The Stone Gallows (36 page)

‘Maybe she wanted proof? So that she could divorce him?'

‘Come on, Cam. If she wanted proof, she'd have asked for it. She'd have wanted photographs and stuff like that. But she didn't, did she?

Think about it; infidelity constitutes eighty percent of our work.

Everybody knows that.'

‘But why?'

‘I don't know yet. But I think this woman's been stalking you from a distance. You know what stalkers are like. They get closer and closer.

Her coming to the office was just her first attempt to initiate direct contact. She seized on the first thing she thought of as an excuse to meet you face to face.'

‘Joe, that's crazy.'

‘I know. But remember we both felt like she wasn't the most tightly wrapped of people? According to Ian, Sophie Sloan's got a season ticket to Fraggle Rock.'

Fraggle Rock was the nickname of a local psychiatric hospital.

‘What do you mean, a season ticket?'

‘I mean she's had four admissions in the past three years. There's been breakdowns. . . bipolar disorder. . . schizophrenia, paranoia. . .

delusional behaviour. After you left, Ian and I had a long chat.'

Which had apparently led to them calling each other by their Christian names.

‘He might be lying.'

‘No way. I got Becky to make a few enquiries – she's still pretty well connected in the NHS. To put it bluntly, Sophie Sloan's madder than a sack of badgers.'

‘She can't be that crazy or they would have kept her in.'

‘Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you? I'm told that as long as she takes her meds, she's relatively O.K., and because she's never harmed anybody, they just stabilise her and send her home.'

It took me a few seconds to digest the information. ‘Why the hell would she kidnap Mark?'

‘There might not be a reason. If she's crazy, she doesn't need one.

Insanity means never having to justify your actions.'

Fair enough. ‘Go on.'

‘Ian says that he's been concerned – well, more concerned than normal – about her mental health ever since their little boy died. He says that her behaviour has become increasingly bizarre.'

‘Yeah, but that doesn't mean that she went out and kidnapped somebody. For goodness sake, Joe, this is clutching at straws.

You once told me that by the power of theoretical thinking, you could make a plausible case for Jack the Ripper and Osama Bin Laden being the same person. This is what you're doing here, you're. . .'

‘How old is Mark?'

The randomness of the question halted me in tracks. ‘Five, Six in February.'

‘About the same age as Luke.'

‘So what does that mean? She's thinking that because they're the same age, then Mark's a. . . a. . . a replacement Luke? Joe, fucking Sunset Beach had more plausible plot lines.'

‘There's something else. She told Ian that a few months ago that she had actually considered abducting a new-born baby from the hospital.'

‘That's just talk.'

‘He doesn't think so. She told him exactly how she planned to do it, and it didn't sound like she was going off half-cocked. From the way she described it to him, she put an awful lot of thought into it.

She even knew the door-access code for the maternity wing at the hospital. It was easy for him to remember. Ten-sixty-six. The Battle Of Hastings.'

‘Yeah, well she's obviously a very clever liar. All these details make the thing sound believable but can't be disproved.'

‘Except that I phoned the maternity wing of the hospital. Guess what their door-access code was up until two months ago?'

I clutched the phone to my ear, already knowing what the answer was. Joe said, ‘Ten-sixty-six. . . Cam? Cameron?'

‘I'm still here.'

‘What do you think about that?'

‘I think I need to sit down.'

Audrey's kitchen was like something out of
Ideal Homes
magazine, all polished surfaces and artificial fruit. Halogen spots lit the whole place up like a mortuary. There was a breakfast nook in the corner by the back door, high-backed stools and a Formica counter. I lurched over and pulled one of the stools out, nearly falling off as I plonked myself down. Sick white light bounced off the waxy, artificial skins of a bowl of plastic apples. ‘Joe. . . are you sure it's Sophie Sloan?'

‘I think so.'

‘But I've never done anything to her.'

‘Like I said, if she's as crazy as her husband describes her, then she doesn't need a reason.'

‘Joe, this is all speculation. There's got to be something else.'

‘There is. Guess what car she drives?'

‘Haven't a clue.'

‘BMW. A convertible. Not quite a Mercedes, but similar enough to Jason Campbell's.' He paused for effect. ‘And it's blue.'

11.13.

The boy went down like a sack of spuds.

Less than two minutes after finishing the doctored Coke, his head
slumped forward onto his chest and his breathing deepened. His face,
which had grown steadily more pinched and watchful as the hours had
dragged on, had evened out, once again assuming the open innocence
of childhood.

Sophie watched him sleep, her heart breaking.

What the hell was I thinking?

She felt like she was being torn in two. One part of her – the sensible
part that crossed t's and dotted i's and somehow managed to lurch
through the days with its hair brushed and its clothes on right-side in –

knew that she had gone too far, that the coastline of reality was almost
lost over the horizon.

The other part. . . well, that was a different matter. Tap-dancing
beside her rational mind was a gibbering chimpanzee of pure, obsessive
hate, bug-eyed and drooling with anger.

I'm going to finish it. Soon.

But the boy. . . he was so beautiful.

So was my child.

He was innocent.

So was my child.

11.14.

It took a few seconds for the penny to drop, metaphorically bouncing and spinning, taking forever to vibrate to a halt. Even then, my mind stuttered.

I remembered standing at the window of my burning flat, feeling the increasing tightness in my chest as I inhaled.

Smoke. Fear. The street. Litter blowing in the wind. Broken light bulb in the lamp-post. Lines and lines of parked cars.

A hooded figure running to a parked car. The angle had been steep and the light had been dim, making it impossible to gauge the arsonist's height or build – a fact that a good defence lawyer would have capitalised on.

Headlights flickering on, tyres squealing. I'd recognised the general shape of the car, and associated it with the wrong person.

Jason Campbell.

I hadn't
really
seen him. I'd seen a hooded figure jump into a convertible car and assumed.

And we all know what they say about making assumptions.

By doing so, I had made ass out of myself – and, just for a bonus, broken the arm of an innocent man.

Well. . . relatively innocent.

I clutched the phone. ‘Joe, what the hell should I do?'

For once, he was silent.

‘I mean, should I tell Audrey?'

‘I think you have to.'

‘But it'll just give her more reason to keep Mark away from me.'

‘Listen, Cam, if Scotty had beamed Mark onto the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, she'd find a way of making it your fault. You need to focus on the bigger picture here. Is there a FPU officer there?'

‘Yeah. Somebody called Janice Galloway.'

‘I know her. She's good at what she does.'

‘Good at what she does? All she's done is make coffee.'

‘Let me talk to her.'

I slipped off my stool, making my way across the kitchen into the living area. Both women looked up as I entered. Galloway's eyes were significantly friendlier than Audrey's. I waved the phone at her. ‘You know Joe Banks?'

She nodded.

‘He's got a theory about who might have abducted Mark.'

She took the phone with a questioning expression on her face.

Audrey looked like she was considering biting me. ‘For God's sake, Cameron. What's going on?'

I sat down beside her. I had some explaining to do.

11.15.

Forty minutes later, I was on my merry way, driving the streets of Glasgow with no particular place to go. The night was unseasonably warm, causing the rear windscreen of the Golf to steam up. It didn't matter; I was disinclined to look behind me in case all I could see was burning bridges.

Audrey had taken the news in an entirely predictable fashion, remaining silent as I explained the Sophie Sloan case, her lips thinning to a blood-red slash, the vein in her temple growing more and more prominent. When I finished speaking, she started.

This was my fault.

Although it was obvious that the woman was mentally imbalanced, I had ignored the signs and deliberately placed Mark in harm's way.

I was never going to see him again.

Then she threw me out, which was actually something of a relief. I had my mobile phone. Why sit around being miserable and worried at my ex's house when I could be just as miserable and just as worried behind the wheel of my car? And at least there I would be doing something practical. The chances of running into Sophie and Mark were slim, but not non-existent.

I wondered where he was and how he was coping. Mark was a fairly bright kid, but he was so young, too young to be a pawn in a crazy game of chess. I hoped that wherever they were, she was treating him kindly, and that he wasn't too frightened.

Without a destination, I found myself drifting through the city as it put itself to bed. A light drizzle fell, causing the few pedestrians that loitered the streets to hunch their shoulders and share the occasional umbrella. It was the usual Monday-night suspects – couples making their way home from dates, older singletons returning from the weekly bingo pilgrimage. There was even a healthy amount of neds, munching on kebabs and swigging from bottles of Buckfast and Mad-Dog. Most of them were young, barely more than kids. As I hissed by on the damp road, a boy threw a bottle at the car, missing by a few inches, the bottle exploding on the pavement beside me. I shook my head and carried on, wondering how things could have turned out so badly.

It seemed like the world had taken a wrong turn somewhere. I hoped that the song was wrong and that children weren't the future, because if they were, then the future was looking pretty bleak. I worried about the kids wandering the streets when they should have been in bed. When I was sixteen, I'd had rules – in before ten on a school night, midnight on a Friday or a Saturday. No underage drinking, no hanging about street corners throwing half-bricks at the late night buses to see if we could get the driver to chase us.

Of course, I'd done my best to ignore the rules, screwing around, getting into trouble at every opportunity, but I had still been bound by the moral and ethical code that my parents had instilled in me. I never did drugs, I never hurt anybody. I was just a silly wee boy.

These kids, with their shell-suits and their iPods and their dead, glassy-eyed stares – they were different. They didn't give a fuck. About anything. They weren't out wandering the streets at all hours because they wanted to rebel against authority, because they had no authority to rebel against. They were out because they had nothing else to do.

Their biological parents barely knew their names, their social workers told them what they should do but not how to do it. If they wanted to work, they could flip burgers in the service industry for minimum wage. Or they could go to college, get an education, except there was no point. They didn't have a chance. Children are like books: the longer they sit on the shelf, the more obscure and difficult to understand they become. Because nobody had ever taken the time to teach them, they were now unable to learn, with an attention span barely longer than the average MTV video. Because of the ongoing absence of authority in their lives, they lacked the discipline it required to sit still and actually learn anything, especially when you consider the fact that most of them could barely read and write. And even if they could, what the fuck for? So that they could be treated like shit for the rest of their lives before being made redundant at the age of fifty, shuffled to one side to make room for the next generation of wage-slaves?

I shouldn't think so much. I was just bringing myself down.

I checked my watch: twelve fifty. The Golf sat steady at thirty-one miles an hour, past the kebab shops and pubs and garage forecourts that had been turned into drug supercentres. I realised that I was hungry and turned into an all night supermarket, parking the car and checking my phone to make sure that I hadn't missed any messages. I hadn't. As I walked through the car-park I messed around with the ring-tones on my phone, making sure that I hadn't put it onto silent.

The supermarket was just another supermarket: bright lights, wide aisles, high shelves, James Morrison in the background whining about having a bad day. I'd like to meet him. I'd teach him about the concept of a bad day. Next to the front door was a chiller cabinet that had probably been filled with sandwiches. Now it was filled with empty space. In one corner was a lone packet of sushi; I decided I wasn't feeling that brave. I grabbed a packet of crisps and made my way to the checkout.

Then I spotted an old friend.

11.16.

He was perched on a high stool behind a till, running items across the automatic scanner, his expression one of intense concentration.

His hands moved slowly, as if unsure of themselves. The name badge on the lapel of his blue polo shirt was Sean.

Sean. AKA Shabsy. AKA Celtic Bhouy, confidante and trusty sidekick to Flick-Knife.