On the Saturday night, Jack Fallon was stamping the cold from his feet on the flat roof of Loch View. Beside him Ralph Slater was down on hands and knees, lightly scraping the powdery snow from the gritted surface with what looked like a shaving brush. Around the perimeter, his team had set up three floodlights on tripod stands, blaring white light onto the frosted roof. Off to the right, the elevator housing and the maintenance shafts stood black against the orange light from the main road in the distance. Above it, the red hazard light winked a warning to low-flying aircraft.
"There's more here," Ralph said, angling his own heavy duty flashlight onto the scraped surface.
He squinted up to Jack.
"We didn't even look here," he said, with a trace of embarrassment.
"No reason at the time," Jack let him off his hook. He wasn't really in the mood for talking. Since the morning, when he'd fallen into the stream, his throat had tightened. It felt raw and made it difficult to swallow. "Not for an accident," he added.
"But what made you think of it?"
"Just a hunch," Jack said with a tight grin. The snow had lessened, but the wind was whipping up little particles from the balustrade wall and sending them into his left ear.
"Aye, pull the other one. Any idea why there's blood here?" Ralph asked, while he delicately lifted samples of the dark and frozen stain to drop it into a fresh plastic sample bag.
"Another hunch."
"And you'll be able to cross match it then?"
"Rhesus negative. Low on factor eight."
"Sure it is," Ralph said with heavy sarcasm.
"If it isn't, I'll buy you a bottle of Talisker. Believe me, I wish it wasn't."
After the call to Robbie Cattanach, Jack had left the station, ignoring the message that the chief superintendent wanted a word with him, and had driven straight to Loch View. The gantry was still swinging from the high edge, frosted with snow. The rope from which Jock Toner had dangled, frozen and bloodless, was gone.
He'd waited at the top while Ralph's men unloaded the equipment. There was only an hour of daylight left. From his vantage point he could see the lights coming on in the town below. The Langmuir Crags were completely white, apart from the big fan-shaped cliff which overhung the scree below. Even in the deepest winter, snow never stuck to the face. As the lift whined, bringing the scene of crime team up to the top, Jack had made the mistake of wandering to the edge again, to where the metal gallows that held the gantry stuck out over the edge like lifeboat davits. He'd looked down through the light snow and felt the pull of the ground tug mesmerically at him. It happened every time he looked down from a height, very time since the last climb on Ben Nevis in his teens when a piton had pulled out and he'd watched the black shape plummet silently, without a scream, without a cry, and then, at the far end of the drop, with no thud in the distance. Yet he remembered the stomach-freezing red stain that scraped across the ice for thirty feet and he knew what had happened. Every time he looked down from a height like this, he got a flash of that cramping shock. The ground down there wanted to pull everything towards it. It dragged and tugged and hauled, not just on the body, but on the mind. Jack shoved himself back from the rail and turned away, waiting for his heart to slow down to a canter and for his breath to moderate. By the time Ralph's boys arrived, he was breathing almost normally.
He'd told Ralph what he was looking for. The other man looked at him askance, then shrugged and got on with the job. Jack couldn't blame the team for not looking last time. It had been a cursory job. A body bundled into a shiny bag and a long ride down to ground level.
It was seven, and without the lights and the hazard beacon it would have been pitch black by the time the roof of Loch View had been scoured. Jack put a rush on the lab order and the men packed up. He waited behind until he was once again alone on the roof.
"Must have been about this time," he said to himself. He swallowed and grimaced as his throat clenched, and thought he really might be catching Julia's cold.
He walked slowly towards the edge. Little flurries of crystals were billowing from the edge of the wall, catching the orange of the street lights, taking on a noxious glint.
Jack knew what the lab would tell him. The blood would be the same type as that of the missing baby, and that would make it a certainty that it came from little Kelly Campbell. But who, he wondered, had brought her up here, and even more baffling, why?
Down to the left, heading due south, Barley Cobble by the riverside was a fair walk away. Off to the right, the two matching blocks of flats reared into the night, though Loch View was set on higher ground. This was the uppermost point on Levenford's north side. It gave a view right over the whole town under a darkly leaden sky.
Someone had either come up, or climbed down to where Jock Toner had been on the gantry, more than an hour after his shift had ended. Nobody knew yet why the man had spent so long up there on his own. All the doors in the building were now being knocked to find out. Jack considered the possibility that he might have had a woman here and had used the gantry as a surreptitious exit. It was a possibility, nothing more. It was also a possibility that they would find some irate and vengeful husband who had caught Jock using the exit. Jack would have ben delighted if it turned out that way, but within himself, he knew it would not. Because an irate husband would not splash Jock Toner with the blood of a baby who had been snatched from its mother's arms unless by sheer chance, the said husband happened to be the abductor and killer. That would be too much to hope for.
He stood stock still, with the warning light blinking monotonously to his right, and tried again to visualise the scene. Images vied for prominence in the forefront of his mind, but none would settle. He needed more evidence, more of a hint. He wanted to know why a killer would bring a baby up to this height and then kill a man and then disappear.
Disappear he certainly had. The blood trail showed drips down the wall on the side where Jock Toner had cracked open his skull. They continued across the roof, away from the blinking light, and across to the other side, and then they stopped.
There were no marks across the balustrade to show that the man had jumped over, certainly nothing down there to show where he would have landed, and if he'd dropped from this height, there would have been plenty of evidence of that, spread for ten yards on the concrete slab. It was possible - and Jack was beginning to detest that word - that he had stuffed the baby into a bag or a sheet or inside a jacket. Ralph had found scrape marks on the concrete walls just below the lip on the gantry side and similar indentations on the east wall, but it was impossible to say what had caused the three straight and parallel lines. Possibly, he'd ventured, it was some tool the workmen used. In any case, it was unlikely, according to Ralph, that they had anything to do with this. When Ralph had mentioned them, something had tried to form a pattern in Jack's mind, but it had danced away elusively.
"Who are you?" he asked aloud. The wind whipped his voice away.
The picture tried to form itself, but though he concentrated hard, it refused to materialise properly. He did not have enough to go on, though there was more now than he'd had before. There was no doubt at all in his mind that little Kelly Campbell was dead, and that meant that Timmy Doyle was dead too. Six deaths. One suicide associated with the killing of Marta Herkik and a tenuous connection to Timmy Doyle. A suicide that turned out to have been a murder, at least almost certainly, and a connection with the one-hit killing of Shona Campbell and her baby. Two of them involving high places. All the deaths except for Simpson's suicide had happened at night.
The pattern was emerging, but it wasn't much of a pattern. Nobody had seen anything, not a thing.
Jack looked down at the lights spreading out below him.
"Where are you?" he asked aloud, gritting his teeth in the stinging ice crystals. His throat was burning.
In that moment, Jack made up his mind. There was a thread connecting all the killings. If he found one end of the thread, he would follow it to the other end. He was now certain that he was dealing with a single killer, and eventually that killer would make the mistake he needed to catch him. Inside his pockets his hands clenched into fists as he walked towards the stairwell. He closed the door behind him and the winking hazard light was cut off.
Once in the car he called down to the station and ordered a house to house inquiry in Loch View and the two adjacent blocks. It would take a lot of manpower, but that was the way things had to go.
Ten minutes later, he was back in his office. He slung his coat on the hook and hunkered against the radiator to take the chill out of his back, thinking about the two phone calls he had to make. His feet were cold and his throat ached and he wondered if he had any paracetamol in his drawer. He was also wondering whether he'd been wise to take Davy on the sledge down by the stream at Cargill Farm. He was about to haul himself to his feet when there was a brief rap on the door, it swung open instantly and Ronald Cowie stepped in. At first he didn't see Jack hunched against the radiator, then the other man's presence registered.
"What the hell are you doing down there?" he demanded.
"Trying to get some heat into my bones."
"I've been looking for you all day," Cowie snorted.
"Have you? I didn't get the message. I've been out."
"Yes. I heard. Complete waste of time."
"You think so?"
"We're in the middle of a murder investigation, man. We don't have time or the manpower to have a whole shift out working on accidents or suicides. I suggest you get them back onto the priority work."
"That's what they're doing," Jack replied, then added: "Sir."
"That's not the way I see it," the Superintendent said. "Anyway, as of this afternoon, I'm in charge. Mr McNicol's laid up with 'flu. Some sort of virus anyway. So as of today, we do it my way."
Jack made no response. Gradually he eased himself away from the radiator and got to his feet. He stared down at Cowie who glared back at him.
"Congratulations," Jack said.
"You won't be saying that shortly. I want all the men pulled out of Loch View. That's obviously the wrong area. I want a complete ground search of every building on the south of River Street. Two killings and an abduction in one area. I think that narrows the field, don't you think?"
"It would, if the field had not expanded to suit," Jack said calmly. "We've already done a search, and a very thorough search, of the whole area, leaving aside domestic property. We'd never get warrants for all of them, not without good cause."
"But every warehouse and every hole in the wall shack down that side of the town should be gone over with a tooth comb."
"And they have," Jack retorted. "You'll have read the reports. There's a file two inches thick."
Cowie blinked. His thin grey moustache twitched. "Then do it again. It has to be painstaking."
"Oh, it will be. But I'd advise against it. If we pull the men out of Loch View, then we could miss something vital."
"On an accident?"
"It was no accident. We found the baby's blood."
"You what?" Cowie's face registered consternation. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I'm just back in. We found traces of blood up on the roof. The same type as was found on Toner. I believe it will match Kelly Campbell's blood."
"Has it been analysed yet?"
"No. But there's a rush on it. The lab have promised it by morning."
Cowie glared at Jack again. His moustache quivered again and his eyes seemed to bulge in his face. Jack could tell he was not happy. He seemed about to speak when he abruptly spun on his heel and strode to the door, snatched it open and walked out, turning back only when he was right outside the room.
"This time I don't want to wait. I want to hear everything immediately. You hear me? Everything."
Jack nodded. The door thudded shut and he smiled to himself, though he did not really feel like smiling. Under Angus McNicol, he would be allowed to work on this his own way. With Cowie in charge, he didn't know what spokes would be put in the wheel.
Mickey Haggerty, his friend from schooldays, was out when Jack called. His sister said he'd been up north for a week, staying with someone in Oban. From the tone of her voice, it sounded as though she thought it might be a woman, and that wouldn't have surprised Jack in the slightest. It was only on the way down from Loch View that he'd remembered the other part of the conversation with Mickey in Mac's Bar. He had cursed himself under his breath. Mickey had seen William Simpson the night Marta Herkik was murdered. He'd seen someone else near or at Cairn House, some Irish fellow whose name he'd forgotten. He'd promised to get back to Jack who had made a mental note to give him a call, but then other things had happened and he'd simply forgotten. Netta Heggarty said her brother would be back in a day or so. She didn't know where he was staying. Jack thanked her and then put a call into the Oban Station. He knew a sergeant there who he'd worked with in the city. By luck, Ian Nicholson was on duty. He took Mickey's description, a shock of fair hair and a lived-in face not unlike a young Kirk Douglas, and he promised to have a couple of men check the bars. That was the best he could do, and that was good enough for Jack. If Mickey was in Oban - and he could have spun his sister any old yarn - then he'd be in a bar and easy to find.
"Do I lock him up or what?" Ian Nicholson had asked.
"No. He's a friend of mine. Drunk or sober, get him to phone me back."
He had better luck with the third call. Andrew Toye answered at the third ring.
Night fell on Levenford at four o'clock. It was bitterly cold. The lights along the quayside were fuzzed to orange haloes by the creeping mist from the river. The water, feeding into the Firth was tidal for a mile upstream the town and the river was low. There was no moon. The haar condensed in the cold air and the mist floated over the quayside walls and crept along the alleys, fogging the hard edges of the old buildings. For half an hour, the old bridge thronged with children hurrying home from Kirkhill School on the west side. They hurried because of the cold and the dark and because of the sense of unease that had crept into Levenford since the killing of Shona Campbell and the taking of her baby. Until then, the townsfolk had not really been aware that something was happening. When little Timmy Doyle was snatched from his pram high up in Latta Court, there was shock. But it was one incident. Marta Herkik's killing was another shock, but the papers were full of such things. Old women got mugged, and old women got raped and killed. It happened. It was terrible, but it happened.
Now, a second baby had been stolen and it's mother killed, and while the killer seemed to be after babies, the community policemen had toured the schools warning children of all ages to be careful. Mothers reinforced the warning. Most children hurried home. There were few stragglers and the bridge cleared of its passing throng. An hour later, the bridge was busy again, this time with cars and a leavening of pedestrians hurrying home from work as the shops and offices closed. Up river, the engine works was still clanging and clanking and across the water, the high windows of the foundry glowed read and from time to time the spitting harsh cough of hot metal would tear at the still air, though by the time it crossed the river, the cat-screech was muffled by the mist. The foundry's massive brick chimneys towered over the old building, their bases flickering pink in the flashes from the furnaces. In the old days, both would have belched smoke and sparks long into the night, but the new electric furnace had made one chimney obsolete. They towered into the darkness, a Victorian monument to the bad old days of hard labour and low pay and full employment.
Between Swan Street and Denny Road, in the old heart of Levenford, maybe two hundred yards from the river, there is a warren of old tenement buildings faced with dirty brown sandstone. They form a rectangle, dingy houses with narrow close mouths. Inside the rectangle, behind the facades, the back courts are a maze of old dustbin shelters and cluttered outhouses. Iron railings, peel-rusted and spiked, separated each individual tenement's territory. In the summer, the boys would climb the brick walls and race across the top of the shelters and leap from one flat roof to the other, bounding over the blank spaces, hurdling the lethal spikes. Ever since the blocks were built before the turn of the century, mothers had warned their children, on pain of dire punishment, not to climb the roofs and never to jump over the railings, and every generation of boys since then had risked life and limb and impalement, completely ignoring their mother's threats.
The cold night air brought the river mist swirling through the closes. It oozed into the back courts and crept between the wrought-iron uprights.
Neil Kennedy was kicking a ball against one of the crumbly walls. He was eight years old, with a faceful of freckles and curly Celtic-red hair hidden under a knitted wooden hat. Upstairs, two floors up, his mother was cooking dinner. Neil felt his belly rumble and guessed the family meal might be ready in an hour. He didn't know if he could wait that long. The cold air carried the smell of the river, a wet and wintry smell of decaying reeds and bullrushes floating down from the upstream marshes. The distillery on the other side of town had done a malting that day, as everyone could tell by the cloying damp-towel odour that permeated everything. This was mixed with the smells of sausages sizzling, chips frying, and, as ever, the unappetising whiff of cabbage boiled beyond edibility.
Up above, the light from uncurtained windows sent solid shafts of luminescence into the fog, occasionally flickering colour from the television sets behind the panes. Neil had wanted to watch cartoons, but at this time on a Monday night, his mother's favourite soap series was showing. She'd have the kitchen door open and the sound turned up and she'd occasionally lean back from the cooker to watch the latest, if thoroughly predictable act.
Neil kicked his ball against the wall, watching it bounce and then trapping it with casual deftness under his foot to repeat the action again and again. Over in the corner, a door slammed open and a corridor of light funnelled into the dim. Children's voices bounced from shelter to wall. Neil kept kicking the ball, communicating his presence by the dull thuds it made on the rebound.
"Hey Neilly," a high voice called out. "That you?"
"Aye."
Three shapes flitted closer, resolving only yards away into three small boys, heavily muffled against the cold, squeezing themselves through a gap in the railings.
"Cold innit?"
"Freezing," Neil agreed.
"Had your tea yet?"
"No. I got sent out. The old man's not in yet."
"Us too." Gerry Murphy said. His twin, Patrick nodded agreement. With them Phil Toner, six years old, whose uncle Jock had been found hanging from the rope at Loch View, shivered. He lived across the landing from the Murphy boys.
"Want a kick-about?" Neil asked.
"Naw. Too dark."
"And the ground's too icy. You could break your neck," Phil said. Everybody had heard what happened to his uncle, but from the perspective of small boys, it was a distant happening, not a thing to dwell on, nothing to spoil the immediate.
"Alright. What'll we do?"
"We could jump the dykes," Phil suggested and everybody laughed. At the age of six, he couldn't have leapt the gaps on a summer afternoon.
"Aye, very good Phil. What's your next joke?"
"No really," he protested and Pat gave him a shove.
"You'd never get to the top of the wall, never mind jump."
"Kick the can?" Neil suggested.
"No," Gerry said. "The old man's on night-shift. If we wake him up he'll lose the rag."
It took five minutes of negotiations on the short list of options of things to do on a winter's night, without much result. Somebody suggested going round to the old railyard two streets away where the spur line to the engine works had long since been disused. There was a ramp there, a concrete slope which led from the shunting point to street level. Earlier in the week it had been covered with frost. By now, Gerry suggested, it should be a sheet of ice.
"I'd better not," Neil said. "I'll get called up in half an hour."
"Oh come on," Pat said, giving him a nudge. You've got stacks of time."
Neil let himself be persuaded with no further difficulty. The four of them went through the common close and into the street. Each end of Swan Street was fuzzed out by the mist. It was as if the world they lived in had shrunk to fifteen yards on either side. They moved along Swan, past Arden Lane before crossing Artisan Road to the old railyard entrance. The tall double gate was closed and padlocked. To the side, the gaunt facade of the crumbling warehouse and offices of the yard loomed upwards. Ferns, crumpled and brittle since the first frosts, clung to the damp patches behind cracked roan pipes and icicles formed fringes on the window ledges below the gaping blind eyes of the smashed frames. Here closer to the river, the fog was thicker. It caught in the throat and curled and coiled around the weave of the rusty chain-link fence where it had been pulled back in a tangled dog-ear by previous forays of small boys. They scrambled through the gap and walked four abreast along the disused tracks, avoiding the slippery sleepers, to the far side of the warehouse block. Set on the side of the crumbly brick building was a lone electric bulb protected by a wire mesh. It glowed feebly.
The sloping ramp was completely iced over. In the weak light it glinted like black glass. Gerry Murphy tested it with a foot and almost fell on his backside, saving himself only with a flurry of windmilling arms.
"Like the cresta run," he pronounced. They all stood at the top of the slope looking down at the straight swoop.
"Who's first?" Gerry asked.
"I want to try it," Phil Toner piped up.
Pat and Neil laughed.
"Go ahead then," Gerry challenged. Little Phil shoved his way to the edge where the flat surface leading to the old weighbridge turned downwards towards the high green gate at the entrance. He stood at the top of the slope, arms spread like a wrestler, one foot in front of the other. He swivelled his hips and launched himself, leaning backwards to prevent a headlong tumble. Behind him, the three boys watched as his arms waved out on either side. His scarf, turned inside out to form a hat, trailed behind him. Little Phil let out a wavering whoop and went scudding down the incline.
"Look at him go!" Neil yelled.
The small boy whizzed into the mist below. One moment a dark, teetering shape, then quickly greying to a blur before it was swallowed completely by the haar. They heard his shrill cry diminish with the distance until it stopped abruptly. A muffled thud came floating out of the mist followed immediately by a shrill cry.
"Hey Phil?" Neil shouted. There was no reply.
"Phil. Are you alright?" Gerry bawled. His voice, ghostly and faint replied in a double echo as it bounced from the walls.
There was a silence for several moments, then from down below, Phil's voice floated up.
"I hurt my knee." They heard him make the kind of noise boys make when they are hurt but not injured and want to ward off tears. A minute later, the small boy came crunching towards them on the edge of the slope where piles of hard-core quarry stones gave enough grip to walk without falling.
"Banged it on the door. Didn't even stop 'til the bottom."
"What's it like."
"Really scary. Dead fast and you can't see where you're going."
"I want to try," Pat said. He braced himself and went off down the slope. Gerry followed, identical in size and clothing. Neil watched them disappear, hooting all the way, before he steeled himself, took a breath and launched himself down the slant and into the fog. Ahead of him the twins were yelling at the tops of their voices. There were two thumps, almost instantaneous howls of exhilarated alarm them peals of laughter before Neil cannoned into the brothers and knocked both of them back against the door. Pat squealed while Gerry's breath was knocked out of him and he leaned against the high gate gasping for air. Just then, little Phil came careening out of the dark, sliding on his backside and crashed into them, knocking their feet from under. They all collapsed in a giggling heap.
After the first slide into the unknown, the next was less scary and the third even easier. Pat found an old rusted coal-shovel without a handle and went skittering off, seated on the blade, using the pitted shaft as a grip. They could hear the metal rasp against the ice as he whizzed out of sight, then an almighty clatter as the shovel caroomed against the door. They all tried it, picking up more speed as the ice was smoothed out by their passage. Gerry found some cardboard boxes which they stacked against the door as a shock absorber to prevent real injury and they spent the next half-hour glissading down and trudging back up the hill, laughing all the while.
It was nearly seven when Neil realised he'd done it again. Since they'd found the ice-slide, his hunger had disappeared, but when he was under the single lit bulb by the side of the warehouse, he glanced at the plastic watch he'd got for his birthday and immediately the pangs returned, along with the sinking feeling he always got when he knew he was in trouble.
Pat and Gerry were preparing to skid down the hill together, with one twin on the shovel and the other sitting on his lap when Neil told them he had to go back.
"I'll catch it if I don't get a move on," he explained when they protested. He knew he'd catch it anyway. His mother had a habit of fetching him a skite on the ear and asking questions later. What was worse, she'd know he hadn't stayed in the back court kicking his ball as she'd told him to do, and that would earn him another skelp. His mother was small and thin, but when it came to open handed slaps, she could strike like a snake and, according to Neil, she didn't know her own strength. Reluctantly he watched the twins skitter off downslope, whirling out of control as they picked up speed. He clapped little Phil on the shoulder and went back along the disused track towards the gap in the fence. Away from the light and away from his friends, it was darker and felt colder. He barked his shin on an old piece of railway track that angled out of the dead stalks of willowherb which clumped on either side of the old line, rimed with frost. Neil's feet crunched on the hardpack. His stomach rumbled again and suddenly he was really hungry. Ahead, one of the street lights gradually became visible as he approached the break in the fence. He crawled through, making sure his winter jacket didn't get snagged on the wires and came out on the other side at the junction of Artisan Road and Station Street. He walked back the way they'd come, heading past the old warehouse. As he got to the front of the gate, he could hear the delighted yells of his friends on the other side as they crashed into the piles of boxes and for a moment he wished he could have stayed and had more fun with them. He passed the gate and along the decaying warehouse front when he came to the door in the wall. As he walked past, he heard a low voice and he turned, startled. The door was open.
Neil stood stock still. The door was open. That itself was enough to spark off an eight-year-old boy's dilemma. He knew he should be getting home, but the door had never been open before and any warehouse is a magnet to small boys.
The voice came again.
"You. Boy."
A woman's voice. Quite soft.
"Hullo?" Neil asked into the darkness.
"Can you help me?"
"Who is it?" he called out.
"Can you help me, please?" the woman's voice came from the darkness inside the building.
"What's wrong?" he heard himself ask.
"I need help. If you help me I'll give you something."
Neil took a hesitant step forward and his foot crossed the doorstep. As soon as he took that step, a powerful feeling of foreboding quivered through him. It came so unexpectedly that the boy felt himself shudder and the hairs on the back of his neck tingled as they crawled against the wool of his hat.
He took the step back. Out from under the lintel, the feeling shrank away.
"Don't be afraid," the unseen woman called out to him.
"I can't see you."
"I need help. I've fallen and hurt myself."
Neil leaned a hand against the brickwork at the side of the door. From inside he could smell mouldy wood and dampness and something else he couldn't identify. It reminded him of the pit out on Slaughterhouse Road where the flies would buzz around the discarded jawbones in summertime, but it was a wetter, colder smell.
"I'll get somebody," he called out timorously.
"No, please. Just come and help me up. I'll give you money for sweets. I've got lots of money."
Neil hesitated, still on the horns of his dilemma, but then, with simple childlike honesty, he realised that he could save himself a clip on the ear, get some money for sweets and earn some praise for helping somebody. His mother had always warned him about talking to strangers, especially strangers on dark wintry nights, but he had always taken that to mean men. Women did not carry the same threat, the same potential for hurt and badness, even if mothers could deal out swift and stinging justice. Women were safe. It took three seconds for this calculation to reach its conclusion in his eight-year-old mind. He took a step forward, pausing between the door-jambs.
The feeling of threat quivered through him when he took the next step into the gloom of the warehouse. Somewhere off to the right something dripped steadily, rapping damply on the wooden floor. Glass crunched under his feet as he went along by the wall, close to the open-treaded metal stairway that zig-zagged above him. It was dark, but some light from the street managed to invade through the high windows. He could just make out a series of doorways leading off the one wall, while to the right, where the dripping sound came from, there was a wide space, punctuated by narrow pillars that stretched up to the dark ceiling.
"Where are you?" Neil called out.
"Here," the voice, now weak and muffled, came from overhead. Neil stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He looked up to the turn at the top of the first flight. The treads were littered with scraps of paper and bottled and squashed and rusting beer cans.
"Up the stairs, and please hurry," the woman called.
Neil went upwards, holding onto the corroded bannister with every step until he reached the top. Cold air and tendrils of frosted mist crept in the smashed window. He could see nothing. He turned at the landing. Above him, some distance away, he could hear the woman sob softly. It did not occur to him to wonder what a woman was doing in a derelict warehouse at night. He moved on and up, and with every step of the way, he felt the tight fingers of alarm squeeze at him.
"Hurry, please hurry," the broken voice called down urgently. Neil forced himself to move more quickly. He reached the second landing, where the light was even dimmer and continued to the next.
Then suddenly, in the gloom ahead of him, he heard a rasping cough.
"Hello?" he asked into the dark.
There was no reply. Only a watery, choking sound. He inched forward, still holding on to the bannister, heart now racing. A dark shape was huddled against the railings at the turn of the stairs. A faint light managed to push through the layers of grime on the window which was still intact by dint of being just out of range of small boys stones. Neil approached cautiously, his breath now speeded up and coming out in quick plumes. He reached the huddled form and stood there, tense with apprehension, wondering what to do.
The thing moved, twisting towards him and suddenly Neil's heart was in his throat, punching away as if it was trying to escape. A pale face lolled forward and the boy got a look at the woman. Even in the faint light, he could see her eyes rolling. Her tongue protruded, wet and slack from between flaccid lips and a rope of saliva gleamed wetly.
She was sprawled across the steps, one leg angled out, her skirt rucked up. A pale moon showed where her tights had ripped at the thigh. There was a sour flat smell that again reminded the boy of the pit on Slaughterhouse Road, but here it was thicker, cloying and cold.
"What's the matter?" Neil asked tremulously, legs bent, prepared to run.
"Mother," the woman moaned. Through the thick saliva, it sounded like mudda.
"What?"
"Oh..." another long moan, almost like a sigh, then the woman's head flopped. The smell grew stronger.
"Go. Now," she said, though the words were hardly recognisable. Her face twisted towards the boy and her eyes seemed to come into focus. Her mouth opened again and just then, on the landing above, there was a small grating noise. The woman coughed, gagging, and her flaccid body convulsed. Just overhead something whimpered. At first Neil though it was a cat, maybe a kitten, but the sound came again.
It was a baby.
The whimpering cry came clear from just above in the darkness. Neil knew all about babies. One of the reasons he'd been out kicking the ball against the wall was because his little sister, only three months old, and almost as much of a surprise to his parents as she had been to Neil, always needed fed when his mother was making the dinner. She made the same wheedling cry when she was hungry.
"Up there," the woman's strangled words came from beside him. She reached out a pallid hand towards him. Neil thought she was directing him upwards. The sense of apprehension diminished when the baby mewled again. He passed the sprawled woman, not noticing her shaking her head like a maudlin drunk. He came to the fourth turn, tripping over cans and boxes, heading upwards to where the darkness was almost complete.
There was a snuffling cry dead ahead. He scrambled up the final six steps, almost losing his balance, eyes wide to try to see. Something whispered in his ear and he stopped dead.
"Get you, " it said. "Catch you. "
The words scraped and tickled, just loud enough to be heard. Sudden fear ballooned in the boy. The shadows seemed to close in on him, while the whispering voice, in his ears, in his head, chittered fast. Panicked, Neil turned, preparing to run back down the stairway when the dark above came reaching down at him.
In that minute fraction of a second, that's exactly what it looked like to Neil Kennedy. He did not even have a chance to think about it. The dark simply rippled towards him, blacker than the gloom at the head of the stairs. He saw it rush towards him and then it slammed him against the wall, knocking his breath out and smashing his nose with the ferocity of the strike.
Neil grunted in surprise and pain and fright. As he bounced, whirling from the wall, something whipped out towards him so fast it was just a blur. He felt a sharp, jagged pain under his collar- bone and a corresponding stab at the top of his shoulderblade and then he was jerked off his feet with such violence that his head snapped back with a flare of pain which felt as through the muscles in his neck had been pulled apart.
The boy screeched as terror exploded inside him.
Beside him, the wall blurred as he was hauled upwards at shocking speed, pinioned by an enormous grip on his shoulder. He screamed again, a high and wavering sound that spanked back and forth from the walls of the stairwell as whatever had grabbed him and had him clenched in a ferocious grip raced upwards. The boy's heel hit off the bannister and his shoe flew into space, tumbling down the dark well, but he didn't even notice. The dark shape held him in a grip of such crushing intensity that he could feel the bones crack. Hot blood gushed across his cheek. He heard his own scream soar higher and higher and beyond it he could hear the rumbling grunt of the black thing that had him in its grip. He was jerked up in a stuttering series of lurches towards the roof where old beams criss-crossed one another. The thing paused momentarily. It snuffled and growled like a hungry animal, like a huge and ravenous beast, mindless and ferocious. By the time they had reached the rafters, Neil Kennedy was almost unconscious from pain and loss of blood and sheer terror. He twisted spasmodically and felt the white fire rip through his neck. The black thing squeezed harder. There was a slight pop as something burst inside the monstrous grip. The boy felt himself flung round, legs whipping like a floppy doll, and his knee hit the edge of a beam. A loud crack clapped the air and a jolt of agony flamed in the boy's leg. The whipping motion snapped his teeth together, slicing through the edge of his tongue. The black thing drew him upwards in one jerking movement and held him up. The boy's vision was fading fast. He saw two orange-yellow eyes open. A discoloured membrane flicked across them. The thing growled like a monstrous cat and brought its victim right up to its eyes. A mouth opened.
Neil Kennedy's heart stopped beating and he died, with those sulphur eyes drilling into his soul. The drips and splashes of his blood on the walls of the staircase began to congeal and solidify in the dark shadowed place just under the roof of the old warehouse.
Only fifty yards away, behind the big double gate of the shunting yard, the three small boys played on, sliding down the ramp and crashing into the now shapeless pile of cardboard boxes. Their laughter and squeals of hilarity pierced the fog. Up in the roof-space, where dust-coated cobwebs festooned the narrow corners, a black shape with a smaller lighter shape dangling in its grasp turned its head towards the sound, snuffling at the air. It moved in that direction in a liquid, insectile creep, then stopped and turned back. The sound had sparked off a barren hunger that could not be sated. Its eyes widened, glowing febrile and feral in the gloom. Wet drool dripped from the corner of a shadowed mouth. It began to move, away from the sounds, to the far end of the roof where a hoisting window gaped on the gable wall. Across the river, the foundry shrieked its night noises and a warm glow flickered on the base of the massive cylinder of chimney that jutted to the sky. The black thing growled again, so low the dusty windows rattled in their frames and turned away from the light. After a moment, it moved on and out into the thickening fog.
The Murphy twins and their small friend lived to play another day. After almost an hour of excitement they trundled along the disused track, laughing amongst themselves, each aware that Neilly Kennedy had missed some great fun. They agreed to meet the next day after school with anything they could use to slide down the ramp.
When Gerry and Pat Murphy got home, Neil Kennedy senior, a big angular man with the same Irish red hair as his son, was sitting on the arm of the chair in the livingroom.
"Where have you boys been?" Meg Murphy demanded to know. The twins looked at each other, one trying to read the other's expression, wondering what to say.
"Och, never mind," their mother went on. "Have you seen Neilly?"
The big man looked from one boy to the other.
"Yes Mr Kennedy," Pat said. "He was playing with us across at the slide."
"But he came home for his tea an hour ago," Gerry interjected.
"Well, he's not home yet," Neil Kennedy said slowly. Already the look of a parent whose child is late on a winter's night was beginning to shade his face.
Half an hour after that, Gerry and Neil were standing side by side, answering all the questions the policeman asked them. They admitted being across in the old railyard. They were certain that Neil had gone home. Constable Bill McGurk took notes and then went outside to speak into his radio and within fifteen minutes, two police cars were parked at the junction of Artisan Road and Station Street. Neil Kennedy, too worried to have muffled himself up against the freezing fog went with the policemen when the search started. They hunted all over the railyard, down the alleys that led to the river before it took its bend at the bridge, and in every back court between Station Street and the quayside. They did not find little Neilly Kennedy that night.
Jack Fallon was woken out of a terrible dream at six in the morning and told the news.
For an instant, while his heart slowed down to a canter, he was glad to get the reprieve from the nightmare of flying glass and dripping blood, until he heard that another child was missing, and this time not a baby.
He was in his office on a freezing, dark and misty morning half an hour after the call.
Later that day, they found the body of a woman, frozen in rigor mortis and with the cold, caught on the anchor chain of one of the little tattered boats moored in the river. She was wearing one shoe, a brown lacing brogue, when they finally hauled her out of the icy water just below the weir downstream from the old bridge. When they got her to the quayside, her body, bent by the flow of water, could not be laid flat. When the diver placed her on her back, she rocked like an ungainly grey toy. They laid her on her side on the stretcher and she was taken to Lochend Hospital where Robbie Cattanach carried out yet another post mortem. Apart from the lack of identification, and the circumstance of her being found floating in the river, there were no suspicious circumstances. The presence of dirty river water in her lungs showed beyond doubt that she had died from drowning.
The only odd thing, Robbie noted, was that both lungs were filled with water, which, in an ordinary drowning, is very rare, as the lungs normally react violently to cold water.
It looked as if she had walked into the river, taken a deep breath and held it in. The fatal accident inquiry might decide on it later, but Robbie Cattanach decided there and then that this was a case of suicide. As to the motive, he couldn't say.