Cold Grave (40 page)

‘Ted,’ his wife stopped him. ‘The gentlemen have come a long way. I dare say it’s important.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Channing. I’m afraid it is. We’ve been working on what is often referred to as a cold case.’

Ted looked as if he were going to make some nervous joke about cold being apt but the utter inappropriateness of it dawned on him just in time.

‘We have reason to believe the case we’re investigating is related to the disappearance of your daughter.’

Ted stroked his chin as if he were confused but behind his eyes the fuse had already been lit. His wife sat with her mouth open and hands trembling.

‘Claire didn’t disappear,’ Ted corrected him. ‘She ran away. She said she was going to but we didn’t… didn’t believe her.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Channing. I realise this is very difficult but if I can just explain the circumstances of our visit, then…’

As Danny spoke to the parents, Winter’s eyes and mind drifted to a solid oak sideboard that stood against one wall and was creaking under the burden of a family history in photographs. He moved nearer to survey them and saw Mr and Mrs Channing in various stages of their lives, from a carefree couple in their twenties through to being young parents, then the parents of a teenager. Then there were more, but considerably fewer, photographs of them in middle age and with considerably fewer smiles.

Among them all was the girl: baby, toddler, child, teenager. Winter watched her grow before his eyes, taller and fuller, freckles appearing and fading, pigtails replaced by flowing locks, braces there and then gone. The constant was the smile; wide and engaging, confident and just a little cheeky. In what he took to be her parents’ last photograph of her, she was in her mid to late teens, hair long and summery blonde, her hand shading her pale blue eyes from sunshine and the wide grin spreading across her face. She had on a bright red T-shirt, which showed off the heart-shaped rhinestone necklace that stood out against her suntanned skin. He wondered how long before she left home and fatefully journeyed north it had been taken.

For it was her. There was no doubt that the photograph of Claire Channing was an incredibly close match for Kirsten Fairweather’s reconstruction model. Winter had a printed photocopy of the image burning a hole in his jacket pocket and he both longed for and dreaded the moment when he would take it out for them to see. They could, he thought incongruously, be sisters. This lost girl in front of him and the girl found on the island on the lake — the one and the same.

His thoughts were interrupted as Danny’s tortuous explanation to the parents flooded back into his hearing.

‘Mr and Mrs Channing, I take it you were familiar with the case in Scotland in which the body of a young girl was found murdered on an island in the Lake of Menteith? This would have been around eight months after your daughter left home.’

Danny let the words hang in the room, as much a test of their reaction as it was a gentle unravelling of the unwanted truth.

‘I’m not sure,’ Ted Channing murmured, seemingly trying to remember. ‘That would have been February — no, March — 1994. Is that right?’

Winter heard the growing impatience that underlined Danny’s reply.

‘Yes, Mr Channing, March 1994. You must remember the case. It received considerable publicity. There were nationwide appeals to try to discover the victim’s identity.’

The word ‘victim’ sent another shockwave around the room and Winter saw Emily Channing shake.

‘I… I think I do. Terrible thing,’ Ted conceded. ‘But what does that have to do with us?’

Tears had begun to run down Emily’s face but her husband didn’t notice.

‘Did it never occur to you or your wife that the girl who was found might have been your daughter?’ Danny continued.

‘Well, no. Not all,’ Channing replied. ‘I mean that was in Scotland. Claire wouldn’t have been in Scotland. She was never going to Scotland. She said she was going to France or possibly Ireland. She never mentioned Scotland.’

Danny let him bluster on, hoping it would blow itself out. It didn’t.

‘Why would we think that might have been Claire? Of course we didn’t.’ He was standing now, getting more anxious. ‘Do you think it might have been Claire? Why would you think that?’

Danny turned slowly from the man and held his hand out towards Winter, who reached inside his jacket and produced the sheet of paper Danny wanted.

‘This,’ Danny explained, ‘is a computer-generated facial reconstruction of the girl who was found murdered.’

He held the image up in front of them and Emily Channing screamed. Her husband’s gaze fell to the floor.

‘It isn’t her,’ he mumbled.

His wife screamed again, this time at him.

‘Oh Ted.’ Hot tears were streaming down Mrs Channing’s face. ‘Of course it is. We knew,’ she shouted at him. ‘We both knew. Of course we did.’

Ted turned from his wife and, for no other reason than to avoid her gaze, faced the opposite wall.

‘Every time it appeared on the news,’ his wife continued. ‘Every time it was mentioned on
Crimewatch
or
Newsnight
. Every time, we’d both blank it as if it had absolutely nothing to do with us. Never even so much as an “Oh, that girl must be about Claire’s age” or “Oh, I wonder if…”. Nothing. We shut it out and just refused to…’

Emily Channing stopped mid-sentence and hammered the heel of her hands onto her husband’s back, thumping them off him but still not achieving the desired effect. He continued to face the far wall, head bowed.

‘You’re still doing it,’ she shrieked at him. ‘Face me, Ted. Face the truth. We can’t keep hiding from this.’

She thumped her husband again and he slumped to his knees, put there more by the revelation he’d been shunning than the renewed pummelling on his back. Even when he was on the floor, she continued to hit him and he refused to acknowledge a single blow.

‘Mrs Channing,’ Danny gently chided her.

She turned quickly, as if surprised there was anyone else in the room, and looked back and forth between Danny and her husband until she realised what she’d been doing and instead cradled him, caressing his greying hair.

‘We knew and we didn’t,’ she tried to explain to Danny, her face streaked from crying, her eyes red. ‘We shut off. We shut down. The police came to the door and asked if the girl in Scotland might be Claire but we told them it couldn’t be, she wasn’t there, she didn’t own clothes like that girl did. And that was true. It was never, ever mentioned. Not between us. But we both thought it. I did. Ted… Ted must have too. If we didn’t mention it, then it wasn’t true and one day she would walk back through the door…’

‘No.’

The monosyllable was blurted out from Ted Channing in a single sob, trying to cut off his wife’s seeming acceptance of the unacceptable. She pulled his head closer to her but another muffled ‘No’ could still be heard.

‘The argument was about nothing, you see,’ Emily continued, her voice wavering and choking back fresh tears. ‘Nothing at all — just teen stuff. Claire was always a free spirit. So when she said she was leaving we didn’t pay much attention. Then when she did go we just thought she’d come back in her own time. And we thought that and thought that for… forever.’

Danny nodded gravely, touched by the couple’s grief.

‘What is it that you know, Mr… Mr…?’

‘It’s Neilson, Mrs Channing. We have uncovered witnesses from the winter of 1993, when we believe Claire was in the area of the Lake of Menteith. One of them has positively identified a girl matching her description…’

Somewhere during the previous conversation, Winter had tuned out. He didn’t know the point at which he could no longer hear anything that was being said in the room but he slowly became aware that all he could hear was the faint bell that was ringing in the recesses of his mind. Almost un consciously, he had turned away from Danny and the Channings and had gone back to the sideboard with its assortment of photographs. He stared at it, absorbing the image and trying to join up pathways, trying to be certain.

Suddenly he knew how he could be sure: his camera. He turned back to where it sat on the arm of the Channings’ printed sofa and grabbed it. He flipped furiously through the images on his memory card, desperately trying to find the set of photographs he wanted. He was sure — something inside him was screaming that he was right — but he had to see it. He rattled through the images, going past what he was looking for and back again, past the dog cut in half on Swanston Street, past the severed head in Cambuslang, past Dunbar’s severed hands on Mansionhouse Drive, past the photographs at the Western and The Rock then back until he came to the photographs he had taken in Greg Deans’ house on Vancouver Road.

There it was. The image he’d taken uninvited from the framed photo on the Deans’ mantelpiece: Deans with his wife and daughter at a wedding. The blonde wife in her pillar box hat and the flame-haired daughter with the unmistakable heart-shaped rhinestone necklace.

‘Deans,’ he said out loud.

Narey had only seen photographs of Peter ‘Paddy’ Bradley from his student days and she’d never seen him with his throat cut and swathed in blood but there was no doubt whatsoever that he was the man sitting dead in the car in front of her right then.

She closed the car door and turned to look at the stunned faces around her. She decided that the best of a bad bunch on the lakeside was a sensible enough guy in his mid-thirties, broad in his red ski jacket and intimidating enough to make others do what they were told.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked him, showing him her ID.

‘Bruce. Bruce Gleeson.’

‘Okay, Mr Gleeson. You’re in charge. No one other than a police officer opens that door. Can you do that for me?’

‘Um, yes. No problem.’

‘Good. Thank you. And you…’ she said to a boy in his late teens. ‘I need you to run to the top of the road or else the first police officer you see and get them down here. Tell them what’s in the car and get them to inform Strathclyde Police as well as Central. Got that? Strathclyde.’

The kid nodded and ran off in the direction of the road, panic and determination written all over his face.

‘The rest of you get back from the car. It’s not a show. Go.’

As the crowd backed away, sure to return, Narey broke into a run and sprinted across the car park to the side of the hotel where it met the lake. Her stay there with Tony seemed so long ago and yet it had been the start of all this. Any thoughts that might have turned to regret were dismissed as soon as she saw the frozen lake. The sight that greeted her pushed all other considerations aside: it was teeming with people.

There were so many of them that even trying to put a figure on it seemed impossible. Three thousand? Six? The ice swarmed with bodies: all shapes, sizes and ages. They crawled over the frozen lake like multi-coloured ants, scurrying this way and that, blurring together and moving apart. They were skating, sliding, walking, curling, running. They were everywhere. And somewhere in the middle of them, seen but unseen, was Greg Deans.

It was obvious now that Deans had abducted Bradley rather than the other way round. Of course it was possible that Deans had overcome his captor and killed him in a struggle but that wouldn’t have explained the mark of zip ties round Bradley’s wrists. It had been Deans all along. He had played them and he was still playing them. The return trip to the Lake of Menteith was all part of his grand production, which meant the final drama had to be played out on the island. The only thing that he couldn’t have accounted for was the number of people there and that, perhaps, had thrown his plans into disarray.

Narey took her mobile from her pocket to check how far away her back-up was but saw that she had no signal and remembered Tony’s constant complaining about not being able to use his phone when they’d been at the hotel.

She could wait or she could go after Deans alone. The deciding factor was her dad: she’d said she would fix this for him and she would. His last case would be closed.

She knew Deans couldn’t be far ahead of her and desperately tried to spot him among the thousands on the ice — so many of them taking the chance to walk across to Inchmahome. The difference was that Deans would be on his own; almost everyone else was in couples or groups. Her eyes searched deeper into the lake, over sledges and dogs, teams of curlers, kids playing impromptu ice hockey, nervous couples tiptoeing across the frozen playground. It was hopeless. She’d never see him. Looking around she saw a couple standing on the shore, about twenty yards away, watching the action, and noticed that the man had a pair of binoculars round his neck. She ran over, shouting to them as she went.

The man looked up, startled and confused, but readily agreed to her request when Narey showed him her badge. Armed with the binoculars, she hurriedly began sweeping the arctic panorama, desperate for a sighting of Deans. She flew by anyone milling around the middle of the lake or anyone in a group, looking only for the lone wolf, the single needle in the moving haystack. There a stray skater, there a lone walker heading for shore, there a single figure walking to the island but, just as suddenly, the smaller shape of a child could be seen with them. Back and forth, she trained the binoculars, seeing hats everywhere, brave and foolhardy souls in kilts, ski jackets in twos and threes but no… wait. She pulled her glasses back and looked again at the figure she had passed by: a man, on his own, head down under a black ski hat and heading directly towards Inchmahome. He wasn’t stopping to take in the view but was moving, relatively slowly, unobtrusively, towards the island. She had no doubt: it was Deans.

Without a word, Narey thrust the binoculars back into the midriff of their owner and took off onto the ice without a second thought. She made a straight line towards Deans and hurried as fast as the surface would let her. On the ice, the noise was so much greater than it had been on the shore. She was buffeted by the sound of people laughing and screaming, cheering and whooping. And the roar. She knew that curling was known as ‘the roaring game’ but now she suddenly knew why. The rumble of the granite stones being hurled across the hard surface of the ice rose up at her and shouted at her, filling her ears with dire warnings that she ignored. She dashed across one of the makeshift curling lanes, was yelled at by angry players and had to leap over one of the large stones, with its spinning handle, as it sped within inches of her ankles.