Earlier, I tried to imagine MacCullagh as my wife. But in a contest with Rita Ortiz, she wouldn’t get a look-in.
‘We’ll be leaving in a police van,’ Rita says. ‘That doesn’t mean you’re in trouble. But this case has attracted a lot of attention. There are quite a few nosy parkers outside.’
‘I saw them.’
She beckons me to the door. ‘Well, they aren’t going to see you.’
IV
The journey from Shrewsbury police station is one I’ll never forget.
Five police officers form a scrum around me and hustle me into the van, so fast that I don’t even see the gathered journalists. The flash of their cameras is like lightning.
‘Is Elissa Mirzoyan dead?’ one of them shouts. ‘Did you kill her?’
Then the doors close and we’re accelerating away. I wonder if their cameras picked me out. Elissa made the Telegraph’s front page. I hope I don’t.
‘You can relax a bit now, Kyle,’ Rita says. ‘The worst is over.’
‘How far’s this place?’
‘Oh, thirty minutes or so.’ She smiles. ‘Do you like Thai food?’
‘I’ve never had it.’
Her eyes widen in mock-horror. ‘You mean you’ve never tasted pad thai?’
‘Nope.’
‘What about tom yum goong?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Gaeng panang? Moo ping?’
The names are so funny that I can’t suppress a giggle. Then I remember Gretel, and the fire, and all the other kids who died. I close my mouth, ashamed.
‘It’s going to be OK, Kyle,’ Rita says.
But this woman who isn’t a detective doesn’t know what I know.
No one does.
Mairéad
I
Sunday morning, thirty-six hours after learning Kyle Buchanan’s true identity, Mairéad is in a car heading to Oswestry police station, nineteen miles north-west of Shrewsbury.
She’s slept five hours in the last fifty. She hasn’t told Scott about the miscarriage. She’s so stricken with exhaustion she no longer trusts her own judgement. And yet she cannot stop.
So far, Mairéad’s had three phone updates with Dr Rita Ortiz, the NHS forensic psychiatrist tasked with Kyle’s immediate care, and one with Dr Patrick Beckett, Ortiz’s boss.
It’s a complicated situation. Kyle Buchanan is clearly a victim, but that doesn’t preclude him from any involvement in Elissa Mirzoyan’s killing. His transfer from the police station is no indication of presumed innocence, simply a concession to his mental-health needs. Kyle might feel safe right now, but everyone’s waiting for him to slip up. Mairéad can’t forget the petrol fumes on his clothes, nor the sight of him, half crazed, hefting a wood axe in the cottage hallway. The equipment used for filming Elissa was found in the room where he slept, along with other items belonging to abducted children.
There’s evidence of one other adult living at the cottage – SOC found an additional set of fingerprints in nearly every room. Likewise, DNA extracted from several hairs – confirmed as male, due to the chromosomal mix – are a negative match for both brothers.
Could Kyle have been indoctrinated? Coerced into becoming an accessory? Ortiz and Beckett certainly think that’s possible. Whether he’d be criminally responsible for his actions is a decision for someone else. Right now, Mairéad just wants to uncover the truth.
Unfortunately, because of Kyle’s fragile mental state, progress has been minimal. It’s clear, now, that he’s suffering from a psychosis: his grip on reality seems fundamentally damaged. Underlying schizophrenia, triggered by the trauma of his twenty-year ordeal, is possibly the cause. Dr Ortiz believes Kyle’s delusions and hallucinations are unusually complex. It means that even when he thinks he’s talking truthfully the reality may be something quite different.
It’s clear, too – from his high-pitched voice, lack of body hair and sloping breasts – that he’s not just damaged mentally. The force medical examiner thinks his physical abnormalities are due either to the huge stress of his ordeal, a sexual injury suffered during his early confinement or a pituitary defect leading to hypogonadism. An endocrinologist is due to examine him in the coming days.
So far, Mairéad’s team has concealed Kyle Buchanan’s identity from the waiting media, but this is an investigation spanning multiple forces; it’s only a question of time before details leak out. When that happens, the story will go stratospheric.
II
Oswestry police station is a wide brick building dominated by a whitewashed front entrance. Moments after introducing herself at the front desk, Mairéad stands at a computer terminal talking to station sergeant Tony Ferrari.
‘Member of the public phoned it in,’ Ferrari says, handing her a coffee. ‘Saw him wandering aimlessly, like he was lost or maybe confused.’
‘Where was this?’
‘Few miles from Meunierfields. Patrol car picked him up and brought him here. We gave him a Coke while we figured things out. Thought he had a learning difficulty or something, but he knew how to contact his old man via Leon Meunier at Rufus Hall. After we called, the dad – at least, the guy we thought was the dad – drove over to collect him.’
‘He came here?’
‘See for yourself,’ Ferrari says, tapping the computer mouse.
A video image fills the screen. Mairéad recognizes Oswestry’s front desk. Around ten seconds in, a man approaches it. Early to mid-fifties, leathery skin, dark hair slicked close to his scalp. He wears a mud-spattered waxed jacket. Greeting the desk sergeant with a flick of his chin, he begins to talk.
There’s no sound on the recording. Eyes on the stranger, Mairéad says, ‘I want to speak to everyone who came in contact with him.’
‘Already rounded them up.’
Onscreen, the desk sergeant says something to a colleague out of shot. The man in the waxed jacket watches, running a hand up and down his throat.
‘Creepy-looking bastard, isn’t he?’ Ferrari says.
Easy to make that kind of judgement in hindsight, but Mairéad has to admit there’s something deeply unsettling about the man. ‘You’ve got this footage ready to go?’
‘It’s all yours.’
Another officer enters the shot. Beside him, pale-faced and frightened-looking, walks Kyle Buchanan.
‘The car park,’ Mairéad says. ‘It’s covered by CCTV?’
‘Give it a sec and you’ll see.’
Almost immediately, the scene changes to outside. In shot is a black Land Rover Defender. The man in the waxed jacket approaches it. Kyle trails behind.
The vehicle’s hazards flash.
‘We checked it out,’ Ferrari says. ‘Registered to Leon Meunier.’
The man on the recording clearly isn’t the late Meunierfields peer. A shame he didn’t bring the white van used for Elissa’s abduction. Mairéad would have liked to see its new plates.
‘Good work,’ she tells Ferrari. ‘We’ll get this circulated. In the meantime, I want to speak to those officers.’