Shifty checked his watch. ‘Maybe we should’ve tried Ditchburn Road, instead?’
Outside, the first spots of rain clicked against the living room window.
A big tabby cat slunk its way through the front garden, across the empty parking bay, then up the waist-height brick wall and down into next door’s.
Empty parking bay.
Surely someone working for a hotshot corporate law firm would have a car? So where was it? And back at the prison, he’d said he was working on an appeal by a prisoner who’d beaten up the mother of his child, and now wanted access to the kid. Bet that kid was Andrew Brennan’s baby brother.
Alice said there was a paedophile ring operating in Kingsmeath, but what if it wasn’t a ring? What if it was one man?
‘Shifty?’
He puffed his cheeks out at me. ‘I think we should go eat before we interview anyone else.’
‘Oscar Harris’s uncle, the DJ with the neckbeard — you said he gave you an alibi then got his lawyer involved. Who was the lawyer?’
Shifty’s finger came up to point to the ceiling above our heads. ‘Like he said, he has to represent all the dodgy scumbags, so...’ Shifty’s eyes widened.
I followed his gaze to the light fitting. Water oozed out around where the thing fixed to the plasterboard, trickled down the plastic cable and dripped off the lightbulb. Pattering down on the already wet newspapers where Dewar had been standing.
‘Move!’
Out the living room door, lumbering up the stairs, Shifty hard on my heels.
The landing handrail was festooned with clothes, the carpet sticky as I lurched past an open bedroom door — another tip — to the closed bathroom. The handle rattled as I gripped and twisted, but didn’t open.
Locked.
‘Shifty!’
He barged past and slammed his shoulder into the door. It boomed and rattled. So he did it again, only this time the thing smashed inwards, the lock ripping from the doorframe, bottom hinges giving way so the door sagged like a twisted sail.
Water covered the bathroom floor, spilling out over the sides of an overfilled bath.
And there was Kenneth Dewar, lying naked in it, both arms stretched out in front of him, slashed from elbow to wrist the flesh inside dark — pulsing deep-red swirls out into the tub. A serene smile on his face. ‘I’m sorry...’ as his head fell back to thunk against the mould-blackened tiles.
‘Bastard!’ I grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved his head under the water.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ Shifty tugged at my arms. ‘Get off him!’
I let go with my bad hand and threw an elbow backwards. It thumped into something solid, but Shifty didn’t let go.
‘It was him! He hit Alice with his car — that’s why it’s not parked outside! Hiding the evidence. He’s Gòrach.’
‘If he’s Gòrach, he’s the only one who knows where Toby Macmillan is, you idiot!’
Oh for...
Shifty was right.
I hauled Dewar out of the bath and onto the bathroom floor, bringing a tidal wave of pink-tinged water with him. ‘We need tourniquets!’
‘On it.’ Shifty lurched out to the landing and returned seconds later with a T-shirt from the railing and a pair of jeans. He twisted the T-shirt into a thick cord and tied it around Dewar’s upper arm, as close to the elbow as possible, tendons straining in his neck as he pulled it tight enough to make the stitches creak. ‘Come on, come on, come on. Stop bleeding, you wanker...’
It was the jeans next: twisting one leg then tying it around Dewar’s other arm.
Sat back on his haunches. ‘Not great, but it’ll have to do.’
I curled a hand into a fist. ‘Only needs to last till he tells us where Toby Macmillan is. Then he dies.’
Shifty shook his head. ‘Are you off your head? If he dies now, he dies pissed on whisky — anaesthetised, feeling no pain, and by his own hand. Thought you wanted to make him suffer?’
My mouth opened, then closed again.
Had to admit it: Shifty had a point.
He took hold of Dewar’s ankles and dragged him out onto the landing, making for the stairs. ‘This bastard’s going to hospital, and when he gets better, he’s going to prison, where we’ll make sure every single day is like the Marquis de Sade’s worst nightmare.’ Shifty paused, frowning down at the pale naked body — the lolling head, open mouth, and closed eyes. ‘Well, as long as he doesn’t die on the way to A-and-E.’
‘We need to question him before we call an ambulance.’ Not that he looked in any fit state to be interviewed. Better get his attention first — wake him up a bit. I limped forward onto my bullet-holed right foot, took the weight, then smashed my left heel down on the bastard’s balls.
He sat upright, howling, elbows coming in towards his groin — the arms and hands dangling from them already going a blueish grey.
I squatted down beside him. Slapped him hard enough to shut him up.
He blinked back at me, mouth a trembling wet line. ‘I’m sorry...’
‘It was you, wasn’t it? You killed Andrew Brennan and Oscar Harris and Lewis Talbot and Toby Macmillan. It wasn’t a paedophile ring, it was you. You had access to every one of those little boys, because you represented their abusers, didn’t you?’
‘I...’
‘But Alice was on to you, wasn’t she? So you tried to kill her.’ I grabbed a handful of that thinning hair and yanked his head back, glared down into his bloodshot eyes. ‘Two questions. One: where’s Toby Macmillan? And two: WHERE’S MY FUCKING DOG?’
The paramedic hissed out a breath, shook her head, then tutted. Clunked the ambulance’s back door shut. ‘He’s made a right mess of himself, hasn’t he?’ A nod set bright ginger curls bobbing. ‘Still, he was lucky you were here! Be dead otherwise.’
We stood back as the ambulance pulled away, lights flickering blue-and-white, siren rising in harsh electronic pulses that faded into the distance.
Two patrol cars sat outside the house, parked half on the kerb.
Our backup.
One pair of PCs, in the full high-viz kit, were out setting up a cordon of ‘POLICE’ tape big enough to take in Kenneth Dewar’s semi and the house next door too. Struggling as the wind tried to snatch the tape from their hands, setting it burrrring and whirring.
The second pair of uniforms were on the other side of the road, getting stuck into the door-to-doors, dragging people out of bed at quarter to one in the morning.
Wouldn’t be long before some concerned householder got in touch with the media and the street would be swarming with outside broadcast vans and cameras and microphones and reporters. Doing bits to camera. Asking the neighbours what Kenneth Dewar was like, and had they any idea he was a child-murdering bastard? Oh no, he was always so quiet and polite, kept himself to himself. Same thing everyone said when they lived next to a monster, because if they admitted knowing he was a wrong-un all along, that made them guilty of keeping quiet about it and letting four little boys die.
Shifty stepped back into the doorway, out of the wind and rain. ‘Absolutely starving.’
‘Not much we can do about that now.’
His big round shoulders drooped. ‘Probably not.’
A boxy Range Rover growled its way along Corriemuir Place, parking outside the cordon. Wouldn’t have thought journalists would’ve got here so fast... But it wasn’t a journalist who climbed out of the big ugly car, it was Detective Superintendent Jacobson, wearing his trademark brown leather jacket and pelt-like hair. Holding a hand above his eyes, like the bill on a baseball cap, to keep the rain off his glasses.