Driftnet (6 page)

Fortunately
Busty Blondes turned out to be a joke for most of them. It centred
mainly on pictures of Pamela Anderson’s tits and what you thought
about them, in minute detail. The likelihood was, the woman was
saying, that someone was wanking off to this right at this minute.
There was no shortage of customers. This particular chat room was
full.

Once a child
was identified, they got started in earnest. Kids logged on at
night or in the early hours of the morning when their parents were
asleep. After the ‘I am your friend’ conversations, the pictures
would arrive. Not bad at first, the usual girlie stuff. She gave
the room a look that said, just like the ones we’ve all just
laughed at. The sort of stuff it would be embarrassing for an
adolescent to buy over the counter. If the kid responded, then the
next set would be more horny, might shock them a little, but always
the reassurance that there was no harm in it. After all it was on
the television all the time.

There were a
few uncomfortable blokes in that room by now. Bill could sense
them. No one liked the idea that anything they did or watched or
looked at, led to this.

Then the next
set of pictures would arrive. Things the boy might have thought
about but never dare ask to see. Things that shocked but made you
go back for more. If the kid stayed on line, the paedos were made.
If the kid logged off, then it wasn’t over yet. There was always
the threat of blackmail. They would send some of the messages to
the child’s parents, maybe some of the pictures. Either way, they
had the child hooked.

The next step
was the meeting. Then the abuse could begin in earnest.

Bill stood on
the steps of the university and took a deep breath. He wanted to
clear his head of the stink. Constable McPhail was coming down the
steps behind him. She gave him a look that said she’d had enough
for one day and headed for her car. His was in the university car
park but he took a split-second decision not to go back to the
office right away. He needed fresh air, the normality of people
walking about, shopping, living. People who couldn’t do things like
that to children. He turned and walked towards the park. The trees
were fresh green, the delicate green you get in Scotland in early
summer. The rain had washed the street and the deep gutters were
running with water from the heavy showers. He walked at a steady
pace, planting his feet firmly as if there had to be something in
this life that was solid and believable. Just as he passed
Gilmorehill the big double doors swung open and the students poured
out, desperate to get out of the exam hall and away. Some were
talking excitedly, hysterical with the need to unburden how bad it
had been. Others couldn’t talk about it at all.

Bill was not a
man to talk for the sake of it either. There were bits of today he
would rather forget. He headed down through the park towards the
River Kelvin. A wee girl was playing all alone on the grass. She
must have been about eight. He walked more slowly, hoping her
mother would appear, or a big sister or brother. He hesitated when
the path remained empty, wondering whether he should go over and
ask her where she lived. He sat down on a bench and waited,
suddenly conscious that he looked like a loiterer himself. A
middle-aged man sitting watching a wee lassie playing on the grass.
At last a woman came up the steep path from the river and shouted
crossly, grabbing the girl by the hand and wrenching her off. Bill
breathed a sigh of relief.

He knew all
about this. The heightened awareness, the worry. After every murder
or violent crime it was the same. For a while he desperately wanted
to protect all the vulnerable and the innocent.

He suddenly
realised how close he was to Rhona’s lab. He hadn’t spoken to her
since he’d warned her about the press. Now he could maybe tell her
a little more about the victim. At least they had a distinguishing
mark now.

Chapter 7

The flat was
big and friendly. Rhona had fallen in love with it three years ago
and when she moved in, she spent the first three weeks saying out
loud, ‘I love this flat’. There had been no one there to hear her
or to think she was going mad. Just the cat, and the cat didn’t
listen to her anyway. When the woman had opened the door the night
she went to view, Rhona had known right away that this was going to
be her home. Not even the dreich Glasgow night had dampened her
enthusiasm. She had vowed to herself and the cat that she would
allow no one, no one to encroach on their living space. And she had
kept her word, until Sean.

The early
evening light was entering the kitchen, touching the worktops with
a warm golden glow. The golden colour came, Rhona had informed the
disinterested cat, from the convent tucked behind them, its
carefully tended garden a tribute to order and faith. Tonight the
toll of the bell for worship only reminded Rhona that she had no
faith, in God or in herself, any more.

She had come
home as soon as DI Wilson left the laboratory. There had been
something achingly sad about his pleasure in revealing the
information on the birthmark. She could feel her face freeze as he
explained that it was just a raised area on the boy’s inside right
thigh. But when he was a baby, he said, it would have been more
obvious. It might help them identify him.

The silent
scream was still there. Seventeen years on and it was still there.
All that time. Rhona sat on the bus hearing it echo through her
brain. They stopped at a set of traffic lights for what seemed an
eternity and she actually began to shake with the effort of keeping
it in her head, until the woman beside her asked what the problem
was and whether she needed a doctor.

As soon as she
got to the flat, she shut the door and locked it before she made
the call. She knew it would achieve nothing, but she had to make it
all the same. The hospital gave her a further number which they
said might be able to help. They warned how difficult it might be.
An adopted child could not be forced to contact a natural parent.
The adoptive parents might not agree, either.

Grief has the
ability to strip away time. Rhona had felt it when her father died.
Looking down at his still face, it was as if her own adult life
dissolved, leaving her a wee girl again. A girl whose hand fitted
easily inside his big one, whose cheek met his in a whiff of
tobacco smoke and bristly beard. All her certainties began to
crumble. And it was happening again. Seventeen years of her life
dissolving into nothingness.

There was a
second knock at the door, this time much louder, then someone tried
the lock, rasping it this way and that. Her name was being called.
It came from far away.

‘Rhona. It’s
me, Sean. Open the door.’

Rhona went to
the door and unlocked it.

‘Sorry,’ she
said. ‘I must have turned the key by mistake.’ She kept her face
turned away from him because she had no idea what she looked like.
She didn’t even know if she’d been crying.

Sean closed the
door carefully and checked the lock (not because he wanted her to
know he didn’t believe her, she knew that, but to give her time),
then he hung his coat on the peg. Rhona went into the kitchen. The
golden light was there, trying to lift the room to normality. Rhona
went to the fridge, took out a bottle of wine and opened it.

Sean didn’t
like drama. She knew that. He was puzzled by it. His attitude to
life was, if things went wrong, they went wrong. If he couldn’t
figure out why, he forgot about it and went and played his music.
Music held all the drama Sean needed. Tonight he didn’t go and play
his saxophone, but followed her into the kitchen.

‘I’m going away
for a week,’ he said quietly. He poured himself a glass of wine and
sat down opposite her at the table. ‘I’ve got a gig in Paris.’

She said
nothing and he reached out and took her hand, stroking the palm
gently with his thumb. ‘An old mate of mine wants me to fill a spot
while one of the band takes a holiday.’ He gripped her hand more
tightly now and dipped his head so that he caught her eyes and drew
them up to meet his. ‘I thought you might come with me.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘The
murder...’

‘You’ll have
finished with that. I don’t go for a couple of days yet.’

She shook her
head. ‘No, it’ll take longer.’

She pulled her
hand from his, got up, and went to the window. The convent bells
had stopped and the world seemed suddenly empty without them. If
she didn’t go with Sean to Paris he wouldn’t come back, she
thought, at least not to the flat, not to her. He had put down his
glass and was coming towards her. She turned and tried to walk past
him but he stopped her at the door. She turned her head away but he
brought it back and held it there while he looked at her.

‘You’re going
to have to tell me if you don’t want me, Rhona. You’re going to
have to say the words.’ He laid his cheek against hers and spoke
softly in her ear. ‘Tell me, Rhona. Tell me you want me to go away.
Tell me you don’t want me to come back.’

In the silence
that followed he moved his mouth to cover hers.

When Bill got
back to the office after speaking to Rhona, Janice had plastered
his desk with yellow notelets. It seemed as though plenty had been
happening while he was away. A few phone calls had revealed the
owner of the murder flat, but, according to Janice, he was swanning
his time away in a bar he owned in Tenerife. The guy had lots of
money and plenty of property in and around Glasgow, most of the
details of which were well hidden. The flat in question was let out
for him by a property services company on Dumbarton Road. Janice
had already been there. The place was clean looking, she reported,
but deserted. Maybe the owners had also decided to take a
break.

When Rhona
called him later to tell him some of the results would be with him
by the morning, she sounded more like her old self.

‘We’ve
identified a DNA profile from the saliva and the seminal fluid. We
also have two hairs, neither of which came from the boy,’ she
said.

‘So we have a
genetic profile of the killer?’

‘Yes. I’ve sent
the samples to the DNA Lab. The fastest they can do is forty eight
hours.’

‘It’s not much
use without a suspect,’ he said.

‘Maybe we’ll be
lucky with the DNA Database.’

‘Let’s hope so.
What about the cover?’

‘Still working
on it. There are a number of older stains we still want to
examine.’

‘The cover’s
had a busy time of it then?’ he said.

‘Yes. I’m
afraid it has.’

When Bill
called DC Clarke in, she told him the cover was even more
interesting than that. They were now sure it had been a curtain,
made to measure by the looks of it, and expensive. So it was
possible the material might be traceable. The pattern was very
distinctive, huge swirls of red, blue and green silk.

Bill thought
back to that terrible room. The smell of sex and sweat and dirt and
those awful shite coloured curtains pulled tightly across the
window to hide what went on inside.

‘The material
is French,’ Janice was saying. ‘We even have the maker’s name,’ she
almost smiled. ‘A small but exclusive shop in the rue St George
near the Sacré Coeur stocks it. We think someone either bought the
material in this country from an imported lot and had the curtains
made up, or they bought it in Paris. Either way it can be traced,
Sir.’

Bill was
pleased.

‘Better contact
the Procurator Fiscal and get permission to release details on the
curtain in case someone recognises it.’

‘Done that
already Sir,’ Janice declared triumphantly.

It seemed his
ship ran quite happily without him.

‘How did the
course go?’ Janice asked.

‘Grim.’

She’d guessed
as much already, she said. She’d spoken to Constable McPhail on the
phone. Seems she’d decided to go home straight afterwards and see
her wee girl.

‘Aye. I don’t
blame her,’ Bill agreed.

He leaned back
in his chair. The swivels girned at him as he swept them round to
look out of the window. The sun had broken through the cloud and
was turning the stoneblasted tenements opposite to russet.

They said when
you stopped caring about what happened to people in this job, it
was time to retire. Bill wondered just what level of caring was
supportable. It was a bit like being a doctor. Care enough but not
too much, not so you took it home. He’d survived in this business a
long time. He could still laugh when things got rough. You had to
have a sense of humour or you’d go mad, as mad as the folk you were
trying to catch and lock up.

Bill stood up
and went closer to the window. The problem was, he’d lost his sense
of humour on this one. The crime had become too personal somehow.
And something in Rhona’s face when he told her about the boy’s
birthmark had unnerved him. It was the same expression he’d seen on
the face of the young female Constable at the Child Abuse Course;
haunted, guilty, despairing, as if the world was too horrible a
place to live in.

When he’d
arrived at the lab, Rhona had been working at her desk and she
hadn’t tied her hair back. It was loose about her face, making her
look too young, like a student, rather than the experienced
scientist Bill knew she was. When he told her about the birthmark,
he knew his voice had been excited because he wanted to believe
that they had something to go on, something that would help them
identify the boy. And Rhona’s face had crumpled. Someone other than
himself was taking this murder to heart.

The phone rang.
It was McSween.

‘You asked for
word on those glasses.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Fingerprints
show one was used by the boy, the other by an unknown.’