Blood Runs Cold (Detective Anna Gwynne #2)
Dylan Young
One
Thursday, Edinburgh
It was hot for June. Sweltering for Scotland. The meteorologists called it a plume. Mediterranean air from southern Europe billowed up across the Channel, sending temperatures soaring. Suddenly men were in T-shirts and shorts, girls in denim cut-offs and flouncy tops, their pale northern thighs and chests blotched from the sudden exposure to rarely experienced levels of UV.
Thirteen-year-old Kirsty Smeaton told her eleven-year-old sister Blair she was taking her to the shop on Market Street for an ice cream. But really it was because their mother wanted half an hour’s quiet to smoke and watch the soaps on catch-up.
Blair dawdled beside Kirsty, concentrating on the Twister dripping sticky green and yellow tracks onto her fingers. Heat seemed to flow up in waves from the pavement. They’d crossed back over the Esk and Kirsty had demolished half of her Solero already, struggling not to get any gunk onto her phone. Her friend Marie had just sent her a Snapchat of her kid brother, Charlie, in a paddling pool with a rubber ring on his head, and she was texting a thumbs-up emoji in reply as she walked along the park path. She didn’t notice the dog until it emerged from behind the white van and they almost walked into it – a gorgeous, wonderful, floppy-eared German Shepherd puppy.
‘Careful now,’ said a voice.
The van stood parked at the kerb in the lay-by on Station Road, opposite the print works. A man followed the dog onto the pavement, clutching a long lead.
‘You need to look where you’re going, ladies,’ said the man, ‘in case you trip over Banshee, here.’
‘Banshee, is that his name?’
‘Her name. Cos she makes a noise like a banshee when she says hello.’
The dog looked longingly up at the girls’ lollipops, straining at the lead. The yellow and black jacket strapped around her chest said, ‘Guide dog puppy in training.’
‘Awww,’ cooed Kirsty.
‘Can we pet her?’ Blair asked.
The man frowned. ‘Well. You shouldn’t. Not really. Not while she’s being walked. But let me put her back in her crate and then we’ll see.’
The man picked the dog up and walked to the rear of the white van, opened the doors and put Banshee into a mesh cage. Both girls followed their progress, leaning in to touch the dog through the grille. Banshee was now in a tail-wagging frenzy, trying to lick as many bits of their flesh as she could.
‘Are you teaching her?’ asked Kirsty, grinning.
‘Oh yes. She’s a quick learner, too,’ said the man, adjusting the rear door inwards a little, shielding the dog from the street. He unclipped something from his belt. Something black and cylindrical that looked like a torch. He reached forwards casually as if he was going to shine it into the van, keeping it at shoulder level. Kirsty followed his hand. It moved slowly, non-threateningly, the man smiling as he noticed her curious gaze, tilting the object almost as if offering it to her. As if he was about to explain.
Blair was too preoccupied with Banshee to notice. But Kirsty frowned, her instincts alerted, blinked once and looked up into the man’s face just before he thrust the prongs towards her T-shirt and hit the skin behind it.
She jerked away, but not before the stun gun sent 800,000 volts pulsing through her with an accompanying crackle and buzz. Kirsty clattered against the van’s rear plastic bumper, her knees folding under her. Pain erupted as her muscles went into spasm and she collapsed against the inside of the rear door. She tried to scream, to breathe, but nothing, for several long seconds, emerged from her locked-up body. The very last thing she remembered before being thrown into the rear next to the yelping Banshee was seeing Blair’s lolly tumble from her hands.
One eyewitness on the other side of the bridge later said they saw a dog handler talking to two girls. The older girl seemed to slump and needed assistance getting into the back of the van. The witness had been too far away to see the make or model. Too far away to see a number plate. The driver, she reported, closed the rear doors, walked calmly around and drove away.
They found Kirsty eight hours later, stumbling, disorientated, in a field in Pennycuick with a stolen German Shepherd puppy at her side. She could add nothing to the accounts other than describing a man dressed in a brown short-sleeved shirt and cargo pants, wearing sunglasses under a green baseball cap. His shirt had looked a little bit too large for him, he spoke in a calm and steady voice that she didn’t recognise and, through her tears, she could think of nothing that made him stand out.
Despite a huge search, house to house on the streets surrounding where it had happened and a Police Scotland city-wide sweep that day, there was no sign of Blair Smeaton anywhere.
Two
Friday, Bath, Royal United Hospital
The staff nurse was new. He’d seen her a couple of times on shifts, her face blooming pink with adrenaline, her dark hair tied back. She was young, still keen.
‘Dr Hawley, Dr Hawley!’ Her voice cut through the war-zone noises; clattering trolleys, someone vomiting in an adjacent cubicle, an elderly patient pleading to go home, her confused begging forlornly hushed by a relative. Hawley didn’t reply immediately. He was busy turning over black instrument boxes on a shelf, searching for an ophthalmoscope. He needed it to examine a stroke patient’s retinas but the one he liked, the one with the least dust on the lens, wasn’t where it should have been. He preferred the wall-units, the rechargeable type. They, at least, never went walkabout.
‘Dr Hawley.’
He felt a hand on his elbow and turned, flicking his gaze down to her name badge. Kelly Mann. The noise of an ambulance siren slowly getting louder in its approach from the city centre drew her attention for a moment and she glanced towards the entrance. More patients on the way.
‘Motorcycle accident according to Charge nurse. Multiple injuries. No idea where we’ll put them.’ Kelly shrugged and proffered a sanguine smile.
‘We’ll find somewhere. He’s a magician.’
Kelly let out a small sigh. She hadn’t quite developed the thick skin you needed to work the Friday night six to two shift. Maybe she never would. Every training NHS doctor and nurse did a stint in A and E. It was more than a bit like conscription given that every day in every hospital in the country felt like a battle. But this wasn’t Syria, this was Bath in June. Not many trainees stayed after their mandatory stint. Only the brave, or the very foolish. Hawley knew to which category he belonged.
‘What can I do for you, Kelly?’
Someone, probably an anaesthetist judging by the green theatre scrubs, ran towards the resuscitation room. Through the open door, Hawley counted at least eight staff working on a forty-six-year-old cardiac arrest.
Kelly said, ‘I know it’s not yours, but I have a six-year-old who fell off a swing. Goran was dealing with it but he’s been in there,’ she nodded towards the resus room, ‘for twenty minutes and I just need someone to take a quick look and sign a form so that we can get the poor little thing to X-ray. Do you mind?’
He wanted to suggest she ask someone else but one glance told him there was no one. They’d had the usual slew of drunks and minor traumas, but the evening had been compounded by a collapsed stage at an agricultural show. No fatalities, but they could have done without the extra dozen cuts and scrapes that needed dressings and sutures.