Ritchie’s face suggested otherwise. ‘This is Anya Renfrew we’re talking about, Tony. She’s never been late in her life.’
‘OK. I’ll get her next-of-kin details from personnel and look into it. Sure there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Anyone checked the hospitals? She might have been in an accident.’
McLean suppressed the sigh that wanted to escape. True enough, it was out of character for Renfrew to simply not turn up, and the failure to answer her phones was troubling. She was a grown adult though, quite capable of looking after herself without the entire station worrying about her. On the other hand, she had high security clearance. She’d worked on some very sensitive enquiries and probably knew secrets about important people they’d rather weren’t in the public domain.
‘I’ll chase it up. Meantime you need to deal with this.’ He nodded past her, towards a young uniformed constable standing behind Ritchie, clearly waiting to ask some vital question. ‘We can compare notes at this riveting senior-officers meeting later on.’
Everyone else was already there when McLean hurried into Deputy Chief Constable Stephen ‘Call-Me-Stevie’ Robinson’s office. Not that everyone was a large number of people. The nature of Operation Caterwaul meant that few had the security clearance necessary to be told exactly what was going on. He had a sneaking suspicion there was more sensitive information even the senior officers weren’t being told. Maybe the chief constable knew, but if so he wasn’t telling.
‘Sorry I’m late. Still trying to track down a missing admin.’ McLean took a seat beside Detective Superintendent Jayne McIntyre. She said nothing to his excuse, giving him no more than a raised eyebrow.
‘Missing? Not one of ours, is it?’ Deputy Chief Constable Robinson sat at the head of the table, as befitted his seniority. That he was part of the operation at all spoke volumes about how important it was, even if his input was only a small part of that. He managed to inject what McLean felt was an unreasonable note of panic into the question.
‘If by “one of ours” you mean assigned to Operation Caterwaul, then, yes, she is. I don’t think that’s a cause for concern though. She’s reliable. Well, she was reliable.’
‘Who are we talking about, Tony?’ McIntyre asked.
‘Anya Renfrew. Didn’t show up for the briefing this morning, not answering her phone and she’s not called in sick.’
McIntyre’s concern was more measured, which somehow made it worse. ‘That’s not like Anya. I don’t think I’ve ever had a problem with her. Been working here, what? Must be twenty years now.’
‘Twenty-one. She came to us straight out of university, never worked anywhere else. I spoke to HR earlier. They’re sending over details. I’ve also asked a squad car to drop round her place and knock on the door, just in case she’s had an accident over the weekend.’
‘Even so.’ Robinson cupped his hands together, resting them on the unblemished pad of notepaper on the conference table in front of him. Said nothing more.
‘I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, sir. And we’ve barely started on the operation so far. I don’t think this is a security risk.’
‘Don’t you? I wish I had your confidence, Tony. You don’t know as much about Caterwaul as I do, how far it reaches. We can’t afford to have anything go wrong with our part of the operation.’ Robinson picked up his pen, wrote something down on his pad that McLean couldn’t read from where he was sitting, underlined it twice. ‘I want this woman accounted for by the end of the day. Whatever’s happened to her, wherever she is, we need to know. Top priority, understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’ McLean nodded, stayed in his seat. The meeting had barely started, after all, and there was much else to discuss. The DCC clearly had other ideas.
‘Well, get to it then, man.’ He closed his notepad, put away his pen and pushed his seat back before standing. Surprised, everyone else did the same.
‘The meeting?’ McIntyre asked.
‘The meeting can wait. Right now I need to make a couple of difficult phone calls.’ Robinson looked at McLean. ‘Find this woman before I have to make any more.’
5
It is over all too soon. The last trouser pulled up, the last fly zipped. The men disappear into the gloom as quickly as they came, a few even quicker. Car lights spear the darkness, engine noise upsetting the silence as the sated depart. She can only wish she was one of them. For a while she was lost in the moment, the grinding and sensation. But now the shame returns, and the self-loathing grows as the night silence closes in on the scene of her degradation.
She sits for a while in the driver’s seat of her car, door open and her legs out through the opening. Knees wide as she feels the soreness deep within her. A cold breeze blows up, sweeps across the car park and rustles the heavy canopy of the trees. It chills her skin, the sweat and other fluids, sends a shiver through her that sparks her back into action. Time to clean up. Time to go home.
There’s a supermarket plastic bag on the back seat, and she spends a few moments picking up used condoms that litter the ground at her feet. So many. She can’t remember ever having seen so many before. They slither and slip and slide as she drops them into the bag, and unbidden she remembers the song, Monty Python’s Meaning of Life and all those Catholic children dancing around the streets to a musical number. ‘Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is good . . .’ It forces a half-chuckle, half-sob from her mouth. She’ll dump the bag in a bin somewhere on the way home. It’s time to go.
She pulls the mask off, wipes her face with a couple of moist towels. Can’t do anything about the stains on her blouse, but it’ll be going in the bin soon anyway. Car door closed, she stares into the darkness for a moment, feeling the weird elation drain from her. She knows that it’s wrong, and yet she can’t help herself. All she can think of is next month and doing it all again.
Or maybe she won’t. Maybe this will be the last time. Perhaps she can seek help, therapy. Find a normal life. The ghostly reflection of her face in the windscreen thinks otherwise, and who is she to argue.
She reaches for the starter button, foot pressed on the brake pedal.
Nothing happens.
She presses it again, the stirring of fear in her throat as the lights in the dashboard flicker. Outside, the darkness pulls in around her like a tide. The headlights fade, then go out altogether.
Shit.
She reaches for her bag, tucked away under the passenger seat, scrabbles through the contents in vain hope. Key fob’s there where she put it, so’s her phone. Does she dare call for help? Like this?
It’s cold outside, so she grabs her coat, slings her bag over her shoulder. Her shoes aren’t the most practical for walking, but she dare not take them off. Underfoot are loose stones, broken twigs, dirt. She totters around the car park, searching desperately for any stragglers. Normally there’d be a few other cars, and at least someone else in the scene might help without judging her. But she’s not in one of her usual spots, and there are no other cars. No other people.
In desperation, she switches on her phone. It takes an age to come to life, the light of its screen only making the darkness beyond it deeper. The tiny icon in the top corner shows empty. No signal.
That’s when the full weight of it hits her. She doesn’t know how to get home from here on foot, even if it wasn’t miles away.
She’s all alone in the woods at night.
And then something in the trees goes crack.
6
The bungalow sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, halfway between Musselburgh and Portobello. It didn’t have a sea view, but it was pleasant enough, and quiet. McLean parked his Alfa Romeo in front of the narrow driveway and stared through the windscreen for a moment. No net curtains twitched, not even in the neighbouring houses.
‘Squad car said it came past at eleven hundred hours, sir. No answer at the
door and they couldn’t see anything through the windows.’ DC Harrison hadn’t made any move to get out of the car when he’d switched off the engine, clearly waiting for his signal.
‘Eleven hundred hours? Is that what they said?’
‘Aye, sir. Wrote it down.’ The detective constable fussed at her jacket pocket until she managed to persuade her notebook out of it, then flipped the pages until she found today’s. ‘Eleven hundred hours.’
‘So they swung past, probably no closer than the road end. That’s if they came here at all.’
‘How d’you reckon that, sir?’ Harrison’s face was all innocence. But then she was young too. Maybe a little naïve.
‘Call it old man’s cynicism, but if I hear a policeman say “eleven hundred hours” rather than “eleven o’clock” in anything other than a formal report, I know he’s making it up. It’s too much detail too. That’s always a good sign someone’s lying.’ He unclipped his seat belt and opened the door. ‘Never mind. We’re here now. Let’s go see what we can find, eh?’
A warm breeze blew in off the nearby Forth, whispering around the houses and kicking up dust from the gutters in miniature tornadoes. The sun hung in a cloudless sky of that perfect pale blue you didn’t see anywhere other than Edinburgh. McLean closed his eyes and turned his face to it for a moment, feeling the warmth on his skin. How nice it would be to just lie somewhere sheltered and soak up that heat. Except that he had a tendency to go as red as a cooked lobster more quickly than you could say factor 30.
Anya Renfrew’s bungalow was as unassuming and unremarkable as the woman herself. Grey harling clung to the walls under slates baked dry by the sun. Overhung by an open porch, the front door had been painted fairly recently in a deep gloss green that looked strangely out of place. Beside it, a single button produced a loud ‘ding dong’ inside when McLean pressed it. No other sound followed. He tried the door handle, unsurprised to find it locked.
‘Any sign of a key?’ He looked around, but there were no flowerpots on the gravel path that surrounded the front of the house, nothing hanging in the eaves of the porch. The front garden wasn’t much to look at either, mostly paved over although weeds were doing their best to reclaim it through the cracks.
‘Nothing I can see.’ Harrison walked along the front of the house towards the corner, peering through one of the front windows as she did so. ‘Looks pretty empty in there too.’
‘I’ll see you round the back then.’ McLean went the other way, pausing at the window on his side of the door. He cupped his hands against the glass to block out the glare, but it was still almost impossible to make out anything beyond the thin net curtain. A couple of sea-washed sticks lay on the windowsill, treasure from the nearby Portobello Beach, he assumed. The smooth wood was silvered and cracked, gnarls and knots worn almost shiny so that they looked a bit like miniature dragons guarding the house from intruders.
There were no windows on the side of the bungalow, only a path wide enough to wheel a bin between the house and the boundary wall. McLean found the bin around the back, but when he lifted up its lid, there was nothing inside.
‘When’s collection day?’ he asked Harrison as she appeared from the other side.
‘No idea, sir. I can find out.’ She had her notebook in hand, flicked it open and scribbled something down. ‘Any particular reason why?’
McLean looked out over the back garden. It was tidy enough, a small area of browning lawn, a couple of dwarf apple trees at the bottom end. The wall that ran between this property and the next ended at a concrete garage that must have opened up onto a lane at the back. ‘We’re sure this is the right address? It feels . . . I don’t know . . .’
‘Like no one actually lives here?’
‘Exactly. See if you can find a key anywhere around the back door. I’ll go and have a wee look in the garage.’
He followed the short path down the garden and peered through a spider-webbed window into a largely empty space. A potting table, shelves and a few garden tools piled against one wall suggested this was used more as a shed than as somewhere to park a car. The door was locked with a hasp, the shiny padlock the newest thing McLean had seen since arriving.
‘If she’s left a spare key it’s well hidden, sir.’ Harrison stood by the back door when he returned. ‘There’s a kitchen and a bedroom at the back. Both look like they’ve not been used in a while.’
McLean started to look for himself, then realised it wasn’t necessary. ‘When was Renfrew last at work?’
‘Friday, sir. You spoke to her in the incident room, remember?’
He did of course. But that was the thing about Renfrew. She was anonymous. Competent enough that you could give her a task and know it would be completed. So reliable you came to rely on her completely, and then forgot all about her until she presented you with the work she’d done. Beyond that he knew absolutely nothing about her, and he couldn’t deny that made him feel a little guilty.
‘OK then. I guess we’ll have to see if any of the neighbours have seen her recently.’
The first two houses they knocked at were as empty as the one they’d come to see. Waiting for doors to be answered at both, McLean could tell they were lived in though. Little things like a wooden box for milk bottles at the front door of one, flowers in pots on the windowsill of the other. Peering through windows, he saw empty coffee mugs on a low table, magazines strewn about, a television remote and a couple of games console controllers. Signs of life, but the people gone. Mid-afternoon, they were probably at work.
The doorbell on the third house made a similar ‘ding dong’ to the one in Renfrew’s, but instead of silence after it, a small dog started yapping furiously. Then someone shouted: ‘Quiet, Brandy’, followed by a singsong ‘Coming.’ They waited patiently as first a scrabbling noise began at the door, then the lock clunked and it swung open.
McLean was ready for the furry bullet that shot out of the gap, but Harrison clearly had less experience. She jumped back with a little shriek. Stooping, McLean caught the dog around its middle and scooped it up into the air. A Jack Russell terrier if he was any judge.
‘Och, thank you. He’s a wee terror for running out like that, but he just loves everyone.’
McLean looked past the small furry face and tongue that was trying to lick him, to see an elderly lady standing in the doorway.
‘He’s certainly a handful. Friendly chap though.’ McLean handed the wriggling dog to its owner, then went to his pocket for his warrant card. ‘Detective Chief Inspector McLean. This is my colleague Detective Constable Harrison. I was wondering if we could have a word?’
The old lady peered at the card, then at McLean. He had a horrible feeling he knew how this was going to play out, but then again, at least he was away from the station and his desk groaning with its load of reports.
‘Of course, of course. Why don’t you come in. I’ll put the kettle on for a cup of tea.’
Her name was Sandra Guilfoyle, and she’d lived in the cul-de-sac since it had been built, fifty-two years earlier. She’d thought about moving when her husband, Alastair, had died a few years back, but the memories kept her there, and the people. McLean learned all this and more as he sat on a sofa that had most likely also been there fifty-two years, with Brandy the terrier shedding beige and white hairs all over his lap. Harrison remained unusually quiet, clearly feeling the same way about small dogs as did Grumpy Bob. At least the tea was nice, and the biscuits well within their sell-by date.
‘I wanted to ask a few questions about the bungalow at the end of the road,’ McLean said when he finally managed to get a word in. As if affronted by his rudeness, the terrier leaped from his now hairy knees and padded over to its mistress.
‘Oh aye? What about it?’
‘I was wondering when you’d last seen its owner, Anya?’
‘Anya?’ The old lady scratched absent-mindedly a
t her terrier’s head, eliciting a wag of the tail and playful bite. ‘No’ this month, for sure. She drops by every so often, but it’s usually old Bill the gardener who keeps an eye on the place.’
‘Not this month?’ McLean felt that familiar sense of dread creeping into his stomach like ice. ‘You mean she doesn’t live there?’
‘Och, no. Nobody’s lived there since old Grace went into a home – what? Two years back?’ Mrs Guilfoyle raised a wrinkled hand and shook it in the air, index finger pointing crookedly at McLean. ‘She was a detective too, wasn’t she?’
‘Anya works in admin. She’s not a police officer as such.’
‘No, no. Not Anya, Grace.’
‘Grace? Grace Renfrew?’ McLean couldn’t recall an officer by that name, certainly not in plain clothes. The first name gave him pause though.
‘Now you mention it, no. She went back to her maiden name when her husband died. Long before she moved in down the road, mind you. What was it now? Oh dear, my memory’s not what it was. Not Renfrew, but something similar.’ Mrs Guilfoyle made a clicking sound with her tongue. Either that or her false teeth were coming loose. ‘Ach. I can’t remember it now. She was always just Grace. Such a lovely lady. It was a shame when she took a tumble. Old bones can be so brittle. And to think she was lying there a whole day before anyone knew.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Guilfoyle. You’re saying that a detective named Grace lived in that bungalow and Anya looked after her? Where is she now?’
‘Grace? I heard she was in a care home. Anya would be able to tell you which one.’
‘Of course.’ McLean felt it unnecessary to let the old lady know Anya was missing. There was something she might be able to help him with, even if he hoped that she wouldn’t. ‘This Grace, Anya’s mother. Her maiden name’s not Ramsay, is it?’
Bury Them Deep Page 3