Leon scratched his bare chest. He really was painfully skinny. Had Logan been so inclined, he could’ve counted every one of the wee nyaff’s ribs. “I said no. I don’t want to talk to you. You can’t make me. I know my rights, so kindly—”
Logan sniffed the air. It was loud and theatrical, and cut short the younger man’s reply. “Is that… is that cannabis I smell?”
Leon went all rabbity again. He didn’t just swallow this time, he gulped. “What? No. What? Where? I don’t smell anything.”
“I do. Strong, too,” Logan said. He jabbed a thumb back in the direction of his BMW. “Maybe I should get the dog out. He’d be able to confirm.”
“Dog?! What, no!” Leon said, and from the look on his face, he was picturing a very different canine to the one currently curled up on the backseat of the car. A larger one, probably. With sharper teeth.
“This conversation can go one of two ways, Mr Robinson,” Logan said, still managing to keep things light despite his growing urge to hoist the lad aloft by his face. “You, me, and the dog can all discuss this aroma of illegal narcotics that seems to be wafting out of your front door, or you can tell me about the van you recently sold to a gentleman over in Ardnamurchan.”
This time, it was Leon who took a little longer to reply than was natural. “What van?” he asked.
Logan rocked on his heels as he eyeballed the lad in the doorway, then he shrugged and turned away. “Right. I’ll get the dog.”
“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.