Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

‘We spoke to everyone we could think of, put adverts in the papers, posters everywhere, appeals on the radio. I’m sorry, Callum. If we’d had even one witness, maybe we could have done more. I suppose we’ll never know what happened to them.’

Franklin scowled at him. ‘We know what happened to Callum’s mother.’

‘Wow.’ A chuckle rippled free, bringing a smile with it. ‘That’s great news. Where has she—’

‘Her severed head turned up in Holburn Forest.’

‘Oh.’ The smile faded. ‘I’m sorry.’

Franklin stood. ‘Well, maybe if you hadn’t treated it as a child abandonment case, you’d have had better luck!’

‘Whoa! I’m going to have to stop you there: Maggie and I ran it as an abduction. We’d been on it for months — fighting hard, but getting nowhere — before the top brass pulled the plug. Shifted us off to other cases. Downgraded this thing to “child abandonment” so it would look better for the crime statistics. Thank you and goodnight.’ Shannon toasted them with his glass and drank. Sighed. ‘So I kicked up a fuss. Wouldn’t believe how much trouble that got me into.’

Franklin lowered herself back into her seat, cheeks flushed. ‘I see.’

‘That was it, far as my career was concerned. Because I wouldn’t shut up, they gave me a “development opportunity”, AKA: chucking me out of CID and back into uniform. I was supposed to make DI by the time I was fifty, instead of which I got to spend my last three years juggling staff rosters and patrolling Harvest Lane at chucking-out time.’

Callum put the statements back on the table. ‘What about the Slug?’

‘Hmm? Oh, we don’t get a lot of them in here. I was listening to Radio Four the other day and they were banging on about setting a few chickens or ducks loose to eat the slimy little monsters, but they’re even worse for guzzling lettuces than slugs are. So I just hand pick them and throw them in the burn.’

‘Not slugs plural, the Slug. The man in the toilets?’

‘What man?’ Shannon leaned forwards, light glinting on his metal-framed glasses. ‘Describe him.’

‘Paedophile, about six feet tall, hunched, balding, think he had a limp? Breath stank of butter-mint.’

‘And this was when you went missing?’ Shannon’s voice had gone up again. Excited. Eager. ‘All those interviews with Constable Giraffe and you never mentioned him once.’

‘He...’ Callum’s mouth clicked shut. ‘I didn’t?’ He cleared his throat.

It was like tying an anvil to his stomach and throwing it overboard. Being dragged down through the water, breath burning in his throat, pressure squeezing him, sunlight fading as the lake swallowed him whole.

‘If we’d even had one witness, maybe we could have done more.’

All this time.

‘Maybe we could have done more.’

They’d had a witness: Callum. And he hadn’t told them about the Slug.

‘This is going to be our little secret. If you tell anyone, I’ll know. And I know where you live and I’ll come get you. Understand?’

He hadn’t told them, because he was too scared. Too cowardly.

‘Could have done more.’

DS Shannon and PC Gibbons could have caught the bastard. Could have saved his family.

It was all his fault.

‘Are you OK?’ Franklin was only visible from the knees down, standing in front of Callum’s chair.

‘No.’ He kept his head between his knees. ‘I didn’t say anything. I should have said something.’

‘Callum, you—’

‘The Slug said he knew where I lived. He would come get me if I told anyone. I was terrified of him.’

‘You were only five. A wee boy.’

Callum sat up, let his head fall back and covered his face with his fibreglass cast. ‘Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh...’

The rain thrummed on the polytunnel walls.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid—

A hand, warm on his shoulder. A squeeze. Franklin’s voice, soft and kind: ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

Her hand was still there when ex-DS Shannon returned.

‘Right, I’ve put in some calls, but it’s going to take a while. Everyone I knew on Nonce Patrol is either retired or dead. But Franky Campbell’s going to have a root about in his shed, see if he’s still got any of the case files from back in the day.’

Franklin’s hand slipped from Callum’s shoulder. ‘Does everyone steal files from the station?’

‘Be glad we did.’ Shannon pulled a face and sank back into his chair. ‘The Great Clear-Out of Ninety-Five. The archives were packed, no one wanted to pay for a new storage facility, so they binned nearly everything not connected to a major case. A lot of people took stuff home rather than see it hurled in a big skip.’ A shrug. ‘I suppose, in a lot of ways, Oldcastle Police managed to outsource its storage problem to our attics and sheds.’

She checked her watch. ‘And is this Franky Campbell going to be long?’

‘Hours. And hours. And hours. He’s on a Zimmer frame. Arthritis. Very bad.’

Callum nodded, then stood. ‘Thanks, Mr Shannon. I appreciate...’ A frown. ‘Wait a minute: when I asked if they were chucking the files on my family’s disappearance because of the Great Clear-Out of Ninety-Five, you said “no”.’

‘That’s right.’ He topped up his glass with the last of the Malbec. ‘Happened right after they decided to write it off as child abandonment, even though any idiot could see it wasn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Officially? Not cluttering up the archive with redundant materials. Unofficially: because they were fiddling the crime figures and didn’t want anything hanging around that proved it was an abduction. And super-unofficially?’ He pursed his lips.

Callum stared.

Franklin cleared her throat. ‘Any time you like.’

‘Well, and this is just a rumour, and it didn’t come out till years afterwards, but super -unofficially: they knew who did it and there was no way they were ever going to bring that person to trial, because that person was famous and that person was protected.’

‘Hrmmm...’ She flexed her hand. ‘If the next words out of your mouth are “Jimmy Savile”, I’m going to slap the face off you.’

‘Jimmy...? No .’ Shannon shook his head. ‘And it’s all just rumours anyway. Oldcastle’s never been a mecca for the rich and famous, has it? Too sodding wet and miserable.’

‘So who was it?’

‘No idea. It was someone’s leaving do, a DCI was drunk and mouthing off. Probably just a wine box of supermarket Cabernet Sauvignon talking.’ A shrug. ‘You know what some cops are like with a drink in them: the Castle Hill Ripper was actually on the city council, Sensational Steve from the radio has a basement full of dead children, Lord Lucan spent his last three years chained to the wall in a warehouse in Logansferry.’

Yeah. Still.

Callum stood. ‘Do me a favour: see if you can track down your drunk DCI. Might be rubbish. Might be worth a go.’

Shannon levered himself upright and shook Callum’s hand. ‘I’m sorry about your mother. I wish we could’ve done more.’

‘Me too.’

‘... spectonkular!’ Grating honking noises blared out of the car radio. ‘You’re listening to this super bumper edition of Crrrrrrrrrazy Colin’s Rush-Hour Drive-Time Club on Castlewave FM, my friend, and we’re here live at...’ pause for dramatic effect, ‘the seventh annual Tartantula music festival! Yay!’ The sound of a crowd baying in the background — whoops, cheers, and whistles.

Franklin turned in the driver’s seat. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’