The Night Hunter (14 page)

I
follow Costello up the stairs of Partickhill police station. The smell of paint and freshly cut pine, the unscuffed beige laminate flooring might give it the sense of a show home, but it is camouflage for the bad coffee and stale air. It is still a police station. Costello pushes a few buttons on the wall-mounted keypad, her quick fingers dancing over the numbers.

The door pushes open revealing a central area of desks. There are eight people in the room who all look up as we enter. I see flickers of recognition everywhere; two older guys nod at Billy; another attempts a conversation but Costello kills it with a glare.

‘Do you want to look at this and see what you think?’ She indicates the whiteboard on the far side wall, entitled ‘The Night Hunter’. Down the side a piece of paper is taped, which says ‘Operation Beluga’. There is nothing much written about the Night Hunter, so I presume there is very little they know. A few articles scanned from the press are pinned to the wall. They are rather sensationalist – the picture of Lorna falling with the headline,
The Lost Victim of the Night Hunter
.
Then, in smaller letters,
Snatched without trace.

‘Do you think she should be reading that?’ asks a very good-looking young man with degrees in cheekbones and sarcasm.

‘Why not? A child could write this.’ I chant out their list. ‘Mobile, all-terrain vehicle, familiar with the area, known to the victims, forensically aware, sense of loss, wants to keep the victims, holds on to them. What he has lost he will obtain from others. No shit, Sherlock.’ There is a picture of Lorna, another of the unknown woman with the name Katrine written under it. ‘You have identified her?’

‘No, we named her after Loch Katrine; giving her a name helps keeps the team focused. It’s much better than
victim number two
,’ says Costello. ‘I think we need to focus on the fact that he looks after them; he’s not your typical “kill them within forty-eight hours” type of abductor. Lorna had been fed and watered for a fair bit of time. People want what they don’t have – they’ll desire things they have lost. And he must have his own property – he has property apart from the family home.’

Charlie could deduce most of that. I look unimpressed.

‘Geographical profiling shows that he lives in North Glasgow, it’s the centre of his activity, where he took the women – well, Lorna, Gillian.’

‘But not Sophie. Eaglesham is south of the city.’

Her look tells me to draw my own conclusion from that. ‘There’s always a distance decay, meaning that people are more likely to commit crimes close to home, in areas they are familiar with.’

‘So this guy knows North Glasgow and the Arrochar Alps?’

‘A posh hillwalker?’ mutters Billy.

‘If you can’t be helpful …’ Costello and Billy indulge in some unfriendly fire.

I interrupt. ‘The Parke boy was running in that area. He said that the man had a huge dog with him, and that might …’

‘Who?’ asks Costello, sharply.

‘We’ve just been doing your job for you, petal. It’ll be in the system somewhere. Anita Parke reported that her son was approached while out running by a dog with a man.’

‘A boy wouldn’t meet our criteria, so it was not passed on to me,’ Costello says and pulls her notebook out and begins scribbling something down with irritable stabs of her ballpoint. Then she looks at me. ‘This is the boy you have
just
interviewed?’

‘Yes,’ says Billy. ‘You need to interview him again. It’s the break you’ve been waiting for. I’ll bet you ten quid and back my hunch with thirty years on major investigations. Our Night Hunter was expecting the sister, not the brother. The boy has long hair, they’re alike enough to be mistaken. She fits the profile of the others. He recognized the dog as an Ovcharka from the picture on Elvie’s phone. Matilda from special services found that dog hair in Lorna’s hair.’

‘And I’ve never been near a dog like that. I didn’t transfer that hair, so it came from the Night Hunter.’ I know everyone in the room is staring at me. ‘Which means the Night Hunter is technically a dog, you do know that, don’t you?’

‘What? A dog?’ asks Anderson, who’s appeared at the door without our noticing. Costello swears under her breath.

‘He has a dog,’ I say. ‘Matilda emailed me about it. The hair comes from an Ovcharka, a Russian shepherd dog. They’re bred to kill, big, powerful dogs. They’re not fast but they are tireless, and they’ll run you down. I’ve never come across an Ovcharka, so Matilda concluded Lorna was the one in contact with the dog.’

‘But she was clean, wasn’t she?’ Costello’s face screws up in frustration.

‘But a dog hair entwined with human hair might stay there until combed out at the post mortem,’ I argue.

‘That is your break, Costello,’ said Billy, going into a coughing fit.

‘Can this Parke boy ID the man?’

‘No, he dresses to hide his face and he doesn’t need to get close to his victims, does he? He sends the dog instead.’

‘What’s the Parke girl’s name?’

‘Callie,’ I answer immediately.

‘So the owner of the dog knew that she would be there. He knew her, as he knew the others. Right, I’ll interview them now, the mum, the boy, the girl. And who has annoyed me recently? Wyngate. He can do a case review and run them through the computer. I won’t let the wee sod home until he comes up with something. We need to find that link.’

‘There’s no link there, we’ve checked and checked,’ protests Cheekbones.

‘Well, there is. So bloody find it,’ Anderson whispers and bangs the door behind him. Cheekbones follows him out, ready to argue.

A deafening silence falls on the room; everyone avoids looking at Costello. I look at the media picture of my sister Sophie, on a separate board. She has a case number above her. For some reason that chokes my throat. Is this what my sister has come to? A number and picture? There are photographs and names and dates, including some of myself, then the diagram spreads down over the whiteboard. It reminds me of a family tree, all spread out, all of it laid bare. And there’s a photograph of Mark Laidlaw. I stare at it for a long time.

I review the information on Gillian Porter, and then Lorna Lennox. There are more photographs of something that looks like the Piltdown Man, a mass of flesh and dirt: Katrine, the Girl on the Hill. As a display of information it’s impressive. As a tool to move the investigation forward, it is proving bloody useless.

Costello starts up again. ‘You can’t accuse us of not being thorough. See here, we’ve mapped out Sophie’s timeline. Maybe you can fill a gap we have. We don’t know what she was doing on the night of Wednesday twenty-first March. Nobody seems to know. Your brother said that she was at home but your mum says that she definitely wasn’t, but then she may not be the best witness. Rod agrees that Sophie wasn’t home. We don’t know where Mark was either. So can you help?’ Her voice becomes sarcastic. ‘If it helps your excellent memory, that was the night you left the hospital after getting a phone call. The nurse who witnessed you take the call got the impression it was some kind of emergency. We can trace who phoned who. You live about ten minutes away from the hospital.’ Her voice drops a little. ‘We can talk through here if you want.’ She opens the door to a smaller, less formal room with two blue sofas. She has concern in her voice as if I am now a victim.

Has Billy put them up to this? He then answers my question. ‘It will be useful for us all to know what was going on in her life at that time, and you’re not the best person to judge what we should and shouldn’t know, Elvie,’ he says, as he indicates I should sit down. ‘We need it black and white.’

Costello picks up on Billy’s lead and smiles encouragingly. She sits down opposite and places a folder in front of her.

‘She was going to my flat but I don’t know where she was before that. I was working nights, doing a rotation in A and E, and she asked me – well …’

‘Well, what …?’

I repeat the story. Me going home, Soph in the bath, my suspicion that she had been raped. It doesn’t get any easier, telling it again.

The fact that Costello is not writing any of it down means that it is not news to her. ‘So you left but she never said what happened to her?’

‘No, I don’t know what she did, but she definitely stayed for a few hours after I left, judging from the mess.’

‘You suspect Mark Laidlaw?’

‘I do.’

‘Why?

‘He’s a brute.’

‘Any other reason?’

I shake my head. ‘It could only have been him.’

‘Would you mind if we had a look at the flat forensically?’

‘No, of course not.’ But this is confusing me. None of this has anything to do with me. It’s all to do with the Night Hunter. I put my hand in my pocket to check the keys are there, then I slide them across the table towards her. Billy’s hand pats me on the shoulder.

‘When does it suit you to go to the flat? You need to be there,’ she says, keeping it very professional.

‘Anytime.’ I get up and walk back through the doors to look at the rest of the women on the wall. They stare back at me for a long time.

‘We’ve exhausted all lines of enquiry on any connection,’ says Costello quietly. She is standing right behind me.

‘But running takes them outside, alone. Through parks. They’re of similar age – does that mean anything? Same stages of life?’

‘No. Have you come up with anything in your travels with Billy the Fox that he is not telling us?’

‘No,’ I answer flatly. I point at Lorna. ‘How did she get to the top of the moor?’

‘We think she was put out of a car on the road up near Succoth and then she went up the hill making for the Rest. Why she didn’t run down the road once the car was gone remains to be seen.’

‘Because they sent the dog after her? Maybe that’s how he gets his kicks, letting a girl loose then getting a dog to chase her down, a big, slow dog that never tires, coming after you, relentless.’

‘Maybe.’ The thought was chilling. We are both quiet for a moment.

‘The geographical profiler was trying to get something out of this.’ She points at the map of Argyll behind her. It is covered with pins, some large, some small – they are colour coded but I am not told the code.

‘That’s the house at Ardno.’ I point. ‘And that – is that Eric’s house?’ I move my finger to a house at the top of the Succoth road.

‘God, no, that’s his house, way over there. There are four farms between him and the point where Lorna fell, if that’s what you’re thinking. And it’s much too far to run in any weather. That road on the left is where we think the car stopped and put Lorna out, maybe Katrine too. That’s where we dropped you on Monday night.’

‘Tuesday morning,’ I correct her. ‘That might be the last point accessible to a normal road vehicle but that police Land Rover struggled.’

She sighs wistfully. ‘I’ve still got the bruises.’

‘So Eric lives way up there on the right, and there’s no way you can get between those two points by going across the way?’

‘Too mountainous, too rough. We know, we tried. The search team have been all over the place. Nothing.’

I look at the map. The main road winds round the top of Loch Long, a small offshoot goes straight north into the forest park through Succoth and keeps on going into nowhere. Beyond nowhere is Eric’s croft, almost up at Ben Vorlich, and that is a long way. I guess it’s about twelve miles as the crow flies, but God knows how long on that windy road. Eric’s croft is much closer to the hydroelectric scheme at Loch Sloy and the north-west side of Loch Lomond. Costello is right, there’s no vehicle access over the top of the hills, so Lorna must have been dumped from the road.

I am still trying to compute that in my mind when Costello says, ‘The road to that point at the top of Succoth is less than single track, it’s listed as “a road of limited use”. You can get to Ben Ime here, much easier. We think that’s where Lorna came from, the nearest point of vehicular access, so we centred our search there. All those farms have been searched and discounted, all outbuildings, ruins,’ she adds. ‘So maybe the holding pen for the women is down here in the city, near where they’re taken. It’s easier to hide somebody down here.’

I think about Lorna. Look at her Ali McGraw smile. She was scared but incredibly fit. I have no idea how we would work out how far she could actually have run. Would her fear have kept her going? Knowing that dog was coming through the darkness behind you … ‘There’s what, nearly eight hundred square miles.’ I look at Lorna’s face. Her hair is short, her face tanned and freckled, with big brown eyes. Trusting. ‘If she’d been in a car there would be contact trace, surely, on her body? Every contact leaves a trace and all that.’

‘You’ve been talking to Billy.’ Costello shoots a bitter glance in his direction.

‘We all know how to avoid leaving a forensic trail, that’s a matter of method and patience. Now what about the other woman, do you know anything about her yet? Forensically?’

‘Any further information from that body has not shed any more light on this,’ Costello says carefully, but she’s listening to me.

Billy smiles sweetly as his phone rings. There is something about his face that makes the room fall silent. His lined red cheeks make his face look like a pathetic clown; it’s obvious something is wrong. He puts his hand out as he looks around, asking for quiet. Every keyboard stops tapping. ‘Yes, I was the senior investigation officer at the time.’ He listens carefully; the room is listening to him. ‘Yes, I know who you are. We’ve just been talking about you.’

Costello mouths, ‘Matilda?’

Billy nods, his eyes narrowing with incredulity. ‘And you’re sure about this? Yes, I know you wouldn’t say unless you were sure … Can you send a copy to DI Costello?… Yes, here – Partickhill … yes, that’s where I am, hen … oh, just get on with it.’ He ends the call. ‘There’s been another match on that dog hair, just the type of dog, but it’s way too rare not to be connected. Kelvingrove Park, 2005, the murder of Natalie Thom? You remember that?’

‘Of course.’

Thoughts start running through my head; I’m glad they’re not looking at me.