Mo Hayder - Pig Island

The police station was in a dark brick building on a main street, and while we waited in Reception for someone to come to the desk, she stood with her back to the wall, arms folded tight round her, eyes darting from side to side as if she expected to be ambushed. The man behind the glass shield was friendly enough until Oakesy told him why we were there. Then his smile froze and the friendliness left him. He looked from Oakesy, to me, to Angeline and back again, as if he was sure we were having him on. 'Wait there,' he muttered, and disappeared for a while. When he reappeared he didn't meet our eyes, but ushered us through a door, down a corridor and into an office, a small stale room at the back of the police station, full of filing cabinets, with chipped mugs on the desk. 'Wait in here,' he said, switching on the light. 'DS Struthers is out on a call, but he's coming back to speak to you. I'm going to get you some coffee.'

We sat in the office waiting for our coffee, none of us speaking. Oakesy spent the time bent over, inspecting his legs, running his fingers down the messy long grazes already scabbing over. I kept watching Angeline. She could hardly keep still she was so nervous: swallowing over and over again and putting her coat sleeve up to dab at the sweat that kept popping out on her forehead. It was strange the way she was sitting, half on her right leg, one hand clutching the seat as if she was sore or something.

After about five minutes a sleepy-looking man in a rather creased suit appeared in the open doorway. We all glanced up at him expectantly, but he didn't say anything, just stood there, studying us all. He was young, probably only about twenty-nine, and slightly overweight (what do they say about the Glaswegians? That they've got a lower life expectancy than the Ethiopians or something?). His hair had been shaved at the back of the neck, with the front all spiked up and the tips bleached yellow.

'I'm DS Callum Struthers,' he said, after a while. 'The desk FSO told me your story and what I'm wondering is…' He looked from one of us to another, taking us in. '… is it true?'

'It's true.'

'You were out on old Cuagach? The three of you?'

'Just me,' said Oakesy. He nodded to Angeline. 'And her.'

'And what are you going to tell me? You saw the devil of Cuagach? A wee maddarous beastie creeping through the forests?'

Next to me I felt Angeline stiffen. She dropped her face and began to scratch compulsively at her shorn head. Her chest was rising and falling, her mouth moving noiselessly; she was muttering something under her breath as if she was talking herself into not getting up and running away. Oakesy turned to Struthers. He had that heavy, red-eyed look that he gets when he's angry.

'Are you sure your desk sergeant told you what happened?'

Struthers lowered his lids and nodded. 'Aye. But to be fair with you, it's not the first time I've heard this story. People love a good hoax call when it comes to old Cuagach. Human remains washing up on the Craignish Peninsula? I mean, what do they think we are?'

'Don't say that word again.'

'What word?'

'Hoax.'

Oh-oh, I thought, there's going to be another fight. But then Struthers seemed to back off a bit. He came in and sat down, studying Oakesy very carefully for a while.

'Our dispatchers in Govan have got a lad nipping out to Cuagach for a keek at what's happening out there.' He glanced up at the big map on the wall. 'They'll've sent someone out of Lochgilphead and he'll've chartered something out of, I don't know, Ardfern or somewhere, because the launch won't come up from the Clyde, not for a ho-' He paused. 'Not until we know what's happening. So that'll be…' He sucked in a breath through his teeth and looked at his watch dubiously. 'What? Two hours before we know how the land lies out there?'

'This isn't a hoax. Do we look like teenagers?'

Struthers didn't say anything for a moment or two. Then he opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a folder, kicking the drawer closed. 'Tell you what. Why don't I do the right thing? Get your statements. Get it all clear in our heads.'

Oakesy went first, leaving the room with Struthers, wooden, still containing his anger. Angeline and I were left with some undrinkable coffee in polystyrene cups that the desk sergeant had brought. We didn't speak. She sat opposite me in an uncommunicative huddle. She'd stopped that compulsive scratching and had her hands pressed between her knees. Her closed little face was lowered, but from time to time she looked up at the door as if she expected someone to come running in. I tipped my head forward, resting it on my fingertips so that she wouldn't be able to see me sneaking glances at her. She was all tilted and awkward, as if she was sitting on a large cushion or something. I thought about the way she'd reacted to what Struthers had said and suddenly my heart started to race, my hands sweat. Something incredible — something strange and unbelievable — was in my head. Something about the mass she was carrying around under the coat. Why doesn't she take that coat off? She must be baking in it …

The video.

A human tail — it sounds like a fantasy, doesn't it? But you as a doctor will know that actually hundreds of children a year are born with tails, it's just that most of them are removed in the first few hours. The sacrococcygeal growth. The vestigial human tail. I'd seen a paper about them in one of the journals at the clinic. There are all these different kinds of human tails, some are haemangiomas — I stared at her with this fixed smile on my face, all the scientific stuff going through my head — and some have something to do with spina bifida. There had been photos in the journal. One was of a little boy in India with a long, skin-covered tube of fat dangling from the bottom of his spine. What was the term they used? Occulta? Spina bifida occulta? But his tail had been quite small in comparison: no bigger than a large worm. So what about something as big as what was on the video?

And then, with Christophe's face in my mind and all these ideas racing around, something else occurred to me. It went click-click-click into place, and I almost smiled. This dreadful thing might have a silver lining, after all. Oakesy was sitting on something big with this story, much better than a feature on the Positive Living Centre. This would be tabloid front-page stuff — the end of our financial troubles. Angeline would give Oakesy everything he needed to know about Malachi. But it wasn't just Oakesy she could help: this was a story Christophe would kill to be involved with. I could just imagine his face, smiling out of the newspaper from Angeline's post-op bedside, maybe holding her hand. And I'd be the one who had found her for him. An excited little itch was starting in the palms of my hands.

I glanced at the door, then sat back, sipping my coffee and smiling at her. My heart was beating, very cool and hard, because I knew Angeline Dove was going to help us. First she'd help Oakesy. And then she'd help me.

It didn't take two hours, as Struthers predicted, but just fifty minutes before the news came through from the dispatcher. Then everything changed. In the time it took for Oakesy to give his statement, the station was transformed from a sleepy backwater to a place full of noise: people busying around, carrying forms and bulging folders, phones ringing in distant offices, doors slamming, police radios firing off bursts of white noise. They were supposed to use a courtroom in Lochgilphead, but that was being renovated so they were setting up an incident room here in Oban, in a building that was too small, and by lunchtime there were arguments raging up and down the corridor between the local police officers and the women in the HOLMES team, who'd just arrived from Glasgow with their computer equipment: there weren't enough parking spaces — where in the name of God were they expected to leave their cars? And what? Only one ladies' lavvy? In the whole building? 'And that's got a broken water-heater that'll scald you if ye're not careful.'