Singing to the Dead

by Caro Ramsay

  Pained, Lynne closed her eyes and went into the kitchen, where she started to swear. Eve smiled; her sister never swore. She wheeled after her. The kitchen was a bombsite, littered with Crunchie and Kit Kat wrappers, and a Battenburg that had been relieved of its marzipan, the toothmarks still in evidence. Two empty Coke cans had been flung in the general direction of the bin. ‘What did you have to eat, Eve?’ asked Lynne sarcastically.

  ‘Not enough.’ Eve started rolling her head as if her neck were stiff, and the gelatinous fat on her neck swelled first on one side then the other so she looked deformed.

  ‘And did you actually post the images of Squidgy to the paper? They need them for tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes; as I said, my genius never sleeps.’

  ‘Nor does your modesty. I hope you drew him sweet and festive.’ Lynne placed her bony hands on the taps and looked out the window, aware of Eve sniggering behind her. ‘What am I saying? You did something horrible, didn’t you?’

  Eve just winked. ‘They loved it. Santa being mugged by Squidgy. I thought him shagging a reindeer might be a bit much.’

  ‘I really don’t believe you at times. This is our income, you stupid cow; this is what pays the bills. This is what keeps the roof over our heads.’

  ‘My roof. Your head,’ corrected Eve.

  Lynne gritted her teeth and glared at the mess on the worktop. ‘And how come you can manage to get all this stuff out, but not quite manage to put any of it back again?’

  ‘I guess I’m just talented.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet,’ said Lynne, going off in search of the computer.

  Alone in the kitchen Eve turned on the radio, and a moment later the gentle strains of ‘Tambourine Girl’ drifted out. She leaned her head back, and hummed along – Say hello to the tambourine girl – staring out the window. It was still thinking about snowing. She began to reverse her chair, silently, positioning it in the hall so she could see Lynne. She half shut her eyes and watched as her sister pressed Enter to call the screen from hibernation. The email from the appeal office at the newspaper came up instantly. We love them, can we use them all? Squidgy’s a superstar.

  Lynne looked around. Eve appeared to be dozing in the kitchen doorway, listening to the radio. She sat down and began scanning the rest of the emails. Eve had been busy. She had been in touch with a few comics, and had ordered some artist’s materials. Then she noticed a folder of emails named Sheriff Court; Records Department. Lynne felt her heart begin to thud, realizing what Eve might have been researching. Indeed, who? She hovered the cursor over the icon and left-clicked the mouse. As the folder opened a message flashed up. ‘Get off my computer, you nosy cow.’

  5

  A sodden poster of Luca Scott was hanging by a tattered corner. Costello leaned against a lamp post, checking the time on her mobile. Half one: she should be back at work, trying to find him, but she was blind in one eye, and the pain in her temple was intensifying. The Sanomigraine had been too little, too late.

  She stood on the kerb, wet hair sticking to her scalp, Christmas music cutting through her head like cheesewire. The cars on Byres Road were queuing back all the way up to the lights at Queen Margaret Drive. The headlights seemed to be dancing in pairs under the parabolas of the Christmas lights above, merging into one and separating again. She couldn’t even see straight; there was no way she could drive like this. She was frozen, sweat making her clothes damp, chilling her to the bone. She started to walk along the pavement to keep warm, one foot in front of the other, one foot… then the other…

  ‘Oi, Costello?’ a voice said. As she put her hand over her bad eye, a figure came into view… anorak, blond hair, tall… ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

  Yes, it’s me. Who else would I be? ‘Colin?’ She felt the blood drain from her head, her knees started to buckle, and she gave up every pretence of being well. She felt a strong arm round her, folding her into the passenger seat of a battered blue Astra, and was aware of a furry dragon being retrieved from under her before she sat on it.

  ‘You look about as good as I feel.’

  She heard the seat belt being clicked home and she leaned her head against the cool headrest, and closed her eyes. ‘Why, what happened to you?’

  ‘I’ve been Quinned. And you’re for it tomorrow. I think she’s going to get a tracking device put on you,’ said Anderson, smoothing Costello’s jacket collar underneath the seat belt.

  Costello realized she was slowly stroking the fur of the dragon, now on her lap. ‘Who cares?’

  ‘Are you going back into work?’

  ‘No, I’m going home. It took me bloody ages to get through the tunnel and I didn’t get my migraine tablet in time.’

  ‘Accident on the Kingston Bridge, that’s why the traffic’s so heavy.’

  ‘My sight isn’t good enough to drive now. I was trying to find a taxi.’ She swayed a little in her seat. ‘I told Irvine. I’m sure I told Wyngate. Might as well talk to a brick wall. Look, it’s just a migraine. I’ll be fine tomorrow. It’s because I’m overtired.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’ Anderson shut the passenger car door and walked round to the driver’s side, holding a hand up in mid-air in an apology to the traffic queue. The slam of the driver’s door bagatelled around in Costello’s head. She leaned forward, eyes closed, and held her head in both hands, concentrating very hard on not being sick. ‘The problem with this squad is,’ Anderson went on, ‘the right hand has no idea what the left is up to. Kate Lewis is doing a…’

  ‘Who?’ Costello screwed up her face.

  ‘Some high-flyer – great legs and not enough skirt – she’s organizing a photo shoot with a blond boy standing on the street in the rain and…’

  ‘If you want somebody to act as his mum and headbutt a puggie, you can count me out.’

  ‘As subtle as ever. For Christ’s sake, the poor woman had a grand mal fit. Lewis won’t re-enact that, I hope,’ he added. ‘But yes, that’s what we’re arranging. Costello, you look terrible, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’ For a minute Anderson thought Costello was going to cry. ‘It’s been a difficult few weeks. It’s been hard. ’

  Anderson lifted his own hand from the gear stick and patted the back of her hand, then asked quietly, ‘How did it go with Sarah McGuire?’

  ‘I wasn’t happy. Couldn’t exactly tell you why, though. With McAlpine I’d have said straight out: I don’t like her, she’s up to something, and he’d have understood. Can’t do that with Quinn, eh? I’d have to submit it in a bloody report in triplicate.’

  ‘We have until tomorrow to make something of it. But apparently Sarah McGuire has already phoned to track down the Fire Investigation report.’

  ‘She’s entitled to ask, I suppose.’

  ‘But not to see it, if she’s a suspect. Is she a suspect?’ asked Anderson.

  ‘Could be; she’s very quick off the mark for one so grief-stricken with bereavement, don’t you think?’

  ‘And Quinn went apeshit because you hadn’t filed your report and weren’t around.’

  ‘Tough.’

  Anderson watched as Costello’s head lolled alarmingly. ‘Do you want to go to the doctor?’ He glanced at his watch, as if he had somewhere important to go. ‘It would give Quinn a whole load of paperwork if you snuffed it somewhere official.’

  ‘No, just home.’ She ground her teeth; she was going to be sick.

  ‘I’m supposed to be out picking up Peter’s Puff the Magic Dragon outfit for his nativity play. Poor Brenda’s stuck at home with Claire moaning about a sore throat. Although you can never tell with her; she might just be jealous of all the attention Peter’s getting, with his starring role. But I’ll nip home later,’ he sighed. ‘Should I cut on to the expressway? I really need to get back to the station asap.’

  ‘Expressway is quicker.’ Costello’s voice was staccato. She tried to open the window with clumsy fingers, trying to find the handle without moving her head or opening her eyes.
‘Puff the Magic Dragon…?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’ As the car stopped at the lights on Great Western Road, Anderson reached across and wound down the window for her, knowing that Brenda would go ballistic if Costello threw up in the car. ‘And I should really do some Christmas shopping at some point. You’re a woman – any idea what Brenda might want as a present?’

  ‘A divorce?’

  ‘Not thinking of spending that much.’ Anderson sighed, ‘But, as you say, the last few weeks have been difficult for us all. I’ve not been much use at home at the moment; Brenda has had a lot to cope with…’

  ‘You lost your best friend.’ Costello looked out the window, then closed her eyes, as if the daylight itself were painful.

  ‘We lost our best friend.’

  ‘We certainly did.’ Costello sat forward, holding her head, trying to anticipate the movement of the car as it weaved through the narrow streets of Rowanhill to get back to the river. Her heightened senses picked up the smell of petrol. She could sense the sweet chemical scent of fresh newspaper somewhere in the car, the stale grease of yesterday’s chips…

  ‘Can you stop the car?’ she said urgently. Anderson pulled over, the tyres bumping on to the raised coping stones beside a grass verge. Costello opened the door and suspended herself by the seat belt, as her stomach emptied out three cream crackers and two cups of Earl Grey, as vile coming up as they had been going down.

  The thumping intensified until it felt as if her brain would split, and for a moment she thought she was going to faint. The concrete came dangerously close, then she felt a hand close gently on the back of her collar and herself slowly being pulled upright, back into the seat. She put her head in her hands, wanting to die. She knew that something very unpleasant was dangling from her nose and something even more unpleasant was dribbling from the corner of her mouth. But Anderson, the doting father of two, had a whole boxful of tissues in the glove compartment. He had to pull a few used crusty ones out of the box first, apologizing for his disgusting son. ‘Better now?’

  She clamped a clean tissue over her mouth and nodded carefully.

  He reached across her, closing the door against the cold wind, and she felt the car pull into the traffic, heard the constant drum of rain on the windscreen, the gentle tick of the wipers, back and forth, back and forth. She opened her eyes, and saw droplets of water, each with a little comet tail behind, being swiped by the blade of the wiper against the glass, only to be replaced by more… and more.

  Then she realized she was home.

  There was a gentle nudge at her shoulder. ‘I think that’s your mobile. It’s the station. I’ll get it. I’ll tell them you’ll phone in when you’re fit.’

  ‘It’ll pass now I’ve been sick,’ Costello croaked. ‘I’ll be fine tomorrow.’

  Anderson flipped the phone open. ‘DS Costello’s mobile, hello.’

  ‘And when did you start answering her phone?’ snapped DCI Quinn.

  By five past two the meeting was still only half full. A picture of a second boy with a stud earring now hung beside the new photograph of Luca with the police horse. Troy McEwen had disappeared from the playground off Horselethill Road sometime the evening before. The incident board told its own story.

  The DCI had reapplied her red lipstick, removed her jacket and rolled up the sleeves of her white blouse, ready for business. She consulted a list on a battered clipboard and surveyed the room. ‘Is this it? Where is everybody?’

  PC Gail Irvine peered at the list over Quinn’s shoulder. ‘Yip, this is your lot. It’s this throat infection, Christmas leave…’

  ‘Has DS Costello called in sick?’ There was silence. ‘DI Anderson? Has DS Costello called in sick?’

  ‘You know she did,’ growled Anderson. He caught a sly smile from Kate Lewis, and smiled back just to confuse her. ‘And so has DC Burns, in case you missed that too.’

  ‘So, I may as well start then.’ Quinn tapped the photograph. ‘The first thing I have to say is that, no matter what happens with the missing children, no matter what Rogan O’Neill gets up to – this squad has to cope with it. There will be no more in the budget, no more personnel. So, what have we got to work with here? We’ve learned very little since the earlier briefing, but we’d better recap for the back shift. Troy McEwen’s disappearance is far too similar to the disappearance of Luca Scott for it to be a coincidence. So, it now looks like abduction. And, following that theory, abduction involving some planning and some kind of surveillance. So,’ Quinn continued, not bothering to hide her irritation, ‘let’s see if we can brainstorm and find some point of connection between the two. Mulholland and Costello had traced Luca as far as the amusement arcade in Byres Road, and we all know what happened when his mother had her fit. There was a biting wind that afternoon, it was dark, it was busy. The ambulance had to double-park and the usual gore-seekers had formed a crowd. In the confusion, Luca was forced or jostled on to the pavement, or perhaps he made his own way there. Everybody was looking in the opposite direction. Kate is organizing a re-enactment of the whole thing tomorrow at four p.m., with the press there.’ DS Kate Lewis rippled her fingers at the squad in a childlike wave, beaming. Quinn continued, ‘We’ll dress up a boy of the same height, and photograph him. Hopefully that will jog a few memories.’

  Anderson caught Gail Irvine glaring at Kate Lewis and muttering something rude which sounded like stupid cow. ‘What was Luca wearing?’ he asked, moving the conversation on.

  ‘A parka from Primark. With a snorkel hood. And yes, they do hide the face, which will afford some anonymity to the stand-in.’ Quinn continued, ‘The mum, Lorraine, is still under observation in Levern-dale and can’t really remember anything. No matter which way round we go, we can’t get past her doctor. So, we have to accept that there’s not much more to be gained from her. Nobody knows who the father is, there’s no ongoing custody battle, and Luca has not appeared at any of his local haunts, so… It looks as if he just wandered up the road and vanished into thin air. DI Anderson?’

  Anderson shrugged. ‘All procedures for a lost child have come up blank, so we’re now considering it an abduction. The CCTV backs up Patsy McKinnon’s statement, but we can’t see much what with the weather, the poor light and a whole load of people milling around.’

  ‘In the light of Troy’s disappearance, we must re-examine,’ Quinn took over. ‘Troy McEwen was wearing only leggings and a lightweight fleece – so, if he is out there, he will be cold, very cold. He was last seen around half past four yesterday. We have a sighting of him here on the swings up in Horselethill Park…’ She tapped the map, ‘… with his mum. The woman was described as sitting slumped on a bench in the playground. The sightings are not confirmed as it was dark, and nobody had a look at her face, but our witness – Mrs Moxham, who was out walking her wee dog – says it’s not the first time she’s seen them both. Troy’s mum has a distinctive Afghan, coat not dog. Mrs Moxham noticed the boy didn’t seem to have a jacket on. You know what the weather was like yesterday; rainy, murky, turning to sleet. The temperature went down to minus three. And Troy wasn’t reported missing until this morning, and that was by a neighbour. Forensics can pick up a whole mishmash of footprints up as far as the rubber matting of the playground, but any shoeprints we got are of doubtful value. We did get a scrape of blood which we’re looking at; however, it is only a scrape, not enough to indicate any real violence.’

  ‘Doesn’t rule it out, though,’ said Kate Lewis, reasonably.

  ‘Did his mother go home without the wee lad then?’ Irvine asked, in disgust.

  ‘The neighbour who reported him missing, Miss Cotter, has already given us a good statement. She’s a nice old dear, lives on the same landing as Troy,’ Lewis said, handing out photocopies of the statement. ‘You can see from this that it wasn’t unusual for Troy to go home on his own. He lived round the corner from the park, across busy roads but still close. The park was his mum’s favourite drinking den, so he was used to walking home,
and if his own flat was locked, Miss Cotter would take him in. She noticed he wasn’t there this morning – the McEwens’ flat door was open, apparently – and that Troy’s mother, Alison, was dead to the world on the settee, clutching a bottle of pills in her hand.’

  ‘So, why did she not think Troy had just gone out?’

  ‘If his mum was having one of her little episodes, i.e. she was pissed, Troy would go next door to Miss Cotter for his breakfast. But he didn’t this morning…’

  Anderson read through Miss Cotter’s statement and could see it all in his mind, a modern-day tale of Babes in the Wood but without the happy ending. Troy McEwen, at seven years old, had enough savvy to find his way through the maze of dark streets that nestle between Horselethill Circus and Byres Road. He knew his own close, and he knew his own door would be on the latch if his mum was in, or to bang Miss Cotter’s letter box if his mum was out. And in he would go, and have chips. Anderson would bet his bottom dollar that had been the pattern of Troy’s life ever since the dad walked out. He thought of Peter, his life full of dragons and pet goldfish. The way a wee boy’s life should be.

  Gail Irvine tentatively raised her hand. ‘From the door-to-door reports, it looks as though Troy wasn’t the only one in and out of Miss Cotter’s flat. She entertains quite a few of the wee kids round there.’

  Quinn nodded. ‘Might be of interest.’ She turned to the wall and ran through the grid search that had already been covered, her finger indicating the ever-increasing circles on the map that centred on the last sighting of Troy. With each hour that passed, the circle was expanding. The abduction sites were less than half a mile apart, so by the end of the day the search teams would be going through the same premises for Troy as they had for Luca the previous day. Even as Quinn resumed speaking, they could hear doors opening and closing downstairs, a constant tramping of boots along the corridor as the search team reassembled, grabbed a cup of tea, warmed their feet and went back out again.

  ‘I’m afraid the search of the McEwens’ flat gave us no leads and, as far as we can tell, nothing else is missing. I want somebody to have another look at it before we talk to the mother, try and get a bit of a feel for the boy. What made him go away just in the clothes he stood up in? He’d no coat, no thick anorak, and it’s going down to minus three again tonight. There was nothing in the fridge – you all know what that means. I don’t think the mother quite grasps the gravity of the situation. She thinks Troy will just turn up… We need to be careful not to interview her without her social worker’s knowledge; need I say more?’ Quinn cracked her fingers. ‘And I don’t need to remind you that family members are responsible for eighty-five per cent of child disappearances. So, are both boys safe and sound somewhere that we have yet to hear about? Do they know each other?’ She kicked a table leg with her heel. ‘But we’ll go with the theory that they have both been abducted. What about the CCTV at the park? Was it any use?’