The Stone Gallows (39 page)

‘She's kidnapped your son? That wee boy that I sometimes see you with? That's your son?'

‘His name's Mark. He lives with his mother. He's a good kid, and this woman – Jane, Sophie, whatever the fuck she's calling herself – snatched him as he walked home from school. Pour the coffee.'

He turned to do as he was told. ‘Jesus, that's heavy.'

‘It's a fucking weight, Lee. It's a gravitational pull of a thousand suns. I want him back. I want my little boy back safe and sound. I want you to help me do this.'

‘I don't know anything.'

‘I need to know how to get in touch with Sophie. . . Jane. Do you have a phone number for her?'

‘I don't. . . wait.' He reached behind, fumbling on the kitchen counter. I tensed, still wary of the sudden knife, but when his hand reappeared, it held nothing but a mobile phone. ‘She called me last night, to tell me that she wasn't coming over. I might still have the number.' He prodded buttons before handing the phone to me. ‘I think this must be it.'

I looked at the digital screen. ‘That's not a mobile number.'

‘She said she was low on credit. It sounded like a pay phone.'

Great. A payphone. Only about a million of them in the city. Even so, it was worth a shot. I dialled the number, hoping that somebody would answer.

Nobody did.

11.21.

Ten minutes later, I was back on the road, cruising aimlessly through the city streets. I was tired, and the caffeine had given me a headache. I found a pack of paracetamol in the glove compartment and dry-swallowed two of them.

It was after four, and the streets were devoid of people. The city seemed to belong to the animals – foxes, cats, the occasional stray dog, even a few rats. They would look up in surprise as my headlights washed over them; dull eyes reflecting dumb curiosity before returning to whatever tasty treat the gutter had yielded. Lonely, I kept the radio on, one-hit wonders linked by a smoky-voiced disc jockey who sounded only a couple of tokes away from Art school.

I was lost.

Not
lost
lost. I had drifted south, the glass and concrete of the commercial centre giving way to sandstone tenements as the city changed from one set of clothes to another. I found myself on Victoria Road, the trees of the park little more than vague shadows in the dark.

I was lost as in aimless. Lost as in directionless. Lost as in having no plan, no ideas, and absolutely no idea what I should do next.

I couldn't go home because I had no home to go to. I couldn't go to Joe's, because I was a guest in his house and guests don't stumble in at four in the morning and wake the place up. Audrey had made it plain that I had outstayed what there had been of my welcome, and I couldn't go to Liz's, because Liz was in hospital recovering from a broken leg that was entirely my fault, yet another person whose life had been negatively affected by my truly spectacular ability to combine poor judgement and bad luck.

I thought briefly about heading north, finding a wooden shack in the middle of a deserted moor, and living off the land. Nothing to occupy me except hunger, pneumonia, and my increasing obsession with persuading the
Sunday Times
to publish my una-bomber style political manifesto.

Sounded fun.

With that thought in my head, I found an empty space in a quiet back-street, tilted my seat back and went to sleep.

Well, tried to, at least.

12.1

I was woken by somebody trying to get into my car. A persistent scratching sound dragged me from a thin, dream-filled sleep into a thin, worry-filled reality.

I opened my eyes and found myself staring into the beady black ones of a magpie standing on the right-side windshield wiper. As I watched, the bastard thing dipped its head and pecked at the rubber with a beak that looked as sharp as a vegetable knife. The thing shifted on its perch, extending its wings for balance.

Bad luck to see a single magpie, and certainly no way to start the day. I looked around for its mate. The darkness was lifting, leaving behind a heavy fog that shrouded the world in a shifting grey. The street was quiet, waiting to wake up, the cars beaded with condensed moisture.

No companion. Mr Magpie was all on his lonesome, just like me.

He watched me beadily through the windscreen, his head cocked to one side. I raised my hand in a wave. ‘Hello there, Captain. How's the wife and kids?'

With a arrogant tilt of the head, the bird took flight, swallowed by the murk before it had travelled ten yards. I watched it go. ‘Well, screw you, then.'

Sleeping in the car had done me no good at all. My knees and ankles were fused, my lower back a symphony of aches and pains. My hip felt like it had been hollowed out, the bone marrow replaced with broken glass. Even my arms were numb. I yawned and stretched as far as the small car would permit. My mobile phone was on the dashboard. I grabbed it, checked the display.

No messages – and, just for a bonus, the battery was nearly flat. I had enough power for maybe two minutes worth of conversation.

First thing I did was send a text to Audrey: N E News?

Three minutes later, she got back to me: No. Fuc off.

Good old Audrey, managing to remain ladylike even in a crisis.

I thought about texting Joe, but what would the point be? If there was anything, he would have called me. No reason to go wasting precious juice. Instead, I looked at the last number I had dialled.

It was an 0141, the standard dialling code for Glasgow. Wherever Sophie had called Lee from, it had been somewhere in the city. I dialled it again, doubting that anybody would answer but giving it a shot just the same.

The tone repeated in my ear. I drifted off, making my plans for the day. I needed to find out a little more about Sophie Sloan, if only to make her appear a more attractive suspect to the officers assigned to investigate Mark's disappearance. Janice Galloway had shared my concern, but the police would be doing what they did best – sifting through details, trying to find out if any of the information I had given them tied up with any of the facts that they had discovered on their own. Right now, Sophie Sloan was nobody, just another name among several, another address to be checked. They would have people concentrating on known paedophiles that lived in the area of the school, or near Arnold's house. That meant lots of interviews, lots of alibis to be confirmed, and most of all, lots of man power. It was frustrating, especially. . .

‘Herro?'

I started, forgetting I was still on the phone. It was a man's voice, but the inflection was childish.

‘Hello, who is that?' I said, in my friendliest voice.

‘Herro?'

‘Hello. Who am I speaking to?'

‘Herro. Who this?'

‘My name's Cameron.'

The English wasn't so much fractured as taken to the toolshed at the bottom of the garden and dismembered. ‘I Hiro. Hiro Makanura.'

I put a smile into my voice. ‘Nice to meet you. Where are you, Hiro?'

‘I from Japan.'

‘And where are you now?'

‘Glasgow, yes please. In Glasgow. Is Miles Better. Is No Mean City.'

‘Whereabouts in Glasgow?'

‘Horrorday in.'

More of that ‘No Mean City' crap, I thought. I wished I could climb into my phone and pop out at Hiro's end like an evil Genie. I'd give him a fucking horror day in. ‘Whereabouts is that?'

‘Sorry?'

‘Where are you just now?'

‘Horrorday in.'

‘What do you mean?' Beeps sounded in the background; my mobile was telling me it was tired and needed a little nap. I resisted the temptation to hurl it out of the window.

‘Horrorday in.'

‘Yes, but where?'

‘I tell you. Ho. . .'

Gone.

Angry, I threw the mobile at the passenger door. It bounced off the glass with a thunk and landed into the footwell. I put my elbows on the steering wheel and my head in my hands, swearing viciously under my breath. The phone number had been my only link with Sophie Sloan.

Horrorday in Glasgow.

He was on holiday in Glasgow.

Well, good for him. I hoped it fucking rained and his camera got nicked.

Although my bodyclock, like my mobile phone, was telling me that my batteries were low, my watch insisted that it was quarter past seven. Time to begin a brand new day of fun and games. Less than three hundred yards away was a drive-through McDonalds. As it was unlikely she would offer me breakfast, I would stop for a Muffin before making my way back to Audrey's to see if there had been any new developments. Sighing, I keyed the ignition.

After that, I would try to hook up with Joe. If the police weren't going to take the Sophie Sloan link seriously, maybe the two of us would be able to do some digging.

Mark.

I did some quick mental arithmetic. He'd been missing for about thirteen and a half hours. Anything could have happened to him. It felt weird. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to act. I was an active person by nature. It felt wrong to sit at home on the settee and worry.

I needed to be out there, looking for him, filling my time with something positive. If I stopped moving, the worry would get to me, would gnaw away in my brain. If Sophie Sloan had been the one that abducted him – and I believed it – then maybe she would look after him. He might be frightened, but she was female. Surely there was something to be said for the maternal instinct? She would comfort him, feed him, reassure him that all was well, even though it fundamentally wasn't.

Amateur night on the Psychology Couch: if it had been Sophie Sloan that abducted Mark, perhaps she was just seeking a replacement child. Perhaps Mark was the spitting image of the one she had lost, and that somehow, in her twisted, delusional mind, she actually believed that she was entitled. If that was so, then I felt sorry for her.

Of course, not sorry enough to not kick the shit out of her for all the fear and worry she had put us through. If Sophie was the one, the bitch was dog meat.

McDonalds was in front of me now, the two golden arches – I think Stephen King calls them The Great Tits Of America – looming out of the fog. I positioned myself in the drive-through lane. There were two cars before me; within seconds there were two cars behind me as well. I wondered if anybody in Scotland even bothered to make breakfast anymore. Within three minutes, it was my turn. The assistant looked about fifty and had a heavy East European accent.

Back in his homeland he was probably a brain surgeon, or a nuclear physicist, and yet he had come to Britain for a better quality of life and found it serving fast food. What a fucking world. I gave him my order and pulled forward to the delivery window. My breakfast was handed to me in a paper sack.

I found a parking space and started to eat. I switched on the radio, but every station was either playing irritating shit Fifty-Cent, or West-life, or Puff Daddy (or Puffy, or Prick-Boy, or whatever the hell he wanted to be called this week), or had some loud-mouth DJ who seemed to think that prank calls was the high point of humour.

Disgusted, I switched it off again and started to read the box that had contained my bagel. It was the typical McDonalds promotional tie-in – I could win a trip to California to meet the stars of some movie. Idly, I read through the competition rules and prizes. Included was a rental car and two thousand dollars of spending money. All I had to do was text in a simple answer to a simple question. The text would cost me fifteen pence, which meant that the prize would be paid for by the number of people that entered it and the McDonald's Corporation wouldn't need to shell out a single penny. My bagel box was covered in cartoon characters from the film – smiling bears, grumpy donkeys, wind-surfing unicorns – all with their voices no doubt provided by Hollywood megastars. Yet another movie that Mark would love and I would yawn through.

All assuming I ever saw him again.

Maybe Audrey would let me take him away on holiday. That would be good. I'd love to take him to somewhere like Disneyworld; he was just the right age, and his excitement would stop me from being a grumpy old bastard who thought the place was nothing more than a glorified fairground with extra-long queues. I read the small print of the competition rules, wondering if McDonalds and Disney had thrown in some accommodation as well.

They had. At Holiday Inn, Orlando.

Something clicked inside my brain.

Hiro Makaunura had understood me better than I had understood him. He hadn't been telling me he was on holiday in Glasgow.

Holiday Inn
, Glasgow.

12.2.

I was stuck in traffic.

My hands clenched the wheel and a pulse beat steadily in my temple. Hemmed in on all sides, I wondered whether VW made an optional cowcatcher specifically for my Golf, and why the hell I'd never bothered to have one fitted. Horns blared. Radios blared louder.

In the lane to my right was a young man who had decided to grind the rest of the world into submission with techno music played at one hundred and forty decibels. The bass was so heavy I could feel it vibrating through the steering wheel. I wondered if I might have a stroke. Nobody would care if I did. The rest of the world would just drive around my corpse, tooting their horns in irritation.

Rush hour.

I'd covered two hundred yards in twenty minutes, which at least gave me time to reflect on the irony.

There were two Holday Inns in the area; one in the city centre, and one near Glasgow Airport, which is actually seven miles out of the city, just north of Paisley. I'd found a payphone – which was harder than you think in this day and age – and asked Directory Assistance to give me the number for both the Holiday Inns in Glasgow. The one based at the airport had the same dialling code as the number Sophie had given Lee. I was glad, because that one was slightly closer.

Although it doesn't really matter how close anything is if you're trapped in traffic.