It was almost pretty.
But then Oldcastle always did look better in the dark.
Especially if you couldn’t see Kingsmeath.
Sitting on the floor, by its charger, my phone let out the ding-buzzzz that announced an incoming text.
The number wasn’t recognised, but the message made it clear enough:
Mr Henderson you promised John you
wood email that footageage to me!!! Don’t
make me regret thrusting you.
Autocorrect strikes again.
Might as well get it over with.
Mother’s business card had gone limp from its stint in my damp pocket, but I dug it out anyway and sent her everything we’d filmed in Gordon Smith’s basement, even the duff bits. Then unplugged my phone and settled into the squeaky leather couch.
Pressed play.
Footage was shaky, but the camera lingered long enough on each Polaroid to capture most of the details. The young blonde woman on one leg, in a park. The brunette on a beach. The young guy in a beer garden. The old man and younger woman, looking awkward on a putting green... Then more. And more. All those people, smiling and alive. Then all those people in life-ending agony.
By my count there were sixteen people in the ‘before’ pictures, and twenty-two in the ‘after’ ones. Couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if most of the first lot were in the second. Not all of them, though. And there were definitely people getting tortured who didn’t have ‘before’ shots.
I went back to the start and pressed play again.
Park; beach; beer garden; putting green; then a man in his mid-twenties and swimming shorts, reclining on a sunlounger, chest and shoulders a painful shade of scarlet, raising a half-coconut with a wee paper umbrella and straw sticking out the top. Two young women, wrapped around each other — one red-haired, the other blonde — caught in the act of laughing, bent nearly double in front of one of those coin-operated binocular things you got at seaside piers. A happy couple, slightly blurred, waving at the camera as the carousel horses they were sitting on galloped past. A teenaged boy wearing a Manchester United top, grinning out of the photo, hot dog in one hand, can of Coke in the other, bunting in the background. A young woman, sat astride a bay pony, crash helmet on, polo shirt and jodhpurs, knee-high riding boots, beaming like this was the best ever day of her life. Rather than the start of the last one.
Clearly, Gordon Smith liked his victims young. The only person over twenty-five was the old guy on the putting green. But then he probably wasn’t the target. The young woman he’d been caught so awkwardly cuddling was.
Next: a smiling young woman in an ugly orange-and-brown one-piece swimming costume, face covered in freckles, mousy-blonde hair tucked behind an ear, rolling sand dunes behind her. Then a young man dressed in a smart suit and academic gown, mortarboard on his head as he posed on the steps outside a pillared portico, what had to be a degree clutched in his...
Hold on a minute.
I rewound the footage, back to the ugly swimming costume, and hit pause.
She looked... familiar.
Well, familiar-ish.
Broad forehead, wide mouth with lots of teeth, long straight nose sitting on a heart-shaped face. A touch overweight. Not conventionally pretty — not someone people would stop to stare at in the street if she walked past — just a normal person, whose luck ran out the moment this photograph was taken.
Maybe she was one of the faces from the other set of Polaroids? The ‘after’ pictures, with their bruises and slashes and blood and screaming. Maybe that’s where I’d seen her?
I called them up and flicked through... yup. There she was.
A hard cold lump turned deep inside my stomach.
How could anyone do that to someone? How could that get your rocks off?
But there was still something else.
Damn.
My jacket lay draped over one of the dining chairs, parked right in front of the radiator, in an attempt to dry the soggy thing out. The framed photo Helen MacNeil had given me still lurked in the side pocket.
The glass was misted with condensation, but a tea towel took care of that.
Two women in the photo: one was Helen MacNeil, smiling for once in her life, a large muscled arm draped across the shoulders of her teenaged granddaughter. It was clearly taken in a photographer’s studio — the mottled backdrop and professional lighting was evidence of that — but while her gran had put in a bit of effort, Leah MacNeil had opted for ripped jeans, a black denim jacket speckled with patches and badges, and a T-shirt for a band I’d never heard of. Wearing so much makeup it looked as if she’d been decorated.
But she had the same heart-shaped face as her grandmother. The same long sharp nose. The same broad forehead. Her hair was dyed a rich purply-blue, but the mousy-blonde roots were clearly visible.
She wasn’t the young woman in the Polaroids, but the family resemblance was obvious.
Damn it. God, sodding, damn it.
‘You were supposed to have killed yourself...’
Maybe it was a coincidence? Someone who looked like her?
I scrolled through to Rhona’s number and pressed the button. Listened to it ring as I placed the photo frame on the coffee table, facing me.
Then, ‘Guv? If you called up hoping to hear me eating again, all I’ve got’s a—’
‘Sophie MacNeil. Where’s her body?’
‘Eh?’
‘Her body, Rhona, if she killed herself, where is it?’
‘Guv, is something wrong?’
‘Yes.’ Finding it difficult to keep my voice calm and reasonable. ‘Now where’s her bloody body?’
‘Hold on.’ Some rustling. ‘Is it something I’ve done? Because if it’s... OK, here we go. Procurator Fiscal’s judgement was that Sophie MacNeil’s remains were washed out to sea. Never recovered. But the suicide note was enough to—’
‘Buggering hell.’
‘Guv?’
‘Sorry, Rhona, got to go. There’s a call I need to make.’
Rain lashed at the patrol car as we left the bright lights of Logansferry behind and headed out the Strathmuir road. Blue-and-whites flickering, turning the downpour into sapphires and diamonds as they rattled against the bonnet and windscreen.
Mother slumped in the passenger seat, face sagging, scrubbing at her eyes. ‘Why me? Why does crap like this always have to happen to me?’
‘Yes, because this is all about you.’ I shifted in the back seat, sat behind the driver because I wasn’t an idiot. ‘How do you think Helen MacNeil’s going to feel?’
The driver, a spotty-faced lump of gristle in the full Police Scotland black with matching accessories, sniffed. ‘Might be a comfort for her: finding out her wee girl didn’t commit suicide.’
My hand tightened around the head of my old walking stick. ‘Is that what you think?’ Knuckles aching as I squeezed the polished wood.
Mother groaned. ‘Come on, Mr Henderson, he didn’t mean anything by that.’
‘You think it’s comforting to find out your daughter was tortured and murdered by a serial killer?’ Getting louder with every word. ‘You think that’ll be an excuse for a party, maybe? Get out the karaoke machine and HAVE A BASTARDING SINGSONG?’