Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (4 page)

"What else do you do, Gwen? May I call you Gwen?"

Nodding, I chew carefully and swallow before answering. Though I have no real answer to give him.
I'm a superhero
is out. "I like to go climbing," I tell him instead.

"Brilliant! Where do you go?"

"Mostly just hillwalking around here, but sometimes up north." There. Nice and vague.

"If you ever need a good climbing gym, I can recommend a few good ones."

I take a closer look at this John Abbey. His suit is just a suit to me — I'm sure it's expensive, but other than that I couldn't tell it from H&M. But when he moves, I can see that his muscles are fluid, densely packed. He's not just saying it to get in my good graces; he's an athlete, and it shows. Life of leisure, I suppose. Or radioactive Irn Bru, in my case.

"Cheers for that. I prefer sport climbing outdoors, though."

"Fair enough."

The silence returns, and I wish I could chat to someone else about anything. Doctor Who. Or salami. I'd take a spirited discussion of salami just now.

Magda saves me.

"Gwen! I see you have met John." She smiles warmly at him, and he returns it just as winningly. 

"I have indeed. We share a love of climbing." 

He gives me a solicitous nod, and I make my escape, heading toward what I assume is the loo. Walking away, I hear him ask Magda a question. "Have you considered my offer?"

I feign interest in a sparkly cocktail dress hanging opposite a landscape painting done all in greyscale.

"I would be happy to hear more," Magda tells him, excitement crowding her words and thickening her Polish accent.

"Dinner then?" He starts to offer times, and I decide I don't need to hear any more.

I check my mobile in the loo. I've got two voicemails from Sergeant McLean.

"Bugger," I mutter, keying in my security code.

Ten seconds of listening later, I'm back out the door. I signal to Magda that I have to go.

"Accounting emergency?" John Abbey's laugh follows me out the door into the stairwell, but I don't care.

There's been another murder.

four

This one's in Falkirk, and I barely catch Sergeant McLean at the Waverley Station before he boards the train without me.

"You'll have to stay out of sight," he says, eschewing a proper greeting for orders, I see.

"Aye, that's fine." I don't expect him to turn up one of these days with a special badge for me. Though that'd make things handy. "How are you getting to visit the crime scene?"

"I know the investigator."

I heft my rucksack in one hand and board the train. The train is sparsely populated; most folk are more likely to be heading into Auld Reekie on a Friday night instead of popping out of the city. McLean and I find two seats together, but we don't chat on the short train ride to Falkirk Grahamston. 

We arrive at the station precisely 34 minutes later and disembark. It's a small train station with a tattered-looking footbridge over the tracks. The lighting is dim and orange, and a light rain falls, spattering my face. The rain brings a little freshness to air that otherwise smells of steel and oil. We cross the bridge and step around an oddly-triangular station building to reach the carpark.

"I'll have to leave you here," McLean tells me. He points to the nearest road. "Take Meeks Street to Alma and then follow Alma all the way north to Gowan Avenue. The murder scene is just on that corner by the train yard." 

I nod. He starts to walk away, but then turns back to me.

"If you come around from the north, you ought to be able to get a good look from the rooftops."

His mobile chirps, and he answers it in a low voice. A police van with lights flashing stops on the other side of the car park. McLean doesn't wave to me, just makes his way across the car park and gets into the van.

With darkness to cover me, I follow McLean's instructions and make my way to Gowan Avenue. Flashing blue lights tell me I'm in the right place, but I walk past with only a moment's pause like any commuter coming home late from work. The bobbies are on the other side of a large metal gate, in the rail yard to my left. Alma makes a T with Gowan, but I manoeuvre through the buildings opposite the crime scene to circle around from the north. There's a large L-shaped building and another seemingly-abandoned ruin across from it, the windows sooty and smudged. I duck into a dirty alley with my rucksack and quickly change into my Shrike outfit, climbing the north side of the L-shaped building. The roof is steeply slanted, and I shoulder my rucksack.

Whoever saw a superhero with a rucksack? 

Across from me, on the other side of the metal fence, is what looks like an abandoned warehouse. The bobbies aren't near it; the actual scene is out in the open on the rain-tamped dusty lot to the west. I leap to the next building, pulling myself up on the roof. There's about a half a yard lip on the edge of the roof, and I hurry to the far side, crouching next to a structure that rises out of the roof. It's enough to shelter me from the bobbies, and I can finally see a lay of the scene.

I don't reckon I'll ever get used to seeing blood on the ground. 

It's purple-black in the flashing blue of the police lights. Every so often one of the constables shines a torch at the puddle and it glints back bright red like patent leather from where it puddles on a sheet of steel. Where the pool meets the ground, it disappears in the wet earth as though nature has swallowed it.

One of the constables moves, and I see the body for the first time.

My fingers clench the lip of the roof.

I know the man.

He's shaped a bit like the Hulk on the outside, but he is fuzzy flowers on the inside. Was. His name is Kinnon, and he's one of Taog's closest colleagues at Gu Bràth. Quiet, studious, kind. Dead.

In the flashing, flickering lights of emergency vehicles and torches, I see a black line at his throat. 

How did Kinnon get out here? 

My skin feels as though something's taken hold of every tiny hair that covers my flesh and pulled. 

Another member of Gu Bràth dead. 

I think of the last time I saw Kinnon, just a fortnight ago at a pub with Taog. He seemed tired and a bit nervous, but no more than usual. It was only for a few minutes, and I wrote it off to him having a rough day. The first time I met him, it was before all of this started. He was handing out Yes pamphlets at the castle with Taog the day de Fournay had me kidnapped by Frost to poke me with needles. 

Now Kinnon's lying in a pool of his own blood. 

And I'm a bloody superhero. Of sorts.

My stomach churns, and before I can stop myself, I turn and vomit in the corner of the roof. 

I haven't eaten in hours, and the bile burns my throat and sticks to my teeth. 

I spit once, twice. Again.

I pull a water bottle from my rucksack and drink, swishing the liquid in my mouth to spit again. I want to grab one of the high-calorie protein bars I keep to eat between meals, but I don't. I need the roiling bile in my stomach. The sense of it eating itself makes me feel as if my body is manifesting what's on the inside of my skull.

Leaning on the outbuilding I watch the scene below, trying to avoid looking at Kinnon again. I pull my mobile from my boot. There's a text from McLean. 

It just says "Granger."

I text back, "Kinnon O'Dair GB."

He'll know what I mean. 

There's nothing more I want to see here. I skirt the pool of my vomit and turn away from the scene. 

How am I supposed to tell Taog he's lost another friend?

Silence is thick like congealing blood. 

Maybe if it were the silence after he saw the final winning lottery number on his ticket, or if I'd just professed my love for him, maybe then the silence would be thick like velvet or clotted cream. Or in the latter case, a slingshot that could smack me in the face.

But neither of those things have happened. Instead, I sit in the heavy silence, surrounded by it, drowning in it, as I watch a tear crawl its way down Taog's face. It drips onto his lap, making a small dark blot on his jeans.

I'm sorry
just won't cut it. Nothing will make it better. 

The last five minutes seem to have added years to his face. The crease between his eyes is somehow permanent. His right hand clutches the duvet on the edge of his bed, and it's all I can do to hold myself still next to him. If I'm thankful for any small thing right now, it's that at least Taog didn't have to see Kinnon's body.

I can't think of the right thing to say, so I say the wrong one instead. "I'll find Granger and stop her."

When he doesn't answer, I let out the rest of a breath I've kept stored in my lungs. 

How many has he lost now? I've lost count. I'm not sure how we both came to be living in the nightmares we try so hard to avoid at night.

My mobile beeps. McLean.

Taog's chest rises and falls faster, and I don't blame him.

Both of us find McLean's name a bit of a trigger the now.

I put one hand on Taog's shoulder, and he reaches up to touch it, placing his own over mine for just a moment. He stands and leaves his room, and his footsteps fade as he goes down the stairs.

I ring McLean. "Please have some good news for me, Trevor."

There's a pause that says whatever news he has is the opposite of good. "I'm sorry, Gwen," he says.

Taog's haggard face in my mind, I take a deep breath. "What is it?"

"Another murder." 

"Jesus Christ." Now my chest is rising faster, and I thank every star in the sky, lucky or not, that Taog left the room. No one can hold up to this for long. No one.

"It's not a Gu Bràth member this time."

My heart gives a hiccough, and my flash of relief immediately washes itself into hot shame. "Tell me."

It doesn't take me long to get to the new crime scene. 

I meet McLean on the roof of the building. It's a run down tenement off Muirhouse Parkway in a rough part of Edinburgh. I don't need to see the scene this time. I don't want to see it. 

"You're sure this one is connected?"

"Almost certain. The knife wounds are almost identical in size and placement. She knows where to hit someone so they'll die fast."

I feel sick at that. At least she's making it quick — if stabbing someone to death isn't already an awful way to go. "And you're sure he wasn't Gu Bràth?" 

"Absolutely. This guy's got a couple crumpled Better Together pamphlets in the flat and followed them on Twitter. Doesn't seem overly political, but if I had to guess, I'd say he voted no if he voted at all."

"Why him?"

"That's what we're trying to figure out. He was a tech guy. Into conspiracy theories."

"What sort of conspiracy theories?" The Forth Road Bridge rises off to the north, peeking above the buildings in an arch of lights slightly veiled by the light mist rolling in from the sea. I can smell the tang of the sea air mingled with the tar of the roof.

"Faked moon landing, the Tories' cronyism, that sort of thing. He had a website, but it looks like it's been taken down."

I ponder that. "Did he take it down, or did someone else?"

"That's what we're trying to figure out. We've got someone who can see if he backed up the website's files before it got taken down, or even an older version."

Trevor McLean looks like he hasn't slept in days either. He leans back against the side of a utility shed, his face slack with the same helplessness I feel.

"Anything else?" I ask.

He hesitates. "I'm not sure if it's connected or not, but there was a murder last week in Elgin that fits Granger's M.O. We put out a bulletin nationwide on any stabbings that could be connected."

"This other one's not a Gu Bràth member either?"

"No. Not politically connected at all."

I can't decide if this is a good thing or not. "There has to be something that ties them together."

"Or the one in Elgin is just a random stabbing or a football row. I should know more by Monday. The lead investigator said she'd ring me by afternoon."

"Thank you, Trevor. I better let you get back to the scene."

He looks at me like he wishes he'd chosen a desk job instead of the one he has, but he turns to leave without another word.

I stay up on the roof a while longer, looking out over the lights of the city. These other murders could be connected. I know we're missing something, and I'm not exactly a detective. I make my way back to Taog's flat, climbing through his window just after three in the morning. He's wide awake again, playing solitaire on his laptop without any concentration attached. 

"Who was it this time?" He asks. He looks up, his eyes set in a way that makes me think he's got every muscle in his body braced for the worst kind of news.

"Not a Gu Bràth member," I say. "Todd MacInch. Tech guy, into conspiracies, probably voted no or not at all."