And out from his lair he crept, invisible in a white nylon track-suit and parka, the hood zipped to the neck and his face hidden behind a white stocking mask.
Meanwhile the taxi had slowed, turned, halted on the hard-standing; a female figure was getting out, standing in the pale glow from the driver’s window. The oval of her face was visible inside the fur-lined hood of her coat; she fumbled with payment for her ride.
Then the taxi’s door slammed; it pulled carefully away in a crump of crushed snow and a puff of exhaust smoke. And clasping the neck of her coat close to her throat, the girl tramped fresh-fallen snow towards the footbridge. But before she could reach it—
—Out of nowhere, the predator was there before her!
Her instinctive, involuntary gasp galvanized him to violent action. As her eyes went wide and she tried to jerk herself out of reach, he stiff-fingered her deep in the stomach. And as the air she’d drawn to scream whooshed uselessly out of her and she folded forward from the first blow, he hit her again; this time in the throat … but not hard enough to kill. Not yet.
Choking, she crumpled; her feet shot out from under her on the icy surface. If he hadn’t caught her she would have fallen. And with his right arm under her neck, breast, and armpit, and his other hand in her hair, he dragged her writhing form back across the road to the side of the knoll.
He was tittering now but couldn’t help it—little girl’s laughter that bubbled up in his throat to spill from his mouth in short bursts—hyena laughter, excited but muted: the call of a wild dog to the pack as it tracks its wounded prey. Hooting and giggling, but softly. And between each crazed burst, a guttural, frothing spray of obscenity: “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” And his flesh hard and throbbing under the zipper of his track-suit trousers.
The girl was making a recovery. She fought harder as he dragged her round the foot of the knoll to his snow-cave’s low entrance. He paused to grip her throat and crush it, shake her head like the head of a rag doll until she went quiet. Then he was dragging her into his den … his red-glowing lust-lair.
Inside, he hauled her up alongside, kneeled over her. She moaned and clutched her throat, trying to breathe as he showed her his mad smile, his teeth, his pig eyes. He wrenched at his zipper and his steaming meat jerked and nodded into view. Smelling it, her eyes went wide with knowledge; she knew his intention, what he would do! Her coat was open; his hand raked down the front of her blouse, caught at her bra, popped buttons and ripped material. Her breasts lolled out, hot and quivering.
“For you!” He waved his swollen, throbbing penis at her.
“Ur-ur-urgh!” She gurgled and choked, trying to rise up on her elbows. He backhanded her—not too hard, just a slap to let her know who was boss here, which rocked her head back and stretched her prone—then reached down, snatched up her short skirt and groped between her legs for her panties. God! He’d be into her in a minute … biting her tits … shooting his spunk! A whole year’s worth into her hot, slimy little—
—His obscene giggling and mouthings were cut short in a moment. For holding her neck, looking down between her legs, looking back at the burrow entrance … someone was there!
He recognized the scene immediately, the prescience of it falling like a hammer blow on his mind, so that he jerked back from it as if shot. His dream, but no longer a dream! The dark tunnel and yellow headlights; except, as he now saw, the headlights were eyes! Great yellow eyes, triangular, unblinking, hypnotic, and oh so intelligent! And the voice when it came—that soft burr of a Scottish brogue, more growled than spoken, but hinting of a monstrous strength—no longer the suppressed memory of a conversation but real, immediate, now!
“You were warned, were ye no? I warned ye!”
“Wha—? Wha—? Wha—?”
“I warned ye: this one was no for ye. To pursue her would place ye in jeopardy most extreme! Aye, but ye ignored mah warning! So be it …”
“Wha—? Wha—? Wha—?” He groped for his knife, found it; the blade gleamed red in red torchlight. But the Thing inching forward in the tunnel wasn’t in the least afraid.
And suddenly: it was as if the predator were really there, back in his dream! Once again he stood on a black road gazing into the yawning black throat of a tunnel, and as before he was frozen, unable to move a muscle, as something awesome bore down on him in a dreadful, inexorable slow-motion. Its yellow eyes shone on him, freezing him rigid, while the darkness surrounding those eyes grew darker yet …
It had never been a dream (he knew that now), but it was a nightmare! The headlight eyes expanding to envelop him. The darkness opening to swallow him whole. The rumbling growl that wasn’t the roar of an engine. But the eyes—those awful eyes—no longer feral yellow!
The face emerging from the darkness wasn’t human. It was triangular. Ears pointing forward, pointing at the man; bottom jaw yawning open; great yellow headlight eyes … turning luminous red. As red as blood!
“Eh?!” said the man; simply that. It scarcely qualified as a question, and wasn’t even close to a scream—no more than a squeak or a whimper—as a hand, a paw, something, reached out of the tunnel, arched for a moment like a great grey furry spider over his leg, and drove home inches deep through track-suit trousers and flesh to scrape the bone of his thigh.
Then he screamed, dropped the knife, tried to hang on to the girl where she had finally managed to sit up … and where she sat there smiling at him! But there are smiles and there are smiles.
And her eyes were as yellow as the Thing’s had been just a moment ago, rapt on him, watching him being dragged into the tunnel; and her ears seemed to reach tremblingly forward, like the Thing’s ears, eager for his panting, bubbling screams and the terrible rrrip! of his clothing and flesh, as talons sharp as razors opened him up the middle like a steaming, screaming joint of meat.
After that, amid all the slobbering, snarling and panting, it was as much as the girl could do to cram herself in a corner and so avoid the hot red splashes.
Knowing the Thing the way she did, she knew how dangerous it would be to try to take her share.
Well, not for a little while, at least..
PART 1
The Sleeping and the Undead
I
INSPECTOR IANSON INVESTIGATE
IT WAS TEN IN THE MORNING, BUT AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, IN THIS PLACE, IT might just as easily be four in the evening. Under a heavy blanket of lowering snow clouds and in the shadow of the hills the time made little or no difference: everything looked grey … except that which now lay exposed, with the snow shovelled back from it, under the canopy of a scenes-of-crime canvas rigged up by the local police. That—what was left of it—was not grey but red. Very red. And torn …
“Animal,” said old Angus McGowan, giving a curt, knowing nod. “A creature did it, an’ a big yin at that!”
“Aye, that’s what we thought,” Inspector Ianson returned the old man’s nod. “A beast for sure. That’s why we called you in, Angus. But now the big question: what sort of a beast? And how a beast … I mean, up here in the snow and all?”
“Eh?” Angus McGowan looked at the Police Inspector curiously, even scathingly. “Up here in the snow and a’? Why … where else, man?”
Ianson shrugged, and shivered, but not entirely from the cold. “Where else?” He frowned as he pondered his old friend and rival’s meaning, then shrugged again. “Just about anywhere else, I should think! The African veldt, maybe? The Australian outback? India? But Scotland? What, and Auld Windy, Edinburgh herself, little more than seven or eight miles away? No lions or tigers or bears up here, Angus—not unless they escaped from a zoo! Which is the other reason I called you in on it, as well you know.”
Angus glanced at him through rheumy, watering eyes. The cold—and, just as the Inspector himself had felt it, maybe something other than the cold—had seeped through to the old vet’s bones. But then, the sight of bloody, violent, unnatural death will have a similar effect on most men.
&nb
sp; Inspector Ianson was tall, well over six feet, and thin as a pole. But for all that he was getting on a bit in years, George Ianson remained spry and alert, mentally and physically active. Homicide was his job (he might often be heard complaining, in his dry, emotionless brogue, “Man, how I hate mah work! It’s sheer murrrder!”), and this was his beat, his area of responsibility: a roughly kite-shaped region falling between Edinburgh and Glasgow east to west, Stirling and Dumfries north to south. Outside that kite a man could get himself killed however he might or might not choose, and his body never have to suffer the cold, calculating gaze of George Ianson. But inside it …
“Africa? India?” Angus echoed the gangling Inspector, then squinted at the tossed and tangled corpse before shaking his head in denial. “No, no, George. She was no big cat, this yin. Nor a dog … but like a dog, aye!”
It was Ianson’s turn to study the other: dour old Angus McGowan, whom he’d known for years. A living caricature! Typically a “canny old Scotsman,” hugging his knowledge as close to his chest as a gambler with his cards, or a rich man with his wealth. His rheumy grey eyes—the eyes of a hawk for all that they were misted—missed nothing; his blue-veined nose seemed sensitive as a bloodhound’s; his knowledge (he’d been a recognized authority in zoology for all of thirty years) brimmed in the library of his brain like an encyclopaedia of feral lore. Quite simply, as the Inspector was gifted to know men—their ways and minds and, in his case especially, their criminal minds—so Angus was gifted to know animals.
Between the two of them, on those rare occasions when the one might call upon the other for his expert knowledge, it had become a game, a competition, no less than the chess game they played once a week in the Inspector’s study at his home in Dalkeith. For here, too, however serious the case, they vied one with the other, trying each other’s minds to see which would come closest to the truth. The beauty of it was this: in chess there’s only one winner, but here they could both win.
“Like a dog?” Ianson looked again, deeply into McGowan’s watery eyes, his wrinkled face. Old Angus: all five foot four or five of him, shrivelled as last year’s walnuts, but standing tall now with some sure knowledge, some inner secret that loaned him stature. Nodding, and careful to avoid the bloodied snow, he went to one knee. Not that it mattered greatly—no need to worry about the destruction of evidence now; the scenes-of-crime men had been and gone all of an hour ago—but Angus didn’t want this poor devil’s blood on his good overcoat.
Looking up at Ianson from where he kneeled—and had the situation been other than it was—the slighter man might well have grinned. Instead he grimaced, tapped the side of his dripping nose with his index finger, and answered, “Shall we say—oh, Ah dinnae ken—a dog o’sorts? Shall we say, a dog, or a bitch, o’ a different colour? Like maybe, grey?”
A great grey dog. Angus could mean only one sort of beast. Ridiculous! Except he wasn’t given to making ridiculous statements. Wherefore:
“From a zoo?” Ianson gripped McGowan’s shoulder as he made to straighten up. “Or maybe a circus? Have you heard of an escape, then? Has one got out?”
“One what?” The other was all wide-eyed innocence.
“Come now, Angus!” The Inspector tut-tutted. “A wild creature of the snows, like a great, grey, handsome dog? You can only be hinting at a wolf, surely?”
“Hintin’, is it!” the other chuckled, however drily, and was serious in a moment. “Ah’m no hintin’, George. Ye want mah opinion? This was a wolf, aye! An’ one hell of a wolf at that! But escaped frae a zoo … ?” He shook his head; not in denial, more out of puzzlement. “Ah’ve never come across a beast this size—no in any zoo in England, Scotland or Wales, at least. And as for yere circuses—what, at this time of year? Certainly no up here! An’ so, well, Ah really canna say; Ah mean, Ah wouldnae care to commit mahsel’.”
“But you’ve done exactly that,” the Inspector pointed out. “The piece is moved, Angus. You can’t put it back.”
“Wolf, aye!” the other snapped, more decisively now. “But as for how she got here, her origin …” He offered a twitch of his thin shoulders, stamped numb feet, blew into cupped hands. “It’s your move, George. It’s your move.”
“Me … I say we move in out of the cold!” Ianson shook himself, both mentally and physically, breathed deeply of the wintry air, deliberately forced himself to draw back from the morbid spell, the dreadful fascination of the case—for the moment, anyway. For if McGowan was right, which in all likelihood he was (or there again not, for after all, the Inspector did have information to the contrary), then it was out of his hands. Murder by a man is one thing … but by a dog, a wolf, or some other wild creature, then it becomes something else: a savaging, a misadventure, simply a killing. (And what of a man and a dog?) But if McGowan was right, then they’d need to call in a different kind of hunter with a very different brief: to kill on sight!
Old Angus guessed what he was thinking—the latter part of it, anyway—and was quick to say, “But first we must try to prove it, or narrow down the suspects, at least.”
“Back to the house?” Ianson ducked out into the open with his small friend close behind. The house he referred to was one of a picturesque cluster standing some three hundred yards away across the footbridge. Once a great farm with outbuildings, now Sma’ Auchterbecky housed a small community, scarcely a hamlet, in the very lee of the mountains.
“Ah can make a few calls frae there, aye,” Angus nodded. “D’ye see the telephone wires?”
“And I’ve a few more questions for the girl,” the Inspector replied, turning up the collar of his coat. He scanned the land all about, noted that it had started to snow again: great fat flakes that fell straight out of a leaden sky. In the lowering atmosphere there was little or no wind.
“A pretty enough place in the summer,” McGowan commented. “But in the winter? A hell o’ a place for a man tae die. Huh! An’ a hell o’ a way for one tae die, too!” They stood side by side a while, scanning the valley between the hills. Nearby, a police Land Rover hunched on the verge at the side of the road, also a squad car fitted with snow chains, and an ambulance with its rear doors open, waiting. The blue lights of the vehicles, silently revolving, loaned eerie, intermittent illumination to the handful of stamping, arm-flapping uniformed policemen and paramedics in attendance. Exhaust fumes from the Land Rover went up in a blue-grey spiral, mimicking the smoke from the cluster of near-distant cottage chimneys.
Ianson signalled the paramedics forward; now they could take the body—its remains—out of here. The forensic lab in Edinburgh would be its next port of call, then the morgue. But there wouldn’t be much gutting of this one. He’d had more than his fair share of that already.
“A hell of a way to die?” The Inspector echoed his companion curiously, enigmatically. “Or maybe a weird sort of … I don’t know, justice, maybe?” There was that in his voice which caused old McGowan to glance at him sharply. Something he’d not been informed of, then? Oh, the vet would stand by his claim to the bitter end, that this was the work of a wolf. For he’d seen (indeed he had sensed, felt) evidence which to him was indisputable. But Ianson was the policeman after all, and a damned good one! Anyway, it wouldn’t do to press the point; a man can’t be seen to know too much, or he might have too much explaining to do. A hunch is one thing, but an assertion needs proving.
“Justice?” Angus let his sharp tone reveal his own suspicions. “Somethin’ ye’ve nae told me, George?” It was hardly surprising; this was the way their game usually went.
Ianson’s smile was grim. “Oh, a lot to come from this yet, Angus … not least from you! Nothing’s solved until everything is known.” And before the other could question further: “Let’s get on over to the house now. We can talk as we go …”
“I know him,” Ianson admitted, as they crossed the footbridge.
“The victim?”
“Victim, villain, whatever,” the Inspector shrugged. “John Moffat’s his name. I w
ouldn’t have known his body—who would? But I recognized his face. Moffat, aye: prime suspect in a murder case in Glasgow just a year ago. Then, too, he’d done it in the snow; a park on the outskirts of the city, in the wee small hours of the morning. The same modus operandi: he dug a hole in a snowdrift, chose a prostitute on her way home and dragged her in. He raped and murdered her. Slit her throat ear to ear. He’d been seen in the park earlier. There were one or two other bits of inconclusive evidence … not enough to pin it on him.”
“He walked away frae it.” McGowan nodded.
“But not away from this one,” Ianson’s voice was grim. “So it’s one down … but it’s still one to go.”
“Ye’re saying that this was … what, revenge? Which means ye believe it was a man. A man and his bloody big dog, maybe?”
Ianson glanced at him out the corner of his eye. “Maybe,” he answered. “Which would put the whammy on your wolf theory.”
The other made no reply. It suited him either way. He knew that Ianson wouldn’t have asked him along if he hadn’t at least suspected a large canine or some other animal. The Inspector had admitted as much.
“I only know that someone protected the girl,” Ianson went on. “Except he did too damn thorough a job of it!”
“Someone close to the Glasgow prostitute, maybe?”
“Eh? Aye, possibly. Close to that one, anyway.”
“Oh? Has there been more than one, then? Unfair, George!” McGowan tut-tutted. “A man cannae play if the lights are out! Ah have tae know all yere moves.”
“One more at least,” Ianson said. “Gleneagles, two winters ago.”
“In the snow again! And no too far away, at that. A prostitute, was she?”