The Exiled Read Online Free PDF Page A

Scores of pictures and video feeds turned up all showing the same thing—Alan’s older brother, John, walking onto an empty platform and going into the men’s lavatory.
    There’s been another one.
    Alan’s first instinct was to grab his camera and notebook and head for the station, but he knew the place would already be locked down tight, and that he was unlikely to get much of anything that other reporters wouldn’t get first. But he had the angle that the others hadn’t latched on to yet. There had been blood and feathers at both scenes. The police knew that, and he knew that. He had a head start on the competition.
    It’s time to see if that’s enough to get the full story.
    * * *
    Instead of heading out to the scene, he went online and started digging.
    In the next half an hour he learned more than he needed to know about Black Swan events, the Roman poet Juvenal, the history of Western Australia and swan upping. None of it seemed to have any relevance at all to the case at hand, but he filed all the links and downloads on his pin drive, just in case.
    He tried a new tack. He searched for recent news reports mentioning black swans in the city, and when that came up blank, widened his search, first to the suburban towns, then wider afield up and down the East Coast.
    Just when he thought he was getting nowhere fast, he found it. It was only a small article, in one of the Fife free papers, but his blood ran cold as he read it. It was from that morning’s edition.
    “Six rare black swans vanished yesterday from a pen in the Lochside Bird Reserve near Loch Leven, where they were being held pending release to the wild. Police suspect the theft to have been organized on behalf of a specialist breeder, but as yet no suspects have been identified.”
    Six.
    * * *
    “So, should I include it?”
    Alan stood at the door of the editor’s office. George Dunlop sat at his desk, glowering.
    “Have you talked to C.I.D… tried your brother?”
    “Why?” Alan asked.
    George looked at him.
    “You don’t get to check your conscience at the door, son,” he said. “There’s a wee lassie involved—maybe two. If we can help, we have a duty to do so.”
    “I know that,” Alan said, “but—”
    “No buts, lad. Tell them what we know—they can decide what to do with the information.”
    “They won’t answer,” Alan said. “I just get a secretary telling me nobody’s available for comment.”
    “So we don’t even know if they’ve made the connection yet?”
    “If it even is a connection.”
    “You’re too long in the job to be naive, son. Of course it’s a bloody connection. It’s the why that’s important. But if we run it before telling them and they don’t know about it, we’ll never get anything else out of C.I.D.” George sighed and looked at his watch. “I’ll need to make the decision soon. Keep trying to get through to them. If that fails, we’ll run with what we’ve got. Any confirmation that there’s a second victim?”
    “Nothing on that yet either,” Alan replied. “But we should at least mention it. Let the punters join the dots for themselves.”
    George nodded.
    “If we don’t, you can bet your arse every other bugger will. Get something to me in the next hour—and keep an ear to the ground. We might need to move fast if the story breaks ahead of us.”
    Alan went back to his desk and added a couple of paragraphs about the situation in Haymarket. He didn’t explicitly link the event with the missing girl from the Albert Road flats, but, as he’d said, the punters were going to be able to join the dots easily enough. While typing he kept one eye on the feeds. White-suited forensics scientists were working the Haymarket crime scene now, watched over by a couple of bored-looking constables. Speculation on Twitter was rife—people had already joined the dots with no prompting required, and rumor was that there was a pedophile ring operating in plain sight under the C.I.D’s