A Litter of Bones

by J D Kirk

  “Hmm? Oh, no. That’s the hospital.”

  “So…” Logan glanced out through the window at the waste ground beyond. “Where’s the Tesco?”

  “It’s not happening?”

  “It’s what?”

  “They’re not building it. They changed their mind. They’re building a hospital, instead.”

  Logan blinked. “Who is? Tesco?”

  DI Forde gave a little chuckle. “No. Tesco sold the land.”

  “But…”

  “But they’d already put up the ‘superstore’ sign, so they just left it.”

  Logan’s eyebrows raised, then lowered. Forde beamed a big broad grin, then patted the DCI on the shoulder. “Welcome to the Highlands, Jack,” he said, then he jabbed a thumb in the direction of the Incident Room. “Shall we?”

  Chapter Seven

  While Logan and DI Forde went back a fair few years, the other faces were completely new to him. No doubt he’d have seen one or two in passing at various events, but none of them were familiar to him now. Forde wasted no time getting stuck into the introductions.

  “We’ll start at the top and work our way down to the riff-raff,” Ben announced, shooting a look of mock contempt at a young Detective Constable who was perched with half an arse-cheek on an otherwise uncluttered desk.

  Very few of the desks in the Incident Room were cluttered, in fact, which made Logan uneasy. He was used to rooms stacked high with documents—reports, witness statements, CCTV printouts, and all the other paperwork that piled up during an investigation. The fact that this one looked practically unused did not bode well for how things had been going thus far.

  “You mean save the best for last, sir,” said the DC. He was late-twenties, Logan thought. Hair gelled, or waxed, or puttied, or whatever the hell they did with it these days, stubble carefully cultivated to make it look like he just hadn’t got around to shaving for a while. Logan got the measure of him right away.

  DI Forde gave a derisory snort. “Aye, you tell yourself that if it helps, son,” he said, then he turned his attention to the only woman in the room.

  “Detective Sergeant Caitlyn McQuarrie,” Ben said. “Originally from Orkney, transferred to Northern MIT in… what? Two-thousand-and-sixteen?”

  “Twenty-seventeen,” the DS said, and Logan detected just a bit of an island twang. Not the lilting teuchter of the Western Isles, but even in just those two words there was something that was unmistakably not of the mainland.

  Her hair was flame-red, but cut short and tied back out of the way. She’d probably endured a lifetime of ‘ginger’ comments, and the hairstyle was a hundred-percent about functionality, zero percent about style.

  She was closer to Logan’s age than to DI Forde’s. Eight or nine years younger than himself, Logan thought, which put her mid-to-late-thirties. She was short and slight—five-four, five-five—but had a presence about her that would doubtless add a few inches when required.

  “Much as it pains me to say so, Caitlyn’s one of the best detectives I’ve ever worked with,” continued Ben.

  “Arguably the best,” the DS added, although the way she said it—light on the ego, heavy on the sarcasm—told Logan they were going to get along just fine.

  “I suppose you could technically argue any old shite, if you put your mind to it,” Ben conceded.

  He moved onto the only person in the room who hadn’t opened his mouth yet—a well-presented, mid-thirties Asian man standing stiffly just a half-step removed from the rest of the group. He wore a new suit and a worried expression, and Logan would put money on him having recently transferred.

  “DC Hamza Khaled. Recently joined us from CID,” said Ben, confirming Logan’s suspicions. “We haven’t really got to know each other that well yet, but I’ve heard only good things,” Ben continued.

  “We’ve obviously been talking to some very different people,” volunteered the as-yet-unnamed officer with the landscaped stubble. Khaled shot him an anxious look, then saw the guy’s grin and clicked that he was joking.

  “Where were you based before?” Logan asked, still trying to get the measure of the man.

  “Aberdeen, sir,” Hamza replied, and Logan found himself surprised by the heavy Doric accent. Aiberdeen.

  “Wait. Khaled,” said Logan, something stirring at the back of his mind. He clicked his fingers a couple of times, egging it on. “Weren’t you involved in that people trafficking thing with the fishing boats?”

  “No’ in the actual trafficking part, sir, but aye, I was one of the arresting officers,” DC Khaled said. He smiled, but warily, like he thought his jokey remark might land him in trouble.

  “From what I heard you pretty much cracked the whole thing wide open.”

  Hamza was quick to shake his head. “Team effort, sir.”

  “Aye, well, it was good work,” Logan told him. The DC seemed to relax a little then, the validation helping push away any thoughts of impostor syndrome.

  “Last, and by every means least, Detective Constable Tyler Neish.”

  The DC flashed his superior a grin, showing off his well maintained teeth. “You love me really, boss.”

  Ben made a weighing motion with both hands. “Meh.”

  DC Neish held a hand out to Logan, but remained half-seated on the desk. Logan considered the younger man’s offer, then extended his own hand, keeping his feet planted in a way that suggested he had no intention whatsoever of moving any closer. Ben smirked as he watched the power struggle unfold, knowing full well who was going to emerge victor.

  After a half-second or so of internal struggle, Tyler stood, took the necessary step closer to Logan, then shook his hand just a little sheepishly. “Nice to meet you, sir.”

  “Aye,” Logan said. “I know.”

  Ben had to briefly turn away, his shoulders shaking with barely contained laughter.

  Logan waited until DC Neish had returned to his perch, then addressed the lot of them. “Thank you for the introductions, DI Forde. It’s good to meet you all. Just a pity about the circumstances, but then I’m sure we’re all used to that by now.”

  Logan realised he was still wearing his coat, and began the process of shrugging it off as he continued.

  “I’m sure Ben’s already filled you in, but in case you need a refresher, I’m DCI Jack Logan. I was the arresting officer in the Mister Whisper case a few years back. I’ve been brought in to lead the charge on this one because of the similarities between both cases.”

  He looked around for somewhere to put his coat, then tossed it over a chair, simultaneously disposing of the garment and staking his claim to that seat.

  “Let me make one thing clear before we go any further,” Logan said, meeting everyone’s eye in turn. “Regardless of how similar aspects of these cases may be, Owen Petrie—Mister Whisper—is not behind them. We caught him. We put him away.”

  Tyler raised a hand, but didn’t wait to be asked. “Didn’t he fall or something during the arrest?”

  Logan nodded. “Off a car-park roof. Fell three floors, but lived to tell the tale. More or less.”

  “How did that happen, sir?” asked Hamza.

  There was a long, pregnant pause as Logan considered his answer. “I cornered him. I guess the old ‘fight or flight’ response kicked in. He elected to fly, which went about as well for him as you might imagine.”

  “Sounds like an unfortunate business, sir,” said DS McQuarrie. There was an edge to her tone that wasn’t accusing, exactly, but was certainly making an insinuation or two.

  “Very much so,” Logan agreed. “Although, on the bright side, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer man. Regardless, we’re a hundred percent that we have the right man locked up, and we know he can’t have been behind this latest abduction. So, we need to figure out who is, find out where they are, and get that boy home.”

  He let that settle for a moment. Then, when he was sure they were all on the same page, he looked to Ben. “What’s the latest?”

&nb
sp; DI Forde cleared his throat. This seemed to be the trigger that switched him into polis mode, and his previously avuncular tone changed to a much more business-like one.

  “We had the handover from CID this morning. I thought DCs Neish and Khaled could go over the report and look through the statements. Not that there’s much in there. I’ve got uniform out doing door-to-doors around the abduction scene, but it’s going to take a while.”

  Logan raised an eyebrow. “Lot of doors to knock?”

  “No, opposite problem. Very few, but they’re all a long way down dirt tracks. Almost certainly a waste of time, but you never know.”

  “Has anyone spoken to the parents again this morning?” asked Caitlyn.

  Ben shook his head. “We’ve got a liaison there with them, and a couple of bigger lads to keep the press from making a nuisance of themselves, but no, we’ve still to get around there.”

  “I’ll do that,” Logan said. “Unless any of you already have a relationship?”

  The others confirmed that none of them had spoken to the family.

  “Right. I’ll speak to them, then. Be good to get a look at them. I want a look at the crime scene first, though,” Logan said. “What about the stuff that arrived this morning?”

  Ben gave a nod to DC Khaled. “Hamza, could you…?”

  Hamza sprang into life, crossing quickly to a desk in the corner, where a number of exhibits sat wrapped in plastic evidence bags. He retrieved three, placed them in a small cardboard box, and carried them back to the group.

  Logan peered in as the box was placed on the desk beside him. “This is the hand-delivered stuff,” Hamza said. He motioned back to the desk. “CID took the cards and letters that arrived over the past couple of days, too. Nothing interesting, as far as we can tell.”

  “Right. Good,” said Logan, absent-mindedly. He was staring down at the contents of the box, fighting the rising urge to vomit.

  The bear was bad enough, with its faded grey fur and glassy eyes. It had been the first thing he’d seen, and the sight of it had stoked those initial fires of nausea.

  The photo was several magnitudes worse, of course. Connor Reid looked nothing like the previous victims, and yet exactly like them. He shared the same look of raw terror that the other boys had, and the staging of the photograph was similar enough to be more than coincidence.

  It was the envelope that tightened Logan’s chest and set his guts churning, though. The Gozer hadn’t been lying. It was identical—identical—to those that Petrie had sent. The second he’d clapped eyes on it through the plastic, Logan had been transported back almost fifteen years. Back to when he’d first joined the ongoing investigation. Back to when that bastard had been out there hunting wee boys.

  Back to Dylan Muir. Back to Lewis Briggs. Back to Matthew Dennison, and to three families whose lives had been chewed up and spat out.

  “You alright, boss?”

  Logan blinked at the sound of Ben Forde’s voice, whooshing back to the present. “Aye. Fine. Have forensics looked at these?”

  “Not yet,” Ben said. “We need to get them up the road to Inverness for that.”

  “Right. Aye, of course,” Logan said, irritating as news of the potential delay was. “I’ll take a look at them first, then one of the uniforms can horse them up there.”

  He stole another look into the box. “Do the press know about this yet?”

  “Not that we know of,” said Ben.

  “Thank Christ. We keep this to ourselves, alright? This does not get out into the wild until we say so. DS McQuarrie—”

  “Caitlyn’s fine, sir.”

  Logan gave a brief nod. “Get onto the liaison over at the house. Make sure the family understands the importance of keeping schtum about this. The vultures are circling out there, already. If this gets out, it’ll be a bloody zoo.”

  “Sir,” Caitlyn said, before reaching for her phone and heading for an empty desk in the corner.

  He looked very deliberately to DC Neish. “Where do I get a coffee around here?”

  Tyler responded with a downturned mouth and a little shrug. “Dunno, sir. First time here.”

  “Right, then,” said Logan, picking up the box. He nodded to the door. “In that case, let’s make that your first line of enquiry. Black. Two sugars. Oh!”

  Tyler hesitated halfway out of his seat.

  “And make it to go.”

  Chapter Eight

  Logan stood in a fine Highland drizzle, sipping lukewarm coffee through the narrow slot in a plastic lid and watching the SOC officers pack up their equipment. There had been a fresh surge of searching after the photo had arrived and the missing child case had been confirmed as an abduction, and Logan was hoping some new nugget of information might turn up.

  No such luck. The second search hadn’t turned up anything that wasn’t already picked up first time round. And that wasn’t much.

  “We got a footprint,” said Ben, gesturing off the path and into the woods. “Headed that way. Size nine or ten.”

  “Male, then,” Logan mused.

  “Or a real brute of a lassie, aye,” Ben agreed.

  Logan sucked some more coffee through the plastic lid and cast his eye across their surroundings. There was a cordon of tape blocking the path ahead, and then another back where the path started, just on the other side of an open gate.

  The little parking area beyond the gate was probably busier than it had ever been, thanks to the platoon of polis vehicles currently crammed into it. Logan hadn’t been able to squeeze the Focus in, so had abandoned it with two wheels on a grassy verge, the other half clogging up the already too-narrow road.

  A few uniforms were scattered around, heads tucked into the shoulders of their high-vis vests, feet stamping to drive out the cold. DS McQuarrie was over talking to some of the SOC lot. She had a notebook open, but didn’t seem to have heard anything worth writing down as of yet.

  The path—a gravel track probably wide enough for a forestry vehicle, provided the driver had his wits about him—stretched out for a third of a mile or more in both directions, before reaching the gate on one side and a bend at the other. That was almost a mile of visibility.

  Off to one side of the path was a couple of acres of scrub, tree stumps, and not a whole lot else. Not a lot of hiding places, and none within easy reach.

  Logan walked through it in his head. “So, the dad goes into the trees after the dog. Our man is presumably waiting in the trees, grabs the boy, and heads back into the forest before the dad gets back.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Ben confirmed.

  “Dogs been in?”

  Ben nodded. “Tracked him headed northwest through the forest. There’s a little carpark—well, a bit of waste ground, really, but it gets used as a carpark. Trail goes dead there.”

  “Anyone see anything parked there?”

  Ben shook his head. “Sadly not. But an old boy at one of the cottages reckons he heard a motorbike roughly around the timeframe we’re looking at.”

  Logan tried to visualize this. “Struggling kid on a motorbike. How would that work?”

  “With difficulty,” said Ben. “We’re checking it out, but it’s worth noting that the fella who told us about it is ninety-three, has two hearing aids, and reckons he invented Roger the Dodger, so we’re not putting a lot of stock in it.”

  “Sounds sensible, but worth checking.”

  “I’m sure it won’t come as a surprise, but we have no CCTV.”

  “CCTV?” Logan looked around at the rugged Highland landscape. “I’d imagine colour TV is stretching it. What else do we have?”

  Ben consulted his notebook, flipped a page, then flipped back. “Right now? That’s about your lot. The Scene of Crime lot took a cast of the print, so we’re trying to find out what kind of shoe it is. Walking boot of some kind, they reckon, but then that’s pretty much par for the course up here.”

  “What about the trees?” Logan asked. “Have the forensics guys
searched the route the dogs followed?”

  “To an extent, aye.”

  “What do you mean ‘to an extent’?”

  Ben shrugged. “It’s a big forest. And CID organized a search the day the boy went missing. Public got involved and trampled right through it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Logan sighed. “So, for all we know the footprint belongs to one of them?”

  “No. That was spotted before the search. Dogs went through before anyone else went in,” Ben said. “We don’t know much, but we’re pretty sure on what we have.”

  Logan grunted begrudgingly. “That’s something.”

  A movement along the road leading to the gate caught his attention. A Sky News van drew to a halt behind Logan’s car, unable to get past. The driver gave a couple of short blasts on the horn.

  “Did he…?” Logan shifted his gaze from the van to Ben and back again. “Did he just toot at me?”

  “He did,” Ben confirmed. “Twice.”

  Logan jabbed a finger in the direction of the van. “Do me a favour. Get over there and get rid. I’d do it, but I’ll only end up strangling someone.”

  Ben was well aware of the DCI’s feelings on the media, and touched a finger to his forehead in salute. “No bother, boss,” he said. “Although…”

  “What?”

  “We should maybe think about giving them something. Throwing them a scrap to fight over while we crack on. A quote, maybe.”

  “A quote?” Logan ran his tongue across the front of his teeth, considering this. “How about, ‘Crawl in a hole and die, you parasitic bastards?’” he suggested. “What do you think? Reckon that’ll suffice?”

  Ben half-smiled. “I’ll maybe leave it for now.”

  “Aye, maybe do that,” Logan told him, then he teased another sip of coffee from the slot on the coffee cup lid as Ben hurried off to intercept the news van.

  The rain had abated slightly, the drizzle becoming something more akin to a damp mist that hung as tiny droplets in the air. If anything, it only served to make everything wetter, and Logan resigned himself to the fact that the chances of getting any new forensic evidence from the area were now practically non-existent.