Jack in the box, p.1
Jack in the Box, page 1
PRAISE FOR PAT BLACK
‘Pat Black has breathed new life into the police procedural in To Pay the Ferryman, the first novel in what promises to be a highly entertaining series’
Mark Sanderson, The Times
‘Arresting writing . . . the art theme works very well, and the villain is a surprise’
Jeremy Black, The Critic
‘With a well-worked plot and credible, sympathetic characters, this is an enjoyable slice of tartan noir’
Allan Massie, The Scotsman
‘Plenty of Scottish police humour, awful coffee, and a most dramatic ending’
Daily Mirror
‘A gripping, multi-faceted mystery with a cast of engaging characters and a delicious dose of camaraderie spiced with dark humour’
Sally McDonald, Sunday Post
‘There’s a dark sense of humour that bubbles away nicely beneath the grisly plot, and Black’s writing style is hypnotically succinct’
Scottish Field
‘A classic murder mystery . . . laced with Scottish humour.
Glasgow-born Pat Black is the author of several thrillers and this is a fine addition to his expert storytelling’
Ella Walker, Irish News
‘A smartly-written thriller’
Alastair Mabbott, The Herald
‘Packed with urgency and threat, and ultimately satisfying’
Jen Med Book Reviews
A note on the author
Pat Black lives in Yorkshire with his wife and children. He will always belong to Glasgow.
Jack-in-the-Box
PAT BLACK
First published in 2026 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.
Birlinn Ltd
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.polygonbooks.co.uk
1
Copyright © Paul McGurk, 2026
The right of Paul McGurk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. This work is reserved from text and data mining (Article 4(3) Directive (EU) 2019/790).
ISBN 978 1 84697 717 6
eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 823 6
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.
Typeset by 3btype, Edinburgh.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd
For Dave Black. No relation. Except he is.
1
Kath had a mother hen moment as Beatrice waved goodbye.
It might have been the falling snow, the leaden skies, or just January in general. A need to stay close to the little one, to keep her safe. Kath remembered her own mother had once declared a snow day, when she was about the same age as Beatrice, without any warning other than a few thick flakes of snow. They’d had a wonderful time away from the school. Tea and toast, and the radio; felt-tip pens and colouring books, and even a cake after lunch. Just for a moment, at the bus stop, Kath had considered doing the same. Might be nice.
But the moment was lost for ever upon sight of the bus’s yellow and green livery. The little girl in pigtails turned to wave before she hopped up to take the seat beside Jessica, her best friend.
‘Have a good day, sweetheart!’ Kath cried, loud enough for Beatrice to hear through the glass. Absurdly, she felt on the verge of tears. Beatrice waved and smiled, oblivious.
She’d been jumpy all morning. Ed was gone for a few days – some jolly in Amsterdam: eyebrows raised, uneasy smiles, work, of course – and while she wasn’t worried about what he got up to over there, she had a childish habit of not being able to sleep while he was gone. Lights on and everything. Something she’d have scolded Beatrice about. Kath still saw monsters in corners. Unblinking yellow eyes under the bed. She reproved herself for these childish fancies, but she couldn’t stop them. As she checked inside the hall cupboard for the second time, she thought, I’ll do this until my dying day.
There were some odd moments as the morning wore on. The snow had stopped minutes after it started, and it even grew mild outside. Kath decided to give some bedsheets an airing after the washing-machine cycle finished, not liking the fusty smell that hung around house-dried laundry, usually a necessity given the time of year.
She’d been happy to see two foxes playing in the frost-covered wasteground as she pegged out the sheets. But only an hour later, when the blue skies had given way to grey cloud, they were gone. The only warm-blooded life out there was a dirty great crow squatting in one of the trees that obscured the houses backing onto the garden. The wind was bitter, and Kath wondered if more snow was on the way.
Worried that the bedding would freeze with the sharp drop in temperature, she gathered the sheets and spaced them out on the clothes rack in the utility room. They flapped and billowed like grasping hands, and Kath felt a brief panic as the white fabric twisted around her – echoes of ghosts wreathed in sheets with scissored eyes. Jittery as a kitten, she closed the windows, locked the patio doors and then, on an impulse, checked the security cameras monitor. Nothing, of course. Nothing in front of the house, nothing in the garden, nothing in the garage, nothing down the side where the bins lived, in front of the padlocked gate . . .
Kath called her mother on the landline, but there was no reply. Neither the computer’s humming solace nor the cosy DJ she favoured after lunchtime could shake that feeling of isolation that came during quiet afternoons alone in the house. The snow was turning to slush on the patio, frosting the trees beyond the fence. Kath didn’t want to look too closely. She always imagined that someone might be hiding there.
Despite the ticking of the radiators and the warmth they exuded, she decided to have a bath. Warm those bones. Nice and cosy. Her shoulder muscles unbunched at the thought.
Lying back in the intense fog from the churning water, Kath kept one eye on the bathroom door. No snib lock. Ed had wanted one, but Kath was against it. What if Beatrice got locked in?
So, even when the door crept open and the dressing gown hanging from the peg swung towards her, blurred through the shower screen, Kath’s mind rationalised the situation. A window left open, surely. A sudden gust of midwinter wind pushing the bathroom door open.
And then the door closed.
Someone was standing there.
2
Corinne said cheerio to Mrs Gleniffer outside Grazers and Blazers. After a good two hours inside, this should only have taken a minute or so, but Corinne managed to extend it to at least five. Even Mrs Glennifer was turning a little bit twitchy, especially with that cold wind in her face. Sliced right through you, that, Corinne thought, turning her back on the sleety gusts and tucking her ears inside her hat.
‘Oh, my Brian’s back,’ Mrs Gleniffer announced, brandishing the phone screen towards Corinne, far too fast for her to focus on. ‘I’d best get home or he’ll get some daft ideas in him. Start thinking he can make the dinner!’
‘God forbid!’ Corinne said, laughing, and the farewells were made at last. As she turned into the high street, wincing as a snowflake landed plum on the point of her nose, she thought her Brian would die before he boiled a bloody egg. Must be desperate to be rid of me, or something. Mind you, they’d been in Grazers and Blazers a while. Nice selection they had there. Good vanilla slice. You didn’t often get one, these days – usually muffins and brownies. They could be a bit much.
Corinne had made it to the shelter of the supermarket entrance, right beside the strange pet shop, inside which she had never seen any customers, nor members of staff either, although the squeezy toys and bird tables and a dog bowl filled with water for passing trade – buffed up better than the silver service in her own house, she had to admit – were left outside the entrance as ever. She was thinking about Mrs Gleniffer and wondering if the phone was new, or just the case – Mrs Gleniffer was forever dropping her bloody phones, or maybe firing them off Brian’s head, which would make sense – when she realised she hadn’t checked her own phone in a while. Reaching into her bag, her fingers curled around it. It was quivering and purring.
Corinne saw that she had missed twenty-six calls. She’d put the phone on silent in order to talk to Mrs Glennifer in Grazers and Blazers. She’d only meant to be in there an hour at most. New place, crafty stuff for sale, but none of your rubbish, mind . . .
Twenty-six calls. Suddenly she understood. She peeled off her gloves, the better to skate across the surface, but her fingers had forgotten how to operate.
She tried to swallow, but a hand seemed to be clamped round her throat, jamming the mechanism. She said ‘Ach’ instead, not the lament, or the exasperated version, just a click. Not even a human sound. It was, she would recall much later, exactly the same as she’d made when the phone went thirty years previously and her Gordon’s site manager was on the line, struggling to tell her the news.
The first of the missed calls was from Kath. Then followed three from an unknown number. Then twenty-two from Ed. Ed was away in Amsterdam.
Corin
‘What is it, Ed?’ she said. ‘What’s happening? Tell me it’s not Bea?’
‘What are you talking about?’ He was angry, not scared. ‘What’s happening there?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, Ed. I was out for the afternoon. There’s no signal down at the Plaza Centre, you know how it gets in there—’
‘Have you spoken to Kath today?’
His tone was so sharp, so savage, that she started to cry. He had a temper, did Ed. ‘I’ve not spoken to her since Sunday, Ed, when you were round for your dinner. Is everything—’
‘Right, never mind. Corinne, I need you to go to the school. Beatrice is there. Kath hasn’t shown up. She was supposed to get her after her piano class at after-school club. She didn’t show. Beatrice is waiting at the school with her teacher.’
‘I’ve got a bag of messages here, Ed. What’s happening with Kath?’
She could hear him grinding his teeth. It was a good connection. ‘One thing at a time, Corinne. Go to the school. Pick up Beatrice. Don’t frighten her. I can’t get hold of Kath. The neighbour says the car is still at the house, but there’s no answer at the door. So I need you to pick up Beatrice at the school. Take her back to the house, and use your key to get in.’
‘Oh, son! What’s going on?’
‘Probably nothing,’ Ed said. ‘She did this once before, when Beatrice was going for gymnastics. Got her dates mixed up. It happens. Don’t panic, Corinne, and don’t frighten the wee one. Pick her up, take her home, and let yourself in. Give Kath a call yourself, when you can. It’s probably nothing.’
3
It was a street that a lot of learner drivers were taken down to practise U-turns. A glorified cul-de-sac – that had annoyed Ed, when Corinne had said it; it was out of her mouth before she could think about it, really – a dead end, just a crescent where the houses arced round, backing onto some trees and the scrubland. Corinne usually parked outside the house rather than going onto the drive, but she went right in this time, parking up beside Kath’s 4x4.
Beatrice knew something was wrong, all right. How could it not be?
‘Where’s she gone, Nana?’ she said from the seat in the back, fidgeting with something in her hand that caught the corner of Corinne’s eye while she was trying to straighten up in the driveway.
‘What have you got there? Stop fidgeting.’ Then Corinne saw what it was in the girl’s hand. Her rosary beads. Pale blue, and blessed at Lourdes, no less.
‘She’s never usually late, Nana.’
‘It’s a cold day – maybe she had things to do and ran out of time. She probably thought you were getting the bus, and forgot it was your piano lesson today.’
Beatrice’s lip trembled. So did the tips of her pigtails.
Corinne unclipped her belt and turned round. Her gloved hands covered the girl’s. Even through the material Corinne felt the chill of her fingers. She cursed herself for not thinking. ‘Now don’t you worry,’ she said, in a light tone that grew brittle before she had finished the sentence. ‘It’ll be fine. She’s just forgotten. It’s easy done, sweetheart. Now, you’ll wait in here, OK?’
‘It’s dark, Nana. I’m scared.’
‘Oh, don’t you be scared.’ Corinne coughed to hide the tremor in her voice. She clasped Beatrice’s hands tighter. ‘I’ll be back in two minutes. Anything happens, you just beep that horn, right?’
Beatrice nodded. Corinne got out – cold wind immediately slapping her cheeks and forehead, threatening to tear her hat off. She locked the car, waved to Beatrice, then tried the door. Locked. She hit the doorbell, courtesy really, and the dull, emotionless tones were still ringing out when she put her key in the lock.
There was already a key in the lock – or something in the lock, at any rate. Corinne grunted as she tried the key again. It would not go all the way in. She extricated it gently. Her heart had surely never been this loud, her blood in revolt against the chill. She moved back and scanned the windows. There was a suggestion of a light on in the front room. Nothing upstairs. She slipped as she followed the path round to the side gate, her footsteps gouging weeping prints into the slush. She steadied herself, took a breath and turned to wave at Beatrice. With the glare of the streetlights, she couldn’t really see if she was there or not. It was bloody dark too.
The gate creaked open. The swing set and slide bolted to the ground. Wee one was too old for them, really. Ed should get rid of them. Lawn was like a pudding itself, come to think of it. No footprints, she remembered later. She was quite firm on that point.
The patio door was open a crack.
‘Kath?’ She slid it open. Much warmer through the threshold; heating was on. Kitchen tidy. Clock ticking. Glowing red script on the oven not reset since the clocks went back. Bloody Ed again. ‘Kath? Where are you, pet?’
Water on the laminate flooring catching the light. Footprints, it seemed. Bit of a mess. God, had she slipped?
‘Kath? What’s going on? It’s me!’
She didn’t get much further into the kitchen before it fell into place in her mind, the way it was meant to. Exactly how it had been planned. The kitchen had a play area with a big toybox in it – crammed full, it was an old-style wooden thing painted with animals and dinosaurs on the front. Beatrice was a lovely girl, bless her, but they’d got her too much stuff. Spoiled rotten at Christmas. She didn’t believe in Santa, really, but she’d gone along with it one more time, so as not to upset her mummy or daddy, or her nana. That was the kind of girl she was, nice like that.
Corinne saw that the box was ajar, just a wee bit. And out of place – it had been moved from the corner where it fitted snugly beside the wall units and dragged into the middle of the room.
But that wasn’t the first thing Corinne noticed. The first thing she noticed was the red scarf, dangling from the box lid like a tongue. It had been pulled straight, and was snagged on something inside. Something was stopping it from closing properly. It invited you to open it, and Corinne did. And then just covered her eyes, and screamed.
4
Detective Inspector Lomond switched off the car stereo, then slowed to a crawl. The snow had come on a lot thicker since he’d set off from the house, and even having the wipers on double-time couldn’t clear it off the windscreen fast enough. Lomond spotted DS Slater’s long, somewhat spindly form in the distance, saw what it was wearing and promptly discounted the evidence. Must be Malcolm’s doppelgänger, he thought. Surely that’s not him.
He sped up and had almost driven past Slater, who was standing in a bus shelter just before the crossroads that would take them deeper into the Southside, before a frantic arm gesture brought him to a sudden halt. Lomond eyed with some astonishment the figure that got into the car.
‘What?’ Slater said innocently.
‘Malcolm.’ Lomond was as grave as a father who has been specifically told by his wife to bollock a child. ‘What in God’s name are you wearing?’
‘What d’you mean?’ Slater glanced down at his coat, tugging the collar.
‘I mean . . . did you inherit that jacket?’
‘As it happens, it’s vintage, gaffer.’ Slater frowned, but one corner of his mouth twitched in a smile.
‘Vintage? Vintage what, curtains?’ To Lomond’s eyes, Slater’s jacket looked more like an analogue television tuned to static, a black-and-white monstrosity.
‘It’s style. Distinctive. And you’d think it was brand new. Never been worn, they said.’
‘Aye, there’s a reason for that.’
‘It was featured in a Sunday supplement, apparently.’
‘You say “apparently”,’ Lomond said in a flash. ‘Meaning someone told you about it. Meaning this wasn’t your idea.’
