Free The Swedish Girl by Alex Gray Page A

back and forth as though searching for the right lie to tell.
    ‘Didn’t she go home on her own?’ he asked eventually, shrugging as though he had no answer to give.
    ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Jo told him sharply.
    ‘Maybe the taxi driver would know,’ he said.
    Jo gave him a wintry smile. ‘We’re already investigating all of the taxi firms in the area,’ she told him. ‘What makes you so certain that she took a cab anyway?’
    Gary Calderwood’s eyebrows took another lift upwards. ‘Because that’s what she always did,’ he said simply.

CHAPTER 12
    I t was warm in the office where they had asked him to wait, but Colin simply could not stop himself from shivering. The hotel bedroom had been small and stuffy, too hot for sleeping, he’d thought, though he must have dozed off at some point because when he had woken up this morning daylight was streaming in through the window. He’d forgotten to flick shut the blinds last night, preferring to sit at the window and watch the lights from the traffic below, anything to keep out the memory of the past two days and nights.
    It seemed like hours since Mr Wilson had arrived to whisk them off to the police station.
A Division
, Kirsty had told him
,
as though that might mean something to him. He had been waiting in that reception area for ages, watching the shadows of officers behind the frosted glass screens, looking up every time a figure emerged from the wooden doors, following them with his eyes when they went out into the streets, wondering if they were police officers or not. Plain clothes? Undercover? Some of them looked so ordinary he simply couldn’t decide.
    Kirsty had been first to go, then Rodge and then Gary, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
    Colin stood up and wandered across to the square window of the office that looked out onto the street. A thin drizzle still fell, the grey pavements slick with rain that had been falling all morning. He could see a couple hurrying along under a huge golf umbrella, their faces hidden by the way one of them held it, slantwise against the driving drops. For a moment he let his mind wander, making up a story about them, giving them a history, a shared past that had brought them to this moment on a Glasgow street. If he had been at home, his laptop open on the desk, then perhaps these strangers might have come alive under his imaginative fingers. Then the thought of home, the flat in Merryfield Avenue, brought Colin back to why he was here, waiting in this room inside the vastness of a Strathclyde divisional headquarters.
    The jittering began in his face as though his cheeks had become icy cold.
    Putting his hands out against the window sill, Colin tried to remember what Kirsty had told him about breathing against these rising panic attacks that she had witnessed back at the flat. He gulped air into his lungs, held it there for a count of four then exhaled as slowly as he could, feeling the shivers gradually subside. A numb sensation crept over his nose and mouth and Colin turned to grasp the back of the chair. Breathe, breathe, he told himself, but with every gulp of air he took, he could see Eva’s lifeless face, all her breath snuffed out for good.
    ‘Mr Young?’
    Colin looked up sharply as the woman came into the room, the sudden motion making him feel light-headed and nauseous.
    ‘Detective Inspector Grant,’ the woman said. ‘Would you like to follow me, please?’
    Colin stood up, forcing his feet to walk across the floor and out into a corridor. The ringing in his ears subsided as he tried to match the dark-haired woman’s stride, the sound of their footsteps unnaturally loud. They passed several doors, one marked VIPER, another FORENSIC DRYING CABINETS, before the woman stopped and turned towards him.
    ‘In here, please.’ DI Grant was smiling at him encouragingly, her hand raised to indicate that Colin should enter the door marked INTERVIEW ROOM 3.
    Taking another deep breath,