A Gathering of Twine Read online

And then there was always the promise of ‘Things’. A colleague of Anna’s had come back one evening and had dinner with them. Ryan was amazed at how alike they looked and fantasised that in another life they could have been sisters.

  After she had left, Anna told her husband that Irene might be interested in ‘Things’ with them. Deep down he knew it was a lie, but that did not stop him thinking about her. Irene had hugged him goodbye at the door, and he had caught the smell of her. Like wildflowers in summer and pink champagne. It made him ache.

  The sound of the letter-box made him stop, and he stood wearily to collect the mornings’ newspaper and mail. They always came together. In a village as small as Falkirk, people often had more than one job and would frequently do them both at the same time.

  The Postman was actually a Postwoman who Ryan had spoken to once. He struggled to remember her name, even though she had introduced herself. The village as a whole was very friendly, but when Ryan told his wife about her, it was made clear in no uncertain terms that he was not to communicate with any of the locals other than a cursory nod if he was out.

  There would be consequences if she found out he had done otherwise.

  Ryan picked up the small pile of mail from the doormat and froze. The letters drifted back down to the floor like autumn leaves, but he held the newspaper tightly.

  KIDNAPPED!

  Eleven girls from seven primary schools in North London were simultaneously abducted last night...

  Ryan could not read the rest, and slumped against the wall.

  All of their photos were plastered across the page. The third one was the girl that he and Anna had followed home less than two months previously.

  NATIONWIDE MANHUNT!

  He felt sick and only just made it to the toilet where he emptied his stomach. He lay there for a moment, shivering and shaking, more through shock than the winter cold that only Scotland knew.

  That girl. Her smiling face. Her muddy blonde hair.

  He forced himself up, and into the kitchen. He went straight past the fridge, to the alcohol cupboard, and poured himself a large measure. It went down in one, and he poured another. He briefly felt his stomach complain, and then subside.

  Gingerly, he went back to the hallway, picked up the newspaper and went into the TV room. Sitting on the sofa he began to digest the story. Eleven girls had failed to return home from school last night. The youngest was six, the eldest was eight. All had left school later than normal, and all were latchkey children. The schools were all close to each other, and despite reports of a number of minicabs in the area, the police had been in touch with their dispatch offices and all had genuine reasons for being in the vicinity. The detective in charge of the case appealed for witnesses in the area... Anyone acting strangely... Anyone new...

  Ryan’s stomach turned. He could feel himself beginning to sweat and shake again. He put the paper down. He knew that Anna was involved. He knew it. He could not prove it, but he knew nonetheless. He leaned back and closed his eyes, letting a wave of nausea roll over him, then away.

  What to do?

  He could call the police, perhaps evenly anonymously. But what would he say? That he and his wife and followed one of the girls home eight weeks ago? They had not been in the area yesterday and had never spoken to her.

  And Anna being a minicab controller? It was all too much of a coincidence.

  He opened his eyes. Above him, Anna had hung a silver mobile. Three concentric circles were suspended from the ceiling of his living room, gently twisting and turning.

  Ryan knew that he should find this strange. But it was pretty; the way the light was caught and then reflected softly. He felt his heart rate begin to slow, and Ryan relaxed. The mobile continued to turn lazily in the drafts and eddies of the old house.

  There must be a rational explanation.

  Still, he should call the police.

  Despite it not yet being noon, Ryan felt sleepy, and even as the mobile continued to turn, his eyelids began to droop.

  *

  His dream was fragmented. Half-images and imagined conversations rose and fell like waves. At one point he fancied himself to be sitting on a raft on a dark sea. It was night and the water was as black as the sky. He felt the low soft rocking underneath him and found it comforting.

  He could hear distant sounds, but these were of no consequence. High above him, where the moon should have been, a celestial-sized version of the mobile spun lazily.

  For reasons he did not understand, he smiled, and then drifted along.

  *

  It was after six when Anna came in with Christopher.

  The sound of the key in the door startled Ryan into wakefulness, and when Anna noticed that very few boxes had been unpacked, the look on her face told him that she was most displeased.

  And that would never do.

  Christopher mewled and Anna took him upstairs to his playroom. Ryan heard the returning footsteps and was desperately trying to think of an excuse when his wife walked in. Her eyes blazed with rage, and he instinctively flinched.

  She noticed the paper on the sofa and relaxed. “It’s been on the radio all day.” She turned, and headed into the kitchen to make dinner. She did not ignore the vodka bottle but looked accusingly at Ryan. He made no reply. Anna said nothing further but began opening cupboards to get saucepans.

  “Do they have any leads?” Ryan asked, trying to deflect the subject away from the empty bottle and on to the missing girls.

  “No. But they think it might be related to a case in Portugal; a paedophile ring tried to snatch girls from a school en masse. That was a few years ago, but apparently, they did not get them all. The police think that maybe some of them came over here. Or it’s a copycat.”

  “Poor lasses,” said Ryan, half to himself, as his wife began to chop vegetables.

  “Oh I wouldn’t worry.”

  Ryan stopped dead. Not to worry? Eleven girls go missing, and she says not to worry?

  Anna continued. “They were from broken families. They all had stepfathers or their mother’s boyfriend of the week living with them. Some were in foster families. You know what that’s like.”

  Ryan had been briefly fostered as a child. His father had worked on the rigs and was away a lot. He and his sister... well, even Ryan would admit that they had been a handful. His mother had some sort of breakdown in one of the local shops when the cashier asked how she was. He was sketchy on the details.

  The fostering process.... well, there had been nothing wrong with it. He had never been abused or anything like that. But still, it had been a strange house with strange smells and a strange family with strange ways.

  He and his sister were returned to his parents after nearly six months, when his father gave up working on the rigs, and took a job locally. But still, it had been one of the most unsettling episodes of his life… apart from these last few months with Anna.

  “They are probably better where they are,” Anna went, oblivious to her husband’s expression of incredulity and revulsion. She turned to fill a jug with water and finally saw the look on his face. “What? There is no evidence that anything has happened to them. You know what silly little girls can be like. They’ve probably just all run away together.”

  Ryan wanted to rage at the thing that was his wife. He wanted to shake her. He wanted to slap her. “Yeah,” he muttered, his bravado giving way. “They’ll probably turn up.” He looked at the floor.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Anna said cheerily. “If someone wants to stay lost, they stay lost, schoolgirls or not.”

  *

  The summer entered limply in Scotland as it had been doing more and more often in recent years.

  Ryan had finished the unpacking of the boxes and Anna began instructing him in the decoration of the small playroom for Christopher. The process was slow as his alcohol intake continued to grow and it was late August by the time he had finished.

  It was one evening, with the sun still on the horizon, whe
n Anna came home with an unexpected guest. Ryan had been having one of his better days and was not unconscious when he heard the key in the lock. Anna came in, and a man followed her.

  “Ryan, this is Mr Kethron.” No hello darling, how has your day been?

  “Err... hello.” Ryan leaned forward to shake his hand.

  “Hello.” The man was immense, nearly as wide as he was tall. Ryan had the sense that Mr Kethron was someone you would want on your side.

  Apparently, in his mid-thirties, Kethron had black hair that was closely cropped, revealing ears that seemed a little too pointed. They reminded Ryan of a Vulcan or an elf. His sheer size suggested that he was a very physical man, and Ryan had no wish to find out how physical.

  “Mr Kethron has a job for you. I told him that you would be more than happy to help.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Ryan said too quickly. “What do you need?”

  “I’ve got a civils job at Edinburgh Airport. I need some labourers.”

  “Oh right. What’s that?”

  Kethron looked to Anna as if Ryan was the village idiot.

  “Edinburgh Airport. It’s a...” he began.

  “No. I meant the civils. What are they… these civils?”

  “Think of it as groundwork.”

  “Like digging?” Ryan asked.

  “Aye.” Ryan was getting the impression that Kethron was not a man of many words. “Except that you’ll be filling in.”

  “Filling what in?”

  “Doesn’t matter. You got any criminal convictions?”

  “Just three points for speeding. But that was years ago. They might have expired by now.”

  “Good. You need to get CRB checked. Fill this in.” Kethron handed him a form and turned to leave. For a moment he paused as if having second thoughts. “And pal, turn the sauce down. You stink.”

  His words hit Ryan like one of Anna’s slaps. He went to say something, anything to defend himself, but Kethron was already out of the door. Anna followed after him, and Ryan could hear them talking on the pathway.

  *

  Six weeks later, Ryan received a letter informing him that he had been cleared by security for work at the airport. He thought about having a drink to celebrate. The look on Anna’s face told him that he should think better of it, and he did.

  He was unsurprised that it was Kethron himself who picked him up in a regulation white van early one cold Monday morning in October. He was also unsurprised that the hour and a half journey was conducted in total silence.

  Once at the airport, Ryan spent the morning in an old leaky office, watching a video about health and safety, whilst the wind blew with increasing fervour against the rusting Crittall windows. This was the part of the airport that the passengers did not see, and as such the airport operator was content to let it rot for the time being.

  From his uncomfortable plastic seat, Ryan could see the small airplanes moving slowly from the main runway to the Business Aviation Terminal. To call it a terminal was like calling a sandcastle a mansion. Two squat portacabins sat next to an equally dejected single-storey brick building that showed every sign of needing a new roof. Once in a while a fuel truck would come around from the main terminal and fill up one of the Lear Jets before trundling off to service the more sizeable aircraft.

  Considering it was Scotland’s busiest airport, as the video repeatedly reminded him, Ryan felt... that it should have been grander. But he had never worked at an airport before, and this was his first time seeing the behind-the-scenes operation. His induction completed, Ryan crossed the potholed road that led to the Contractors Compound, and met with Kethron and the rest of the men he would be working with.

  The job seemed simple enough. Edinburgh Airport, although spending its early life as an RAF base, had been converted for civilian use in the fifties, and in the seventies had benefited from a new longer runway and what was at the time a state-of-the-art terminal. It did not look state-of-the-art now.

  The problem was that, unknown to the designers and engineers at the time, the new runway went over an old coal mine. The runway was inspected several times a day, for rubbish and debris, and for a number of years it had been noted that a depression was forming in the grass just to the north, along the boundary with the Almond River, where water would collect in a pool before draining mysteriously away.

  A survey team had eventually been sent out, and as they were examining it, the whole thing had collapsed, revealing a ventilation shaft some twenty foot across.

  Fortunately, it was sufficiently distant from the runway not to impede the operation of the airport. Unfortunately, it was close enough that every pilot and passenger could see it on takeoff and landing. The press had a field-day.

  A flurry of letters between the airport operator and the Coal Board had yielded a map that showed a network of enclosed mine tunnels at a depth of several hundred feet, all which dated back to the eighteenth century.

  The airport operator had gone to exceptional lengths to emphasise to the public that their operation was safe, but as a precaution had closed their secondary crosswinds runway. Looking at the map, Ryan was not convinced that the main runway was any safer, but held his tongue.

  Kethron’s job was two-fold. Firstly get in, and survey the extent of the mines. Secondly, make them safe and fill them up with expanding concrete. The first part had already been undertaken and now came the part of marshalling a fleet of concrete mixers across a busy runway, and filling in the mine.

  Even before Kethron said it, Ryan knew there had to be a catch. Not fifty yards from where the first ventilation shaft had collapsed was a standing stone. Allegedly dating to Neolithic times, the Cat Stane was later adapted to be a sort of war memorial to the Pictish dead who had repelled a Roman invasion. And the mines had of course gone straight underneath this, threatening to bring the series of graves and the five tonne stone crashing down.

  As Kethron explained, the problem was that the stone was a scheduled ancient monument and could not be moved, so the team had to take additional measures to ensure that the mine did not deteriorate causing further ground collapse and the loss of the stone. The emphasis on its preservation had been firmly put on the airport chiefs, who had likewise impressed the severity of any possible damage on Kethron.

  Given the extent of the mine, the standing stone, and that a substantial river ran through the middle of the main runway, Ryan could not help but think that this had been a particularly bad place to build an airport.

  *

  Several weeks after his induction, Ryan found himself standing at the mouth of one of the vertical ventilation shafts. Nine had been opened up in total and the mine network had been divided up into cells, the intention being to fill each one independently with expanding concrete. Ryan was not sure, but this did not sound like the method traditionally used to fill in a mine. Again, he kept quiet. Anna would not be pleased if she heard that he was asking difficult questions.

  Because of the poor quality of the earth, they would have to do it in layers and, when dry, someone would have to go back down to confirm that the earth had not moved before the next layer could be applied. Each layer of concrete would take three months to cure, and a minimum of three layers was needed per cell. There were eighteen cells – two off each ventilation shaft - and this had quickly quashed Ryan’s hope that they would be finished by Christmas. The Scottish winters could be brutal, and Ryan was not looking forward to working outside if a freeze came.

  Kethron had laughed at him when he had asked how long the job would last. “At least a year. Maybe more. Don’t worry little man. We’ll look after you.”

  Ryan had not liked the way that had sounded, and right now, it did not feel like he was being looked after. Watched, yes. Looked after, no. He stood a little way back from the terminal and the wind picked up again, buffeting Ryan so hard that his eyes began to water. As he would have expected, the main runway- and associated taxiway network - was on a flat plateau. What he had not expected was t
hat there were very few trees to break the wind. Trees attracted birds, and birds led to aircraft engine strikes.

  So why build an airport next to a river where all the birds come to drink and feed?

  The winter chill bit deeper. Ryan shivered, as he stood by the pump watching as the first load of concrete descended through the pipe - like some monstrous vein - to the mine floor below. The pressure and flow of the concrete remained constant, and firmly in the green, and Ryan allowed his eye to wander. He could see the remnants of what would have been the original part of the airport. Old RAF buildings lined the airside-landside boundary of the airport, their once proud green paint now mouldering and flaking. They had stood since the thirties, but were now functionally obsolete and of course riddled with asbestos. The airport operator had bought the final parcel of land from the MOD nearly fifteen years ago and then done nothing with it. There was a rumour that they were trying to recruit some hot-shot development surveyor from London to lead an air-cargo regeneration programme, but Kethron had harrumphed at Ryan when he had asked if they would be able to get involved in that contract too.

  “We’re here to do this job, so let’s focus on that, alright pal?”

  The needles were still in the green, and Ryan looked over to the main terminal building. It was almost completely encased in scaffolding, as another extension was added. Supposedly there was more retail space being added, but Ryan did not see the attraction.

  It’s a glorified bus stop, not a shopping centre. Who buys this crap?

  He had become friendly with the airport’s lead engineer, a big man with an even bigger sense of humour, affectionately known as Kiwi.

  “You wouldn’t believe how much the retail operation brings in,” Kiwi had told him. “Nearly forty million a year.” No wonder they wanted more of it.

  Ryan’s radio squawked, bringing his focus back to his dials. “Go ahead.”

  “Looks good. Shut it off.” That was Tom. He too had come up from London, having decided that teacher-training was not for him. He worked as a DJ a couple of nights a week at one of Edinburgh’s lesser clubs, and Ryan had suggested to Anna that they go along one night. Her look of utter contempt gave him his answer.