies. Although why successful businessman Sebastian Sinclair would have associated with petty criminal Theo Gall remained a mystery.

  ‘Sure.’ Her mum nodded, face set in an intent frown. ‘What does Crawford think? What’s his angle on it?’

  Monica cleared her throat again and tried to hide her blossoming irritation.

  ‘We’re still in the early stages,’ she said without raising her eyes from the food. ‘We can’t rule out anything at this stage.’ One of her favourite deadpan responses to nosy members of the public, to journalists, to her mum.

  Angela pushed both sleeves of her jumper up. ‘That’s right, that’s where they go wrong with investigations a lot. Just looking at the obvious solutions without taking in the bigger picture.’

  Monica took a mouthful of the curry, tried to remember the last time she’d eaten, probably not since the night before.

  ‘Nice?’ Angela watched Monica’s face for telltale signs. ‘I made it with cauliflower for you, but me and Lucy had chicken. Bill Macdonald called. Said he’d been pleased to see you the other night.’ Monica nodded but didn’t reply. ‘He always did like you. Wasn’t one of these little boys, afraid of my Amazonian,’ Angela said with a laugh. ‘Your dad liked him too, believe it or not. Always had so many friends, your dad.’

  Monica glanced away from her mum’s smiling face. Feeling that barrier, the disconnect. They remembered John Kennedy so differently.

  Angela went on: ‘I think he could relate to Bill though, being a big man too. That’s not easy in Scotland, all these idiots wanting to fight. Trying to prove themselves. That’s why your dad got into the boxing in the first place.’

  ‘What did Bill want?’ Monica felt that familiar flicker of unease, of the past circling in on her.

  ‘Oh I think just to catch up, take you for coffee. Though between me and you I think he’s worried sick about his boy. I told you? I think maybe he wants to talk that over as well.’

  CHAPTER 26

  Back in that strange dark room, when Marcus had closed and bolted the door, Annabelle spent a long time in a state that was close to panic. No matter how often she told herself to leave her phone under her pillow and save what little of the battery was left, she couldn’t resist switching it on again. Desperately hoping it would somehow connect. But ‘O2-UK’ resolutely refused to replace ‘No Service’ as the battery percentage ticked slowly down.

  A sound echoed in the corridor outside, mercifully interrupting her fixation on her phone. After a moment she realised it was a shout, muffled by the thick door. She switched the iPhone off and pushed herself up on the bed, listening intently. The sound came again, indistinct but louder this time. Was it someone calling to her?

  ‘Scott?!’ she shouted back, remembering what Marcus had said about a visitor. ‘Can you hear me?! My name’s Annabelle!’

  For a long time she listened, praying for a response, but it never came. Finally she began to doubt she’d even heard the voice in the first place, if it hadn’t been a ghost of her past, come to taunt her in those haunted tunnels.

  CHAPTER 27

  When her mum had finally gathered up her iPad and gone through to bed to continue her ‘research’ on the case, Monica sat down on the sofa by the window. After setting her tea on the windowsill she reached to flick through her dad’s old vinyls again. She had been listening to them since she’d discovered his collection up in the loft at her parents’ house a couple of years previously, but had still barely scratched the surface of the collection. It was mostly country and western. Something about the genre had appealed to his macho self-image, the part of John Kennedy that saw himself as an instrument of justice in his role as a prison warden. The part her mum seemed to minimise in her recollections of him but loomed largest for Monica.

  She chose another of the records at random, set it spinning on the turntable and flipped the cardboard sleeve over to check the album title: Out of Hand. The track was ‘She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)’ by Gary Stewart, possibly the most archetypal country song title ever, Monica thought as she pulled the headphones on and sank back on the sofa.

  As the music started up in her ears it triggered a memory. Hearing her dad and his workmates sitting at the table in the kitchen of her parents’ small house down in the Marsh. They were drinking and playing cards while she sat upstairs in the doorway of her bedroom. Half wanting to use the bathroom, but feeling a teenage shyness about crossing the landing, where she might bump into one of them if they came upstairs to use it themselves. Half listening in to the drunken conversation as it drifted up with the smell of cigarette smoke. Stories about riots they’d dealt with, difficult prisoners they’d subdued. Long John Kennedy, her dad, the big man.

  She remembered them talking about another big man, a prisoner who had tried it on. Thought he could handle himself with our Long John. The sound of her dad’s smirked laugh, then his catchphrase: That’ll be the day. Joking but serious, like John Wayne himself. In the infirmary for two weeks after that. Wasn’t he? Then the laughter again, her dad joining in, and Monica remembered the moment of shock.

  Were they really talking about her dad? Could he really batter another man into hospital and find something to laugh about in it? And the dawning realisation that the respect she had identified as a little girl on her visit to her dad’s workplace was fear: his colleagues were afraid of him. Her bare feet propped up on the wall by the door. The poster above them, Michael Hutchence leaning forward on the handlebars of a motorcycle, hair covering half his face. Her familiar teenage bedroom now tilted and strange. Her father, who she had to hide the Guns N’ Roses tape from because of the PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT CONTENT label. Boasting about hurting someone he was supposed to protect.

  Monica blinked, wondered for a moment where her mum had been that evening while her dad and his cronies were drinking, then caught her reflection in the darkened window. Her pale white face and dark hair, same as her dad. And she wondered how similar they were on the inside. How much of her need to be close to crime derived from some attraction to violence? She blinked again and looked away from those shadowy eyes.

  She needed to think about something else and reached for her laptop. Euston Miller’s website with the story about the tunnel was still open. She clicked on another story and began to read.

  The mysterious Affric Men have been spotted in numerous locations. The story of an unnamed crofter who until 1982 lived alone close to the entrance of Glen Turrit is little known. In early winter 1982 the crofter got off the late bus f
rom Beauly and was walking the last couple of long miles on the lonely single-track road to his croft when he spotted a light in the dense birch woodland off by the side of the road. Thinking it might be a lost hillwalker in need of assistance he hailed the light and stood watching. The light immediately disappeared and the woods were plunged into darkness. The crofter shone his own torch among the silver birch trees but couldn’t see anything. After a moment he decided that perhaps he’d been mistaken and continued along the lonely road.

  It was then that he heard the footsteps crunching among the twigs and bracken in the forest beside the road. He stopped. The footsteps stopped in unison. He started up and the footsteps began again.

  By now the crofter, who was not at all unaccustomed to being alone in these remote areas, was beginning to panic. He said afterwards that it was as if some curtain had been pulled back from his eyes, and suddenly he saw the world in a completely new and terrifying light. The fear settled across all his senses, encompassing his mind and his body. He hurried on along the road with the sound of movement in the distance echoing though the woodland in unison. Terror overtook him and he ran madly towards his croft, where he shut himself in.

  Cowering in his locked cottage, he heard the first sounds through the shuttered windows. A quiet voice, just out of the range of understanding. He had no intention of responding and he stayed, hunched up with fear, in his kitchen. But an image came into his mind, as if someone else had put it there. Of two men outside. Demanding he let them into his house. When he came to from this vision he found himself standing at his front door, one hand on the key, the other on the handle. In the process of turning the lock. As those whispering voices continued.

  Monica sighed and closed the laptop. She had enough to think about without adding Euston Miller’s ridiculous conspiracy-theory website into the mix. Though the man’s name reminded her she hadn’t heard back from Fisher about his death in Glen Affric yet. She made a mental note to ask him about it in the morning. She turned to lay the laptop on the table by the sofa and caught a flicker of movement at the side of the room.

  Her daughter was standing by the door to her bedroom, looking straight at her.

  She pulled the headphones off. ‘Lucy? Are you OK?’ She unfolded herself from the couch and moved across the room towards her. Lucy didn’t respond. Just kept staring at her.

  Monica bent down to pick her up. The kid’s body was rigid in her arms. As if Monica wasn’t there at all.

  ‘Lucy?!’ Monica pushed the curly hair out of her daughter’s face. Was she sleepwalking? Her eyes still fixed and staring, Lucy then collapsed forward into Monica’s arms.

  CHAPTER 28

  In her dreams Annabelle was desperately trying to escape a terrifying grey world. Moving down streets and through empty buildings in an abandoned city, like London but different. Populated with characters from her life – her mum and dad, Miss Albright, Mr Pepper, girls from school and university, the other volunteers from the cafe – watching, mocking her because she couldn’t walk properly. She kept trying to ask them for help, but somehow they were always just out of reach.

  She opened her eyes in the murky room. The strange half-carpeted walls, the damp concrete and the stifling stillness. It took everything she had to resist reaching for her phone, switching it on and trying futilely to connect to the network again. For her sanity she needed to save that last little fragment of battery life.

  Instead she stared up at the grey ceiling, lit by the bedside lamp. Her leg ached, but the pain behind her eyes had finally faded. For the first time since the crash the fog in her brain seemed to have shifted slightly too. She took a deep breath of the damp air and tried to think logically. Who might actually know where she was? Who might come looking?

  Mum or Dad? The idea took her back to the past and the feeling of strangeness in her childhood house. Her parents never touched her in a harsh or inappropriate way, never hurt her, but her bedroom possessed a kind of pink-tinted emptiness. The wallpaper with the teddy bears on it, the dolls and the little dresser. The pink clothes and being a perfect princess. She thought very carefully about what her mother used to whisper in her ear: Daddy will be home soon and we’re going to make everything perfect so he knows how much we care. All the ways she’d got things wrong, disappointing her dad by not staying a perfect daughter, by getting older and becoming a strange child who couldn’t smile properly and whose curly blonde hair turned dark and straight. A child who was unremarkable at school and faded into the background. So far from perfect, indeed causing her parents to split up by being a failure. Would her parents even care if she was missing?

  Annabelle glanced down at her bare arms. For the first time in a long time she looked at the white marks, like plastic, where she used to cut herself when the thoughts got too much. By then she had already ruined everything for her mum through her lack of perfection, and her dad had already given up on them and left.

  The scars indicated ‘a history of mental health problems’. If anyone did start to worry, the police would look into her past, wouldn’t they? Assume she was exactly the kind of person who would disappear? But you haven’t cut yourself in a long time or even taken medication. Wouldn’t they speak to the supervisors at the volunteer cafe? She had worked there for almost three years. Since she moved into the flat opposite Miss Albright’s, although she didn’t get to know her elderly neighbour until six months later when an envelope addressed to Miss Albright was wrongly pushed through Annabelle’s letter box. That was after the breakdown at university, when she couldn’t handle the pressure of failing to be perfect again. The supervisors at the cafe knew she hadn’t cut herself since then. They knew she was doing well and wouldn’t just disappear.

  It doesn’t matter anyway. The cruel thought came back. Because no one even knows where you are. How would anyone guess she’d gone down that locked road? The Instagram post at the service station was the only piece of evidence she was even in Scotland. Over a hundred miles south, no mention of where she was actually going … All her Internet searches about the road had been done on her phone.

  ‘What should I do? How can I get out of here?’ She heard the panic in her voice. And the unexpected answer came back almost instantly and with an unusual clarity: You have to kill Marcus. It’s your only way out.

  CHAPTER 29

  ‘Kids can do strange things when they sleepwalk. You used to be the same,’ Angela Kennedy whispered across the kitchen worktop. She tilted her head to glance at where Lucy was sitting on the sofa, watching breakfast TV with a bowl of Cheerios on her lap.

  After Lucy had sunk into Monica’s arms she’d seemed to be in a deep sleep, and for a few horrible moments Monica had thought her daughter was having some kind of fit. She was already holding her phone out, about to dial 999, when Lucy had opened her eyes and smiled up at her, seemingly completely normal.

  ‘One morning I found you out in the coal shed.’ Angela shook her head at the memory. ‘Me and your dad were sure someone had come into the house and taken you. There you were, sitting chatting away to yourself as if you were talking to a friend. My gran used to say that children can just see more than adults. They’re closer to what we are before we’re born. For a while I thought you might have her way about you.’

  Monica shook her own head. She’d heard the stories about her great-grandmother, who was supposedly able to read tea leaves and communicate with spirits, more than enough times. ‘Have you mentioned any of that to Lucy?’ Monica said quietly, an accusatory tone creeping into her voice.

  ‘Of course not!’ Angela snapped back defensively. ‘Anyway, it’s just a family story. I don’t see what harm it would do …’

  Monica sighed, feeling every one of her forty-four years after another night of broken sleep on the couch. She scraped her hair back and started looking around for something to tie it with. Her mum noticed and dug in her giant handbag, handing Monica a pack of hair ties.

  ‘Take these. You shouldn’t be using those rubbe
r bands; they’re bad for your hair roots.’ Though recently Monica had noticed the posties seemed to have stopped leaving those useful red bands in the hall outside her flat anyway. Perhaps out of some new environmental concern. She unhooked one of the ties and secured her hair with it.

  ‘Just … make sure Lucy’s not reading anything too grown-up for her,’ Monica whispered, glancing back at her daughter on the sofa. The grey spring morning was visible through the window beyond her. Lucy had always had a strangeness. The way she barely ever cried, those smoky blue-grey eyes that watched what was going on as if they’d seen other lives, other worlds. ‘Or watching anything too scary. It worries me sometimes. The way she is.’ The sleepwalking was a new worry. Monica wondered for a second if it was linked to her going back to work on the case. Had the change in routine disturbed Lucy somehow? Opened up everything that happened six months ago and got her wondering about evil, death again? She had asked that strange question about her grandad’s funeral practically the day Monica started work on this investigation. It was probably her fault. Lucy was once again paying the price for her choices. She needed to get the case resolved quickly for Lucy’s sake if nothing else.

  Monica pulled the Volvo over on Union Street in the centre of Inverness, where she’d arranged to collect Crawford after he’d failed to turn up at headquarters on time that morning. She spotted him standing outside a cafe, cardboard cup in his left hand, checking his phone with the right. She sounded the horn, and he looked up, hurried along the pavement, opened the door and got into the passenger seat, the scent of his aftershave filling the car.