The Exiled Read Online Free PDF

noses. Public feeling was getting ugly, and there was as yet no confirmation that there even was a second victim.
    John will be getting shit coming down on him from a great height.
    They hadn’t spoken much recently, but John had seen him in the bar earlier, and knew he was on the case.
    If I don’t tell him, and he finds out, there’ll be hell to pay.
    Alan tried phoning the station again but he didn’t even get as far as the secretary. All he got was an engaged tone. He tried three times in the next hour to no avail.
    At ten p.m. George decided to run with what they had—leaving out any speculation about the black swans. Alan didn’t leave his desk. He had a feeling this story was just getting started. His gaze kept returning to the Fife newspaper article—and that one word in particular.
    Six.

 
     
     
    5
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    At the same time Alan was trying to get through to him, Grainger was nursing a splitting headache, mainly brought on by staring too hard for too long at out-of-focus CCTV footage of the Haymarket platform. He’d played the same scene, over and over, for hours now, and still couldn’t make head or tail of it.
    The camera shows the platform—it’s a busy evening rush-hour, but even so the little girl is clearly visible, standing very still, holding her mother’s hand, obviously somewhat awed by the hurry and press of bodies as trains arrive and depart.
    Then something catches her attention. She turns, staring at the open door to the men’s lavatory. The CCTV footage is too grainy to make out the details, but Grainger is pretty sure what she’s looking at. It’s a swan’s head, peering around from behind the open door, bobbing and lifting in that too-cute way they have that entices folks to feed them.
    The girl looks up at her mum and tugs at the woman’s sleeve, but Mum doesn’t notice, intent on reading the arrivals board above them. The girl frowns, turns back to see that the swan is still there…
    And she lets go of her mother’s hand.
    It takes the woman maybe ten seconds to notice that the girl has gone. In that time the small figure walks into the dark shadows beyond the lavatory door and is lost to sight. A short, stocky man walks into the lavatory shortly afterwards and leaves straightaway, a look of disgust on his face.
    Things happen fast. The woman checks the waiting room, the platform, then finally the lavatory. That’s when the screaming starts, and everything becomes a blur of action.
    Grainger kept watching the footage. Nobody went in or out of the lavatory that couldn’t be traced.
    Some time in that ten-second gap between her letting go of her mother’s hand and the woman noticing it, the little girl—and her assailant—vanished off the face of the earth.
    * * *
    Interviewing the mother had been a trial in itself. The woman was almost too distraught to speak, and when she did, it was in a painful, sobbing whisper that brought unbidden tears to anyone who heard her, no matter how hardened they thought they might be. D.S. Simpson ended up asking most of the questions, although she herself struggled with her emotions throughout.
    And in the end they got nothing beyond what they saw on the CCTV footage.
    “I only let go for five seconds,” the woman—Mrs. McGuire—sobbed. “What happened to my wee lassie?”
    Grainger had no answer—not for Mrs. McGuire or for the clamor that was rising fast from both the media and from his superiors.
    Forensics from the station lavatory proved every bit as baffling as the results from the Albert Road flats. Yet again the missing child’s footprints were found in the blood—which more than probably came from the swan—and yet again there were no stray hairs or fibers. Their only clue, if it could be called that, was the torn remains of a black swan.
    And again, the wings were missing. That fact at least gave some forensics that might be useful. The wings of both dead swans had—in contrast to the carnage wrought