Chapter Two

Siobhan had slept badly in the small bed and breakfast Melissa had recommended on the harbour road — a converted fisherman’s cottage with thin walls and a landlady who’d asked, checking her in the previous evening, whether she was “here about the attacks” with the specific bright, unashamed curiosity of a woman who had clearly been waiting all week for someone worth asking — and had woken before her alarm with the particular restless clarity that meant her mind had already started working on the case without her conscious permission. She lay in the dark for a while, running the geography of the three assaults over in her head, the careful spacing of the pins, the false name on the records request, and understood, somewhere around six, that she wasn’t going to get back to sleep, and dressed instead, and went out into a morning still more grey than blue.

Petra Hale ran twelve miles most mornings before the town properly woke, and Melissa had told Siobhan, walking her out to the car the previous evening, that the surest way to find her before nine was the coast path itself — the same stretch of ground currently marked with three red pins on an incident room whiteboard, which Siobhan understood, standing at the harbour wall at half past six with the sky still more grey than blue, was either a coincidence nobody had properly examined or the first thing about this town that made a certain grim, circular sense.

She saw the runner before she was close enough to be certain it was her — a lean, upright figure moving with the flat, economical stride of someone who had long ago stopped running for pleasure and run instead because stopping felt like the more dangerous option. Petra Hale slowed as she approached, not out of any evident wariness but with the unhurried courtesy of a person entirely used to strangers wanting something from her, and studied Siobhan for a moment with sharp, assessing eyes that reminded Siobhan, uncomfortably, of her own reflection on the harder mornings.

‘You’re the profiler.’ Not a question. ‘Melissa said you might come find me.’

‘Siobhan Lowe.’

‘Petra Hale.’ She didn’t offer a hand, breathing still controlled but audible, and fell into step beside Siobhan along the path without being asked, the two of them walking rather than running now, back toward the harbour. ‘I’d guess you already know who my father was, or you wouldn’t have come looking for me specifically rather than just reading my professional file.’

‘Marcus Hale. One of the five boys.’

‘One of the four who were never found.’ Petra said it flatly, the particular flatness of a fact rehearsed so many times across so many years that it had worn every sharp edge off itself, leaving only the shape. ‘I was two years old. I don’t remember him at all, which people always find strange, as though grief requires memory to be real. I’ve spent forty-two years grieving a man I have no actual images of in my own head, just photographs other people took, and a story my mother could never quite finish telling me before she stopped being able to talk about him at all.’

She glanced sideways at Siobhan, something assessing in the look. ‘You’ll have read the file on the boys. On my father, specifically, I’d imagine, if you’re any good at your job, which Melissa seems to think you are.’

‘I read it on the drive up.’

‘Then you know he was the second one taken that night. Not the first, not the last — the middle of it, somehow, which I’ve never once been able to decide whether it means anything at all, or whether I’ve simply spent too many years looking for shape in a thing that never had any shape to begin with.’ Petra’s voice had gone quieter. ‘I do this for a living, Dr. Lowe — I read families, same as you read offenders, and I know the difference between a pattern that means something and a pattern a grieving mind builds because meaning is easier to carry than randomness. I still haven’t managed to apply that same discipline to my own father’s death. I don’t imagine I ever will.’

They walked in silence for a stretch, the harbour opening up ahead of them, grey and still. ‘You never left,’ Siobhan said, eventually, not quite a question.

‘People ask me that a great deal, usually more delicately than you just did.’ Petra’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. ‘I trained in Glasgow. I could have stayed there, or gone further — Home Office work, same as you, or private practice somewhere that pays considerably better than the council does. I came back the week I qualified and I’ve never once seriously entertained leaving since.’

‘Why.’

‘Because leaving would mean admitting my father’s disappearance was simply something that happened to this place once, a long time ago, rather than something the place is still actively doing to people, every single day, in smaller and quieter ways.’ She said it without self-pity, the specific flat honesty of someone who had examined the thought from every angle available to her and made her peace with what it cost. ‘I couldn’t save my mother, Dr. Lowe. She died four years ago, still waiting for a body that never came, still unable to finish a sentence about him without her voice going somewhere I couldn’t follow her to. I decided, somewhere in my twenties, that I could at least try to save the children this town is still actively failing, even if I couldn’t save the one person I actually wanted to.’ She glanced sideways, something sharp and assessing in the look. ‘You’re doing the same thing, aren’t you. Whatever brought you into this work in the first place. I can usually tell.’

Siobhan didn’t answer immediately, surprised by how close the observation landed, and Petra, reading the silence correctly, didn’t push further, which Siobhan understood, walking on beside her, was its own kind of professional courtesy — one wounded person recognising another and choosing not to make her say it aloud on a cold coast path before either of them had properly earned that particular honesty from the other.

‘You work with the town’s vulnerable children,’ Siobhan said, eventually, returning them both to safer ground. ‘Kinloch Community Services.’

‘Twenty years, this June.’ Petra’s voice had gone careful, the specific carefulness Siobhan recognised from a hundred prior interviews as belonging to someone who understood, better than most, exactly how much a stranger asking careful questions might already suspect. ‘You want to know about the assaults.’

‘I want to know about the town’s care system. Historically. Who ran it, who was placed where, what records exist from the nineties that might connect to what’s happening now.’

Something crossed Petra’s face — not surprise, Siobhan understood, watching it happen with the same clinical attention she brought to every face she read, but a kind of weary recognition, the look of someone who had been half-expecting this exact question to eventually arrive at her door and had spent considerable energy hoping it wouldn’t. ‘Why the nineties.’

‘Because I think whoever’s committing these assaults was a child once, in this town, in a system that failed him badly enough to build the man he’s become. And because I think there’s a retired social worker somewhere in this town’s history who knows exactly which child, and exactly what happened to him, and has spent a very long time deciding whether that knowledge is safe to have.’

Petra stopped walking. They had reached the harbour wall proper now, the working boats stirring for the morning, gulls already loud over the water, and she stood for a long moment looking out at it before she spoke again, her voice considerably quieter than it had been.

‘Morag Sinclair,’ she said, finally. ‘She ran the fostering and placement service here for the better part of thirty years, retired now, must be close to eighty. She trained me, when I first started — the only person in this whole profession who ever properly taught me anything useful about doing this job in a town this small, where everyone already knows everyone and half the families you’re meant to be protecting people from are also somehow the families with the most power to make your working life impossible.’ Petra’s jaw had tightened, a small, controlled movement Siobhan noted without comment. ‘I asked her once, years ago, whether she’d ever placed a child with a family she had doubts about. She looked at me for a long time before she answered, and then she told me that in a town like this, doubt was a luxury the paperwork rarely allowed you to properly act on. I never forgot that answer. I’ve thought about it most weeks since.’

‘Is she still in Kinloch.’

‘Cottage out past the old asylum point, on her own, since her husband died. I see her sometimes at the church jumble sales, though she’s gone quieter these last couple of years — folk her age do, I suppose, but with Morag it always felt like something more deliberate than simple age catching up to her.’ Petra turned to look at Siobhan properly for the first time since they’d started walking. ‘You think she’s in danger.’

‘I think if she knows what I suspect she knows, she’s either already been contacted, or she’s about to be.’ Siobhan held the older woman’s eye. ‘Would you take me to her.’

Morag Sinclair’s cottage sat exactly where Petra had described it, close enough to the old asylum ruin that Siobhan could see the crumbling outline of it from the front step, a stark grey shape against an equally grey sky, and she understood, standing there, why the coast path’s spacing had felt so deliberately choreographed on the incident room map — whoever had planned this route had planned it around this exact stretch of shore, the same ground that apparently anchored half the town’s unfinished business in one direction or another.

Morag answered the door slowly, a small, upright woman with sharp eyes that had dimmed only slightly with age, and studied the two of them on her step with an expression that told Siobhan, before either of them had said a proper word, that this was a woman who had spent a professional lifetime reading exactly this kind of unannounced visit for what it actually meant.

‘Petra.’ Her voice was warm, genuinely so, though something underneath the warmth had gone very still. ‘And you’ve brought someone.’

‘Dr. Siobhan Lowe. She’s working with the police, Morag. On the assaults.’

Something moved behind Morag’s eyes at that — recognition, Siobhan thought, or perhaps simply the arrival of a fear she’d been carrying, unexamined, for longer than she’d let herself admit even to herself. ‘You’d better come in, then,’ she said, and stood back from the door.

The cottage inside was small and neat, the specific tidiness of someone living carefully within a fixed income and a body that no longer moved as easily as it once had, and Morag made tea without being asked, the same unthinking ritual Siobhan had already come to recognise, in her short time in this town, as the universal Highland response to conversations too difficult to begin any other way.

‘I’ve been expecting someone to come asking about Raymond,’ Morag said, once the tea was down and none of them had touched it, and Siobhan felt the whole shape of the case shift, quietly and definitively, around the single name.

‘Raymond.’

‘Raymond Wick.’ Morag’s hands had gone very still around her mug. ‘I placed him myself, in 1988. A baby, not even a year old, his mother unable to cope and his father — well. His father’s identity was never fully established on the paperwork, which I always thought strange, given how small this town is, though I understood, even then, that certain kinds of not-knowing were sometimes arranged rather than simply accidental.’ She looked up at Siobhan, and something in her face had aged further, just in the last minute, the specific accelerated ageing of someone finally setting down a weight they’d carried privately for decades. ‘I moved him through four placements across his childhood. I want you to understand that I did everything the system allowed me to do, at the time, with the resources I had. I also want you to understand that I have spent thirty years knowing it wasn’t enough, and I have never once, until this exact morning, said that out loud to another living person.’

‘Do you still have records. From any of the placements.’

Morag was quiet for a moment, then rose, slowly, favouring one hip, and went to a small bureau in the corner of the room, returning with a slim cardboard folder gone soft at the edges with handling. ‘I kept copies. Against every rule the service had at the time, and every rule it’s had since, because I understood, even then, filing them away in a drawer I told nobody about, that a day might come when the official file had been quietly tidied of anything inconvenient, and I wanted at least one honest record to survive that tidying.’ She set the folder on the table between them without yet opening it. ‘I’ve never shown this to anyone. I want you to understand what that means, before you look at it. I could lose my pension. I could be prosecuted, for all I know, for keeping it in the first place. I have decided, this morning, sitting across from the two of you, that none of that frightens me nearly as much as the thought of dying with it still hidden in that bureau.’

She opened the folder. Inside, in her own careful, decades-old handwriting, were placement dates, addresses, and — Siobhan felt something cold move through her, reading it — a series of short, clinical notes recording visits she’d made to the third placement, each one flagged, in the margin, with a small pencil mark Morag had clearly used as her own private code.

‘What happened to him. In those placements.’

Morag was quiet for a long moment, her eyes on the window, on the grey shape of the asylum ruin visible beyond it. ‘I had concerns,’ she said, finally. ‘About the third placement particularly. A man used to visit — regularly, I was told, though never when I made my scheduled checks, which I understood, even at the time, was not a coincidence a competent system should have allowed to keep happening. I raised it. I was told, by someone considerably more senior than me, that the family in question had connections it would be unwise to challenge without stronger evidence than a social worker’s professional instinct. I moved Raymond to a fourth placement eighteen months later, for reasons I told myself were unrelated. I have never been fully certain that was true.’

‘Who told you not to challenge it.’

Morag’s hands tightened around her mug, and for a long moment Siobhan thought she wasn’t going to answer at all. When she finally spoke, her voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper.

‘I don’t know his full name,’ she said. ‘That was rather the point of how these things worked, in this town, in those years — you learned, if you wanted to keep your job and your pension and your ability to help any child at all, exactly which questions not to ask, and exactly whose displeasure not to risk. I know only that he had church connections. That he spoke, when he spoke to me at all, with the particular unhurried authority of a man who had never once in his life needed to raise his voice to get what he wanted.’ She looked up, and something in her expression had shifted into a kind of frightened, exhausted resolve that reminded Siobhan, with an uncomfortable jolt, of every source she’d ever interviewed in the final stages of finally deciding to speak. ‘I have wondered, Dr. Lowe, more nights than I would like to admit, whether the boy I failed to properly protect thirty years ago has grown into whatever is currently happening on that coast path. I think, meeting you this morning, some part of me already knew the answer, and has simply been waiting for someone to finally come and ask me the question properly.’

Siobhan looked at the folder on the table between them, at three decades of a frightened, careful woman’s private insurance against exactly this morning, and understood, with the particular cold clarity that arrived at moments like this one, that she was looking at the single most dangerous object currently in Kinloch — not because of what it proved, which was still, on its own, considerably short of anything a court would recognise, but because of what its existence implied about the woman who’d kept it.

‘Has anyone else asked you about Raymond,’ she said. ‘Recently. In the last two years.’

Morag’s face went very still. ‘A man came to the church jumble sale, perhaps eighteen months ago now. Polite. Asked whether I remembered any of the children I’d placed in the nineties, said he was researching a book about the care system’s history. I gave him nothing — some instinct in me went cold the moment he asked it, though I couldn’t have told you why at the time. He didn’t give his name. I’ve thought about him since, more than I let on to anyone, including myself.’

Eighteen months. The same window as the false records request. Siobhan felt the shape of the case tighten another notch, the timeline assembling itself with a precision that left no real room for coincidence.

‘I need you to consider staying somewhere else, for a few days at least,’ Siobhan said. ‘A relative, a friend, somewhere that isn’t this cottage, which is close enough to that path that I don’t think it’s a coincidence you’re living where you are.’

‘I’ve lived here forty years, Dr. Lowe. I’ll not be frightened out of my own home by a man I’ve never even properly met.’

‘I’m not asking you to be frightened. I’m asking you to be careful, the way you were careful thirty years ago writing notes nobody was supposed to see, because you understood, even then, that some knowledge is dangerous simply by virtue of existing in one place.’ Siobhan held her eye, gentle but unmoving. ‘You kept this folder safe for thirty years by being patient about when to show it to anyone. I’m asking for a few more days of that same patience, that’s all.’

Morag looked at her for a long moment, and something in her face — the specific, hard-won stubbornness of a woman who had outlived most of the people who’d once told her what to do — softened, very slightly.

‘My sister’s in Inverdrum. I could manage a week there, I suppose, if it would put your mind at ease.’

‘It would.’

She helped Morag pack a small bag before they left, the old woman moving through her own cottage with the particular careful economy of someone used to travelling light, and Siobhan understood, watching her fold three cardigans into a case with the same precision she’d clearly once brought to thirty years of case files, that this was a woman who had spent her whole working life being told what she could and couldn’t act on, and was, this morning, for perhaps the first time, choosing her own caution entirely on her own terms.

Siobhan called Melissa from the car, Petra sitting quiet in the passenger seat beside her, the folder — Morag had insisted, in the end, that they take it, that a stranger’s careful handling felt safer than her own bureau now that the question had finally been asked aloud — resting on the dashboard between them.

‘Raymond Wick,’ Siobhan said, the moment Melissa picked up. ‘Born 1988, moved through four foster placements across his childhood, at least one of them with a suspected abuser connected to the church, protected by someone senior enough to shut down a social worker’s concerns without needing to raise his voice. I want everything you can find on him — current address, employment history, any contact with the police at all, however minor.’

There was a pause on the other end, and when Melissa spoke again her voice had gone careful in a way Siobhan was already learning to recognise as this whole town’s particular register for very bad news. ‘We’ve got a Raymond Wick on file. Not for anything violent — a handful of minor incidents over the years, nothing that ever went to court. He works maintenance for the council. Parks, verges, coastal paths.’

Siobhan closed her eyes for a moment, the last piece of the geography finally settling into place. ‘He’d know that stretch of coast better than almost anyone else in this town.’

‘He’d have reason to be on it at any hour, in any weather, without a single soul thinking to question why,’ Melissa said, and Siobhan heard, in the small silence that followed, both of them arriving at the same cold understanding at exactly the same moment. ‘I’ll pull his current address. Don’t do anything with this alone, Dr. Lowe. Not yet.’

‘I won’t.’ Siobhan looked out at the grey water beyond the windscreen, at Petra’s still, watchful profile beside her, and understood that the case had just stopped being an abstract pattern on a whiteboard and become, instead, a name attached to a face she hadn’t yet seen, moving somewhere in this same small town, close enough to touch. ‘But we need to move quickly, Detective. Whoever taught him this route thirty years ago is still out there, and I don’t think they’ve finished using him yet.’