October Song

by Ru Pringle

  He wonders idly how he’d respond to a job offer.

  The room feels like a balloon about to burst. It’s been three days since the bombing, with still no trace either of Kenneth McCoull or Rajiv Sinclair-Kohli. Despite a cross-agency manhunt employing roadblocks, interviews, searches, raids, and trawls of communication records and almost every recent pixel of CCTV footage from the central western quadrant of the UK’s most troublesome territory, Coira Keir’s trail remained stubbornly cold past Dumbarton. They’d begun wondering if her Dumbarton flypast was a ruse.

  Sebastian stands, clutching his paper cup. ‘Where?’

  ‘Lochgilphead.’

  ‘Is that a place? No clue where that is. Map!’

  The latest Google image of North Britain appears on the big screen. It zooms in to show a rectangle two-thirds of the way up an absurdly elongate peninsula extending lewdly south towards Northern Ireland.

  ‘What’s there?’

  ‘Not much. It’s a small town. Two thousand people.’

  ‘Bloody hell. I was expecting – I don’t know. Roads, houses …?’

  ‘It’s like that over there, sir. It’s the Highlands.’

  He studies the indented and island-spattered coastline in dismay. It’s almost fractal in its complexity. ‘Wasn’t this where one of the roadblocks was, the night of the bombing?’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Fields confirms. ‘Part of an operation against local arms smugglers originally. Meaning it was running before word about the Edinburgh attack came through. The car was found barely three hundred metres away. It was crashed.’

  ‘Crashed?’

  ‘Looks like it went straight over a wall. It wasn’t obvious from the road, and someone had put vegetation over it, meaning it was only found when the roadblock was downgraded this morning. By an old wyfie out taking her dog for a walk.’

  Aerial drone footage is appearing on the screen. It’s showing a dirty white hatchback at the foot of a deep furrow, half-hidden by branches and fronds of dead bracken. The furrow’s in a bank below a tight bend on the neighbouring road. Uniformed police and plain-clothed officers are standing around. As well as police cars, there’s a fire engine. Neglected-looking houses are visible through the trees not far off.

  Sebastian groans. ‘What you’re saying is, the roadblock’s what stopped us finding it.’

  ‘Possibly, sir,’ says Fields, diplomatically. ‘On the other hand, the fact it was found at all may have been a stroke of luck. It was quite well hidden. Dog-walking woman only reported it because of the reward for information mentioned on the news.’

  ‘Anyone hear anything around the time of the crash? Looks like the car hit a rock and a tree. That had to have been audible at the roadblock.’

  ‘No one remembers anything. But not all officers on duty that night have been tracked down yet.’

  Sebastian sits back down. Blows air at the ceiling. ‘Okay. Let’s run through this. Anyone buy that she just happened to go off the road in that particular spot?’

  Much head-shaking is going on. Lorna’s watching him like a kestrel watching a mouse.

  ‘So … she’s driving along the road, feeling paranoid. Probably a total bag of nerves, in fact. Then she sees the roadblock ahead. Maybe the idiots have got their red and blues flashing or something, I don’t know. She panics. Makes a split-second decision. She probably knows that by the time she brakes she’ll be almost upon them – maybe even in full view. So – she throws the dice, and … bam!’ He claps his hands together. ‘Down that bank. Fortunately her car’s stopped out of direct sight of the road, but she’s taking no chances, so she gets busy with the shrubbery.’

  He pulls at his lips. ‘But then what?’ Sebastian isn’t expecting suggestions: he’s just thinking aloud. Having mused for a moment, he leaps to his feet.

  ‘I want a thorough sweep-search of the area around the crash. With tracker dogs.’

  ‘Trail could be three days old now, sir.’ This from Andrew Campbell. The gammon-faced chief inspector seems to have taken Keir’s treachery personally. While he’s trying a little too hard to make up for it, given the edgy servility of most of the team, his bluntness is refreshing.

  ‘So, make sure the dogs have really big noses.’

  This raises a chuckle or two.

  ‘Ina – this is where you come in. You’ve given us a rough idea of Keir before. We need an update. If you were her, in this position, what would you do?’

  He sits as Tiles stands, fascinated by her nervous tic of pushing stereotypical black-framed glasses up the bridge of her nose. Few psychologists he’s met have been comfortable around people. He wonders if they became psychologists to understand what for most people came instinctively.

  ‘Well,’ she begins, tightening her black ponytail even more severely. ‘Um … as I said before, Keir has no close family at all, having been orphaned in her teens. She … displayed many of the usual traits of bereaved kids: didn’t get on well with foster parents, was rebellious at school, got into fights … She, er, ah … left her foster home as soon as she could at sixteen, and – after a couple of years doing menial jobs, during which it appears she mostly stayed on friends’ floors and in youth hostels – got herself a scholarship to Edinburgh University, where she studied law. Although she dropped out a year before her course was due to finish.’

  ‘Any mention of why?’

  Tiles blinks. ‘Ah … well, eh – apparently she told her director of studies she wanted to do something “real”.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  A shake of the head. Even behind concave prescription lenses, the profiler’s eyes look enormous. Sebastian finally nails the sense of familiarity about her that’s been bugging him. She’s a character from one of the Japanese cartoons he was hooked on as a kid.

  ‘MI5 tried to recruit her,’ Tiles goes on, hunching birdlike shoulders with remarkable awkwardness as Sebastian tries not to grin. This statement is causing a few murmurs. ‘She ticked a lot of our boxes, but pulled out just before completing her trial period. There’s no reason given, but Scottish independence had just become official. She moved back north early in the grace period for citizenship. You do the maths.’ Tiles gives a brittle, truncated laugh. Some of the team are beginning to fidget. ‘Then she signed up with what was then Police Scotland, and worked her way steadily up the ranks. Um …’

  Whatever’s been keeping her going seems to have dried up. Sebastian nods encouragement. She frowns, cheeks colouring furiously.

  ‘Yeah. Um … despite what was regularly described as a confrontational manner, police colleagues have spoken highly of her. By all accounts she is an unusually capable officer, with top percentile aptitude scores in most disciplines. She’s cited as having been unusually effective at undercover work, was an exceptional DI in her nine years at the job … And we shouldn’t forget she had the determination and ability to reach the rank of superintendent before her fortieth birthday. In what’s still a highly sexist organisation.’

  She darts glances at Fields and Campbell as she says this. Her entire face is turning pink.

  ‘She, she, ah, has few close friends. Those that we know of have been interviewed, and the ones that aren’t contactable, or are overseas, are being traced. While she should be no match for a trained MI5 field officer, in my opinion we are chasing a determined, clever, and highly resourceful fugitive. I believe she has the potential of being … quite ruthless, within certain parameters. As well as unpredictable. She’s driven by what to her may seem a fierce desire for fairness and order. Which may well explain her part in the bombing – although, ah … I have to say that from what I’ve come to know of her, an indiscriminate act like this is …’ she swallows, audibly. ‘A surprise.’

  Sebastian squints at the psychologist. ‘You don’t think she’s capable of killing?’

  ‘Oh, but she has killed. Twice, on duty. And ordered it too, numerous times, as overseer of armed response units. I’d ju
st have expected something … um,’ – again, she pushes her glasses up her nose – ‘more clinical. I mean, she can be impulsive. But she’s not driven by it. This is a woman who thinks things through. We have to ask: what was she trying to achieve here?’

  Sebastian shrugs. Puts his hands behind his head. ‘You tell me.’

  Ina pouts. Somehow the gesture makes her seem more self-assured. ‘That’s what bugs me. Sir. I don’t know. It doesn’t fit. Which leads me to downgrade the reliability of some of my earlier conclusions.’

  Sebastian leans his elbows on his desk and rubs his eyes. ‘Okay – let’s put motive on the backburner for a while. If you were in her shoes, using what information you have, what would you do now?’

  ‘Well …’ Ina licks her lips. ‘I believe she has a well-developed facility for risk assessment. She can make snap decisions if she has to – but I don’t believe she would act without considering options unless she felt she’d no choice. She probably realises the roads are a danger to her.’

  Sebastian activates the pointer on his ’phone. A red dot appears on the map. ‘Which leaves a limited number of options. One would be walking towards the water, and making her way back south down this … loch. Loch Fyne?’ The dot scribbles up and down the satellite image. ‘Then what? If we buy the theory she crashed the car on impulse, I think we have to assume any original escape plan she had has gone to pot. So … we need to search for any missing boats in Loch Fyne, particularly around Loch Gilphead. What’s funny?’

  There’s a lot of smirking going on. ‘It’s loch,’ says James Fields. ‘Not lock.’

  ‘Who gives a shit? This is a terrorism investigation, not an elocution lesson.’ The smirks magically vanish. ‘We need to drag it too, for bodies, just to rule that out. But if she didn’t choose that option – and I have to say it seems unlikely – then what? She’d have to head overland. Which means either over the top of the peninsula there down to that … Lake Sween, or crossing that little road to go north towards that Crinan place.’

  ‘Cree-nan,’ says Fields, then winces.

  ‘Whatever. Alternatively, if she wants to avoid roads, she can go north towards Lake Awe. Do we know what she was wearing?’

  ‘Footwear?’ Andrew Campbell again. ‘As far as we know, police issue work shoes. I’ll get the boys at the scene to look for footprints; take casts. Speaking of which … a fingerprint from the scene should be coming up. The car looks like it was cleaned, but not perfectly. Just enough to slow us down.’

  A three-metre high partial print scrolls up on the main screen, alongside a complete one from Coira Keir’s records and a confidence figure calculated for the match.

  Ninety-four percent.

  ‘At least there’s no doubt now.’ Sebastian scratches his close-cropped hair. ‘I don’t understand where she’s going, though. I mean, there’s nothing there, right? It’s not like there will be boats just lying around that she can jump into.’ He gets to his feet. ‘Don’t boats have keys? Could she hotwire one? Is that taught in the police?’

  ‘It’s no standard practice.’ Derek Planter this time, pulling a face. ‘For cars noo, we maistly jaist hack the OS wi an official master key.’

  Sebastian ceases his pacing. ‘And where would she go in one? The range of your average speedboat can’t be that great, surely?’

  ‘It’s not that far,’ supplies Carla Stout. Her keyboard is rattling furiously: she’s clearly Googling. ‘Three hundred kay for some military Rigid Inflatables, but most are designed for less than a quarter of that. Boats with tanks inside removable outboard engines will only run for an hour or so.’

  ‘Any reports of boats missing?’

  ‘Not near the crash site, boss.’ This time it’s Scott Petrie’s high, rather nasal voice. ‘Further north, all bets are off. We don’t really know what’s going on up there any more.’ He glances at James Fields, who nods.

  ‘It’s gone to shite. North of Oban, Police North Britain no longer consider property crime worth the personnel risk. Typically, it’s not even logged. We lost seven officers on duty last month, investigating non-critical cases. No way we could sustain that rate of attrition.’ Sebastian ruffles his own hair.

  ‘Any remote intel?’

  ‘Drones were sweeping the coast, the first couple of days.’ Carla again. ‘Nothing. Unfortunately it’s been way too cloudy for satellites, but the glimpses we’ve had have also shown nothing.’

  Sebastian taps his teeth. For a while, he just stands there, squeezing his lips in his palm. He looks up to find Lorna still watching. There’s a wry curl to one corner of her mouth.

  This is her team. At least, it was until he found himself parachuted in. As technically his number two she’s been keeping a low profile, seeming content to beaver away in the background and observe. He thinks he knows the game she’s playing. It’s not that he doesn’t trust her. He’s fairly certain she has a genuine soft spot for him. But now he’s chosen such a hands-on approach, both of them know it’ll be his head on the chopping block if the operation goes south.

  ‘Okay, we’re running out of time here. If she’s gone north, things will get difficult for us, and rapidly. We need remote sensing. Soo-Ling: get us a weather forecast. Book some satellite time, I don’t care what you have to do. Requisition drones for us too. I can see two options: she’s either heading north on foot to a pre-arranged rendezvous, or she’s in a boat.’

  He motions Lorna out of the room. They meet in the corridor outside.

  ‘Anything useful from … you know who?’

  Lorna looks surprised. ‘Were you seriously expecting anything so soon?’

  ‘No. Always was a shot in the dark, if you ask me. And you know I never had much of a liking for loose cannons.’

  ‘The biggest risk is not finding her. Besides, you’re the one who did the vouching.’

  ‘Let’s hope I don’t regret it.’

  ‘I still think we should tell the others.’

  He considers this for a moment. ‘What would that achieve? We’ve had leaks before, when everything was buttoned down. Half this taskforce aren’t even Service. Until you can vouch one hundred percent for everyone in that room …’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  She looks irritated now. Or scared, or something. Sebastian turns, shoulders aside the ops room door, and stands at the top of the steps. Soo-Ling Campbell already has her hand up, like a dutiful schoolgirl. When did everyone start to seem so young? He gestures for her to go ahead.

  ‘Sir – I’m afraid that’s a negative on the satellites. Same for the drones.’

  He rocks back. Blinks. ‘You’re kidding. Don’t we have priority?’

  ‘The army has requisitioned them. They say they’re in the middle of a major separatist insurgence near Fort William, insisting they need all the tactical they can get. Truth is, it might be kind of academic. From the forecast, the satellites won’t be usable for at least two days anyway.’

  ‘Go to the top if you have to.’

  ‘That was from the top, sir.’

  Sebastian realises he’s scowling. Two words pop into his head: Bolton-Clemens. He swears under his breath. ‘Is there nothing at all?’

  ‘Best they can offer is two old WK450 Watchkeepers.’

  ‘Are those things still flying?’

  He pinches the bridge of his nose. At that moment, hearing the door squeak open, he looks up to see a familiar tweed-clad figure leaning on the rail at the top of the stairs. Christ.

  ‘Take them,’ he says, rising. ‘Tell the jockeys we’re looking for a lone female. On foot, or in a boat. In fact, just send them her bloody profile.’

  He draws himself up. Faces the room.

  ‘Okay folks. Looks like we’re doing this the old-fashioned way. I’m authorising a search of the peninsula, starting from … this Gilp-Head place. Try the dogs first. If there’s no trail, we do it the hard way. Grid-search with dogs, west and north, until we find something. A
nd see if you can find some human trackers. I don’t know – use Bear Grylls, or whatever that twat on the TV’s name was. He might still be alive. Use diviners, or hippies waving crystals if we have to. And lean on the police: hard. I want major manpower on this.

  ‘Questions?’

  If there are any, no one is saying. He moves towards the stairs.

  ‘Then let’s get to it!’

  BEYOND THE DOOR, Sir Trevor Bolton-Clemens is waiting like an elderly vulture. Standing perfectly erect with thumbs hooked behind his tweedy lapels, he somehow avoids absurdity. Sebastian would have put money on there being a meeting like this at some point. In fact, he’s surprised it’s taken this long. He supposes it’s a compliment, in a way. It means his nemesis was being thorough.

  Bolton-Clemens fixes him with his probing stare. His eyebrows are raised slightly.

  ‘You have friends in some high places,’ he observes at length.

  Sebastian thinks he sees something more than disdain in the man’s pebble-like eyes. Though he might be imagining it. He says nothing. He’s half expecting to be invited to go on a stroll. Or to take tea with the man somewhere. He isn’t.

  ‘So they found her car.’

  Sebastian nods. He’s not surprised. ‘You’re very well informed. Considering my team only just found out.’

  ‘I am, Mr Blakeslee. It would serve you not to forget it.’

  ‘Are you obstructing my investigation?’

  There’s no change of expression. Not even a flicker. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘We’re experiencing … difficulties scheduling the use of military surveillance assets. To which MI5 is entitled a timeshare under state of emergency protocols.’

  The corners of the man’s lips curl slightly. ‘Whatever would be the point in that? We both want the same thing. This Keir woman brought to justice. Her organisation closed down, as quickly as possible.’