The Shadow Man

by Helen Fields

  Baarda ended the call before knocking softly on the bathroom door.

  ‘Connie, are you all right?’

  ‘All good,’ she declared, opening the door. ‘Anything new on Elspeth?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. Just an update on the missing schoolgirl. Uniformed officers have canvassed the school area and the streets surrounding Meggy’s home address and got nothing, save for one of Meggy’s friends, who said she’d talked about seeing someone in the park who’d made her feel unsettled. Makes sense that he’d been following her. If it had been an opportunistic snatch from a school, he’d have been there at the normal end of the school day. He was obviously aware that Meggy was always picked up later.’

  ‘Sure,’ Connie said, the word faint in her own ears. She was staring at her laptop across the room, reconstructing the masses of images contained in the files but seeing those on the walls at Angela’s house. ‘Parks are good places to watch people. You can be jogging, walking, birdwatching, almost anything. Public spaces where it’s normal to be going slowly or just sitting around. Chances are, no one would notice you.’

  ‘Is there something …?’

  ‘Can’t be. Doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Connie,’ Baarda said. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Pull up all the photos you have of Elspeth where she’s in a park. Go through everything, whether it’s her, her husband, their children. They have dogs, right?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Them too. And get someone to double-check with her family which parks those photographs were taken in. We’re only interested in those in or around Edinburgh.’ She grabbed her laptop and began clicking and scrolling.

  ‘But everyone with children or dogs has taken photographs in parks. It has to be one of the most common threads in family images.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Connie said. ‘Look. Angela has these photos on her walls.’ She pointed at images from the Fernycrofts’ house. The park was a focal point.

  ‘That still doesn’t link it to Meggy’s disappearance. I may not be a profiler, but even I’m aware that offenders shifting victim type to such a vast degree is highly unusual.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You don’t think we should talk about that before we alert Police Scotland to the fact that a predator might be lurking in their green spaces? Because that’s not so much a profile as an invitation to every would-be vigilante to start beating up any single male seen on parkland within a hundred-mile radius.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, putting her laptop aside. ‘You’re a predator looking for a particular type of woman. Someone with youngish children. Where do you go to find her?’

  ‘School playground?’

  ‘Now limit the parameters. You don’t just want a mom who drops off and picks up the kids, you want that extra-special mother. You want to witness parental engagement. You probably want to be able to do more than just imagine what she’s saying to her kids. That requires being able to get close enough without standing out.’

  ‘Could be done in a number of different places. Shops, restaurants, even on the street.’

  ‘That’s generic. The conversations will all be the same. What shall we put in the shopping cart for dinner? Are we running late? You’re looking for somewhere where the mother can let her guard down, where she has the chance to showcase her parenting skills.’

  ‘You mean … is she actively playing with her children, or sitting on a park bench checking her social media?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Connie said. ‘A park is an underrated arena for assessing relationships. Teenagers go there either for headspace or to cause trouble. Elderly people who live alone might go there hoping for a chat with a passerby. Parents go there because it provides exercise and a chance for play, but playing with kids is hard work. It requires imaginative and physical effort. Swimming pools are the other place where the same is true.’

  ‘Except at a pool there would be a higher likelihood of cameras,’ Baarda said. ‘But Meggy’s twelve years old. Angela and Elspeth are both in their thirties. You said yourself there had to be some sort of psychosexual motivation to those crimes. Meggy wouldn’t fit his type.’

  ‘This is Edinburgh, not Lagos or Caracas. One dead woman, another kidnapped, now a kidnapped child. That’s a substantial crime spree. What’s the probability of those events being unrelated?’

  ‘Have you seen a photo of Meggy?’ Baarda asked.

  Connie shook her head.

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  He opened his laptop and brought up an image of a girl who, if anything, looked younger than her twelve years.

  ‘This is recent?’ Connie asked.

  ‘From a few weeks ago. A classmate took it at school as part of a science project. No makeup, nothing precocious in her clothing or hairstyle. If she looked or was attempting to act older than her years, then I could see how a mistake about her age might have been possible, but until now we’ve been working on the basis that the link between Angela and Elspeth was the fact that he was attracted to this concept of the perfect mother. The fact that Meggy had noticed a strange man in a park isn’t enough to establish a link for me.’

  ‘What exactly did the friend say about Meggy noticing the man in the park?’ Connie asked.

  ‘Meggy’s home address is Durward Grove in the Inch area, south-west of the city centre. At the northern end of that road is Inch Park, which has a play area. The friend who also lives locally says Meggy saw a man there who she felt was watching her. He initiated a conversation, following which there was some incident where he bled. The friend wasn’t clear on the details of that. Meggy has haemophobia, so she was badly affected by that, and she told her friend the man was … I think freaky was the word, but she didn’t elaborate on that. It’s a large park with plenty of benches. Meggy made some comment about how most grown-ups know they should keep away from girls on their own, not choose the nearest bench to them. Bright kid.’

  ‘Really bright kid. Was that a one-off event – her trip to the park?’

  ‘No, we established from her father that her routine was to go to the park after school whenever it wasn’t raining, sometimes even when it was. She’d take a book and read there,’ Baarda said.

  ‘Take a book and read there? How many twelve-year-olds read a book in preference to plugging into social media these days?’

  ‘This is still a reach,’ Baarda said. ‘The shift in victim type alone makes the link between these offences tenuous.’

  ‘Meggy said the man looked freaky,’ Connie reminded him.

  ‘Plenty of adults look freaky to children. That could be anything from the way he was dressed to what he was doing, to the fact that he might have been humming or had a twitch.’

  Connie pulled up a map of the area on her laptop.

  ‘Think about this,’ she said. ‘Meggy’s address at Durward Grove is in Inch, south of Inch Park. Angela’s address is in Prestonfield, which is north of the top boundary of Inch Park, but still just about within walking distance.’

  Baarda typed into his mobile. ‘Inch Park itself covers sixty-one acres,’ he read aloud. ‘So while their addresses look relatively distant, the parkland is the common ground between their homes.’

  ‘We need to gather the relevant information. Photos, maps of the park, information about how often Angela and Meggy each went to that park,’ she said.

  ‘Connie, you’re still talking about the same man shifting from adult females to a girl who isn’t even a teenager yet. I just don’t want to leap to any conclusions and get sidetracked. We were supposed to be looking for links between Angela and Elspeth.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to assume you have a single predator out there. I just need to see if there’s a chance Meggy and Angela frequented the same area,’ Connie said.

  ‘Okay, but Elspeth’s home is in the city centre, nowhere near Inch Park.’

  Connie shrugged. ‘You got anything better than this at the moment?’

  ‘Fine,’ Baarda conceded. �
�You concentrate on Angela, I’ll follow up with Elspeth’s family, and I’ll ask one of the officers from MIT to do the same for Meggy. Given what her friend said about the man in the park, it’s an exercise they’ll be undertaking in any event.’

  Nodding her agreement, Connie was already entering search terms into a database of psychiatric profiles. The photographs could wait. She already knew what those would show her.

  ‘Profile: Adult female victim + child female victim + violence + abduction + organised.’

  She hit the search key and waited for the results.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Wheelchair access to the sports centre wasn’t through the front door, and that suited Xavier fine. He had a priority parking space at the rear. When it was raining and holding an umbrella wasn’t practical, taking the shallow ramp down to the alleyway was just fine. There had been times in his life when he’d resented being made to feel different. An alternative doorway avoiding steps that also kept him out of queues and therefore out of sight – he’d had that with night clubs before. Seating at the edge of venues, purportedly with easier access but that actually just kept less able bodies out of view.

  The sports centre wasn’t guilty of that. Twice a week he met up with friends and played wheelchair basketball. The benefits were social as much as they were fitness. He got out of the house whenever he could, but that was getting increasingly difficult as muscular degeneration caught up in the race they’d been having for several years. Sometimes he felt strong enough to believe that it would never get the better of him. Then there were days when just lifting his arms to pick up the kettle and make a cup of tea was the effort equivalent of a boxing match.

  Today was about medium on the scale of useless to extraordinary. The basketball team was diverse in terms of how each had arrived at wheelchair status. From army veterans to car-crash victims, those who’d been born lacking a functioning pair of legs to one who’d attempted suicide from a high building only to smash both legs beyond repair but with a renewed appreciation of the value of life. They all carried a label.

  Sport had always been a part of his life. He’d played football, rugby, hockey, jogged whenever he could and never felt it was a chore. Then, as if in slow motion, his body had begun to fail. The misdiagnoses in the early stages had veered from the ridiculous to the just plain negligent. Glandular fever. Food poisoning. Excessive growth spurt. Gluten intolerance. Hypochondria. And excessive masturbation: if only.

  He still loved getting outside. These days things just happened a little slower. He’d be on the sidelines watching his local team playing football rather than scoring goals himself, and offer encouraging words to those doing their utmost to shift from the sofa to completing their first park run. Sidelined pretty much summed up how he defined life in a wheelchair. That wasn’t self-pity – just his reality.

  The girls who’d giggled when he’d spoken to them in his past life – a tall, well-muscled eighteen-year-old – now slid their gazes towards his able-bodied friends. Potential employers saw him as either a diversity tick box or as requiring additional investment. Not everyone, not everywhere. Life still had its moments of hilarity, warmth, and fulfilment. But had the edge been taken off? You fucking bet it had.

  It was only a couple of minutes to the car park. He had his sports kit on his lap, keys in one hand and was self-propelling with the other. It was dark, raining and the lighting wasn’t as good as it should have been. He checked the upper guttering of the sports centre, below which movement-triggered lighting usually made the access more useable. Two of the four lights weren’t working. The cause of that wasn’t immediately obvious until he reached a spot directly beneath one of them and found splinters of plastic and half a brick. Kids. Not that he didn’t understand the desire to break things during those testosterone-fuelled fury days when the world was a constantly rolling ball of hate and hilarity. The destruction of physical things served a purpose to teenagers, offering much-needed relief from societal structure. He just wished they didn’t have to practise it down already dim alleyways.

  To his left was a dead end filled with the usual detritus of big cities. Skips for rubbish, recycling bins, a stack of wooden pallets, and darkened doorways into industrial buildings that were never used. He headed to the right, where in about fifty yards a left-hand turn would get him to his vehicle in a matter of seconds. The footsteps behind him were nothing unusual. It wasn’t only wheelchair users who took the back access, although the only parking spaces out here were reserved for disabled badge holders. Sometimes the odd staff member could be found sneaking out for an illicit cigarette, or to make a call they didn’t want overheard, which was why he didn’t turn round. Even when the footsteps got louder, he didn’t look to see who was coming. It had never occurred to him that he was at risk.

  Xavier heard a rustling, no more suspicious than a hand rifling through a bag for keys. By the time he decided to look round to see if the nearby pedestrian was anyone he recognised, there was already a pair of hands and a vague black shape heading towards his face. He had time only to issue a garbled ‘whayygg’ combination of question and outcry before his head whipped backwards, his chair performed a sharp 180-degree turn, and everything went dark.

  Engine oil assaulted his nose as he sped backwards, pulled along by the pressure of the material against his neck, and he fought to remove the bag that was blinding him. The thickness of the material made shouting futile, and he needed all the oxygen he could get to fuel his muscles. Two hours of exercise though, and he was all but done. His super-lightweight wheelchair, designed to make his movement around the basketball court speedy and fluid, offered no resistance to whatever lunatic had decided he was fair game.

  The bag tightened around his neck as he grappled with it. Words flew like bullets through his brain as he thrashed, but none would come out of his mouth with his windpipe cut off.

  Pranksters? he thought.

  One wheel of his chair hit an obstacle along the alleyway and he tipped perilously to the side. Abandoning his efforts with the bag, he clung on.

  Neo-Nazis?

  There had been an upsurge in the far right’s outspokenness. Only two weeks earlier someone had shoved a leaflet under his door, disconcertingly professionally designed and printed, that suggested ancient Ugly Laws should be resurrected. Not so ancient in the USA, where the last of those laws had only been repealed officially in the 1970s. Unbidden, the wording came back to him as his chair righted itself and banged, hard, back onto solid ground.

  ‘Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way as to be an unsightly or disgusting object …’ was forbidden to expose themselves to public view. When he’d picked up the brochure, he’d assumed it had been broadly distributed and only ended up in his possession by chance. Now, it seemed more likely that he was the subject of a deliberate targeting, and that the pamphlet had been the precursor to the treatment he was currently receiving.

  Mistaken identity?

  He clung to that. Perhaps it was all a mistake. He wasn’t the only one on the wheelchair basketball team, and at least three of them were former military. Those men had enemies in several quarters. What would they do to him if he couldn’t convince his attacker that he had the wrong man? Kneecapping? Beheading? Immolation?

  ‘You fucker!’ Xavier recognised his teammate Danny’s Geordie accent.

  The bag around his neck flapped loose and he wrenched it off, gulping air and spinning round.

  Danny wheeled his chair towards them at speed and threw a hammer fist punch at the chest of a man who was still grappling to take control of Xavier’s wheelchair. The blow landed, but its force was softened as the man took a half step back. Xavier took his sports bag by the handles, whirled it over his head and into the man’s face, buying Danny time to wheel in closer and line up a further punch.

  His attacker was unmoved. The sports bag fell to the floor.

  Xavier did his best to scream for help, but all that came was a
hoarse rumble.

  ‘Get the fuck out of here, X,’ Danny said. ‘I’ll deal with this bastard.’

  Xavier didn’t need to be told twice. Heading for the door he’d exited through, he knew that there were times to fight and times to send for help. If Danny – ex-marines, weightlifter, and all-round powerhouse – couldn’t fight off the lunatic, then he didn’t know who could. He looked around for signs of anyone else coming to help as he headed for the ramp. Danny was making plenty of noise, but there was a main road nearby, drowning the sounds of the fight, and it was night-time in an industrial area. Typically, the gym was well soundproofed to keep the noise in. It hadn’t occurred to Xavier until then that the soundproofing would work both ways.

  ‘Come on then, you mother …’ Danny growled.

  The man didn’t make a sound, instead sidestepping around Danny’s chair and neatly avoiding contact. Not attempting to engage in a fight. It wasn’t a general attack then, Xavier realised, and it certainly hadn’t been a prank. Whoever the man was, he had come for him and him alone.

  He pushed forward, his right wheel grating and catching. Xavier leaned down to rectify the problem. There was damage, presumably from when he’d landed too hard after tipping. He reached into his pocket for his mobile, knowing as he did so that he’d left it in his sports bag and not yet retrieved it. The bag lay in the alleyway the other side of the man, who was staring blankly at Danny, entirely unconcerned.

  Danny rushed in, fist smashing into the man’s abdomen and issuing a battle cry worthy of the fiercest Highlander. The attacker folded slightly but didn’t crumble. Danny’s mouth opened, and Xavier could see his friend trying to process what had happened. His fist was an unstoppable force. Their team told jokes about it. It had become something of a legend. And the man was little more than a reed. Even in the dark and with a jacket on, his build was insubstantial.

  The man looked Xavier in the eyes as if Danny weren’t there at all and walked towards him again. Steady but unrushed. Passing under one of the remaining pools of light, his face became clearer and Xavier finally recognised him for what he was. The skeletal body, sunken eyes and stark cheekbones. The sense that nothing earthly could touch him.