“Wait! No! OK, OK! The van. Yes. What about it? What do you want to know?”
Logan about-turned, already fishing in his pocket for his notebook. “Everything, Mr Robinson,” he said. “I want you to tell me everything.”
Eleanor Rigg had been just as standoffish with Sinead as she had been when Hamza had called. Possibly even more so, in fact, given that she’d made it very clear she didn’t want any further contact regarding the whereabouts of her estranged husband.
And yet, here they were again, calling her up, ignoring her wishes. She had a good mind to complain, she’d said.
And then, something had changed. The more Sinead talked—the more she empathised with the woman on the other end of the line—the less abrasive Eleanor became. And the less abrasive she became, the more she started to open up.
Five minutes after being urged to piss off and leave Eleanor alone, Sinead was chatting away to her like they’d been friends for years.
Eleanor and Alan—she referred to him exclusively by that name, and had never known him as anything else—had married quite young. They’d met at university where she was studying English Literature and he was doing Art History.
The wedding had taken place shortly after they’d both graduated. And it had been good. For a long time, it had been great. They’d travelled for a while, then they’d found an old fixer-upper of a house for sale in the north of England, less than an hour from where Eleanor’s parents lived.
It was much further to Alan’s mum’s farmhouse down in the southwest, and he’d been reluctant to leave her alone, as his dad had died a few years earlier. But she was a fiercely independent woman, and she had plans to move out of the old family home, anyway, so Alan had eventually made peace with it.
It had taken a few years of long days and hard work, but together they’d turned it into a home. There had been disagreements along the way, but never an argument. Not one, in all those years.
“Do you mind me asking what changed?” Sinead asked.
“Well… Lucy.”
Sinead scribbled the name in her pad. “Lucy?”
There was silence from the other end of the line. Sinead pressed the handset to her ear. She could still hear Eleanor breathing, so the line hadn’t dropped.
“You still there, Mrs Rigg?”
“Our daughter.” The words were thin and fragile, like they’d been forced through a narrow gap.
“Lucy is your daughter?”
Another silence. This time, Sinead let it run its course.
“You don’t know, do you?” Eleanor asked.
“We don’t know a whole lot at the moment, no,” Sinead admitted. “That’s why we were hoping you might—”
“I thought… after everything on TV. I thought this must be connected to… Oh, God. You don’t know.”
“Know what, Mrs Rigg? What don’t we know?”
“Please, just… Give me a minute,” Eleanor replied, and it was clear from her voice that she was fighting a losing battle against tears.
While Sinead waited for the other woman to compose herself, she took out her phone, checked she was still connected to the station’s Wi-Fi, then tapped the name ‘Lucy Rigg’ into Google. A scroll through showed various social media profiles and an Etsy store, but nothing of any obvious interest.
“Lucy died. Eleven years ago,” Eleanor said, battling through the pain that sentence brought with it. “She had an aggressive form of cancer, and she died. She was ten years old.”
“Oh. Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t…”
“She was a daddy’s girl, was Lucy. And Alan, he… God, he adored her. When we lost her… I lost him, too. He became… different. Angry. I don’t know. You could say paranoid, I suppose.”
“In what way?” Sinead probed.
“He blamed her doctor. That’s why I thought you were phoning, see? He said the doctor had been testing stuff on her. Like he had killed her on purpose.”
Across the room, Hamza stood up suddenly, then had to scramble to grab his laptop that had been balanced on his knees. “Holy shit!” he cried, then he remembered Sinead was on the phone and winced in apology.
Sinead shot him a questioning smile, and he hurried over to where she was sitting, turning his laptop screen so she could see it. A photograph of a sombre-looking black man in a long white coat took up a chunk of a webpage. The caption below gave his name as Dr Ekon Oboko.
Something about him was familiar, Sinead felt, like she’d met him, or…
“When I saw the stuff on the TV. On the news. I thought… it couldn’t be a coincidence. It just… it couldn’t.”
The TV. God. The TV. That’s where she knew him from. That’s where she’d seen him. He’d been at the press conference. He and his wife together. They’d made the appeal.
“She’s the same age as Lucy was when we lost her,” Eleanor said, her voice breaking into a sob. “Alan’s taken her, hasn’t he? Alan’s taken Dr Oboko’s little girl!”
Logan was traipsing through a field, watching Taggart go sniffing excitedly through the undergrowth, when the call came through. It was another conference call, and he could hear at least three voices all trying to talk to him at the same time.
“Right, right, one at a time, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “What’s happened?”
He heard Sinead say, “You go,” then Hamza’s voice came on.
“I’ve been digging a bit deeper into Alan Rigg’s record, sir,” he said. “Got CID in Inverness to do a full report in HOLMES. Turns out, he’s got an outstanding warrant.”
“For what?”
“For assaulting the doctor who was treating his daughter before she died.”
Logan stopped walking. The ground beneath him was wet and muddy, but since moving north from Glasgow he had long since given up hope of keeping his boots clean.
“Go on,” he said, sensing there was much more to come.
“He blamed the doctor for his daughter’s death. Said it was deliberate. Said he had been doing tests on her, and that’s what had killed her, not the cancer.”
“And?” Logan urged.
Sinead took over, clearly sharing the DCI’s impatience. “The doctor is the father of that girl that’s missing down south, sir. Jameelah Oboko. She’s been all over the news.”
“I’ve seen her, aye,” Logan confirmed, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end.
“She’s the same age as Alan Rigg’s daughter was when she died,” the Detective Constable continued. “Alan Rigg—Bernie—his wife thinks he’s behind it. She thinks that he’s taken the girl as revenge.”
“Jesus,” Logan muttered.
“You get anywhere on the van, Jack?” That was Ben, jumping into the gap in the conversation. “Because, if it can help us find the bugger…”
“Aye. I got the reg. Going to text it through. I wouldn’t waste your time with the DVLA, though. Let’s just say the seller wasn’t exactly doing things above board when it came to paperwork. I’ve told him to expect a visit from Uniform to follow up on that.”
“ANPR cameras might get a hit,” Ben suggested.