‘Don’t be a dick.’
‘We could be making a difference somewhere else, that’s all I’m saying.’ He hollowed his chubby cheeks, then hissed out a billow of work-shy smoke. ‘Let someone else carry the can.’
She scowled at him. ‘We’re supposed to be—’
A snapppp rang out from somewhere behind her and Lucy whirled around, eyes raking the gloom.
No sign of life.
She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’
‘Shhhh!’ Lucy stood perfectly still, head cocked to one side, listening.
But the only sound was the Dunk’s wheezy breathing.
Maybe it was just a dead branch, breaking under its own weight? Must happen all the time in a forest this size, right? Didn’t have to be anything sinister. Nothing to worry about.
Yeah...
Then why did she have that weird feeling she was being watched again? Like spiders crawling up the skin of her back.
Lucy did a slow three-sixty, squinting out into the shrouded woods. No sign of anyone.
Been wandering about in here too long, that was the problem. Starting to see and hear things. Next stop: squirrel fur, mud, and Dunk tartare.
She pulled out her phone and checked the map again. The cottage they were after wasn’t considered important enough to feature, and the satellite image showed nothing but a lumpy green sea of treetops. ‘Why the hell didn’t the search team put some sort of GPS marker on the place, so we could actually find it?’
‘Cos they’re idiots?’ A rapid series of rasping coughs barked out of his gob, followed by another gobbet of brown and a grimace.
Well, there was no point just standing here, was there?
‘Maybe this way?’ She headed off, deeper into the forest with the Dunk wheezing along behind her.
The house, when they finally found it, buried away in the woods, couldn’t have looked less like a gingerbread cottage if it tried. Its roof sagged, one gable wall exposed where the harling had crumbled away, the mortar missing between the rough lumps of sandstone it’d been built out of. Two small windows, devoid of glass, one either side of the gaping doorway, turned the building into a howling skull. A chimney breast should’ve poked up from each gable end, but the one on the left had collapsed at some point, leaving a ragged stump that played home to a trio of jackdaws — lurking shadows in the gloom. They stared down with glittering gimlet eyes as Lucy and the Dunk staggered into the dank little clearing out front.
There must’ve been a garden at some point, but all that remained was a bunch of straggly bushes and overgrown weeds, delineated by nothing more than the vague memory of a tumbledown wall partially consumed by ferns and moss.
‘Oh, thank... thank God.’ The Dunk grabbed his knees, bent over like a broken paperclip as his back heaved. Hauling in the breaths. ‘Thought we’d... never... never get... here.’
According to the file, it had been a gamekeeper’s cottage, back when most of Moncuir Wood was still part of Lord Dundas’s hunting estate. A rough place, thrown together to house some bastard whose job it would’ve been to clype on anyone hungry enough to risk a backside full of buckshot in exchange for a rabbit to feed their starving family.
The Dunk let go of his knees and slumped back against a tree instead, wafting a pudgy hand in front of his flushed and sweaty face. ‘One thing... one thing’s for sure... the Bloodsmith knew where... this place was.’
‘You’re a wreck.’ Lucy opened the Operation Maypole folder and pulled out the sheets on Abby Geddes again. ‘Right: two years ago, fifteenth of October; Abby was seen leaving work at five past six by one Byron Moore. Byron said they were meant to go to the pub, but she begged off.’
‘Oh, I remember Byron Moore — greasy as a chip pan. Me and Emma interviewed him, but his alibi was sound.’
Right: first things first. Lucy pulled out her phone, brought up the map, and added a GPS marker for the cottage. At least this way it’d be easy enough to find again. ‘How long do you think it’d take to walk here from the call centre? Half an hour?’
‘Yeah, if you didn’t get lost in these buggering woods.’ He pulled out an off-grey hanky and wiped the back of his neck. ‘And even if you didn’t, why would you? Not like it’s a tourist destination, is it?’
True. ‘Come on then.’ Lucy clambered over what was left of the garden wall and picked her way across the uneven ground to the cottage. Its front door had disappeared at some point, leaving nothing but the rusty strap hinges behind, poking out from the darkness beyond.
The Dunk peered over her shoulder. ‘Wow. Creepy. We going in?’
‘No, Dunk, we came all that way to stand in this lovely garden, enjoying the view.’ She killed the map on her phone and called up the torch app instead.
Its hard white circle swept across the doorway, pulling a crappy crumbling floor into view — rectangles of chipboard, with big rat-chewed holes in them. You could tell by the liquorice-coloured jelly-bean droppings that ran along the skirting boards. What little wallpaper remained was faded and peeling, unblemished by graffiti. Because who in their right minds would schlep all the way out here just to do a little light vandalism?
Lucy stepped over the threshold and the floor groaned beneath her feet. It was cold enough outside, but in here her breath came out in a cloud of bright white where it hit the torchlight, fading to a ghost, then gone for good. ‘OK, so we can be pretty sure Abby Geddes didn’t meet the Bloodsmith here. She’d never be able to find the place.’
Lucy swept her torch beam around a shortish corridor, leading off left and right. A closed door lurked at either end, three more doors on the wall in front of her, paintwork flaking and mouldy. A large hole in the flooring, showing off woodwormed joists like hollow ribs.
She picked her way along the outside where the chipboard butted up against the skirting board — just in case the middle bit gave way — inching closer to the hole. ‘Did you get anything on CCTV?’
The Dunk stuck his head into the cottage. ‘Can you smell that? Kind of nippy, sour, and widdly.’
‘It’s the rats. Now: CCTV?’
‘God, I hate rats.’ But he crept into the corridor anyway. ‘Call-centre security cameras show her walking away from the front of the building about ten past six. Normally went out back to the car park, but her Ford Ka was busy failing its MOT at the time, so she got the bus that morning.’
Those joists didn’t look particularly trustworthy — the pale wood was all crumbly at the edges and pocked with little black holes as if someone had thrown hundreds of darts at it. The first joist moaned like a dying dog when she put her foot down, but didn’t collapse, so she tried the next one too. ‘Business park?’
‘Seems Logansferry Industrial Estate is in dispute with the company that’s meant to maintain the security cameras. Haven’t been working for two-and-a-bit years. Emma and me went through every company on the estate, but there’s no footage of Abby Geddes walking past.’
Interesting. So, either she purposefully took a route that avoided CCTV, or she met someone who did. Or maybe she didn’t show up walking on the pathways because someone gave her a lift?
The third joist complained even more when Lucy put her full weight on it, and so did the one after that. Little flakes of dry rot crumbled beneath her feet to fall away into the darkness.