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THE SNOW FELL softy at first, light flakes floating slowly to the frozen forest floor. Not once had the sun shown its face, the sky an indistinct grey that blended in with the woods. The treetops were invisible, disappearing as tall trunks stretched towards the heavens, keeping out the worst of the weather. A log fire crackled, spitting sparks in the hearth like a hissing cat each time it was stoked with the poker.

Adele rested Morag's pie over the grate, heating it up over the fire until the mixed berry filling bubbled up through the cracks in the glazed pastry lid. Caleb was in charge of drinks, carefully pouring boiling water over a couple of mugs of cocoa powder and fixing a coffee for Adele. Ainslie sat cross-legged in front of the fire, frowning at the page she was hunched over.

"Here." Caleb nudged her when he passed her the mug. She looked up with a distracted glaze in her eyes and took it from him with a half-hearted smile, her pen still clutched in one hand. Adele passed her a portion of the oozing pie, serving a bigger piece onto a second plate for her and Caleb to share.

"I don't know what we can do," Ainslie said. She put her mug and pie aside to flip back to the previous page in her notebook. "I really have no idea how we can get rid of him."

"Me neither," Adele said. "God, this is a nightmare." She sat down next to Caleb, curling up with him to make herself feel a little better. It was difficult to process the magnitude of the situation, even harder to come to terms with how helpless she felt.

"The main problem is that he doesn't care about anything as much as he cares about hunting," Ainslie said. "We can't use Jade or the baby against him."

"Because he doesn't care about them," Caleb added, his voice sombre.

"No." Ainslie sighed. "At first I thought maybe we could, I don't know, offer to babysit or something and get him and Jade to have a date night but..."

"He would never fall for that," Adele said. "Something tells me he and Jade have hardly spoken since she had Fiona. He spends as little time in the house as possible and when he is there, he's drinking in the kitchen. He wouldn't give up his hunt to be with her."

"So how are we ever going to get rid of him?" Ainslie let out a cry of exasperation and pushed the notebook away, replacing it with the pie that she stabbed her spoon into. "We're screwed. The only way he'll leave is if he died. I wish he would just drop dead."

"Hey, Ains, calm down. It's going to be ok," Adele said, stretching out her foot to poke her with her socked toe. "We're not going to kill him. That would just set the whole town off on a witch hunt. And we're not killers. We'll figure something out."

"But what?" Caleb asked with a heavy sigh. His spoon clanked against Adele's when they both dug into the pie at the same time. It was divine. Morag was a talented baker, mastering the perfect balance of sweet and sharp.

"I don't know." She shrugged, her shoulders dropping heavily. Her spoon fell onto her lap, leaving a berry smear on her jeans.

"Well, we need to think," Ainslie said. With a fresh burst of energy, she grabbed her notebook and turned to a fresh page, writing CREIGHTON 101 at the top in her neatest handwriting. "What do we know about Creighton? Everything we know – something has to help us."

"Let's see..." Adele mused. "Off the top of my head, he's a homicidal danger to society with a major ego problem and some serious issues with women."

"More specific." Ainslie tapped her pen. "If we can figure him out more, we can figure out how to get rid of him. We need to know what makes him tick. How long have he and Jade been married?"

"They're not."

She snapped her head up. "What?"

"You know that, Ains. They got engaged six months ago. They're not married."

"That's weird," she hummed, her frown deepening. The light of the fire cast a glow over her freckles, the flames dancing over her auburn hair.

"Why?"

Ainslie wrote it down, her lips pursed. "We know he's a controller," she said. "He's got major control issues, and he goes out of his way to control Jade. We know he's never loved her because he's with her to get back at you, but he went to the effort of getting engaged to her. Why not marry her? I'd have thought he'd want to tie her down as soon as possible."

Adele pursed her lips in thought. She had never thought about that, only ever resting on the relief that Jade had yet to tie the knot. "The baby," she said after a moment. "They didn't know the baby was a girl when they got engaged. He only wanted to marry her to carry on the legacy but he thinks she failed him by having a girl. He can't stand her. She probably disgusts him: he can't bring himself to marry her, not even for show."

Ainslie pulled a face, her nose wrinkling and her pale eyes darkening. "Well, isn't that lovely?" she muttered. "So he hates her and won't marry her but he won't let her leave? To hurt both of you?"

"Probably."

"He has to keep her around to hurt you," Caleb said. He shifted in the armchair, one arm around Adele's waist. "If he marries her ... is that like marking her?"

"Kind of, I think," Adele said.

"If he marks her, she can't leave. Maybe he wants her to leave, but not yet. If he doesn't mark her, she will stay because she is waiting for the mark, for him to marry her, and he can get rid of her when he doesn't need her anymore."

A sudden shiver rolled through Adele, the hairs on her arms standing on edge. "Oh, God," she muttered. "I think you're right. But oh, God, that's awful."

"That's really sick," Ainslie said, her voice dropping as her face fell.

"He has serious psychological issues, Ains. We need to be careful."

"I know." She nodded and bit her lip as she wrote down Caleb's theory. "So, he's keeping Jade around in some kind of limbo to hurt you, because he blames you for James and Rose's affair and for Katherine going missing. He can't take it out on your parents so he takes it out on you."

"His mother," Caleb said. Both of them turned to face him.

"What about her?"

"Why doesn't he hate her?" he asked. "She's still alive. She's the one who cheated. Why doesn't her hate her instead? It was her who cheated and it was her who had Katherine. It's more her fault that she disappeared than yours."

Ainslie scoffed. "Because he's broken and twisted and wants to hurt Adele."

Adele's mind cleared for a fraction of a second as though the sun had pierced the clouds that fogged her thoughts. "No, no, I think Caleb's got a point," she said. "He should be angry at his mother. He should hate her for what she did, and he should hate her for not being there when Katherine disappeared, but he doesn't."

"So he's got mummy issues?"

"No." She shook her head. "If he had mummy issues, he'd hate her more. I think it's the opposite. He's a mummy's boy. Think about it: he spends fifty thousand pounds a year for her to live in the best care home around. She's been there since before Bernard died – he's probably spent quarter of a million to keep her comfortable. And we know he goes to see her."

"He loves her," Ainslie said. "If he didn't, she'd be dead by now."

Adele nodded. "I'd be willing to bet he killed his father," she added. "As soon as Creighton got control of the Honour Guard, his father died."

"Maybe he wanted to impress his mother. He wanted to prove himself to her?" Ainslie scrawled as she spoke. "Does he see her much? Or was that a one off?"

Adele closed her eyes tightly, transporting herself back to that day at the care home. The blur of her memory brought up a flash of the visitor log when she had signed herself in. Creighton's name had been right above hers from the day before, but that hadn't been the only time it had appeared on the page. She remembered that, the way his name dominated the page in harsh capital letters.

"He goes a lot," she said. "I think he goes every week. Remember how excited Rose sounded when I said we knew Creighton?"

"Ok," Caleb said slowly. "Does this help? Did I help?"

Adele nodded and smiled at him, cupping his cheek with her hand. "I think you did," she said, "and I think he's even more fucked up than I thought."

"How?" Ainslie asked.

"His mother's the only woman for him. That's why he's such a misogynist. No-one can compare to whatever he's built her up to be. He got his father out of the picture. He wants to impress her. That's probably why he settled down with Jade. His mother probably asked if he was ever going to have a family."

"Oh." Ainslie winced. "You think there's, like, something creepy there? Like, incest?"

"I don't think so. I don't know. But I do think he idolises her. What's that thing, the thing about boys and their mothers?" she asked, clicking her fingers as she tried to remember.

"Oedipus?" Ainslie offered.

"Yes! You know about it?"

Ainslie nodded. "I watch a lot of crime shows," she said. "You know, CSI and Criminal Minds and things like that. The detective shows. I love them."

"No idea what those are," Adele said, "but what do you know about it?"

"It's a Greek thing, isn't it? There was a guy called Oedipus who killed his father because he was in love with his mother and it ended up destroying his city," she said. "And the Oedipus complex, the Freud thing, that's when a boy loves his mother and his father is his enemy. Something to do with a traumatic childhood."

Adele hugged her elbows, trying to shake the disgust that filled her. "I hate to say it, but that sounds like Creighton. Whatever hatred he should have had for his mother somehow got projected onto his father and he worships Rose. I don't know about his childhood but he certainly had a traumatic adolescence."

"Maybe he thought it was his father's role to be the head of the house," Ainslie said, "and he thinks it was Bernard's responsibility to protect Katherine and to stop Rose from straying. I don't know if that makes sense, but nothing he does makes much sense. Not rationally, anyway. Irrationally, maybe."

"So he is even more horrible," Caleb said, "but how does this help?"

"It gives us a way in," Ainslie said. "We thought Rose would just be useful for getting answers about Katherine, but maybe she'll be the way we get Creighton out of the picture for a bit."

"She's the only person in the world that he cares about. Jade can't live up to whatever legacy he thinks Rose has, not just whatever legacy his dad passed down," Adele said. "He probably thinks Jade is betraying Rose by not being a carbon copy of her."

"We need him to go and see his mother," Ainslie said.

"I don't know if that's enough, though," Adele said with a grimace. "Think about it: it would take him an hour to get to the care home from where he lives, another ninety minutes to drive back to the quarry. Even if he stayed with his mother for half an hour, that would only give us three hours. That's just not enough time."

"We can't get caught," Caleb said, his eyes wide as he shook his head. "If he comes back while we're there, we all die."

"We don't know how long we'll be at the quarry," Adele added. "It's not exactly shallow and it's fucking cold and icy out there. It'll probably take at least half an hour or more to get to the bottom and way longer to get back up, and who knows how long it'll take to find Reed?"

"Ok," Ainslie said, "so what do we do? We could ring and pretend to be the care home and say she's in hospital or something? Somewhere far away? We could say she was airlifted to Aberdeen or something – it'd take him three hours to drive there."

Adele shook her head. "Too risky. If he didn't recognise my voice straight away, he could ring the care home back or not trust the number, or he could call the hospital. There are too many variables. And even if he did go, she wouldn't be there and he'd know it was us."

Ainslie let out a heavy sigh and her face fell. "So we're back to square one. His mother's useless."

"Unless she actually did have an accident and was airlifted to Aberdeen, yes, she's useless," Adele said. "And no, before you think it, we're not going to orchestrate some kind of accident."

Ainslie gasped, hurt in her eyes. "I never would suggest that! Oh my goodness, Adele, do you really think I would force Rose to go to hospital? I'm not that evil. I only want to hurt Creighton. The worst thing Rose did was have an affair twenty-three years ago. Creighton, on the other hand, is living out this whole Oedipus thing which means he's going to destroy this town and take us all down with him."

"He already is," Adele said. "He's made sure the whole town is built upon the Honour Guard – without it, everyone crumbles. He controls everyone."

"So," Caleb said, "what do we do?"

"What about Katherine?" Ainslie suddenly asked.

"What about her?" Adele finished the last bite of pie when Caleb nudged it towards her, even though he could have devoured the whole thing. When she set the plate down on the floor, she snuggled closer against him, her feet tucked down the side of the cushion across his legs and her ear was pressed to his chest.

"Well, if he's so angry at you for supposedly killing her, he must've liked her, right? They were close?"

"I don't know," Adele said, "but he did say that she should still be alive. He said that he should still have a sister. But he thinks she's dead, Ains."

"Exactly – he thinks that. All he knows for sure is that she disappeared and in eighteen years of hunting, he's never found her." She doodled as she spoke, drawling swirls in the margin of her pages. "What if he thought there was a lead? He's a control freak who lost control when he lost his sister: surely he'd drop everything to find her if he thought there had been a sighting?"

Adele lifted her head away from Caleb's chest. "Maybe," she said. "You might be onto something. If he thought there was a chance she was alive somewhere, chances are he'd try to find her. That way he could take back control, and it would be a way to impress his mother. He'd jump at the chance for her to see him as a hero."

"But how?" Caleb asked. "How do you make him think she's somewhere he can find her?"

"We'll have to do some acting," Adele said. "Well, I will. Neither of you are going to take the fall for this. This is all on my shoulders. Ains, is there a way I can hide my number if I call?"

She nodded. "Not on your old phone, but you can on mine," she said. "But he'll know your voice, Adele. He'll make you immediately."

"He'll make her what?" Caleb asked.

"I mean he'll figure her out," she explained. "The second Creighton hears Adele's voice, he'll know something's up. He's not stupid. He's just crazy."

"I can change my voice," Adele said. She cleared her throat and sat up a little, leaning against Caleb to hold herself up. "Do you think he'd recognise me if I spoke like this?"

"Oh my goodness!" Ainslie cried, her hand flying to her mouth. "That's not you! Oh my goodness, you sound English."

Adele laughed and cleared her throat again, slipping down to her normal Scottish comfort zone. "I guess I can do an English accent," she said. "The further we can get him, the better. Reckon he'd bite if I said I was a detective from Scotland Yard with a potential sighting of Katherine Keir?"

"What's Scotland Yard?" Caleb asked. He moved her elbow when it dug into his chest.

"The police headquarters in London."

Ainslie shook her head. "Too big. Too risky. And you could get done for interpreting a police officer. They'd probably think you're a terrorist if anyone found out. You could say you're from, I don't know, the Inverness PD and you got word of a lead in London. That'd be more believable."

"You reckon?"

She nodded. "I think so. I doubt someone from Scotland Yard would ring his home number just to say there's a chance his missing sister was spotted." Jumping to her feet, she grabbed a tin of Katherine memorabilia that she had brought in from the bunker, some of the most important pieces. Amongst them, one of the missing posters. "Here."

Adele took it, studying the details of Katherine's disappearance. "What if I say I'm from Inverness and he wants to go to Inverness to talk to them? That's only an hour away. We need him to go to London."

"If Katherine's involved, I think he'd cut out the middle man," Ainslie said. "Since when has he ever relied on anyone else? He likes to take matters into his own hands. I bet he'd drive straight down."

"How long would that take?" Caleb asked. "How far is London?"

"Nine or ten hours," Ainslie said. "And he's bound to stay a bit if he thinks his sister might be there. Plenty of time for us to get to Reed."

A flicker of a smile twitched at the corners of Adele's mouth, the first glimmer of optimism she had felt in a while. "This just might work," she said. "What should I say?"

Ainslie hugged her knees to her chest, caught between excitement and fear. "That you have reason to believe his sister may be in London. Maybe a woman matching her description has been spotted panhandling."

"What if he actually goes to the police and asks about her?"

Ainslie winced. "I don't know. Maybe you say you're from the Penlark PD and that this is a gesture of goodwill. They'd be more familiar with the case, and the family, and you could say it's totally off the records. He has no respect for other people – he won't go to the police. He would take it into his own hands."

"He knows the Penlark PD too well," Adele said. "But the Aranmore PD on the other side of the valley would have been involved in a missing child case, and he wouldn't know them."

"There you go then," Ainslie said.

Adele took a deep breath, filling her lungs and straightening out her back as she inhaled. "Ok. Let's do this. Give me your phone."

"Really? Now?"

"No time like the present," Adele said. She waited as Ainslie set her number to private and handed over the phone, and Adele typed in the home number for Keir Manor. "Either we're about to buy ourselves a couple of days or I've got myself a one way ticket to hell." She laughed, but Ainslie didn't find it funny in the slightest.

"Is this a good idea?" Caleb asked when Adele stood, freeing up his lap.

"It's the only one we've got," she said. "I can't exactly ask Archie to do it for me – then I'd have to bring him up to speed with all this and we're not close enough for him to have any sort of loyalty towards me over Angus or his job."

"Ok. Ok. Good luck," he said. She nodded and hit dial, her shaky hand holding the phone to her ear. It rang several times before there was the rustle of a receiver.

"Hello?" Creighton's voice. Unmistakeable. She closed her eyes, forcing her head into the game, and dropped her accent.

"This is Officer Davis, former officer with the Aranmore Police Department," she said, speaking a little slower than usual to measure out her new accent. "I'm looking for Creighton Keir."

"That's me," he said. "Why?"

"I need you to know that this is strictly off the records and what I am about to tell you is as a gesture of goodwill towards you and your family," she said, her eyes on Ainslie as she nodded along and scribbled notes for Adele to repeat.

"Ok," Creighton said. "What is this about?"

Adele peered at the notes Ainslie had written. "When I was on the force, I worked your sister's missing person's case, in 1999," she said. She didn't miss the sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line, but she didn't stray from reciting the words Ainslie was hastily writing out. "I left the department shortly afterwards but the case stuck with me."

"My sister died," Creighton said. His words were short and clipped.

"I have reason to believe she's alive," Adele said. "I have come across reports of a London panhandler matching Katherine's description. A woman in her early twenties, dark hair and blue eyes."

Creighton scoffed. "That describes an awful lot of women, Officer. You're wasting my time and yours."

Ainslie scrambled for a photo from the tin, lunging at Adele and frantically tapping the picture. Adele glanced at it, trying to stop her heart from beating out of her throat.

"She has a distinctive birthmark on her neck in the shape of a fifty-pence coin," she said, her eyes trained on the picture of her and Katherine, scouring it for features, "and three moles beneath her left eye."

Creighton went silent.

"Mr Keir? Are you still there?"

"Where is she?"

Adele gave Ainslie a thumbs up and a grin, and slipped back into character. "Reports have placed her in the city of London," she said, stalling as she tried to interpret Ainslie's messy writing. "In the south bank area. I must warn you, this is by no means a guarantee but I have a suspicion that your sister was abducted, Mr Keir, and she is now living in London. As I mentioned, this is off the records. I am going out on a limb to let you know this."

He didn't say anything for a while. Adele waited patiently, holding her breath

"Thank you," he said. It wasn't often that those words passed his lips.

"Good luck, Mr Keir. I hope you find your sister."

The line went dead. Adele dropped her hand from her ear, passing the phone back to Ainslie.

"You're scarily good at lying," she said when she was sure that the call was over. "Did he buy it?"

Adele took a shaky breath and pushed her hands through her hair. Her throat hurt from the effort of distorting her voice, especially with so much pressure not to slip up. She dropped down onto the armchair again, welcomed by Caleb's comforting hold, and she met Ainslie's gaze. "I think he did. Now we just need to be sure."

"Then we can find Reed," Caleb said.

"Then we can find Reed." 

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sorry for unpredictable updates recently! i always end up slowing down a bit towards the end of a book. i can't believe TP is nearly over. i can't wait to write Blue Christmas, and then Holding Point! this book will be finished by the 16th of December as that's when I fly home and TP was always set to be my Canada project! only 4 more chapters to go and tensions are rising . . .

what're you thinking?

also, because i'm in an undeniably festive mood, tell me your favourite christmas film!