The Lost Sister Read online

  She forced a smile and raised a finger. A teacher ticking off a cheeky child. “Nuh-uh. No way, this is something else.”

  She could read me easily. Always the same.

  Only one other person had been able do that.

  I said, “What do you know about Deborah Brown?”

  She gave me the basics. The surrogacy off the books. The complaints filed. The disappearance.

  Tallying up with Wickes’s story.

  What had worried me from the start had been his emphasis. The facts he chose to linger on. The emotions he evoked when he spoke.

  I told her what I could about Deborah Brown. She listened intently, waited until I was finished before saying, “And that prick Wickes says she’s unstable?”

  I nodded. “I believed him at first.”

  “And now?”

  Did I have to answer?

  “I’ve seen the video,” I said. “At Deborah’s flat. No denying it’s Mary. I went to the school. Talked to the rector.”

  Susan nodded. She was interviewing me. This was not about friendship. Or anything close to it. Oh, no, this was business. She took a deep breath, ran a hand through her hair. “You don’t think she’s behind the abduction?”

  “I don’t know if she means the girl harm.”

  “Aye, because you abduct the people you love.”

  “Right now,” I said, “I doubt anything that Wickes told me is true. Whatever he says in interview, I wouldn’t quite –”

  Susan reached up to touch the swelling around her eye. Deliberate? Christ, I hoped not. “Bastard legged it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Fast on his feet for a big guy.”

  “I noticed.”

  “We’re checking on him, now.”

  I nodded. “You won’t find anything. “He’s too clever for that.”

  “I wouldn’t call assaulting a police officer clever.”

  “No,” I said. Thinking maybe I’d call it desperate.

  What was it I’d said before? Aye, love makes you do crazy things.

  Maybe Wickes knew that better than most.

  Chapter 32

  I refused a trip to the hospital. Figured I’d sort my own head out.

  I’d seen enough of Ninewells to last me a lifetime. Hospital was the last place I wanted to be.

  I remember being in a hospital bed. A private room. Uniform outside the door like they thought I was going to get up and walk off.

  My hand shattered.

  Woozy with drugs and exhaustion.

  DI George Lindsay came walking in. His simian slope enough to make me want to shout, “keep your paws offa me, you damn dirty ape.” Guess I had enough sense left in me to keep my big mouth shut. Or else I was just too tired to care.

  He scraped over a chair beside the bed.

  “This isn’t an interview,” he said. “That comes later.”

  I nodded.

  An hour or so earlier I’d been in a graveyard, with my hand freshly broken and a gun pointed at the head of a London hard man who seemed the perfect scapegoat for all the pain and suffering I had witnessed.

  I would have killed the bastard, too. If Susan hadn’t shown up. Hadn’t made me realise what the fuck I was doing, that I was ready to become exactly like the man before me.

  “I’m here,” Lindsay said, “To tell you that I know you’re going to shite me off. I’m not an eejit, even if you keep believing that. No, pal, I’m a fucking copper. A good one, too. Heavy handed? Oh, aye. A cunt? Spot fuckin’ on.”

  Hard to believe a man like Lindsay came here just to tell me that I’d been right all along.

  “I’m here to tell you that you’ll get away with it this time. Not because I like you. Not because you’re innocent – nobody’s innocent, you know that, aye? – but because you’ll weasel your way out of it. Because that stupid wee lass with her head full of ideals seems to like you. Because you’ll get fucking lucky, pal.”

  He leaned in close.

  I could smell onions.

  “Luck doesn’t last forever. I know that. And somewhere in that thick skull of yours, I know that you know it, too. So if you get out of this, maybe you want to give it a rest. Because the minute you stick your size bloody twelves in, that’s when things get fucked up. I’ve known that about you, pal, from the minute we met. You’re a man with a conscience and a code and all that other bollocks, but you’re also a man who drags his own disaster around with him like a wrecking ball. You want to help people. But you can’t. Can’t even help your fucking self.”

  Maybe he got to me, then.

  I remember this shiver that ran through my body; a thousand ants scuttling just below my skin.

  I’d blame it on the drugs, of course.

  How could I ever admit that a man like Lindsay got to me like that?

  And how could I ever admit that I thought he was right?

  Back home from the station, I slugged aspirin, decided to hit the sack. Sleep it off. I’d had worse than this.

  I drifted off, spent the night passed out.

  Needed the rest. Clearly.

  When I woke up, it was past eleven in the morning. Something was battering at the inside of my skull.

  Something I’d forgotten.

  I threw off the sheets, and got to my feet. Stumbled through to the kitchen, my legs unsteady. My muscles protested, but I ignored them.

  This thing – this idea – refused to leave. It was like seeing something on the periphery of your vision, but every time you turn to catch it, it floats out of view again.

  The kettle rumbled on the worktop.

  I massaged my temples hard, as though I could somehow work loose this idea which seemed to be so desperately calling for my attention.

  The kettle boiled. The switch clicked.

  The idea slipped into focus.

  The sister.

  The paper Wickes had pocketed at the apartment. I’d almost forgotten about it.

  Deborah’s sister.

  The one Wickes had talked about like she hated him.

  Why would Deborah have her address?

  Why would Wickes pocket it?

  I walked back through to the bedroom, forgetting about the kettle, and grabbed my jacket from where I’d slung it on the end of the bed. I dug inside the pockets. Pulled out the little cross on the chain.

  Let it dangle between my fingers.

  Chapter 33

  This work, you need a good memory. Facts, figures, faces, names, attitudes; they all need to be kept straight in your head. You get nowhere if you start to forget things, fuzz up cases and people.

  I’d never played the game like amateur hour. Call that a matter of pride.

  Concussion counts as an excuse?

  Maybe to some.

  I was trying to recall what I’d seen on the paper. The address. Sitting in the spare bedroom, lit up by a desk lamp, writing down names and words on paper, concentrating on the memory of that wee pink square I’d seen in Wickes’s grasp earlier.

  It had been important.

  Time ticked by. Hours. I struggled. My head was swimming. If I sat back, I’d drift off again.

  Every time, that nagging insistence would pull me back out of sleep.

  But it was slow going.

  How hard had I gone down in the car park?

  I should have been paying attention to Wickes.

  Not allowed myself to be distracted by suspicions and conspiracies. Maybe then I wouldn’t be locked up in a spare room trying to drag some half-remembered scrap out of information out of the useless lump of grey matter inside my skull.

  But it wasn’t just that. Sure, I’d refused to go to hospital, but I recognised the fuzzy feeling in my head, knew I wasn’t at my best. My memory wasn’t working properly: things seemed more confusing than they should have been. I couldn’t separate out every fact I wanted to.

  All I wanted was one piece of information.

  Something that could help me connect the dots.

  This
was important. I wasn’t about to be responsible for yet another fuck up. I was going to get all the evidence together, present it to Susan, let her deal with it.

  That bastard Lindsay wasn’t going to be right about me.

  But I wasn’t calling Susan until I had hard evidence.

  Same old story.

  The psychiatrist I’d seen after the crash – mandatory counselling, so the big boys on the force had called it – had unofficially diagnosed me like this:

  “You have to be the hero. Save everyone. Doesn’t matter if you know it’s a bad idea. It’s a compulsion. To satisfy your own ego.”

  I’d called shite.

  Knowing he had my number down cold.

  But who’d admit to that?

  I closed my eyes, tried to see that paper.

  Got nothing.

  Threw the pen and paper across the room. Wanting to roar.

  My head was bulging from the inside out. That pain even worse than ever, now.

  My hand was buzzing.

  The muscles in my left leg were screaming. As though stretched to breaking point.

  I leaned back in the chair, locked my fingers behind my head and pulled my hands together. Tried to squeeze all the pressure out from inside my skull.

  I closed my eyes.

  The thing with this job, so much of it is logical procedure. Simple steps lead you to every solution. You need to remain methodical.

  You can’t remember an address, there’s always some small thing you can do. Some tiny, intuitive practice that should come to you natural as breathing.

  Remind me how hard I’d slammed the concrete?

  Fuck my memory; Swiss-cheesed as the fall had made it. Let my fingers do the walking.

  A name.

  Kathryn Brown.

  Came to me in a moment, as though something in my head just turned and clicked into place. That was all I needed. That first step, I could stumble the rest of the way.

  What had Wickes called her? Aye, “the bitch”. That and the way he reacted to Susan, I had to wonder how much love was really in his heart for Deborah.

  One name is all you need. A name, enough information to guess at where they’d roam. Most people don’t move so far. Aye, sure this is the age of mass transport, but the fact of the matter is that most folks stay where they’re comfortable. Within a day’s drive of the place they consider home.

  Makes them easy to trace.

  Especially if they’re staying on the grid.

  Information is everywhere. The modern world is a mass of facts and figures, most of it unsecured. People think they’re being careful, they don’t know the meaning of the word.

  Without thinking, we give names and addresses to unsecured agencies. We willingly put ourselves on the electoral register. We give our whole lives out to the world in plain view of anyone who knows where to look.

  A straight citizen like Kathryn Brown wouldn’t be hard to trace. Made me wonder why the police hadn’t done so already. Could be any number of reasons, of course. Most of them bureaucratic.

  That was part of why I’d struck it out on my own. Any mistakes in my investigation would be my own and no one else’s.

  Of course, some days that was no comfort at all.

  Mary Furst Missing

  72 Hours

  Chapter 34

  “So where are you now?”

  Susan knew exactly where I was. No question she could hear the rush of the engine on her end of the line. She was deliberately playing dumb; seeing whether I was still pulling those same old dance moves.

  A little honesty doesn’t hurt every once in a while. “I’m about ten minutes from her place.”

  She grunted. I could hear the disappointment.

  Felt it a little myself.

  What happened to passing this one off to the people best placed to deal with it?

  I tried for light-hearted. “Figured telling the truth might stop you killing me.”

  “We’ll see.” Did I hear a barely disguised laugh behind that?

  I tried to reason with her. Or at least convince myself I was doing the right thing. “If we go in like a raiding party and drop our size twelves all over her carpet, we’re going to spook this woman. I think she knows where Deborah is – where Mary is – but I don’t think she’s going to want to talk to a whole platoon of fucking coppers about it. She’s known the truth from the start; I don’t think she wants to give her sister up.”

  “But she’ll talk to you? She’ll tell you everything?”

  “I’m not a copper.”

  “That gives you some kind of privilege?”

  “What I’m saying is…if you come alone, don’t flash the badge, maybe between the two of us we’ll be able to figure out what’s going on. Find Mary. Bring her home.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Wickes was lying from the start. I think Deborah has Mary, but I think there’s more going on here than we realise.”

  “You’re angry that you fell for his sob story.”

  “Aye, you’re right.”

  “You want to fix this yourself.” She didn’t even give me a chance to answer. “Look what happened last time.”

  I hit the brakes for red lights. Idled. Hands gripping the wheel. The leather slipped beneath my palms.

  Susan said, “But I’ll go with you on this. If nothing else, I want to be there to stop you. Before you make the same mistakes you did before.”

  “I’m a different man.”

  “Really?”

  “You need someone to back you up,” she said. “Watch out for you. I know you think things have changed, but you don’t just come up for air from the kind of place you were in last year.”

  The lights changed. I hit the accelerator. “I’ll see you there,” I said, ignoring what she had just told me. Fighting a strange shiver that had started to build inside me. I reached out with my left hand and terminated the connection.

  Here’s what I knew about Kathryn Brown before I pulled up outside her house:

  Homeowner. Decent credit rating. No outstanding debts. Kept her head down and stayed out of trouble.

  She was unmarried. Held down a decent job with the forestry service that didn’t involve going into the great outdoors terribly often. Had resided at the same address for the past five years.

  I had her home phone. Address. Yearly salary.

  Took two hours to pull all of that.

  If you know where to look, you can find out things about people they’d never expect you to know.

  Kathryn Brown lived out near Camperdown. A two storey Georgian house with a small front garden and driveway. Neat and minimal from outside. Nice place, bought during the housing boom. In the current climate, repossession had to be a worry.

  In the current climate, everything was a worry.

  The front door was painted dark blue. Recent job if I was any judge. Frosted glass at head height. I could see my splintered reflection looking back at me.

  I rang the doorbell.

  Lights were on. Someone was home.

  The woman who answered was in her early to mid forties. Her hair was swept up and her makeup was smooth and subtle. Some signs of age in her features, noticeably creasing around the eyes and mouth. But middle-age hadn’t quite left behind the soft eyes and shy attractiveness of youth yet. See her in the right light, you’d be kind enough to guess at early thirties. She was dressed for the office in a sobering skirt-suit and silk blouse. Her expression was bemused and a little harried. Figured I’d caught her just in from work.

  “Hello?”

  I hesitated. Just a moment. She sensed it, too, took a step back and looked ready to close the door in my face.

  I said, “It’s about your sister. Deborah. And her daughter. We need to talk about that. We really do.”

  All things considered, she remained calm. Stepped back and let me walk inside. No protest.

  Chapter 35

  As I stepped inside, Kathryn Brown sa
id, “I thought you might be the police. Except maybe for…” She gestured to her own face, meaning she’d noticed my new scars. And who wouldn’t?

  “The police?” Aye, check the innocent tone.

  She led me through to the kitchen. The sliding French doors that led out to the rear of the property had been broken; glass shattered and spread out across the linoleum. “Happened before I came home. Five years I’ve been here, and no trouble.” She nodded out across the back garden to the silhouettes of the high rises. “Sometimes wonder if the problems are worse in people’s heads.”

  I said, “Comes to us all sooner or later.”

  She nodded. “You’re sure you’re not the police?”

  I smiled. “Used to be.”

  She nodded. “You have the walk.” She kept her back to me, started examining the shattered window, assessing the damage. A B&E, executed with no hint of subtlety.

  I kept back. Looked around the kitchen. All the utensils were packed away. All the work surfaces sparkled.

  Funny thing was, I would have expected more chaos in the wake of a B&E.

  When I looked back at Kathryn Brown, she offered me a sad little smile and said, “I think I scared them off when I came home.”

  “You saw someone here?”

  She ignored the question: “When you mentioned Deborah, I was ready to shut the door in your face.”

  “You know where she is.” Not a question. A statement of fact. She couldn’t argue with me.

  “Who are you again?”

  I pulled out a card, laid it on the kitchen worktop. She looked at it, but not closely.

  “Unusual job,” she said.

  “It pays the bills.”

  “Oh? Surprised we don’t have more of you, then.”

  “Discretion,” I said, “is the key.”

  She smiled, picked up the card and slipped it into the inside pocket of her suit jacket. She moved to the sink, grabbed a glass from the draining board and poured herself a water straight from the tap. Let it run for a few moments before placing the glass in the stream.

  Splash back bounced off her hand.

  “Tell me why you left the police.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, what kind of man gives up on that? Goes on to become –”