8. The Appeal to Vagueness

The telephone call to Detective Inspector Callum Baird lasted forty-seven minutes. Leo made it from the payphone in the corner of the tavern while Dougal, the tavern keeper, busied himself polishing glasses that had not been used in years and pretending not to listen. Mara sat at the bar, the plastic bag containing Samuel's sock laid flat on the counter before her, her hands folded around it as if it were a relic, a fragment of something sacred.

Baird listened without interrupting. Leo told him everything: the records office in Halvergate, the meeting with Patricia Vance in Tamberley, the journey to Brimswater, the conversation with Michael Bickford on the deck of the Pelican, the trail that had led them to Selby Cove and the duffel bag and the small, pale-blue sock. When he finished, there was a long silence on the line, broken only by the crackle of static and the distant sound of Baird's breathing.

“You went to Brimswater,” Baird said finally. His voice was flat, controlled, but Leo could hear the anger beneath it. “You went to Brimswater after I specifically instructed you to step back and let us conduct the investigation.”

“We found evidence,” Leo said. “We found a sock that belonged to our son. It was in a bag that Clegg left behind. It's been sitting in this tavern for a year while Clegg has been gods knows where. If we had waited for your investigation, it might have sat here for another year. Or another ten.”

Another silence. Then Baird exhaled, a long, weary sound. “I understand why you did it. I don't agree with it, and I'm going to have to note it in the file, but I understand. What's done is done. The question now is what we do with what you've found.”

“We arrest him,” Leo said. “We have Holm's statement, Michael Bickford's account of Clegg's sleep-talking confession, and now the sock. That's enough. That has to be enough.”

“It's more than we had,” Baird agreed. “But it's still circumstantial. The sock—assuming it is your son's sock—places Clegg in possession of an item belonging to a missing child. It doesn't prove he abducted him. It doesn't prove he harmed him. A defence lawyer would argue that Clegg found the sock, or bought it at a charity shop, or that it belonged to some other child entirely. And the confessions—Holm's account of a drunken boast, Bickford's account of sleep-talking—those are witness statements about things that were said years ago. They're not recordings. They're not signed confessions. They're hearsay, and hearsay is notoriously fragile in court.”

Leo felt the hope that had kindled in the tavern begin to gutter. “So what are you saying? That we've come all this way for nothing?”

“I'm saying that we need more. We need to find Clegg and bring him in. We need to question him properly, in an interview room, with a recording device running. We need to see if he slips, if he contradicts himself, if he says something that we can use. And we need forensic evidence. The sock can be tested for DNA. If your son's DNA is on it, and if Clegg's DNA is on it, that's a connection that's harder to explain away. But DNA testing takes time, and it's not always conclusive, especially on fabric that's been sitting in a duffel bag for ten years.”

“How long?” Mara had crossed the room and was standing beside Leo, her face pale in the dim light of the tavern. “How long will the testing take?”

Baird heard her. “Mrs. Vance. I understand your frustration. The laboratory in Halvergate has a backlog. We're looking at six to eight weeks, possibly longer.”

Mara took the receiver from Leo's hand. Her voice was very quiet, very calm, the kind of calm that Leo had learned to recognise as the prelude to something dangerous. “Inspector Baird, my son has been missing for ten years. Ten years. We have waited while the police searched and failed to find him. We have waited while Clegg moved from town to town, using false names, working jobs, living his life as if he had done nothing wrong. We have waited while the law told us, again and again, that what we had was not enough. I am done waiting. If your laboratory cannot test that sock quickly enough, I will find a laboratory that can. If your investigation cannot find Clegg, I will find him myself. And if the law cannot deliver justice, I will find another way. Do you understand me?”

There was a pause. When Baird spoke again, his voice had lost some of its bureaucratic detachment. It sounded almost human. “Mrs. Vance, I understand more than you know. I have been doing this job for twenty-two years. I have seen what happens to people when the system fails them. I have seen the anger, the despair, the way it eats at them until there is nothing left. I don't want that to happen to you. But I also don't want to see you do something that will destroy any chance of a prosecution. If you find Clegg before we do, if you confront him, if you do anything that could be construed as harassment or intimidation, his defence will use it to undermine the entire case. Everything you've found, everything we've built, will be thrown out. And he will walk free. Again.”

Mara closed her eyes. The receiver trembled in her hand. Leo put his arm around her shoulders, and for a moment, she allowed it. Then she straightened and opened her eyes.

“Then find him,” she said. “Find him before we do.”

She handed the receiver back to Leo and walked away, back to the bar where the sock waited in its plastic bag. Leo watched her go, then raised the receiver to his ear.

“We'll be in Halvergate,” he said. “We'll wait for the DNA results. But we're not going to stop looking. We can't.”

“I wouldn't expect you to,” Baird said. “Just... be careful. Clegg is dangerous. He's been evading the law for a decade. If he knows you're getting close, he may do something desperate. And desperate men are unpredictable.”

The line went dead. Leo replaced the receiver and stood for a moment in the corner of the tavern, staring at the fly-specked window and the grey, fading light beyond. Dougal was still polishing glasses, his movements slow and rhythmic, as if nothing of consequence had occurred. Perhaps, in his world, nothing had. Another drifter had passed through Selby Cove and left another bag behind. The mountains did not care. The sea did not care. Only the Vances cared, and their caring had become a kind of affliction, a wound that would not heal.

They drove back to Halvergate through the night, the headlights cutting a pale tunnel through the darkness. Mara did not speak. She held the plastic bag on her lap, her fingers tracing the outline of the sock through the plastic, and stared out the window at the invisible landscape. Leo drove, his mind turning over the fragments of the case like a man sifting through rubble after an earthquake, looking for something solid, something that would hold.

The DNA testing, Baird had said, would take six to eight weeks. But Leo knew, with a certainty that had been hardening in him for years, that the law's timeline was not their timeline. The law moved slowly because it could afford to. It had other cases, other victims, other families waiting for justice. The Vances had only one case, one victim, one family. They could not afford to wait. And the sock, the small, pale-blue sock with its pattern of anchors, had changed something fundamental in the equation. It was no longer a matter of waiting. It was a matter of hunting.

They arrived in Halvergate as the sun was rising over the eastern spires of the city. The streets were empty, the shops still shuttered, the only movement the occasional delivery lorry rumbling toward the markets. Leo found a guesthouse near the Central Records Office, a narrow, three-storey building with a sign that creaked in the morning wind, and they took a room on the top floor. The room was small and spare, with a single window that looked out over the rooftops toward the grey ribbon of the river. Mara placed the plastic bag on the bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap.

“We need to find out where he went after Selby Cove,” she said. “Dougal said he was heading to the city. Halvergate or Port Meridian. That's two cities, millions of people. But he uses patterns. He always goes back to certain kinds of places. Slaughterhouses. Mills. Places where they pay cash and don't ask questions.”

“There are dozens of slaughterhouses in the Federation,” Leo said. “Hundreds of mills. We can't search them all.”

“Then we narrow it down. He uses aliases that start with the letter M. Martin Ashby. Peter Ashford. He keeps the initials the same—Dorian Clegg, Martin Ashby, Peter Ashford. The first and last letters match. It's a pattern. He's not creative enough to break it.”

Leo sat down on the bed beside her. The exhaustion of the past days had settled into his bones, a deep, grinding ache that made every movement feel as though he were wading through water. But beneath the exhaustion, there was something else: a current of energy, sharp and electric, that had been absent for years. It was the energy of proximity. They were closer to Clegg than they had ever been. The sock was proof of that. The sock was a thread, and if they pulled on it hard enough, it might lead them to the man himself.

“We start with the city records,” Mara continued. “Employment registrations. Tax records. If he's working under a false name, he might still be paying taxes. He might have a national insurance number, even if it's forged. There are ways to find people, even people who don't want to be found.”

“And if we find him?”

Mara turned to look at him. Her eyes were very clear, very steady. “Then we go to Baird. We give him the information. We let the law do its work.”

Leo nodded. But even as he did, he felt a small, cold doubt stirring in the back of his mind. He had seen what the law could do. He had seen its limitations, its failures, its capacity for absorbing the truth and producing, in its place, a verdict that satisfied the requirements of procedure while spitting out the remains of justice. If they found Clegg, and if they handed him over to Baird, and if the case went to trial—there were too many conditionals. Too many points of failure. And the sock, the precious, fragile sock, might not be enough.

They spent the next three days in the records office in Halvergate, combing through employment registrations and tax filings. The work was tedious and exhausting, the hours blurring into each other as they moved from one set of records to the next. Miss Pargeter was no longer there; her replacement was a young man with a wispy beard and the distracted air of someone who would rather be anywhere else. He offered them no special assistance, and they did not ask for any. They had learned, over the years, to rely only on themselves.

On the afternoon of the third day, Mara found something. It was a tax filing from a slaughterhouse in the industrial district of Halvergate, dated eighteen months earlier. The employee was listed as David Crane—another name that matched the pattern of Clegg's aliases, the same initial letters, the same five-letter surname. The employment had lasted four months, after which David Crane had simply disappeared from the records, as if he had never existed.

“He was here,” Mara said, her finger pressed against the entry in the ledger. “Eighteen months ago. He was working at a slaughterhouse less than three miles from where we're sitting.”

They took the information to Baird's office that evening. The detective was not there—he was in court, the desk sergeant told them, testifying in an unrelated case—but they left the details with a young constable who promised to pass them along. Leo did not feel reassured. The machinery of the law was grinding into motion, but it was grinding slowly, and Clegg, wherever he was, was still moving.

That night, back in the guesthouse, Mara sat by the window and watched the lights of Halvergate glitter in the darkness. She was holding the sock again, her fingers tracing the anchors through the plastic.

“He was here,” she said. “In this city. While we were searching for him, while we were driving across the country, while we were knocking on doors and begging strangers for information—he was here. Working. Living. As if nothing had happened.”

Leo came to stand beside her. The city stretched out before them, vast and indifferent, its streets filled with people who had never heard of Samuel Vance, who would never know what had been lost.

“We'll find him,” Leo said. But the words felt hollow, a mantra repeated so often that it had lost all meaning.

Mara did not answer. She continued to trace the anchors, her fingers moving in slow, repetitive circles, and her face, reflected in the dark glass of the window, was the face of a woman who had passed beyond hope into something colder and more determined. Leo looked at her and felt, for the first time in years, a flicker of genuine fear. Not of Clegg. Of his wife, and of what she might become when hope finally ran out.