The Exiled by William Meikle Read Free Book Online

to add. Grainger had again asked for all the CCTV footage available, and given the size of the castle and the amount of security deployed there, someone was going to be busy for a long time watching it all. But Grainger already knew they’d find nothing—he felt it in his gut. This perpetrator wasn’t just smart—he was toying with them.
    Now that they had three girls missing—and the concomitant rise in workload from having three crime scenes to process, interview and monitor—the team was stretched to the limit. But Grainger’s request for more staff fell on deaf ears. The D.C.I. was adamant.
    “Get me a result—find one of the girls, or at least be able to tell me how they were taken—until then, do your job. Diligent police work is what’s needed here. Put our team to work.”
    The D.C.I. hadn’t said it—he hadn’t needed to—but Grainger knew that the case could be taken away from him at any minute. Every new missing girl just hurried the moment along when he’d no longer be in charge, no longer have a chance to make a difference to the outcome. To Grainger’s surprise, he found that he cared.
    He left Simpson to organize a rotation of officers for going through the castle security footage and went outside for some air and a smoke. Even from here, in the quiet courtyard at the rear of the building, he heard the hubbub from the front entrance. It sounded like every press van and news reporter in the country was out there, all clamoring desperately for any scrap of information they could get and not caring how they got it. They’d already had to deal with reporters trying to pass themselves off as coffee or pizza delivery boys and security at the front door had to be tightened to ensure that any member of the public trying to get in was not just another snoop trying it on. What with that, the constant round of interviews—none of which came to anything—the stark fact of the missing children, and a distinct lack of sleep, Grainger felt himself unraveling at the edges.
    He sucked smoke and let his mind drift. On the far side of the courtyard he looked into a busy office of administrative workers, all bent forward peering at computer screens.
    Worker bees.
    That set off a new strain of thought, about birds of a feather flocking together, and he was snapped back to the memory of the dead swan among the tombstones. Before he could dispel that image, his sight blurred and the scene in front of him shifted.
    He stood on a high cliff, a stiff breeze at his back threatening to overbalance him. Away to his right the sun was going down behind a high, rocky outcrop, bathing a huddled group of tall stone dwellings in an orange light that made the stone shine. A wide pathway snaked away ahead of him through tall grassland, meandering along the edge of the cliffs to a mountain range in the far, misty distance.
    What the fuck is this?
    He still tasted the cigarette at his lips, but on turning into the wind he also smelled flowers, and grass, and the salt tang of the sea. Behind him, seen as if through a fog, he could just make out the doorway that led from the office to the courtyard, but even now that was thinning and fading into near invisibility.
    “Hey!”
    He stepped towards the entrance. Something caught his gaze, something big and black coming up the cliff towards him on massive wings. He stumbled, reaching out for the door as a black shadow fell over him like a cloak. His hand touched the door handle.
    And he turned, looking out over the courtyard. One of the workers looked up from her desk, saw him there and smiled—a smile that turned to a frown when she saw the look on Grainger’s face.
    He almost fell back into the safety of the station. Just before the door swung shut behind him he heard a voice cry out, as if from far way and into the wind.
    “I’m lost, Mammy.”

 
     
     
    8
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Reports of a fourth missing girl came across Alan’s feeds in the late afternoon. This one