فصل 60

60

SEAN

The back door had been left open, the Scenes of Crime officers said. Not just unlocked, but open. The tang of iron caught in my nostrils as I entered. Callie Buchan was already there, talking to the SOCOs; she asked me a question, but I wasn’t really listening because I was straining to hear something else—an animal, whimpering.

“Shhh,” I said. “Listen.”

“They’ve checked the house, sir,” Callie said. “There’s no one here.”

“Does he have a dog?” I asked her. She looked at me blankly. “Is there a dog, a pet in the house? Any sign of one?”

“Nope, no sign at all, sir. Why do you ask?”

I listened again, but the sound was gone and I was left with a sense of déjà vu: I’ve seen this before, I’ve done all this before—I’ve listened to a dog whimper, I’ve walked through a bloody kitchen into the rain.

Only it isn’t raining, and there’s no dog.

Callie was staring at me. “Sir? There’s something over here.” She pointed at an item on the floor, a pair of kitchen scissors lying in a smear of blood. “That’s not just a nick, is it? I mean, it might not be arterial, but it doesn’t look good.”

“Hospitals?”

“Nothing so far, no sign of either of them.” Her phone rang and she went outside to take the call.

I remained stock-still in the kitchen while two Scenes of Crime officers worked quietly around me. I watched one of them pluck with tweezers a strand of long blond hair that had snagged on the edge of the table. I felt a sudden wave of nausea, saliva flooding my mouth. I couldn’t credit it: I’ve seen worse scenes than this—far worse—and remained impassive. Haven’t I? Have I not walked through bloodier kitchens than this?

I touched my palm to my wrist and realized that Callie was speaking to me again, her head poked around the doorframe. “Can I have a word, sir?” I followed her outside, and while I removed the plastic covers from my shoes, she filled me in on the latest. “Traffic have picked up Henderson’s car,” she said. “I mean, not picked up, but they’ve got his red Vauxhall on camera twice.” She looked down at her notebook. “Thing is, it’s a bit confusing because the first capture, just after three this morning, has him on the A68 going north towards Edinburgh, but then a couple of hours later, at five fifteen, he’s driving south on the A1 just outside Eyemouth. So maybe he . . . dropped something off?” Got rid of something, she means. Something or someone. “Or he’s trying to confuse us?”

“Or he changed his mind about the best place to run to,” I said. “Or he’s panicking.”

She nodded. “Running around like a headless chicken.”

I didn’t like that idea, I didn’t want him—or anyone else—headless. I wanted him calm. “Was it possible to see if there was anyone else in the car, anyone in the passenger seat?” I asked her.

She shook her head, lips pursed. “No. Of course . . .” she tailed off. Of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t another person in the car. It just means that the other person isn’t upright.

Again, that odd sense of having been here before, a scrap of memory that didn’t feel like my own. How could it be anyone else’s? It must have been part of a story, told to me by someone I don’t remember. A woman lying slumped in a car seat, a sick woman, convulsing, drooling. Not much of a story—I couldn’t remember the rest of it, I only knew that thinking about it turned my stomach. I pushed it aside.

“Newcastle would seem the obvious place,” Callie said. “I mean, if he’s running. Planes, trains, ferries—world’s his oyster. But the odd thing is that since that five a.m. sighting, they’ve got nothing, so either he’s stopped or he’s got off the main road. He might be taking smaller roads, the coastal road even—”

“Isn’t there a girlfriend?” I asked, interrupting her flow. “A woman in Edinburgh?”

“The famous fiancée,” Callie said, eyebrows raised. “Well, way ahead of you there. She—Tracey McBride, her name is—was picked up this morning. Uniform are bringing her down to Beckford for a chat. But, just to warn you, our Tracey claims she hasn’t seen Mark Henderson for a good while. Almost a year, in fact.”

“What? I thought they’d just been on holiday together?”

“That’s what Henderson said when he spoke to DS Morgan, but according to Tracey, she’s not seen hide nor hair of him since he called the whole thing off last autumn. She says he dumped her out of the blue, telling her he’d fallen head over heels for some other woman.”

• • •

TRACEY DIDN’T KNOW who the woman was or what she did. “Nor did I want to,” she told me abruptly. She was sitting in the back office of the police station, an hour later, sipping her tea. “I was . . . I was pretty devastated, actually. One minute I’m shopping for wedding dresses and the next he’s telling me he can’t go through with it ’cos he’s met the love of his life.” She smiled at me sadly, pushing her fingers through cropped dark hair. “After that, I just cut him off. Deleted his number, unfriended him, the full monty. Could you please tell me, has something happened to him? No one will tell me what the hell’s going on.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry about that, but there’s not a lot I can tell you at the moment. We don’t believe he’s been harmed, though. We just need to find him, we need to talk to him about something. You don’t know where he might go, do you? If he needed to get away? Parents, friends in the area?”

She frowned. “This is not about that dead woman, is it? I read in the papers that there was another one a week or two back. I mean . . . he wasn’t . . . that wasn’t the woman he was seeing, was it?”

“No, no. It’s nothing to do with that.”

“Oh, OK.” She looked relieved. “I mean, she would have been a bit old for him, wouldn’t she?”

“Why do you say that? Did he like younger women?”

Tracey looked confused. “No, I mean . . . how do you mean, younger? That woman was, like, about forty, wasn’t she? Mark’s not yet thirty, so . . .”

“Right.”

“You really can’t tell me what’s going on?” she asked.

“Was Mark ever violent to you, did he ever lose his temper, anything like that?”

“What? God, no. Never.” She leaned back in her chair, frowning. “Has someone accused him of something? Because he’s not like that. He’s selfish, no doubt about that, but he’s not a bad person, not in that way.”

I walked her out to the car, where uniform were waiting to drive her home, wondering about the ways in which Mark Henderson was bad, wondering whether he’d managed to convince himself that being in love absolved him.

“You asked about where he might go,” Tracey said to me when we got to the car. “It’s difficult to say, without knowing the context, but there’s one place I can think of. We—well, my dad—has a place out on the coast. Mark and I went there at weekends quite a bit. It’s quite isolated, there’s no one else around. Mark always said it was the perfect escape.”

“It’s unoccupied, this place?”

“It’s not used much. We used to leave a key out the back under a pot, but earlier this year we discovered that someone had been using it without our permission—there would be mugs left out or rubbish in the bins or whatever—so we stopped doing that.”

“When was the last time that happened? The last time someone used it without asking?”

She frowned. “Oh, God. A while back. April, I think? Yeah, April. The Easter holidays.”

“And where exactly is this place?”

“Howick,” she said. “It’s a tiny little village, nothing much there at all. Just up the coast from Craster.”