A scream. It ripped through the silence of the trees around the cottage as a knife slashes silk.
Then the silence slithered back again as if no sound had ever banished it, as if this was just another October night with a touch of ground mist so that the pine branches appeared ghostly, floating on the thickened air.
The woman knitting by the fire looked up. ‘What was that?’ she said.
Caught up in the synthetic excitement being blared out from the TV in the corner as the goal attempt failed, her husband only grunted.
She raised her voice, irritably. ‘What was that, I said. It sounded like a scream.’
‘Oh – vixen, most likely. They’re mating just now.’ He sat back in his chair. ‘That’s half-time. How about a cuppa?’
‘You know where the kettle is.’ She went on knitting, but when he made no move, sighed, ‘Oh, all right then. Just let me finish this row.’
Before she put on the light in the kitchen, she peered out of the little window above the sink towards the direction the sound had come from but she couldn’t see anything, except a light glimmering faintly through the mist where the cottage stood on the other side of the main road among the trees. As she watched, it went out.
She shrugged, switched on the light and the kettle. If there were foxes around, they’d be after her hens. He could always get off his backside and go out right now with his shotgun – fat chance!
In the cottage, the girl stirred into pain-filled consciousness. Her head hurt, really badly, and she was lying on her face. With a struggle, she turned over and opened her eyes; that hurt too.
There had been something – some noise … She tried to sit up, but she felt so sick and dizzy that she had to lie down again. She wanted to put on the light by her bed but it was too far away to reach without lifting her head.
She put up her hand and tentatively explored the sorest part. There was a huge lump and her hair was wet and sticky. She must have hurt herself. She felt strange, sort of fuzzy and muddled inside.
She couldn’t remember what had happened, couldn’t remember going to bed. That felt weird. She could always remember everything perfectly. Much too perfectly.
She didn’t know what time it was either. It was pitch-dark outside, but that didn’t tell her much. At this time of year it could be dark at five in the afternoon.
Out here by the forest it was always like this at night if there wasn’t a moon, but now, with her sore head and her mind being all weird, she was scared. ‘Mum!’ she called. ‘Mum!’
There was no answer, no reassuring sound of movement. Sometimes Mum took pills and couldn’t hear her so that when she needed her, if she was ill or something, she had to go and shake her awake, but she knew that if she got up now she’d be sick. She called again but there was still no answer or sound of movement.
She began to cry. The sobs hurt her head and she bit on her lip to stifle them, but she couldn’t stop the tears running down into her ears.
It was cold, too. It was never very warm in this house, but there seemed to be a worse draught than usual coming through the open door of her bedroom. She’d begun to shiver and then she realised she wasn’t under the covers at all, she was sort of lying as if she’d fallen across the bed. She wasn’t in her pyjamas either: she was still wearing her black miniskirt and bomber jacket.
At least she could wriggle under the duvet without lifting her head. That was better. And if she got back to sleep it would be morning when she woke up and Mum would be awake. Probably.
When Marnie opened her eyes again it was daylight – a grudging daylight, gloomy and overcast, with rain streaming down the windowpanes and the trees outside making that roaring noise like the sea. Her head was pounding as if someone was beating it like a drum, and when she sat up, she vomited without warning.
‘Mum!’ she wailed. ‘I’ve been sick!’
The smell was disgusting and now she could see there was blood on her cover too from where she had been lying – a big dark-red stain. She was frightened now. The next ‘Mum!’ was a scream, but there was still no reassuring reply.
The door of her bedroom was open and there was cold air blowing through it – really blowing, not just the usual draughts through ill-fitting door frames. Her teeth were beginning to chatter and she couldn’t huddle under the stinking duvet or the stench would make her sick again.
Dizzy and unsteady, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She was swaying on her feet when she heard a man’s voice.
‘Hello! Anybody in?’
Why should a man be there? But at least it was someone. Marnie staggered across the room and out into the hall.
There was a man standing there, a man holding a shotgun. She gave a cry of terror; her legs buckled and she fell in a heap on the floor.
Douglas Boyd had been stumping along in the pouring rain, his shotgun broken over his arm, muttering under his breath as he walked along the road. Peggy had been on about the foxes she’d heard last night since she opened her eyes this morning – her and her blasted hens!
She insisted their screams had come from this direction, but there wasn’t a chance he’d find a sign of them at this hour of the day when they’d been cavorting all night, and weather like this would wash away even the rank smell that hung around the beasts. The only thing to be said for it was that it got him out the house.
He had been passing the old forestry cottage on the other side of the road when he noticed the front door was standing open, and stopped for a moment, uncertainly.
They didn’t have anything to do with the people here, even though they were their nearest neighbours. Peggy had gone over there to say hello when they’d moved in a few years ago, but she’d not even been asked over the threshold and the woman had been a bit tarty-looking, Peggy said, with unnaturally jet-black hair. There was a man around occasionally and Douglas had seen the girl out in the garden quite often but she seemed shy and these days trying to get to know a kiddie wasn’t a smart thing to do.
He’d seen Bill Fleming’s wife there a couple of times too, recently, her that was with the polis now. When he’d told Peggy, she’d sniffed and said that in that case she wasn’t their kind of people and they’d just keep themselves to themselves, thank you very much. So they had.
There was no car outside, but with the front door standing open, it looked as if they’d gone off in a hurry and forgotten to shut it. Well, he and Peggy didn’t always lock their own door, living out here, but this was just an invitation to any lowlife passing in a car. He’d been planning to do his good deed for the day and just close it for them, if they weren’t about, but he had called as he stepped into the hall in case he was poking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
His shock at the appearance of the bloodstained girl, her cry of alarm and her collapse, set his heart beating at a rate that wasn’t healthy for a man of his age. She was looking up at him pitifully from the floor, her blue eyes wide with fear. He could see there was an ugly wound on the back of her head.
It was rather more than he’d bargained for, doing his good neighbour bit, but this was a poor wee soul needing his help and comfort. He pulled himself together and realised she was staring at the shotgun, transfixed. He set it down hastily.
‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I was just out after foxes that were screaming last night. You know me, don’t you? Douglas Boyd, from along the road. Dearie me, whatever’s happened to you, lassie?’
She didn’t say anything, as if she was too traumatised to speak.
He looked round, helplessly. ‘Where’s your mum?’
The tears came. ‘I don’t know! I’ve been calling and calling.’
Douglas’s heart sank. An injured child was bad enough, but a mother who didn’t answer, in a situation like this … And maybe the scream hadn’t been the foxes, after all.
‘You’re needing to lie down and have a wee rest,’ he said. ‘Can you stand up, do you think, if I help you?’
Still crying, she pushed herself up onto her feet with his supporting arm but when he tried to lead her back to the room she had come from, she resisted.
‘No. It’s – messy.’
A door to his right was open and he could see a sofa. ‘You could go in there,’ he suggested, then added hastily, ‘just let me take a wee look first to see if there’s somewhere you could lie down.’
It was a lame excuse but she didn’t seem to notice, standing there obediently as he put his head round the door, braced for what he might find.
The room was very untidy, with a brown imitation leather suite and a wood-veneer coffee table and a carpet that seemed a stranger to the hoover. The air stank of stale smoke and there was an ashtray overflowing with stubs among the clutter: magazines, circulars, a wine glass, a bottle of white wine, empty. Discarded clothes were draped over the back of one of the chairs and a pair of shoes had been abandoned on the hearth beside the ashes of a dead fire.
At least there was nothing untoward here. Douglas puffed out a little sigh of relief. Turning to tell the girl she could come in, he noticed a plastic witch’s mask tossed down on one of the armchairs, along with a black cardboard pointed hat with an orange frill round the bottom.
Halloween. He was not a superstitious man, but at the thought of what had been happening here on that night of dead souls and unquiet spirits he gave an involuntary shiver.
‘Come on in, then,’ he called. ‘You can have a wee lie-down on the sofa and I’ll go and see if I can find your mum. She’s probably asleep.’
The girl trailed in, shivering. He helped her onto the sofa and found a cushion to tuck under her poor head; she didn’t say anything, just watched him silently as he went back out to the hall.
The doors to the kitchen and bathroom were both standing open so he could see they were empty too. The door to the other bedroom, though, was closed. Taking a deep breath, he opened it.
His first thought was that it had been ransacked, but given the state of the sitting room she’d probably been the kind to use the floor as a laundry basket anyway. The bed was unmade and the kidney-shaped dressing table was covered with pots and jars, some with their lids off, and a thin, greasy layer of powder lay on the glass top. There was another ashtray there as well, with a couple of stubs in it.
Douglas couldn’t be sure immediately that this room, too, was empty; there could be … anything, hidden under the rumpled duvet on the unmade bed or under one of the piles of clothing on the floor or even in the wardrobe.
The bed first. He pulled back the duvet – nothing below. There was nothing under the clothes, either, which left only the wardrobe.
It was a flimsy construction, with the door sagging a little on its hinges and a key holding it shut. With a feeling of dread Douglas turned it and the door swung open under its own weight.
She wasn’t there, either, just some clothes hanging up and a lot of shoes tumbled in the bottom.
He’d been steeling himself for horror and now he felt at a loss. Was the woman outside, perhaps, lying injured or even dead? But the car was gone – an attacker couldn’t have driven off in two cars. Could she possibly have walked out on her injured daughter? Or even have done the injuring herself, then left her? It was hard to imagine, but you read such terrible things in the papers these days.
He could hear the child giving the occasional frightened sob. So what now? Police and ambulance, obviously.
The phone was in the hall. He shut the sitting-room door, made his call, then went back in again.
‘Your mum seems to have gone out, pet, but you’ve had a nasty knock on the head so they’re going to send an ambulance to take you in to get a doctor to take a wee look at it. All right? I expect your mum’ll be back shortly.’
His voice sounded too hearty, even to himself. She didn’t say anything, just began to cry again.
The children’s ward was bright with pictures and posters, with a corner for toys and games at one end where convalescent children were playing. The patients here expected to be discharged within days: it wasn’t one of these heart-rending places where wan and listless invalids lay connected up to machines and drips.
The mother of small children herself, PC Marjory Fleming was grateful for that but she didn’t like hospitals anyway. They were too hot and felt completely airless when you were used to the open-air life on your husband’s farm. She’d joined the police force last year, not, as her father liked to think, because she wanted to follow in his footsteps but because she wanted a job where she wouldn’t spend her days shut up in some office.
As she strode down the ward towards another policewoman who was sitting by one of the beds, she seemed to bring a breath of fresh air in with her: an athletic-looking woman only a little under six feet, bright-faced, with hazel eyes and chestnut hair pulled into a neat ponytail under her police hat.
The other officer got up as she approached, spoke briefly to the patient, then came to meet her, yawning as she put her hat back on.
‘At last! I’m really needing my bed.’
‘Sorry! Everything’s about at a standstill with the roadworks coming in. How is she?’ Fleming nodded towards the girl in the bed, lying staring at the ceiling.
The other woman pulled a face. ‘Not saying much, apart from asking when her mum will be coming. I’ve stalled her so far, but she’ll have to be told something soon. They’re saying she’s fine and they need the bed. Any progress?’
‘Car’s gone and mother’s just disappeared. They’re going through the house just now and there’s details out talking to the neighbours. If she’s feeling chatty I can encourage her but I’ve been warned it’s just guard duty. If I question her before the fancy-pants CID get here they’ll have my guts for garters.’
The constable laughed, smothered another enormous yawn and left. Fleming turned to watch her go, nerving herself to approach the girl. She hadn’t been entirely open with her colleague; there were reasons for that but it made her uncomfortable.
She couldn’t put it off any longer. She took off her hat and jacket, laying them on one of the chairs at the bedside, then sat down.
‘Hello, Marnie. Do you remember me?’
The girl had a bandage round her head and her red-gold hair was still matted with dried blood. She was lying back against the pillows as if she lacked the energy to sit up but as Fleming spoke she turned to look at her, blue eyes vivid in her white face.
‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice was thin and shaky. ‘You come to see my mum sometimes. The last time you were wearing a raincoat and it had brown buttons and you had an orange and browny-green jersey and jeans and tan boots. You said, “Hello, Karen, just coming for a chat, all right?” And she said yes and then you both went into the sitting room and shut the door.’
Fleming was amused. ‘My goodness, you do have a good memory, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Marnie said flatly.
‘How are you feeling? That’s a seriously impressive bandage.’ It sounded phoney, even as she said it, the result of her own unease. The girl was too old – ten, eleven, perhaps? – to be jollied along.
Not surprisingly, it was ignored. ‘When will my mum be here?’
‘Sorry, Marnie, I’m afraid I don’t know. She’ll probably be along later.’ She hated saying something she didn’t believe to be true but she had no authority to say anything else.
‘You’re in the police. Something’s happened to my mum, hasn’t it?’
‘Possibly’ was the answer, and if Fleming were to be truthful that wasn’t the worst-case scenario. She deflected the question.
‘Something happened to your head. That’s why I’m here. We’re trying to find out what went on last night.’ She risked adding, ‘Do you know?’ hoping that this wouldn’t be stepping on CID toes. She didn’t want to wreck her chances before she even got round to applying to join them.
‘I-I don’t know. I just can’t remember. I don’t understand it – I can’t remember!’
Marnie was getting distressed and Fleming hurried to reassure her. ‘You’ve had a head injury. That’s what often happens – you find you’ve got a blank about it. Sometimes it comes back and sometimes it doesn’t.’
She saw her assimilate that, then after a moment Marnie turned her head to meet her eyes squarely.
‘You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?’
‘We don’t really know anything, just at the moment.’ That, at least, was true. She changed the subject. ‘What about your dad? Will he be coming to see you?’
Marnie turned her head away. ‘Don’t know.’
An uncomfortable area, obviously. Would pursuing it be acceptable chatting or the forbidden questioning? Fleming hesitated, but only for a moment. It was her insatiable appetite for answers that made her so keen to join the CID.
‘Does he live with you, your dad?’
‘No.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Don’t know.’ Marnie still wasn’t looking at her, perhaps uncomfortable at having to admit that.
The instinct to probe the sore spot was too strong to resist. ‘Would you like us to try to find him – tell him you’ve been hurt so he could come and see you?’
‘No!’ The response was too vehement and Marnie winced.
There were more questions Fleming itched to ask but she could see that risked going too far. ‘Does your head still hurt?’ she asked instead.
‘A bit. But it’s OK. I just want to go home with my mum.’
‘The doctor will have to decide. You’ll be getting a day or two off school, that’s for sure.’
‘I like school. Nothing to do at home and Mum doesn’t like me having friends coming round.’
Fleming was opening her mouth to ask the follow-up ‘Why?’ when she saw DS Tam MacNee coming down the ward towards her: short, wiry, walking with his usual jaunty swagger and wearing his unvarying uniform of white T-shirt, jeans, trainers and a black leather jacket.
She gave a guilty start, but her face brightened too. MacNee had only recently joined the CID and before that had been her sergeant and mentor since she joined the force. She got up and moved away from the bed.
‘Just having a wee chat, were you?’ He raised an eyebrow and she blushed.
‘I wasn’t interrogating her, I swear. She just started telling me about her mum – didn’t like having people round the place, apparently.’
‘She wouldn’t, would she? Mmm. Anything else the lassie “just started telling you?”’
Fleming ignored his cynical look. ‘She doesn’t know where her dad is and she’s sensitive about it.’
‘Oh, you’re the wee girl! We’ll have you in the CID before long, no doubt about it. Maybe not right this morning, though. I’ll take over now. Anything else?’
‘Just wants to know when her mother’s coming.’
‘You’ve not said anything about it, have you?’
‘Instructed not to.’
He sighed. ‘Well, I’m not wanting to do it either. You know what they’re thinking?’
‘Oh yes, I know,’ Fleming said heavily. ‘You’re not going to tell her that, though, are you?’
‘I’ll have to tell her there’s someone from social services coming to take her into care. But apart from that …’ he shrugged. ‘I’ll just say we don’t know. And that’s God’s truth.’
The little man who said he was a detective kept asking her questions. What was the point of them? He was wanting to know where her mother was – like she didn’t? – and he seemed to be expecting her to tell him. There was something about the questions, too, that made her uncomfortable.
Had they had a row last night?
That started it, the spool unrolling in her head as if she was watching a film …
She puts on a coat before going into the sitting room to cover up what she’s wearing. Mum’s in one of her moods at the moment, ready to go mental at the least thing and she’ll go radge if she sees the skirt. She’s sitting smoking and just staring straight ahead, and she’s opened a bottle of white wine.
‘I’m just off into the town, Mum.’
Her mother looks at her across the cigarette, eyes narrowed against the smoke. ‘What for?’
She holds up her witch’s hat and mask. ‘Just guising. Halloween, you know?’
Weirdly, her mother looks sort of horrified, staring at her and even choking on her cigarette. ‘No! I won’t—’ Then stops and there’s a long moment when she doesn’t say anything and her eyes are stretched open wide.
‘Won’t what, Mum?’ She feels uneasy.
‘It’s, it’s …’ Mum’s groping for words, then she says, ‘It’s not safe, hanging around the streets on your own.’
‘I’m meeting Gemma.’
She knows it’s the wrong thing to say even before she says it. Her mum hates it when she has anything to do with Gemma – something to do with business and her father. Her mum kicks off.
‘I’ve told you before to steer clear of Gemma—’
‘You tell me to steer clear of everyone! You’d rather I didn’t have any friends at all, in case they want to come out here. What’s with you, Mum? What have you got to hide?’
Her mother jumps up, white with anger. ‘That’s it, Marnie. You’re staying here. You’re grounded.’
‘I’m not, Mum. I’m going and you can’t stop me.’ She jinks out of the door but not before her low-cut T-shirt and miniskirt has been noticed.
‘You’re not to go out looking like a slapper,’ her mother screams after her, sounding angry, but as she runs out of the house and walks along to the place where the bus will stop she can hear the sound of crying. It makes her feel guilty and she hesitates, but then the lighted bus is coming round the corner and she shrugs her shoulders and lifts her hand to hail it.
The policeman was sitting patiently, watching her as he waited for an answer. As she focused on his face again, he smiled at her, showing the gap between his two front teeth. He’d looked nicer when he wasn’t smiling.
‘A row?’ he prompted her.
‘Well, sort of,’ Marnie said. ‘She didn’t want me going into town to meet my friend. Wasn’t anything out of the usual.’
‘How do you get on with your mum generally?’
‘Oh, fine.’
She felt as if his eyes were boring holes in her, but she wasn’t going to say anything else about that. None of his business. She volunteered, instead, that she could remember coming home, but nothing after that.
And then it all starts again.
She’s going to have to keep well out of her mother’s way, just stick her head round the sitting-room door to say she’s home. She and Gemma had necked a couple of lagers and with Mum like she was, anyway, and with the row they’d had, she could go mental. Mum’s not in the sitting room, though, and so she drops her hat and mask onto a chair. The fire’s not quite out so Mum must just have gone to bed. Great – she only needs to shout through the bedroom door and go to bed herself.
She stands in the hall. ‘I’m back, Mum,’ she calls and goes on into her bedroom and—
Then the reel snapped and Marnie was back looking at the policeman. He asked her some more questions but it was making her head sore and she turned away and shut her eyes.
She heard him say, ‘A lady’ll be coming soon to take you somewhere you can stay till we find your mum, OK?’
Marnie knew what that meant – taken into care. Her mum had told her long ago that if she said something silly to a teacher about being left alone in the house or anything else, that would happen. Tears formed and trickled out from under her closed eyelids. All she wanted was her mum to come back and take her home. It wasn’t great, living with her mum, but it was all she knew. Surely her mum couldn’t have walked out on her?
The terrible thing was, she wasn’t absolutely sure that she wouldn’t. But if she hadn’t, where was she? Marnie started to feel sick again.
Superintendent Jakie McNally was under pressure this afternoon. The chief constable, no less, was making waves and McNally was old school. What the CC wanted the CC got and what he wanted was the Marnie Bruce business wrapped up before too many people started asking questions, so he could do without one of the most junior of the PCs doing just that. She was sitting in front of him now, her bright-eyed eagerness both a threat and a reproach.
‘PC Fleming, you know the background as well as I do. You were sworn to complete confidentiality when you took over monitoring from MacNee.’
‘Yes, sir, but I—’
He talked across her. ‘You know that there is absolutely no sign of an intruder or a struggle, and no evidence that there was anyone in the house that evening apart from Marnie and her mother. You know they’ve combed the woods and there’s nothing. You know the missing car was found in the station car park in Dumfries and they’ve checked it out – nothing.’
Fixing her with a look, he went on, ‘You and I both know why the outcome isn’t surprising, surely?’
‘Of course I do, sir.’ Fleming had taken a deep breath to be ready to power through. ‘I know it’s a possibility, but I think it’s only fair to the child—’
That was as far as she got. ‘It was, mercifully, just a knock on the head and she’s well on the way to a full recovery. We’ll be looking for the woman quietly, of course, but if we go public on this, perhaps you could explain to me in what way this would be “fair” to the child?’
Silenced, Fleming bit her lip.
McNally relaxed. ‘You see, Marjory – it is Marjory, isn’t it? – policing isn’t only about exposing the brutal truth. Sometimes it’s about tempering justice with mercy.
‘All right? That’s a good girl. Run along, sweetheart.’
Seething with anger, PC Marjory Fleming went back down the stairs from the inspector’s office, wishing she’d had the courage to say that in her view, what justice was being tempered with was not mercy but expediency.