The Exiled by William Meikle Read Free Book Online Page A

had been taken from the back garden of her family home in Leith just after three. The police had the place locked down tight too fast for anyone to get a whiff of the story—but the news had moved on anyway. Individual tales of loss and grief were being swamped by the idea there was a serial abductor on the loose. It had gone national—international even—filling most of the available news slots in all media and spilling over into heated discussions on the social networks.
    It was no longer Alan’s story—half the paper’s team was on it now, including the lead reporters. That left Alan with only his hunch that the swans were key to the whole thing, and George Dunlop trusted him enough to let him run with it—for the evening at least.
    “Get me something nobody else has got.”
    If only it were that easy.
    For want of anywhere else to start, he went back to his swan research, this time covering the whole of Scotland and going back a year at a time.
    He finally got a hit in 1996 in the Daily Record .
    “David Galloway, (19), was arrested today in Airdrie and charged with animal abuse, namely the slaughter of four swans that were found dead in the Hunterskill Quarry near Cambuslang last week. Reports initially suggested a possible animal attack, but Galloway was found to have the wings of the swans in his possession at the time of his arrest.”
    Alan felt the tingle that told him he was onto something. Ten minutes later he had David Galloway’s history laid out on this laptop screen, and by now he knew—he was most definitely onto something.
    He spent the next hour on the phone to a variety of medical personnel, relatives and police officers. He finally got what he wanted by using John’s name as leverage. An underhanded tactic, but if it didn’t break the story, John didn’t have to know, and if it did, John would be happy to hear of it. Alan was given an address—a popular bar in the New Town—and told to be there at eight.
    * * *
    He arrived fifteen minutes early. He took a beer to a corner seat and sipped at it while watching the patrons. Most of the talk seemed to be of the abductions, and there was a lot of theorizing and proselytizing taking place—but nobody seemed to have any firm clue as to the abductor’s motives, beyond the general agreement that whoever was doing it was an evil fuck.
    His contact arrived at eight on the dot. Alan got a beer for the man and sat down opposite John Weir, a retired sergeant from the Lanark constabulary. He was a burly chap in his sixties, with the look of a hard man who’d let himself go a bit as the years advanced. He also, judging by the speed it was disappearing, liked his beer. Alan decided to get straight to the point before he ended up having to shelf out more cash.
    “You worked a case—the David Galloway case—back in the nineties in Airdie, didn’t you?”
    Weir took a deep slug of beer before replying.
    “Daft Davie? I haven’t thought about him in years. He was just a big gangly lad—soft in the head but no harm to anybody. The other kids used to poke fun at him, calling him a retard and a mong, but Davie just took it all in and smiled back at them. ‘The best-natured boy in Scotland,’ was how his mother described him, and for a while it seemed that was the case.
    “That was until he started going on about the black birds and the castle. He got it into his head that he wanted to be a big bird himself, so he took to tearing the wings off birds—crows and magpies at first before he moved on to seagulls, and when he started on the swans, we had to do something about it.”
    Alan was startled momentarily at the mention of a castle and black birds—too close to his earlier vision to be coincidental. The ex-cop put down his beer and looked over the table, clearly concerned.
    “Are you okay, son? You’ve gone as white as a sheet.”
    Alan remembered the job at hand—and the question he needed to ask.
    “This Davie—there was never any indication