Dark Flight (20 page)

It was a bald statement of fact. Malcolm was dead because the police had the mobile.

‘We’ll get them, Sara.’ Rhona said it as much for her benefit as Sara’s. In a moment of time, her life had become entwined with this woman’s. She had gone to the waste ground alone, against Bill’s orders. Her meeting with Malchie and Danny had been the catalyst for what happened afterwards.

The door opened and a nervous Mr Kirk appeared
carrying a tray with two mugs and a china teapot. He sat it on a nearby table and left without speaking.

Rhona poured the tea and added two sugar cubes and milk. Sara took a mug in blue-tinged hands, with a murmured thanks.

‘Does your daughter know?’

Sara shook her head. ‘She’s at work. She’s a cancer nurse at the Beatson. The centre in the Western Infirmary.’

‘Would you like me to call her? We could pick her up on the way to the mortuary?’

‘I can’t remember the number.’

‘That’s no problem. Tell me your daughter’s name.’

‘Karen. Staff Nurse Karen Menzies.’

The centre was a stone’s throw from where they were now, but Rhona didn’t want to leave Sara, nor did she want to send a policeman to break the news.

When she explained to the switchboard that she was from Strathclyde Police Force, she was put through immediately.

Karen sounded like a younger version of her mother, without the stuffing knocked out. Rhona explained who she was. You could tell from the silence at the other end, that Karen was expecting the worst.

‘Your brother has been found dead in a flat in Ashton Road.’

Karen’s relief was palpable. ‘I thought you were going to tell me my mother was dead.’

Whatever she’d experienced in that household hadn’t endeared Karen to her younger brother.

‘Mum will blame herself, whatever happened,’ she announced. There was a catch in her throat as she went on, ‘Stupid wee bugger. He never had any sense. You could never tell him. Wanted to be a hard man. Like my dad.’

‘Can you come over? Your mum wants to go to the mortuary.’

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

As a nurse, Karen must deal with death all the time. She ended the call with the detached professional air Rhona recognised in her own tone.

Sara was still nursing the mug. She looked up as Rhona came in.

‘Karen’s on her way.’

‘She always said this would happen.’ Sara gave a weak smile. ‘Karen’s been grown up since the day she was born. More sense than the rest of us put together.’ Her voice broke and she turned her attention to the film forming on top of the cold tea.

‘Do you want me to get you a fresh cup?’

Sara shook her head. ‘No. I’d just nurse it until it got cold anyway.’

McNab put his face around the door. ‘Can I have a quick word?’

They walked outside, away from Mr Kirk’s satellite ears.

‘I need a car to take her to the mortuary,’ Rhona told him.

‘The DI’s been trying to contact her at her daughter’s number.’

‘Karen will be here any minute. She works at the Western Infirmary.’

‘How did Mrs Menzies hear about . . .’ He nodded at the upstairs window.

‘There was a report on the news. She decided it was Malcolm. A mix of guilt and intuition.’

He was standing close to her, keeping their words for them alone. A flash of a camera in the distance suggested they might be featured in tomorrow’s paper.
Forensic officers at satanic crime scene
.

‘The Super pulled in the boss,’ he said. ‘One murder too many.’

‘It’s not Bill’s fault.’

‘The DS is muttering words like Taggart and body count.’

‘Bill was joking about that earlier.’

‘The DS doesn’t think it’s funny.’

She met his look. ‘Neither do I.’

‘There’re moves afoot to send a team to Kano.’

‘Oh,’ she said cautiously.

‘Passport control came back with the news that three days ago a Dr Olatunde departed from London Heathrow for Kano with, wait for it, his wife and two children.’

‘
Two
children?’

‘A girl and a boy, separate passports.’

‘I thought he only had Yana.’

‘Mr Kirk says only one child stayed in the flat. He doesn’t normally take kids, made an exception on the
doctor’s part. But one quiet girl only. So who was the boy?’

‘Stephen,’ she said, and his face told her he had reached the same conclusion.

BILL FELT CURSED
. Despite countless years on the job, this time his ability to separate private life and work had evaporated. DS Sutherland said as much when Bill explained about Margaret.

‘You should have told me sooner.’ He made it sound easy. ‘Who else knows?’

‘Dr MacLeod. That’s it.’

‘Your children?’

‘Margaret wants to wait until it’s definite, one way or the other.’

A look of sympathy crossed the DS’s face. Bill didn’t want sympathy, he just wanted to get on with the job.

‘I think we need to send a team out to Kano,’ Bill said. ‘If the boy travelling with Olatunde is Stephen then the sooner we get to him the better.’

‘I agree. But not you, Bill.’

The use of his first name brought down the professional barrier between them, disconcerting him. There were many things about the Super that both frustrated and irritated Bill. His use of his position in the police force to infiltrate the upper echelons of Glasgow society for one. The Super saw a gong on the horizon for himself and was already building the trappings to go
with it. Bill had watched the DS rise swiftly through the ranks. He wasn’t envious, knowing the higher you went, the less you dealt with real crime. It was the difference between being a classroom teacher and being a headteacher. Margaret had always wanted to stay in the classroom. He wanted to stay with his team.

‘Then I suggest DS McNab and a forensic,’ Bill went on, trying to focus solely on the task in hand. ‘Abel’s torso suggested he came from the Kano area. Forensic can confirm this once they’re out there.’

‘Dr MacLeod is the most experienced.’ The DS was thinking aloud.

Bill wanted to steer him away from that line of thought, but how could he explain that McNab and Rhona were not a combination she would relish? Some more private business the DS knew nothing about.

‘Okay. Set it up,’ DS Sutherland said firmly. ‘As soon as possible. And can we go light to the press on the ritual aspects of the latest death? Talk only of a stabbing?’

‘The stab wound killed him. That’s what we’re saying.’

‘You’re certain the death is linked to Stephen’s abduction?’

‘Malcolm Menzies was guarding the building on the waste ground. His mother brought in a mobile he’d been using to keep contact with whoever was paying him to keep people away from there.’

The DS nodded, acknowledging the connection. He shuffled some papers. The perfect cue for Bill’s exit.

‘And let me know what happens on the home front.’

Bill gave an almost imperceptible nod. Like hell he would.

There was a strained atmosphere in the team office and not just because of the latest death. The police station was like a tiny village where gossip was as swift moving as a westerly breeze. As soon as Bill was called in front of the Super, the world and his granny knew about it.

The faces were half turned towards him, not staring, but indicating that if he wanted their attention, he could have it pronto.

Bill stopped in front of the wallboards that held the photos of all the victims. The beaten slumped body of the old woman; her daughter splayed out like a mutilated carcass; the boy, sweet and innocent in school uniform. A constructed image of what the computer department thought Abel would have looked like. And now Malcolm Menzies. A victim of his own stupidity and the evil that surrounded this case.

Bill outlined the information from passport control to the waiting group. When he mentioned a boy and a girl had flown to Kano with the Olatundes, there was a collective gasp. Everyone in that room made up their mind that the child must be Stephen – the alternative was unthinkable.

‘We’re sending out a team to locate and hopefully bring back Olatunde and the man who professed to be Carole Devlin’s husband.’

‘Who’s going, sir?’ an unidentified voice called from the back.

‘Not sure yet,’ he lied. He wouldn’t be short of volunteers, but the boss had spoken and his will must be done. ‘Okay, we need everything possible on Malcolm Menzies. School, friends. Bring in his mate Danny Boy again. And in particular we need to know who he was getting his gear from.’

‘Can I speak to you, sir?’ Janice asked. ‘It’s about the white van.’

He motioned her into his office.

The van had been spotted after hours of trawling through transport video recordings of the motorway system that riddled the centre of Glasgow and its surrounds. A van with the number plate supplied by Mr Martin, S 064 OXO.

The vehicle, according to Pastor Achebe, was not used directly by his church. It did a variety of charity work, having been made available to cancer charity shops, housing the homeless, helping the aged, and anyone else that needed something shifted – household articles, clothing and occasionally people.

‘He sounded genuine,’ she told Bill.

He grunted but kept his mouth shut and let her go on.

‘He had a list of all users of the van. The arrangement is pretty flexible. The church pays for its upkeep, insurance, tax, repairs and so on. The other charities supply the drivers.’

‘So what was on the tape?’

‘The van was recorded heading south via the M74 on Tuesday morning at six o’clock.’

‘And, let me guess. None of the charities have seen it since?’

‘We’re working our way through the list.’

‘Who used it last?’

‘We don’t know that yet. Sorry, sir.’

Her apology was unnecessary. DC Clark had been working harder than he had, and with more focus and dedication.

‘There’s one more thing.’

He waited, sensing how important this might be from the look on her face.

‘Vice called when you were at the mortuary. They raided a sauna reported as working illegal immigrants. A Nigerian girl, in her early teens, said she’d been brought here by force from Lagos.’

Vice had taken the girl to the safe suite. She sat hunched in the corner of a sofa. When she saw Bill, she visibly retreated, her expression one of terror. Bill had interviewed countless victims in his many years as a police officer, but he had never seen such abject fear in a woman’s eyes. He was shocked.

The female officer in charge of the unit suggested he retreat and leave DC Clark to observe. He could watch from behind the glass screen.

Bill took her advice and went next door. A vice squad detective, Andy Davies, was waiting for him there.

‘We found her in a room in the basement,’ Andy told him. ‘The girls on duty upstairs denied all knowledge of her. We would have missed her except one of our
bright new recruits, a structural engineer in his former life, insisted there had to be another level to the building. The entrance was behind a cupboard.’

They had brought in an interpreter, a tall ebony-coloured woman, her long hair braided with small gold coins. She was sitting on the sofa, an arm’s length from the girl. Her voice was soothing and the tension in the girl’s body had lessened.

Davies explained who she was. ‘Larai is Fulani, from Northern Nigeria. A professor, no less, of African and Oriental studies.’

Davies’s sarcasm couldn’t quite disguise his awe at the beautiful and commanding woman in the next room. Under her gentle encouragement, the girl began to talk, gradually increasing in speed, as though she had to get it over with.

DC Clark sat opposite, her expression strained, particularly when Larai translated for her benefit, and theirs.

Her name was Adeela. A thirteen-year-old Hausa girl from Bauchi State. She was captured in the bush when fetching water from the river. She was taken to Lagos where she was made to service men, including
Baturi
– Europeans – from the oil rigs. She tried to run away twice and was beaten. The woman in charge told her if she tried again she would become a juju sacrifice and her mother declared a witch. One night, she was taken to a rig and from there to a ship. She was on the ship a long time. They drugged her before they took her off. She woke up in the cellar.

When Larai joined Bill and Andy in the side room she was visibly angry.

‘She is sure there are others,’ she told them. ‘She heard crying on the ship. A boy’s voice called to her. He said his name was Sanni.’ She turned to Bill. ‘The girl has been circumcised. It is not a tradition practised by my tribe, the Fulani, but it is common in other Nigerian tribes. The Hausa method is the most severe form. All external genitalia are removed and the vagina sewn up to make entry more difficult. For white men this is a novelty they will pay for.’

Beside him, Davies made a small noise in his throat, a mixture of anger and disbelief. Bill had a daughter of seventeen, but he well remembered her at thirteen. Then he had never wanted her to grow up.

‘I read in the paper that the woman, Carole Devlin, had been circumcised by her attacker?’ Larai asked.

Bill nodded. There had been no point hiding the fact, however gruesome it might be to the general public.

‘Some tribes believe that if a male child’s head touches the clitoris during birth, he will die,’ she told him. ‘Others that lying with an uncircumcised woman can make a man impotent, destroy his fertility and make him go mad.’

Larai, wittingly or not, had given Bill the first tangible explanation for Carole Devlin’s mutilation.

STEPHEN TRIED TO
sit up, but each time he raised his head he felt sick. The small dark space was going up and down and his stomach with it. He wanted to be asleep again. In his dreams everything was all right. He was back in the garden in Kano, before he and his mum ran away.

He lifted the plastic bottle of water. It tasted funny, but he drank it anyway. Almost immediately he felt himself sink back into an oblivion filled with dreams of the past.

Boniface was hanging out the washing on the line between the two acacia trees. The heavy wet clothes made the rope sag in the middle. Water dripped onto the dry soil, throwing up little puffs of dust
.