The Shadow Man Read online

  At first his doctor had been falsely cheerful and given nothing other than common-sense advice. Try to get out more. It was amazing what the benefits of fresh air and exercise could do. Find someone to talk to, if not a friend then there were plenty of free groups around that provided support and counselling during periods of grief. He’d been asked about his personal relationships and stress. About his sex life and even, to his shame, about his masturbation habits. It had taken a whole year before anyone had taken him seriously, and by then there was the inevitable slow crawl towards blood tests and urine samples.

  Two years in, and you could see every rib and every bony joint. He began missing increasingly lengthy periods from his work at the factory. Fergus’ boss was making unpleasant noises about him becoming a liability. Eating had become a chore, often ending in a sudden, explosive vomiting session. As hard as he tried to replicate his grandmother’s care routine, he was failing to thrive. Then came the news that his liver and stomach were suffering. The doctors had tried to tell him that it was nothing serious, but he’d seen and felt the truth. Finally, the tests had become more meaningful. There had been cameras inserted and scans taken. After that the doctors’ voices had lowered in volume and softened in tone.

  The horrible truth was that his organs had begun rotting inside his body. Perhaps exacerbated by his gran’s passing, or perhaps it was just his time, a clock had begun to tick and the alarm was about to ring.

  Sleep crept over him and he pinched the soft skin of his stomach fiercely. He didn’t have time to nap. There was so much more to do. A new bed had been delivered that he needed to put together. The bedding was still in its plastic wrappers and needed to be washed before it could be put on the bed. If it still had the folds from the packaging, it wouldn’t look nice at all. There were toys and games to put on shelves. The effort felt crushing. Swinging his legs off the bed, and bracing for the pain in his back as he rose, Fergus willed his shaking hands to comply with the need to grip screwdrivers and hammer nails. He took a photograph from the wall, and walked up the stairs to the upper apartment, checking the peepholes to make sure the hallway was clear before entering.

  Inside, he took a moment to walk around and appreciate the place. The windows were bricked up, and each room was a fraction smaller than the original plans showed. A layer of soundproofing with plasterboard over the top had made a larger impact than he’d anticipated. But it was cosy. He’d painted the bedroom walls pink. The tiny kitchenette was summer morning blue, the lounge a sunny yellow. He peered into his and Elspeth’s bedroom. The lazy woman was still asleep, or perhaps just hung-over. Leaving her in silence, he entered the second bedroom.

  Taping the photo on the wall first to motivate himself, he began unwrapping lengths of wood, cross slats, a bundle of screws and Allen keys.

  A girl beamed at him from the photograph.

  Not long now. This time it would all work out.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘So to summarise, you have five people in custody, and in spite of that you have thus far been completely unable to ascertain where Elspeth Dunwoody actually is,’ Detective Chief Inspector O’Neill said, the sneer in her voice evidenced by her extended vowel pronunciation.

  Connie looked across the desk at Baarda, who was cradling a steaming cup of coffee and maintaining a remarkable air of calm in spite of the hostility coming from the conference call speaker phone.

  ‘As I explained, ma’am, the people we arrested are, in our opinion, no more than profiteers from the media release of the detail of Mrs Dunwoody’s kidnapping. They manipulated an existing audio file to ensure they had a voice clip of her saying words that related to being held prisoner. Then they added background noise which we identified as St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral bells to make us think she was being held in central Edinburgh. Given her social prominence the amount of money they’d asked for was in keeping with our expectations. We had no choice but to follow the lead.

  ‘We traced the five of them through text messages they’d exchanged regarding the money pickup. They’ve been charged with extortion, and in the circumstances they can all expect to receive substantial custodial sentences.’ Baarda kept his voice low and polite, while Connie wanted to disconnect and stop wasting time.

  Edinburgh’s Major Investigation Team had provided them with a briefing room, a phone, access to a kitchen that needed an introduction to basic hygiene levels, and a glass board. The latter had been covered with a rough tessellation of photographs, maps, forensic reports and statements. Blue lines with arrows indicated information flow. Red lines were reserved for evidential links and random white question marks were plastered wherever there were obvious gaps in the storyline.

  ‘So what decent new leads do you have, now that your first line of investigation has collapsed?’ O’Neill snapped.

  ‘We have a DNA match with a male who murdered a woman in her bed. The same DNA was in a blood droplet on Elspeth Dunwoody’s car, and our time would be better spent figuring out who that male is rather than relaying information to you. There’s another DNA match in a cold case relating to the disappearance of a homeless woman. Is that not enough for you?’ Connie asked.

  Baarda stared at her open-mouthed.

  ‘That would be Dr Woolwine, I suppose,’ O’Neill drawled.

  ‘Yes, ma’am, we’re—’

  ‘Don’t interrupt, Baarda. I was told you’d been given access at all levels of the case, Dr Woolwine. Your insights, please.’

  ‘My insights? We have three different categories of crime scene. Right now, I can’t provide an outline of your suspect either physically, psychologically or in socio-economic terms.’

  ‘Ma’am, it was Dr Woolwine who first realised that they did not actually have our kidnap victim,’ Baarda explained.

  ‘So I gather, about five minutes before everyone else figured it out, which no doubt was a huge help, except to contextualise just how incompetently the police investigation is being handled. I’m not seeing much progress from either of you with regard to Mrs Dunwoody’s whereabouts, though. Best guess, Dr Woolwine, is Mrs Dunwoody alive or dead?’

  ‘Alive,’ Connie replied.

  ‘Because?’ O’Neill asked.

  ‘Because we haven’t found her body yet,’ Connie said. ‘Everyone’s alive until we know for sure they’re dead.’

  Baarda scribbled a note on a piece of paper and held it up for Connie to read: ‘Don’t aggravate her.’

  Connie shrugged.

  A dramatic sigh issued from the phone speaker. ‘I’ll need an update tomorrow. One with information I can pass on that suggests we are moving forward. Witnesses, forensics, a sighting, intelligence. Just get me something. I’ll be handing over daily supervision to Detective Superintendent Overbeck at MIT. You’ll be answering to her on the ground there. Baarda, I saw Anoushka last night. She was asking me how long you’d be in Scotland. I told her hopefully only a couple more days. Don’t make me a liar.’ The line was dead before Baarda could respond.

  ‘Who’s Anoushka?’ Connie asked him.

  ‘My wife. She and DCI O’Neill are members of the same supper club.’

  ‘You’re fucking with me. A supper club? You know, I do my best to avoid forming stereotypes based on nationalities, but really …’

  ‘Am I allowed to stereotype you based on your overuse of expletives?’ Baarda asked.

  ‘Yeah, if you want. I can even help. I’m a coarse American. I chew gum, watch endless sport on TV, and I’m as loud as possible as often as possible. Feel better?’

  ‘Are you always so extreme?’ he asked, adjusting his cuffs.

  ‘I guess I am,’ Connie said, standing up to peer at the photograph of Elspeth Dunwoody’s car. ‘Which is exactly the problem I’m having with our killer-cum-kidnapper. The crime scenes have zero in common. Angela Fernycroft died chaotically. Nothing about it made sense. If he intended to kill her, then why do it in a way that left him so vulnerable to injury? There was blood everywhere. She even manag
ed to bite a chunk out of his finger, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘He got in unnoticed, though. We still don’t have evidence of a break-in. If she was asleep when he approached her, he also managed to secrete himself successfully for some time.’

  ‘Good call,’ Connie smiled at him. ‘So he has a high level of impulse control when necessary, but poor final execution.’

  ‘How can you be so sure he didn’t mean to kill her in exactly the manner he did?’ Baarda asked, joining Connie in front of the photos.

  ‘The chloroform suggests he either wanted to move her, or to do something more specific that required a lengthy set-up. And the statistical analysis is all wrong for this type of crime. There was no sexual assault, but also nothing stolen. The drawers weren’t turned out. So no robbery, no sexual assault in situ. What’s the motive?’

  ‘Would I be stating the obvious if I said murder?’

  ‘Only to the extent that the murder of an adult female following a home invasion rarely goes down like this, unless he was known to her. That could explain why he didn’t have to break into the house,’ Connie mused.

  ‘But none of his DNA has been found in any other room in the house. Why would she go to bed with a visitor on the premises, even someone she knew? If he was staying overnight, if he was her lover or an old family friend, we’d expect to find his DNA elsewhere.’

  ‘It’s going to remain a mystery until we catch this bastard, but if the entry was opportunistic, the invader would have been expecting other occupants. The fact that no one else was there means that he was likely armed with that information in advance.’

  ‘You think he stalked her,’ Baarda said.

  ‘The evidence suggests that he stalked her.’

  ‘So while the crime scene is chaotic, the offender himself may not be,’ Baarda noted.

  ‘Which makes Elspeth’s abduction a big leap forward. He made contact with her, convinced her to move her vehicle somewhere familiar to her but that was also unoccupied at the time. He must also have had a vehicle available. The spot of blood on the car door was close to being pure bad luck.’

  ‘So did he just plan the scenario with Elspeth better?’ Baarda asked.

  Connie shrugged. ‘Criminals evolve. They adapt, hone their skills and perfect methodology, but this sort of leap is like humans skipping from tree-dwelling to building skyscrapers in a single generation.’

  ‘You don’t think that’s possible?’ Baarda asked.

  ‘I think it’s unlikely,’ Connie said. ‘A rapist will have flashed a woman first. A man who kills his partner will have been abusive over a period of time. But this’ – Connie pointed at the photo of Angela Fernycroft’s bedroom – ‘feels clumsy and amateurish. It’s a disaster that resembles a first offence by a psychotic teenager. And yet Elspeth Dunwoody disappeared into thin air. How did he get from A to Z so fast? Something changed for him between Angela and Elspeth, more than just trial and error.’ She crossed her arms and shook her head at the photos. ‘Then there’s the twenty-pound note. Did you read the file?’

  ‘I did. There’s not a lot of content, given there’s no evidence a crime was committed. The disturbance the witness thought she heard could have been an episode in a mental health breakdown, drug-fuelled psychosis, an argument over territory or possessions between two homeless people. The fact that possessions were abandoned isn’t unusual. There’s no solid storyline, let alone a proper police complaint.’

  ‘And yet the same DNA is on file.’

  ‘You have a theory?’ Baarda asked.

  ‘The male we’re looking for has been in the Edinburgh area for years. He was old enough to be walking the streets at night five years ago, so we can narrow the age range down to starting in the mid-twenties. He knows the city well. Advocate’s Close is a back alley that runs beneath the structure of other buildings. Unless you knew it, you might assume that you couldn’t exit at the other end. I’d say something about him gave her the creeps. Women who live on city streets develop good instincts for danger real fast.’

  ‘Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, what’s to say he wasn’t simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

  Connie leaned forward, beaming. ‘I like you, Brodie Baarda,’ she said. ‘You ask the questions that make me look good. Why wasn’t he in the wrong place at the wrong time? If I was in Vegas and taking a bet, I’d call it like this. The saliva on the note is the killer detail. We pass DNA every time our skin cells touch something. We leave invisible smears when we don’t wash our hands after using the restroom.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Baarda said faintly.

  ‘No, no, go with it, there’s a point. Blood DNA has more innocent explanations than you’d think. But the loss of saliva is often specific to emotion and trauma. On cutlery, it’s a no-brainer. On the end of a pen, I’d expect it. In a bathroom, loads of it after transference from a toothbrush or the sink. On a banknote? Disgusting, dirty things. No adult in their right mind puts their mouth on it. So the note caught some of his spittle.’

  ‘He was upset …’ Baarda said.

  ‘Damn right he was upset. You can add angry, accusatory, and overwrought to that list of emotions. People rarely lose saliva when they’re talking normally. The only other time is when people are fist-fighting or kissing. Do you know that if I kiss you right now, I’ll transfer around eighty million germs from my mouth to yours?’

  ‘Please don’t,’ Baarda said.

  ‘Killjoy. Anyway, those are my thoughts, but I do have one question.’

  ‘Is it about saliva?’

  ‘No. However, I have many more exciting facts and statistics on the subject of bodily fluids if we’re ever stuck on overnight surveillance together. My question is this. There’s no assault, no body. So how come the twenty-pound note was DNA tested at all? You’re not telling me Police Scotland has such limitless resources that it checks every homeless person’s abandoned belongings based only on a call saying there’s been a disturbance?’

  ‘Five years ago, the then Detective Chief Inspector of MIT had a niece who’d developed a drug habit, become homeless, and disappeared off the radar. Police were under instruction to check any homeless woman they came across in her twenties. All the possessions in this case were checked to see if the girl who appears to have gone missing was the chief inspector’s niece. It’s an abuse of position, but an understandable one. Obviously it wasn’t the Chief’s niece, as we have no name to put to the belongings, but the file remained open and the DNA sample was kept on the database.’

  Connie put her feet up on a desk and leaned her head back, closing her eyes.

  ‘Did the DCI ever find his niece?’ Connie asked.

  ‘I couldn’t ask him,’ Baarda said. ‘He died a couple of years ago.’

  ‘Fucksticks,’ Connie said. ‘You’re telling me that as the police were trying to find one missing girl, another went missing? Now here we are, five years later, with one dead woman and one missing. So are they all linked or not? I mean, is this your standard incredibly bad situation, or is it a really, truly fucking grand-scale disaster waiting to be uncovered?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. We can only rescue the victim he has right now. Scale is irrelevant when you’re the captive,’ Baarda said.

  ‘Did you just out-perspective me?’

  ‘I did, and honestly, it was easier than I’d anticipated.’ Baarda undid his top button and ran a tired hand through his hair. ‘So what’s our next move?’

  ‘I have more questions. Lots of them. One of them can only be answered by the forensic pathologist. Want to swing by the morgue with me?’ She picked up her bag and jacket.

  ‘We call it a mortuary,’ he murmured, pulling his car keys from his pocket.

  ‘You can call it whatever you like, but let’s go figure out if Elspeth Dunwoody is alive or dead.’

  Chapter Eight

  It wasn’t much of a park, but it was better than being at home. Meggy Russell sat on the roundabout and watched the world spin.
The metallic squeal from beneath her enhanced rather than diminished the ride. The screech-on-repeat reflected her own state of mind. Meggy had a bullying problem in the form of her step-mother, Carmen. If she’d had siblings to act as allies it might have been bearable, but until her father got home from work Monday to Friday it was just her and the awful Carmen in the house after school.

  The park at the end of her road offered sanctuary whenever it wasn’t freezing cold. There were swings that were comfortable enough to sit on and read for an hour, and a wooden playhouse designed for the smaller kids but that offered shelter from the rain as necessary. At the park she couldn’t be yelled at or belittled, didn’t have to listen to Carmen on the phone telling all of her friends what a drag it was being a step-mother.

  Meggy, it had turned out, was an unnecessary pain in her step-mother’s arse. Given that her father worked excessively long hours, Carmen dropped her at school and picked her up, supervised homework, and was supposed to cook nutritious meals and keep the house tidy. This was the quid pro quo for the fact that an underqualified thirty-year-old with no kids had no job, and no interest in getting one. The reality was that Meggy prepared her own food when she got home, did a hefty chunk of the housework, and had made the mistake of arriving home early from school one half-day when Carmen had forgotten to pick her up, to find her panting heavily, naked on the sofa while on her mobile to a person she referred to only as ‘big man’.

  Meggy had just gambled with that particular nugget of information, and lost. Her father (she’d recently learned a new phrase and was repeating it to herself at every given moment) was well and truly pussy-whipped. Her step-mother could do no wrong in Meggy’s father’s eyes. Blonde (from a bottle) and skinny (from using so many calories by being a total bitch), Carmen had only to lean over the kitchen sink sticking her butt out more than was strictly necessary, and her father would do literally anything she wanted.

  As Meggy had imparted the story of Carmen’s naked writhings and accompanying sex talk to her father, Carmen had appeared in tears from the master bedroom, phone records wiped, holding the shreds of one of her favourite dresses, and claimed that her step-daughter was acting up out of childish jealousy. Her freshly pussy-whipped dad had done what all men finally getting to fuck someone new and vastly younger than themselves might have done, and believed the step-mother. He bought Carmen a new dress to make up for the one ‘Meggy’ had destroyed, and grounded his daughter – like that made a difference in her life – punishing her by allocating all the household chores to her for the following month. Also big whoop, but her father had proved he needed a much more dramatic wake-up call. So Meggy was going to run away.