Crime

1 Vacation

RAY LENNOX IS now entering an area of turbulence. Raising a bandaged right hand to his hooked nose, slightly askew after being badly set following a break some years back, he looks at his image reflected in the blank screen of the personal television, provided for his in-flight entertainment. A thin wisp of air struggles through one grouted nostril, provoking a protesting heave in his chest. Trying to sidetrack his agitated mind, he scans the body crushed next to him.

It’s Trudi, his fiancée; shoulder-length hair tinted a tasteful honey blonde indicating the attentions of a proper stylist. She’s oblivious to his discomfort. A manicured, polished nail turns a magazine page. Beyond her, there’s somebody else. Around them, still more bodies.

It’s only now registering: now, as he sits crammed into this economy-class seat on the London to Miami flight. The spiel he’d gotten from Bob Toal before he took stress leave. It was the altitude announcement that had sparked it.

We are now cruising at thirty-two thousand feet.

You’re a high-flyer, Ray, he recalled Toal saying, as he’d stared at the black hairs sprouting from his boss’s nose. A favoured son. It was a harrowing case. You did well; got the bastard under lock and key. Result. Take a long holiday. Look forward. A lot of us have invested heavily in your career, Ray. Don’t prove us wrong, son. Can’t have you taking the Robertson route, he’d said, referring to the suicide of Lennox’s old mentor. Don’t go down.

And Ray Lennox – gaunt, white-faced, clean-shaven, his trademark floppy fringe shorn at John’s in Broughton Street to reveal a short, sloping forehead – feels his pulse precipitously quicken.

We are now entering an area of turbulence. Please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened.

Don’t go down.

Danger. Threat.

They’d given him the third degree at the airport. He looked nothing like his passport picture. The sallow grey of his Scottish skin, cruelly highlighted by the photo booth’s creaky technology, contrasting with his thick, raven hair, eyebrows and moustache, rendering the look joke-shop false. Now all reduced to a post-conscript shadow that spreads across his head before circling round to his jaw.

He’d been vexed by the attentions of airport security, for he was an officer of the law, but they were right to care. His Lothian Police ID helped him negotiate the mini-state the Americans had set up at Heathrow to pre-emptively protect their borders. — Sorry, sir, difficult times, the Homeland Security Officer had declaimed apologetically.

Now Ray Lennox’s eyes urgently scan the cabin. Nothing to worry about in front. Nobody looked like an al-Qaeda affiliate. But that guy looks Indian. Muslim? More likely a Hindu, surely. But might be Pakistani. Stop this. He himself was white, but not a Christian. Church of Scotland on the census form as recorded for official data, but not religious, until he boarded a plane. The drinks trolley approaching slowly; so slowly, he didn’t want to think about it. He turns, craning his neck, looks back at his fellow passengers. Nothing out of the obvious: holidaymakers in search of the sun. A cheap(ish) flight.

Next to him, Trudi, aloof with her hair brushed back and gathered up in a tight black clasp. Those dark, intense hazelnut eyes devouring, almost psychotically, the Perfect Bride magazine as her red-painted nail extension flips over the next page.

All lassies dream about the big day, about being the perfect bride: the enactment of the fairy-princess ideal.

Did that wee girl?

Nah, no that wee soul…

Turbulence rocks the plane and Lennox’s sweat ducts open up under its broadside, as he’s abruptly conscious of the fact that he’s travelling in a metal tube at six hundred miles an hour, six miles in the air over the sea. A drop in the ocean: just a speck waiting to fall into oblivion. He watches Trudi, unperturbed, small scarlet slash of a mouth, only briefly raising a thinly plucked brow in disdain. As if an aircraft disaster would merely inconvenience the wedding plans.

The shaking in the Boeing 747 stops as the engines thunder through the air. The buzz that permeates the plane constantly in his ears. Thrusting ahead. Into blackness. The pilots seeing nothing in front of them. The instruments in the cockpit would be blinking and twirling on the console.

You can see why terrorists and governments – those with the biggest stake in our fear, Lennox considers – are so focused on aircraft travel. We are scared shitless before we start out. All they need to do is fine-tune this dread through the odd atrocity or its consort, heavy-handed security.

Trudi has a blanket over her legs.

The magnetic dark around him. He can feel it beckoning.

Why should he worry? He’s on holiday. He’s done his job. What is there to regret? It’s self-indulgent. But he can’t help it. The metal taste in his mouth. Can’t help hurting himself with thoughts. Nerves prickling under his skin. He fears himself again. He wishes he’d taken more pills.

— What if we go down? Lennox whispers, swamped with notions of death as a vast bleak nothingness. — We’d be free from it all.

— I’m still thinking periwinkle for the bridesmaids, Trudi says without looking up from the magazine, — but I don’t want Adele upstaging me. Then she turns to him in real fear. — You don’t think—

Ray Lennox feels a surge of emotion as he recalls a picture of Trudi as a young girl, on the mantelpiece at her parents’ house. An only child: the couple’s one shot at immortality. What if anything were—

Another jag of trepidation rising in him. — Trudi, I’d never let anybody hurt you, you know that, don’t you? he announces in desperate urgency.

Her eyes expand in the stilted horror of the soap-opera heroine. — You think she’s pretty, don’t you? Don’t even try to deny it, Ray, it sticks out a mile.

Trudi thrusts her breasts out towards him and he sees the ribbing pattern of her tight brown sweater curve almost implausibly in a way that once aroused him. A few weeks back.

She wants to be the perfect bride. Like wee Britney Hamil might have dreamt of.

He grabs her, hugs her close, breathing in her perfume, the fragrance of the shampoo in her hair. Something in his throat is choking him. As if a foreign object is wedged there. His voice so thin he wonders if she can hear him. — Trudi, I love you… I…

She squirms in his grasp, wriggles free and pushes him away. For the first time on the flight, her searching eyes engage with him. — What’s wrong, Ray? What is it?

— That case I was working on… that wee lassie…

Her head shakes vigorously and she puts a shushing finger over his lips. — No shop talk, Ray. We agreed. You’ve to get away from the job. That was the plan. That was what Bob Toal said. If I remember correctly his exact words were: Don’t even think about the job. Don’t think. Have a good time. Relax. The purpose of this vacation is to relax and plan the wedding. But you’re drinking again, and you know how I feel about that, she exhales, protracted and peevish. — But it’s what you wanted, and the mug that I am, I reluctantly agreed. So relax. You have your pills for anxiety.

It occurs to Lennox that she’s used the American term ‘vacation’ instead of holiday. The word clatters around in his head. To vacate. To leave.

But to go where?

Where did you go when you left?

The stewardess arrives with the drinks service. Trudi orders a white wine. A Chardonnay. Lennox gets in a couple of Bloody Marys.

Trudi settles back in her seat. Her head tilted to the side. Voice cooing, in sing-song manner. — All jobs are stressful in this day and age. That’s why we have vacations.

Again!

— Ver’ near two glorious weeks of sun, sand, sea and the other, she nudges him, then sulks, — You do still fancy me, Ray? And she does that thing with her breasts again.

— Course ah do. Lennox feels a constricting of the muscles around his chest and throat. His windpipe has become a straw. He is trapped; hemmed in beside the window, far too small to offer escape into the oblivion of sky. He looks at his crippled, bandaged right hand, a bag of broken knuckles, phalanxes and metacarpals. How many more would go, how long would it take for both fists to be pulped trying to punch a hole through this plane? Between him and the aisle sits first Trudi, then a blade-faced older woman, spare-framed, with bony hands. Probably ages with his own mother. He breathes in the dirty, dry recycled air of the plane. The old girl’s skin is like melted plastic. Like it has been dried out by the air conditioning. There are orangey blotches. He wonders how many hours an eight-hour flight aged you. He didn’t want Trudi to know that he’d only brought a few pills; that he was planning to stop them in Miami.

Trudi drops her voice. — I’ll do it if you want, Ray. If it’s what you really want…

He raises the plastic beaker to his mouth and sips at the vodka. His hand trembles. Then his body. How many paltry measures from those little bottles will it take to stop this, to make it go away? — The thing is… he manages to cough.

—… because I want to please you in that way, Ray, I really do, she implores, perhaps a bit too loudly as she’d had a few drinks at the airport bar and with the wine and altitude they are digging in. She turns to the old dear sitting next to her and exchanges saccharine smiles followed by a greeting.

Lennox thinks about the crime. At his desk the morning he heard and—

Trudi’s elbow digs his ribs. Her voice now a low whisper. The faintest of downy hair on the top of her glossy pink lips. — It’s just that it shocked me at first. It was trying to reconcile the fact that you’re a normal, red-blooded, heterosexual male with you wanting to be… penetrated in that way…

Lennox fortifies himself with another swig of the Bloody Mary. It’s all but gone. — I never want you to do anything you’re uncomfortable with, he says, pulling his features into a shallow smile.

— You’re a honey, she kisses him on the side of the face, the kiss of an aunt, he thinks. She holds open Perfect Bride, at a page displaying, in several script styles, the same announcement of a fictitious wedding. — What do you reckon about these for the invitations? Her big nail thuds down on a blue script in Charles Rennie Mackintosh style.

Glancing at them, Lennox thinks, with mild parochial resentment, of Glasgow. — Too Weedgie. He then points at the Gothic illustrations. — I like this one better.

— Oh my God, no way! She gasps and laughs, — You are totally bonkers, Raymond Lennox! These are like funeral invitations! I’m not the Bride of Frankenstein. She raises her eyes and fills her wine beaker. — Just as well you’ve got me organising this wedding. I dread to think what kind of a joke it would be if it was left up to you. She turns to the old girl whose cheery, intrusive smile is beginning to nauseate Lennox. — Men. Honestly! Good for nothing!

— I’ve always said it, the old girl adds encouragingly.

They cluck enthusiastically over the contents of the magazine and Trudi’s ecstatic descriptions of her dress, as Lennox adjusts the seat to its stingy recline, his eyes growing heavy with sleep. Soon his mind is drifting back to the crime. His thoughts are like a landslide; they seem to subside and settle, then before he knows it they’re off again, heading for the same downhill destination. The crime. Always plummeting inexorably towards the crime.

You got the call that morning.

At your desk in that small, utilitarian office in Edinburgh’s police headquarters at Fettes. A frosty, late-October Wednesday, your sad African violet plant on the window ledge struggling in the meagre light and cold, as the noisy central heating, set to come on late for economy purposes, clattered and cranked into reluctant action. Preparing a case for court. Two youths cabbaged after drinking all day: one had stabbed the other to death in a flat. Something was said and taken the wrong way. A threat made; a counter, the escalation. One life ended, the other ruined. All in the time it took to buy a pint of milk. You recalled the murderer, stripped of bravado-giving intoxicants, in the interview room under the fluorescent lights; so young, broken and scared. But this case hadn’t bugged you. You’d seen so many like it.

What got to you was the phone call, at around eleven fifteen. A uniformed cop, Donald Harrower, telling you about a seven-year-old girl, Britney Hamil, setting off for school at 8.30 a.m. and never arriving. The school had reported the absence to her mother, Angela, just before ten, who, after phoning some friends and relatives, had called the police half an hour later. Harrower and another officer had gone out to speak to the woman, as well as Britney’s teacher and some neighbours and schoolmates. Two older girls had seen her walking down the street ahead of them, but when they turned the corner a few minutes later, Britney had vanished and they’d witnessed a white van speeding away.

— The girls, Andrea Jack and Stella Hetherington, were the only witnesses and the white van was the only vehicle they recall seeing in the vicinity, Harrower had explained in his adenoidal tones, — so I thought you’d like to know about it.

The words ‘unmarked white van’ crackled through your brain in static. That great British archetype: always trouble to a polisman. You’d thanked Harrower, thinking it was unfortunate his dour, taciturn aspect often shielded a thoughtful diligence from his bosses. The van compelled you to go straight to your boss, acting Chief Superintendent Bob Toal, and request to investigate the disappearance and potential abduction of a child.

You worked with Harrower, talking to neighbours, friends, the school staff and children whom Britney might have passed en route. And Angela. You remembered the first time you set eyes on the child’s mother, on her way out to the local shopping centre. She’d been due at her cleaning job in the Scottish Office that afternoon, but explained that she’d taken time off to look after her other daughter, Tessa, who had food poisoning. She was the eleven-year-old sister who normally accompanied Britney to school. Instead of asking Angela to hold on, something made you want to walk with her. You followed her around Iceland, as she filled up on cheap burgers, fish fingers, oven chips and cigarettes. Found yourself judging her every purchase, as if they made her not only complicit in Tessa’s poisoning but also in Britney’s vanishing. — Isn’t she a little young to be walking to the school on her own?

— I was gaunny take her, but Tessa started being sick again, really chucking it up. Britney… she didnae want to be late. Telt me she was a big girl now. Angela fought back the tears as she pushed her shopping trolley down the yellow neon-lit gangways. — It’s only five minutes’ walk, she pleaded. — You will find her, won’t ye?

— We’re doing everything we can. So Tessa was ill this morning?

— Aye. I took them oot tae that burger bar last night, the yin at the centre. For a wee treat, then tae the pictures, at the multi-plex tae see the new Harry Potter. Tess came doon wi it in there. Ah mind ay Britney bein that sad that we had tae go hame…

— Right, you had said, feeling then that missing a film might be the least of the girl’s worries.

Leaving Angela back at her flat, you walked the walk to the school and found that it actually took fourteen minutes. Out the housing scheme, past the Loganburn roundabout, round the corner into Carr Road (where Britney vanished), and alongside a long, stark brick wall, behind which sat a disused factory. Then, round another corner, a block of tenements and the Gothic black-railed gates of the Victorian school.

Everyone at Police Headquarters knew that the next few hours were crucial, the something-or-nothing time. An alert call was made to all cars to be on the lookout for the girl and the driver of an unmarked white van. But as morning rolled into afternoon there was no news, and outside of Andrea and Stella, the girls walking behind Britney, only a couple of neighbours – a Mrs Doig on her way to her work, and a Mr Loughlan out walking his dog – could specifically recall seeing the girl that morning.

You went back to Bob Toal and asked if you could put a proper investigation team together. In the era of sex-crime awareness a missing child was big news and the media-savvy Toal quickly concurred. — Take Amanda Drummond, he’d said, — and Ally Notman.

You expressed gratitude. Drummond was thorough and had good people skills, while Notman had an engine on him and knew his way around data management. Like you, he had an Information Technology degree from Heriot-Watt University, but you were envious of the more efficient way your younger charge put these skills to use.

Then Toal had added, — And Dougie Gillman.

You felt the air inside you ebbing away. There had been a serious personal fallout with Gillman a few years back. But you said nothing, because it was personal. You’d keep it off the job.

You got Harrower and another reliable copper, Kenny McCaig, out of uniform. You commandeered an office at Police HQ and started your formal investigation. McCaig and Harrower continued knocking on doors. Notman examined speed camera and CCTV footage to identify any white vans tracked in or around the vicinity of Carr Road at the time, pulling out possible registration numbers, checking the list of owners against the Vehicle Licensing Agency’s database in Swansea. Drummond and Gillman took a forensics team out to give the bend on Carr Road, where Britney had vanished, a good dusting down. Neither forensics nor IT were the forte of Gillman, an old-school street cop, but he’d coldly followed your order.

As for you, you busied yourself with the ‘register’: the database of sex offenders. Seeing who was out, who was on parole and who was under surveillance; who was considered to be high-risk and low-risk. You’d clicked through the mugshots that Wednesday in your office, as the light declined in the drizzle over the Castle Hill, calling Trudi and telling her that you’d be late meeting her at the Filmhouse. When you got there, you’d coughed out an apology. — Sorry, babe, shit day at work. This weather doesnae help.

She didn’t seem to mind. — Thank God we’ve got Miami to look forward to!

But you weren’t looking forward to anything. You’d felt a building tug of unease from Harrower’s call; through your job you’d learned to define evil not just as the presence of something malign, but the absence of something good. Experience had taught you that the only misfortune worse than a having loved one murdered was for them to vanish without their fate ever coming to light. The torment of uncertainty, where the heart pounded each time the doorbell or phone rang, and desperate, hungry eyes devoured every face in every crowd. The inevitability of the cherished person’s death could be mentally reasoned, but it was harder to stifle the soul’s defiant scream that they lived on. But were they coming home or had they gone for ever? After time spent in this hellish limbo, any news, no matter how searing, was welcomed beyond the endless waiting and searching. In Britney’s mother, lone parent Angela Hamil, you saw a woman slowly drowning in this terrible madness.

By that evening you all knew that somebody had snatched Britney. The next day Toal decided to go public and give it to the newspapers. If the situation couldn’t be managed, then the news had to be. The later editions of the Evening News in Edinburgh carried a smiling, wholesome-looking picture of the girl that would become iconic. Adults would gaze at their children with a tender ache, giving strangers a suspicious glare. The term ‘like an angel’ was used a lot in the press. You recalled her grandad saying that.

The police switchboards became jammed with the usual litany of busybodies and sickos, as well as the genuine but largely misguided members of the public. And that creeping unease, how it had spread like a virus through your investigative team. Whatever you all said on the PR front, or to the family, you knew as professional law enforcement officers that after twenty-four hours you were probably dealing with a child sex murder.

The team quickly swung into action. Gillman had been the first to find something, a single page of yellow notepaper wet in the gutter on the other side of the road to where Britney had vanished. Angela confirmed it was from her school notepad. Its very presence indicated some sort of struggle between child and kidnapper.

The villain needed some degree of tangibility in the minds of his pursuers, and was dubbed the usual nicknames, ‘The Stoat’, ‘The Nonce’ or ‘The Beast’. But another moniker in the police canteen was Mr Confectioner. It came from the Toblerone chocolate advert from television: Oh, Mr Confectioner, please… give me Toblerone. The boys in Bert’s Bar thought the cartoon confectioner looked like a stereotype sex beast, bribing kids with sweets.

Stop this.

No crime…

Vacation…

His actions strangled the empathy from us like they had the life from…

Because…

Because he was born like that, he had to be, the fuckin beast. That dirty bastard was put on this earth to prey on us…

We had to be strong and vigilant and alert to stop them; stop them from destroying our flesh…

He jars back into something like full consciousness as the beaker crushes in his fist. A gloopy vodka and tomato mix slops over his undamaged left hand. He puts it down and catlicks himself, mopping up with a napkin. Trudi hasn’t noticed; she’s engrossed in the magazine with the old girl. He tries to think about some of the games he’s seen over the years at Tynecastle Park. His dad taking him along to watch Hearts beat Leipzig five–one. Curtis Park, one of his mates from school, and a Hibs fan, seeing it on television and telling him that the Englishman, Alan Weeks, was commentating. Iain Ferguson scoring the winning goal against Bayern Munich. That three–two Scottish Cup victory over Rangers. Lifting the cup at Parkhead. John Robertson’s numerous derby winners. Shaking the wee man’s hand in the carpet department at John Lewis’s. John Colquhoun, teetering on the brink of world class for a season. That fateful afternoon in May 1986, when they threw it all away. The charity dinner a couple of years back, when he’d sat next to Wallace Mercer, the former chairman, who told him some great stories about games past and that terrible day up in Dundee. Now who was in charge?

A Russian millionaire as chairman. A convicted sex offender as manager.

Heart of Midlothian FC.

Tradition.

It all means nothing now alongside our vile decadence. How long before we have paedophile reality TV shows? Michael Jackson, Gary Glitter and that whole BBC crowd, like the former football pro working as a pundit. Those who were on the right side of the divide and got their noncing in before we cared.

He shuts his eyes. With the sound of the engines it’s like going through a long, dark, tunnel. Hopes they stay closed until he steps into the light with the blood of other men on his hands. Even if it takes for ever.

2 Miami Beach

AS THEY COME to the glorious salvation of land, Lennox can see how quickly the powerful 747 jet plane devours the toytown miles beneath them. America is not a big country, he remembers. He’s jumped across it before in aircraft; New York–Chicago–New Orleans–Vegas–San Francisco–LA. It was like going round Scotland in a bus, only at ground level you could see the vastness of the country in the changing landscape. One function of wealth is to shrink the world. And, like poverty, it has at least the potential to breed dissatisfaction. Florida, he knows, he will encounter as Scotland, immense and irreducible by the plane. A tremor of excitement passes through him as he awaits its grandeur. For beyond the plexiglas he sees Miami, gleaming silvery-white constructions straddling the edge of a milky turquoise sea and its harbours. The water is rashed with emerald-purple shadows cast up from below by submerged islands. Tiny sailboats surge along like yellow dots against a radar display backdrop, leaving a fading trail behind them.

People clap as the plane lands – so smoothly he’s barely aware of the touchdown he had braced himself for hours ago, since surviving take-off and turbulence. Despite this sense of anticlimax, Lennox’s wrapped and damaged hand gently squeezes Trudi’s.

Their room is in a boutique hotel in the art deco district of Miami Beach. The historic art deco district, as it seems to say everywhere. Historic? Art deco? Where’s the history in that? He goes into the shower, and realising that he badly needs to urinate, lets himself pee as he washes. The heavy, gold streams of his piss weave down the drain-hole. The bathroom is mirrored on opposite walls. He watches his cloned naked body purging into infinity.

Then, without warning, he’s hit by an acute desperation to get outside. The bathroom, the bedroom, they seem too small. He drips over to the sink. Rubs at himself with a towel. Fills a glass with water and downs two antidepressants he has left out. The Seroxat. Consumed like M&Ms. At least one hundred milligrams more than the maximum recommended daily dose. The anxiety isn’t as bad when you’re on them. Yes, it’s always there, you can still feel it, it just doesn’t bother you as much. But he hasn’t brought many; he wants to stop them. Thinks the sun will help. Light is good for depression. A natural cure. A good dose of winter sun will do you more good than all the pills in the world. Somebody had said that. Trudi? Toal? He can’t think. But they were right. It was a relief to leave the cold and dark of winter Edinburgh. There had been the horror of the funeral. Then Christmas was a washout. Hogmanay too. Lennox had no head for it. The chanting crowds: people seeming boorish and hateful as they tried to enjoy themselves. Beneath the surface bonhomie there was desperation, a barely submerged fear that the next year would be just as miserable as the last. He steps out of the bathroom, towel round his waist. The tumbler of water is still in his hand. He sets it down on the glass table by the phone.

Trudi is lying on the bed in her black underwear still reading Perfect Bride. Cooling off under the overhead fan that augments the air con. Lennox admires her feet, with the red-painted toes.

He gets hold of the nail clippers on his key ring. Then he switches on the television. It’s what you do in America. That big holiday, years ago: with Caitlin Pringle, an old girlfriend, pre-Trudi. Her father worked for British Airways; a big noise. Alasdair Pringle. Cheap travel. Caitlin; Alasdair-Big-Noise-from-the-Airline’s daughter. A sexual relationship, a baseball pennant procured from every city they’d fucked in. Then, the second time, New York, with some of the boys on the force. A piss-up. Las Vegas for a wedding: this time with Trudi. Whose wedding? He can’t think. But every time he’d watched loads of telly. You just went to the TV automatically here, like you did in no other foreign country. That one clicking gesture with the handset and you were into America. The breaking news. The infomercial. The daytime soap with the moving mannequins. The courtroom show. The fat poor people who screamed at each other while Jerry or Ricki or Montel kept order. Tried to help, even. Attempted to understand the problems faced by the poor and the fat. Empathise with their need to shout and point their blobby fingers at each other in public. The evening dating shows. The thick, complacent studs, wearily referring to themselves as ‘players’ as they slowly suffocated in their own ennui. Bored, manicured girls, faces immobilised, unmoved by anything other than the boys’ salaries. How those crazed inanities were rendered understandable, even palpable, by the context.

As he chops at nails already close to the quick, voices fill the room. They drown out the slow rattle and hum of the air conditioning. There’s one channel that appears to be devoted to culture in the Miami area. To Lennox, this seems to mean mainly real estate and shopping. A series of impeccably groomed yet tacky presenters, reading in clipped tones from autocues, expound various opportunities in different high-rise apartment developments. Clearly something exciting is happening. Missing out isn’t an option. The failed actors and Botox-faced models stress the high-concept, architectural qualities of what to Lennox appear to be Scottish scheme tower blocks in the sun.

— You can’t keep clipping your nails, Ray, Trudi says, — your thumb’s bleeding! Compulsive behaviour!

He turns to observe her lying on the bed, reading her magazine.

— I have tae or I pick at them. I need to keep them short.

But she’s no longer concerned; her mouth has gone round and her eyes stare at the magazine as if seeing something she can’t comprehend or quite believe she’s reading. Before, he might have found that look sexy. Caressed the inside of her bronzed thigh. Up to where several pubic hairs curled enticingly outside her panties. Put his hand between her legs. Or maybe on her breast. His lips pressing on hers. His cock’s belligerent push against her thigh.

But now she looks other-worldly.

— An alien wedding, Lennox says softly, rummaging through his case, which lies at the bottom of the bed, on a fold-out stand with straps. Did these things have a special name? Whatever, there is a Motörhead T-shirt in there somewhere. Ace of Spades. He picks it out. It lies on top of a white one with BELIEVE in big maroon letters.

Lennox looks out into the street and sees a white van, brilliant magnesium sunlight reflecting from it as it pauses at traffic lights.

Trudi lowers her magazine, watches him go through his suitcase. His movements have the attractiveness of the awkward man who has learned to circumvent this condition by slowing everything down. Catlike in his languid movements, with his slightly hunched shoulders, hands a little too big for his body, like he’s never quite known what to do with them. Legs perhaps a tad short for the frame; in tandem with the slouching tendency and his hairiness, they could occasionally hint at something simian. But he’s always carried the air of a large wounded mammal; how the potentials of vulnerability and violence never seem far from him.

It is easy for her to relate to grace as a destination rather than a state. A few years back she’d decided to shed the sugar and carbohydrates in her diet, do a regular gym programme, spend more money on decent clothes and make-up and invest time in her appearance. It came as a shock to her that new cheekbones and a slim, athletic body quickly began to emerge. The blonde tints followed, and the biggest surprise was that the world could so lazily reclassify her as conventionally beautiful. It was a disappointment to learn just how much perceived female beauty was about diet, exercise and grooming.

Nonetheless, Trudi had become entranced by the shallowness of it all; the easy power it conferred. The exalting attentions of others; how men in groups at bars would graciously part for her like the Red Sea for Moses. How spite would sting the eyes and tongues of other women who saw only the make-up, clothes, diet and exercise; the effort they couldn’t or wouldn’t make. How men and women at the public utility where she was employed gave up chairs for her at crowded meetings. She’d be the first to be asked by the new start in the office what she wanted brought back for her lunch. Handsome Mark McKendrick, a young senior executive, challenging her to lunchtime games of squash. Then the several workplace promotions came easily, fast-tracking her all the way up to the glass ceiling. That relentless evolution of Trudi Lowe: from office junior to corporate female managerial icon.

And now back with Ray Lennox. A broken boy soldier. She watches his muscular but lithe body negotiate his clothing, a pair of long canvas trousers and the Motörhead T-shirt. Notes a slight thickening around his waistline; no, she isn’t imagining it. The gym would sort that out.

The TV programme changes emphasis, discussing Miami’s museums and monuments. Lennox can’t believe it when they get to a Holocaust memorial, which is situated here in Miami Beach. — So that we never forget, the presenter says sincerely, patently more downbeat than when he talks about condominium prices. — A place of healing.

— Why the fuck do they have that in Miami Beach? he asks incredulously, pointing at the screen. — It’s like having something tae commemorate the Rwandan atrocities in Las Vegas!

— I think it’s great. Trudi puts down the magazine. — There should be one in every city in the world.

— What’s Miami got tae dae with the Holocaust? Lennox raises his eyebrows. Sunlight suddenly rips through the blinds, casting tight, gold bars across the room. He can see the dust particles floating in them. He wants to be outside: away from the air conditioning.

— It’s like the guy said; a place of healing, Trudi contends. — Besides, I think the Rough Guide mentioned that there were a lot of Jewish people in Miami. She reclines back on the bed. That is what she does. He knows that recline. Used to love it. But, please God, not now.

— I need to get some air, Lennox says, avoiding contact with her hopeful eyes. Instead, his wrapped hand depresses some slats on the blind and he looks across to the sun-reflected, smiling facades of the vanilla apartments opposite. They seem to be beckoning him to come out and play. He picks up the phone on the dark glass table. — I said I’d call Ginger Rogers. He’s a good mate. He hears the plea in his voice. — No seen the old bastard in yonks.

— Does it have to be right now? An internal tautness distorts Trudi’s sexy purr into something quite high and fey. She turns her head and glimpses at the empty side of the bed. Perhaps sees the phantom climax that could chill her out. — I don’t want to sit nattering with old people. I’ve nothing to say to them.

— Me neither. But let’s get the boring shit oot ay the way while we’re jet-lagged, Lennox says, shaking the phone.

— Okay, Trudi concedes, — I suppose we’ve got plenty time.

— Attagirl, he responds, instantly aware of the strange in-appropriateness of the term. Lennox can’t look at her, as he calls his friend Ginger. Trudi can hear the voice of the old retired cop through the receiver: grating and loud, charged with the dangerous enthusiasm of Scotsmen bonding.

Lennox puts the phone down. Informs Trudi that Ginger will pick them up later on, and that they’ll get a drink and a bite to eat. Watches something sink inside her. Defensively, he looks across to the table. The glass of water seems to have shifted a few inches to the right.

Then, Trudi’s elevated sigh of resignation: — I’ll only come if you promise not to talk about police stuff.

— Deal. Lennox feels his face muscles relax in relief. — But we should go down for that cocktail first. It’s complimentary, he picks up the voucher they had given him at the desk during check-in. Displays it to her.

A South Beach welcome:

Complimentary afternoon cocktail: 2–4 p.m.

— You have to watch the drinking, Ray. It’s so silly. You put in so much work at NA…

He moves over to the table. The glass from this angle seems normal. — I just want to drink socially. I don’t want to be in recovery all the time. It’s not as if I’m going to get cocaine here, he shakes his head, realising where he is, adding tamely, — even if I wanted to, which I most certainly don’t.

Her eyes roll. She changes tack. — Why don’t you phone your mum? Just to tell her that we got here safely. She’ll be worried.

— No way, Lennox says emphatically. — Let’s grab that cocktail, he urges, trying to keep the need out of his voice.

During the check-in Lennox had already decided that the boutique hotel was not to his taste. The slick metal-and-chrome surfaces, exuberant artwork on the walls, draped mirrors and lean chandeliers didn’t bug him; he has nothing against luxury and decadence. It just felt too public, and when they get down to have their cocktail it’s become very busy at the bar. Lennox kills his vodka Martini quickly. Then he’s struck by an inkling that, with her marginally deeper breathing, and control over her glass so that it makes no sound every time she sets it back down on the marble table, Trudi is as tense as he is. Her behaviour frays his nerves more effectively than any violent outburst, and makes him want to go outside. The people, both staff and customers, strut and preen like catwalk models, everybody sneakily checking out everyone else while all the time cultivating an air of studied aloofness. He looks to the door. — Let’s explore a bit before Ginger comes tae pick us up.

Outside it is hot. He recalls the TV forecaster saying it was unseasonably warm for winter. It was usually only around seventy-five degrees in January, but it has soared into the mid-nineties. Lennox is baking. That is how he feels. Like he is baking in a big oven. His brains a stew in the casserole dish of his skull. It’s too hot to walk far. They sit down on the patio of a bar-restaurant. A flashbulb-smiling girl flourishingly hands them a menu card.

— It’s roastin, he says lazily, from behind his shades as he and Trudi sit al fresco sipping another cocktail, this time a Sea Breeze. They have only gone one block. Collins Avenue on to Ocean Drive. Strutting holidaying youths pass by, enjoying the bounty of their years and wealth; waxed macho boys pumped up with muscle, giggling and pouting girls in bikinis and sarongs, older women trying to emulate them with some help from pills, scalpels and chemicals. Tropically smart Latin men in white suits smoke Cuban cigars the same colour as their girlfriends. Salsa and mambo music fills the air, and a programmed bass pulses out from somewhere. The sea is close, across the busy two-way street. Behind a couple of Bermuda-grass verges, some tarmac and a few palm trees is a strip of sand and then the ocean. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there.

— Ray! Trudi’s hand scalds his forehead. He winces. Like she’d branded him with a heated iron. — You’re burning up!

Rising and skipping off towards the shop next door, Trudi returns with a New York Yankees baseball cap. She pulls it over his head. It feels better. — Sitting frying your brains out! With that haircut you’ve no protection in this sun!

She delves into her straw bag, producing a tube of sunblock and swathing it on his neck and arms, disdainfully regarding his Ace of Spades T-shirt. — A black T-shirt! In this heat! And I don’t know why you won’t wear shorts!

— For wee laddies, he mumbles.

Lennox remembers his mother making similar administrations to him as a boy, at home in the small utilitarian garden with its cut-grass lawn and its paved path meandering down to a ramshackle tool shed. Or in the summer at Dingwall: a rare Highland heatwave when they were staying at his aunt’s. Again at Lloret De Mar, on their first family holiday abroad, with his father’s pal and workmate, Jock Allardyce, and his wife, soon to be ex-wife, Liz. It was also their last, as Avril Lennox’s stomach was swollen with his kid brother, and his older sister Jackie was on the cusp of being too cool for such excursions. He’d met a mangy old dog on the beach and they’d become friends. He’d introduced the animal to his dad, horrified when his father chased it off. — Keep away from that filthy bugger. Rabies, John Lennox had explained in alarm. — Standards of hygiene in Spain are different from Scotland.

He takes the cap off and regards the ubiquitous NY symbol. He reluctantly puts it back on his head, pulling a sour face. Something about it depresses him. It was the sort of hat that might by worn by someone who had been to neither a baseball match nor New York City. The sort of hat Mr Confectioner might have had in his wardrobe.

— What’s wrong with it? Trudi asks.

— I don’t like the Yankees. No Boston Red Sox hats?

— There’s loads in there, I didn’t know what you wanted. I just got it to keep the sun from burning out your brains! It’s New York, she urges.

— This is Florida, Lennox shrugs. He tried to think of a Florida baseball team. The name Merlins seems to ring a bell. The Magical Merlins.

— Yes, but it’s all American and that’s where we are, she says, then sips her Sea Breeze and returns to her notes. — Go and see if they’ll change it if you want… I think Mandy Devlin and her boyfriend should be at the evening do, rather than the church and the meal… what do you think?

— I agree, Lennox says. He gets up, stretches, and steps next door. Some football shirts: Real Madrid, Manchester United, Barcelona, AC Milan. The baseball caps. He chooses a Boston Red Sox number and puts it on. Returning to the patio, he sticks the Yankees one on Trudi’s head. Her hand goes to it, as if he’s messed up her hair, then stops.

She simpers at him, squeezes his good hand. Something rises in him, a surge of optimism, which is crushed when she speaks. — I’m really happy, Ray, she says, but it sounds like a threat. — Are you winding down?

— I need to get the Hearts score. We’re at home to Kilmarnock in the Cup. Shall we find an Internet café soon?

Trudi’s expression is briefly acerbic, then her face lights up. — There’s some stuff I want to show you on this website, some really good ceilidh bands.

She is reading in another magazine about the television actress Jennifer Aniston; her recovery after her divorce from the actor Brad Pitt, now with a different actress, Angelina Jolie. Lennox glances at each magazine on the table. Both were about relationships: one focusing on a day of happiness, the other dealing with a lifetime of misery and uncertainty. He’d glimpsed at it on the plane. Jennifer Aniston was supposed to be with another actor now, whose name he couldn’t recall. Trudi points at her picture on the cover. — It must be so difficult for her. It just goes to show: money can’t buy happiness. She looks at Lennox, who has caught the waitress’s eye and ordered another two Sea Breezes. — We’re okay though, aren’t we, Ray?

— Hmm, he muses to himself, trying to think of the last decent film Brad Pitt was in. Decides that the remake of Ocean’s Eleven wasn’t too bad.

— Well, thank you for that vote of confidence! We’re only going to be spending the rest of our lives together! She looks at him, harsh, shrew-like. He can see the old woman in her. It’s like she’s fast-forwarded forty years. She throws the notepad on the table. — At least pretend to be interested!

Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. Different women, faces, bodies.

The body had seemed to shrink in death, washed up on the rocks at the bottom of that cliff. It was strange, but it hadn’t bothered him at the time. Well, it had bothered him, but not obsessively. He thinks of his old mate, Les Brodie. How they used to shoot seagulls with their air rifles. How, when you shot a gull, it was different from shooting a pigeon. Les and his pigeons. The gull, though, it just reduced, went into nothing, like it was a balloon, all air. The difference between a dead adult body and a dead child’s (and Britney was the first dead child he had seen) was that sense of reduction. Maybe you were just seeing for the first time how small they really were.

Lennox feels his heartbeat rising again, as sweat coats his palms. He forces down a deep breath. That cyanic corpse and its mysterious, unyielding opacity; it was just a body though, Britney had gone; what counted was bringing the bastard who had done her to justice. But now he can see it as vividly as ever; the eyes popping out of the head, the blood vessels on the lids haemorrhaged where he’d throttled her, while penetrating her, wringing the life from her for his own fleeting gratification.

A human life bartered for an orgasm.

He wondered if it was really like that. It was when he tried to imagine the little girl’s fear, her last moments, that those corporeal images came racing back. But did she really look like that? Was it not his imagination filling in the gaps?

No. The video. It was all there. He shouldn’t have watched the video. But Gillman was present, staring coldly at the images Mr Confectioner had filmed. His act demanding that Lennox, as superior officer, had to sit as implacably as his charge, even though every second of it was crippling him inside.

He thought about the moment before he squeezed the trigger, the gull in his sights. That timeless pause before release: the hollow shabbiness inside him afterwards, as it lay small and lifeless on the tarmac or the rocks at the Forth estuary at Seafield.

Les Brodie. The pigeons.

Suddenly he is tuning into a voice.

—… you won’t talk to me Ray, you won’t touch me… in bed. You’re not interested. Trudi shakes her head. Turns in profile. Her eyes and lips are tight. — Sometimes I think that we should just call the whole thing off. Is that what you want? Is it?

An ember of anger glows in his chest. It seems to be coming from so far away, cutting through a maze of paralysis. Ray Lennox looks evenly at her, wants to say, ‘I’m drowning, please, please help me…’ but it comes out as, — We just need to get some sun. A bit of light, likes.

Trudi hauls in a huge intake of breath. — It is a stressful time, Ray. And we really need to make our minds up about the venue. I think that’s the big one hanging over us, and then she gasps, — September is only eight and a bit months away!

— Let’s take it easy tonight, his tones are soothing, — go and meet Ginger back at the hotel.

— What about your Hearts score?

— It can wait till I see the papers. We’re on holiday, after all.

Trudi twinkles, her face opening up further as a carnival float crammed with children in fancy dress chugs along in the traffic of Ocean Drive.

3 Fort Lauderdale

THE MOTTLED LATE-AFTERNOON clouds head in from the Atlantic and the palm trees move loosely in the gentle breeze. Trudi and Lennox have settled back at a table on the hotel’s front patio to wait for Ginger. They people-watch on Collins Avenue, Lennox drinking a mineral water to try and prove some point, when he’s craving alcohol so badly he could commit any number of crimes for a vodka.

He’s changed into a short-sleeved blue shirt and tan-blond canvas trousers. Trudi wears a yellow dress and white shoes. The cloud cover has thickened, and although the sun still pulses out occasionally, she can feel the coolness on her limbs. Then a familiar accent shouts out the surname Trudi has guiltily practised signing, but all she can see is a 4×4 Dodge, which has pulled up outside the hotel. Though its tinted-glass window is wound down, the driver remains concealed. The door opens and a fat man wearing a garish yellow and green shirt emerges, squinting in the sun, before staring at her. — Hey! Princess! he sings. She can tell he’s forgotten her name, as they’d only met once before: back in Edinburgh at his retirement do.

— Ginger! Lennox smiles. He gets up and hugs his old friend. Feels the increased girth. Ginger is a big brown leather suitcase wrapped in a Hawaiian shirt. He gets a thin smile back. — Look, Ray, I’d appreciate it if you didnae call me that here. I’ve never liked it, makes me sound like a fuckin nancy boy.

Lennox nods in taut acquiescence as Trudi reviews her elementary knowledge of Eddie ‘Ginger’ Rogers. A retired Edinburgh cop with nearly forty years’ service on the force. His first wife had died a year before his retirement. He had married Dolores Hodge, an American whom he’d met in a ballroom-dancing chat room. After some Internet romancing and a few transatlantic visits, they had tied the knot, Ginger moving over to his new bride’s home in Fort Lauderdale.

— What’s this? He notes Lennox’s bandaged hand. — Wanking injury? Then, aware of Trudi, he gives a contrite smile. They climb into the 4×4, Trudi in the back, and drive on to Washington Avenue, and down 5th Street. Soon they cross over a long bridge heading towards what Ginger tells them is Miami proper. Trudi watches a rusting, low-built sludge tanker as it creeps past some dazzling white cruise ships berthed at the docks, like a jakey sneaking into a society wedding, and then they’re on a five-lane freeway. It’s a mess: tagliatelle rather than spaghetti junction.

Ginger drives in the aggressive manner of the TV cop, perpetually jumping lanes. Trudi believed that Americans were generally decent drivers compared to the British, being used to travelling on roads actually designed for that purpose. Ginger seems intent on confirming his reputation for cavalier performances behind the wheel. He pulls out in front of some college kids in an unhooded convertible. Despite being in the wrong, his response to their blaring horn is to give them the finger, US style. — Spoiled little cunts, he chuckles, before snorting, — Think they’re entitled. Then he recklessly weaves in front of another car and is tooted again. — No hesitation: reservations are for yuppies and Indians, he grins broadly, glancing back at Trudi. — Awright, princess?

Her tight-stretched, tooth-bearing smile at the back of his head. One hand checks the seat belt; the other, white-knuckled, grasps the exit strap above the door.

Ginger’s section of Fort Lauderdale is situated right by the beach. The apartment is in the Carlton Tower Condominiums, a twenty-storey building behind a Holiday Inn, just one block from the Atlantic Ocean. Lennox has noted the relative proximity of the thin strip of beach to the road in comparison with the art deco district. Externally and from afar, the tower might have given the initial impression of British council flats, but closer examination makes Lennox revise his opinion. The ground level is opened up with floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. They step inside to a large lobby and reception area, the marbled floor and walls impressing him, and Trudi too, he can tell by the arch her biro-thin brows make. It is furnished with couches and coffee tables full of glossy magazines, and decorated with exotic and lavish floral arrangements, which it takes Lennox a couple of glances to ascertain are actually plastic. The concierge, a large black woman, sits behind the reception desk. She smiles at Ginger who waves cheerfully at her. — Nice woman, he says humbly, as if apologising to Lennox for his previous police-canteen racism, and underlining that it’s a thing of the past.

Lennox stifles a chuckle. Scots have schizophrenic views on the issue of ethnicity. As most of them never see a black face from one day to the next in that whitest of countries, they feel free to be either as racist or as right-on as they like, enjoying the extravagance of unearned certainty.

In the elevator, Ginger hits the button for the fourteenth floor. In a playful gesture, he gently and in slow motion punches Lennox’s shoulder, then winks at them both. Trudi grimaces in a nervous smile. They emerge into a tight corridor, seeming to herald a depressing uniformity of brown-doored rabbit hutches, before having their expectations again confounded as they enter an apartment both spacious and luxurious. It has an open-plan living room and kitchen, which leads through sliding glass doors out on to a balcony. There are two bedrooms, both with en suite facilities, in addition to another, larger bathroom.

Lennox can’t believe that a home with two bedrooms can have three bathrooms. He is about to say something when the door opens behind them and an elegant, well-dressed woman who looks to be in her late fifties walks in with a West Highland terrier on a leash. On its release it bounds up to Trudi and Lennox, tail wagging, sniffing proffered, patting hands.

— This is Dolores. Ginger makes the introductions to Lennox and Trudi, both of whom are greeted with great enthusiasm. — And this wee rogue here is Braveheart.

The beast evidently does not like Lennox; a shared ‘Skarrish’ heritage means nothing. It hatefully bares its small front teeth below the rubberlike gums. It’s a narky wee bastard, liable to attack, he reckons.

— Braaay-ve-heart! Dolores warns.

Then the dog seems to collapse a couple of inches and skulks slowly towards Lennox as he sits down on the couch. It briefly looks up as if to bark, but then drops at his feet, coiling around them. — See! Dolores sings in triumph. — He likes you!

— Aye, Braveheart, Lennox says warily, tentatively leaning forward and stroking the animal’s neck, becoming more bullish as his hand sinks into fur and he ascertains how thin it really is. Well chokable, he thinks, relaxing back into the sumptuous settee with cheery malice.

Dolores seems fascinated by Trudi. — Well, aren’t you a pretty one? she luxuriantly observes, looking her up and down appreciatively. Trudi’s coy embarrassment is evident, as her hand involuntarily moves to her hair. Then her face stiffens in anticipation of the wedding guest list rising further.

Dolores takes the bag she is carrying and waltzes gracefully across to the kitchen area. Ginger had said she used to teach dance. Lennox can see she’s light on her feet and in excellent condition apart from a bit of a distended stomach. Like Ginger, she has a sparkle in her eyes under that lacquered hair, which Lennox and some of the other boys on the force would habitually refer to as ‘shagger’s glint’. They wouldn’t be going quietly into old age.

Dolores and Ginger give Trudi and Lennox separate tours. Everything in the apartment is new: pristine, gleaming and dust-free. Lennox notices the smell; that slightly burnt aroma that many places in America seemed to have. It’s probably the cleaning agents they use. He wonders if the UK has a distinctive scent for American visitors and what it’s like. In the master bedroom, Ginger shows off his electronic coin distributor. — You put all the coins in and it sorts them out, up to twenty at a time. Automatically stacked and bound intae paper wrappers. Amazing, eh?

— If you accumulate that many coins, then why no just take them tae the bank?

— Fuck the banks. Ginger drops his voice, taps his skull and winks. — These cunts take the fuckin pish as it is.

In the other room, in spite of herself, Trudi is warming to the earthy candour of this American woman, who is older than her own mother. — My mom married a cop, and she told me not to make the same mistake, Dolores laments. — I did, twice. Two words of advice: short leash.

— I’ll bear that in mind.

Hearing talk of weddings, dresses and venues filtering through the walls, Ginger whispers to Lennox, — The girls seem to have hit it off. What say we slip our markers and I take ye somewhere special?

— Okay, Lennox cagily agrees, wondering how he can sell this to Trudi. The problem in acquiescing to the idea that he’s depressed, or even its more benign bedfellow, ‘under stress’, is that it intrinisically means the ceding of his moral assurances. The potential at least existed for every comment he made to be viewed as a symptom of the disease. And he senses that Trudi’s management of his supposed condition is about control (hers) and disenfranchisement (his). Her logic is that his thoughts will take him back to the trauma of his work, therefore all independent deliberation by him is inherently bad. She will replace this with her projects, with nice things to think about, like the wedding, the new place to live, the furniture, the future children, the next house, that limiting narrative unto death that so terrifies him.

Just then Dolores reappears and announces, — I’m gonna take this beautiful lady of yours away for a little while, Ray, show her some of the bridal stores in town. I guess you boys will have a bit of catchin up to do.

— Aye, sound. Lennox registers Trudi’s sly smile, then Ginger’s raffish wink.

They wait for a few minutes after the women’s departure, then leave and get back into the Dodge. Driving west on Broward Boulevard, they pass a large police station before stopping at the Torpedo men’s club on 24th Ave. They park in the lot behind the one-storey concrete building, which, from the outside, looks like a pillbox. At the front entrance it advertises ‘Friction Dancing’. — This place rules, Ginger informs him.

A huge Hispanic guy in a black T-shirt, pumped up on iron and steroids, stands in the doorway. His threatening scowl dissolves into a broad smile as he sees Ginger. — Hey, Buck, how ya doin, man?

— Awright, Manny, Ginger says, slapping the man’s big, broad back. — This is my buddy Ray, from Scotland.

— Hey! Al-right! Manny sings, as Lennox’s mouth creases in a grin and they are ushered into a dark, cavernous space. Lennox evaluates it as one of the type that cops, villains, daft young lads and sad old men all over the Western world frequent. Then he wonders exactly which category he himself now fell into. An elongated catwalk stage, with several pole-dance podiums branching off it, twists towards the Mecca of a large, glittering island bar. Although it is still early, the place is reasonably busy and quite a few of the tables that line either side of the stage are in full tenure. Lennox knows instantly by the alienation from their clothing, that sense of being dressed by somebody else that all uniformed men give off, that the occupants of one space are off-duty cops.

The waitresses wear tight, white T-shirts that buzz electric blue under neon lights and they work hard keeping the drinks flowing as the dancing girls perform. It’s tame at first, but as the beers go down, they get more raunchy and explicit. Ginger and Lennox order some ribs and fries. — Tell Dolores I was having a tuna salad plate, he says earnestly, — no mayo. She wants me watching my weight. It’s this ballroom-dancing finale we’re in next week.

Lennox nods slowly. Rubs his shorn skull. — The guy on the door called you Buck. What’s all that about?

— Buck Rogers; that’s what they call me here, Ginger mouths in proud, emphatic defiance.

Lennox considers this. Raises his glass to clink it with his friend’s. — Here’s to the twenty-fifth century, he toasts.

The beers are going down nicely, as are the shots of tequila. Lennox rises to go to the restroom. With the drink and his antidepressants, he feels a bit shaky. He steadies himself with one hand as he pishes, heavy, thick and steamy, into the latrine.

Life isn’t so bad. We got the bastard that did Britney. He’s gone.

— Gone like the nonce cunt ye are, Lennox spits at the full-length mirror indented into the tiled wall. He holds his right hand up as if to swear an oath and makes a fist through the slackening bandages and the pain that the drink has dulled.

Going back outside, he heads towards his seat as Tina Turner’s ‘What’s Love Got To Do With It’ blasts from the sound system. But a dancing girl intercepts his journey, rubbing up against him, her pelvic thrusts full on his groin. The girl’s face is garish and almost clown-like under her warpaint, and layers of foundation can’t conceal brutal pockmarks from the harsh overhead spotlights. Wild eyes and a twisted, cruel mouth throw down a gauntlet.

Lennox freezes; stiff everywhere but where she wants him. This is friction dancing. She isn’t going to cease her gyrations till she’s brought him off. He feels a blaze of anger rise in him. This is for old men and losers, for nerds and retards. Clocking the bitter desperation in her eyes, he sees how he’s now a challenge and he will get aroused and come. To force him to take part in the circus and become as desperate and degraded by it as her – it’s the one way for this crackhead stripper to keep face. He understands this as he’s participated in versions of it so many times back home in Edinburgh on police stag nights. He discerns the uptightness on the men’s faces. Knows he’s implicating them all by not playing the game, by being better than them, and humiliating this woman by rejecting the only thing she has to sell, her sexuality, or this cartoon version of it. It was less a self-esteem issue than a professional pride one; this was what she did for a living.

But he can’t do anything other than win this terrible stand-off.

Eventually she gives up and her face contorts as she whispers, — Faggot, spitefully in his ear, then twists with a gleeful smile to rub up against the next sweaty crotch. The men in the bar cheer as one in palpable relief.

He sits beside Ginger, whose head throbs psychedelic purple from an overhead light. His old friend looks at him, first in hostility then in greasy admiration. — Fuck sakes, Lennox, that dance cost me twenty bucks and ye didnae even blaw yir muck! That Trudi lassie, she’s fair got you sorted oot, eh! The beast has been tamed!

Lennox bristles at the use of Ginger’s terminology. — Sorry to waste the dosh. Then he thinks: let him believe what he wants. But now his own mental river is diverting again, away from the stripper, Trudi and Ginger. The drink that had distanced the crime now bubbles it up in his head, like percolating coffee.

Britney Hamil. Now the beast had been tamed. How will Mr Confectioner be serving his sentence? What would he be doing right now? Isolated from all the other prisoners for his own safety – even the other nonces – would his arrogance have evaporated? Lennox suddenly needs to know.

— Do you ever think aboot these cunts we bang up in Serious Crimes? he asks Ginger. — How they can live with what they’ve done?

— They live with what they’ve done cause they’re scum. They couldnae care less. Fuck them, let them rot, his reddening face snarls, as he signals to a waitress for more beer.

It seems to Lennox that this reprimand is as much directed at him as any criminals Ginger can recall. They have another drink, but he senses that things have soured a little.

When Ginger does speak it’s to call a halt to proceedings. — Better no have any more, I’m way over the limit as it is, he gasps. A girl showily licks the fingers that she had previously used to breach herself as she swivels on the catwalk stage in front of him. — Let’s head back over my side and dump the motor, he says, looking at the girl and raising his glass in appreciation, — after this wee cutey-pie has done her thing, but. Christ, Ray, if I was twenty years younger…

— You’d still be auld enough tae be her faither.

— Cheeky cunt.

Ginger’s driving is better with a drink in him; he takes greater care and actually watches the road, as they get down on to the beach area neighbourhood. It looks run-down in the murky twilight. It seems that many local businesses have gone bust or are hanging on by the skin of their teeth. On the block behind the Holiday Inn, drunk, young vacationers and the transient workers and beach bums who survive on their patronage and carelessness, inhabit the bars and cheap eateries. And all around are old people, solitary and depressed. Lennox comments on this as he and Ginger go into an open patio bar, well removed in its grime and sleaze from the sterile glitz of the Miami Beach establishments.

— A lot of poor bastards have retired down here with a partner, who’s since kicked the bucket, and now they cannae afford to move elsewhere. I know tons of codgers in that situation. Ginger swirls back a mouthful of beer and signals for some shots of tequila. — The retirement dream becomes a nightmare, he muses. Two men walk in, hand in hand, and sit in a corner of the bar. — This place was meant for retirees. Now look at it, Poof Central.

They down another few drinks and briefly walk along a strip of beach before heading back up to meet their wives present and future.

Trudi and Dolores have evidently enjoyed their early-evening shopping. — The best time to do it in this heat, Dolores explains, as Trudi defiantly holds up some purchases at Lennox. — It’s stuff I need, Ray. I know that we’re meant to be saving up… but I never ask what you spend your money on.

Resentment bubbles in Lennox. As if I care what she spends her money on. — Who’s asking questions? Ah’ve no said a fuckin word.

— I know that look, Raymond Lennox.

— What look? Lennox protests through his semi-drunken fug. — You’re makin something oot ay nothing. This is ridic, he appeals to Ginger.

But it’s Dolores who pitches in. — Shopping’s what we do best, son. Get used to it, she playfully chides, shifting her gaze to Ginger, — right, lover boy?

— Aye. Ginger flushes through his drink. Lennox thinks it could have been with pride or embarrassment or perhaps a little bit of both.

Ginger Rogers then presents his guests with two alternatives. Either Dolores can run them back to Miami Beach, as he concedes that he’s drunk way too much, or they can go out for a meal at his favourite restaurant and spend the night in the spare room.

— We can get a cab, Trudi suggests.

— Won’t hear of it. Fifty bucks? Robbery! Dolores or me’ll whisk you doon there in the morning.

— Okay, Lennox agrees, heading out on to the balcony and looking over the rail. The Holiday Inn can’t totally obscure the view of the ocean. The darkness has thickened but some heat is still in the air, despite a thin breeze whistling coolly on his arms. Down below, the soft thump of beats from a disco bar. He can tell Trudi isn’t happy. As she would say herself: he knows that face.

Ginger comes out to join him, closing the patio door behind them. He has two cans of Miller in his hand; issues one to Lennox. — Paradise, eh? he says, scrutinising his pal’s reaction.

— Nice, says Lennox, and they bang beer cans together. He knows that he would go crazy here, but each to their own.

— So why the long face, Raymondo?

— The long face is on her through there. Lennox twists round and looks in, fuddled and aggressive in drink. — I don’t give a suffering fuck what she buys. And that makes her worse. What I was meant to say was: ‘C’mon, baby, we’re supposed to be saving up for the wedding,’ so she could go, ‘Don’t spend all your money on drink then.’ Ah didnae gie her thet satisfaction, so she got nippy and had the argument anyway: with herself. Only it’s worse now because I supposedly don’t care aboot the poxy wedding.

Ginger’s eyes take on a manic gleam as they dance in his head. Lennox has the sense that he is watching something moving behind him. — This is your first night here?

— Aye. He briefly glimpses round, but there’s nothing.

— And you’re on holiday?

— Aye.

— And you’re on med leave after stress breakdown?

Lennox can see where this is heading. — Aye.

— And you’re seeing an old buddy you havnae seen in five years?

— Aye, Lennox hesitantly replies, — but aw the same, I—

Ginger cuts him off. — And she’s been hassling ye wi wedding plans?

— Well, aye, I suppose—

— Tell her those three magical little words every woman needs tae hear now and again, he smiles in defiant cheer, — Get tae fuck!

The door slides open and Braveheart charges out on to the balcony, barking skittishly in circles as Dolores shouts, — Buck! Get that Caledonian ass of yours in here. You too, Ray! Bill and Jessica have arrived!

Bill Riordan is a retired New York City police officer. Thin, but looks granite-hewn hard, his whole body like one big bone. The sort of man age had chiselled rather than bloated. His wife, Jessica, is a slender woman with meandering eyes and a lazy smile. Time had given her a light sack of fat under her chin but little anywhere else. They are part of the ballroom-dancing competition, and Lennox is already writing off Ginger’s chances. They move into the kitchen, where Ginger steers Lennox to the hot-dog cooker. — Put the buns and the dogs into vertical slots and they all pop up at once, he announces proudly. — Dolores disnae like me going too crazy with it, he whispers, glancing at Bill, who chats to the women, — likes me to keep the weight doon, wi the competition finals up in Palm Beach next week.

More drinks follow as the evening dissolves around them. They decide they won’t make the restaurant and phone for a pizza delivery. As the party finds its way back out on to the balcony and the plastic chairs, Ginger’s voice rises in a rasping catcall. Lennox dimly remembers drinking sessions past and an obnoxiousness that could come out in him when he was pissed. — You fuckin Paddies, he turns to Riordan, — all you supplied the New World wi was the numbers, the expendable brawn. Fucking worker ants. The Scots, we provided the know-how. He thumps at his chest. — Right, Ray?

Lennox pulls a tight smile.

— That’s a very misty Caledonian perspective, Buck, Bill Riordan cheerfully offers.

— What about Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Wilde? Trudi intervenes. — The Irish have given so much to Western culture.

Ginger is now drunk enough to openly scoff at her.— Couldnae write their names on a giro compared to the bard. Rabbie Burns, right, Ray?

— I’m keepin ootay this one.

— You stop it, Dolores shouts, leaning forward in her chair and punching Ginger in the chest. — I’m Irish. And Danish. And Skats. My paternal grandfather came from Kilmarnock.

She pronounces it Kil-mir-nok.

— A wise choice to get on that boat, Ginger teases, mellowing under her intervention.

Lennox turns to Riordan. — Must have been some tough beats in New York, Bill.

Riordan nods in cautious affirmation. — The city’s a lot different now, Ray. But I loved my time on the force. Wouldn’t have changed a thing.

— It must be so dangerous compared to the UK, all these guns, Trudi shudders, glancing briefly at Lennox.

This time Riordan gestures in the negative. — I certainly wouldn’t like to work in Britain and not have a pistol in my holster.

Trudi clicks her teeth together. She often does that when she’s nervous or excited, Lennox considers. — But isn’t it dangerous? Doesn’t it make you more likely to use the gun? You must have shot a few people, right?

Smiling genially at her Bill Riordan lowers his glass. — Honey, in all my years on the force I shot nobody. I worked some of the toughest precincts in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens. You name it. I’ve never personally known a New York City cop who shot anybody. I unholstered my gun twice in thirty-five years.

Lennox watches her almost purring under his kindly gentleman-uncle patter. Sees the wedding guest list grow by two.

— Uh-oh, cop talk, Dolores gripes, — time to evacuate, girls. She stands, sending her plastic chair hurtling back along the tiled balcony floor. Jessica follows suit. Trudi hesitates for a while, preferring the company of one youngish and two old men, to that of two old women, but realises that Scottish sexist protocol will set the social agenda tonight, and follows back through to the lounge.

Ginger cranes his neck to watch the sliding glass door slurp along its runner, before thudding closed. — Course it’s aw fucked now, he slurs, as he pours some shots from a tequila bottle he’s opened, — the job. It’s the same everywhere. The high-flyers come in, tell all us old pros how it’s done, eh, Bill?

— I guess, Riordan smiles warily. Like Lennox, he seems keen on avoiding the fight that the host is spoiling for.

— Ray? Ginger challenges, his eyes narrowing on his ex-colleague.

Lennox feels himself swallow his beer in a hard gulp. That promotion was eight years ago. His career has stagnated since, but some cunts wouldnae let it go. He shrugs again in a non-committal manner.

— I reckon that’s the way of the world, Buck, Bill Riordan chuckles.

— Aye, but it shouldnae be. Ginger closes one eye, focusing the other in accusation on Lennox. — Polis, they call them. That job you got, that should have gone tae somebody like Robbo. Now there wis a polisman!

Lennox takes in a long breath through his nose, pleasantly surprised to hear his sinuses pop. — Robbo was a fuckin washed-up nutjob, he spits. And he wants to add: And now I’m just like him. Just like the lot of youse.

— A fuckin good cop, Ginger mumbles, seeming to run out of steam. Then he asks, — How’s Dougie Gillman? Some boy him, eh, Ray… His voice tails off.

— The same, Lennox says through tight lips.

— Course… ah forgot that you and Gilly had that wee fawoot. Kissed and made up yet?

— No.

A silence falls. Rather than let it hang, Lennox rises and heads through to the open-plan lounge where Jessica is playing with the dog and Dolores is teaching Trudi some dance steps. — I’m heading for my scratcher, he announces. — Jet lag kicking in.

— Ah… lightweight, Trudi teases, now lost in the drink and the dance.

In the en suite bathroom he washes down his last two antidepressants and prepares for another night, hoping he’s ingested enough to obliterate its horrors. Sliding into the bed, he listens to the chatter and laughter from the front room dissolve into the madness inside his head. Though exhausted, a harsh, regressive calculus seems to dictate that sleep will be denied him again. Instead, he has thought.

What was it Toal said in his briefing about Angela Hamil? – A wanton slut, he’d ventured, putting his pipe back in his mouth and sucking on it. Since the ban he wasn’t allowed to smoke it in the office now, but he still brought it out as a prop, chewing on the stem when he was nervous. Then he’d added, — I reckon that it’s some scumbag she’s had in her orbit. You know the kind of rubbish the likes of that woman’s bound to attract.

Lennox blinks, tugging on the duvet. Images of Angela, her straw hair and haggard face, form into clarity around him, not like in a dream because he is painfully conscious that he’s in this bed.

Then he can see him, Mr Confectioner: his cold, fishlike eyes, his monstrous, rubbery, scandalised lips, and Britney, helpless, at his feet.

And Ray Lennox thinks of that balcony outside, beyond the cackling party. Just to step over that railing and let go. To be away from it all: the Nonce, Britney. Just how hard could it be?

4 Edinburgh (1)

IT WAS THE morning following the disappearance. You’d broken off a long session sifting through data, stealing a few hours of sleep at your Leith flat. Awakening with a start in disorientating blackness, your missed calls list told you that Keith Goodwin had phoned. You’d forgotten about last night’s NA meeting. It was still shy of 6 a.m. when you were back at Police HQ’s IT lab, reabsorbed in the CCTV footage.

Not that there was much of it. The mind-boggling network of cameras that recorded every Briton’s movements on an average of between ten and forty times a day, depending on your source, had thinned out when it left the city centre and was threadbare by the time it got to Britney’s housing scheme. There was some coverage of her yesterday morning: a grainy shot on security film that lasted just under a minute as she left her block of flats, school-bound, then a few beats more, courtesy of a speed camera, as she traipsed towards the roundabout. You deployed every program and procedure that might enhance these shabby images. You stretched them out, slowed them down, closed in and pulled out to scan the peripheries and all the nooks and crannies where somebody might be lurking. From the back of Britney’s head and the side of her face, you’d try to trace her line of vision, to see the world through her gaze. Like a fevered prospector, you sifted through the data swarm hoping to find a pixel of gold that might provide a clue to the kidnapper’s identity. Nobody in Lothian and Borders Police knew more about sex offenders. And nobody was more inclined to cast the net wider.

Through the repeat black-and-white viewings of the pensive child, the name Robert Ellis kept resonating in your skull. A man who’d been under lock and key for three years now for the murder of two young girls, one in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the other in Manchester. Britney’s case seemed to have many of the same characteristics as the murders of Nula Andrews and Stacey Earnshaw. Predictably, Ellis had protested his innocence to those heinous crimes.

The other name that came back to you was George Marsden, part of the Hertfordshire team who had put Robert Ellis away for the kidnap and murder of twelve-year-old Nula. The prosecution had established that Ellis was prone to hanging around the local park where the girl had last been seen, by a tree-lined path that she was traversing en route to her aunt’s.

Only George believed that they’d got the wrong man. There were similarities with the case of Stacey Earnshaw, whose body had been found dumped in woods in the Lake District two years previously. When Hertfordshire Police hauled in Ellis, they discovered he’d had a girlfriend in Preston whom he’d visited regularly around the time of Stacey’s murder. The girl, Maria Rossiter, disclosed some fairly mundane details of their relationship to a tabloid, which were luridly recast and spiced with innuendo. Alongside a disturbing tape Ellis involuntarily made, this helped establish his guilt. George Marsden was sure it was same person who snatched Nula Andrews who had got Stacey Earnshaw in Manchester. Only he was absolutely convinced that it wasn’t Ellis. In Welwyn Garden City, a white van had been reported leaving the side street adjacent to the wooded parkland near the time of Nula’s disappearance. Now Ellis was inside and White Van Man was back.

You’d felt a disturbing weight settle around your limbs as you’d looked up at the wall clock at around 9 a.m. It was now over twenty-four hours since Britney had gone. You opted to give those stinging eyes a rest, head to the Stockbridge Deli and get another black coffee and call up George Marsden. You were on friendly terms, having got drunk together after a DNA-testing training course in Harrogate several years back.

—White van, was it? George casually asked after you’d explained the crime in broad brushstrokes. Refusing to confirm or deny this detail as a smile pulled at your features, you hoped your silence didn’t speak too many volumes.

You seemed to get immediate pay-off from the break when you returned to the footage. Once again Britney stepped out of her stair, turned, but this time you noticed that she seemed to give a half-wave; a furtive acknowledgement to someone approaching from her right. An enhancement of the image confirmed this impression. The person was out of shot but would be heading into the stair. You looked at the list of names of the neighbours. Then you loaded up the sex offenders register and the image of Tommy Loughran leapt out at you.

When you got down to the Hamil family’s house with Notman, it was discovered that Loughran was the man just beyond camera range. He’d been walking his dog yesterday morning. And he was the people’s choice, with votes cast in brick through his shattered window, and campaign graffiti dubbed on his wall:

NONCES DIE

The security guard, an old flasher, was an ex-alco turned Christian teetotaller. He carried the air of the sinner who had repented with gusto but still expected more retribution before the slate could hope to be wiped clean. Such was Loughran’s masochistic self-loathing, you figured that he could easily have been induced to admit that he’d committed the crime. The only problem was that after taking his dog home and seeing Britney leave for school, he boarded a crowded bus to a cinema, where local students had started a morning movie club. The transaction on his Bank of Scotland card and the film theatre’s records indicated that Loughran was watching the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man. You recalled how the movie – about a self-righteous, liberal environmentalist, eaten by the creature he was trying protect – was a hit in the police canteen. Remembered Herzog dismissing the subject’s claims of the spiritual superiority of the bear. In the face of the beast, the German film-maker saw only ‘the cruel indifference of nature’. — What do you think the message of that film was, you’d asked the bemused Loughran.

Billy Lumsden, a janitor at Britney’s school who regularly talked to the girl (although he talked to most of the kids), was late for work on the day of the disappearance and was taken in to assist the inquiry. You learned that his marriage had broken up the previous year, when he’d left his wife and their three kids. Lumsden had already been suspended for being intoxicated on duty, and he confessed to you his feelings of loneliness and despair. The compassion you experienced for this man shocked you in its intensity. What if Lumsden was the beast? But he seemed so broken, so quietly desperate. Then it was established that his mother had suffered a bad fall at her home. Neighbours and a local shopkeeper verified his presence four miles away at the time of Britney’s vanishing.

The case continued to seep under your skin. The clock was ticking. The disappearance of a child was harrowing enough. But it was also showing you how the vulnerable were lining up to be devoured by the criminal justice system. The potential for miscarriage was so strong everywhere. It sowed a sickening moral relativism into your psyche, spreading a rash of doubt and uncertainty. You steeled yourself with the thought that somebody had taken Britney. She couldn’t have just vaporised into the misty air in those three minutes she turned the corner into Carr Road out of sight of Stella and Andrea. Somebody was evil. And you vowed that you were going to get them.

The starting point had been checking out the men who came into contact with the girl, at school, home and work, and slowly eliminating them from the investigation. Britney’s biological father was off the list; long estranged from the family, he was on an oil platform in the North Sea. One man remained unaccounted for and, chillingly, he’d vanished around the same time as the child. They couldn’t find her grandfather, Ronnie Hamil, at his flat in Dalry. Neighbours informed you that this was nothing new; Ronnie could vanish for days at a time when his giro arrived. It had been Gillman who had cottoned on to the grandfather connection first. — That cunt’s up tae something, he’d sneered over a photograph of Ronnie with Angela and the girls. — Auld Gary Glitter.

You put everyone in the team on a full-time search for Ronnie Hamil. All squad cars were instructed to be on the lookout for him. His tenement flat was staked out around the clock. The team spent hours visiting his haunts: the bookies, the off-licences and the bars of Dalry and Gorgie Roads. But you declined to join the hunt. Try as you might, you couldn’t stop yourself pursuing another avenue. — I’m heading off to do some snooping around, you’d informed Bob Toal.

Toal had given you his trademark lemon-sucking look. He knew you were up to something. Somehow you’d suspected this wasn’t going to be a typical child sex case; a bubbling in your innards told you that the trail wouldn’t lead to a traditional British nonce. You’d studied the mugshots of every paedophile on the register: the priests, schoolteachers and scoutmasters; the pervert uncles, opportunistic stepfathers and twisted blood-fathers with their arrogant and chilling rationalisations. Nobody fitted the bill. It seemed an American-style crime, or rather the kind of crime of US fiction, as you supposed that real American crimes were like British ones. But it was culturally American: a lone drifter, a predator, not driving across long and lonely interstate freeways over a vast continent, but shuffling along in a white van through crowded, nosy Britain.

What you did was drive to the airport, surreptitiously boarding a lunchtime flight to Gatwick, then jumping on a train down to Eastbourne, where George Marsden now lived. He’d resigned after the Nula Andrews case and now installed security systems and offered advice to nervous retirees. George had never struck you as a maverick. Ex-forces, Royal Marines; had fought in the first Gulf War. A straight-backed divorcee with a rugby player’s build, a floppy head of thick grey hair and sportive smile that suggested he wouldn’t spend too many lonely nights. With his pressed trousers and freshly laundered shirts, everything about him suggested steadfast adherence to procedure. Except that when he’d seen the evidence and it didn’t add up, he’d lost faith.

Over espresso in a café, you and George watched his prospective clients amble along the seafront as he explained that Ellis had been the town bad boy back in Welwyn. A charismatic and sly young man, he wasn’t a hard case, but was somehow able to get tougher souls to do his bidding. Ellis had several offences, mainly burglary, but there had been one charge of rape, dropped through lack of evidence. While there was nothing to link him to minors, he was easy to detest; the sort of shitbag that every community manages to produce. Nobody, police or public, would lament him being banged up for a long time. Nula Andrews was the opposite: small, frail, elfin-faced, an innocent looking much younger than her twelve years. You recalled the picture of her they’d circulated, and those blazing doe eyes that blitzed into the psyche of the British public. Nula was on her way to help her aunt with some decorating. She was easy to cast as Little Red Riding Hood to Ellis’s Big Bad Wolf. So Robert Ellis became the most hated man in Britain: a Huntley, a Brady. And, in a sickening fashion, he did make an unsolicited confession of sorts.

But whatever Ellis was, he was not guilty of this crime. George Marsden was having none of it and honour compelled him to resign, ending his police career on a sour note. He had a troubling belief in right and wrong. If it was religion, it wasn’t the insurance policy stuff most people took out by nipping to church on Sunday. So George talked through the Nula Andrews case with you: the similarities and differences to Britney. Then you’d discussed Stacey Earnshaw, snatched near Salford Shopping Centre. — It wasn’t Ellis, he said emphatically.

Every city produced its share of Ellises. Bob Toal was anxious to see if any in Edinburgh could be linked in some manner to Britney. He himself had cried wolf about retiring for years and now that his compulsory date loomed, he wanted to do so on a high. Some sections of the press, which had originally crucified Ellis, now, in light of Britney’s case, had started to hint at a grave miscarriage of justice. The public, meantime, were doing what the public will do in such instances: clamouring for a body.

You hadn’t told a soul about the Eastbourne visit and feared the phone call that might force the truth, but received nothing other than routine messages informing you Grandad Ronnie’s whereabouts still hadn’t been uncovered. Guilt was beginning to strike hard; you felt you should have been knocking on doors and sitting in cramped vans on stake-outs with the others. You’d fallen asleep on the plane back to Edinburgh, not fully waking up till you picked up the local newspaper at an airport stand to see Britney’s face, with a vibrant, insolent grin, staring at you. Tomorrow it would go national. You took a taxi back to your Leith flat, in a new development by the docks. You were planning on speaking to Toal about the Ellis case. Then you realised that in your tiredness you’d neglected to switch on your mobile after coming off the flight. There was a message from Trudi and two from your boss. — Think we’ve got our man, Ray, he’d chirped in the last of them.

You were sure you knew who this was, but when you headed down to HQ you were surprised to find Ronnie Hamil still missing and a youth called Gary Forbes in custody. Forbes had confessed that he had taken Britney, killing her and burying her body in woodlands in Perthshire. Then you looked at Bob Toal, now utterly despondent; between leaving that message and you joining him, Toal’s confidence in this arrest had completely evaporated. It wasn’t surprising; Forbes was an idiot, desperate for attention. A gangling, introverted young man, he was obsessed with murders and serial killers and kept scrapbooks documenting their deeds. You’d watched this sad, socially neglected teenager revel in his faux bad-boy status. He was already clearly fantasising about the crazy women who would write and visit him in prison. Worst of all, though, was the way your investigative team were desperately stretching him to fit the template. Seizing on pathetic anecdotes; the neighbour who claimed he’d tortured a budgie, the young cousin who’d sustained a bad wrist-burn at his hands.

— Is this the best we can do? you’d asked. You looked around at the faces in the office; Harrower, Notman, Gillman, Drummond, McCaig.

Toal, meanwhile, sat in an ulcerous silence.

— We can comb the Highlands at this halfwit’s instigation and we’ll just be wasting manpower, Bob, you’d said. — Let’s get him to show a couple of cops where he’s supposedly hidden the body, then charge him with wasting police time.

— Yes, Toal snapped grimly, scarcely moving. — Get on to it, he’d said to Gillman, nodding curtly. The others took their cue to leave. Toal shut the door behind them, his expression and body language warning you to brace yourself. — Where in hell’s name have you been? Why did you have your phone switched off?

— You’re not going to like this.

Toal hadn’t moved a muscle.

— I flew down to Gatwick and met George Marsden. He was investigating officer on the Nula And—

— I know who the fuck he is, Ray, Toal had spat. — He’s trouble! Then your boss shook his head in disbelief, — You took off down south to meet a bitter ex-copper, a civvy, when your team are looking for a missing girl and a prime suspect? I’m disappointed in your judgement, Ray. Very, very disappointed.

You’d wanted to discuss Welwyn and Manchester, but it wasn’t the time. Anybody who had made a serious study of the latter case would have seen that there was no way Robert Ellis could have kidnapped Stacey Earnshaw. And the evidence tying him to Nula Andrews was highly contentious. But it meant taking on senior police officials and judges. It wasn’t a war you felt you could even start at this point, let alone hope to win.

Toal was incredulous. — Do you know that Ronnie Hamil’s still missing?

— We’re doing everything we can to find him, you’d said, shabbily.

— No. Your team are doing everything they can to find him. Toal’s voice was getting high and excited. — You won’t solve this case dicking around in Welwyn Garden City or Manchester. It’s the family that’s the key, mark my words! Find Ronnie Hamil, Ray!

You nodded meekly at your boss and looked forward to another long night.