She’d… When she was little she’d sneak in there and play. I know we shouldn’t have indulged her, but we did. Keep meaning to clear it out, but every time I tried, she’d burst into tears and scream till she was sick.’ Mrs Garfield narrowed her eyes, then looked away down the hall. ‘What kind of grown woman wants to be a wee wizard boy in a stupid book?’
Logan pulled on a smile. ‘Don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea, is there? DS Chalmers will lend a hand, won’t you, DS Chalmers?’
She looked up at him from the cupboard. ‘I—’
‘Excellent. Milk and two for me, thanks.’ He stood back so she could climb out. ‘I just need to make a couple of calls – get the ball rolling – then I’ll be right through.’
‘You want tea?’ Mrs Garfield’s mouth hung open. ‘You’ve not done anything yet!’
‘Like I said, I need to make a few calls. And DS Chalmers needs to ask you some questions about Agnes’s friends.’
Chalmers blinked. ‘I do? … Oh, right, yes, that’s right. Questions. Er, shall we?’
As soon as they’d disappeared into the kitchen, Logan shut the lounge door again, then clambered into the cupboard under the stairs. There was just enough space to kneel at the tall end without banging his head on the sloping ceiling.
He frowned up at it. Now there was something you didn’t see every day. A pentagram covered the plasterboard, scratched out in red ink. It sat within a couple of circles, with squiggles in various bits, and what looked like Latin around the outside.
Why were teenagers such a bunch of freaks?
A pair of wingnuts sat on the inside of the doorframe. Logan peered outside again. The bolt fitted into a metal bracket held in place by the wingnuts. So if you cracked the padlock, opened the door, unscrewed them, put the padlock back on the now unattached bolt mechanism, then climbed inside – you could pull the door shut, do up the wingnuts again, and no one would know you were in there. From the outside it’d look as if the cupboard was still locked.
He shifted the action figures to one side of the shelf and picked his way through the books. Three of them were hollowed out hardbacks, like the one with Harry and Edward getting intimate. One held a notebook, with curly leaves and squiggles inlaid into the red leather cover. It was full of cramped black handwriting, interspersed with sketches of magic circles and other occult thingies. The next held a little woollen dolly, no bigger than the palm of his hand, with button eyes and a lock of brown hair fastened to its chest with a safety pin; a wizened chicken’s foot wrapped in tartan ribbon – like a really cheap kilt pin; a hairbrush; and a test-tube of something dark and viscous.
Book number three was a lot more interesting. Logan tipped the contents out on the mattress. One pack of cherry-scented pipe tobacco. One old-fashioned long-necked pipe. One blister-pack sheet of little orange pills. And one clear plastic Ziploc bag with what looked like catnip in it. He opened the bag and took a sniff: the sweet, sweaty smell of marijuana.
What kind of person smoked weed in a pipe, like an auld mannie?
There was a lot of it too – enough to get a coach-load of students off their faces for a week. Enough to count as possession with intent to supply.
Logan sat back on his haunches. Why would someone run away and leave that much pot behind? Maybe Agnes got into difficulties with her supplier, or another dealer, and needed to get out of town in a hurry?
Assuming she actually managed to leave Aberdeen before they caught up with her…
Well, while he was here, might as well be thorough.
He unzipped the sleeping bag and turned it inside out: nothing. The mattress was old and saggy, soft enough that he could lift the corners up and over and poke at the floorboards underneath. More nothing. He let the corner fall back and a puff of fusty dust billowed out into the air.
Logan turned and struggled to haul the mattress up from the short end of the cupboard. Bloody thing was like manoeuvring a dead body…
There: a plastic folder lay on the floorboards. He grabbed it and the mattress thumped back into place. More dust.
Inside the folder was a stack of press clippings about Witchfire being filmed in Aberdeen – the actors burbling about what a great script it was; the author hedging his bets as to whether it would be any good or not; some toad from the local council banging on about job creation and tourism opportunities; a photo op with the actors doling out soup to homeless people; another with a troupe of little kids in school uniform on the movie set, all grinning and holding swords. But the biggest thing was a copy of the script, marked up with green and yellow highlighter pen:
Witchfire
A Golden Slater Production
Based on the book by William Hunter
Script V: 4.0.2
The name ‘NICHOLE FYFE’ was written in red ink on the top-right corner… Nichole Fyfe… Nichole Fyfe… Wasn’t she the blonde woman? The one in that awful Disney romcom about undertakers last year? The one on the telly that morning with the red hair?
Logan pulled an evidence bag out of his pocket and stuck the weed and pills into it, sealed the sticky flap, and wrote down the details on the form printed onto the plastic.
‘…I mean it isn’t right, is it? Boy like that sniffing around our…’ Mrs Garfield’s mouth clicked shut as Logan walked into the room.
The kitchen was warm, the units painted a terracotta colour, French doors lying wide open, as if they were in the middle of the Mediterranean and not a housing estate in Northfield, overlooking the backside of Middlefield Primary School.
Chalmers nodded towards a mug on the counter. Her mouth turned down at the edges. ‘Milk and two.’
Probably came with free spit.
Logan dumped the evidence bag next to it. ‘I found this in your daughter’s room under the stairs.’
Chalmers whistled. ‘That’s a lot of marijuana.’
Agnes’s mum squared her shoulders, voice getting louder with every word: ‘You planted that, didn’t you? You planted it to deflect attention from the fact your lot are doing nothing to find my bloody daughter! You sick—’
A man’s voice blared out across the kitchen. ‘For God’s sake, Doreen!’ Agnes’s dad shuffled in: black goatee, long greying hair swept back from his high forehead with a black Alice band, wearing a T-shirt and torn jeans. Like a middle-aged skateboard dude. He even had a tattoo snaking down his left arm. ‘It’s hers, OK? They didn’t plant anything.’
Doreen Garfield’s mouth hung open. ‘You knew about this?’
‘Why do you think I kept buying all that incense? It covered the smell. The weed kept her … level. Meant she didn’t need the pills as much.’
Doreen grabbed Logan’s mug and sent it hurling across the kitchen, tea spraying out behind it like a banner. ‘HOW COULD YOU NOT TELL ME?’ It hit the wall by Agnes’s dad’s head and exploded.
‘You
