The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(74)

A line of yellow flares across stone arches overhead. It’s only the light seeping under a door, but after the endless darkness it’s bright enough to hurt her eyes. She screws them shut as the door is pushed open, flinches as more lights are switched on overhead. Their buzzing is a swarm of angry bees.

She squints against the glare, trying to see who has come. But tied to the bed, exhausted by the hours of silence and darkness, she can barely move her head enough to see the walls.

‘Ah, good. You’re awake.’ A man’s voice, familiar from somewhere. But where? She tries to remember, but it’s hard to do anything as the panic rises.

‘Please, help me.’ It’s little more than a croak.

‘I was worried, you know.’

Soft, well-spoken, educated. What her mother would have called a trustworthy voice, God rest her na?ve soul.

‘You slept a long time. Much longer than the other ones.’

The other ones? She cracks open her eyes a bit more, wincing at the pain in her head. Her vision is blurred. Christ, she’s still got her contacts in. How long can you wear them before they stick to your eyeballs? The man is standing a few yards away, quite still, watching her. She is suddenly all too aware of her nakedness and the way the ropes spread her legs.

‘What do you want?’ Each word rasps out of her throat as if it has been posted in a sandpaper envelope.

‘What do I want?’ The man seems to be considering this for a while. Then he comes closer and she can see he is carrying something. Closer still and he draws up a chair, sits down beside her. His features are indistinct, pink and blue to her dry, lens-filled eyes as he bows his head to the thing he is carrying. Opens it up. A large book.

‘I want to read you a story.’

McLean didn’t know the police station at Howdenhall well, but it had a canteen and that canteen had hot soup. As far as he was concerned, anything else was just window-dressing. He sat at the head of a table of uniformed officers, all tucking in, warming hands and generally looking relieved that their ordeal was over, at least for now. Beside him, DC MacBride went over the results of their door-to-door enquiries.

‘We’ve got two possible sightings on the evening of the twenty-sixth. Both around seven p.m., both people who knew her as a local but didn’t know her name.’ He looked down the list, making squiggles against it with a chewed biro. ‘The rest is just people trying to be helpful.’

‘No sightings after then?’

‘None.’

‘Anyone see anything else? Any cars going slowly?’

‘It’s the Brae, sir. They all go slowly. Uphill at least.’

McLean sighed. He knew damn well that it was too late. Trisha Lubkin had been abducted. If she wasn’t dead already she would be soon. And they’d find her naked body under a bridge somewhere in the next day or two, carefully cleaned and laid out in the water.

‘It’s all wrong,’ he said.

‘Sir?’ MacBride’s spoon hovered in front of his mouth, soup splashing back into the bowl and over his papers.

‘Anderson killed once a year. He was always in control. Never escalated. That’s why we had such a hard time catching him.’

‘Well, we know this isn’t Anderson. He’s dead. This has got to be some sick bastard copy-cat.’

‘I know. But why go to all the trouble of copying Anderson and then kill twice in a month? Three times if we’re being realistic about it.’

‘Don’t you think that’s a bit premature, sir? I mean, she might just have got on a train and gone to London.’

‘She had no money, no phone. She didn’t get in touch with any of her close friends. It is possible she went to stay with someone else from work ...’ McLean tried to cling to that one small sliver of hope. With the holiday today and tomorrow it was almost impossible getting hold of anyone at the bank where Trisha Lubkin worked. Grumpy Bob was meant to be working on a list, but no, the hope was a waste of time. It was too much of a coincidence that she should disappear in exactly the same place as Kate McKenzie.

‘I hate to admit it but I don’t think we’re going to find her alive.’

She feels strange. Not the oddness of being tied up for God knows how long, naked and drugged. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she can’t quite understand the language the man beside her is speaking. It sounds maybe like Latin. Could be gibberish, what would she know? But the words stick in her head, swirling around in her mind, dredging up long-forgotten memories.

Like the time when she was a kid, down on the beach at Portobello, with wee Jimmy Shanks. They’d been smoking stolen cigarettes, then played ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.’ Christ, she must have been all of ten. But it wasn’t that. Not her first sight of a boy’s willy. It was after that, when they’d been going home and found that dog. Hit by a car, poor wee sod. Lying at the side of the road whimpering. All broken up and bloody. They’d thought it was funny, had taunted it as it tried to crawl away. Jimmy’d thrown rocks at it and she’d hit it with a stick. Why’d she done that? That wasn’t her.

And then he’s on top of her. How did that happen? She can still hear him reading the words from the book, but he’s pressing down on her, hands kneading painfully at her breasts, trousers round his ankles, that little boy’s willy angry and large now.