Dark Flight Page 16

  ‘Then I suggest DS McNab and a forensic,’ Bill went on, trying to focus solely on the task in hand. ‘Abel’s torso suggested he came from the Kano area. Forensic can confirm this once they’re out there.’

  ‘Dr MacLeod is the most experienced.’ The DS was thinking aloud.

  Bill wanted to steer him away from that line of thought, but how could he explain that McNab and Rhona were not a combination she would relish? Some more private business the DS knew nothing about.

  ‘Okay. Set it up,’ DS Sutherland said firmly. ‘As soon as possible. And can we go light to the press on the ritual aspects of the latest death? Talk only of a stabbing?’

  ‘The stab wound killed him. That’s what we’re saying.’

  ‘You’re certain the death is linked to Stephen’s abduction?’

  ‘Malcolm Menzies was guarding the building on the waste ground. His mother brought in a mobile he’d been using to keep contact with whoever was paying him to keep people away from there.’

  The DS nodded, acknowledging the connection. He shuffled some papers. The perfect cue for Bill’s exit.

  ‘And let me know what happens on the home front.’

  Bill gave an almost imperceptible nod. Like hell he would.

  There was a strained atmosphere in the team office and not just because of the latest death. The police station was like a tiny village where gossip was as swift moving as a westerly breeze. As soon as Bill was called in front of the Super, the world and his granny knew about it.

  The faces were half turned towards him, not staring, but indicating that if he wanted their attention, he could have it pronto.

  Bill stopped in front of the wallboards that held the photos of all the victims. The beaten slumped body of the old woman; her daughter splayed out like a mutilated carcass; the boy, sweet and innocent in school uniform. A constructed image of what the computer department thought Abel would have looked like. And now Malcolm Menzies. A victim of his own stupidity and the evil that surrounded this case.

  Bill outlined the information from passport control to the waiting group. When he mentioned a boy and a girl had flown to Kano with the Olatundes, there was a collective gasp. Everyone in that room made up their mind that the child must be Stephen – the alternative was unthinkable.

  ‘We’re sending out a team to locate and hopefully bring back Olatunde and the man who professed to be Carole Devlin’s husband.’

  ‘Who’s going, sir?’ an unidentified voice called from the back.

  ‘Not sure yet,’ he lied. He wouldn’t be short of volunteers, but the boss had spoken and his will must be done. ‘Okay, we need everything possible on Malcolm Menzies. School, friends. Bring in his mate Danny Boy again. And in particular we need to know who he was getting his gear from.’

  ‘Can I speak to you, sir?’ Janice asked. ‘It’s about the white van.’

  He motioned her into his office.

  The van had been spotted after hours of trawling through transport video recordings of the motorway system that riddled the centre of Glasgow and its surrounds. A van with the number plate supplied by Mr Martin, S 064 OXO.

  The vehicle, according to Pastor Achebe, was not used directly by his church. It did a variety of charity work, having been made available to cancer charity shops, housing the homeless, helping the aged, and anyone else that needed something shifted – household articles, clothing and occasionally people.

  ‘He sounded genuine,’ she told Bill.

  He grunted but kept his mouth shut and let her go on.

  ‘He had a list of all users of the van. The arrangement is pretty flexible. The church pays for its upkeep, insurance, tax, repairs and so on. The other charities supply the drivers.’

  ‘So what was on the tape?’

  ‘The van was recorded heading south via the M74 on Tuesday morning at six o’clock.’

  ‘And, let me guess. None of the charities have seen it since?’

  ‘We’re working our way through the list.’

  ‘Who used it last?’

  ‘We don’t know that yet. Sorry, sir.’

  Her apology was unnecessary. DC Clark had been working harder than he had, and with more focus and dedication.

  ‘There’s one more thing.’

  He waited, sensing how important this might be from the look on her face.

  ‘Vice called when you were at the mortuary. They raided a sauna reported as working illegal immigrants. A Nigerian girl, in her early teens, said she’d been brought here by force from Lagos.’

  Vice had taken the girl to the safe suite. She sat hunched in the corner of a sofa. When she saw Bill, she visibly retreated, her expression one of terror. Bill had interviewed countless victims in his many years as a police officer, but he had never seen such abject fear in a woman’s eyes. He was shocked.

  The female officer in charge of the unit suggested he retreat and leave DC Clark to observe. He could watch from behind the glass screen.

  Bill took her advice and went next door. A vice squad detective, Andy Davies, was waiting for him there.

  ‘We found her in a room in the basement,’ Andy told him. ‘The girls on duty upstairs denied all knowledge of her. We would have missed her except one of our bright new recruits, a structural engineer in his former life, insisted there had to be another level to the building. The entrance was behind a cupboard.’

  They had brought in an interpreter, a tall ebony-coloured woman, her long hair braided with small gold coins. She was sitting on the sofa, an arm’s length from the girl. Her voice was soothing and the tension in the girl’s body had lessened.

  Davies explained who she was. ‘Larai is Fulani, from Northern Nigeria. A professor, no less, of African and Oriental studies.’

  Davies’s sarcasm couldn’t quite disguise his awe at the beautiful and commanding woman in the next room. Under her gentle encouragement, the girl began to talk, gradually increasing in speed, as though she had to get it over with.

  DC Clark sat opposite, her expression strained, particularly when Larai translated for her benefit, and theirs.

  Her name was Adeela. A thirteen-year-old Hausa girl from Bauchi State. She was captured in the bush when fetching water from the river. She was taken to Lagos where she was made to service men, including Baturi – Europeans – from the oil rigs. She tried to run away twice and was beaten. The woman in charge told her if she tried again she would become a juju sacrifice and her mother declared a witch. One night, she was taken to a rig and from there to a ship. She was on the ship a long time. They drugged her before they took her off. She woke up in the cellar.

  When Larai joined Bill and Andy in the side room she was visibly angry.

  ‘She is sure there are others,’ she told them. ‘She heard crying on the ship. A boy’s voice called to her. He said his name was Sanni.’ She turned to Bill. ‘The girl has been circumcised. It is not a tradition practised by my tribe, the Fulani, but it is common in other Nigerian tribes. The Hausa method is the most severe form. All external genitalia are removed and the vagina sewn up to make entry more difficult. For white men this is a novelty they will pay for.’

  Beside him, Davies made a small noise in his throat, a mixture of anger and disbelief. Bill had a daughter of seventeen, but he well remembered her at thirteen. Then he had never wanted her to grow up.

  ‘I read in the paper that the woman, Carole Devlin, had been circumcised by her attacker?’ Larai asked.

  Bill nodded. There had been no point hiding the fact, however gruesome it might be to the general public.

  ‘Some tribes believe that if a male child’s head touches the clitoris during birth, he will die,’ she told him. ‘Others that lying with an uncircumcised woman can make a man impotent, destroy his fertility and make him go mad.’

  Larai, wittingly or not, had given Bill the first tangible explanation for Carole Devlin’s mutilation.

  32

  STEPHEN TRIED TO sit up, but each time he raised his head he felt sick. T
he small dark space was going up and down and his stomach with it. He wanted to be asleep again. In his dreams everything was all right. He was back in the garden in Kano, before he and his mum ran away.

  He lifted the plastic bottle of water. It tasted funny, but he drank it anyway. Almost immediately he felt himself sink back into an oblivion filled with dreams of the past.

  Boniface was hanging out the washing on the line between the two acacia trees. The heavy wet clothes made the rope sag in the middle. Water dripped onto the dry soil, throwing up little puffs of dust.

  Stephen was watching a column of big black ants, using the rope as a walkway between the two trees. Then he spotted the red velvet spiders. They were crossing the narrow path that snaked through the tall stalks of dry elephant grass. Boniface made him wait until he checked the spiders out, then smiled an okay, his teeth orange from chewing kola nuts, and told him the swarming spiders meant the rains were on their way.

  Boniface pointed at the sky where thick dark clouds threatened on the horizon.

  ‘Ruwa.’ Boniface grinned. ‘Ruwa!’

  Stephen knelt and carefully picked up a spider, cupping it in his hand. It played dead, while he stroked its soft velvety surface.

  The rain came that night. He sat on the verandah seat beside his mum and watched lightning dance in the sky. The wind blew into their faces, bringing the first smell of rain for seven months. Then the wind suddenly changed direction and the first big drops began to fall. Soon a wall of water was falling from the overhang, digging a trench through his mum’s zinnia patch. Stephen ran down the steps onto the drive, screaming and laughing, to dance in the muddy puddles.

  When he eventually looked back, his mum was talking to a man with scars on his face. Stephen stood perfectly still, feeling the rain drum on his head and run down his chest. He shivered, his temperature dropping with the watery onslaught and his growing fear.

  33

  RHONA HAD DRUNK three glasses of wine one after the other. She didn’t seek oblivion, only to take the edge off the memory of her time in the mortuary with Sara Menzies.

  A parent should never bury a child, no matter what that child has done. It is an aberration of nature.

  Sara had stood, her hand in Karen’s, as the cover was pulled back. Thankfully, she never saw below Malcolm’s neckline. As rigor had eased, his face had assumed a less tortured look. His eyes had been closed. He had been made pretty in death. His smooth skin betrayed his youth, and the angry young man was gone. Sara’s child, the son she loved, had been returned to her in death. Sara had looked down on the boy she had set out, in vain, to save.

  Karen had displayed the stoic stance of someone who knew the truth. Bad memories had replaced any that were good, yet even she had buckled at the sight of her dead brother.

  They had held one another up, these two women, without the man who had made the child in his own image. Rhona wondered if Sara had even informed him. He was somewhere on the road, oblivious to what had happened to his family.

  Rhona took up her favourite place at the kitchen window. The convent garden was in darkness, apart from the spotlight illuminating the Virgin Mary, blessing the world and all its sinners.

  Where was Malcolm now, apart from a drawer in the mortuary? Was he at heaven’s gate, being turned away? Or was he apologising for his sins and being forgiven?

  The wine was her refuge from the questions her brain couldn’t answer. In the space of five days, her world had changed. But she was alive and privileged and anything that happened to her was insignificant in comparison to what had happened to others. She thought of Bill, tortured by the thought of the illness and death of the woman who was his life. Sean, his father’s demise both a release and a curse. Stephen, alone and in danger, knowing his mother had been murdered. And Sara Menzies, living with the knowledge that her dead son was complicit in the death or torture of others.

  Having a child meant carrying its sins on your shoulders along with your own.

  Rhona didn’t hear the buzzer at first, lost as she was in her own troubled thoughts. When she did answer, McNab’s voice on the intercom was not one she anticipated or wanted to hear.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

  ‘No we don’t.’

  Rhona didn’t need to talk to anyone. She preferred to stay mildly drunk and alone with her morbid thoughts.

  McNab spoke again, more insistent this time. ‘The DS wants us to be the team sent to Kano.’

  She buzzed him in, hearing the front door bang shut below.

  He stood in her hall, hiding a smile at its familiarity.

  Rhona led him through to the kitchen. He glanced at the open wine bottle on the table, but she didn’t offer him any.

  ‘I came to check if you were okay about us travelling together. If not, I’ll find some personal reason not to go.’

  He was challenging her. If she said she didn’t like the idea, he would withdraw, but she would never hear the end of it. It was not in McNab’s nature to be magnanimous.

  ‘I have no problems with that.’ Rhona met him eye to eye.

  ‘Good. I’ll tell the DI.’

  ‘Bill sent you here?’ Now she was surprised, and not a little annoyed.

  ‘Not exactly.’ Even McNab wouldn’t be daft enough to lie about that. ‘But I had to be sure.’

  They had reached a compromise. She sat down at the kitchen table, indicating that he should do the same. ‘I’ve whisky,’ she offered, ‘if you don’t like wine.’

  She knew he didn’t drink wine and he knew she knew. A memory of a sex game they’d played involving whisky brought colour to her cheeks.

  ‘I’ll have a whisky,’ he said, pretending not to notice.

  ‘It’s next door.’ She stood, turning her back on him, glad of a moment to regain her composure.

  There was a bottle of Bushmills Malt in the cabinet for special occasions. She fetched it with a suitable glass.

  ‘It’s Irish,’ she said unnecessarily.

  McNab gave a wry smile. It should have annoyed her, but she felt herself soften. He had been ousted by an Irishman and was not about to complain about it.

  She poured him a decent shot.

  He raised his glass. ‘To past and future endeavours.’

  It seemed churlish not to chink her glass to his.

  They spoke of the case. McNab related what had happened with Larai, the interpreter. Rhona listened carefully, realising the importance of the woman’s knowledge.

  ‘If Carole’s husband decided she should be circumcised and she refused—’ Rhona said.

  ‘It would make her run, and take the boy with her.’

  The thought of it horrified Rhona. ‘I don’t understand . . .’ she began.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why men hate women so much.’

  ‘Well, if they’re not circumcised, they make a man impotent, scupper his chances of being a father and their clitoris can kill a baby boy if it touches his head during his birth.’

  Rhona looked at McNab aghast.

  ‘So Larai told us. Or, to be more exact, so the Hausa tribe believes.’

  ‘How on earth did such an idea begin?’

  He smiled wryly. ‘Fear of women and all they can do and all they are.’

  His green eyes locked with hers. Rhona felt her stomach contract. He looked younger than Sean, his deep auburn hair cropped close to his head, a day’s stubble on his chin. There was a tense energy about him, like a tiger waiting to spring.

  She stood up. ‘When do we leave?’

  ‘Tomorrow. Evening flight to Heathrow. Stay over in the airport hotel. Kano flight leaves early Sunday morning.’

  ‘It’s short notice.’

  ‘As far as Stephen’s life is concerned, not short enough.’

  McNab had stayed no longer than it took to drink his whisky. When Rhona showed him out, he was cool and contained, but underneath, she knew, he was relishing the fact that they would be alone together, strangers in a strange land, with no
one but themselves to rely on.

  He handed her a pack of anti-malarial tablets.

  ‘One a day, starting tonight.’

  ‘I’ve been to Africa before,’ she said.

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘Good. You’ll know what to do when we get there. Apparently it’s the beginning of the wet season, so pack for hot and humid.’

  He stopped short of suggesting what forensic equipment she should take. Their African adventure had already captured McNab’s imagination.

  Rhona’s sleep was disturbed by alcohol and vivid dreams, in which all her frantic efforts to get to the airport were constantly thwarted. She dreamt of Liam, his Nigerian village always hidden despite her constant attempts to find it.

  She was woken around midnight by the sound of Sean’s key in the lock. She heard the suitcase hit the hall floor and a strangled curse. He was home and tipsy, if not drunk.

  Rhona waited in silence, incapable of facing him. Then she heard him whistling softly as he moved about the kitchen. The bottle of Bushmills and two glasses sat on the table and if he wasn’t too drunk he was bound to notice. She sat up, cursing herself silently for not clearing up after McNab’s departure.

  Sean went on whistling. The tune was unfamiliar and sad.

  Her need for him at that moment was as strong and painful as a kick in the groin. But she couldn’t go through.

  He opened the bedroom door and stood, illuminated by the hall light.

  Her eyes were half closed, but she saw him smile.

  ‘Beautiful one,’ he whispered.

  She heard the shower come on and his gasp as the water hit his nakedness. When he finally crawled in beside her, his body was ice-cold.