Dark Flight (3 page)

‘While he undressed you with his eyes.’

‘Bill was there.’

‘I bet that pissed McNab off.’

‘He’s a good CSM.’

Chrissy shrugged and took a swallow. ‘If a little obsessive.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

Chrissy made a noise in her throat that sounded like a grunt of disbelief. ‘McNab has a damaged ego where you’re concerned.’

‘I’m history,’ Rhona said firmly.

It had been stupid getting involved with someone from work. There were lots of affairs in the police force. Unsocial hours, shift work, escape from the horrors of the job threw people together. Most liaisons
screwed up the work and the personal life of those involved. It was the only time Rhona had made that mistake and it still bothered her.

When McNab headed for the Fife Police College, it had seemed a perfect time to end it. Numerous emails and phone calls from him had left her feeling threatened as well as angry. So she’d told Bill in confidence. He must have had a quiet word with McNab because the communication onslaught had suddenly stopped. Now McNab was back in Glasgow and impossible to avoid.

As Chrissy drained her bottle Sam appeared with another. He flashed her a big dazzling-white smile. ‘I finish in an hour?’

‘I’ll be here.’

Rhona waited until he went to serve someone else, then raised an eyebrow at Chrissy.

‘What?’ Chrissy played the innocent.

‘You never said you were seeing Sam.’

‘I like to give it longer than three weeks before I spread the word.’

‘And?’

Chrissy looked like the cat that got the cream. ‘Well, you know that story about black men . . .’

‘Stop, Chrissy!’

The one thing you had to remember about Chrissy: she always told it like it was.

Sam had left the wine bottle beside her and Rhona refilled her glass as Chrissy headed for the Ladies. Someone had switched on the overhead television. A news flash showed the photograph of the missing boy
with his mother and grandmother. Rhona asked Sam to turn up the sound.

The report was short, with little detail. A six-year-old boy, Stephen Devlin, was missing, after the grim discovery of the murdered bodies of his mother and grandmother in a flat in the west end of the city. Anyone with any information on the boy’s whereabouts should contact the police immediately.

Chrissy returned from the toilet and glanced up at the screen. ‘No sign of him?’

Rhona shook her head. As long as they hadn’t discovered a body, they had to believe the child was alive. Tomorrow, she would study the attacker’s print against the one Chrissy found. If he was carrying the boy as he left, the difference in pressure should be detectable.

Sam came back to check on Chrissy. She gave him the thumbs up and he deposited another pink bottle in front of her. His ebony skin and high cheekbones gave him the look of an African god. He had told Rhona his ancestors were Fulani, a wandering tribe who herded their cattle through Northern Nigeria and its neighbouring states. He’d been brought up in the northern city of Kano. As well as working behind the bar he played jazz piano a couple of evenings a week and his work in the club supported his medical course at Glasgow University.

‘Why don’t you ask Sam about the bones thing?’ Chrissy suggested.

‘The bones thing?’ Sam gave Chrissy a suggestive smile. ‘This isn’t another one of your anatomy tests?’

Rhona didn’t like to imagine what the anatomy tests
consisted of. She pulled a notepad from her bag, drew a representation of the crossed bones and pushed it across the counter.

Sam had a look, his expression changing from humorous to serious. ‘Are they human?’

‘I think they are. A child or small adult.’

He thought for a moment. ‘They were tied like this when you found them?’

‘Yes.’

‘It looks like a juju
tsafi
to me.’

‘
Tsafi
?’ Chrissy raised an eyebrow.

‘A fetish.’ He caught Chrissy’s eye. ‘We’re not necessarily talking sex here.’ Sam smiled. ‘Although they’re often for that.’

‘An object believed by primitive people to have some magical power?’ Rhona tried.

‘Not always primitive,’ Sam corrected her. ‘Lots of well-educated people in West Africa still believe in witch doctors. Let me show you something.’ He extracted a folded piece of paper from his wallet. ‘My mother sent me this in case I needed a bit of help from the old country.’

He spread out the paper on the counter. There was a name and address at the top:
Mallam Muhammed Tunni Sokoto, 21 Yoruba Road, Sabon Gari, Kano
.

Beneath was a long list comprising fifty-six ways your witch doctor could help improve your life.

Chrissy ran an eye down the page. ‘Medicine for a commanding tongue?’ she read out.

‘Well,
you
don’t need that one,’ Rhona told her with conviction.

‘Mmmm. Now here’s one I like. Medicine for love.’

‘How did you think we two got together?’ Sam grinned.

Chrissy read on. ‘Medicine for a tired penis?’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t need that.’

Rhona joined in the laughter. ‘So the bones might be some sort of witch doctor medicine?’ she asked Sam.

‘Bones are important in juju.’

‘There were three deep scores on each bone.’

He looked startled. ‘Where did you find them?’

‘Outside a house.’

He thought for a moment. ‘Beats me. But I don’t pay much attention to that sort of stuff. I could email my mother,’ he offered. ‘She would be the one to ask.’

‘What if I send you a digital photo of the bones?’

‘Sure.’

He wrote his email address on the back of her drawing.

A nasty thought struck Rhona. ‘How do the witch doctors get the human bones to make the fetish?’

‘Poor people die all the time in Nigeria. In the cities you find the bodies in the streets. In the UK?’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘It would be more difficult.’

‘Not to say illegal,’ Chrissy said.

‘Would someone kill to get bones for juju?’ Rhona asked.

Sam looked worried by that. ‘Human sacrifice is the darker side of juju. In black juju, the organs and bones of children are highly prized.’

On her way to the underground station, Rhona found herself looking at children, reminding herself she had a
child, although Liam was a young man now. Eighteen years of age, older than she was when he was born. When she left the hospital after the birth, her heart and her arms were empty. Edward, her lover at the time, had talked her into adoption. They were too young for a child, they had to finish their degrees before they married and had children. There was plenty of time. And she’d believed him.

Edward did get married, but not to her. Fiona had given him two children. A son, Jonathan, and a daughter, Morag. Rhona, on the other hand, had stayed single and for the most part alone, until Sean Maguire had entered her life.

She often asked herself what she would do if she got pregnant again. Every time the thought crossed her mind she determined that this time the decision would be hers and hers alone. No one would talk her in or out of anything that important again. Not Sean, not anyone.

Moroseness settled on her like a thick dark cloud. Bill Wilson would be at home now, in the bosom of his family. Would he tell Margaret what he had witnessed today or would he do as she did? Place that knowledge inside a compartment of his brain and shut the door on it.

She’d missed the commuter rush and the underground train was half empty. Two young teenage Goths sat opposite, noses, ears, eyebrows and tongues pierced. Satanic symbols hung on chains around their necks. They were laughing together, the sweet reek of cannabis clinging to their clothes.

Beside them a young mother struggled with a toddler, a buggy, and a girl of about six. The woman had a frazzled air as though her edges were unravelling. They got off at the same stop and Rhona offered to help her up the stairs with the buggy. When the girl slipped her hand in Rhona’s, the trusting gesture unnerved her.

She was surprised and disappointed when she reached home to find the flat in darkness. She checked her mobile. If Sean had called while she was in the club she might not have heard him, but there were no messages, voice or text.

Rhona stood in the hall, wishing Chance, her cat, were still alive and running to greet her, his big black body trailing between her legs, tripping her up on her way to the kitchen.

Sean had encouraged her to get another cat, as though she were replacing a pair of shoes. But Chance’s death was still too raw in her mind.

The kitchen was as she’d left it that morning, with dishes in the sink and the rock-hard remains of some hastily buttered toast. Any hopes of meeting the scent of garlic and herbs, the open bottle of a carefully chosen red wine, were dashed.

She tried to remember if Sean had mentioned something he had to do tonight. But nothing came to mind. They normally had an easy routine on his night off, eating a leisurely meal together, then making love. He would play her his favourite jazz tracks and she would dutifully listen, knowing his efforts would never turn her into a real jazz fan. Yet when he played the saxophone, it almost worked: she was seduced by
the haunting sound and image, his closed eyes, fingers caressing the keys with the intensity of a lover.

She admitted to herself that tonight she needed Sean to talk to. She wanted him to enter her troubled body and make her forget today.

She rang out for a pizza, then poured herself a whisky and water and opened up her laptop. If she couldn’t dispel work from her mind, then she would have to engage with it.

She went online and typed ‘female genital mutilation’ in the search engine.

The result confirmed what she already suspected. FGM was more of a cultural than a religious practice, carried out predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa, on pre-pubescent girls, designed to reduce their sexual response.

What she hadn’t known was that an estimated fifty per cent of all Nigerian girls had been operated on. Some thirty million women in Sam’s country had been mutilated in this way.

Whoever killed Carole performed that ritual on her. Although Stephen’s father was likely black, that didn’t mean he was African. But most murdered women were killed by their husband or partner. If Carole Devlin’s husband was in Scotland, then he had to be a suspect.

Much later she was awakened by Sean’s key in the lock. The stumbling sound of his footsteps in the hall, followed by the masked expletive, suggested he was drunk. Rhona lay in the darkness, nonplussed by this, because she had never seen Sean really drunk before.

When he didn’t come into the bedroom, curiosity sent her to find him. The sight made her stop silently in her tracks. He was in the spare room, a fiddle in his hand. He’d brought the battered case with him when he moved in. When she asked whether he could play, he’d told her all Irishmen could play the fiddle, if not with their hands, then in their hearts. Yet the case had stood gathering dust in a corner. To her knowledge Sean had never looked at it since, let alone played it.

Something made her melt back into the shadow of the hall, so she could watch Sean, unseen.

He began to play, slowly at first, as though trying to remember, then he relaxed and the music came of its own accord. She didn’t recognise the tune, yet felt herself drown in its sadness.

Sean stopped suddenly, mid-phrase, and threw the fiddle back in its case. ‘Fucking old bastard!’

Rhona stepped into the light, frightened by his vehemence. ‘Sean?’

His eyes tried to focus on her. ‘I’m drunk,’ he said in a mixture of defiance and apology.

She smiled. ‘I can see that.’

He staggered past her into the kitchen.

When she got there, he had already poured himself a whisky. ‘Is that wise?’

‘Who are you? My fucking mother?’

She recoiled, stung by the viciousness of the attack.

He shook his head, as if he didn’t know where the anger had come from, then swallowed the whisky.

Rhona mentally calculated whether his blood alcohol
content was at danger level. Sean wouldn’t be the first male in Glasgow to die from too much drink.

Seeing the worried look on her face, he pushed the glass away. ‘My father’s sick. I have to go home.’

BILL’S RELIEF AT
being back home was almost overwhelming. The normal sounds as he slipped his key in the lock; the warmth in the hall after the night air between the car and the front door.

But it wasn’t the wind that had chilled him to the bone. It was the remembered sight in that room. The mutilated spread-eagled body of the woman. Her elderly mother, her head bowed almost in prayer. What manner of man could have done such a thing? For he had no doubt in his mind that it had been a man. And the child? The face in the photograph smiling and happy. Where was the boy?

He pulled himself together as Lisa came down the stairs.

‘At last. We’re starving and Mum made us wait until you came home.’ She brushed past him, shouting, ‘He’s here,’ on her way to the kitchen.

A door banged upstairs and Robbie’s gelled head appeared, the dark locks spiked like a Victorian street urchin’s. He nodded at Bill, his earphones in, the tinny sound of a band escaping.

Margaret’s back was towards him as Bill entered the kitchen. Thinking about it later, he realised he should
have seen the too-high shoulders, the tenseness in the position of her head.

He placed a kiss in the nape of her neck, feeling overwhelmingly tender towards her. She was his friend, his lover and his soulmate. He could only do what he did because of her. The blackest of days would dissolve as they lay curled together in the bed where his two children had been conceived.

She pointed to a dram already poured out for him.

‘You’re having one?’ he’d said in surprise, seeing the second glass.

Margaret, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, drank rarely, and never mid-week; the drinking habit had not lasted past student days.

She placed the serving dish on the table and sat down. Bill threw back the whisky, not wanting to delay the meal any further.

‘I saw it on the news,’ Margaret said, to make it easier for him.