The Lost Sister (12 page)

Dundee was Scotland's fourth city in terms of size, constantly jockeying with Aberdeen for the coveted position of third. But its reputation as the city with the small town feel was what gave it the edge. Stay there long enough, you felt like you knew the streets and the people intimately.

One of the strange contrasts of the city came in the way that neighbourhoods were spread out. Poverty sat on the doorstep of middle class comfort without anyone batting an eyelid. There were no ghettos, just a few wrong turns.

Which is why Richie Harisson's parent's comfortable, mid-sized bungalow sat in the shadow of old council tower blocks that cast a jealous shadow across their neighbours.

I pulled up and idled for a few minutes on the main road outside. It was just past four, and most of my afternoon had been wasted at Burns' house and the school. Before driving over, I'd called Susan to ask if there had been a break in the case. Anything I needed to know.

She hadn't answered.

I hadn't left a voicemail.

Walking up the path to the front door, I felt a chill in the air and couldn't figure whether the temperature was dropping or I was suffering some kind of psychosomatic reaction.

Did it matter?

I chapped the front door three times. Rapid. Hard.

Waited.

The woman who answered was small, with blonde hair cropped short, and blue eyes enveloped by bags that had clearly come with the years. She was dressed in a cheap looking blouse and dark trousers, wore chunky heels to give her that extra little bit of height. Even then, she barely passed five feet. I figured her age for early fifties at a kindly estimate.

“Aye?”

“Mrs Harrison?”

She nodded, wary.

“My name's McNee.” I presented my card. She turned it over a few times as though looking for a hidden message. “I need to talk to your son.”

“The police have been here.”

“DCI Bright, right?”

She hesitated. “Said she was a DC.”

At least I got the name right. But I figured I could stretch the truth a little. Mrs Harrison didn't strike me so sharp as Ms Foster had at the school. “I'm consulting with the official investigation.”

“No one mentioned you.”

“You can phone the detective in charge if you like.” She looked as though she barely had the energy to pick up the receiver, never mind dial the digits.

“Aye, well,” she said. “The lad's not here, anyway. Fed up with all these eejits coming round, asking him about Mary. Hard enough on him and all that. If you do see him, Mr McNee, though, you can tell him he's getting a skelp behind the ear for cutting out. He should be at home with me. Where I can protect him.”

I pulled out a card. Said, “Give Richie this. He wants to talk, he can.”

She looked at the card. Said, “Who're you trying to fool? Nobody's a private investigator. Not in Dundee of all places.”

I shrugged and stepped back. No point in forcing this one. She didn't want to talk. She wouldn't talk.

She wouldn't give me her son. Perhaps afraid of the questions I wanted to ask. The truths I might uncover.

Richie's mother closed the door in my face. Hard. I stood there for a moment, feeling somehow stunned. Then shook my head and turned to walk back out to the road.

I was about to get into the car when a voice said, “You're not the police.”

I looked up and saw a lad sitting on the wall a few metres down he road. Doc Marten's, frayed jeans, attitude to spare. He looked at me from beneath a sandy fringe and his eyes had the attitude of the rebellious teenager.

He wasn't practised, though.

Likely, he'd perfected this act over the last few days. A defence mechanism.

I said, “Richie?”

“Aye. And who're you?”

“I'm consulting with the police.”

He didn't question that. Just nodded and said, “Told that woman I didn't have anything to do with Mary.”

That woman
. Figured he meant Susan.

He hopped off the wall. “What do you mean you're ‘consulting' with the police?” Smart kid, cutting straight through my crap.

“Just that. I'm an investigator.”

“Aye?”

“Private.”

“That's only from films.”

I shook my head. “The real deal.”

He laughed at that, got down off the wall and walked over to the car. Said, “Got a cigarette?”

“Bad habit.”

He nodded. Said, “How'd you quit?”

“Willpower,” I said. “The woman copper. Her name's Susan Bright. We're friends. She's the one asked me to dig a little deeper.”

“I've got nothing else to say. So why'd they send you?” He shook his head, started to back off. “They think I did something to Mary.”

“Did you?”

He nodded, made to walk off again. I followed. Caught up with him. He didn't seem to care, turned off the main road and took the gap between two houses. Heading to the old tower blocks.

I said, “You split up with Mary a few months ago?”

“Aye.”

I leaned forward. “Hurts, right?”

He shrugged. “What do you care?”

I tried for a smile. “Hurts like a bastard. I know it. Really.”

“The breakup? Aye…It was…mutual.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“She was…she wasn't interested any more.”

“She tell you why?”

Didn't get a response. We kept walking up near the high-rises, through patches of grassland that might have once been decorative but were now strewn with discarded glass and rubbish. There was no one around; from just beyond the buildings came the sound of traffic on the Lochee Road heading up towards Camperdown way.

I looked up at the high-rises. Social and architectural failures in every sense. The grand experiment, and it all got fucked up. Story of every city, I suppose, and it could have been worse. Dundee had a history to fall back on.

Some Scottish towns were built on nothing but experiments like this from back in the sixties, and were now something of a national embarrassment; synonymous in the popular public imagination with poverty and crime. A self-fulfilling prejudice.

Richie wasn't a high-rise kid. But I figured he kind of liked hanging around the buildings. He walked here with an ease I'd never have had at his age.

Mind you, it was still daylight and the open spaces seemed deserted. A ghost scheme.

He said, finally, “It was Ms Brown.”

Deborah.

“What, it was her fault that you and Mary broke up?”

“Aye.”

I wished that Wickes had really taken me on some kind of wild goose chase. Would have made my life simpler.

I didn't want his truths confirmed.

But I couldn't run from them either.

Richie stopped walking, looked at some graffiti on the side of one of the rises. Multi-coloured scrawls that didn't mean anything beyond boredom and anger.

I said, “Tell me.”

He kicked at the wall. His manner sulky and awkwardly defiant. Aye, for all that attitude in his clothing and slouched shoulders, he was still little more than a boy. Didn't really know how to defend himself in this world.

Then again, do any of us?

Typical teenage romance.

Finding they were pushed together by mutual friends after cautious flirting. Deciding,
what the fuck
, and discovering they clicked.

For maybe…four or five months?

There are two types of teenage love that I remember. Theirs was the one I was most familiar with. The other one only seemed to happen to other people; the true
highschool sweethearts
who hooked up fourth or fifth year and remained sickeningly attached even when they headed off to university.

Maybe Richie and Mary would have wound up that way.

But Mary changed.

At least, the way Richie told it she did, “Pretty soon after Ms Brown took her for art.”

Go figure.

“I don't know if…I mean, she started not being there. All the time, that is. Kept telling me how she couldn't be distracted. She wanted to be an artist. She was good, too. And she told me how I was dragging her away from that, how we didn't need to spend every waking hour together.” No bitterness there. Or no more than you'd expect from a teenage boy, anyway. “She told me how it was tough to be an artist and how she needed to spend so much time doing it and, well, I was fine with that except…” He still wasn't sure about what he was going to say next. I figured he knew that it could sound petty and jealous to the wrong ears. All appearances aside, I got the feeling Richie was a pretty sensitive kid, knew that he'd have been stupid to make his girlfriend choose between him and her dreams. “We never saw each other at all after a while. She spent all her time…not with me, anyway.”

From what little I knew of Mary, she was smart, focussed and driven. Everything that Richie told me confirmed that. When he talked about her, his body language became fluid and expressive. He sat forward.

He told me how she used to hum to herself when she was working or reading. A habit she tried to break in time for exams, when silence in the hall was mandatory. And that she always wore a cross even though she told people she was a devout atheist. “She wore it because her godfather gave it to her.”

For the breakup being mutual, it was clear he still carried a torch for her.

Don't we all when it comes to our first loves?

More and more the excuses came to be expected. He'd make a date, she'd agree, and then a call or text would break the arrangement off at the last minute. “Every time,” Richie said, “she was with Ms Brown. Always. Everyone knew it, too, that she was spending more time with her art teacher than me.” He started kicking up dirt from the ground, staring at the toes of his boots. Spoke quietly; “Some people said things.”

The rumours that Ms Foster had inferred.

The kind of whispers that could lose a teacher her job.

I had the feeling that Deborah Brown hadn't made a move to nip those in the bud. Probably hadn't even noticed they were circulating. No, all she would have cared about was not being close to her daughter again.

“I didn't want to believe them.”

“Did you talk to her about it?”

He didn't say anything.

I said, “Did you want to talk to her about it?”

More silence. Aye, check the Scottish male:
let's not talk about this
.

“I told the police –”

“I don't care what you told them.”

He looked ready to walk. But he wanted to tell me. I knew it. He just needed the right encouragement.

“Richie,” I said, “We need to find Mary. You want to know what happened to her, same as me. You want to know she's all right. And believe me, pal, anything you can tell me…it's going to help. Even if it seems stupid.”

He ran his hand through his hair, tugging as though to pull it out by the roots. His features squeezed tight, and I saw tears leak from the corner of his eyes. “I thought she was playing with me,” he said. “Really, just messing with my head.” He let his hands drop and his body relaxed completely. “When she told me about Ms Brown. I mean, that's why I didn't tell the police what she said. Because…it wasn't true.”

“What wasn't true?”

“She told me…told me Ms Brown…was her mum.”

When I got back to the car, it was nearly four in the afternoon.

I was strangely light headed. Still couldn't figure why Deborah had abducted Mary. She'd been at the school for months. Working her way into the girl's affections.

Was this not enough?

And if Mary knew Deborah was her real mother, why the need for any of this?

What really unnerved me was the way everything seemed to jar with Wickes's story, even in subtle ways. All his talk of solidarity among people in our line of work was just so much smoke up my arse.

The sheer planning and patience involved with Deborah's plan seemed at odds with the impulsive and obsessive behaviour Wickes had described to me. I couldn't figure it.