Crime Read online

  — Eddie! Ginger spits, and he sees Dolores playing thoughtfully with the name.

  — Sorry … Eddie, Lennox forces a weak, defeated grin. Bad habits, they are so very hard to stop, so very, very hard. — Tianna, these are good friends of mine, Eddie and Dolores Rogers. I want you to stay with them and Trudi. I’ll be back later.

  — I wanna stay with you, she says, standing her ground.

  Lennox’s palms out-turn in appeal, mimicking a hundred Scottish con men he’s put behind bars. — I’ll be back before you know it.

  Doubt and distrust colour Tianna’s face: she could be his mother now. He’s relieved that Trudi’s here, and Dolores, who asks Tianna, — Do you like dolphins and marine life?

  — I guess so, she says as Braveheart approaches, sniffing at her leg, tail wagging.

  — Trudi and I were gonna take a trip to Ocean World tomorrow morning.

  — And you can help me look at dresses, Trudi says, taking Tianna’s hand as they lead her to the 4x4. But the girl looks back to Lennox. — Lance is a cop. He’ll put you in jail! Be careful!

  — Of course I will.

  Trudi disengages and hastens back over to him. — It’s time to let go, Ray. To get the local police involved, she urges, as Braveheart follows his nose over to the verge by the waterway.

  — I cannae, I need tae –

  — You need to sort out your own life. Trying to sort out other people’s won’t save you, Ray.

  — But I –

  They are distracted by a growling noise. The dog has gone sniffing over into a clump of mangrove bushes by the fence. An exasperated Dolores gets out of the car and follows after him. — Look, buster, I’ve had it with you!

  Then something happens so quickly, they almost believe it to be a hoax. The emerging alligator looks like a plastic toy as its snout protrudes from the bushes, but it lunges out at speed and its jaws, in one terrible snap, seize the dog. — BRAVEHEARRTTT! Dolores screams, and runs towards the fence and swamp, only to be restrained by Ginger. — Don’t, Dolly, for fuck sakes!

  At first it seems as if the reptile is going to gorge the small mammal whole, then it bites down in bone-crushing repetition on the screeching dog. It semi-swallows, regurgitates and slaps the dog, now like a rag doll, against the ground twice, and then shoots over a large hurricane-flattened section of fence, the limp body in its jaws.

  Lennox and Trudi head over in cagey pursuit. She halts at the edge of the swamp, Lennox takes a few steps into it, but stops as he can feel its leafy, boundless darkness multiplying around him. They draw back to where Dolores, straining against Ginger, screams in anguish. Lennox takes hold of her as Ginger runs to the back of his vehicle, telling Tianna not to move and swiftly returning with a flashlight, but both creatures have vanished into the night. Silence is restored to the swamp, though Lennox fancies he can hear a sweet, victorious groan coming from the glades. A shaken Dolores crumpled into the Dodge, where Trudi and Tianna try to comfort her.

  — That’s that then, Ginger observes, nervously looking back towards the gap in the fence.

  — I’m so sorry, Eddie, Lennox says wretchedly. — I feel responsible. It was me who brought you out here.

  Ginger drops his voice and sidles close to him, eliminating the others from earshot. — Don’t be, he hisses in barely repressed glee. — Dinnae say anything tae Dolores, but that wee fucker was the bane ay ma life. I always wanted a bigger dug, like a German shepherd, a proper dug. Look, I’d better get the lassies hame. Ye comin?

  — No. I’m going back. I’ll be along later.

  — Ray, Trudi has got out of the car again, — please come with us.

  — Get back in the car! It’s dangerous! Lennox snaps. But Trudi doesn’t move.

  — She’s right, Ginger says. — You’ve done your bit. From here on in, all you can do is make a total cunt of yourself. And by that I mean an even bigger one than you already have.

  — No way, Lennox says. He’s thinking about Robyn. And Dearing, Johnnie, Starry and Chet. She knows something and they are keeping her quiet till they decide what to do with her. What will they do, given the resources they have? Now, out here in those swamps, it is so chillingly obvious to him. The sea. They’ll lose her at sea. Lance and Johnnie are taking Robyn to Chet’s boat and they’ll dump her somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s high risk, of course. Coastguards, terrorist alerts, illegal-immigration control teams, DEA helicopters. But they might now be desperate enough to try it.

  But not as desperate as him. Because he wants them: Lance, Johnnie, Starry, that trinity of bad intent. Chet too, though the nature of his embroilment is harder to fathom. And the terrible possibility of Robyn’s culpability won’t dislodge itself from his overheated mind. The music in his head is winding down, because his part in Tianna’s terrible ballad is over. Now there’s a new song striking up, or a remix of an old forgotten one. And it isn’t about Britney. It’s about a frightened boy trapped in a dark tunnel. And despite Dolores’s cries and Trudi’s protests, it’s all he can hear.

  — C’mon, Ray, Ginger pleads.

  Lennox thinks of Perfect Bride with Trudi’s address in it. — I’ve left something, and he climbs back into the rented Volkswagen.

  17

  Edinburgh (4)

  YOU SAW POLICE Headquarters at Fettes as a factory, one which measured and allotted the requisite units of humanity to everyone that came through its doors. The suspects. The members of your team: Gillman, Drummond, Notman, Harrower, McCaig. You.

  Through his entire processing by the state’s law enforcement and criminal justice systems, Horsburgh displayed only arrogance and disdain. The searches of property and assets. The intimate forensic tests. The interrogations. The psychiatrist’s reports. The official charges. He enjoyed it as a game; savoured the embarrassment all round when he confessed to the Welwyn Garden City and Manchester crimes. It all meant so little to him. But it meant so much to you, and Mr Confectioner knew it.

  It came to a head on a mid-November Wednesday, three weeks after Britney had been taken. You’d spent hours with this man, trying to find out what made him the way he was. Looked into his soul. Saw nothing. Exasperation got the better of you. — Why? Why did you do it?

  — Because I could, Confectioner had replied in offhand candour, removing his reading specs, waving them gently to underscore a point. — It was the sport of it mainly. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I got a lot of pleasure from the sexual side, but that wasn’t the main motivation. Very fleeting, that sort of thing. Besides, this one was a little too young. I prefer them to have some sort of awareness of what’s going to happen to them. His lips trembled in delight, knowing he’d got to you. — It was more the thrill of the chase, stalking them, building up the dossiers, evading you lot. We’re thrill-seeking creatures, are we not?

  You had fought to maintain silence and an even stare; to keep looking dispassionately for the clues. We studied our serial killers, nonces and murderers in the same way we did our scientists, intellectuals and artists, looking for answers to the mystery of our nature.

  And Confectioner recognised that in you, this fatal curiosity; used it to toy with you. — You’re different from the others, he’d pompously declared. — They just need to know how. How did I lure, overpower, fuck, kill and conceal. But you’re really so desperate to know why. You want me to tell you that I was buggered by my father or the local parish priest or whoever. In your dwarf mind, there must always be cause and effect. But you’re only protecting weaklings like yourself, Lennox. You can’t accept that man is a hunter, a predator. Civil society’s set up to protect the weak and the cowardly – be they rich or poor – from the strong and virtuous who have the courage to fulfil the destiny of their species. Who have the guts to take what they want.

  The grimly cheerful smile. That rubbery mouth you wanted to tear from his face.

  — You know, I had every police force in Britain looking for me for the best part of five years and you didn’t have a fucking clue a
s to who I was. All this time I’d be lodging complaints at my local station about vandalism or noise coming from pubs, and you’d bend over backwards to help.

  It was true. Mr Confectioner, ‘Horsey’, the pedantic Home Office civil servant nobody wanted to be stuck beside on the morning commuter train from Aylesbury to Marylebone, had conned them all. His whole persona was an act, concealing a warped but calculating mind. Photography was his supposed interest, but the darkroom upstairs in his home, out of reach from his crippled mother, was really a laboratory. All his weekend and holiday time was spent planning his abductions and murders. His true hobby was kidnapping, beasting and killing.

  Horsburgh would hire a cottage within a couple of hours’ driving distance from his intended target area. Nula Andrews was taken to a place in the Fenlands, Stacey Earnshaw the Lake District, and Britney Hamil to the Berwickshire coast. Horsburgh also told them where the body of a young French girl was buried in Normandy. — A holiday romance, he’d chirped, meeting your seething rage with a television game-show host’s smile. — They never last.

  This disclosure resulted in the release of a farm labourer who had been in a French prison for seven years. Crucially, though, Confectioner refused to cooperate when you showed him pictures of other missing children. — Not quite ready to help you there, he’d said genially. But you knew there were more victims.

  None of the missing kids was on Horsburgh’s comprehensive database of young girls, or featured in his detailed notes. But also absent were records for Nula, Stacey and Britney; he’d obviously erased them on completion of each abominable mission. How many others were there?

  You did find the white van. Horsburgh also had a black one, keeping both in a lock-up garage a mile from his home, using them solely for his crimes. He selected his victims at random, trying for a geographical spread. He also had the tapes he’d made.

  If there was one thing more unsettling to you than talking to Confectioner, it had been watching the Britney tape earlier that morning with Dougie Gillman. — That’s five times, his frozen, mordant observation, — he’s fucked her, choked her unconscious, then brought her back for another shot. That’s his thing.

  Gillman’s voice and those images snapped back into your head as you stared at Horsburgh’s hands. You buckled under a sharp intake of breath, as you heard the soft, childlike plea escape from somewhere deep within you. — She was only a wee lassie.

  The killer looked at you as if you were simple: with pity as well as contempt. Then you realised that Bob Toal had come into the interview room. He nodded for you to follow him outside, steering you into an empty office and closing the door. — You’re losing it, Ray, he warned. — Go and get some lunch. I want to give Dougie a shot at him this affie.

  You gripped his forearm. — Just one more session, you begged.

  Toal looked over your shoulder into the middle distance. — Okay, Ray, he said finally, — you pulled him, you deserve the chance to see it through. Then he looked down at your hand, shaming you into withdrawing your grip. — But it’s against my better judgement: you’re a mess.

  And you couldn’t contradict him. Last night you’d turned up at Trudi’s, a rambling drunk. There was an argument and you’d woken up on her couch, and gone straight into work. — I’m sorry, you told your boss, — I’ll sort myself out.

  Toal looked doubtful. — Leave the whys for the shrinks. Find out about those other kids.

  — Thanks. I’ll stick to the details, like you said, as you glanced at each other in impasse, both unsure of what to say next. You eventually managed to wheeze out your intention of getting some lunch, and you trooped down to Stockbridge.

  Then, in Bert’s Bar, as you watched Sky News, Robert Ellis appeared on the screen. Out of prison, self-educated, well read. Enjoying the new-found status of being the articulate good guy. — I feel sorry for the families of Stacey Earnshaw and Nula Andrews. They deserved genuine closure but instead they were forced to live a lie all those years. Most of all, though, I really feel for the family of Britney Hamil. While I was rotting in jail, this monster was out there, free to do these unspeakable things to that child. Heads will roll, he threatened. Ellis now a hero to those who forgot his vile rant at the grave of Nula Andrews. But you harboured the uneasy sensation that had he been as eloquent several years back, Ellis, instead of instigating bar-room brawls, might have been a man who led nations into war.

  You couldn’t stand it: you went to the toilet and snorted a line of cocaine.

  When you returned to Fettes, you savoured the cold burn in your veins. Felt that you now had the measure of the beast. In the interview room you had distance back in your voice. — You’d have been pretend-tinkering in the back of the van, looking out for signs of life at the windows. Waiting till Britney had walked past and was blocked by the body of the van from any prying eyes on the other side of the road. You grabbed the kid, bundled her into the back, shut the door, secured her, probably with duct tape, maybe forced some Rohypnol or chloroform on to her, then climbed into the front, right?

  — And tore off to my evil lair for the slow devouring. Horsburgh smiled. — You’re a smart one, DI Lennox. Probably an IT background, I’m guessing. A 2:1 at some second-rate, but still decent uni. Perhaps even a master’s –

  — Shut the fuck up.

  Horsburgh looked offended, then somewhat disappointed as he disdainfully raised his brows. — But you missed stuff. The CCTV footage of the grave. You’ve probably looked at loads of it. Kills the eyes, that sort of thing. How’s your vision?

  You sensed you were being played. Were suddenly very aware of your colleagues through the mirror. — What?

  — Did you ever look at Parka Man’s debut appearance?

  — In Welwyn …

  — Sorry, I meant my debut appearance in Edinburgh. He paused for effect. You felt the room grow bigger, Horsburgh receding from you. — The security footage from Burger Palace, at that dreadful shopping centre … you missed it, didn’t you?

  You battled to retain your composure. — Go on.

  Mr Confectioner laughed like a waterfall, all shoulder-shaking shushes. — I suppose I overestimated you. Check it. The night before I took her, when she went with her mother and sister to that grotty fast-food place. Had you checked the footage, you’d have seen me there. Sporting the trusty parka. You were remiss, DI Lennox.

  You could feel the eyes of the others – Toal, Gillman – through that mirror. Knew they wouldn’t be on Horsburgh.

  — I’d dumped my little device in the rubbish bin outside the window. A small bang to attract them all, then that blazing bucket. How children love a fire! So easy for me to swap Tessa’s drink with my spiked concoction; I knew she’d go for Sprite, she always did. I hoped that Britney would walk alone to school the next day, and sure enough … He basked in self-approval. — The rest played out roughly as you described it. My discarding of the school books and bag was basically just to mess around with you. A little tease. It thrilled me to think of you earnestly pondering the deep significance of these completely playful actions. But … you didn’t think to check the burger bar’s CCTV from the night before? Shabby policework, Lenno –

  You’d sprung across that cold distance between you and him and had your hands round Mr Confectioner’s throat. But although his body went limp and he offered no resistance, fear was absent from his bulging eyes. Instead, a sick smile played upon his rubbery lips; he was like a terrifying ventriloquist’s dummy. And you heard him rasp in a thin, ghostly voice, — Feels good, doesn’t it?

  Then, in a slow caressing movement, Gareth Horsburgh’s hand went up to your genitals. You stopped, froze under the nonce’s touch on your penis; that contact when you realised, with horror, that you were erect. You loosened your grip and backed away, just as Gillman and Notman burst through the door. — Now you’re beginning to understand, Mr Confectioner said, rubbing at his throat.

  Then you saw how it should be done. Saw Gillman move slowly behind Horsburgh.
Watched apprehension replace the hauteur in the beast’s eyes. Saw the unnerved nonce try to steel himself, and he was about to speak when Gillman said in an even, neutral voice, like he was talking about the weather: — You’re mine now.

  — No marks, Doug, Ally, you’d said softly, trying pathetically to maintain an authority you knew had left you as you closed the door, squeamished by the mutual information that hung adhesively between you and your brother officers, as cosy and wily as clandestine sex.

  You went to the anteroom, slumped down in a chair next to Toal. Watched defeatedly through the screen. There are many ways you can hurt somebody without leaving marks. Every interrogator in every police force in the world gets taught them, either formally or informally, depending on the nature of the regime. You were sure that Gillman, standing behind the now disquieted Mr Confectioner, a white towel in his hands, knew every one of them. — All that stuff aboot being a hunter, he smirked as he snapped the ends of the towel tight, — made me laugh, that yin.

  By his silence, Gareth Horsburgh recognised that true terror would now be visited upon him, by someone who really did understand punishment.

  — Ye know, ah don’t see that. Gillman shook his head. — Ah see a middle-aged guy who lives at hame with ehs ma.

  You couldn’t stay. You sprang to your feet, headed out and down the stairs, shamed again by the beast. A pursuing Toal caught up with you on the path outside. In the biting cold air, your boss gave you the spiel about being a good man, who’d done a good job. About not taking the Robertson route and going down. Then he’d whispered, — You were caught on camera, leaving a bar in Newcastle frequented by drug dealers.

  — Boss, I –

  — Don’t say anything, Ray. Toal’s head whipped back and forth. — It’s been taken care of. Don’t speak to anybody about this. I’ve made an appointment for you to go and see Melissa Collingwood in counselling. You are officially on leave till further notice. Go to Trudi’s, Ray.

  You nodded, walked down into Comely Bank Avenue and jumped in a taxi up to the Jeanie Deans pub. All you could think of was: I didn’t consider the camera in the centre, at the burger bar. They had one there, to check who was going in and out of the toilets, and over the counters for robbery and staff assaults. I just didn’t think about the night before. Why? Because all I thought about was Angela, what a dirty, lazy cow she was, who’d poisoned her own kid with her crap food.