Missing For Good Page 2

  ‘God, it’s the Big Man,’ Drew muttered.

  Calla somehow knew they were coming for them. ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, no…’ she whispered.

  Graeme Millar strode into the lobby of the tower block, walking with the invincible self-confidence that practised violence gave you, flanked by his minders, Big Dougie and Ray. She had heard about them from Drew, although she had never met them.

  ‘What have you been up to, Drew?’ wailed Calla. This woke the baby who started to cry. She looked in anguish at her husband, then picked up her daughter, Palmer, and held her close. ‘There, there,’ she said, soothing the baby.

  What had Drew been up to? Surely to God nothing he could have done would have warranted Millar’s presence? He simply wasn’t important enough. Millar controlled the drugs trade in Dumbarton and the other towns and suburbs like Clydebank on the western fringes of Glasgow. He was the guy who Drew’s dealer bought his coke from; he was top of the food chain and Ray was his second in command.

  ‘Nothing, woman,’ he snapped. He lit a cigarette. Calla looked at him with anguish. It was obvious to her that the same question that was going through her mind was going through his. The Big Man was here for a reason, but God knew what. Surely it could have nothing to do with him? He was too far down the pecking order to attract Millar’s attention. But here he was, nevertheless.

  Drew walked into the bedroom and came out carrying a baseball bat.

  Her husband had a short fuse and Calla could see that far from being intimidated by Millar he was determined to take the initiative.

  ‘Put it down, Drew,’ Calla shouted at him. ‘Don’t be stupid!’

  He hefted the aluminium bat; Oh, God the idiot. She could guess what he was thinking – that he’d show Millar. There was a pounding on the door.

  ‘Drew, it’s Millar, put the bat down,’ she begged, starting to cry.

  He shook his head. ‘Nobody fucks around with me in my own place, Calla,’ he said. Another couple of blows on the door.

  ‘Go and open it,’ he ordered her.

  She did so and Big Dougie, about six foot four, raw boned, his long, pale face and very light blue eyes topped by fine, blond hair, shoved the door open. She didn’t say anything, instead, she backed away from the door, terrified, Palmer cradled in her arms.

  Now the Big Man and Ray walked into the flat and Dougie closed the door behind them and stood leaning against it. She had never met Millar, but she recognised him from descriptions. He was massive, with a hard, brutal, red face and glittering eyes. The blue two-piece suit and raincoat somehow made him seem even bigger. He always wore a suit, she’d heard that. Rumour was true, then. She felt like a small child in his presence. Drew, still holding his baseball bat, walked backwards as the two men came into the living room. What the hell did he think he was going to achieve? she thought. The idiot.

  Calla followed them, clutching her daughter like a talisman. Please, God, she prayed frantically, let her be all right. Please, God, let him not hurt her. Everyone was ignoring her as if she were just a piece of the furniture – that suited her just fine. The lounge had seemed perfectly large a minute or so ago, now it seemed tiny, like a child’s room, and she and Drew were the bairns and here were the grown-ups, to punish them.

  Millar was so close, she could have leaned forward and touched him. He was even bigger than she had imagined. He had very black hair, thick and coarse-looking, long on the top and cut short on the sides. It was sticking up here and there as though he had pushed his fingers through it. His eyes looked crazy; she could see he was high – coke, probably.

  Why not? He sold enough of it.

  She shrank into the corner of the room, her arms wrapped tight around baby Palmer. The Big Man glanced at her.

  ‘You’re Calla?’

  ‘Aye, Mr Millar,’ she said, swallowing nervously. She stared at the floor; she didn’t want to meet his eye.

  ‘What do you want, Millar?’ Drew said aggressively.

  Shut up, you cretin, thought Calla, looking up, trying to catch Drew’s eye. But that was Drew for you, he never had known when to back down. Like now – he was holding the bat in front of him, threateningly.

  Millar turned to look at him. For Calla, time seemed to stop. Like when you had a car crash. Everything happened in slow motion.

  ‘And just what the fuck do you think you’re doing with that?’ Millar was pointing at the baseball bat.

  Drew raised the bat menacingly.

  ‘What are you doing in my flat with these two pricks?’ he said.

  Calla stared at the three men. The guy with Millar, Ray, was very good-looking, about fifty, she guessed – she had thought he was young, but now, with her heightened senses, she could see the lines on his face. He had a flowery shirt under his jacket that looked expensive, blue chinos and properly good-looking trainers, not like the crap ones from the local market that Drew was wearing.

  Millar’s face darkened. Like lightning flickering over a stormy sky. There was a sudden blur of movement. He moved very quickly, without warning, and hit Drew in the face; Drew cried out in pain, his hands covering his nose, then Millar, grabbing the bat from him, drove the metal end hard into Drew’s stomach. Drew doubled up and gasped for breath.

  Millar swung the bat into Drew’s head as if he were hitting a ball out of the park. The noise was horrible. She winced. Drew’s legs went and he collapsed. Calla squeezed her eyes tight shut. Then she heard a couple of dull thuds. Millar had dropped the bat and was hitting Drew, his face a kind of mask of animal rage. ‘Fucking threaten me, you fucking wee bastard…would you? Fuckin’ would you?’ The monologue was punctuated four times by his fist; now her eyes were open and she saw that there was something in his hand. Drew was face down, not moving. There was a lot of blood, so red, pooling from him, spreading out onto the carpet. Calla felt sick and black spots danced in front of her eyes. Please, God, let me not faint, she prayed. Her legs were like jelly. Blood on the hands of Millar, on his tan raincoat. Millar straightened up, breathing heavily.

  He turned to Calla, his face enraged.

  ‘Where’s your fucking brother?’ Millar said angrily. ‘Jamie McDonald, where is he?’

  She shrank into the corner of the room, pressed herself hard against the wall for support. So this hadn’t been about Drew at all; it was about Jamie.

  ‘Port Glasgow,’ she whispered.

  ‘He isnae there, we looked.’ Ray said, his face stern.

  ‘I don’t know, I swear to God.’ Tears were running down her face.

  Millar took her chin gently but firmly in his bloody hand – Drew’s blood. She could smell it. He looked into her eyes. His were hard, pitiless; they dropped down to the baby in her arms, to Palmer.

  ‘She’s very small,’ he said. He put his head on one side; his eyes flickered meaningfully to the partially open window. She had no doubt he was capable of it. He was capable of anything.

  ‘Where is he?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘Please…’

  Millar bent forward and leaned his head close to hers.

  ‘I’ve heard you’re close to Jamie… When that brother of yours calls you, you be sure to find out exactly where he is,’ he said. His eyes didn’t leave hers.

  She swallowed nervously. ‘Yes, Mr Millar.’

  ‘Good girl,’ he said approvingly. He took his hand away from her and turned away, staring down at Drew’s body with a slight frown on his face.

  Millar left the room. Ray came up to her. He nodded in the direction of Drew.

  ‘I’ll be round tomorrow with some cash for your expenses.’

  Calla nodded. Ray didn’t need to add ‘for the funeral’. She understood what he meant well enough.

  Ray paused at the door. ‘Clean up behind us,’ he ordered. ‘Oh, and it goes without saying, we weren’t here.’

  She nodded again.

  You weren’t here. None of you were here.

  She heard the door close behind them
and her legs buckled. She slid down the wall so she was sitting on the floor and she started to cry.

  ‘Oh, Jamie, what have you done?’ she whispered.

  4

  It was nearly two hours after leaving Hanlon’s cottage in the small village that Gillies slowed and pulled off the road. She wasn’t sure exactly where they were, only that it was about a ten-minute drive north of the town of Oban.

  Gillies had refused to make conversation during the journey. Hanlon had tried her best but all she’d got had been monosyllables. After a while she gave up trying to engage with him and just looked out of the window as the beautiful landscape passed by. The further north they went, the rockier and wilder the countryside became. Occasionally they would drive past a standing stone in a field, deserted, mournful and mysterious. Nobody really knew why the stones had been placed there nor what the mysterious cup and ring markings on them meant. They were just there. Puzzling.

  Not unlike Gillies, she reflected.

  As the road twisted its way through the rocky hills, bare and forbidding at this time of year, she thought that this potential job offer could not have come at a better time. Finding work had been a hell of a lot harder than she had anticipated.

  After an hour she closed her eyes and dozed. The entire journey had been spent in more or less complete silence except for the music that had played continuously since they had left Hanlon’s cottage.

  After two hours she knew one thing for sure about the taciturn lawyer: he certainly had a thing for the blues. The entertainment display on the car’s dash gave the name of the artist so Hanlon, who wasn’t keen on music of any description, by now was well aware of what the Robert Cray Band, Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith and Etta James sounded like.

  Depressing, to her way of thinking.

  Etta finished and Robert Cray returned to let them know about his suspicions regarding his partner and her boss, suspicions that would inevitably lead to him moving out and living in some flophouse, drinking whiskey for breakfast, if the pattern of earlier songs held true. Nobody ever seemed to get the blues and be motivated to do anything remotely useful about the situation, Hanlon reflected. She wondered if Gillies took this defeatist mindset into work with him.

  The road dropped down a hill with a view of the sea below them. It was practically dark now, the land in the distance a foreboding sable mass. The driveway they stopped at had an imposing entrance: two large stone pillars surmounted by crumbling lichen-encrusted lions and a set of double gates. The lions and pillars were old, but the gates were new. They were also large, made of metal bars surmounted by spikes disguised as ornamental and painted gold, but they looked sharp. Extremely sharp. They weren’t just decorative. There was evidence of more attention to security. There were two CCTV cameras that were partly hidden by the plinths that the lions were on. On either side of the gate was a high metal mesh fence. Razor wire ran along the top. Gillies’ boss obviously took security seriously, Hanlon thought. Gillies pressed a button on his key fob and the gates swung slowly inwards.

  The drive was lined by tall rhododendrons, their mournful leaves funereally drab as the car slowly made its way along the meandering ribbon of tarmac. The sky above them was almost black now; it was a depressing arrival, shrouded in the darkness of the evergreen foliage on both sides and the gathering approach of night.

  They rounded a corner and the house came into view.

  ‘Kinnachan House,’ said Gillies laconically. Hanlon almost jumped in her seat; it was about the only thing he’d volunteered until now.

  The place wasn’t unusual for the west coast of Scotland. It was late-nineteenth-century style, built of dark stone, granite, she guessed, and had the touches that Victorian Scots seemed to go for: crenellations as a castle might have running along the roof, and circular turrets at the corners, the odd leaded window.

  The place was as sizeable as it was ugly. Behind it, in the darkening gloom, she could see the sea and, beyond that, indistinct hills rising up high into the sky that might have been the island of Mull or part of the mainland on the other side of the loch. They were north of Oban now and the lands surrounding them were as bleak and forbidding as they were beautiful.

  Gillies pulled up in front of the large wood-panelled door. A dozen or so security lights bathed them in their harsh white illumination. She noted the alarm boxes on the walls, no less than three of them, and the security cameras. She and Gillies got out of the car; the cold salt, sea breeze whipped into their faces, wet with drizzle. The lawyer released Wemyss from the back and the dog ran to Hanlon to check all was OK and then stood patiently by her side, sniffing the air and looking around him with interest.

  The door was opened by a guy, in his thirties she guessed, wearing a suit and a serious expression. He had a very short, military-style haircut and a nose whose shape had been modified by severe punishment over the years. He nodded to Gillies, gave Hanlon a cursory glance and then, ignoring her, spoke to the lawyer.

  ‘So you’re here. He’s waiting in the study.’

  Gillies nodded and the man suddenly turned to Hanlon with a charming smile. ‘I’m sorry, I’m forgetting my manners. You must be Hanlon. I’m Andy Hampton – I work for Mr Cameron. Thank you for coming at such short notice. Please, follow me…’

  The three of them walked into the house. In the lobby, Hampton paused and turned to Hanlon. ‘Can I take your coat?’ She nodded and removed her old Barbour jacket. He disappeared with it into a cloakroom by the door and reappeared seconds later. She looked around. She was feeling distinctly underdressed for this place.

  They were in a large hall, high-ceilinged and very long. There was a wide staircase running upstairs to the left. The decor was a total contrast to the outside of the house. That was traditional, nineteenth-century baronial vernacular, inside was classic, cool modern. The hall floor had been restored to highly polished stone flagstones, a grey runner carpet ran the length of it, modern art hung on the walls. The lighting was recessed. Far away some baroque music, maybe Bach, was playing. The three of them walked in silence down the corridor, their footsteps muffled by the carpet. The dog walked slightly to one side of Hanlon, the claws on his paws clicking on the stone of the floor, the only sound above the music.

  They neared the end of the entrance hall and then Hampton stopped.

  ‘In here, please.’

  He knocked on one of the tall wood-panelled doors and ushered them into a room. It was, in keeping with the house, large. There were floor-to-ceiling windows, which overlooked the loch and the hills on the other side. The view would have been spectacular if it hadn’t been so dark beyond the glass. The room was carpeted; there was a fireplace at one end with a log fire burning, a desk with a computer screen at the other. More art of a minimalist nature was on the wall, maybe twenty or so paintings, modern, mostly abstract, except for one picture that stood out from the others both in subject and style. It was a large oil painting of a woman standing and leaning over a table to look at a laptop. It was a view of her painted from behind. Her face was reflected in the window of the room – it was dark outside. It was very skilfully done, hyper-realistic; she looked as if she could just step out of the frame if she wanted to. The table in the painting must have belonged to an artist, maybe the one who had made the picture; there were jars with brushes, tubes of paint, a wine bottle and glasses. She was young, blonde, you could tell she was beautiful. She was also naked.

  There was a man in the room standing with his back to them, looking out at the view.

  Gillies, Hanlon and the dog walked in and the door closed behind them. The man staring out at the loch was tall; his hair was short and grey, skilfully cut.

  He turned around and faced them. He was not young, far from it – she guessed he was probably in his sixties – but he looked good for his years, trim and fit. No stranger to the gym and the cross-trainer. The colour of his hair matched his two-piece suit, which was beautifully cut, tailored to fit his slim figure. Like a concours vintage car, h
e looked expensively maintained.

  ‘You must be Hanlon,’ he said. In one hand he had a small bottle of Czech lager that he was holding almost self-consciously, like it was a prop on stage. ‘Do sit down.’ He gestured with an open palm at the sofa and chairs that were arranged in a semicircle facing the windows with a couple of low coffee tables in front of them. Hanlon glanced down at her worn, slightly muddy combat trousers, her old green jumper, and looked with irritation at Gillies. OK for him in his suit. She presumed she was here for a prospective job interview and she was uncomfortably aware that she was dressed like some kind of handyman.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ The guy’s accent was educated Scottish.

  ‘Coffee, please. Black, no sugar.’ She said. He looked at Gillies, who, taciturn as ever, shook his head.

  He nodded, took his phone out and tapped on the screen, then repocketed it.

  ‘Right,’ he said decisively. He sat down on a chair slightly to the side of Hanlon. He took a mouthful of beer from the bottle in his hand, ‘Do you have any idea who I am?’

  ‘No.’ Hanlon didn’t see any need to elaborate.

  ‘There’s no need to worry,’ he said reassuringly. It didn’t seem politic to tell him she wasn’t worried at all. ‘My name’s Hamish Cameron.’

  Hanlon wondered if he was going to feed her more and more snippets of information until she eventually guessed who he was. If so, they could be there some time.

  He smiled. ‘I’m an art dealer.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Hanlon said. She guessed that explained the pictures and the security. He looked at her expectantly.

  ‘So how can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m also a father,’ he said. ‘My daughter is missing.’ There was a lengthy pause. ‘I want you to find her for me.’

  So, there we are, she thought. She felt a brief surge of excitement. This would be her first case since she had left the police and set up as a private investigator.