In the dark, all Costello saw was the shadow of a car taking the turn on to the parade way too fast for a corner that tight. She looked up the street. Dark. No streetlights, just the rain glistening off the tarmac, the small river gurgling in the gutter, and something that looked like two bin bags having rolled away from the hedge at number 10. Except nothing would have been thrown out. Not from number 10. She started to jog, one hand holding her hood up. One bin bag was rolling back and forth, growing arms and legs.
There on the ground was Wyngate, conscious, eyes closed, moaning slightly. Across the pavement, face down, was another figure. A female, short skirt.
She pulled out her phone: ambulance, two please, quickly.
‘Gordon, what has happened, what is wrong with your face?’
He was in the gutter, slipping from consciousness. He was suffering. His hands up over his face, groaning; the skin on his face was red, pitted with blood. There was something very wrong. He was trying to say something. Laura, Laura?
‘Ambulance is on its way, Gordon. You will be fine.’
‘Amberson?’
‘Ambulance,’ she corrected, reaching over, trying find a pulse on Cadena’s neck. Something weak, but it was there. She was unconscious, staring at the dark sky. God. Costello loosened the jacket round her neck, trying to make her comfortable.
She could make out Wyngate saying: Anderson …
‘Yes. He’s an idiot.’
Then she saw Michael Broadfoot’s Mazda reversing back up the street. She waved at him frantically, as if flagging down a low-flying aircraft. Broadfoot got out, abandoning the car. He started to walk, then jog. By the time he got to his daughter he was running.
‘I’ve called the ambulance, you stay with her. She needs to know you are here.’
The big man was on his knees, incoherent, sobbing, holding on to his daughter’s head. She backed off to give him some privacy. Wyngate grabbed her arm, the blood was everywhere.
‘Anderson,’ he said, pointing to the gutter, and Costello looked at the blood pooling from his side.
He was concussed.
‘You just rest, the ambulance is on its way. You have lost a lot of blood. Tell them you’ve been stabbed.’
She still hadn’t found Jennifer. That worried her. Call it intuition, but something was going on with that girl. Something not right. Broadfoot was phoning his wife, more help was coming. There was only one place she thought Anderson and Jennifer could be, so Costello slipped into the woods.
Costello pushed forward into the forest. It was wet underfoot now and she found herself recalling the case at Inchgarten which had led them all to this point, when her colleagues Samantha and Elvie had made their way round the island, in conditions as inhospitable as these. Except it had been warmer.
She thought of Elvie, slipping and sliding through the mud, and what that must have taken out of her, and still she had kept on going. What a load of crap that was. Elvie was fifteen years younger and super-fit. Costello had been dashing about all day with an infected blister. Twenty, twenty-five minutes. She kept checking her watch. The path was unfamiliar to her in the dark, and in the rain it had taken on a personality all of its own. She knew damn well that the branches had not grown since she was last here, but it seemed that way. They were reaching out and grabbing her. Whatever was going on in the Doon that night in the woods, the trees did not want her to witness it.
She had nearly stumbled right into them, just like Griffin had done all those years before.
Costello stopped just in time, and crouched down behind the old wall, so far that her face was on the grass. But with her hood up, covering her blonde hair, and her head turned sideways, she had a good view of what was going on. And the most worrying thing she could see was Jock Aird behind a tree with a shotgun and Jennifer sitting in the middle like bait. She needed her arse slapped, that girl. She stepped forward to talk to Jennifer, then heard a rustle of undergrowth from the opposite side of the Doon and she withdrew back in the shadows.
A policeman emerged from the trees.
Costello immediately straightened up, thinking this was going to be okay. It was indeed a kind of reconstruction that Anderson had planned, without telling any of them. She was already on her feet when she realized that something was terribly wrong; the uniform was wrong. It was too old. It didn’t fit. It was too tight. There was no utility belt, but the thing that was wrong most of all was the last thing she saw.
The huge knife in his hand.
And he saw her, but directed his words at Jennifer.
‘So, Jennifer, do you get it now?’
Jennifer said, ‘Get what? Who are you?’ But the sight of the blade had made her pull Robbie a bit closer to her chest.
Costello tried to take a step backwards, but David Griffin lifted the knife to arm’s length and pointed it at Costello, while never taking his eyes off Jennifer. ‘I’m Douglas’s lover, Mrs Lawson. You are in the way.’
Jennifer burst out laughing, but Costello could see some realization on the back of those big brown eyes. Griffin smiled slightly and looked from one woman to the other. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he said. ‘I can slit her throat and you wouldn’t get a hundred yards and I’d slit yours as well.’
‘So is that what you do when nobody leaves an axe lying around?’ asked Costello, pieces of the jigsaw falling into place. On that night, all those years ago, they had accepted his story. He was a cop, the distressed police officer. They had taken his word for what happened that night. They all had. Her just as much as anybody else.
Jennifer looked from Costello to Griffin. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’
Griffin smiled and turned the knife in his hand, twirling it like a majorette. ‘Nobody stands between me and true love. I’m in the flat in Edinburgh with Douglas, Jennifer. We are the couple; we are the family. Do you think he’s really interested in you? All we need is you out the picture. Leave the boys behind and we will have the ideal family. After all you have been through, you are going to have a wee accident. You are a disgrace as a mother, not seeing that your child had been eaten by rats. Leaving him to be infected. You are nothing. Just nothing, a nobody.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Jennifer, voice trembling, but Costello couldn’t doubt her guts.
‘Nothing gets in the way of true love,’ repeated Griffin.
‘But it wasn’t, was it?’ said a voice from the far side, somebody using the same overgrown path as Griffin. Costello took the opportunity to move closer to Jennifer, who was still sitting in the middle of the Doon like a foundling in the forest.
Griffin exhaled deeply. The knife was still in his hand, but his arm was now down at his side. Costello squeezed Jennifer’s shoulder, trying to tell her silently to get ready to run. They didn’t want another bloodbath here, and Jennifer, and indeed now herself, were directly in the line of fire. Griffin was far too close with a very sharp blade. Griffin’s attention had been totally diverted, though, his face almost dissolved into the young, handsome policeman he had been.
‘Oh my God, it’s you. I never thought I’d see you again.’
Steven Melrose looked down at the knife and then looked at Costello. He took a step back. Melrose was trying to think of the right thing to say, but couldn’t. His eyes closed slightly, his lips twisting into a line, ‘Did you kill them?’
‘I killed them for you,’ Griffin said.
‘What do you mean, you killed them for me?’
‘We were in love,’ said Griffin.
‘No, we weren’t. We were friends, Dave.’
Costello squeezed Jennifer’s shoulder again, but the young woman had turned to stone. Out the corner of her eye, Costello saw the plumed white tail of a collie skirting its way through the trees that surrounded the Doon. She thought of Heidi, the mess Griffin had made of that dog. She willed Betty to walk away. If anything happened, it would break Jock’s heart.
‘Why did you kill them?’ Steven Melrose’s face was streaming with tears. ‘My wee boys?’
‘Because, without them, you would be mine.’
Then Costello said, ‘So if you kill Jennifer, do you think Douglas will be yours?’
‘Douglas is mine.’ There was no mistaking the madness now.
‘No, he fucking isn’t,’ said Jennifer.
Melrose put his arm out. It was a slow gesture that could be either placatory or an instruction. ‘Go on, kill her. Why don’t you just kill her?’
Under the palm of her hand, Costello felt Jennifer’s body stiffen. Griffin took a step to the right, then two steps forward. Costello straightened her arm, pushing Jennifer and Robbie down on to the flowered moss of the Doon.
There was a deafening bang and the middle of David Griffin’s chest exploded.