He held the image up in front of them and Emily Channing screamed. Her husband’s gaze fell to the floor.
‘It isn’t her,’ he mumbled.
His wife screamed again, this time at him.
‘Oh Ted.’ Hot tears were streaming down Mrs Channing’s face. ‘Of course it is. We knew,’ she shouted at him. ‘We both knew. Of course we did.’
Ted turned from his wife and, for no other reason than to avoid her gaze, faced the opposite wall.
‘Every time it appeared on the news,’ his wife continued. ‘Every time it was mentioned on Crimewatch or Newsnight. Every time, we’d both blank it as if it had absolutely nothing to do with us. Never even so much as an “Oh, that girl must be about Claire’s age” or “Oh, I wonder if…”. Nothing. We shut it out and just refused to…’
Emily Channing stopped mid-sentence and hammered the heel of her hands onto her husband’s back, thumping them off him but still not achieving the desired effect. He continued to face the far wall, head bowed.
‘You’re still doing it,’ she shrieked at him. ‘Face me, Ted. Face the truth. We can’t keep hiding from this.’
She thumped her husband again and he slumped to his knees, put there more by the revelation he’d been shunning than the renewed pummelling on his back. Even when he was on the floor, she continued to hit him and he refused to acknowledge a single blow.
‘Mrs Channing,’ Danny gently chided her.
She turned quickly, as if surprised there was anyone else in the room, and looked back and forth between Danny and her husband until she realised what she’d been doing and instead cradled him, caressing his greying hair.
‘We knew and we didn’t,’ she tried to explain to Danny, her face streaked from crying, her eyes red. ‘We shut off. We shut down. The police came to the door and asked if the girl in Scotland might be Claire but we told them it couldn’t be, she wasn’t there, she didn’t own clothes like that girl did. And that was true. It was never, ever mentioned. Not between us. But we both thought it. I did. Ted… Ted must have too. If we didn’t mention it, then it wasn’t true and one day she would walk back through the door…’
‘No.’
The monosyllable was blurted out from Ted Channing in a single sob, trying to cut off his wife’s seeming acceptance of the unacceptable. She pulled his head closer to her but another muffled ‘No’ could still be heard.
‘The argument was about nothing, you see,’ Emily continued, her voice wavering and choking back fresh tears. ‘Nothing at all — just teen stuff. Claire was always a free spirit. So when she said she was leaving we didn’t pay much attention. Then when she did go we just thought she’d come back in her own time. And we thought that and thought that for… forever.’
Danny nodded gravely, touched by the couple’s grief.
‘What is it that you know, Mr… Mr…?’
‘It’s Neilson, Mrs Channing. We have uncovered witnesses from the winter of 1993, when we believe Claire was in the area of the Lake of Menteith. One of them has positively identified a girl matching her description…’
Somewhere during the previous conversation, Winter had tuned out. He didn’t know the point at which he could no longer hear anything that was being said in the room but he slowly became aware that all he could hear was the faint bell that was ringing in the recesses of his mind. Almost un consciously, he had turned away from Danny and the Channings and had gone back to the sideboard with its assortment of photographs. He stared at it, absorbing the image and trying to join up pathways, trying to be certain.
Suddenly he knew how he could be sure: his camera. He turned back to where it sat on the arm of the Channings’ printed sofa and grabbed it. He flipped furiously through the images on his memory card, desperately trying to find the set of photographs he wanted. He was sure — something inside him was screaming that he was right — but he had to see it. He rattled through the images, going past what he was looking for and back again, past the dog cut in half on Swanston Street, past the severed head in Cambuslang, past Dunbar’s severed hands on Mansionhouse Drive, past the photographs at the Western and The Rock then back until he came to the photographs he had taken in Greg Deans’ house on Vancouver Road.
There it was. The image he’d taken uninvited from the framed photo on the Deans’ mantelpiece: Deans with his wife and daughter at a wedding. The blonde wife in her pillar box hat and the flame-haired daughter with the unmistakable heart-shaped rhinestone necklace.
‘Deans,’ he said out loud.
CHAPTER 54
Narey had only seen photographs of Peter ‘Paddy’ Bradley from his student days and she’d never seen him with his throat cut and swathed in blood but there was no doubt whatsoever that he was the man sitting dead in the car in front of her right then.
She closed the car door and turned to look at the stunned faces around her. She decided that the best of a bad bunch on the lakeside was a sensible enough guy in his mid-thirties, broad in his red ski jacket and intimidating enough to make others do what they were told.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked him, showing him her ID.
‘Bruce. Bruce Gleeson.’
‘Okay, Mr Gleeson. You’re in charge. No one other than a police officer opens that door. Can you do that for me?’
‘Um, yes. No problem.’
‘Good. Thank you. And you…’ she said to a boy in his late teens. ‘I need you to run to the top of the road or else the first police officer you see and get them down here. Tell them what’s in the car and get them to inform Strathclyde Police as well as Central. Got that? Strathclyde.’
The kid nodded and ran off in the direction of the road, panic and determination written all over his face.
‘The rest of you get back from the car. It’s not a show. Go.’
As the crowd backed away, sure to return, Narey broke into a run and sprinted across the car park to the side of the hotel where it met the lake. Her stay there with Tony seemed so long ago and yet it had been the start of all this. Any thoughts that might have turned to regret were dismissed as soon as she saw the frozen lake. The sight that greeted her pushed all other considerations aside: it was teeming with people.
There were so many of them that even trying to put a figure on it seemed impossible. Three thousand? Six? The ice swarmed with bodies: all shapes, sizes and ages. They crawled over the frozen lake like multi-coloured ants, scurrying this way and that, blurring together and moving apart. They were skating, sliding, walking, curling, running. They were everywhere. And somewhere in the middle of them, seen but unseen, was Greg Deans.
It was obvious now that Deans had abducted Bradley rather than the other way round. Of course it was possible that Deans had overcome his captor and killed him in a struggle but that wouldn’t have explained the mark of zip ties round Bradley’s wrists. It had been Deans all along. He had played them and he was still playing them. The return trip to the Lake of Menteith was all part of his grand production, which meant the final drama had to be played out on the island. The only thing that he couldn’t have accounted for was the number of people there and that, perhaps, had thrown his plans into disarray.
Narey took her mobile from her pocket to check how far away her back-up was but saw that she had no signal and remembered Tony’s constant complaining about not being able to use his phone when they’d been at the hotel.
She could wait or she could go after Deans alone. The deciding factor was her dad: she’d said she would fix this for him and she would. His last case would be closed.
She knew Deans couldn’t be far ahead of her and desperately tried to spot him among the thousands on the ice — so many of them taking the chance to walk across to Inchmahome. The difference was that Deans would be on his own; almost everyone else was in couples or groups. Her eyes searched deeper into the lake, over sledges and dogs, teams of curlers, kids playing impromptu ice hockey, nervous couples tiptoeing across the frozen playground. It was hopeless. She’d never see him. Looking around she saw a couple standing on the shore, about twenty yards away, watching the action, and noticed that the man had a pair of binoculars round his neck. She ran over, shouting to them as she went.