There would, no doubt, be some wrangling in the coming days about where Alan and his mother were to be prosecuted, but that was a worry for another time. For now, all that mattered was that the girl was safe in the arms of her parents.
They hugged each other. They sobbed. They laughed. They shivered and shook, their bodies reacting to the joy, and the relief, and the terror, and the dread that was all wrapped up in knots around them.
Jameelah had spent the hour before the helicopter’s arrival out in the car park, throwing a tennis ball for the dog. Taggart, who Dave Davidson had always insisted was ‘thick as mince,’ had failed to grasp the point of the game, and it had been Jameelah herself who had done much of the fetching, with the dog trotting happily along at her heels.
Still, they’d both seemed to enjoy themselves. Despite what she’d been through, playing with the dog seemed to melt Jameelah’s worries away.
And now, as Logan stood there, watching the girl with her parents and thinking of all the things she was going to have to face in the days and weeks to come, he knew what he had to do.
“Excuse me for a moment,” he told Grimm, then he headed through to the canteen, where Ben and Hamza were getting stuck into bacon rolls from JJ’s while Taggart sat staring hopefully up at them both.
“Alright, Jack?” Ben said, hurriedly swallowing. He shot a guilty look at what was left of his roll. “We just… We didn’t think you’d be ready for anything yet.”
“We can go back and get you something later,” Hamza added.
Logan reprimanded them by telling them they were a pair of selfish bastards, then scooped Taggart up into his arms. The dog panted happily, but didn’t break eye contact with the bacon butties.
“Everything OK, sir?” Hamza asked.
Logan gave the dog’s head a pat, then ruffled the fur beneath its chin.
“Aye, son,” he said, then he turned to the door. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”
Shona Maguire plucked one of Logan’s chips from his tray and dunked it in the tomato sauce. She tossed it in her mouth, then chewed and swallowed before speaking.
“And she said no?”
“Aye. Bloody cheek,” Logan said. “Said thanks, but no thanks. She’s got a cat. And she said she thought he looked a bit daft.”
He threw a chip onto the floor, where Taggart instantly devoured it.
“So, you’re stuck with him, then?”
“Looks like it, aye,” Logan said. “Can’t keep dragging the bugger around with me, though. I’ll need to figure something out.”
Shona smiled and pilfered another chip. “Well, you’re pretty good at that sort of thing.”
Logan frowned. “Looking after dugs?”
“Figuring stuff out,” Shona said.
“Oh. Aye,” Logan said. “Because I was going to say, I’m shite at looking after dugs.”
“You’re not the best, no,” Shona agreed. “But figuring stuff out? You’re top ten, easy. You’re up there at the top of the league.”
And he was, he supposed.
There were a couple of things he’d struggled with, but the interviews with Alan Rigg and Kathryn Chegwin—her maiden name, it turned out, which she’d gone back to a few years after her husband’s death—had helped clarify.
The plan had been to burn the victim inside the caravan, destroying any clues to Alan’s past and giving the police a body that they’d think was his. The victim, though, had other ideas, and when he’d figured out what Alan had in store for him, he’d done a runner, forcing Alan to kill him out in the open. He’d built the tent around him, planted the ring and the caravan key in the hope it would be used to identify him, then set the body alight.
Of course, at that point, he discovered that he was locked out of the caravan. He also needed the door to remain intact so the police could figure out that the key fit the lock.
Once he’d realised this, he had also concluded that he couldn’t let himself be seen by anyone, or the police would know that the body wasn’t his. So, he’d slunk off, planning to come back and take care of the caravan later, once he was believed to be dead.
He’d watched from the trees as Hamza and Tyler had gone inside, and thought he was too late. But, when Ally Bally and Dinky had turned up and the detectives had run off, he’d seen his chance. He hadn’t seen Dinky leave with the briefcase. As far as he’d known, the fire had covered his tracks.
“How is she doing?” Shona asked. “The girl, I mean.”
Logan leaned an arm across the back of the couch and blew out his cheeks. “Good question. She says she’s fine, but… I don’t know. What do you think?”
Shona looked down at the tray of chips, picked out a couple, and gave one to the dog. “I don’t know,” she said.
“No, I know. But… If you were to put yourself in her shoes. How do you think she’ll be holding up? After everything she went through. Being taken and held like that.”
“I mean… God. I don’t know,” Shona said. Her voice sounded younger. Smaller, maybe. “I suppose… she’ll be scared. About… everything. Or, not everything, but anything. Random stuff. For a while. Even when she knows it’s stupid. She’ll probably panic a lot. Overthink stuff. See things that aren’t there sometimes. Jump at her own shadow.”
Logan said nothing. Just listened for once. Shona was still fixated on the tray of chips. Even more so than Taggart, which was saying something.
“She’ll probably doubt herself. She’ll wonder if she was to blame somehow. She’ll know she wasn’t, of course. Deep down. But she’ll have doubts. She’ll think… if she’d done things differently. If she’d been quicker. If she’d been stronger.” Shona ground the heels of her hands into her eyes and sniffed. “She’ll need help. She might not say it. She might never say it. But she will. She’ll need help, and she’ll need support, and patience and understanding.”
She smiled faintly, and met Logan’s eye for a moment. “I suppose… I suppose that’s what I think.”
“She’ll get it,” Logan promised. “All of it. That’s a promise.”
Shona placed her hand on his much larger one, and their fingers locked together.
“I’m sure she appreciates that more than she can say.”
“And I suppose… if she was really worried being at home…” His eyes darted around the room. “…she could always move in here.”
Shona pulled a concerned face. “Sure, that’s a bit creepy, she’s not even twelve. Not sure her parents would—”
He kissed her, his fingers brushing back her hair, his hand warm against her cheek.
When it broke off, they rested their foreheads against one another, and Shona’s voice cracked as she offered her response.
“Oh, go on, then.”
Logan leaned back, eyes widening as he looked at her in surprise. Shona winced.
“Was I not supposed to say yes to that?” she asked. “Was that like one of those, ‘I’ll make a nice offer and hope she turns it down,’ sort of things?”