Read Online The Stone Gallows by C David Ingram - Free Book Online

club’s bar was small and dimly lit, the only other customer a fat man in a business suit. He sat at a nearby table and sipped his glass, a girl on each side to keep him company. He saw me looking and winked, his face growing cold when I didn’t reciprocate.
    Eventually, Susan put the picture down. ‘How did you find me?’
    I shrugged. ‘Shoe leather.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜It’s what we do. Find people.’
    William McPherson, Susan’s father, had contacted us a month ago, with a photograph and very little else. Just under two years ago, Susan had gone missing from the family home in Bonnydoon, a tiny village thirty miles outside of Inverness, leaving nothing but a hand-written note saying that she was leaving and not to try and find her. Of course, they searched, but once all the obvious places had proved fruitless, there was nowhere left to look. She’s over sixteen, the police said. She can do what she wants.
    Two months ago a holidaymaking friend claimed to have seen the McPhersons’ missing daughter walking down Argyle Street one Saturday morning. Acutely aware that Glasgow’s a hell of a lot bigger than Bonnydoon, Daddy had sold his car and called in the professionals.
    Neither my boss nor I had been particularly hopeful of finding Susan; there were too many ifs in the equation. What if the friend had made a mistake, or was playing a cruel joke, or even just making up the story in a misguided attempt to give the McPhersons a little hope? What if Susan had just been passing through, on her way to somewhere else? What if she was in Glasgow, but just didn’t want to be found?
    Cruelly but necessarily we pointed out the Worst Case Scenario: maybe she was lying at the bottom of a loch somewhere, a tragic victim of an unknown accident or vile, secret crime? One of the few missing people who were truly missing, somehow completely, unequivocally lost? Sometimes, we said, it’s better not to know.
    Wily McPherson shook his head and pleaded with us to take the case. A gentle, softly spoken man with a lilting highland accent and a sad, bloodhound face. It was easy to see the cost of his daughter’s disappearance in the slump of his shoulders and the way he tugged nervously at his greying moustache. I think we agreed to help him not only because he was willing to pay fifty percent of our fee up front, but because we felt sorry for him. People who don’t know what it’s like say that there’s always hope, but the truth is that perpetual, unfulfilled, unjustifiable hope is a terrible thing to live in.
    Of course, Joe had delegated most of the hard work to me, the trusty sidekick. I was a new employee, and I suspected that he had used the case as a test, examining my attitude and dedication. Because Joe had given me a job when the rest of the world hadn’t wanted to know, I was determined to repay him. I spent my days and nights walking the streets, showing the out-of-date photograph in bars, in homeless shelters, in cafe’s. Train stations, bus stations, hospitals.
    There wasn’t a Big Issue vendor in the city I hadn’t bought a magazine from. I tried the street girls. Blytheswood Square, Byres Road. The Anderston Centre. It was in Bothwell Street that I finally got a bite. A fifty-year old hooker name Rosie Hawes (aka Rosie the Whore) remembered a girl that looked a lot like Susan working the West End of the town. They’d shared a cigarette one cold night a few months back. ‘She talked about going into one of those massage parlours,’
    Rosie had told me, tucking the fiver I had given her into the cup of her massive bra. ‘Said there was less chance of getting the plague in a place like that.’
    It was only a hint, but I doggedly pursued it, using my knowledge of the city to check out every club, every massage parlour, every knocking shop and strip club. And then I had my one stroke of luck, spotting Susan walking