‘Hello?’
‘Hi Dad. It’s Rachel.’
‘Rachel! Hello, love. It’s so good to hear your voice.’
‘And yours, Dad. It’s so good to hear yours.’
CHAPTER 48
Winter was standing before the fax machine in his Pitt Street office, wondering when he’d last used the thing. Whatever the answer, he knew he’d never been remotely as anxious to see anything appear from its black plastic mouth.
He’d been pacing before the fax for the past few minutes, urging it to deliver. The gloom of the poorly lit room swamped him as he waited, feeding his anxiety and quickening his pulse. Would she fit the image that taunted and tempted him in his dreams? Would he know her?
Winter knew it mattered more to him than it should have done but he wouldn’t change that even if he could. It went beyond ghoulish interest: he cared. He wanted to see her and he wanted to see her now. Lily. Barbie. It had been ten minutes since Rachel had said she’d fax the image — ten long minutes.
When the beep that signalled the arrival of the fax burst into the quiet of the room, it made Winter jump and sent his heart thudding into his ribcage. For that momentary beat, he suddenly wondered whether he really wanted to see her after all. The thought lasted as much time as it took the noise to fade.
The wait wasn’t over, however. He had forgotten how bloody slow and inefficient fax machines were when you were used to email or text. The paper edged agonisingly from the feeder, testing his patience and his nerves. When she eventually began to emerge, pixel by laboured pixel, it was head first, her blonde hair filling the top of the page.
It took an age for her eyes to appear, peeping out below a flaxen curtain of eyelashes. They looked up at him from the tray, spring sky blue perhaps, lighter than he’d expected, wide set and deep. In his imagination, her eyes were pleading, appealing to him for help. Sometimes they screamed and he’d stare deep into them, trying to see the reflection of the person who had caused them to cry out in such pain. But the eyes that looked back at him now were disappointingly expressionless.
The paper eased on, revealing the bridge of a slim nose peppered with the faintest of freckles that spread engagingly onto high cheekbones. Her face was narrow and her ears stuck out ever so slightly. As her lips emerged, he saw that they were full and symmetrical, turning up into the beginnings of a natural, youthful smile that defied any attempts at making it impassive.
Her chin carried a mark just right of centre; not a natural cleft but probably the result of an accident, maybe falling from a swing or a bicycle, its faintly irregular contour having been raised by the professor’s scanner. It didn’t scar her looks but offered character and insight into the girl she had been.
When the last of the paper had filtered through the fax machine, Winter hesitated before picking it up, leaving her lying alone and untouched on the tray. Breathe. Deep. He finally picked her up, holding the paper gently, almost reverentially, and looked at her properly for the first time.
Her face was lean and the skin taut. She was a pretty girl, not beautiful perhaps but attractive in an outdoorsy, fun-filled kind of way. He liked her. She was friendly and open but there was a suggestion of something more, a hint of rebelliousness maybe. He read mischief and kindness. Winter knew he was seeing all sorts that probably weren’t there, things that certainly couldn’t be seen by eyes alone. He was able to see those things because he’d seen her before.
She was the girl who visited him in his sleep. His fellow waif and stray. The little sister he’d never had. The photograph he never took. Lily. Barbie. Claire Channing. Who was she really? It scared him at least as much as it excited him to know that he was soon going to find out.
CHAPTER 49
Twenty minutes after they received the call, Winter and Danny were on their way to Whitby. Rachel had resisted the urge to call Addison or anyone else at Strathclyde, and certainly not anyone at North Yorkshire Police, reasoning to herself that the identification wasn’t confirmed and she’d rather be sure before she made it official. She knew, of course, that the truth was far different.
Winter had asked her to phone the SPSA and make up some kind of story to keep his bosses happy. He knew Baxter would go spare about him missing yet another shift and all he could do was hope her plan to come up with some bullshit about vital photographs and identification would be enough for there to be a job for him still when he got back.
Danny was driving, which meant they could probably knock half an hour off the estimated three hours and forty-five minutes the online directions had suggested. Danny had always had a heavy right foot behind the wheel of a car but rejected Winter’s notion that it was because Strathclyde’s boys in blue had let him off speeding tickets for years. He also had a much simpler idea of directions than Winter’s computer.
‘South past Carlisle, hit a left at Penrith, left a bit again at Scotch Corner and keep going till we’re nearly in the sea. Simple.’
That was more or less it for conversation until they were nearly at Lockerbie, both of them consumed with their own thoughts of what lay at the other end of their journey, letting music on the radio fill the void.
‘I still think we should have phoned ahead and told them we were coming,’ Winter piped up. ‘Christ, if it is their daughter, then this is going to come as a bit of a shock. You not think we should have warned them?’
‘No.’
‘That’s it? No.’
‘Aye, that’s it. Tony, there’s more harm than good to be done by telling them we’re coming. I don’t want them prepared.’
‘What? You think they had something to do with it?’
‘I don’t know, do I? Okay, it doesn’t look like it at the moment but if I’ve learned anything in thirty years on the job…’
‘Oh fuck, here we go again…’
‘If I’ve learned anything, it’s that nothing would surprise you. And I’m not taking the chance they might just be involved. When we knock on their door, assuming it is still their door after all these years, I want to see the look on their faces. I want to be sure it’s real.’
‘You’re a sick bastard, Uncle Danny.’
‘And this coming from a man who covers his bedroom wall in photographs of dead people?’
‘Piss off.’
They lapsed into regular silence again after that, pierced only by Danny swearing at the radio DJ’s choice of music and Winter telling him to leave the bloody channels alone. They were near Barnard Castle when Danny’s mobile began ringing. He fished it out of his jacket pocket, took one look at the caller display and threw it over to Winter, who juggled with it before he too saw who was calling: Jered Dunbar.
‘Hello.’
‘Neilson?’
‘No, it’s Tony Winter. And anyway, it’s Mr Neilson to you.’
‘A hard man when you’re on the other end of the phone, eh? Where’s Neilson?’
‘Mr Neilson’s driving. Talk to me.’
There was a long pause on the other end of the line.
‘Okay, monkey, but you make sure you pass it on to the organ grinder. I’ve got a message for him from Uncle: Peter Bradley is at the travellers’ site in Dumbarton at Dennystown Forge.’
‘Thanks, Jered.’
‘Don’t thank me. If it were down to me, I’d have told you nothing. Anyways, word will likely have got to Bradley by now. He’ll know you’ve been asking about him.’
‘You make sure of that?’
‘He’s family.’