The Exiled (6 page)

“There’s sumfink dead down there,” a London voice shouted. Grainger was close enough to be one of the first people on the scene. He leaned over the parapet and looked down onto the small cemetery that was reserved for the army dogs that worked and died here in the castle. Something black lay among the now bloodstained stones, and he didn’t have to look too hard to know what it was.

They had another brutalized swan—and another missing girl.

* * *

“Look, somebody had to have seen something,” Grainger said. “Find them.”

They were back in the office. Two hours had passed since they left the castle, and they were no further forward. They couldn’t find a single witness who had seen the girl after she let go of her mother’s hand. None of the soldiers on duty had anything to add. Grainger had again asked for all the CCTV footage available, and given the size of the castle and the amount of security deployed there, someone was going to be busy for a long time watching it all. But Grainger already knew they’d find nothing—he felt it in his gut. This perpetrator wasn’t just smart—he was toying with them.

Now that they had three girls missing—and the concomitant rise in workload from having three crime scenes to process, interview and monitor—the team was stretched to the limit. But Grainger’s request for more staff fell on deaf ears. The D.C.I. was adamant.

“Get me a result—find one of the girls, or at least be able to tell me how they were taken—until then, do your job. Diligent police work is what’s needed here. Put our team to work.”

The D.C.I. hadn’t said it—he hadn’t needed to—but Grainger knew that the case could be taken away from him at any minute. Every new missing girl just hurried the moment along when he’d no longer be in charge, no longer have a chance to make a difference to the outcome. To Grainger’s surprise, he found that he cared.

He left Simpson to organize a rotation of officers for going through the castle security footage and went outside for some air and a smoke. Even from here, in the quiet courtyard at the rear of the building, he heard the hubbub from the front entrance. It sounded like every press van and news reporter in the country was out there, all clamoring desperately for any scrap of information they could get and not caring how they got it. They’d already had to deal with reporters trying to pass themselves off as coffee or pizza delivery boys and security at the front door had to be tightened to ensure that any member of the public trying to get in was not just another snoop trying it on. What with that, the constant round of interviews—none of which came to anything—the stark fact of the missing children, and a distinct lack of sleep, Grainger felt himself unraveling at the edges.

He sucked smoke and let his mind drift. On the far side of the courtyard he looked into a busy office of administrative workers, all bent forward peering at computer screens.

Worker bees.

That set off a new strain of thought, about birds of a feather flocking together, and he was snapped back to the memory of the dead swan among the tombstones. Before he could dispel that image, his sight blurred and the scene in front of him shifted.

He stood on a high cliff, a stiff breeze at his back threatening to overbalance him. Away to his right the sun was going down behind a high, rocky outcrop, bathing a huddled group of tall stone dwellings in an orange light that made the stone shine. A wide pathway snaked away ahead of him through tall grassland, meandering along the edge of the cliffs to a mountain range in the far, misty distance.

What the fuck is this?

He still tasted the cigarette at his lips, but on turning into the wind he also smelled flowers, and grass, and the salt tang of the sea. Behind him, seen as if through a fog, he could just make out the doorway that led from the office to the courtyard, but even now that was thinning and fading into near invisibility.

“Hey!”

He stepped towards the entrance. Something caught his gaze, something big and black coming up the cliff towards him on massive wings. He stumbled, reaching out for the door as a black shadow fell over him like a cloak. His hand touched the door handle.

And he turned, looking out over the courtyard. One of the workers looked up from her desk, saw him there and smiled—a smile that turned to a frown when she saw the look on Grainger’s face.

He almost fell back into the safety of the station. Just before the door swung shut behind him he heard a voice cry out, as if from far way and into the wind.

“I’m lost, Mammy.”

8

Reports of a fourth missing girl came across Alan’s feeds in the late afternoon. This one had been taken from the back garden of her family home in Leith just after three. The police had the place locked down tight too fast for anyone to get a whiff of the story—but the news had moved on anyway. Individual tales of loss and grief were being swamped by the idea there was a serial abductor on the loose. It had gone national—international even—filling most of the available news slots in all media and spilling over into heated discussions on the social networks.

It was no longer Alan’s story—half the paper’s team was on it now, including the lead reporters. That left Alan with only his hunch that the swans were key to the whole thing, and George Dunlop trusted him enough to let him run with it—for the evening at least.

“Get me something nobody else has got.”

If only it were that easy.

For want of anywhere else to start, he went back to his swan research, this time covering the whole of Scotland and going back a year at a time.

He finally got a hit in 1996 in the
Daily Record
.

“David Galloway, (19), was arrested today in Airdrie and charged with animal abuse, namely the slaughter of four swans that were found dead in the Hunterskill Quarry near Cambuslang last week. Reports initially suggested a possible animal attack, but Galloway was found to have the wings of the swans in his possession at the time of his arrest.”

Alan felt the tingle that told him he was onto something. Ten minutes later he had David Galloway’s history laid out on this laptop screen, and by now he knew—he was most definitely onto something.

He spent the next hour on the phone to a variety of medical personnel, relatives and police officers. He finally got what he wanted by using John’s name as leverage. An underhanded tactic, but if it didn’t break the story, John didn’t have to know, and if it did, John would be happy to hear of it. Alan was given an address—a popular bar in the New Town—and told to be there at eight.

* * *

He arrived fifteen minutes early. He took a beer to a corner seat and sipped at it while watching the patrons. Most of the talk seemed to be of the abductions, and there was a lot of theorizing and proselytizing taking place—but nobody seemed to have any firm clue as to the abductor’s motives, beyond the general agreement that whoever was doing it was an evil fuck.

His contact arrived at eight on the dot. Alan got a beer for the man and sat down opposite John Weir, a retired sergeant from the Lanark constabulary. He was a burly chap in his sixties, with the look of a hard man who’d let himself go a bit as the years advanced. He also, judging by the speed it was disappearing, liked his beer. Alan decided to get straight to the point before he ended up having to shelf out more cash.

“You worked a case—the David Galloway case—back in the nineties in Airdie, didn’t you?”

Weir took a deep slug of beer before replying.

“Daft Davie? I haven’t thought about him in years. He was just a big gangly lad—soft in the head but no harm to anybody. The other kids used to poke fun at him, calling him a retard and a mong, but Davie just took it all in and smiled back at them. ‘The best-natured boy in Scotland,’ was how his mother described him, and for a while it seemed that was the case.

“That was until he started going on about the black birds and the castle. He got it into his head that he wanted to be a big bird himself, so he took to tearing the wings off birds—crows and magpies at first before he moved on to seagulls, and when he started on the swans, we had to do something about it.”

Alan was startled momentarily at the mention of a castle and black birds—too close to his earlier vision to be coincidental. The ex-cop put down his beer and looked over the table, clearly concerned.

“Are you okay, son? You’ve gone as white as a sheet.”

Alan remembered the job at hand—and the question he needed to ask.

“This Davie—there was never any indication of him taking a fancy to kids?”

The older man wasn’t slow on the uptake.

“You think Daft Davie is the man they’re after? No—it won’t be him. The birds were his thing—he was obsessed. And in the end it drove him mad. They put him away years ago, and he’s rotting in a home somewhere in the Borders last I heard.”

Alan shook his head and lowered his voice.

“They let him out—two months ago. Care in the community, they call it—a way to save money on looking after him. Any idea where he’d go?”

The older man tapped his wedding ring on a now empty beer glass.

“I might.”

Alan gave in to the inevitable and went back to the bar. When he returned, he got what he’d been after all along.

“Davie never went far from the farm,” Weir said. “He liked to be close to his mammy. She died, but Davie’s brother took it on after that. Last I knew he was still alive and the farm’s still there, just off the New Lanark road. Galloway’s farm—you can’t miss it.”

* * *

It was nearing ten o’clock by the time Alan turned off the main road onto the farm track, and the only lights to be seen were his own headlights.

He was aware he was pushing this hunch to the limits, aware that he might just be heading for a rude expulsion, maybe even bodily, from the farm.

But I have to know.

The detail about the black birds and the castle were just too closely related to be coincidence. That, and the fact that there was no news on any of the missing children, forced his hand. He switched off the headlights and drove, as slowly and carefully as he could manage, up the short drive to where a squat stone building stood in a thicket of spindly trees.

No lights showed in the dwelling, or in the various outbuildings scattered at the rear of the property. Alan killed the engine, rolled the window down and sat there in the dark, listening. The only sound was a slight rustle of wind in the trees and the far-off muffled noise of tires on tarmac on the main road. It looked like the journey had been for nothing.

I should have a look around. Just in case.

The thought didn’t fill him with enthusiasm, but he was a reporter, on a case that might make his name. If he didn’t do his job now, he knew he would spend every night from here on wondering if things might have been different.

The vision from earlier still had him spooked though, and he was loath to leave the safety of the car without a backup plan. There was only one person he trusted to do the right thing with the information on hand. He got out his phone and texted Galloway’s name and the farm’s address to John. It would be more than enough to get things moving should things go wrong.

He got out of the car and made for the main farmhouse. He’d already decided that the bold approach was the only option—he didn’t have the nerve for skulking around in the shadows, not out here in the dark. He walked up to the front door and rapped on it, hard.

Shave and a haircut—two bits.

No one answered, but something shifted in the house, not too far from the door, as if someone had come to stand, silent, on the other side.

“Mr. Galloway? I just need to ask you a few questions. Can I come in?”

There was still no reply, but now Alan was sure there was someone there on the other side of the door, listening. He bent down and pushed open the brass letterbox. He peered inside. All he could see was blackness.

“Mr. Galloway?”

Without warning the door opened, startling Alan so much that he almost tumbled headfirst onto the hall carpet. When he recovered his composure, he looked into an empty hallway, so dark that only the first couple of feet inside the door were visible.

“Mr. Galloway?”

Something shuffled, deep in darkness.

Alan walked forward into the hall.

The door slammed shut at his back with a concussion that echoed in his ears before fading to silence. He was in pitch-black stillness except for the thud of his racing heart in his ears.

Bugger this for a lark.

He turned and reached for the door, meaning to make a quick escape. His hand met only empty space.

That’s not right. I didn’t move that far—did I?

He took a step, then another… and another. There was no door there to touch. He turned ninety degrees and walked forward, his hands outstretched. After five steps he stopped. The hallway he’d seen had been only five feet wide at most.

So why haven’t I reached a wall yet?

He stood still, hoping his eyesight might adjust to the conditions. But there was to be no respite from the darkness.