The Night Hunter (6 page)

If it is a disguise.

At the door of the café he drops his cigarette, stubbing it out under his toe before grinding it into the ground with a foot motion that reminds me of my dad doing the twist. He waves. He has known I was here all along.

This is a lesson for me. Never underestimate him – he is a clever man. He just hides it well.

I get out the Merc, lock it and wait a minute for the traffic to pass. The Henry the Eighth Tearoom used to be a small department store but now it is a Thornton’s and a bakery on the ground floor and the café on the first. There is a gallery of overpriced prints of little girls with unfeasibly large eyes looking at lambs under a sky the colour of an engorged spleen on the stairway. Little wonder there is such a high level of drug abuse in the area.

The café smells of damp and chip fat, and the ancient Artex on the ceiling is stained with circles of water damage. Slip-on Shoes is sitting at the fake coal fire, which is on full blast despite the fact that it is the middle of summer. As I walk towards his table, I feel I am walking uphill. The building seems to be slowly sliding into the Firth of Clyde.

‘Take a pew,’ he says, without looking up from the menu.

I slide into the seat opposite him.

‘The latte is good, ’cept it’ll be cold or in the saucer before you get it.’ He sucks air through his teeth; it sounds like someone clearing a blocked drain. ‘But you do get a nice wee biscuit.’ He flicks the menu with his thumb. ‘I’ll have a Coke, chips and cheese sauce.’

‘Classy.’

A waitress with peroxide hair and five chins is hovering. Both her black jumper and matching skirt are in need of a good wash. Her face powder has sprinkled over the front of her jumper, making her bosom look like a dusty shelf.

He orders.

The waitress turns to me. ‘And what do you want, son?’

I say nothing. Then ask for a black coffee, folding my menu over and giving it back to the stupid cow.

‘You’ll get that a lot, with a face like yours,’ he says as he watches her waddle away, her worn shoes scuffing the carpet as she goes, leaving a dual trail in the pile like a jet engine. I watch him watch her, his tongue playing around his lips. His face is red and swollen, with flecks of dry white skin around his nose and mouth. The whites of his eyes are red-veined and yellow-tinged. I could write him up for a case study at uni and list his disease processes alphabetically.

His eyes are still on the waddling figure as he says, ‘So you phoned me because … let me guess, you saw me on the news?’

I nod.

‘And you are wondering if it was pure chance that I was at that meeting?’

I nod again.

‘Do you know how many meetings like that one I’ve sat through, listening to all the shite of the day? Listening for anybody with a story like Gillian’s?’

‘You were lucky you picked that meeting.’

He winked. ‘Not called Billy the Fox for nothing. Your dad put it on Facebook.’

I say, ‘He’s not my dad.’

He drops his eyes from mine the way folk do when they touch a raw nerve. I pick up a small envelope of sugar from the bowl and squeeze all the contents up to one end. I have only one question for him. ‘Can you help me find Sophie?’

‘Can you help me find Gillian?’ He chews on his lip.

I stare him out. He blinks first.

‘I was in charge of the Gillian Porter case and I failed to find her. She went missing in the first week of March 2010. It was a Thursday night, her usual running night, but she went out later due to the rain. Stop me when this sounds familiar …’

The reality of it hits me; the simplicity of his words exaggerate the similarities.

‘We failed to find any trace of Gillian. Your lot failed to find any trace of Sophie.’ He pauses a little, he is making sure that his words are sinking in.

‘She was a teacher?’ I ask. ‘A PE teacher? Something like that?’ Rod used to be a PE teacher, that’s the thing that has stuck in my mind.

He nods. ‘Well remembered.’ He sits back a little as the coffee is put on the table along with a can of Coke and an old-fashioned thick glass. My cup is small and chipped, with a little band of gold that doesn’t quite go all the way round the top. I turn it until the chip is furthest away from my mouth, placing the handle directly towards me. It might look clumsy but at least it is infection-free.

A plate of chips arrives in front of him, like oily dead worms. A lake of vinegar swirls round, adding to the aroma. A yellow paste of cheese sauce sits to one side in a ramekin, a nod to sophistication. He picks up the ramekin and slaps it heavily on the bottom, making the sauce splurge on top of the chips. He picks up a long chip, scoops up some sauce and stuffs it in his mouth, chewing noisily. He eats like a starving pig.

‘Chips are great.’ He pulls the can of Coke towards him, opens it and the noise goes round the room like sniper fire. ‘It was not my biggest case, but it was my last one. I’ve spent a long time looking round for any others.’

‘Others?’ I hold my cup to my lips, moving it back and forth under my nose, smelling the coffee, breathing in caffeine.

‘Others. I don’t think whoever took Gillian stopped. People who are good at doing things like that don’t come out of nowhere; they’ve been around and they’ve practised.’ He waves a chip in the air before it disappears between those fleshy blue lips. ‘Problem is, if these women were loonies or lezzies or druggies or whores, the cops would be all over the place, searching.’

‘I presume you were kicked off the force before you could sign up for political correctness class?’

‘You bet your bottom dollar, sweet cheeks.’ He waves another chip at me. ‘It’s more likely that young, clever women from decent homes decide to leave for their own good reason. They’re also more difficult to take and that makes me suspicious. Why would Sophie go away with a stranger?’

I can’t tell him that. Ex-DCI Hopkirk is staring at me, waiting for an answer. ‘Do you think the same man took Soph?’

‘Do you?’ He stuffs another chip in his face, sideways. ‘I’m a private detective and I’m working this case. Unhampered by the force, I can take a more free range approach.’

‘The case you started and didn’t finish because of the drink?’

His glass of Coke pauses slightly between his mouth and the table; he regards me again with eyes of warm, faded cornflower blue. ‘It was the drink that finished my career.’ He smiles a little. ‘It was that case that drove me to the drink.’

He calls the waitress over with a nod and a wink. She is putty in his hands as he asks for two lattes. She smiles back at him, the bright red lipstick cracking open to reveal nicotine brown teeth with a gap where she balances her fag. They would make a good couple, these two. They share the same rank body odour.

As she ambles away her buttocks roll like a strolling elephant. Billy stares after her, his eyes narrowing slightly as he struggles with a thought. He looks like a fox scenting the night air, a sleekit, sly, canny old fox. ‘So tell me about Sophie. What about the clothes missing from her room?’

‘How did you know about them?’

‘I didn’t but I do now.’ He nods to himself; he does not seem to gain any pleasure from outwitting me. ‘I knew Costello had good reason not to investigate it too seriously.’

‘I think that there’s a fine institution looking for them. It’s called Strathclyde Police. I think they’re doing all that needs to be done.’

He looks at me, his face incredulous. ‘And I think that most people will agree that the NHS is a fine institution but it does not do all that can be done. It does all it can do and that is not the same thing. Is it? So anything you can tell me, anything at all, will be good.’

I consider that for a moment before I say, ‘There was something up with her. She said nothing to me, but according to her friend Belinda, Sophie got upset at her birthday party.’

‘That was the thirty-first of March?’

‘She was a bit quiet but she had a lot on at work. On the fifth of April she went out for a run and never came back. I was busy so she went out on her own. I went over later when Rod phoned me to say she was very late; he’d already phoned everybody he could think of. My brother was frantic, he’d just come in from looking for Soph; my mother was on her third G and T.’

‘And you then went out and found her car parked down by the dam, locked? Like she’d walked away and left it.’

‘As I’ve said before, you seem very well informed.’

‘Friends in low places. You got nothing else to tell me about the car?’

‘No.’

His eyes flash over mine, he does not believe me. Tough. ‘And then?’

‘Rod reported it to the cops. Sophie and Avril Scott …’

‘The PC? Giffnock?’

‘That’s her, they knew each other personally, so Avril has been going above and beyond for us, but the official line is that Sophie went of her own free will.’

‘Because of the clothes taken, the affair with the married man, the money? Understandable.’

‘She is missing,’ I say. ‘Rod got the Facebook campaign going. Avril said that was the best thing to do. A whole load of people have responded – school pals, uni pals, running pals, the gym, men she liked, men she’d never even looked at, her teachers, clients, and staff from Boadicea. I think Rod has been everywhere and spoken to everybody.’

‘Boadicea? The refuge for battered woman?’

‘For victims of domestic violence,’ I correct him.

‘Why were you not doing that stuff?’

‘I’m not good at it.’ I deflect that question. ‘But nobody has heard from her. That means that something’s happened to Sophie.’

‘But Rod had all those conversations one to one.’ Billy seems to mull this point over. ‘And what happened last night?’

‘You’re the one with friends in low places; you must have friends in the force that can tell you that.’

‘I use my natural charm.’ He wiped some snot from his nose on the back of his sleeve. ‘It’s been confirmed it was Lorna Lennox.’ He does the trick with the sideways chip again, and globules of fat gather at the side of his slavering mouth.

‘I knew it was her,’ I repeat. ‘I don’t get things like that wrong.’

He looks over my shoulder and sighs. ‘So Sophie left about dusk, she had been waiting for the rain to go off. There was a vehicle track close to the path where she ran through the trees. The track itself is isolated. And she was young, slim, smallish. Clever. Of a type. As was Lorna. And Gillian.’

‘All that is true.’ All that is perfectly true, and I’m chilled by the way he has connected these words, these cases. ‘You think that Gillian is still alive?’

‘Lorna has been missing for six months and she was alive until last night. No reason to think that Gillian is dead.’

‘She’s been missing two years.’

‘Two years and three months, to be exact. But Lorna was held somewhere, held prisoner.’

Suddenly I am short of breath.

He nods, acknowledging that he has struck a chord. ‘But they were all taken from different locations within a ten-mile radius by someone with the means to hide them. It’s not easy to hide a human being. You need property, isolation.’

‘There are loads of places like that up here.’ I am thinking of every house that I go past as I drive up here, every remote light on a hillside.

‘But now we know where one of them ended up. My ex-colleagues with Strathclyde’s finest are spending most of the day today going through all those wee crofts dotted around the Rest, every garage, every outhouse. Including your pal Eric’s.’ He smiles at me. ‘They’re trying to puzzle out where Lorna came from, if she really did come over the top of the rock face.

‘Eric thinks she was dumped from a car.’

He nods at me thoughtfully, as if agreeing with Eric’s thought process. ‘What was your opinion of Lorna, when you saw her? Physically? Medically? What do you think had happened to her?’ He gives me that encouraging nod again. I can see that he would have been a good interviewer.

‘Well, she was thin, her skin was poor, she had an injury to her left calf.’

‘Left calf?’ he repeats.

‘Yes. She was covered in scratches and scars – they were recent – but the injury to the leg was much older. She was pitiful. When I see her in my mind’s eye I think of those scenes from Belsen. Those long limbs, skeletally thin.’

‘And?’ he prompts.

I think, picturing her in my mind. The Henry The Eighth Tearoom recedes, and I am out there on the road again. I can feel the tarmac through my trousers, hear the sounds of the animals down near the water, feel the chill in the air. The weight of her head is on my knees, and there is a peculiar noise rattling from her. I take my jumper off, I roll it up, I look down the length of her … ‘Ankles,’ I say.

‘Ankles?’

‘They were discoloured.’ I try hard to think. ‘At first I thought they were marks from socks being tight but there were changes to the skin, as if she had been chained or shackled.’

‘OK …’

I find the thought shocking. Billy is made of harder stuff and crams another chip into his face and nods as though he finds this noteworthy.

‘Anything else that you’ve forgotten to tell the police about Sophie? And don’t lie to me, you’re rubbish at it.’

‘They know her gym bag was missing too. She always kept some stuff in it.’

‘Stuff for going to the gym or for going away for the weekend?’ He has spotted my omission. ‘With someone like Mark Laidlaw. They met through the refuge.’ He is thinking deeply now, staring into the middle distance. ‘She ever mention him to you? He is a person of interest, as they say.’

That is a black and white question – did
she
ever mention him to me? ‘No.’

‘Really?’

‘No.’

He gives me a long, hard look but I do not waver. He continues, ‘I’ve had a chat with the cop in charge of Gillian’s case although it’s barely active; the finding of Lorna might get it fired up again. I want to know the results of the PM and I do have my friends in low places. You need to talk to the new SIO.’

‘Why doesn’t he talk to Rod? He’s the one who knows all this, he’s in the middle of it all. I’ve lived up here since May.’

Billy sniffles slightly. ‘Look, Elvie, I need to clarify if Sophie is part of my case or not. Maybe she left of her own accord, maybe she has reasons for not getting in touch with her family. Maybe she was running from one of you. Sophie is a very attractive young lady, and Rod is your mum’s boyfriend. Maybe you should ask what was in that house that she wanted to get away from.’ He drains his coffee cup, puts a twenty on the table to cover the bill and leaves. I stare at the cold, glutinous chips sitting on his plate.