Night fell abruptly and early. Thick clouds had piled in from the north west, swept in on cold winds that had driven down from the north of Greenland, threatening snow and dismal hail. They had blown by after an hour of darkness and the wind died. Overhead the sky was black, frosted with the stars, clear enough to make out the twinkling jewels of the seven sisters high over the Langmuir crags. There was no moon.
The hard frost crystallised out of the cold air to rime the windows and lay mirror-sheets of black ice on the roads out of Levenford.
Jack Fallon was still in College Street station, going over the evidence reports again, still trying to knit together a the puzzle which was growing in his mind.
Mickey Haggerty was on his third pint of beer in Mac's Bar, and enjoying every mouthful.
Robbie Cattanach was putting the finishing touches to his report on the post mortem he'd carried out on William Simpson, the late minister of Castlebank church. He hadn't needed a video cassette to tell him what he needed to know. Death was by strangulation. The other injuries were mere curiosities as far as he was concerned.
Lorna Breck sat with her feet curled up underneath her on the soft sofa in her small living-room down by the estuary, trying to read a book, and making heavy weather of it. A small log fire flickered in the corner, the embers glowing red and sending out enough heat to make her feel comfortable on a cold night, yet she felt chilled inside. A sense of apprehension had been building up inside her since she'd left the library and crossed the old bridge, heading for home. It was vague, but getting stronger all the time, and Lorna couldn't shake the sensation of foreboding. She turned the page and her eyes followed the words right down to the bottom before she realised she hadn't read a word of the story. The image of what she'd seen when she'd looked into the shop window kept coming back to her, faded not one whit by the passage of three days.
Just after nine o'clock, down on Quay Street, a shape moved along the pavement, indistinct at first in the frosty mist floating in from the river. In this old part of the town, the council had built a small walkway along the edge of the harbour, where an ancient boat repair shed had stood for generations until it had burned down three years before. During the day, in summertime, the clerks from the distillery and mothers with small children, spent a sunny hour throwing pieces of bread to the swans on the water, and losing most of it to the squadrons of screaming gulls who competed for the crumbs. Now, in winter, the swans were gone. The water was dark, the sound of its passage along the harbour wall was liquid and urgent. It slapped against the small boats moored out in the deeper-water midstream and made sucking, burbling noises as it swirled, out of sight, round the moorings and the old pier stanchions.
Shona Campbell needed the money. She was twenty one years old and had a year-old baby girl. Eighteen months ago she'd had a good job in Cameron and Dunn's lawyer's office. Old Cameron had died twenty years ago and the practise was run by Roger Dunn, who handled most of the criminal work at Levenford Sheriff Court. In the old days, anybody banged up on a weekend drunk and disorderly would demand of the station sergeant: "Get me Cameron."
Now they got Dunn, so the joke went, done good and proper.
That was the position Shona Campbell found herself in, done good and proper. Two years before this cold Friday night, she'd had another interesting Friday night at a party out by Eastmains, on the far edge of town, where she'd met Craig Campbell known for some forgotten reason as Bunnet. He had looked good in his leathers, and better on the back of his big black Yamaha, and she'd agreed to let him take her home on the back of the purring machine. He was a barrel-pusher in Castlebank distillery, the immense four-square building that loomed beside the curve of the river. She should have known better when he'd taken the half bottle of crystal-clear overproof spirit out of his inside pocket and taken a large swallow. She'd tried some, just a sip, and had shivered with distaste. He'd laughed, his fair hair falling over his brow, and his strong teeth white in the night, and he'd slipped a casual arm around her shoulder to kiss her goodnight. She'd gone out with him four times, once to the pictures and three times roaring round the back roads on the big bike, and then he'd let the bike idle silently down the hill to Fetter Farm where he'd sneaked her into the hayloft. She'd gone along with it, apprehensively at first, but when his cold hand had slid against the skin under her brassiere, she'd been unable to say no. He'd laid her down, taken off most of her clothes and some of his and then she'd come with such intensity that she gouged two stuttering furrows in the back of his leather Jacket.
Six months later, they were married in a small ceremony conducted by the same Rev William Simpson whose filleted and eviscerated remains were now glacial and blue in a cold storage drawer in the old mortuary. A few months after little Kelly was born, Shona came quickly to the conclusion that Bunnet Campbell was a drunk and a waster, and by that time it was too late. They'd got a small, dingy apartment three up in a huddle of old tenements just off Quay Street and Shona settled down to watch the rest of her life drift by in a dismal haze of need and faded dreams.
She came round the corner onto the walkway. Ahead of her, a globe of light was haloed by the frosted mist. She could feel the icy air catch in the back of her throat, clean and sharp, and she drew the shawl tightly around the sleeping baby at her shoulder.
Here the walkway passed two low bench seats which had been there since the promenade was built and were already cross-hatched by initials and gang slogans. To the right, there was a high wall, punctuated by gateways which led into the alleys and back courts of the River Street shops. She passed the light, walking on quickly, her shoes clacking on the cold paving stones. About fifty yards on, Rock Lane pulled off up towards the main street, bisected by Barley Cobble, an ancient pathway which had once been the route of the old grain barrows when the distillery had been a family enterprise. At the end of this long, twisting and narrow alley, the Castlegate Bar, the oldest, and the dingiest drinking house in town, would be alive with noise and laughter and the occasional sound of snarling drunk men. This was a Friday night and that's where Shona was headed. Bunnet Campbell would be up against the bar, most likely sprawled across it. Friday night was still pay night in the distillery. The men had threatened to walk out when the company suggested paying their wages direct into bank accounts, for two reasons. Firstly, few of them had bank accounts. But the main reason was that few of them, under any circumstances, wanted any evidence of how much they were paid for their week's work. The difference between their take-home pay and what actually got home was immense.
It had become a Friday night ritual, a race against the drink and the devil, a bid to get some of the money before Tam Finch, the Castlegate's beefy owner, got the lot. Already, they were five weeks behind with the rent. Shona owed another two months on the hired television set, and there was a mountain of debt piling up, most of it to the Housemarket catalogue collector.
As Shona scurried quickly past the long wall, she thought about the good job she'd had in the lawyer's office and once again thought she'd been done. Good and proper.
Her shadow lengthened in front of her as she hurried, eyes smarting from the cold, until she got midway to the next street lamp. Beside her, an open gateway yawned, a dark blot of lightlessness. She was about to move on when a low moan came soughing out of the dark. The girl stopped and turned simultaneously, clutching her baby tightly against herself, feeling the child give a start at the sudden jar. The moan came again and Shona peered in to the blank space, nervous lest something should leap out from the shadows. A shape moved, and the girl took a step back with a little intake of breath, but nothing leapt out. The gloom diminished a little as her eyes grew accustomed to it and finally Shona could make out the huddle against the swung-back gate. The low noise came again. A man moaning.
Shona took two steps forward and peered again. The man was lying in the shadows, back against the wall, beside a tumbled clutter of super-strength lager cans, the kind that were left there by the handful of drunks who hung around the quayside during the day.
"Are you alright?" she asked.
The shape stirred and a pale face swung upwards. Shona couldn't make out the features. She leaned closer and saw a thin man, one leg sprawled out in front of his, both hands up to the side of his face.
"Do you need some help?" the girl asked again. On her shoulder, the baby made a little mewling sound and she automatically patted it to silence.
The man looked drunk. There was a rip in his trousers, a pale stripe against the rest of his leg. The young mother leaned forward down and the man looked at her, or through her. He made the moaning noise again and some saliva dribbled down from slack lips.
His eyes were wide and vacant, mouth slack. Shona wondered whether to call an ambulance or a doctor or something. It was freezing down here and the sprawled, slumped man was only wearing trousers and jacket, no heavy winter coat. She began to straighten up, torn between her need to get round to try to snatch some of her husband's wages and her inability to let someone lie and die in the cold. Just then, the man gave a little jolt, as if she'd awoken.
"Go," he said, very clearly.
"What?"
"Go. Gone. Go. Get." The words came in a slobbery jumble, as if the man had little control over her mouth.
He raised herself up from the wall and stretched out a hand, so quickly Shona thought she had tried to strike at her. The girl pulled back, holding her baby even tighter.
"Go." the man said, her face looming pale up from the shadows. "Get out. Out of here. Go. Get you!"
He tried to heave himself to her feet, the one hand still outstretched towards Shona. He looked more than drunk. He looked mad, the girl thought. She backed away out of the gate. The shape loomed, then fell back with a crumping sound, a flaccid weight hitting the wall.
Shona hesitated again, wondering what to do, then the voice came out from the shadows, now more a shout than a moan.
"Get you!" This time it sounded like a threat.
That was enough for the girl. She turned quickly and clattered up the narrow end of Quay Street, turned at River Lane and then jinked to the left along the alley that would take her to Barley Cobble.
Here the mist from the river had no breeze at all to dissipate its thick pallid tendrils. They curled around the corners and scraped against the crumbling sandstone walls looming in on either side. High on the stonework, old fashioned lamps glowed dimly from within their orange halos. On her shoulder, the baby whimpered again and Shona clapped it lightly, drawing it in close to her body heat. The man in the yard had scared her. She shouldn't have stopped, she told herself, not to be threatened by some disgusting drunk.
She reached the cobbled alley and turned along it, through the swirling mist. Past a doorway she caught a glimpse of someone standing in the shadows and she jerked around, staring, breath caught. There was a dim shape there. At first she thought it was a girl of her own height, but then she twisted her head and the shadows resolved themselves into the shape of the old peeling door. There was no-one there. She walked on for ten paces, not quite scared, but wanting to be out of the mist and home in her own little house, which, no matter how dingy and ill kept, was warm on a winter's night.
There was a noise above her. Still walking, she looked upwards.
A shadow came swooping out of the mist curling above her head and slammed her to the ground.
The blow was such a stunner that Shona Campbell's arm snapped just above the elbow. She hit the cobbled alley with a thud. Out of the corner of her eye, something black whipped backwards, lunged at her again. A searing pain screamed in her neck as her head was smacked to the side and above her, the orange light becamea two whirling fuzzy globes as her vision doubled. She rolled with the force of the blow, scraped her knee on a stone kerb, then fetched against the wall with a thump which socked her breath out in one loud, bewildered grunt.
Despite the pain and the shock, Shona kept little Kelly clasped tight against her with her left arm. She turned, gasping for breath, still unable to comprehend what had happened. Her vision was still swimming and she blinked back tears. Darkness wavered in front of her and she twisted away from it. The dark stretched out and grabbed the baby in one vicious snatch. The child wailed and Shona screamed. Her hand flew out and caught on to the trailing edge of the shawl, fingers hooked in the wide crochet stitching and she was dragged, wailing like a banshee for several yards.
The tugging stopped and Shona managed to get to one knee, just at the corner of the alley where it gave into a small unlit back yard.
"My baby," she screamed. "Give her back!"
She crawled, lurching to her feet. Just ahead of her, in the dark, she could make out the pale fluttering of the shawl and reached out.
Her fingers touched something cold and hard and rough. It moved under her fingers. She blinked again and her eyes cleared. Just above her head height, a snorting, rasping sound grated, like crumbling stone and a foul stench of rot came wafting towards her.
"You bastard," she bawled. "Give her back to me. "
Under her fingers, something gave a wrench.
"Oh help! Somebody help me. It's got my baby." Shona screamed. Off to the right, a lamp blinked on, sending a long rhombus of light through the mist.
"What in the name's going on down there," a querulous old voice demanded to know.
"Oh help me mister. It's my baby," Shona screeched incoherently. She grabbed at the movement, still unable to see anything in the darkness. She was wailing and screaming, scratching and scrabbling at the shadowy shape when the black expanded again. Her arm was flung off with almost enough force to dislocate her shoulder. Something loomed in at her and she got a glimpse of two orange globes as a head swivelled towards her. There was a movement just above her. Her head snapped up, turning and then the dark flicked out and hit her right down the side of her temple.
Her cry was cut off instantly. She smacked the ground with a wet crump.
There was a pain in her right elbow and a tight, ripping throb in her neck, but they started to fade almost immediately. There was no feeling down the left side of her face which was now pressed against the cold cobbles. She tried to move, but her hands were shivering and she couldn't get them to stop. There was a wet feeling on her neck and a thick coppery smell. Her eye swivelled. automatically following a shadowy movement that scuttled and flowed, liquid yet spidery, up the wall close to her head. Her other eye wouldn't move at all and that gave her an odd doubling of vision which was confusing.
Shona's mouth opened and she managed a small croak. There was a warm smell of butcher shops and Shona didn't know why she was lying in Barley Cobble. Very vaguely she thought she might have left the potato pot still bubbling on the old cooker and wondered if dinner would be burned before she got back again. She hoped little Kelly would be alright until then and she hoped the man lying in the dark behind the gate hadn't sneaked up to her flat and crept up beside Kelly's little cot. She wondered mistily about the darkness that had climbed up the wall with the fluttering white thing trailing behind it.
Her hands and arms and legs would not stop shaking. She tried to turn her head and managed to make it move. There was a wet, sucking sound as her face came away from the cobbles and the metal smell came warm again, clogging her throat.
The mist was getting thicker, crowding in on twists of gauzy white and everything began to get cold. Her one good eye rolled and she saw a girl standing there in the alley, watching her. The girl was trying to say something and Shona tried to say something back, but she forgot what she was going to say and the girl started to fade away into the mist.
The corner of River Lane and Barley Cobble was silent for some time. Round the corner, less than fifty yards away, Bunnet Campbell was flopped over the bar, mumbling to Doug Mitchell who was equally drunk, about the fact that his stupid wife couldn't run a piss-up in a brewery. It was another half an hour before Shona Campbell was found lying in a pool of blood, limbs already frozen stiff, her face a ruin of sinew and bone. Of little Kelly Campbell, there was no sign, and it was not until the following morning that the baby's father sobered up enough to report her missing.
On that same Friday night, Jack Fallon was huddled over his kitchen table which was littered with books and scraps of paper. He had cooked two pork chops, burned both of them but ignored the blackened bits and wolfed the lot, then he had made a pot of coffee and sat down at the table. He was on his fourth cup, which he knew was probably a mistake, because it guaranteed him little sleep that night. He almost smiled at the thought. Nothing guaranteed much sleep these days.
He'd got through a lot of work since he'd finished at the office. Robbie Cattanach's post mortem on Simpson would arrive on his desk in the morning and he expected no surprises. It was possible, he told himself, that the autopsy might reveal an exotic substance, like LSD or crack, or magic mushrooms or any other hallucinogenic substance, but Jack didn't think the minister was a likely candidate for turning on and dropping out.
He shook his head wryly. He had to stop pigeonholing people. Simpson did not seem a likely candidate for attending seances. He hadn't seemed the kind of man who would make a video recording of his own gruesome death.
There was no pigeon hole for that kind of thing, and that caused Jack more problems.
Oh, Angus McNicol had been pleased, not only at getting a name for Marta Herkik's murderer, but he also delighted in Superintendent Cowie's embarrassed fury. Cowie had been an elder of Castlebank Church. He'd been a lodge-fellow of the dead and dangling man who was now a twitching star of the small screen. Now the policeman was trying to dissociate himself from the minister.
"There was always something odd about him," he declared to Jack and Angus. "I could never put my finger on it."
"That's why I went very carefully," Jack said, trying to keep his face straight. Angus winked at him over the top of his whisky glass.
Cowie glared at him.
The big chief superintendent offered Jack another drink. He shook his head.
"No thanks. I've stacks of paperwork to get through."
"No urgency now, is there?"
"I don't know."
"What do you mean?" Cowie asked. "I've released the name to the press. Told them our inquiries are at an end."
"Yes, I saw that on the news," Angus said gruffly.
"Might be a bit premature," Jack said evenly.
"Nonsense. We've tied him in to the Herkik place and Latta Court. What more do we need."
"I don't know about you, but I need just a little bit more than circumstantial evidence."
"Come on, Fallon. Simpson did it, and that's an end to it."
"Well, I hope you're right. But so far, we haven't got a body for the Doyle kid. And we've no motive for either. And the one person I would like to speak to is in the middle of a post mortem. On the receiving end, as we speak."
"Well, that's hardly here nor there. We've got Simpson's prints from the Lanark case, and those photographs. That shows he was a killer in the first place."
"It does tend to point that way. But I have to consider the near certainty that there were several people at Marta Herkik's house on the night she died. I don't know how many. I'd like to speak to them all."
"To what end?" Angus asked.
"To make sure this wasn't a group effort. I don't mind nailing this to Simpson's door. The man was a walking shit-house. But if he wasn't the only one involved, then we could have a problem. Just think what the headlines will say if we close the file and then something else happens? I'd just like to make sure."
Cowie turned to Angus McNicol, his eyebrows arched.
"Seems a waste of time, effort and public money to me," he said stiffly."
Angus sat back, steepled his fingers, looking thoughtful.
"Oh, I don't see any harm in Jack here tying up loose ends if he can. I mean, it could have taken a long time to get Simpson anyway, so I think we're ahead on points. For the time being."
He finished his whisky and leaned over the desk.
"Another couple of days Jack. Just so we're sure."
"Thanks," Jack said. Cowie left in an indignant bustle. When the door had closed, Angus asked him what he'd been getting at.
"Just what I said. There's something about this that doesn't sit square with me."
"It would be better all round, propaganda wise and from an admin point of view if we could leave it all with Simpson. It's neat enough for me."
"But if it wasn't just Simpson, it could happen again. I don't think anybody wants that. We'll get egg all over."
Jack had spend a full morning talking to the dead minister's wife. She did not know about the video and he had no plans to tell her just yet.
Her daughter Fiona was lying sedated in an upstairs bedroom of the handsome red-sandstone manse. Betty Simpson had refused all medication.
She offered Jack a sherry in a tiny cut-crystal glass, which he accepted. It was very bitter.
"I suppose you want to ask me some questions," she'd said as soon as she'd poured a glass for herself.
"Yes," Jack agreed. "I do have a few questions."
"About him. My husband." The corners of her mouth turned down as she said it. It made her look as if she'd smelled something rotting in a corner.
"I've known for years," she said. Jack stopped in the act of raising the glass to his mouth. He put it slowly down on the table.
"Known what?"
"About him. About what he does."
"And what does he do. Or did do," he corrected.
"Girls. Young ones. He couldn't keep himself away from them. That's why my other daughters don't live here. Now he'd dead I can say it. He interfered.
"What, with your daughters?"
"With anybody's daughters. He was sick. But I couldn't stop him. I had to stay, to protect Fiona. To make sure he didn't go near her. He was sick, you know, and I hated him for it. I didn't know when we got married, but then I found things." Again she made the disgusted twist of her mouth.
"Things?"
"Pictures. He'd taken them himself. Little girls, sometimes boys, but mostly girls. Disgusting pictures. And there were others. They must have come in the post. He never let me open any of his letters. Filthy pictures, but not as bad as the ones he'd taken by himself."
"And did you ever tell him you knew?"
"I didn't have to. He knew I did. When that little girl was found in Lanark, I knew."
"So why didn't you say anything?"
The minister's widow gave a little laugh. "And who would have believed me? And if they had I would have brought shame on my daughters. No. I said nothing for their sake, but now it's over, and he can't hurt them any more. He can't touch them any more, and I'm glad."
She raised her head and looked at Jack, pale blue eyes glittering like ice. "I hope he burns in hell."
The final word came out like a spit. The grey-haired woman smacked her hand down on the polished coffee-table and the thin stem of the sherry glass broke. Blood immediately dripped from the centre of her palm where the jagged edge had dug into the skin, but she hardly seemed to notice the pain. She wrapped a small handkerchief around her hand and continued to talk as if nothing had happened.
"I'd told him that if he touched me or the girls ever again, then I'd kill him. He never touched any of us after that. That was good enough for me. I just didn't think he'd go so far again, now that he was older."
Jack said back, listening to the stream of loathing from the small woman.
"Tell me. Why would he go to a seance?"
She looked at him, failing to understand.
"He was at a spiritualist meeting last week. A medium."
"I don't know. He never said, but he never told me anything."
"Did he keep a diary?"
"You can check his desk if you like. I couldn't say. Take everything away if you want. I never want to see any of it ever again."