Lone Wolf (DI Sutherland Scottish Crime Thriller Book 5), page 1
LONE WOLF
A DI SUTHERLAND SCOTTISH CRIME THRILLER
OLIVER DAVIES
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
2. Dominic
3. Dominic
4. Dominic
5. Dominic
6. Dominic
7. Dominic
8. Ray
9. Dominic
10. Dominic
11. Ray
12. Dominic
13. Dominic
14. Dominic
15. Dominic
16. Dominic
17. Dominic
18. Dominic
19. Dominic
20. Dominic
21. Dominic
22. Dominic
23. Dominic
24. Dominic
25. Dominic
26. Ray
27. Dominic
28. Bonnie
Epilogue
A Message from the Author
PROLOGUE
And so the ghosts materialised, in much the same fashion as they did for Scrooge on the eve of Christmas. Still, as the river ran through Greenock on a warm, summer day like today, their motionless faces of ash grey remained as silent as when we’d left this town. Inscribed with marks which couldn't be undone no matter how many times we blinked the sun out of our eyes, their headstones we’d memorised inch for inch, still bearing the marks of death, each carved by a steady hand. Only three headstones of importance stood before the tips of our shoes, before Bonnie’s polished loafers and my scuffed suit pair of lace-ups. I say only, because CID’s collateral damage could fill a whole row if it chose.
However, the three bodies buried beneath the Scottish soil weren’t merely CID’s losses. They were our personal and professional mistakes rolled into one subdued scene. My personal and professional mistakes, waiting to be accepted and recognised with open arms in the way Bonnie and I should have allowed ourselves to all those years ago, in place of our younger selves who had found it easier to flee from the pain and from the waiting arms of their ghosts. Easier to avoid them altogether. Brushing our grief under the carpet in order to move forward with the long life which had appeared to stretch ahead of us then, where waking up in the morning with a heaviness in our hearts and a brave expression plastered on our faces seemed the only solution to our problems.
It was a lie. All of it. Life wasn’t long. You couldn’t run away from ghosts, and you couldn’t build a future on a past you hadn’t healed from, owned up to, and accepted. It was a pretence ready to break. To crack. A foundation of a new life built on unstable ground, which threatened to cave inwards on itself. Letting the guilt of these unfinished endings seep into our lives in the way an old house lets in the rain and the cold, a personal kind of guilt that we hadn’t mustered the courage in the past to visit the bodies of these three men below the ground we’d failed every once in a while. Hadn’t mustered the courage to leave an unwilted bunch of flowers in place of those which had bent in two, or found ourselves able to honour their memories by sharing their stories with the next generation. To tell of their quirks, their own mistakes and, above all else, the impact each of them had on us when Bonnie and I were but a sergeant and inspector.
We were ready to give them that now, Bonnie and I. Ready for this return to where the rocky foundation of our new life had stemmed from and send it tumbling to the floor, allowing ourselves to rebuild the stones of our future to how they should have been stacked in the first place. Or so we’d convinced ourselves. Biting the bullet and moving back to Greenock after hiding within the depths of the thrumming capital city of England had been intended to give us this kick up the backside we needed to get ourselves into shape. Now, amidst the sun and the undergrowth, my stomach was near able to convince me that we weren’t fully ready after all. Too late, my head told my stomach.
We were here.
And here we were indeed, having trekked past the creeping strings of ivy hanging from the trees and thickets of bushes which the groundskeeper had trimmed to perfection. Every bend and twist of the graveyard was to thank for my aching bones, the route carved into my memory better than the dates written upon the headstones. To the place where the shadows of the dead walked the path beside us and our children who dawdled in the distance, all three of them having found a snail to amuse them. Bonnie and I had an affliction for threes, it seemed.
We didn’t complain of their wandering attention spans. This moment of calm before their little worlds full of hurricanes and scraped knees spotted the graves is exactly what it needed to be. Private. Respectful. Weighty too. It didn’t take much of an explanation to tell Bonnie and me that we were both going through a multitude of self reflective thoughts. One in particular which soothed me is that the bodies beneath the soil would have been proud to see this. Us. Happy with children in tow. Older, etched with a few more lines than we’d sported than when they were living; the bedtime routine could do that to the best of parents. Most of all, they would have loved to see us swallow our varying degrees of pride and admit to ourselves that London hadn’t given us everything that we had once hoped it would. That everything we searched for had been in Greenock all along. I pictured them raising a glass to us in whatever pub they found themselves in during the afterlife and smiling. Surely, out of everything believed about the afterlife, there had to be a pub? If so, there was one shy grin in particular I hoped was aimed towards me and the wedding band sitting snug on my hand.
A shift occurred next to me from the woman five feet four in stature and much more than that in spirit. Bonnie’s unwavering gaze had fixated on the patch where the same blond lad with the shy grin I was thinking of rested. Her stooped brow line beaded with a light sheen of sweat. I wasn’t entirely sure the sweat was on account of the sun. Cheeks fresh with the glow of unpacking our final boxes full of odd bits and pieces that morning, the new house seeming more and more like our own every day, those pursed lips of hers told me everything I needed to know, yet kept so much hidden from me all at the same time. My pinkie finger brushed against the hot palm hanging limp by Bonnie’s thigh, then thought better of it and retracted.
“I’m not sure,” Bonnie muttered into the gentle breeze, her voice carried away with it. Shifting my attention to her, I hadn’t expected the conversation to come so soon. I wasn’t sure what I had expected from her today. To break down? Burst into tears at the reminder of what she had suffered in the past? No, Bonnie rarely allowed herself to break down in front of anybody. Not even me.
“Of?”
“The question you wanted to ask me,” she muttered.
Mustering an unconvincing grimace, I shrugged. “Probably because I haven’t had the chance to ask it yet.”
“No.” Bonnie scuffed her heel in the gravel and a short-lived billow of dust was kicked up at our knees. However confusing the idea, Bonnie wasn’t agreeing with me. She was disputing. “You don’t have to. Because you were wondering if there was anything you could say that could do this moment justice, and that was my answer. I’m not sure there’s anything to say that could make this okay.”
Bonnie was right, as she often was. Not everything could be smoothed over with a conventional phrase of sorrow, and perhaps it was for the best. Perhaps it would only cheapen situations such as these and diminish the effects the endings of those underneath the soil had had on us, on people who had suffered similar situations to what Bonnie and I had. Or worse. My earliest days on the job should have taught us that we had gotten through our hardships easily in comparison to others. The amount of innocent lives I had torn to shreds as an inspector was unfathomable by those who had never been in the same position, having to tell telling families tales of how their beloved had fallen victim to homicides, road accidents, and a whole ugly list more gritter and crueller than anything we had endured.
“One thing’s for sure.” Bonnie faltered before she could finish her sentence. Fishing a piece of dirt from underneath her nails, she glanced over her shoulder towards where the children were playing with no idea of our mutual heartaches. Swaying on the spot with the thoughts intruding upon her, Bonnie dipped into a bout of silence I couldn’t stomach on top of everything else.
“The grass is green?” I harboured a wild guess.
“That too.”
“I have a feeling I’m going to have to decode everything you say today.”
“If there’s anybody who could guess codes, it would be you,” Bonnie chuckled. Wryly, it had to be said. “Especially mine. You have all the experience necessary to do so.”
“For once, you might be wrong. Unless you’re attempting to spare my ego,” I added after a short pause. “Nothing about you makes much sense to me at the best of times, Bonnie, and nothing ever did. When it comes to him, especially.” I nodded at the headstone belonging to the slim blond lad with a history with Bonnie to be rivalled. Tommy Smith had spent a teenage youth by her side, her first love, accounting for the years with her I had missed out on. “If this experience you speak of consists of me patching together clueless theories of what might be going on in that head of yours, then perhaps I’m the wrong man for the job.”
Bonnie’s elbow jammed into my ribcage.
“Are you forgetting that you were one of the most renowned detective inspectors in Greenock, Sutherland, and will be again upon your return to the station? Or did that realm of experience happen to sl
Goosebumps flooded my arms on account of the nickname which had filtered out of her vocabulary when we had run away from Greenock. A piece of my identity lost along the way, now returning. God, it felt good. No. It felt marvellous. Like slipping into the most comfortable pair of slippers you owned after a gruelling day. Better than that, even. Like letting Bonnie’s silken palms glide up and down my muscles, easing the tension in my spine. Me treasuring her warmth and her treasuring mine.
“I was the only DI.” Clearing my throat, I brushed the fantasy away quicker than the money spider crawling up the length of my sleeve. “And I rather imagined I was by your side to act as your husband today. It’s my intention to stay as far away as possible from the requirements of creating such theories my rank brings me for a while.”
“You are.” Bonnie nodded. I didn’t miss the struggle to catch her breath. “Except, sometimes, the officer and the person can rarely be separated.”
“I act as a husband when I'm able.” I tried to disguise the affront. “And a father when I’m needed.”
“I was talking about myself.” Bonnie pressed her lips into a grim line. “Whilst I gave up being a sergeant when I fell pregnant, it hasn’t refrained me from thinking of that period of my life. Now more than ever, and not only because we lost these men when we were a vital part of CID around here, but because the horror stories I managed to bury years ago when we first became parents are coming back to me. Climbing out of the woodwork. Bringing back memories I’d tried to forget I had.”
“Old cases?”
“There’s an investigation in particular that springs to mind. And it’s gotten me thinking,” Bonnie hummed, avoiding my gaze. “That out of all of everything we’ve seen, theirs would be the worst, Dominic. For what I know for sure, is if any of our children were to end up like Charlie Grieg did… like this,” Bonnie motioned towards the heaps of soil, “I think I’d beg to be taken in their place. For the first time, I understand how Charlie Grieg’s parents found themselves in a pit of despair from something more than an outsider’s perspective. Losing a child is having an actual part of you, a piece of your soul, robbed. More than a partner or a colleague, it’s a baby who once relied on you for everything it needed. Milk in a bottle when they were hungry, a pair of arms to catch them when they were learning to crawl, a source of comfort whilst they cried themselves to sleep…”
In the distance, ours wound and weaved around the path, the distraction of the snail well and truly forgotten. There was far more for them to see here, more for them to do. Oblivious to the inevitable fear most parents were filled with from the minute their flesh and blood were brought into such a dark and drab world, they were wrapped wholly in their summertime bliss, rejoicing safely in the knowledge that the time to start their new school was almost five weeks away. An age, as far as they were concerned.
“Don’t,” I croaked, though what had been intended as a plea for mercy sounded similar to a threat. A call to arms. “Because the way you speak, Bonnie. It’s as though you expect it to become a reality for us.”
“Maybe every mother does. Or maybe the suspicious loss of a child it’s what every single officer out there, old and new fears.” Bonnie shrugged. I frowned. DCI Aikman had once told me the exact same thing. “And now we have our own to protect, it’s hard to stop from imagining them showing up on the next slab you and DCI Aikman will be called to inspect. Harder still not to replace the image stuck in my mind of Charlie Greig’s body with one of theirs.”
Shielding the sun from my eyes, I turned away from the headstones to view the woman that could still persuade me to run a mile barefoot if she asked. It was then that I saw the tears Bonnie was holding back, the pools of silver collecting on her lashes. She would blink away before they could fall, I was almost certain, for I could count the number of times Bonnie allowed herself to cry without inhibition in front of me on one hand. The first time had been in a hospital bed, the second, at the death of Tommy Smith. Eventually, and the third had been sometime during the re-opening of the Charlie Grieg case, actually. Then there was the last. The last time Bonnie had cried was during our biggest argument since our marriage, heated disagreements we didn’t make a habit of repeating often. Snaking an arm around her shoulders, I pulled Bonnie into my tight hold. Planted a fraught kiss into her hair. She thumbed a button halfway down my shirt and the reverse side dug ever-so-softly into my ribcage; it was a quiet display of her thanks.
“We agreed that I wouldn’t get too involved in the physical side of proceedings when I return to the station for good. DCI Aikman may be many things but he knows better these days than to put me in a position which would compromise our family…”
“No.” Bonnie sent me a look that told me to refrain from putting words into her mouth, from skewing her meanings. “It isn’t you or DCI Aikman my concern was aimed towards. I’m talking about the other type of people out there. Those who could commit the types of crimes which affected the Grieg family, people we learn to trust without question. When you’ve been face to face with the types in the interviewing rooms, offered them a glass of water and watched as they’ve taken it with a smile that could melt butter whilst knowing what they’ve done to children like Charlie Grieg, whether we have evidence to support it or not, it’s harder to pretend evil doesn’t exist. Harder still when you’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with them. Respected them. Worked underneath them. Had all different kinds of affection for them.”
“Not us, Bonnie,” I vowed. “Not again.”
Had I convinced either of us? Bonnie’s lack of a smile was my answer. Crime always happened to somebody and most of the families affected were normal people, all of which had told themselves the same thing. It would never be them. It’s probably what Mr and Mrs Greig told themselves when they’d tightened the toggle on their son’s neckerchief and sent him off to the woods for a scouting weekend in the height of summer, 2005. On a humid early evening like tonight would be, where the worst nightmare for all CID officers and parents alike had begun. Where Bonnie's seed of doubt had been sown. That seed had sprouted into a thicket of nettles decorating the banks of a stream on the edge of the woods which the officers in starched shirts and hats positioned at ninety-degree angles had lifted Charlie Grieg's limp corpse from.
ONE
Charlie Grieg lifted the sleeping bag from over his head.
Breathing. He could hear breathing. Another set of inhales and exhales that weren’t his own, for the second set of inhales and exhales continued their rasping rhythm during the long pause in which Charlie had sucked in all the air he could manage to find inside his stuffy tent and held it still within his lungs. Charlie waited. Listened. Savoured the stuffy air he’d sucked in as one by one his boy-ish muscles seized up in fear of what could be lurking outside there in the woods. The way in which muscles often do when a body has a choice between entering flight or fight mode and decides to side with neither of those options, rather the option that is rarely listed. To freeze.
The scout leaders who had organised this camping weekend away had taught Charlie that, if faced with debilitating fear, there were approximately five seconds to move before the fear had set in for good. Leaked through to your core. There were five seconds before a body could fail its master completely, leaving you as prey for the predators that lurked out in the wilderness.
