The Night Hunter (9 page)

‘No, no, no,’ says Billy quickly, taking her hand in his. ‘Christine? It was not Gilly.’

Christine bites her lip, her free hand wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. She takes a deep breath to compose herself.

Billy twists in his seat to take both her hands in his good one. ‘But I do think that woman was taken by the same person that took Gilly and I didn’t want you reading the details in the papers. There was a body found, that’s all you need to know. We’re going to have a chat with the Senior Investigating Officer and that might move the situation on, get us closer to finding Gilly.’

Christine glances at me and then back to Billy. ‘So if the woman at the Rest and Be Thankful was alive until Friday night …’ Her eyes look straight into Billy’s. ‘There’s a chance that Gilly is still alive?’

Billy has the confidence to nod; Christine looks at me bleary-eyed and I smile. ‘Every chance she is alive.’ I am sitting on my hands so that she does not see that my fingers are crossed.

‘You need to see the room, it might help.’ She is suddenly on her feet and moving. ‘There might be somebody there that you recognize, somebody your sister knew. You must look.’

‘Was her husband abusive?’ The question flies from my lips, and Christine looks stunned.

‘Pardon?’

‘No,’ said Billy to me sharply before turning to Christine. ‘There’s a battered women’s refuge that has come up twice in the investigation, that’s all.’

‘Refuge for victims of domestic violence,’ I correct him.

‘Gilly was happily married,’ said Christine, sitting back down. ‘Very happily.’

‘Something we needed to ask, that’s all. Can you think of any other reason for Gilly to come into contact with the refuge? In her role as a teacher, perhaps?’ asks Billy. ‘Needn’t be anything personal.’

‘I can’t think why she would. But she wouldn’t have told me.’ She smiles at me. ‘Do you want to look at the room, just through there?’ She points.

‘Just leave her to it, Chris. Come on, we’ll put the kettle on …’ says Billy.

She shows me through to the room across the hall, a dining room converted to a murder room. Just the same as we have at home, but with Gilly instead of Sophie.

‘You found anything?’

I jump. They’re both standing in the doorway and I think they might have been there for some time. ‘Sorry, I was miles away. I’ve looked at the pictures, read the articles, but I don’t see any link between them, except running. They were not the same kind of people.’ I stop and check my radar that Christine is not offended.

Her pursed lips suggest that she might be. ‘Gilly was married young to her childhood sweetheart. She loved her children and her family life. She liked working with the kids at school.’

‘Whereas Sophie liked to live the life of a student. Gillian ran with the Milngavie Mummies? Did they have a trainer or a coach or something?’

Christine shook her head. ‘Nothing so formal, they went out jogging on a Tuesday and Thursday night and there was a babysitter provided so they could all go out together. Afterwards they went for coffee. That’s all.’

‘But she must have been on her own the night she went missing.’ I look at Billy for confirmation.

‘Yes. She was late home from school that night, the weather was terrible. Rather than not go she went out on her own.’

‘Did she run the same route?’

‘I think so.’ Christine shudders. ‘She was down by the Baldernock Linn. That was where she was last seen. Graham said it was their favourite summer run.’

‘Was she having an affair?’

Christine pursed her lips. ‘No. Why, was your sister?’

‘Probably,’ I replied. ‘She normally was.’ I look at a little map, photocopied and folded many times. ‘So she was along this route somewhere. The person who abducted her knew where she would be.’

‘Or came across her?’ asks Christine.

Billy shook his head. ‘He couldn’t get that lucky twice. He knows where these women will be and when.’

‘Do you know any really big dogs – or anyone with a really big dog?’

Christine shakes her head.

‘OK, Christine,’ Billy says. ‘We have another idea that might help.’ As if on cue his phone goes; he smiles and accepts the call. ‘Do you think that might be a flyer?’ Absent-mindedly he rubs his nose, just where the skin is cross-marked with fine red veins from his drinking days. Then he listens. ‘Well, you can take credit for it. It’s your jurisdiction, your idea.’ He progresses to scratching and turns to look at me. The scared old man has gone, the fox is back. ‘Yeah, she’ll do it. She can go out hunting in the night. It’s something that she does. Yeah, she’ll be glad to … no, I don’t need to ask her. The body nearly fell on her, remember? And her sister is missing. She already is involved.’

I
t’s a simple plan. Find out where Lorna came from. We know where she ended up, so all I have to do is retrace her steps. I look out into the darkness. Same place, same time of night, same type of woman. It’s the best that they can think of as the dogs can’t find a scent with all this rain. Billy says that we don’t know what it will achieve until we try. I console myself with the fact that even if Lorna was chased by the Earl of Hell her feet still hit the ground and somewhere up there was a footprint that might take us to a track, to a road, to a tyre print. To a CCTV camera. A number plate. An ID.

I couldn’t say no.

So now I am running over the moor. Two crime lab technicians are standing in the glare of a very powerful arc light, huddled against the rain and poring over a plastic map. They have already calculated the radius that Lorna could have covered in her state of dehydration and weakness. One of them has factored in that I am fitter, well nourished and not injured.

‘But I am not scared,’ I said and jogged away to warm up. Lorna would have a runner’s eye for the contour of the land, she would know roughly where she was trying to get to – the Rest. There was no sign of her being chased, and only her footsteps were at the top of the landslide, nobody else’s. She was simply trying to get away. Didn’t matter if that was uphill or downhill, she would run towards where she thought she would get help. The emptiness up here – hundreds of square miles of it – would focus her mind.

It’s certainly focusing mine.

They talked me through it. I will be followed, and they will check for any evidence that Lorna also passed this way. I will have a camera on my skip cap to record what I’m looking at. Later they will clarify the images to examine any
places of interest,
as they put it. Sounds a load of cack to me.

At twenty past midnight we are still gathering on the hillside.

I’m dressed in my usual black leggings, wearing trail-running boots to protect my ankles from the clumps of heather. I feel good as I jog past the Land Rover that dropped me off, past the huddle of people taking notes. They are looking up at the sky, looking at their watches and wondering why their phones have no signal. It’s going to be a very wet and windy night. Sipping my water, I head off down the track, loosening up my limbs, wishing these men would get their finger out so that I can get on with it. It will take us an hour or more to walk to where Lorna fell before I can start to run. I jog on past a police tape that separates nothing from nowhere and look back, they’re still milling around. I go on, waiting for it to happen, getting my anger up, my own little roid rage. I roll my neck and shoulders until I feel it creeping along my arteries and I move away from the lights, into the dark shadows. I have no fear about the run; the bigger fear is that we might miss something.

Something moves in the darkness; I hear the breathless wheeze of unfit lungs behind me. I turn round quickly, he puts his arms up to protect himself. He is an older man, wearing a coat ill-matched to this weather.

‘What’s going on?’ he asks. ‘I know she was here.’

Of course she was or we wouldn’t be here. I take a minute to read his body language; he is no threat. Not only is he scared of me, he’s trying to hold back the tears.

‘Please?’ His hand reaches out towards me, shaking. His skin is red with exposure to the cold and the rain as he holds a creased piece of paper in a clear plastic folder out towards me. That Ali McGraw smile. It’s a million miles away from the face that lay in my lap and ceased to breathe, so thin that the skin looked painted on her bones. His thumb grips the photograph tightly in case the wind should catch it and take it from him, as fate had taken Lorna.

‘Mr Lennox? We will find the man who did this.’

‘So what is happening? What are you looking for?’

‘Whatever we can find. You should go home.’ I can’t tell him that his daughter spent her last hours on earth in this dark, lonely, desolate place.

‘Three days shy of six months.’ He shakes his head. For a minute his face is impassive, then he nods. ‘And it comes down to this.’ He coughs. I think that might be to hide a tear. ‘Just tell me if she suffered.’

Tell me if she suffered.
I recognize that type of question; he does not want to know the answer. ‘She was doing her best to get back to you,’ I say. We have been spotted, someone shouts to us. I say quickly, ‘I’m Sophie McCulloch’s sister …’

His head jerks up at that. ‘Oh?’

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Aye? Whit?’ His eyes narrow, I have his attention.

‘Your daughter’s running schedule?’ It comes out as a formal question but he answers it.

‘Well, she’d been up for the marathon, but she injured her foot. She got a pool thing built at her house so she could run in water. Nothing like that in our day. But she was fit enough when … when she was taken.’

I smile what I hope is an understanding smile. ‘She went missing on a Thursday night, out running?’

He nods. None of this is news to him.

I nod back, he thinks we have empathy. ‘I’ll let you know how this goes.’ I can say that confidently as I know Billy will know all about Mr Lennox. ‘I’ll do my best.’

‘God bless you, hen, mind how you go.’

And I trot away.

A team of six of us set out to walk to Lorna’s last known point, the point where she fell to her death.

An hour and ten minutes later. I am running, thinking that Lorna, marathon fit with all that muscle memory, could have run here from bloody anywhere, no matter what state she was in. She was tough.

The first part is almost a clamber up a few rocks, and it’s easy to see where Lorna had come down. I have the camera fixed to my hat, a small flat torch clipped to my waist and two big clunking brutes of men behind me. I try to find a rhythm, ignoring the discomfort of the guy behind me trying to talk down his radio, his lack of breath giving his speech a staccato arrhythmia. My instructions were to go and to keep going, so I ignore him and push on. From the point where she fell, the natural path is upwards. She would have run down this gully, not realising she was being funnelled into the landslide and the sheer drop to the road below. Half a mile north or south she would have had an ungainly clamber down, but not here. Because of the heather I look down as I run and the torch finds the footprint before my eyes register it. A crescent moon of toes embedded in the mud on the bank of a stream that gurgles loudly in protest at all the rainwater pouring into it. So Lorna jumped it here coming the opposite way, this was her take-off point. The torch finds her landing footprint just beside my own take-off one. One of the cops takes a photograph of them, they look so slight, so inconsequential – just small imprints of a bare sole and toes. I am on the right track. So where she ran up, I run down. I feel she’s talking to me, guiding me.

I look behind me along the grey outline of the tops against the dark sky, and see a gap. She must have seen it too, must have thought that was her way down on to the road, her way to safety and sanctuary. I slow my pace and move on, searching for any signs that she passed this way, then quicken my pace when I realize I’m on a hillwalkers’ path. If she found it she would stay on it, conserving her energy. She would have had the gap in sight and she would move towards it just as I am moving away from it. I run on, heading north, not watching where I am going but running faster as I gain confidence that this path will meet a track of some kind and spark a chain of evidence that Billy is hopeful of.

Suddenly I am airborne, there is a pain in my ankle and the torch catches a sky full of rain and clouds, then grass, then mud. I fall straight into the soaking, spongy earth which does its best to swallow me up. The ground beneath me is giving way, and I stumble into a roll. The landslide flashes in my mind and I grip on to a clump of earth that yields and tumbles until it and I both come to a halt.

I hear one of the cops behind me say
Fuck,
the other say
Oh my God
,
then one of them starts to retch and a terrible smell floats to my nostrils. The smell of dead flesh. I think I have tripped over a dead sheep. I lie there looking at the sky, at the huge dark clouds chasing each other, shape shifting the landscape, some so low I think they are snatching at my feet. The footpath has gone, the gap in the hills has gone, I have no idea where I am. The landscape has lied to me as it lied to Lorna.

The beam of light from the cop’s torch bobs around me and I raise my head to examine my ankle which feels both hot and numb. I look around me, frowning as the rain and wind sting my eyes. The cop calls my name, nods to me then beams his torch to the ground where my hand is, where the remains of another hand lies in disturbed earth, its fingers entwined in mine.

The arc lights of the police team cast bright beams of white, catching the dance of the summer heather rippled by the wind. The crime scene officers are silent phantoms, no point in talking when the wind cuts the breath from their lungs and the words from their lips. The plateau of the Ben is its own little world; all actions are accompanied by the patter of the rain on nylon shoulders and the high-pitched whisper of the wind somewhere beyond the darkness.

At three-thirty I am in a four-by-four at the nearest point of vehicular access, having followed the professor, O’Hare, off the hill. I’m not sure that I am invited but I don’t care. The sweat has dried and is salty on my skin, making me feel colder now than I was before. O’Hare immediately switches on the ignition and the heater before he starts struggling to get his jacket and plastic trousers off in the confined space. Grandpa Cop sits in the passenger seat, blowing on the palms of his hands. O’Hare reaches into the footwell, lifts up a small thermos flask and pours two coffees. He hands one to Grandpa Cop and offers the other to me but I shake my head.

I let them enjoy it, let them warm their veins. I’ve already reminded them that I have just found another body hidden amongst the tuffets of grass. Should they not be doing a wee bit more about it than sitting in this car and drinking coffee? Now I think if I am quiet then they might forget about me and talk a little more.

They are indulging in chit-chat about the endless rain when a figure in a white crime scene suit ghosts into sight looking like an overweight Teletubby.

Grandpa Cop mutters something about being glad that the coffee has warmed his brain up a little, he’s getting too old for this game. O’Hare agrees. I deduce from this that the person approaching in the CSI suit is important, someone I should get to know.

O’Hare pumps the horn lightly and the Teletubby hurries towards us, hand up to hold a plastic hood in place, jogging clumsily. The Teletubby opens the back door and clambers in, and the hood is pulled down, accompanied by a vicious curse about the weather as small teeth pull quilted gloves from cold hands fingertip by fingertip. The same fingers then work through crushed, short blonde hair. She looks at me. ‘God, this is fucking awful weather.’

‘Good evening, DS Costello?’ asks O’Hare, his tone drier than anything else in the vehicle.

‘I’ve had better.’

Grandpa Cop twists on his seat to introduce himself like this is a tea party.

‘Is it Sophie?’ I interrupt.

Costello glares at me, annoyed at being spoken to.

‘This is Sophie’s sister,’ says O’Hare quickly, warning Costello that any comment should be guarded. ‘She’s persistent.’

‘By that you mean a pest.’

‘Well, is it? Sophie had a silver locket on … here …’ I put my fingers at my neck, round the top of the blanket. ‘Right here,’ I say.

O’Hare says quietly, ‘That body up there is of a woman much taller than your sister. Off the record, five feet nine, at least,’ he adds, keeping his gaze fixed through the front windscreen.

Sophie is five foot three. I recall my first sight of her Fiat at the reservoir where she disappeared, noticing that the seat was too far back. Somebody else had driven it, someone taller than five foot three.

This is not Sophie. The unspoken question has been on my lips since I felt that cold, rubbery flesh under my fingers and the beam of that torch had passed over hair. Stringy, matted, dark hair. Dark. Not blonde.

Grandpa Cop passes his cup back to Costello, offering a sip of his coffee. She declines with a vigorous shake of the head then opens a small folder of Polaroids and hands them to O’Hare. She leans forward, and her jacket squeaks as she angles her head and shoulders between the front seats. O’Hare switches on the courtesy light to get a better view.

‘What do you think?’ she asks. ‘It’s kind of hard to make out what that actually is.’ She points to the image with her pinkie. ‘They say the body was on the surface but disturbed by the increased stream of surface water sometime before you came across it.’

‘How tall was Gillian Porter?’ As I ask, I can imagine Billy’s face.

‘This girl is taller than Gillian also,’ says O’Hare quietly, but at least it shows he has thought of that as well.

I take the picture from him and study it as the rain, caught by the wind, suddenly batters on the windscreen, on the roof, on the door beside me. It interrupts my train of thought. They start to chat amongst themselves, procedural things like who is doing what and who is going where. Grandpa Cop’s radio starts to buzz and beep so he turns it off. I turn the photograph through 180 degrees but still cannot identify what the mosaic of light and dark, grey and black actually is. ‘You must have some idea who she is?’

The car falls silent, as they recall that I am not one of them.

O’Hare remains quiet; he takes a slow sip of coffee but our eyes meet through the rear-view mirror.

‘Or can you speculate?’ I prompt, trying to read the situation. ‘If anybody has a need to hear your theories then it is me.’

O’Hare shuffles in his seat a little and I hand the Polaroid to Grandpa Cop.

‘Billy Hopkirk. Me. Sophie. Gillian.’ I then add, ‘My brother, my mother, her mother, her husband, her kids – we all need to hear something. A theory?’ I add for effect.

‘OK.’ O’Hare gazes out the front window. ‘We need further tests to be sure how long she has been lying there. But she is female, youngish, emaciated, naked, barefoot. All echoes of Lorna.’ He stops and rubs the back of his hand against the inside of the front windscreen; it squeaks. A small viewing space appears, another two figures are coming off the hill, one raises an arm. O’Hare flashes his lights in response before taking the picture from Grandpa Cop and turning it round ninety degrees. He holds it in his right hand, his index finger dancing on the surface. ‘That is the back of her head. That dark bit is her matted hair, the light bits are her scalp showing through, which is why it’s difficult to make out the form of her head on this. And that …’ he draws his nail along a faint line on the picture, ‘… is her face, buried into her raised elbow, her forehead on her forearm, face down as if she was protecting herself from attack. I couldn’t see any obvious injuries but that doesn’t mean to say they aren’t there.’