Dark Flight

by Lin Anderson

  She could only hope and pray that Sam was alive and safe, that he might escape the authorities and make a new life somewhere else. But that place couldn’t be Scotland. His future as a doctor there was over.

  Rhona thought of Chrissy and wanted to weep.

  They left Mrs Haruna waiting on her verandah for the son who couldn’t come home. Rhona understood now, why she didn’t care about her own safety. Her life was already over.

  The most difficult task Rhona had was to tell Chrissy about Sam. She’d asked Bill, when he called the consulate, if she could give Chrissy the news before it reached her through the police grapevine.

  ‘Of course. I won’t say anything until after you speak to her. You know we brought in Naseem’s brother, Kabiru? Danny identified him as the man who recruited them.’

  ‘You think Kabiru killed the women?’

  ‘His DNA didn’t match anything we had from Carole or her mother. That’s why the bastard let us test him. He thought he was okay.’

  So they were no closer to finding Carole’s murderer.

  ‘But the good news is he matched the fingerprint you got from the toilet seat in Olatunde’s flat,’ Bill said triumphantly. ‘Kabiru killed Malcolm Menzies. I’m sure of it. But we still have to prove it. The plane that took Sam and Stephen over there was owned by Suleiman Incorporated. The Met have been investigating the Suleiman family for some time. They suspect them of human trafficking. Women and children from West Africa coming via their oil tankers.’

  ‘So you’ve got it sewn up without me?’

  ‘We still have a murderer on the loose.’

  Finally, they talked about McNab.

  ‘He did great,’ Rhona said sincerely. ‘I couldn’t have managed without him.’

  ‘Any news on Abel?’

  ‘I’ve got the samples. John Adamu, our police liaison officer here, has been running a check on missing children. Advertising around the local villages. Looks like Abel isn’t the only child missing.’

  They lapsed into silence. Outside the Boswells’ bungalow, the crickets were singing in the heat. Bill was thousands of miles away, but Rhona could sense his distress.

  ‘Bill, tell me about Margaret.’

  He cleared his throat.

  ‘She has breast cancer. The biopsy results just came back.’

  Rhona’s heart jumped into her mouth. ‘Oh Bill.’

  ‘They said they caught it early.’

  ‘And Margaret’s a fighter.’

  ‘She is that.’

  There was nothing else to say.

  In the end, Stephen didn’t travel home with them. Henry wasn’t anxious to part him from Boniface. He thought it better they gave it time. He would discuss the repatriation with the Foreign Office.

  Rhona was grateful. Stephen was better off here, living in his old home and tending his red velvet spiders.

  It rained on their last evening in Kano. A spectacular thunderstorm that turned the dusty dirt roads to mud. Rhona remembered what Chrissy had told her about Sam. How much he loved living in Scotland, a country where it rained all the time. Because the rain makes things grow.

  They were two very different people on the return journey to Glasgow. McNab said little, and she didn’t mind. They were comfortable with each other at last. Rhona would never call him McNab again.

  She suspected he blamed himself for her abduction, but they didn’t discuss it. What she did know was that his faith in the certainties of life had been shaken.

  ‘Africa changes people.’ That’s what Henry said when he escorted them to the airport. ‘For ever.’

  He didn’t say for good or bad. Rhona believed it was for the good.

  60

  BILL HADN’T MENTIONED Sam in his story about how they found Stephen, but Chrissy knew he was somehow involved. Rhona would have asked Bill to say nothing until she got home. She would think it her responsibility to tell Chrissy. Which probably meant Sam was dead.

  Chrissy said the words out loud. ‘Sam is dead.’

  It didn’t make her believe them.

  She set the coffee mug down without drinking any. Her stomach was churning, her mind in turmoil. Better to concentrate on work.

  She had said nothing to Bill yet about her most recent findings. She wanted to be sure, absolutely sure.

  She sat at the lab table, the DNA profile printouts in front of her. The match was perfect. She knew who had raped Carole before she died.

  Rhona’s painstaking lifting of the partial print near the door confirmed that the same person was in that room.

  And the third and final piece of evidence connecting the murderer to the crime . . .

  Chrissy lifted the murder weapon from the table with her gloved hand. The knife blade was very sharp. If she ran the smooth edge down her thumb it would easily slice through the latex glove, and part her skin beneath like ripe fruit. Although the edge looked uniform to the human eye, under the microscope its pattern of indentations was obvious, and that pattern matched the wound in Carole’s back and the mutilation around her vagina.

  Three pieces of evidence that nailed the bastard!

  Chrissy’s pleasure at this was short-lived. Despair flowed through her again. She had done what she set out to do. Her job. She had succeeded. In the circumstances, it meant less than nothing.

  It took a while for Chrissy’s words to sink in.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Rhona asked again.

  ‘Sure about Malchie or sure I’m pregnant?’

  ‘Chrissy?’

  ‘I’m sure. All tests are positive,’ she said with a half laugh. ‘I’m definitely pregnant. And Malchie definitely killed Carole and her mother.’

  She busied herself fetching the lab reports and handing them to Rhona.

  ‘I ran Malchie’s profile against everything we had, including the ones from the . . . Nigerian Church of God.’ She stumbled over the words.

  ‘Chrissy, please . . .’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t believe it when his DNA matched the semen in Carole. Then I checked his footwear. You would have been proud of me,’ she told Rhona. ‘The partial footprint by the kitchen door was an exact match for Malchie’s trainer. They found his knife on him. It matches the blade markings of the murder weapon.’

  ‘He was only fifteen.’ Rhona couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘He was an evil psychotic bastard who liked fucking with women.’

  Rhona watched Chrissy disintegrate in front of her eyes.

  ‘I’m glad he’s dead. I want them all dead.’

  Rhona reached out to her.

  ‘I want Sam alive. Alive and here with me.’

  Rhona gathered Chrissy in her arms.

  ‘I want him here with me.’ Chrissy gave a wail of despair, her body heaving with sobs. ‘What am I going to do without him?’

  Rhona held her tight and let her cry. Rhona cried with her; for Sam, for Stephen, for Bill, for Margaret and for Chrissy herself.

  Going to the lab had been a displacement activity. Rhona had told herself that she needed to see Chrissy in the flesh, explain the whole story, check she was okay, before she went home.

  She expected Chrissy to be upset when she told her about Sam, but nothing had prepared her for the news of Chrissy’s pregnancy.

  Sam would have made a great father, would make a great father, she corrected herself, if he ever got to see his child. Chrissy might decide to terminate the pregnancy. It would seem like the easier option. Somehow, Rhona didn’t think Chrissy would choose that path.

  Bringing up a child as a single mother would be difficult. A mixed-race child in Scotland would have plenty to deal with.

  Rhona hated herself for thinking that way. Sam had saved Stephen’s life. He’d saved her life. Any child of his would be precious.

  But it had to be Chrissy’s decision. And she hadn’t given up hope that Sam was still alive.

  She spent a couple of hours in the lab, looking at Chrissy’s reports, ch
ecking the results. There was no doubt. All the data they’d collected at the first murder scene matched Malcolm Menzies.

  He killed the two women and mutilated Carole. If the white van was involved, as they suspected, then someone helped him remove Stephen, and take him to the building on the waste ground. If it wasn’t Kabiru, then it was another of his followers.

  Rhona remembered her own fear of Malchie. Perhaps her instinct for evil ran deeper than she realised. Malchie got his kicks from tormenting and torturing women. She’d seen the evidence of that in his mother. She’d experienced it herself. And any psychotic leanings he had were exacerbated by his association with Kabiru Suleiman and the strong dope he’d been using.

  Kabiru had given Malchie the opportunity to act out his fantasies. But when Kabiru thought the boy had betrayed him, he faced the same fate as his victims.

  ‘A stupid wee bugger. Wanted to be a hard man,’ Karen had said of her brother. A hard man who became a murderer.

  Chrissy went home early. Rhona offered to go with her, but she refused.

  ‘I’m going to tell Mum about the baby.’

  ‘It’s early yet. Maybe you should wait.’

  ‘There’s no point. I’ll never live at home again. Mum’ll be okay. Wait till she hears the father’s a committed Christian . . . or a black bastard, as my dad would say.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. I’ll see Sam again. Maybe not in the flesh but . . .’ She didn’t finish.

  Rhona wondered if Chrissy was intent on telling her mother so there would be no question whether she should have the baby. Her mother would never countenance an abortion, even if the father was an African.

  ‘I think I’ll ask Pastor Achebe to christen it. That’ll really piss off Dad. There’s only one thing worse than a gay bastard, and that’s a black one.’

  The old Chrissy, wonderfully irreverent, was fighting back.

  Sean was walking along the path through the park. He walks like a musician, Rhona thought, then wondered what she meant by that. Rhythm. There was rhythm in everything he did, like Sam.

  He was coming to look for her at the lab because she hadn’t come home. He must have asked Bill for the details of her return flight.

  A stab of pain went through her at the thought of Bill. She hadn’t spoken to him since she landed. There was a strategy meeting tomorrow morning. But they wouldn’t be talking about Margaret at that. Maybe there was nothing left to say. All she could do now was be his friend.

  Sean had paused at the bridge over the Kelvin and was staring down at the water. Rhona thought of the first time they had stood together on that bridge. They had only just met. She was avoiding him, not because she didn’t like him, but because she did. When she agreed to see him again, he looked so pleased that she felt like a tune he had just played.

  Rhona put on her outdoor coat and went to meet him. Africa changes people, Henry had said.

  It had certainly changed her.

  About the author

  Lin Anderson began writing whilst working as a teacher, and now writes full time. Dark Flight is her fourth novel, and the fourth to feature forensic scientist Rhona Macleod.