‘Fuck off.’
‘We will find out what happened to her, Tam. You know that, don’t you?’
He stood taller, his mouth twitching. ‘Well, I hope so.’
‘Do you?’
He was breathing harder, talking through gritted teeth. ‘’Course I do.’
Narey turned her head back to the counter, where the shop worker stood open-mouthed. ‘Do you know the name Eloise Gray? Young woman from Cardonald who went missing five months back? It was all over the papers and television. Her blood found next to her parked car. You remember?’
The older man nodded warily, his eyes switching between Narey and Harkness.
‘You’ll have seen all the searches that were done, the door-to-door interviews, the appeals and the reconstruction. You maybe read how we ran checks, but her bank account had never been touched, her emails never read, her phone never used or found. Maybe you heard how a man was pulled in for questioning, a prime suspect, no less. But how we had to let him go.’
The shopworker shrugged, scared.
‘You see, this gentleman here is Thomas Harkness. Tam used to be Eloise’s boyfriend. She broke up with him after he slapped her around, chipped one of her teeth with a backhander. Isn’t that right, Tam?’
He just glared, trapped by the conversation.
‘Tam here didn’t take it too well when she ended it. Sent her threatening texts, said he’d hit her harder. Said he’d make her sorry she’d treated him like that. Then she disappeared. All that was left was her blood and her abandoned car. Doesn’t look good, does it?’
The older man looked at Harkness, clearly intimidated by his size and belligerence, deliberating before making the slightest shrug of his shoulders that he could get away with.
‘Oh it doesn’t. Trust me. I’ve been doing this job a long time. Someone who does what Tam did to a woman, he’s done it before and he’ll do it again. And again. Can’t help themselves, men like Tam. And they can’t take the rejection. Their poor little egos can’t handle it. They build themselves up into such a rage that they can’t do anything else except explode. I’m betting you practised screaming at the mirror, didn’t you Tam?’
Harkness moved closer, eyes bulging, his neck red as the blood pulsed, his face contorted into a picture of hate. She felt his breath on her face, smelling beer, cigarettes and bile.
‘You don’t know me.’
‘Oh yes I do. I know you and I know your type. Coward. Bully. Thug. Those steroids you take for the gym won’t be helping with the rage either. I bet you’re just busting to lash out right now, aren’t you? Aren’t you, Tam?’
He clearly was but settled for leaning further forward again to snarl in her face, flecks of spittle landing on her cheek. ‘I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of hitting you.’
‘But you want to.’
‘Aye, but that’s no a crime. Not wanting to. You want it so you can arrest me and save you the bother of fitting me up like you’ve been trying to do. I’m no that stupid.’
She whispered. ‘I think maybe you are.’
He took a step back to give himself some room and seemed on the verge of proving her right. She steeled herself but the blow didn’t come. Instead he grabbed his right forearm with his left hand and held on.
‘What happened to Eloise, Tam? Is she dead?’
‘How do I know? So there was blood but that doesn’t mean anything. She could have just cut herself. She’s just done a runner. Probably off with her new fancy man. Or if something’s happened to her then it’s him.’
The fancy man. The mystery beau. The unknown stranger who was the unseen witness for the defence. Eloise had told friends how she’d met someone, a school-teacher named Jamie. She hadn’t dated him but was keen to. He seemed lovely, kind and caring and liked all the things she did. Dogs, hill-climbing, old movies and Oasis. The fancy man had ticked all the boxes. Harkness’s lawyers were, of course, all over this.
The only problem was that no one could find Jamie. Narey’s team had asked for a surname but none of her friends knew it. They contacted every school in the central belt and there wasn’t one teacher named Jamie. There were nine named James in its various forms but none of them admitted to going by Jamie, none of them claimed a passion for classic movies or fitted the fair-haired, six-foot, blue-eyed description.
Jamie was their main lead other than Harkness but it got them nowhere. Some suggested that Eloise had just made him up, that she was trying to convince her friends that things were better for her than they were. Her friends insisted she wouldn’t have done that.
Some of the squad latched onto Jamie, drawing comparisons with the Suzy Lamplugh case from the mid-1980s in London. The young estate agent disappeared after going to show a house to a client she’d referred to as Mr Kipper and was later declared dead, presumed murdered. Jamie was their Mr Kipper, that was the way many saw it.
Narey didn’t rule it out but she was focused on the devil she knew. Harkness had previous, Harkness had motive, Harkness had threatened her. Harkness was someone she could go after.
‘It’s him you should be looking for,’ he was telling her. ‘Find that Jamie character and you’ll find her. She’s run off with this guy.’
Narey snorted. ‘No chance and you know it. Eloise’s mum was in hospital. Treatment for blood cancer. There’s no way Eloise would have disappeared and left her like that. She and her mum were really close. She visited twice a day every day. You really expect us to believe she’d leave her?’
‘I don’t know. He’s killed her then. Whatever, it’s nothing to do with me.’
She pursed her lips as if considering that. ‘And of course, nothing to do with you that her mother took a turn for the worse, sick from worry, and that she ended up in intensive care.’
‘No, nothing. And she pulled through.’
‘Yes, she did. And now she lives every day in the knowledge that someone murdered her daughter.’
She’d held the word back deliberately, saving it for maximum impact. He reacted as if it were a red-hot poker and she’d just rammed it up his arse.
‘You can’t . . . I didn’t. I liked Eloise. I really liked her.’
‘Yeah. That’s why you smashed her in the mouth. That’s why you threatened her. That’s why you told her you’d make her sorry. Is that how much you liked her, Tam?’
The man’s mouth started making words that he couldn’t finish, managing just guttural sounds instead. He jabbed his finger at her repeatedly, backing towards the door as he did so. His eyes were reddening and, for a moment, she thought he was going to cry.
Job done. Sort of.
She turned back to the man at the counter, who was standing with his hands spread wide.
‘Sorry about that. It looks like I’ve just cost you a customer. I guess you never know who you’re going to bump into when you’re buying supper.’
‘It’s okay,’ he told her graciously. ‘I’m thinking maybe he wasn’t a good customer anyway.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘Not good at all.’
*
Narey drove for a few minutes until she spotted a figure sheltering from the rain in a shop doorway. One glance was enough to know he was intending to bed down there for the night. She parked and got out of the car, striding quickly through the rain.