The Hidden Eye

by Oliver Davies

  “A picture of mini Callum,” Fletcher said with a devilish grin, holding up a framed picture of my father, Sam, and myself, all wearing matching jumpers. I was probably about five in that captured moment, and Sam was just a baby, reaching up her chubby hand to yank on Alasdair’s beard. “Look at your little central parting!” Fletcher cooed, pointing at my absolutely terrible haircut. That photo used to sit on my father’s desk where he could look at it every day. Sam always said that if he had simply walked out on us, he would have taken it with him, and the fact that he hadn’t proved that something bad had happened. I once asked her why a man cold enough to abandon his family would take a reminder of them with him, and she refused to talk to me for a month.

  Fletcher put the picture aside as she continued to paw through the box. “I’ve got a couple of books, and a really, really old laptop. Look at this thing.” She pulled a grey brick of a laptop out, turning it over in her hands and blowing off the dust.

  “Pass me that,” I said, stretching out a hand for the device. Fletcher tugged the cord free as well and passed both things over, and I ducked under the desk to plug it in. I set the laptop by my own box to wait to see if it would boot up.

  “Let’s see,” Fletcher continued. “Your dad had a lot of crap.” She piled several toys and random decorations on the coffee table as I shrugged. My dad had been a bit of a hoarder. She focused on a Magic 8 Ball, an odd piece of junk he had picked up during a trip to the United States. “Only ever seen something like this in an American film.” She shook it up. “Will Callum ever learn how to smile without looking like he’s in pain?” She studied the little window for the answer and frowned. “‘My sources say no.’ Bummer.” She cracked a grin, and I rolled my eyes.

  The laptop finally whirred to life, the fan wheezing like a fat man in summer, and the screen asked me for a username and password. I turned to the last page of my father’s journal where I knew he kept all his login information. My fingers jumped across the keyboard, and then it was just a matter of waiting for the computer to load.

  “Bloody hell, did we really live like this?” I asked as the white circle went round and round.

  “I don’t have the patience for this,” Fletcher agreed.

  The desktop appeared, and then the icons popped up one by one as the mouse cursor spun. I had to reconnect the laptop to the WiFi since we’d changed providers since this dinosaur had last been used, and then I began to poke through the various folders. Despite the fact, or perhaps because he had been a data analyst, Alasdair preferred paper filing to electronic copies, hence the stacks and stacks of folders in Fletcher’s third box.

  Next, I went into his browser history, and found about five different cryptid forums and message boards. I opened each of them up, cycling through the various usernames and passwords at the back of the notebook until I found the ones that worked. Three of the websites hadn’t been active for five or six years, but the other two had posts from just last week.

  I scrolled through the site, looking for any mentions of Kane or the Kraken. Most of the discussions were full of theories about well-known photos, how they were taken, what they were, what they meant, while other posts were of new, original sightings, trying to prove that this one, this time was real. The messages only went back ten years, and I couldn’t figure out if or where the site kept archived posts, so there was nothing from my father which I found was actually a little disappointing.

  “You should post something,” Fletcher said. She’d stood and was leaning in to read over my shoulder. “Maybe you can catch this Kraken’s attention.”

  “Or the people who abducted him,” Sam’s voice said in my head.

  I poised my fingers over the keyboard, wondering what I should write. My mind had gone completely blank.

  “Pretend to be your dad,” Fletcher suggested.

  “Yes, thanks for that,” I said drily.

  I took a deep breath and then dove in before I could think too hard about what I was going to do. “Back in the game. Found something big. Anyone heard from Kraken recently? Could use their help.”

  I had no idea if I’d matched my father’s tone and style or if it was even acceptable to name drop the Kraken like that, but it seemed like it was better to be as blatant as possible. I was more likely to attract someone’s attention that way.

  “Yes?” I asked Fletcher, looking for confirmation.

  She nodded, so I hit the post button and closed out of the browser. Nerves wrinkled within my stomach as I did so. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

  I gathered up the leather notebook and the laptop, and we got to work putting the boxes back in the loft. I figured Martin might be able to get something else off the computer. “Can I keep this?” Fletcher asked, holding up the Magic 8 Ball.

  “Sure,” I said, and she shook the toy happily.

  “Will I get to see Callum’s baby photos?” she asked it. “It is decidedly so.” She gave me a serious look. “The orb has spoken. You must obey.”

  I squinted at her but didn’t deign to give her a reply.

  We clattered down the stairs and went to say goodbye to Eleanor who was no longer in the kitchen. We found her out in the garden, on her knees amongst the baby plants. There were two sides to Eleanor MacBain--the polished and professional side she showed the world with her perfectly crisp blouses and tailored blazers, and then there was this other side with a streak of soil on her cheek and worn canvas gloves on her hands.

  “Is it okay if we take these?” I asked, holding up the laptop and notebook.

  Eleanor stood, brushing soil from her knees, a flush on her cheeks. “Do you think you found something?” Eleanor believed her husband’s disappearance had something to do with a scandal he’d potentially discovered working at his security company, but she’d never been able to find proof. She’d never let it go though.

  “Maybe. I’ll let you know.”

  Fletcher pulled out her pocket Moleskine notebook, scribbled something across a page, and ripped it out, holding it out to Eleanor. “This is my email. I would like some embarrassing photos to share with the station, please.” She batted her eyes at Eleanor, whose eyes took on a gleam that I definitely did not like as she took the paper from Fletcher.

  “I have some lovely pictures of Callum when he was wee,” Eleanor said, grinning as she pinched my cheek.

  I flinched away and scowled at her. “When did sharing these with the station come into this?” I demanded.

  Fletcher smirked. “Just now.”

  “Why do I work with you?” I muttered, pinching the bridge of my nose.

  We said goodbye to Eleanor and returned to the station. The last thing to do before we called it a day was to check-in with the lab to hear their report on the crime scene and body. There was an argument going on as we walked in, though I couldn’t see any of the lab techs in between the metal tables and cluttered computer desks.

  “I told you not to touch it!” I heard Martin yell. “What did you think was going to happen?”

  “I thought I could do it,” a second, much younger sounding voice whined.

  “I’ve been drilling laboratory safety into your head since day one. Did it all just go in one ear and out the other?”

  Fletcher and I stepped into the back half of the lab to see Martin hunched over his assistant’s hand, cleaning a long cut on the palm as he berated the red-faced young man. There was a shattered beaker on the ground, a few of the glass fragments flecked with blood. Adams sat on one of the metal tables, eating crisps out of a family-sized packet as she watched the scene.

  She spotted us first and coughed into her hand to signal the others. Martin paused as he shook out a roll of gauze and then went back to wrapping the bandage around his assistant’s hand. “Oh, hey, Callum.”

  “What’s going on here?” Fletcher asked.

  “Benson broke a beaker.”

  “I didn’t mean to!” Benson insisted. He’d been an intern for a few months before Martin mad
e him a full-time assistant, which had shocked everyone in the station since the two of them were almost always at each other’s throats. He had bright orange curls and freckles splashed across his cheeks. His nose was oddly flat, but it somehow worked with the rest of his face, making him look like a bruiser even though the rest of him was reedy and small.

  Martin, on the other hand, was dark-skinned and balding, a greying goatee ringing his mouth. He’d worked under Eleanor when she’d been Chief Superintendent and was considered a staple of the station. If he ever left, the entire place would shut down.

  Martin patted Benson’s hand once he was finished wrapping it and then walked over to a board hanging from the wall that read, “Days Since Benson’s Last Accident” and changed the thirty-three to a zero. He shook his head and tsked, but there was a hint of a smile on his face.

  Adams jumped down from the table and rolled up her crisp bag, licking the last of the salt from her fingers. “You here for the report?” she asked Fletcher and me.

  “Yes,” I said “Are you ready? We can come back.”

  “We’re still waiting on the post-mortem, but we’ve got everything else put together.”

  She led us over to a small glass room just off the main room of the lab, Martin and Benson following along behind us. A projection screen hung on one wall, and the table was covered with plastic evidence bags and photographs. The five of us formed a ring around the table, and Adams dimmed the lights, turning on the projector so we could see the larger versions of the photos on the table.

  “Okay, so the window was definitely broken from the outside, so the killer came in from there,” Adams began.

  “Do we know how they got up there?” Fletcher interrupted, and Adams gave her a bit of a look because she was one of those people who liked to get through her whole spiel before she took questions.

  “Very skillfully,” Adams replied. “Though we’re waiting on confirmation from O’Neil, we think the arm wound was the first one, creating that blood pool you saw in the living room.” Adams clicked through the corresponding pictures. “Then he ran out of the flat and was pushed down the stairs. We found some blood on the staircase and a smear on the doorknob. There was a bit of a struggle leading into the alley, and then, you know, the stabbing.” She grimaced, staring at the full-body photo of the crime scene.

  “Did you find any sort of ID?” I asked.

  “In a way. We found these.” Martin sorted through the evidence bags on the table and handed me one filled with chips of melted plastic.

  I examined them. The pieces had been scorched and warped beyond recognition. “What am I looking at?”

  “I’ve been working on reconstructing them.” Martin held out his hand for the clicker, and Adams passed the little remote over. He moved through the slides until he found the one where he’d put the pieces back together like some kind of messed up jigsaw puzzle. “I think it’s some kind of work ID. See the edges of a logo up in the corner?” He sketched a circle around the upper left corner where faint, geometric lines were barely visible. “The damage is pretty extensive. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make a full rendering.”

  “Why would he cut up and burn his work ID?” Fletcher wondered. She took the bag from me and peered at it, rotating it over in her hands.

  Martin shrugged.

  “Fletcher and I thought it looked like he was getting ready to run,” I said. “Did you get the same impression?”

  Adams pulled a box out from under the table. It held the duffel we’d seen on John Doe’s bed. “This bag’s certainly got everything in it that a person would need to run.”

  “We found the credit cards in the bin as well, also cut up,” Martin added, locating the matching evidence bags. The cards had been diced up just like the work ID, but they hadn’t been burnt. Martin had taped them back together, and the name matched the one on the driver’s licence.

  “And his phone?” I asked.

  Martin and Adams glanced at each other and shrugged in unison. “We couldn’t find it or a laptop,” Adams answered. “It wasn’t on him, and it wasn’t anywhere in the flat.”

  “Do you think the killer took it?” Fletcher said.

  “Maybe. But why?” Martin answered.

  There were quite a few ‘but why's’ to this case. It felt like we had all the pieces we needed to play the game with a few extras thrown in for good measure, and those few extra bits didn’t fit but also had no home of their own, but you couldn’t throw them out because they might be integral to their own game.

  We’d had a lot of mismatched board games growing up because my father kept trying to invent new ones, and then he’d forget which pieces came from which game. It used to drive Eleanor and me nuts.

  “I’ve emailed all this to you,” Martin said as silence began to stretch across the room.

  “That’s great. Thanks, guys.” I smiled at the three lab techs as Adams began to pick everything up off the table and sort it into boxes. “Martin, could I have a word?”

  “Sure.” Martin and I stepped out of the small room while Benson and Fletcher stayed behind to help Adams finish cleaning up. “What is it?”

  I pulled Alasdair’s laptop from the messenger bag I had slung over my shoulder and passed it to him. “This was my father’s. If you’ve got the time, do you think you could see if you can pull anything off it? I’m looking specifically for any mention of a man named Kane or someone called the Kraken.”

  Martin’s eyes glowed as he took the laptop off me. “Does this have something to do with that Loch Ness Monster photo?” Martin was almost as cryptid-obsessed as my father had been, so when I’d first sent him that photo, he’d practically shot off the walls with excitement.

  “Yes,” I replied. “And I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.”

  “Sure thing.” If Martin clutched that laptop much tighter, he was going to break it. “I love a good code name. I’ve been trying to get them to catch on down here, but Lindsey won’t go for it.”

  “Good luck with that,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Let me know if you find anything.”

  Martin gave me a thumbs-up and carted the laptop away to his workstation, placing it in a drawer for safekeeping. Fletcher appeared behind me. “Boo,” she said in my ear, trying to startle me, but I just gave her a flat look.

  “I’ll get you eventually,” she promised.

  If she kept trying to sneak up on me, I was going to have to introduce her to The Rabbit to give her a taste of her own medicine.

  “I think we’re done for the day,” I said. “Unless there’s anything else you can think of?”

  “Not until we get the coroner’s report,” she agreed.

  “See you tomorrow then.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Five

  Tomorrow came far too quickly, as it always did, and before long, I found myself back at the station, feeling as if I’d never left. Owens, manning the front desk, waved me over as soon as I arrived. “There are two women here to see you,” he said.

  “About what?” I asked. I glanced towards my desk to see two brightly dressed black women standing beside it, their backs to me.

  “Something about your case.”

  I perked up. We could really use a good solid lead to go on “Thanks, Owens,” I said, and he turned back to his newspaper as I went to greet my visitors.

  “I’m Detective Inspector MacBain,” I said as I approached. “What can I do for you?”

  I recognized the taller of the two from one of the photos in our John Doe’s flat. Long plaits cascaded down her shoulders, strands of colour woven through each one, brushing the shoulders of her brown leather jacket. Bracelets jingled on one wrist, and her bright red trousers were tucked into the top of her heeled boots, adding a couple of inches to her height so that she wound up taller than I was.

  Her friend was shorter and more willowy, dressed in a loudly patterned skirt and white blouse. She’d bound her dreadlocks up with a blue scarf, its
edges dangling down the back of her neck. She looked a little nervous to be here while her friend looked positively furious as she shoved a newspaper my way.

  “What is this?” I asked as I skimmed the page before me. I spotted the article about my case almost instantly, and my eyes widened with shock.

  “They deadnamed and misgendered our friend,” the tall woman said. Her hand trembled as she released the paper, and tears welled in her eyes, barely pushed back by her anger.

  Sure enough, the article called our John Doe Julia Greene and used feminine pronouns throughout. I frowned. How did the reporter get this information? “Why didn’t you go right to the newspaper?” I asked.

  “We did,” she answered. “They told us they were just using the information they got from the police.”

  “I didn’t authorize any kind of press release,” I said. “I have no idea who would have talked to them.” I tried to think of everyone who had worked on or known about the case, but they were all people I trusted to be respectful and also keep their mouths shut unless I told them otherwise.

  “Well, somebody did. Do you have any idea how often this happens to people like us?” the tall woman demanded. She lost the fight against her tears, and they slid down her cheeks as her shoulders began to shake. Her friend took her hand and gently squeezed. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to have the very last record of you be wrong?”

  “No,” I answered honestly. “But I can promise you that I had nothing to do with this, and if I had known, I would have made sure it never got published.”

  “Fat lot of good promises do now,” she said.

  “Would it help if I corrected it?” I asked. “I could give an official statement and make sure the right information gets out.”

  She squinted at me suspiciously, trying to figure out if I really meant it.

  “You knew him, yes?” I continued, and both of them nodded. “We couldn’t find mention of his real name anywhere when we searched his flat, or much of anything about him, really. Would you be willing to sit down with me and help fill in the blanks?”