The Night Hunter (3 page)

Darkness surrounds the car in a thick soup, as ‘Way Down’ hits the CD. I have to keep switching from full beam to dipped. At Arrochar I turn off to head up the Rest and Be Thankful. The mountains sit in the distance, their black peaks sharply silhouetted against the indigo sky. I concentrate as the ‘The Rest’ is a full-beam-all-the-way kind of road. There are often rockfalls and landslides, webcams now warn of trouble. They are still working on the stability of the east bank after the most recent fall and rumours abound that they are reopening the old drovers’ road at the bottom of the glen because it has never been blocked in a thousand years. When I drove down this morning there was temporary traffic control so I proceed with more caution than usual as the road follows the contour of the Glen Croe Alps. The landscape has switched again, the hills rise up to the right now, dropping steeply down on the left. I can see two headlights ahead but they are not moving. Maybe there has been a further rockfall, boulders escaping from their wire cages and smashing on to the concrete, or cars, below. Automatically I lift my mobile and make sure it’s on as I pull up to the red light. I am suspicious, as any woman on her own would be. It’s never safe being forced to stop a car in the middle of nowhere.

In particular, I am suspicious of the man dancing in the road in front of me.

A green Prius is stopped on the far side yet his light must be green if mine is red. I flash my lights at the dancing figure and he gestures that I should get out of the car. Then my full beam catches his warning triangle. I move the Polo forward on the narrow cordoned lane, pull up and memorize his registration. Then I see what he is pointing at.

There is something lying on the bonnet of his car. The impact has crazed the windscreen and blood gives it the appearance of raspberry ripple sorbet. Deer are notorious for being stupid and a hazard to cars on this road. I drop my window to tell him to drag the body off, leave it at the side of the road and punch out his windscreen. Then drive on. It happens, and he can claim it against his insurance.

But the man is now a dancing demon, pointing at his car. I pull on the handbrake, cut the engine and stick on my own hazards. There is no one else around, which is just as well, as our two cars are now blocking the road completely.

He rushes to my car and opens the door. There is no doubting his distress.

‘She fell. She fell,’ he is saying, pointing his fingers at the Prius as if he can’t bear to look. I step out, looking at the blood smeared on his face and hands. He is shaking, tearful with shock.

‘OK,’ I say. I am calm. I look over and see the reason for his distress and the use of the word ‘she’. On his bonnet is a lump of flesh and bones, human bones. Her face is to the sky, her arms flung outward like she was sunbathing under the moon. Her hair hangs down the side of the car. She is slim. Very slim. And very naked.

‘Have you called the police? An ambulance?’ I ask as I jog across.

He trots behind me like a dog, saying
Oh God Oh God
over and over again. ‘I didn’t hit her, she fell.’

I place my finger on her neck and find a faint pulse. Just an irregular flutter. I look at her legs. She has a black swollen injury on the back of her calf. The widest part of her leg is her knee joint, a sign of anorexia. She has marks on her ankle as if her socks were too tight. ‘When did you call the police?’ I look at my watch as the pulse fails under my fingertips.

‘Five minutes ago? Ten?’ He looks into my eyes, wanting me to make the situation right.

I calculate that she might not last until help gets here. I reach my hand under her neck; the vertebrae move too far and too easily. I move round the bonnet of the car and scrape my thumbnail on the sole of her foot. Her reflex is wrong. I have a decision to make. It might not be the right one, but to do nothing will definitely be the wrong one. ‘Help me,’ I say to the dancing man. ‘Let’s get her on to the road.’

He moves, glad to be active. I take my jumper off and try to cradle her head and neck. I pull the man towards me, place his hands on either side of her and tell him to use his fingers like a cradle. ‘I think she’s broken her neck, you must hold her steady.’

He stands and looks at me blankly.

‘Come on.’ This time he responds very slowly. He is in shock so there is no point in shouting at him. ‘Brace her neck while I slide her to the ground and try to keep her straight. After three.’

We pull her from the bonnet of the Prius. She slides easily in her own blood. She is no real weight, her body sags as if it has no strength to hold itself together. She is nacreous in the beam of the headlights. Then a slight change to the colour of her skin reflects that the traffic light has changed to green again. It makes her look dead already.

We lower her on to the ground. He is on his knees holding her neck as if it is the most precious thing in the world. I press on her chest and the palms of my hands fall through her ribcage like a stone through a wet paper bag. There is no compression here, there is no structure left in her ribcage. I sit back on my hunkers.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.

I place my fingers on her carotid. Nothing. Not even the faintest flutter. I look at him and shake my head. He looks down at her face, caressing her with his eyes. But his hands are still clamped tight. He is holding on, even though she has let go. I reach over and pull his fingers free. Her head rolls a little, comfortable in the pillow of my jumper.

He looks up at the rock face above us, working out where she came from; it doesn’t make sense. We sit there for a minute. I can hear the munching of sheep down in the glen, the odd bleat. Somehow it helps to know that we are not alone out here.

I pull the hair from her face. She looks my age. Her lips are bloodied. I smooth the matted hair which spikes across her cheek. She smells of decay already. I look at her face; it is barely human but … I feel I know her. She is a mass of blood and swelling. Mentally I fill in her features, in my mind she is smiling. I hear the voice of Avril, our police liaison officer, in my head. I hear her asking my mother if she knows her, asking if Sophie might have known her. Avril slipping the picture to me across the dining room table, keeping her fingertip on the photograph. I remember thinking what nice nails she had for a cop, French manicure or Shellac.

The face on that photograph is lying in front of me now.

The police arrive in a flurry of flashing blue neon. Sitting in the back of their car, I listen to the radio chatter in the night air. It is getting cold now; my jumper remains under the head of the woman lying on the road, a woman I think is Lorna Lennox.

The car stinks of vomit and Dettol so I get out and close the door. Two officers stop their conversation. The older one with chubby grandpa cheeks walks towards me, slapping the other cheerily on the back as he passes. Even I think it strange that a man should be happy in a situation like this.

‘Miss McCulloch? Elvira?’

‘I think we’ve established that.’ What is it with cops and their uncanny ability to state the friggin’ obvious?

‘PC McAndrew. And you were driving …’

‘To Ardno, up beyond St Catherine’s.’

‘Why? Bit late to be out and about.’

‘Going back to work. I’m a nanny, paid companion, child minder, call it what you like.’ I give him the address and the phone number. Then the address of Mum’s house. And the address of my flat in Glasgow. Grandpa Cop looks at me. It’s complicated.

He writes slowly, I can almost see his brain trying to spell without him moving his lips.

‘And what did you see? Did you see the woman in the road?’

‘No. I saw a man in the road. Panicking. I saw the woman on the bonnet of his car. At first I thought he might have hit a deer, then I got closer.’ I look across at the driver. His name is David. I know that he is thirty-six. Another cop is walking him up and down the grass verge to calm him. He has been sick twice already and he isn’t finished yet.

‘Brave. Stopping in the middle of nowhere like that. At night, lady on her own.’

‘The light was red.’ I stare him down. He is in his fifties and is still on traffic patrol or sheep patrol or whatever it is they call themselves up here, so I judge that he is not attending Mensa meetings on his night off. My story seems to be confusing him. ‘I am taking a year out of uni, I’m studying medicine. I stopped because the light was red. I got out because I thought I might be able to help. The woman was haemorrhaging internally, her pulse was weak and failing. She had a broken neck.’

He nods, making a few more notes. I see David bending over, his hands on his knees, more retching. He straightens up and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand then starts pacing across the road again. As he turns our eyes meet, he looks lost. I give him a wan smile. Tough call.

‘You didn’t see him hit her.’ Grandpa Cop moves in front of me, blocking my line of vision. Maybe he’s not so daft after all.

‘He didn’t hit her.’

‘We are well aware what he’s saying …’ he says in that tone that cops use because they think their uniform means superiority.

I take a step closer to him, invading his space. I’m tall and broad, not a pretty sight with my acne. He takes a step back. I speak right in his face. ‘I stated a fact, he did not hit her. Why would he say something so outrageous unless it was true? If he just ran into her, why not say so? But he said she fell out of the sky. You can tell by the lack of skid marks on the road that his vehicle was stationary at the time of impact. If he’d been moving when he hit her then she would have come sideways off the bonnet. If he’d been moving fast she would have gone over the top. But she dropped on top of him.’ I look down at the Prius. ‘It’s parked right at the sign that says
Wait here when the light is red
. So he was waiting …’ Grandpa Cop snorts so I carry on. ‘One look at the lack of damage on the front of his car says that she didn’t impact there; even a skinny woman like her would leave some kind of dent. So he is telling the truth.’

He lifts his pen, hoping that I have stopped.

I haven’t.

‘Look up there.’ I point up to the wire-caged cliff above us, its rocky teeth jagged and treacherous. ‘Imagine she was running over that hill, not realising she’s so close to the edge. She’s tired, she stumbles into the downward slope of the landslide. She drops off the edge like a stone. Your question should be why. And why naked?’ I realize that I am trying to make some kind of connection, the same connection between Lorna and Sophie that Avril had already made.

Grandpa Cop throws me a look like I have crawled out from under a stone then his radio crackles, sounding loud in the dark night. The glen seems darker now with the metronome illumination of the blue lights. Lorna is still lying on the road, covered by a plastic sheet. I think how long she had been missing, three months longer than Sophie. I recall Avril shrugging, being non-committal. There were similarities; both went out running and neither came back. The police had mentioned another name at the time, another woman, missing for a much longer period. It is in the back of my brain, beginning with a G. Gillian. Gillian Porter. I can see her face in my mind’s eye. There is something else about her still hiding in my brain. It will come to me eventually, it always does. I might be slow but I am never, ever wrong. I try to recall it, thinking about the pictures Avril had placed in front of me. I remember Mum answering her questions, me shaking my head. I did not know this other woman. Of course, there should have been no connection as I believed then that Sophie had gone of her own free will. But now?

Grandpa Cop has turned to look at me; his radio has told him something that he does not like. Then my mobile rings, the number displayed tells me it is Alex Parnell, my boss. The cop is on his radio, I am on my mobile. A brief look of fear flicks across his face. I realize that Alex Parnell, the millionaire builder, is someone in these parts. His child’s nanny has been involved in an incident. I can sense Grandpa Cop backtracking. Parnell does not do conversation; he issues instructions. ‘Elvie? Eric’s up at his croft, he’ll pick you up and bring you to Ardno. The police are impounding the Polo. Don’t worry.’

The call is ended and I am not sure that I have spoken at all. Grandpa Cop’s expression has changed.
He says, ‘I’m sorry, the name Elvira McCulloch meant nothing to me.’

‘But the name Sophie McCulloch does?’

‘Of course it does.’ His voice has softened, I can see the granddad now. He smiles at me. ‘I think her photograph is on the wall in the office. A bonnie lassie.’ He puts his radio away without saying
you look nothing like her
.

‘I think I should tell you something.’

‘Yes?’

‘I recognize that woman.’

‘You know her?’ The notebook comes out again.

‘I don’t know her, but I was shown a photograph of her. A woman called Lorna Lennox. I’ve had a picture of every woman missing in Glasgow over the last two years put in front of me. That woman went missing on January the fifth.’

He is looking at me, a suggestion of patronising humour flirting with his lips.

‘I am right.’ I add, to make it perfectly clear, ‘Read a bit further down on the MisPer list. There’s a picture of a woman with long dark hair, and someone standing behind her is hugging her.’ I demonstrate. ‘You must have seen the picture. She looks a bit like Ali McGraw.’

‘Ali McGraw?’ He nods to himself; that has sparked off a memory in him. He flicks the notebook closed. ‘Did I hear you’re being picked up?’ He stands to one side as a small queue of traffic goes past in convoy, all gawping at the Prius and the body covered in its plastic bag and wondering how the car came to hit a pedestrian out here. I look down the road to where David is sitting in another cop car, his face hidden.

‘Eric Mason is coming to get me,’ I say. ‘He works for Alex Parnell.’

‘Oh, Eric from the croft up at Succoth?’ he says. ‘The water clock man?’

So he knows him. ‘We live next door to each other in Glasgow. I need to get my stuff out the car?’

‘Of course.’ He walks over with me, his boots scuffing the gravel as he chatters about Eric. He seems to know him well. ‘Better to wait up at my car. Eric can pick you up from there.’ He raises his hand. ‘No doubt we will talk again. You take care now, Miss McCulloch.’