Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

Glasgow

May 2024

CLEM

The police come to the hospital that afternoon: a woman in her forties in a gray trousers suit and brogues, her blonde hair tied back in a tight ponytail. A flash of a snake tattoo on her wrist. And a man in a navy suit, late fifties, dark-eyed and somber, who introduces himself as Detective Constable Sanger.

“How are you?” he asks Clem.

She takes a sharp breath and nods, the answer too overwhelming to speak aloud.

“This is Detective Constable Dorrit,” he says, nodding at his colleague. “She’s your family liaison officer.”

“Call me Stephanie,” the woman says, shaking Clem’s hand.

“What’s a family liaison officer?” Clem asks weakly.

“I’ll be supporting you during the investigation,” Stephanie says gently. “Any queries you have, anything you need, you come to me. I’m the point of contact between you and the other people involved in the inquiry.”

“I know this is the worst possible time for you to have to answer questions from the police,” DC Sanger says. “But it’s also the most important time if we’re to figure out what happened. Do you mind speaking with us for a few minutes?”

“Of course.”

Clem follows them to a side room, the three of them still in their armory of yellow plastic. Stephanie closes the door on the small room, and Clem feels faint. She sits down and grips the sides of the chair to steady herself.

“We just wanted to get an understanding of what Erin and her friends were doing in Orkney,” DC Sanger says, pulling off the plastic gown with a free hand while fetching a small notepad and pen from his pocket.

Clem nods. “Have you spoken to Arlo’s parents already?”

“We have,” DC Sanger says, and Clem’s stomach flips.

“How are they?”

He gives a sad sigh. “About as well as you might expect.”

She shakes her head, unable to speak at the thought of what Arlo’s parents must be going through. “I’d like to speak to them,” she says. “I don’t have a number for them. Perhaps you can give it to me?”

“I’ll pass on your number, how about that?” he says, and she nods.

“Can you tell us what Erin said about the trip?” Stephanie asks gently. “What plans she mentioned?”

“No plans, other than visiting Orkney,” Clem says, her voice shaking. “She took a DNA test a few years ago and it said she had a huge link to Orkney. I think she wanted to trace some ancestors.”

“And she wanted her friends to go with her?”

Clem nods. “She and Arlo were together for about a year, I think. She didn’t tell me when they first got together.”

“Why was that?” DC Sanger asks.

Clem isn’t sure why they need to know this. “I don’t know. She’s always been secretive.”

“How long were they gone for?”

Clem turns her mind back to the morning when she drove the three teenagers, happy, playful, to Glasgow Central. “They left the Saturday before last. April twenty-first? They took the train to Scrabster, then got the ferry to Stromness. They didn’t book return tickets, just so Erin could come back earlier if she wanted to. She has a daughter, Freya. She’s fifteen months old. Erin was anxious about going away, now that I think about it. She was excited at first but then more anxious as it got closer.”

DC Sanger scribbles down notes. Clem sees the word anxious underlined. “Why do you think that was?” he asks.

Clem thinks back to the night before Erin left. She sees herself in the doorway of Erin’s bedroom as she knelt by her rucksack, stuffing it with smalls, her face tight and flushed. She asked her what was wrong, thinking that maybe she couldn’t find something she needed for the trip, or maybe that Senna had pulled out. Erin looked up.

I’m scared, Mum.

She glanced at Freya then, and Clem assumed she meant she was scared to leave Freya for a whole three weeks. It was a long time, after all, and she still remembered how nervous she had been to leave Erin when she was a baby, even for a night out.

But maybe it was something else.

“I encouraged her to go,” she says tearfully.

“Why was that?”

Clem swallows back a sob, bitterly recalling her own words. Go and have fun. Freya will be fine!

“It’s difficult to explain.”

“Try.” DC Sanger’s voice is suddenly pressing.

How to put the last three years in a sentence?

“Erin got pregnant at seventeen,” she says slowly. “It was just completely out of the blue. She’d been a grade A student, had a place at Oxford to read Politics and Philosophy. But then…”

“But what?” DC Sanger presses.

Clem bites her lip. “I don’t know what happened. She bombed her Highers. Didn’t even turn up for some. She’s not seen much of her dad over the years but I was so desperate I drove her to his house in Wetherby for an emergency family meeting, you know, a crisis gathering.” She thinks back, flinching as she remembers the three of them in Quinn’s orangery on a hot August afternoon, surrounded by dead flies and lukewarm elderflower cordials, Heather and the boys hovering in the extension nearby.

“Quinn and I asked her what was going on,” Clem says. “And she told us she was pregnant.”

Stephanie nods sympathetically. “That must have been quite a shock.”

“It was,” she says. “And an extra shock because there was no inkling she was seeing anyone. Erin’s bisexual. She’s had a few girlfriends in the past but no boyfriend that we knew of. And when we asked who the father was, she just shrugged. We worried she was sleeping around, or being abused, or something.”

“And was she?” DC Sanger asks.

Clem hesitates. “I don’t think so. But we still don’t know who Freya’s father is.”

DC Sanger writes that down. “What about phone calls and messages since they left? Was there anything that indicated another traveler? Someone they met up with?”

Clem feels her blood run cold. “No. I mean, I don’t think so.” The implication of this hits her like a rock. “Are you saying they met up with someone else?”

“We’re still trying to work out what happened,” DC Sanger says.

“Where is the site?” Clem asks. “Where were they when…it happened?”

“On the island of Gunn. Do you know Orkney?”

Clem shakes her head. “Not at all.”

“Gunn’s an unusual spot for a group of teenagers, I must say.”

“I thought all of Orkney was beautiful,” Clem says, looking across both their faces. “That’s what Erin said.”

“It is. But Gunn’s a strange one. Hasn’t been inhabited since the eighteen hundreds, since it was ravaged by plague. Not the prettiest island, either. There isn’t a ferry service to it.”

Clem draws a sharp breath, not sure what to make of this. “How did they get to it if there wasn’t a ferry?”

“The island has a low tide,” Stephanie says, “so you can wade across from Gairsay, which does have a regular ferry.”

“God.” She feels more confused with each answer to her questions, an endless spiral of mystery.

“The island does have quite a controversial history among the locals. Your daughter and the boy were found on a beach known as Fynhallow.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” Clem says, her stomach flipping at the word found . The thought of Erin helpless and vulnerable in some remote place for God knows what reason feels like her skin is being stripped off, very slowly.

“Would it be possible to take a look at the messages Erin sent you in the days leading up to the incident?” Stephanie asks.

Clem begins to say yes, then hesitates. “Why?”

The detectives share a glance. “We want to cross-reference the messages sent to the other parents,” DC Sanger says. “To build a picture of their last activities. Senna’s still missing, and Arlo’s hands were bound when he died. This is now a murder investigation.”