He reached out with his senses and touched her. She was coming closer.
Here in the dark he became very still. The mother moved and he pushed at her until she stopped. She made a low noise and then was silent. He reached out again, pushing harder. There were glass sounds of ice forming in the air. A small thing rustled in the dead flowerbeds out there and that caused a reflexive pang of hunger which he pushed away. The footsteps were loud, picked up by his new and heightened ability, crunching harsh on the frost on the flagstones.
They paused and there was another silence broken only by the whirr of starlings wings in the far sky under the blue of the moon and the chittering cheep as the flock wheeled towards the church tower to roost. The gate shrieked, a scream of protest that sent his own hackles rising. It sounded like a challenge and he responded to the high rasp with an involuntary twitch. Inside of him excitement surged for an incandescent moment and then slowly deflated.
The footsteps came closer and he forced his sense out further, until he trailed them over her warmth. The new hunger swelled again. She was hot and pulsing, tense with readiness. Something familiar came to him. He concentrated, focusing tight.
And he recognised her.
He had no words, not yet, but the sense picked out the differences in texture and shape and heat and a thousand other subtle differences that enabled him to tell one from the other. This one had come before, to the other place where the old mother had nested. She had come with the other one and he had been afraid, vulnerable and threatened in the disorientation that followed hard on the loss and the change to a new mother and the imminence of the change.
Was she hunting him? Was she a danger?
He snuffled with his mind, questing and probing, but he was not strong enough yet for anything more than a brush of contact. It was difficult, impossible to tell, but still he felt the uneasy sense of approaching threat. His instinct was to avoid it, to stay still until it had gone. He could wait in the darkness, safe in the mother's warmth until it passed.
The gate shut with a clatter of the hasp, cold metal on metal. The vibration racketed against the glass of the window and sent it shivering in sympathetic resonance. Footsteps came closer, now echoing loud and he had to muffle them out while he concentrated his thoughts. They stopped by the window where the curtains almost met, allowing in a sliver of moonlight to send a bright line running down the side of the wall. A shadow moved, cutting off the light, turned away to let it spear back inside again, then blocked it off once more.
Tension rippled inside of him and his excited perception narrowed to target the approach.
A different light came swinging up and speared through the slit between the edges of the drapes and he recoiled as a searing pain drilled into his eyes. If the light had caught him directly, they would have smoked and sizzled with the unexpected heat of it. A small sound blurted out from him and the mother went into a sudden spasm of shivering in response.
Outside the new one shivered too, suddenly tensed, responding unconsciously to the subaudial sound.
The shadow moved away out of sight and the cold moonlight was back again, wavering in his stinging vision. Something thumped at the door and the mother twisted at the sound. He sensed her protesting, felt her sudden lurch of hope and he clamped down on it hard. She grunted softly as the conflict within her mind and body pulled on her like warring tides.
The door rattled and a metallic click came. He had heard letter flaps open before and dismissed the noise as insignificant. A human sound came echoing down the gall, garbled words that made no real sense. Just then the mother moved, her weight shifting off balance. She put a hand out to stop herself falling from the crouch beside the door. A floorboard creaked.
The stranger shivered hard, not physically, but mentally. The vibration came singing through the dark, a pure and clear note and he sensed the primitive beginnings of fear. A swell of satisfaction and another hunger followed instantly. He swivelled his head, eyes wide in the dark of the room, waiting for the next move. Almost absently, he urged the mother to move, to pull back to the corner close to the door beyond the scope of the light should it come again. She responded sluggishly, a deep and untouchable part of her fighting him all the way, but he pressed, plucked on the inside of the nerves and she moved slowly. Her knee came down on the sprung board and made it creak again.
The reaction from outside was instantaneous. He could feel the cold shiver in the new arrival transmit to him. Through the wall, through brick and mortar he saw the warm colour change and doppler down to a cool nameless shade as the tension altered the very vibrations of the other life. The alteration in sensation faded off quickly and the woman moved away from the door. He sat there in the dark, beside the lounge door, clasped tight in the mother's arms while she trembled almost imperceptibly. The new one moved, almost out of range, beyond the side of the wall and then came back again at the back. He strained to pick her up, almost ready to move, when there was a soft, slow scrape of noise from in the kitchen,
She was inside.
It was completely unexpected. Over by the far wall, the green eyes blinked at him, Celia Barker's answering machine. The colour represented a small and blinking animal in the night but he had learned to ignore the reactions the eyes sparked off within him. It had no sense of life. He ignored them now because of the noise in the kitchen. She was in now.
The sensation of approaching danger inflated wildly.
In the kitchen the woman called out in a low, unintelligible series of clicks and booms that sounded raw in his ears. She came closer, bright in his night sense and he reacted to the nearness.
The mother moved. She tried to call out and he wrapped around her. His glands were primed, pumped up as never before as he prepared for flight or fight, though his instinct told him it was not yet the fight time. The mother moved and tried to pull back. He wrapped his tail around her, looping it round her neck, hauling it tight to strangle the sounds that were about to blurt out and reveal them both. It held her taut and she gurgled mutely.
His glands were pumped up and he was ready.
The presence came towards the door. The mother drew back and he forced her forward, one step, two steps. Beyond the door, the noise came again, a different sound of drawn out vowels and beating consonants, stretched by his altered timescale of sudden alertness. The mother's foot rapped against the skirting board.
On the other side of the door the heartbeat thudded in sudden fast pulses of colour. Feral anger and hollow need rippled through him as the apprehension came to him in ripples. His glands swelled, lumping up below the skin, pressing tight under the surface.
She came out of the kitchen and into the hall. He mewled. The sound came from low down in his chest, a smothered whimper of fury and his own kind of fear. A footstep came closer and he made the mother press herself in against the wall. Out there the woman called out, a stuttering rumble of noise that bounced and echoed from the walls of the narrow hallway. Muscles inside him clenched tight, pressing like a pain, suddenly urgent. Spiracles down the length of his abdomen, little parallel rows of holes that trailed from under each limb opened. There was no volition, no choosing of the mix he would need, the way he did with the mother or the others who came close to be manipulated. This time it all came out, every gland sphincter opening like a mouth, every muscle squeezing in an instant of relief. He could hear the pheremones spray from him in a hiss of mist.
The mother went rigid. It was instantaneous. She jerked as if she'd been hit with a hammer right on the forehead and he gripped her tight. Her head rapped against the wall, her whole body vibrating so fast and so hard that the back of her skull jittered on the surface in a rapid series of dull thuds. Her mouth opened and a drool of saliva spilled out in a sticky rope. Inside her head, frantic fear screamed in a mental blast and he absorbed it with his own mind, soaking it instantly to damp its force.
Out there beyond the door the spray caught the other one and she stopped dead, halfway out of the kitchen, one foot still raised from the ground.
He felt it slam into her like a physical blow. His concentration was wound up so tight that all his receptors were wide open. She reeled back with the enormous force of the physical reaction as the pheromones triggered the responses. Adrenaline spurted into her veins. Complex dopamines and melatonins flooded receptors in her brain. Even more complex sugars urged in a powerful hit of energy that could not be expended. Her ovaries squeezed progesterone and oestrogen into her system and she fell back, almost doubled up with the overwhelming chemical overload.
He felt it sizzle through her, perceived her galvanic reaction. Inside her head the neural connections sparked and forked uncontrollably. She staggered back, mind emitting sharp and crazy pulses of thought-static that he picked up in the dark. It was like watching an explosion of light and colour, like tasting the concentrated essence of his own self in a mother's blood. It was like draining the pure distillation from deep in a mother's depths.
For a moment he too was in sensory overload, experiencing everything that erupted within the new one. He was almost paralysed on the crest of the momentous reaction.
In his grasp the mother quivered and vibrated, her own receptors shuddering under the impact but already, even in so short a time, inured to its full blast. He loosened his hold just a fraction and she gagged, choking for breath. The fear was swirling inside her in a hot stir while the mother-need clashed with it, sending counter-pulses through her. Her mind was ripping apart. He swivelled his head to peer through the crack between the door and the wall. In the hallway the new shape stumbled back.
He moved then. He turned back and focused on the mother. She moved too. There was no hesitation. He pressed hard, swamped the fear with the need and the urgency and the urge to protect.
Even in the dark, Ginny Marsden saw her baby's wide eyes and she sensed the danger.
She came out the chemical assault, eyes staring and the panic already thrumming through her. The dreadful, supernatural fear was crushed down to a hot coal, while the mother-love simply ballooned. She felt her legs move, muscles still trembling hard enough to spill her to the ground. Something was coming for the baby. Something wanted to hurt it. She did not think, but reacted. She lurched out through the doorway, banged against the wall, now holding the baby tight in her arms. It whimpered. She groaned an unintelligible sound of panic and anger and threw herself forward.
A shape was moving just inside the kitchen door, its outlines blurred in the dark.
This thing was threatening the baby. She ran forward, clutching the mite in against her, feeling its soft skin, mind flaring and flickering with the irresistible need to protect.
She hit the floundering shadow, reaching out with her hand to push it away. The back door was wide open. The silhouette whirled away from her, careered against the sink and bounced back. She saw a hand reach up and knew it was reaching for the baby. She tried to turn and then something happened.
Ginny did not see it, but suddenly the shape was reeling back once more. There was a clatter of noise and a sharp unmusical crack as something made of glass broke and then shattered. A metal utensil fell into the sink with a ringing sound that seemed to go on and on. Something screamed loud and deafening in the enclosed space.
_______
Helen saw a lurching shape come through the doorway.
Her stretched senses reached and touched something alien. She was still turning, trying to flee from the dark and the dreadful images that flickered and wavered and exploded in her mind. Enormous jolts of distilled terror sent shocks through her.
Then her mind brushed against something scabrous and completely alien. In that moment, despite the other sensations careering through her and the fragmented horrors rolling and tumbling inside her head, a part of her knew this was different. The cold and loathsome touch slithered across the surface of her brain and she reeled from it. A scream tried to blurt.
But no sound came out from her strangled throat. Her hair whipped like thick tentacles, slapping against her cheeks as she shoved herself away from that appalling touch.
A dreadful jittering thing came rushing towards her. She had no time to react. The sensory overload was so overwhelming, so devastating that she could not stop herself in the act of turning, could not raise a hand up. The shape came slamming out through the other doorway. A hand reached out, pale against the dark, expanding in her vision. It looked like a white and writhing spider. Her own hand, stretched out as it was, almost touched the fingers. They pulled back unaccountably. The shape lunged towards her.
Oh my god it's got two heads
A sudden clear thought blazed. The thing had two heads. It was a monster coming at her from the dark of the hall. Some rational part of her mind told her it was another hallucination, an appalling vision caused by a gas or a drug that she'd breathed in. Another part of her, completely primitive, completely fundamental told her it was a monster, a gorgon. It was a nightmare come alive and coming for her. Her mouth opened and this time a gurgle of fear escaped her. Her head twisted to the side. A pale face turned away from her, moving, it seemed in slow motion. She saw fair hair whip around, bouncing almost elegantly in the air. The first hand whirled away, flying of its own volition.
And another face loomed up.
Her heart punched into her throat and kicked so hard she was sure it would choke her to death.
The face leaned forward, its features twisted and gnarled, eyes huge in the dark, large as golf balls, protruding from a face that she could never have dreamed. The eyes were staring, emitting a light of their own. The mouth was small and puckered, forming an almost perfect black circle inside which needle teeth looked like splinters of glass. The lids pulled back so far that the appalling amphibious eyes looked as if they would pop out and burst on the sunken cheeks. A papery, shiny substance fluttered on the skin.
It screeched at her, so loud and so high she felt the bones inside her ears, the very shell of her skull vibrate so rapidly it caused a drill-bit of pain to cross her brow from one temple to another.
Something came out towards her. It was only a blur. Her eyes were locked onto the protuberant eyes of the two-headed thing. It opened its mouth and its scream turned into a hiss. The smell came again, more diffuse than before. The shape blurred and changed. The colour, even in the dark, wavered from shades of grey to pale pink. The eyes shrank, swelled, shrank again. For an instant she thought she saw a baby. Some other strange sensation kicked in her belly. Need grappled with absolute and unspeakable supernatural fear.
Then something came whipping out and caught her just above the eyes. Needle sharp points poked at her skin. She felt a rip. The face blurred and ran like wax, leaning in close to her. She sensed a dreadful hunger and recoiled aghast. On her forehead a pain erupted in a slender point of fire and she fell back. The last thing she saw was the two-headed thing dance back, along the line of the sink. Helen's head hit against something hard and colours sparked and spangled in front of her eyes, but they were real colours, not sick and alien. She realised that she was going to pass out and her survival instinct tried to prevent that from happening.
The darkness closed in on her and she realised with fading horror that she would be left alone in the dark with the monster. The shadows of the kitchen spun away from her as a deeper dark came in and she felt as if she was falling down a long well.
______
"The door's unlocked," David Harper told the two uniforms. Another patrol were just coming up the alley. There was hardly any daylight left, but he hadn't wanted to waste time, not since the talk with Heather McDougall's old mother. John Barclay had left two messages for him at the station, both asking him to call urgently. David knew the ex-cop would be wanting his video tapes back, or at least to get the go-ahead to re-use the ones he already had. David promised himself he'd call in the morning, once the search of the dead woman's house was finished. Inspector Cruden had not been easy to convince, but the neighbours statements that the woman they knew as Thelma Quigley had always been seen pushing a pram and had always had a baby, were definite enough to make it worth the check. If there had been a baby, they had to find it.
"It could be another West case," somebody had said in the squadroom and Cruden had lifted his eyebrows just enough to think about it some more. "She's always been seen with a baby in pram, but it's definitely not a neighbour's kid and she had no relatives to speak of. The house was full of toys and baby clothes. She could have been a weirdo, or just some sad old lady with a complex, but if she wasn't...."
"You're sure she's Heather McDougall?"
"Certain of it. We're getting dental records checks right now, but it's a formality. The three birthmarks on her cheek match exactly. No point of trying for prints. She was pure as the driven snow. Prof. Hardingwell confirms that too."
"But you've already been to the house?"
"We didn't know about the babies then."
"Sounds a bit of a long shot to me," Cruden said, but he was policeman enough to consider the possibility however remote. David Harper was a good cop, and not given to flights of fancy. Finally the Inspector gave the go-ahead for the search and they got the warrant signed within the hour. There were one or two things David hadn't mentioned, not to anyone, because the information he'd got from Edinburgh was old and purely coincidental. It kept nudging in on his conscious thoughts quite insistently and he had to shove it away.
"Is Lamont back?" he asked as he was pulling on his coat. He wanted her back on the case with him, told himself it was only because of her professionalism. Another internal voice told him he was a damned liar, but he ignored it.
"No, she's still out," Cruden told him. "She's still working on the runner. Gone over to Gilmourhill to knock a door or two."
David shrugged, buttoning the coat up to the neck for the short walk across the car park. "If she gets in, tell her to call me."
It was bitterly cold now in the still air with darkness falling swiftly and a pale moon rising over the rooftops. The two patrolmen stamped their feet hard on the flagstones, making the ground quake. Their batons and cuffs clunked and jangled. David pushed the door open and flashed his light into the hall.
"Bulb's gone here," he said. "Take one from inside and set it up."
"What are we looking for?" one of the officers asked. He took several steps up the hallway, then stopped. "God, what a stench. Has something died in here?" he turned, still holding his torch up. The beam caught David in the eye and he flinched back from the glare.
"Turn that off," he snapped. The smell was different now to what he remembered. It was cold and stale and smelt slightly of rot. He recalled how he'd thought it was a nerve gas, remembering the surge of anger and the undertow of violence that last time he'd been in the dingy room. He remembered the other sensation, the different drive, and the image of Helen Lamont pale and spreadeagled. He shied away from that and forced it away yet again. Now the smell was thinned, but it still had the musky reek that conjured up images of stoats and ferrets and movement in the dark. David realised he should have pulled a search team together the first time. If there had been a baby, and if the baby was in the room, he'd not only be turned over for missing something quite literally under his nose, but he'd find it hard to forgive himself.
If there had been a baby and it had still been alive....
He turned away from that kind of thought. It would get him nowhere.
"Left is the living room. Beyond there's a bathroom and on the other side a kitchen." He gave them directions and the five of them began a systematic search. The nest of blankets and sheets was still a swirl where he'd last seen them. The team carefully unravelled the tangle, screwing up their noses at the smell that still lingered on the fabrics.
"What did she keep then? This is worse than cat's piss."
"Dog farts. Worse than that." His partner went one better. "This would make you puke your guts."
David was on the far side of the room checking among the piles of toys. Opposite him, a young policeman was going through the small cupboards on the dresser, neatly placing everything on the floor beside him. He drew out a cardboard shoebox, opened it slowly. The top slid to the side, David turned just in time to see the recruit stumble back so quickly he fell on his backside with a thump. The box flew out of his hand, twisted in the air and a white ghostly shape came floating out.
"Holy fuck..." the patrolman at the bed barked. The youngster on the floor scrabbled back as if he was being attacked. The ghostly shape spun slowly in the air, a translucent face staring blindly and hollowly and then sank to the floor. It landed with a papery rustle and crumpled where it fell. The cop on the floor was still scrambling backwards and his movements were enough to cause an eddy in the cloy air of the room. The papery thing rolled over, scraped against the edge of the dresser and immediately began to disintegrate.
David crossed the room in three strides and tried to get a hold of it. He reached a hand out and stopped.
The face moved. Small shoulders shrugged as it rolled, thin and narrow, oddly slender. The face was in profile, flat and somehow wizened. The eyes were huge and blind and the ears, set high on the sides, were hardly more than pointed flaps. There was no real nose. As David reached lift it, the whole thing crumbled.
"What the hell is it?" one of the men asked.
David did not reply. He was hunkered down, watching the papery shape fragment into flakes. It was like a skin and it reminded him of something he'd seen before. Even as he watched the thing disintegrate, it came back to him. It was like the papery covering of a dragonfly larva after it had split to free the jewelled adult.
It made a tiny sighing rustle sound as the breath of air stirred by his very reach shifted it again. The small face collapsed in on itself. The translucent arms folded and bent. There were no legs, just a slender, tapering body that ended in what looked like an umbilical chord. There was nothing he could do right then but watch as the littler shape fell apart into tissue scraps. The face broke into a hundred pieces, more delicate than an old wasp's paper nest, more fragile than butterfly wings.
"Jesus Sarge, I thought it was a friggin ghost," the young policeman said. "Scared the shite out of me."
"It's a caul," David said, almost, but not completely sure. "There must have been a baby here at some time." The thing was unrecognisable as anything now.
"I'm sorry sarge. I just opened the box and it came out. I didn't mean to let it drop."
David let it go. He stooped and collected some of the flakes and put them back in the box. His mind was working fast and he could have kicked himself for not searching the place more thoroughly the first time.
"What's a caul?" the young man's partner asked.
"Something babies can be born with," David explained. "You must have heard of it. It's like a fine skin, mostly covering the face like a membrane. It peels away after birth."
The officer made a face. "Why would somebody keep it?"
"For good luck," David said, but he didn't feel there was any luck in this. A caul would have to come from a new-born baby, which meant there must have been an infant here at one time, maybe even born in this room. If that was the case, what had happened to the mother? None of the neighbours had ever seen her. They had only seen the old woman with a baby.
The image of the fluttering, decaying shape crumbling onto the old floorboards stayed in his mind. It had been a queer, wraith-fine shape, with bulging eyes and a flattened face. No legs, but long arms. It hadn't looked like any baby David had ever seen, but then again, he'd only read about the caul that covers some babies at birth. He'd never seen one before. But this caul, if it really was a birth-mask, could be another clue to add the rest that surrounded the woman who had taken the identity of a girl murdered thirty hears before.
"Never came home," old Mrs McDougall had said. "She just vanished. It was the same time as the baby was killed up there at Duncryne Bridge."
The words kept coming back to him, intruding and insisting, demanding attention. What old Mrs McDougall had said had been repeated in the tag-on to the murder story and the tale of the missing girl. There had been another death at the bridge on the day Heather McDougall had disappeared.
She had gone up to Duncryne Bridge to throw herself off, to join her murdered friend, but she had not killed herself. She had simply vanished for thirty years. There had been a baby on that day and there had been a baby now.
That nagged at David's mind and would not let him go. Was it a coincidence? Or was there something deeper, something more sinister.
Down on the floor the flaky remains of the membrane formed an oddly sprawled light patch on the old wood. David had already taken some samples for tests, to make sure it was what he thought it was. He scraped some more into the shoebox and again he thought of the bulging eyes and the dragonfly as it peeled off its skin to emerge a fast and dazzling predator from a black and scaly thing that lived in the dark. The eyes on the caul had bulged.
The search turned up nothing new. There were stains on the sheets at the centre of the jumble, which could have been bloodstains. David had the men fold them for forensics. Apart from that there was little to be found. There were no trapdoors to get under the floor and no evidence that any of the boards had been lifted in recent times. A hatch led up to a small loft above the kitchen, a tight and dusty space where the rank scent lingered. It had a narrow skylight that gave on to a low, sloping roof at the back of the property. In the beam of the flashlight, David could see scrape-marks on the moss where something had slid towards the guttering that abutted the adjacent flat, and he wondered, trying to recall the sounds he'd heard the first time he and Helen Lamont had come to this house.
There had been a noise. He'd been almost sure. A whimpering sound that he'd taken for a kitten, a slight scrape of a piece of furniture being moved. He had not been sure then, and he was not sure now, but now he wondered.
Had there been someone in the house all along?
_______
Helen Lamont staggered to her feet, gasping for breath, gagging with a sudden roll of nausea that swelled up in a sickening rush.
Her head thumped front and back giving her a wave of pain with every beat of her heart, and she felt a trickle of blood slide down her forehead and between her eyebrows. Her flashlight had spun away and landed somewhere and she was in total darkness. Even the light of the moon had gone. For an instant she was completely disoriented, struggling to comprehend what had happened.
Monster...!
No, not a monster. The sudden jolt of apprehension had brought back an image of something that had lurched out of the shadows. She'd thought it was a creature with two heads, but that had been a hallucination. Either that or she was going completely crazy. Hot on that thought came the realisation that she had to get out of here. There was a smell in the air, still rank and sickening, though diminished now from what it had been. That's what had caused the hallucination, she told herself, some chemical, some poison in the close atmosphere of the room. She stumbled to the door and yanked it open, vaguely aware that she had not closed it when she came in.
Out in the dark of the winter the air was cold and clean and she haled it in her heaving lungs, feeling the rasp of its icy touch at the back of her throat, yet welcoming it. Out in the back of the house she leaned against the wall and retched violently, bent double with the force of it, though nothing came out except a trickle of saliva. Heartburn flared under her breastbone and acid burned her gullet, but she kept everything inside.
"Stupid bloody bitch," she told herself. "Should have called in." Now she had to get on the radio and that would mean a red face at best. She was still trying to work out what had happened, now completely unsure of the train of events. Something had come lunging at her.
Hadn't it?
She could not even be sure of that now. There had been the smell, like the foul reek in Thelma Quigley's house. It had come billowing up, thick and greasy and then suddenly she'd gone completely crazy. There was no other way to describe it.
She'd fallen and banged her head. That was true enough, for there was a lump rising on the back of her skull, still pulsing urgently, and another pain on her forehead where the trickle of blood welled from a cut. Something had come lunging out of the dark, a dreadful shape that wavered and twisted and looked as if it had two heads.
Hadn't it?
Or had she slipped and knocked her head? Out in the clear air of the night, all she could be sure of was that she had thought she'd seen something and she'd hurt her head.
"Damned silly bitch," she scolded herself again. Helen got to the car and got on the radio. The control-room girl patched her through. A squad car arrived in four minutes. David Harper was the first to get out. He saw her in her own car and came walking quickly across. The two uniforms followed behind.
"We were just passing," he said. "What happened?" He leaned right over her, almost protectively, put a hand on her shoulder. She felt herself lean against him, felt the warmth of his solid weight. For a moment she wanted to hold on to him, hold on tight, and let loose the tears that were close to the surface. He steadied her, eyes full of concern.
"Got a bang on the head, that's all," Helen said. She was still unsure, still confused. She didn't want to say the wrong thing. Could have been a burglar, but it was dark and hard to tell. I think I was dazed for a minute."
"Did you get a look at him?"
She shook her head. "No. Couldn't say if it was a man or a woman. Just a shape in the dark. Slammed into me."
"So why were you checking a place out on your own?" he asked. "You should have called in."
Helen shot a look at the two policemen who had just reached the pavement. She quickly drew her eyes back to David, giving him a sign to leave it alone. He picked up the message, but his eyes had that confusing mix of concern and anger.
"I thought I saw something and slipped when I turned round. It was nothing. I was just on a routine check, a long shot. I'm still looking for the girl and there was a possibility she might have come here to feed the cat." She kept her eyes on him, knowing he was right, but unwilling to take it in front of uniforms. "I'll put it in my report."
One of the patrolmen walked up to the gate. "Want us to take a look around?"
Helen swivelled round. "No. I've done that. The place is empty." David saw the tension in her look. For some reason she didn't want them going into the house. He went along with that for now.
"That's okay with us," the man said. "We're off shift ten minutes ago Sarge."
"Fine. You might as well knock off. I'll check the place out and then I can take DC Lamont back."
Once they were gone he turned back to Helen. "I should get you back to St Enoch's." He reached towards her and felt the back of her head. She stayed still while he palpated the lump, wincing slightly under the pressure of his fingers. "You got a right crack there." He brought his hand round, cupped it under her chin and tilted her face so that she was looking directly at him. "And a cut there too. How many of me can you see?"
"Just the one, and that's enough," Helen said. "I didn't need a rip in front of the boys. It was just a routine check. I never expected anything."
"Okay. I wasn't giving you a rip. I was worried, that's all. But then you didn't want them to go inside. So what's up?"
"I don't know," Helen said, glad of his concern. She cold still feel the pressure of his fingers on the back of her head where the lump throbbed in time to her heartbeat. "It's really weird. I didn't want to make a fool of myself, but there's something funny going on. You remember Thelma Quigley's place? The smell?"
He hadn't got round to telling her he had identified the Jane Doe.
"Well it smells like that in there, but worse I couldn't be sure what happened. It made me dizzy and I might have fainted. I'm not even a hundred percent certain that I was knocked down, but I think I was." She explained what had happened, or what she thought had happened and then he made her stay in the car until he checked out Celia Barker's small house himself. There was nothing much to find except for a swirl of blankets on the floor and the dead and stiffened cat. If there had been any smell inside the house it had not lingered long. A faint, acrid scent was barely discernible and could have been anything, but he knew Helen Lamont. If she said it was the same as the dead woman's house, then he'd believe her. There was no sign of anything that could have caused it, no canisters of chemicals, nothing. The dead cat was a puzzle, but it was close enough to the door to have crawled in through the cat flap. It looked as if it had been mauled, maybe caught by a dog, and the missing eyes told him it had been dead a while. Even in winter, they were always the first to go. He dumped it without ceremony in the waste bin outside the back door rather than leave it to rot any more. A dead cat was not important.