Friday, 1st of December
Morna got up, thinking how cold and damp the house was. She walked into the shower, letting hot water run over her, wondering if they had enough bread left to make toast for breakfast. Neil had forgotten to get any shopping. She needed to feed Finn before she delivered him to her mother’s so she could get to work.
When she got dressed, she walked into her son’s room to start the difficult task of waking up her six-year-old. The room was very cold, the air damp, the curtains at the window billowing, lifting the hem from the carpet. She turned round, looking at the bed, the shape of the duvet, ruffled up on the bed like a small log. Before she reached out to it, she knew her hand would go right down until it reached the mattress. The bed was empty.
Morna looked at the curtain, still shifting with the wind and rushed out the room to get her mobile. She phoned Neil, left a message and then called Patrick who answered immediately, and told her to keep calm. He mentioned an amber alert, told her to keep her mobile phone with her.
She said she had to get out and search, she wasn’t staying here.
He said he would get a team organized when he thought it was pertinent to do so.
What?
‘He might have climbed out the window, Morna. We have to be sensible here. Go round, ask Lachlan, check Finn’s friends, phone round, be logical and don’t panic. Everybody round here knows Finn. He’ll have gone off on a Star Wars adventure. They will spot him, don’t you worry.’
And with that the phone was cut off leaving her staring at the screen.
Patrick looked around, standing on top of the hill, watching the lie of the land, binoculars at his eyes. He was close into the side of the wall, a small cliff face, scanning the horizon down towards the water, watching. He checked his watch; it was half past three. Finn had been missing for eight hours. People were predictable and he was sure Morna was no different. She had spent most of the day with Lachlan, being driven around, leaving her mother at Constance House to watch the phone in case there were any sightings. Patrick knew that wasn’t going to happen. The lack of sightings would drive her to look round Dolphin Point eventually, within the next hour, he reckoned. People really could be that predictable.
Ten minutes later he saw Morna walk along, hearing her shouting for Finn, on her own. No Neil with her, that suited Patrick fine. That useless piece of crap would be out doing his own dirty business. He had been worried that Anderson might get involved but Patrick had made sure the city boy was where he belonged, wrapped up in the office, dissecting the video from the loch.
He took no pleasure in watching Morna, listening to her hoarse voice shouting, the heartbreak she had been going through that day. In every way, she was on her own. Slowly, he lifted the phone and called a number and gave a set of coordinates. She was on form, she wasn’t going to be going anywhere fast, the guys would move in and take her, easy.
He waited, motionless. He was a man who could wait for a long time. Occasionally pulling back into the shadows when he thought Morna might be looking up his way. How pathetic she was, how programmable. One word from Lachlan about how the boy had believed Chewbacca lived up here, that the boy believed Neil when he told him the tall stories of this magical place and this might be the place a boy would run to. Morna had really accepted their reasoning. She had checked everywhere else, and now she had been brought to where her son might be. So she thought.
It had been easy to take the boy.
Taking the mother would be easier.
He waited until he saw the man approach, forty degrees behind the target, downwind, so she wouldn’t catch the stink of dead fish. It was going to be a simple take down. Patrick didn’t stop and watch, he didn’t need to. Seen too much of that in his time.
He slipped his binoculars into his pocket and walked away.
Morna was looking for her son, meandering over Dolphin Point, no plan to her search. Neil was going round the town, asking in pubs, like that would help. She was walking south out towards the lodge. It wasn’t like the wee boy to wander away, but her mind didn’t want to think past that possibility. She’d had eight hours of tears and screaming and doubt.
DCI Patrick had taken charge. He was organizing the search teams. The helicopter would get called out, the dogs, everything for wee Finn. Patrick adored her wee boy. She couldn’t work out why she had heard nothing so far, the sky was quiet. Even Anderson had given her nothing but platitudes, leave it to Patrick, he knows what he’s doing.
She checked her watch, it was mid-afternoon. Where was a search team? What was holding them up? She should have brought the dog, but she didn’t want to interfere with the search dogs. But she couldn’t sit at home doing nothing. Morna turned, thinking she heard somebody coming through the hedgerow behind her. She called out, shone her torch around for a bit of extra light, but it was just the bushes waving, only the wind. She shouted, calling out again and again, the breeze catching her words and taking them out to sea.
Then she stood very still for a moment, in windblown rain; she pulled her jumper round her, zipped up her jacket. There were sounds out here in the half-darkness; she shouted her husband’s name louder, then quietly. Then she called for her son.
She tried to ease the beating in her heart. There was somebody up here with her.
She stood very still, very still indeed. Listening. Then the thought struck her that now Finn was gone, they might be after her. But why?
Her car was down at the road so she turned and started to walk, then ran, her arms pumping. The sound of her throat rasping for air, she heard her footfall, but nothing following them. But she felt she was running for her life. She believed in the instinct of danger, she needed to find Finn and she needed to be alive to do that.
She ran through the undergrowth. It was getting thicker, holding her back. She thought she was running down to the road but looking back she couldn’t see the rock stack. She couldn’t see it against the darkening sky. Had she come down the wrong way? Her wet red hair was straggling behind after her. She stumbled as she ran, her arms windmilling to stop her falling. There was somebody there now, she could hear their feet behind her, they were getting closer. She was being chased down. She risked a quick look over her shoulder, managing to run forwards while looking back.
She ran straight into his arms, a fist to her stomach. She was down, winded.
Morna lay in the undergrowth, sleeping in a nest, comfortable and still. They circled round her, people like vultures. She lay in the middle, a tiny form in a big spinning wheel. The man looked down at her and smiled.
Easy.
‘What do you mean, you let him go?’
‘Nothing to hold him on,’ said Patrick, tapping angrily at the enter button on his laptop.
‘Well, fraud for a start, he defrauded his insurance company out of millions of pounds. If we don’t get Haggerty for the murders or for facilitating those rapes, we could at least hold him for fraud.’
‘DCI Anderson,’ Patrick began, ready for a speech, ‘in the whole scheme of things, of life and death and the universe and the glory of a sunrise, nobody cares. Joe Bloggs out on the street would clap at that fraud, bravo they would say. Sometimes better to go with that, eh? What good would it do? Ask yourself, what good would it do? Let Oscar be. Anything else would be cruel. And Morna’s boy is missing. Did you know that? And now we can’t find her either. I’m worried, DCI Anderson.’
‘Sorry. Surely Finn’s just wandered off and got lost? Morna is a trained police officer, any idea where she has gone?’
‘Do you?’
‘No. Has she just upped and left?’
Patrick had his chin on his hands, deep in thought. ‘Her son was abducted, she has been abducted.’
‘So why are you not out there looking for them. Get an incident room set up, call in the squad for a house to house.’ He was appalled. ‘If that’s what you think why are we doing nothing?’
Patrick raised an eyebrow. ‘Just as you are turning over every leaf to find Costello and Abernethy?’ He gave a trite nod. ‘We have the situation in hand, believe me.’
It sounded like a slight threat. This was Port MacDuff. Anderson needed to be careful, he wasn’t going to be burned in a wicker pyre. He had missing people of his own to look for so he excused himself and went to phone Mathieson for an update. ‘Fine,’ he said, as he went out the office door, ‘your turf, your rules.’