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wending its way up the hill.
    “Are you okay?” the watchman asked, and it took Alan several seconds to realize he had been asked a question.
    What the hell was that?
    He tasted salt spray at his lips. Somewhere in the distance a swan barked. A cloud covered the sun, a dark cape falling on the loch.
    Like huge wings.
    Alan’s heart thudded in his chest and at his ears, and his hands trembled as he walked, almost ran, for the safety of his car, leaving an astonished watchman gaping at his back.
    * * *
    He almost crashed three times on the way back towards the city—the third time coming so close to calamity that he pulled off the main road after crossing the Forth Bridge and parked in the truck stop on the south side. His hands shook, whether from the adrenaline from the near misses, or from the memory of the impossible landscape, he could not tell. He only knew one thing for sure. He needed coffee; he needed a lot of coffee.
    The rough-and-ready atmosphere in the truck stop eatery quickly grounded him back in reality, and two large mugs of coffee soon had the near misses on the road fading to a memory. His hands still shook, but not as bad as before. Real life filled in around him as his reporter instincts kicked in and he listened to snatches and fragments of conversations, sifting for golden nuggets to use later.
    The television high in the corner had its volume turned up, and the truckers had to almost shout to be heard above it. But that didn’t stop them making their feelings plain.
    “If I caught that bastard first, he’d never see the inside of a cell.”
    “They should hack his balls off with a rusty pair of shears and leave him to fester.”
    It was only then that Alan realized that the story—his story—had been playing on the television all through his coffee intake. He turned his attention to the television, but soon spotted that there had been nothing new to break since he left the office earlier that morning—two girls taken, still missing, and police seemingly baffled. There was no mention of swans or of anything at all untoward going on at the bird sanctuary.
    That memory was proving resistant to any fading. He only had to close his eyes to recall it, clear as day in full color.
    What the hell was I looking at?
    He remembered a story, years back, about a supposed fairy ring in Peebles that, under investigation, had proved to be made by underground fungi that might, or might not, have been sending hallucinogens into the air in their spores. But Alan’s head was clear, he was thinking straight.
    And drugs don’t explain away the missing girls, or the missing swans.
    He finished his coffee and put his questions away to the back of his mind—they’d be back later, he knew that, but for now he had a story waiting for him back in the city, and if he didn’t get on it, somebody else would.
    As he got in the car and started up the engine he heard the voice again, clear as if she were sitting in the passenger seat.
    “I’m lost, Mammy.”
    He drove back into the city with the radio turned up full.

 
     
     
    7
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Grainger was almost happy when a report came in at lunchtime of another missing girl—at least it gave him something to do beyond shouting at junior officers and avoiding the press.
    Although there would always be juniors to shout at, he wasn’t going to be able to avoid the media for much longer. The new call had come from Edinburgh Castle. At this time of year it would be packed with tourists from all over the world. A missing child in the castle premises wasn’t in itself a rare occurrence—mostly they turned up after having got lost wandering among the warren of rooms and different levels that made up the old fortress. He knew from experience that this was probably another one of those cases—but he couldn’t afford not to be seen to be investigating—the media was after him already, and any scent of blood in the water would turn it into a feeding