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111 lines
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<title>8</title>
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<h1>8</h1>
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<p><em>May.</em></p>
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<p>Angus McNicol's boss, Commander Ross, who was head of the County force, made the announcement when Lucy Saunders was finally found. Angus the rest of the team under Hector Kelso who headed CID, had worked night and day for two weeks, going over the ground again with the tracker dogs, asking every boy and girl within a mile, trudging round the doors again asking them a second time if they'd seen anything. At the end of the day, it was the sergeant who pieced together what had happened to the child.</p>
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<p>Her body was found under the third bridge over the Ladyburn Stream, a fair distance upstream of where it flowed to the sluggish marsh of the Rough Drain. She was lying crumpled and bloodied in a corner, slumped in a puddle.</p>
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<p>From the Rough Drain, where the bike had been thrown into the muddy ditch, Angus McNicol, using hindsight, worked out the route the man with the twitchy eyes had brought the girl through the far side of the wasteland and up the curve of the stream where it skirted the lower end of the Overbuck estate, by the Dower House where the old Lady Hartfield had, according to legend, thrown some crazy, equally legendary parties back in the twenties.</p>
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<p>He must have carried the child, it seemed certain, because it was unlikely a girl of eight would willingly go along with a man who had thrown her brand new bike into a stagnant pool. Also, Angus reasoned, she must have been unconscious, or silenced in some way, because to get to the stream, they would have passed by the old timber-frame houses still occupied by the estate workers. Somebody would have heard a child crying, or screaming, and would have come to investigate.</p>
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<p>But nobody had heard a thing.</p>
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<p>What was certain, from Dr Bell's post mortem report, was that Lucy Saunders had still been alive at that time. For, like Neil Hopkirk, it had taken her some time to die.</p>
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<p>Danny Gillan's Aunt Bernadette had been right in her prophetic statement.</p>
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<p>It was a matter of luck, if luck could be involved in such a thing, that they found Lucy Saunders so soon. She could have lain under the bridge for weeks, possibly months, had it not been for George Scott and his cousin Eric who had been poaching for rabbits on Overbuck Estate in the early hours of a May morning. They had just come down from the hill, using the trees by the stream as cover because the estate's fields were open and old Leitch the gamekeeper was as wily as a red fox. They came splashing down with the two terriers ahead of them and when they got to the bridge both dogs had started snuffling around at the darkened hollow of the metal access door into the water valve. The door had been pushed open and the two dogs disappeared into the gloom.</p>
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<p>George bent in front of the low door, leaning into the gloom, calling on his terriers. They were scrabbling in the corner, both of them growling that low rumble, the way they did when they'd got too close to a fox in its den. Eric pushed by him and struck a match, sending a flare of light into the shadows. The dog's bobbed tails were sticking straight up, white salutes over in the corner. Beyond then, a white arm stuck upwards, as if waving.</p>
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<p>Eric thought it was a doll at first and then he breathed in the stench. Right away he knew what he'd found. The arm was raised up and out. Below it, a small shape was slumped to the right, head down. The dogs were snuffling heavily and over the sound Eric could hear the humming of insects. He backed out fast, hissing at the dogs to come away, inadvertently grinding his heel down on his cousin's toe.</p>
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<p>George yelped and cursed vehemently, but Eric didn't even hear it. "It's her George. That girl everybody's been looking for."</p>
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<p>"You should watch where you're going," George said. "Nearly broke my flamin' toe."</p>
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<p>"<em>Wheesht</em> man," Eric hissed, in the same stage whisper tone he'd used on the dogs. "It's that wee girl who's been missing. It must be."
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</p>
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<p>"What are you blethering on about?" George finally asked.</p>
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<p>"Bloody hell man, would you listen to me," Eric grabbed his cousin by the lapel, forcing him to stop hopping around in the shallow gravel on the stream. "It's a dead fuggin'
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<em>body!"</em></p>
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<p>Angus McNicol and John Fallon were up at the third bridge in the space of fifteen minutes from the panicked phone call, and under the bridge, in the square stone box normally closed to the world by a heavy iron door fastened with a big brass padlock on a hasp, they found Lucy Saunders.</p>
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<p>The pale little body was sprawled in a puddle, legs spread-eagled in pitiful invitation, arms outstretched, each one tied by a ripped piece of cloth to pulley-hooks set in the stonework. Her head was thrown back over to one side and her hair hung in rat's tails down on her bare shoulders.</p>
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<p>The only article of clothing was the collar of a shirt and a scrap of cloth which hung down on her chest. One of her sandals was in the puddle, but there was no sign of the other.</p>
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<p>At first, when the beam of the flashlight swept across the body, Angus McNicol thought, just as Eric Scott had done, that they'd made a mistake and merely found a discarded doll. The girl's small frame looked waxy, almost plastic in the damp gloom. But the smell was unmistakable, the stench of rotting flesh.</p>
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<p>Even Dr Bell found it difficult to keep the emotion out of his post mortem report.</p>
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<p>The name
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<em>Twitchy Eyes</em> spread like a searing brush fire around the town. Mothers panicked, and down at the distillery, the biggest employer of women, two of the bottling lines had to shut down completely because so many women had taken time off to make sure they were home when their children arrived from school.
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</p>
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<p>Down on Strathleven Street, at the edge of the leafy path that angled down towards the allotments, a telephone line worker stepped into the shadow of an overgrown privet hedge to relieve himself of the pressure of two pints of beer he'd drunk in Mac's bar over lunchtime. He'd turned round, shaking himself dry the way men do, unaware of the mother and two children passing by on the other side of the street. All she saw was a man looming out of the bushes and exposing himself . She screamed like a banshee and dragged her girls to the nearest doorway, both of them squealing in fear and alarm though completely unaware of the workman's presence - and banged on the door until the householder who'd been tending his dahlias came running round the front of the house. A window next slammed open and a woman leaned out, yelling and pointing an accusing finger. Postman Brendan McFall came round the corner into the melee. A car stopped and two men - canvassers for the upcoming council by-election got out.</p>
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<p>All they saw was the pointed finger and all they heard was a gabbled and garbled accusation and the four men took after the line worker. The dahlia gardener still had a long-handled weeding hoe in his hand and without any hesitation he took a swipe at the man, knocking his hard-hat into the privet hedge and knocking him to the ground. By the time the police arrived, the unfortunate man thought the whole world had gone crazy. He'd a lump the size of a pigeon's egg on the side of his head. Two streams of blood were dripping from his nose and one badly blacked eye was closed tight shut. Not only that, but when he'd tried to escape from the four madmen, two of them had grabbed his arms and out of nowhere a demented, screaming woman had come rushing across the road and kicked him right in the balls and drawn a row of bloody lines down his face with her fingernails. To add insult to this injury, on the following morning, when it was all accepted that he was not the crazed killer, he was hauled in front of Baillie McGraw at the Monday morning court and fined five pounds for committing a public nuisance. After that he refused ever again to work on Strathleven Street.</p>
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<p>More unfortunate was the poor Asian salesman who had just come into town to take on a new territory for the Housemarket Supply Company. He had a dark coat and a turban and a glossy black beard and was a pretty exotic fellow by the normal standards of the backwater where he planned to sell his plastic toilet brushes and knickknacks.</p>
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<p>He was on the far side of town, up by Arden Road, and he stopped to ask a directions of a group of children. Everything would have been fine, but for the fact that a four-year old had turned round and seen the dark face under the turban and the shiny beard and taken him for a pirate. She gave a wail of fright, which was immediately taken up by her younger friend and in an infectious wave of panic a bunch of little girls who had been skipping gaily in the late spring sun, were screeching like piglets.</p>
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<p>A group of men playing quoits with old iron carthorse shoes on the wasteland where the old quarry buildings used to be came running round and attacked the salesman with such violence that he ended up in Lochend General where he needed a three-hour operation to relieve the pressure caused by a dreadful curved dent in his skull caused by a solid iron shoe from a Clydesdale horse.</p>
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<p>It was that kind of panic, the jitters that sizzled through the town. There was a
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<em>bad man</em> here, a murderer, and while people naturally suspected it must be a stranger, all that was known was that he was a man, tall, with dark hair. And with twitchy eyes.
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</p>
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<p>From the pulpit in St Rowan's on Sunday, the Father O'Connor who ruled the parish took the opportunity to warn the children of his flock.</p>
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<p>"Let us pray for Lucinda Saunders," he enjoined them, joining his hands together to show he little ones exactly how it was done, "who was only eight years old and who met such a dreadful end."</p>
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<p>The old priest, who sported an Italian-style Beretta hat and an accent as thick as the bogs of Ireland, was hell on pagans, protestants and purgatory, along with the devil and all his wiles who was lurking around every corner waiting to snare a good catholic boy. And the said devil wasn't above using flirty teenage non-Catholic girls to do his dirty work either.</p>
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<p>"Yeah, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death," he began. "The Lord is with us. This poor girl was not of our faith, children, and because of that she had never been baptised in the cleansing water of Christ's Holy Church, and that is a terrible thing don't you know."</p>
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<p>He peered at them, hands clamped over the ornate polished marble edge, marble that would have cost six months wages in a good-paying foreman's job and leaned forward.</p>
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<p>"For that means she was not cleansed of the original sin and because of that, she will be tormented by the purifying flames of purgatory, burning until that sin is purged away and she comes out shining and clean and fit to meet the Lord in all his great glory."</p>
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<p>Danny Gillan put his head in his hands and as soon as he did so, his father leaned over and knuckled him sharply, letting him know he had to sit up and pay attention. This was God's business and He liked straight kneeling. The old priest lumbered along on his theme, purging and purgatory, cleansing fires. Over by the side altar, Father Dowran kept his eye on the unruly boys.</p>
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<p>Danny had vaguely known Lucy Saunders they way all children know the connections. She was the cousin of some of the guys who played football on the spare field at the bottom end of Overbuck Estate, and while he might not have picked her out in a crowd of small girls, she was no different from anybody else. Just a kid.</p>
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<p><em>Burning and purgatory</em>. Just like the
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<em>Bad Fire</em>, like hell itself, except that after a thousand years in the searing heat of the flames, you got a chance to get out and go to heaven and that was something Danny Gillan couldn't fathom out. He just couldn't get his thoughts to hold on to that concept at all.
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</p>
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<p>He looked up at his father, sitting straight-backed in his good Sunday suit, one long-knuckled hand clasped around Danny's little sister's dainty fingers, nodding all the while, as if mesmerised by the truth of the priest's words.</p>
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<p>But Danny's thoughts had gone sparking off in a different direction. The kid was no different from anybody else, except fore the fact that when she was small and helpless, her parents hadn't brought her here to the old Italian marble fountain and had the water poured over her while they renounced Satan and all its works and all his pomps and because of that - according to old Father O'Connor - she would feel the cauterising sear of purgatory. After all she had suffered, (and Doc bell's report missed one of that awfulness) after having the life squeezed out of her in a puddle of her own piss, she had to suffer some more.</p>
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<p>He shook his head at the immensity of it, the complete and utter wrongness of it. His father looked down at him, hunched in the corner of the seat, eyes diverted, and he thought Danny was daydreaming again. He reached once more and nudged his son's shoulder. Danny automatically straightened his posture while the priest asked them all to pray for the repose of the innocent but somehow tainted soul of Lucinda Saunders - and he wondered what his father would think if he knew that some of the boys in the Church Legion said that sometimes the curate, Father Dowran who ran the boys club would take them down to the room under the hall and chastise them for any perceived wrongdoing. And in the dark of the store-room, he would take their trousers down and....</p>
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<p>"Daniel, pay attention."</p>
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<p>Danny brought his eyes forward and thought of Lucy Saunders and Paulie Degman and not for the first time, he thought the whole world was going totally crazy.</p>
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<p>Either that or <em>he</em> was going mad.</p>
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