A Litter of Bones

by J D Kirk

  “Not a lot,” he said, stepping down. “But it doesn’t fill me with confidence.”

  He put a hand on Sinead’s shoulder. “You should go.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I’m telling you to, constable,” Logan said, his tone becoming officious. “You’ve done well. You show a lot of promise, but you should get home. Call it a night.”

  Sinead looked past him at the living room window, then up at the closed curtains above.

  “But… I want to help.”

  “And that’s to your credit.” He jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder. “But, in a minute, I’m going to hear a cry for help from within this house, giving me no choice but to break this door down and investigate. It wouldn’t be wise for you to be here when that happens.”

  Sinead chewed her bottom lip. Her eyes searched the house again. “What if we both heard it, sir?” she asked. “I just don’t think you should be going in there by yourself.”

  “I’m a big boy. And I’ve been in a lot worse places, believe me,” Logan told her. He smiled, not unkindly. “Go home, Sinead. That’s an order.”

  Sinead hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said. “But… can I make a suggestion?”

  Logan nodded. He watched as Sinead leaned past him, turned the handle, and pushed the door open. “It’s the Highlands,” she told him. “We don’t always lock our doors.”

  “Daft bastard,” Logan muttered, although it wasn’t clear if he was referring to himself or to Next Door Ed. “Thank you, Sinead,” he said, pulling on a thin smile.

  Reaching into his pocket, he produced a pair of thin blue rubber gloves, and began the laborious process of wrestling his oversized hands into them.

  “Now, piss off before you get us both into trouble.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The air in the kitchen was old and stale, flavoured with something damp that clawed up inside the nostrils and down the back of the throat.

  Logan eased the door closed behind him and listened for any sign of movement from elsewhere in the house.

  Nothing.

  There were no appliances in the kitchen, just the open voids and trailing wires where a washing machine and oven should’ve been. Water pooled from the end of a hose in one of the cavities, forming a puddle on the scuffed lino floor.

  Outside, the evening was drawing in, and the last of the sunlight had a fight on its hands to get through the blanket of cloud. The kitchen was washed in a gloomy half-darkness, but Logan could see just enough to know that there wasn’t a lot worth looking at.

  He quietened his breath and moved to the door leading out of the kitchen, the bottom of his coat brushing against his knees.

  The living room looked much like it had from the window. Camping chair. Plastic table. Stack of lager cans. They were empty, as he’d guessed, but there were a few unopened tins in a Spar bag under the table.

  The Pot Noodle was two-thirds eaten. Logan touched the side of the pot. Cold, he thought, although the gloves made it difficult to be sure.

  There was another window at the far end of the room that looked out onto the street at the front. Logan could see a couple of press vans out there, but the journos themselves were still assembled outside the Reids’ house, waiting in the rain for him to come striding down the path.

  They’d be disappointed.

  Keeping as far from the window as possible, Logan made for the room’s second door. It rubbed against the carpet as he eased it open, and he stopped a couple of times to listen for the sound of anyone moving around upstairs that would suggest someone had heard him.

  Silence.

  On the other side of the door was a small hall, barely larger than the inside of a hotel lift. The house’s front door was on Logan’s right, an internal door on his left, and then a staircase led up to the floor above.

  There was no furniture in the hall, either, just a worn-out old mat, a stack of letters on the floor that mostly looked like junk, and a little mirror fixed to the wall around Logan’s chest height.

  The door on the left led to a cupboard. A disposable waterproof jacket hung from a hook, and a couple of pairs of trainers had been left on the floor. Logan squatted and picked a couple of the shoes up. There were no size markings inside one of the pairs, but the other had a tag sewn into the inside of the tongue.

  Size ten.

  Setting the trainers down again, Logan returned to the hallway, and crept to the bottom of the narrow stairs. A bathroom door stood open at the top, the light through the dimpled window mottling the shadows on the staircase walls.

  Logan held his breath. Listened.

  A couple of cars passed outside. One of the uniforms ordered some over-eager press bastard to, ‘Keep back from the gate.’

  But, from inside the house, there was nothing.

  There were thirteen steps. Every single one of them creaked and groaned beneath the carpet as Logan made his way up, sounding out a fanfare to anyone lurking above.

  By the fourth step, Logan decided to abandon his attempts at stealth and just charge up the stairs as quickly as he could. He braced himself as he reached the top, fists clenching, ready for someone to come swinging at him from behind the bannister.

  No-one did. The cramped upstairs landing was as empty as the floor below.

  There were four doors, including the bathroom. Logan spent a second giving that room a cursory once-over. A similar damp smell to the one in the kitchen loitered around in there, too, thick and claggy in the DCI’s throat.

  Two of the other doors were open. The other had been pulled fully closed. Judging by position, it was the room with the closed curtains he’d seen from outside.

  He checked the other two first. Both bedrooms, he supposed, although they both lacked anything in the way of beds. They both lacked anything in the way of very much, in fact.

  One had a threadbare carpet, while the other had bare floorboards that had been badly painted in a ill-judged shade of lilac at some point in the dim and distant past. The décor in both was shabby and long past its best, and Logan got the sense that neither room had been in use for some time.

  More importantly than any of that, neither room was occupied, so no big bastards were likely to come rushing up behind him when he entered the other room.

  He stole a glance down the stairs, listened for a moment, then turned his attention to the fourth and final door.

  The floorboards upstairs were more solid than those on the staircase, and he was able to approach the door in relative silence. He waited outside it, breath held, ear pointed to the wood, ready for anything but prepared for nothing.

  There was no point doing all the announcement stuff. He wasn’t officially here. Instead, he pushed down the handle and simultaneously put his shoulder to the wood, throwing the door wide.

  The smell hit him almost immediately—the sour tang of sweat mixed with the sweeter notes of cannabis. The heavy curtains and lack of light from elsewhere made it hard to make out the details of anything, but there was a single mattress in the corner of the room, a dark lump curled up on top of it.

  Child-sized.

  Motionless.

  No. God, no.

  Not again.

  Logan flicked the light switch and a bare bulb sparked into life, pushing back the darkness. Logan saw the mattress properly, and the knot in his stomach slackened a little.

  A sleeping bag. Just a sleeping bag. That was all.

  He gave it a nudge with his foot.

  Empty.

  The rest of the room was a graveyard of crisp bags, pizza boxes, Irn Bru bottles, and other junk-food detritus. Logan carefully opened the lid of one of the cardboard pizza containers. There was half a slice left. Ham and pineapple.

  “Bloody savage,” he muttered, nostrils flaring in distaste.

  Closing the lid, he took out his phone and snapped a photo of the logo and phone number printed on the box.

  That done, he patted down the sleeping bag. Tucked in at the bott
om was a little wooden box containing half a packet of green Rizla, some torn-up strips of what looked like a cereal box, and a few crumbs of hash that’d struggle to choke a mouse.

  He replaced the box, then turned, still crouched, and took another look at the room. It was grim, no doubt about that, but there was nothing to suggest that Connor had been here. Which meant that Logan was officially breaking and entering without anything even vaguely resembling an excuse.

  Time to go.

  He began to stand, then hesitated. On a hunch, he slipped a hand beneath the mattress. Almost immediately, the side of his pinkie finger bumped against something solid.

  Raising the edge of the mattress, Logan found himself staring down at an old battered laptop.

  “Shite,” Logan spat, torn by the discovery.

  Two very different ‘next steps’ presented themselves to him. He spent a few moments considering the implications of each. Then, reluctantly, he lowered the edge of the mattress again, covering the laptop.

  He made for the door, took another look around the room, then switched the light off before stepping out onto the upstairs landing and pulling the door closed.

  Logan was at the top of the stairs when a thought that had been niggling at him for the past few minutes pushed its way forward.

  His eyes crept up to the ceiling, and to the hatch built into it.

  He was working on converting the loft.

  A tingling crept up the back of Logan’s neck. The thin rubber of his gloves creaked as he flexed his fingers in and out.

  And then, he stretched up and slid the snib aside. An exhalation of stale hair hit him as the hatch swung down, revealing a yawning chasm of blackness.

  There was a ladder attached to the hatch. Logan fiddled with the hook until the bottom half slid down to the floor at his feet.

  Reaching up, he took hold of one of the rungs and shook it, testing its sturdiness.

  And then, with his heart thudding in his chest, he began to climb.

  Chapter Twelve

  If Next Door Ed was converting the loft, it wasn’t immediately apparent what he was converting it into. Logan swept his phone’s torch across it, taking it all in.

  A few planks had been nailed across the exposed ceiling beams, forming a haphazard pathway leading to the wall that divided this attic space from the one next door.

  Or, what was left of the wall, at least. A hole had been knocked through it, the crumbling bricks stacked up on another clumsily floored area. The planks used for the flooring looked like the same ones in the Reids’ back garden. Presumably they had been nicked at some point.

  The rafters creaked ominously as Logan made his way across the makeshift floorboards. The hole in the wall wasn’t particularly big, but large enough for an adult to clamber through, provided dignity wasn’t high on their list of priorities.

  The loft on the other side of the wall was empty, aside from some thick rolls of insulation between the ceiling joists, and another couple of the same planks Logan was standing on. They had been laid across the insulation but weren’t nailed down.

  Logan snapped a couple of pictures of the hole, a few of the loft beyond, then did another sweep of the space around him. The wind whistled through gaps in the sloping roof. A percussion of rain played on the tiles overhead.

  The oval of torchlight tracked across the exposed beams, and probed the corners where the floor met the roof. Just like downstairs, there was nothing to actively suggest that Connor had been there.

  Still, even before venturing into the attic space, Logan had been keen to talk to Ed Walker as a matter of urgency. Now, after this, he was suspect number one.

  Technically, suspect number only, but Logan didn’t really want to dwell on that right now.

  After taking another few pictures, he clambered down the ladder, the rungs groaning in protest as he picked his way to the bottom.

  Once down, he manhandled the bottom part of the ladder back up into position, then closed the hatch and fastened the snib.

  He was halfway down the stairs when he stopped.

  Logan stood in the mottled darkness, chewing his bottom lip.

  “Bollocks,” he muttered.

  His eyes flitted upwards in the direction of the closed door.

  The journos hadn’t expected him to approach around the side of the house, and Logan was almost back at his car before they spotted him. They moved through the rain like a single organism—one that was generously endowed with limbs and heads, but distinctly lacking in moral integrity.

  “Detective Chief Inspector!”

  “What is the family saying?”

  “Do you know where Connor is?”

  Their voices were raised, shouting to be heard over the growing wind. Logan muttered something deeply uncomplimentary and fished his car keys from his pocket. The Focus chirped as he thumbed the button, its wing mirrors unfolding as if giving him a welcoming wave.

  “Is the boy alive?”

  “When will you be making an official statement?”

  “Do you have any leads yet?”

  Logan shot the approaching throng a glare. If looks could kill, this one would’ve taken out the whole front row, and probably left the rest of them fighting for their lives in the ICU.

  He had just hauled the driver’s door open when one voice in particular rose up above the others. One familiar, fork-scraping-on-a-plate voice that stirred some primal response deep in Logan’s gut.

  Ken Bloody Henderson.

  “Is it true there was a teddy and a photo, Jack?”

  Logan tried to rein in the look of shock he could feel spreading across his face, but only managed to temper it a little. He stood there, frozen, the car door held open.

  The rest of the journalists had fallen quiet. For a moment, it was just Logan and Henderson, eye to eye, the reporter holding his phone out, the microphone aimed at the DCI.

  “What?” Logan asked. His mind raced. “Where did you hear that?”

  Henderson shrugged nonchalantly. He said nothing, but there was a little smirk on his face that Logan would’ve dearly loved to wipe off. Ideally, with the sole of his shoe.

  “No comment,” Logan told him. He jumped into the car and slammed the door shut.

  He sat swearing below his breath for a moment, then glanced in the wing mirror and caught sight of Henderson and his gaggle of bastards hanging around behind the car. Grimacing, he fired up the engine and slipped a gloved hand inside his coat.

  He took out the Spar bag containing the laptop, placed it carefully on the passenger seat, and spent a few seconds considering the ramifications of it.

  The car’s automatic windscreen wipers kicked in, swishing a slick of rain from the glass and drawing Logan’s gaze away from the bag with the battered computer inside.

  With a final glance back at the houses, Logan crunched the car into first, pulled away from the kerb, and set off into the strengthening storm.

  Chapter Thirteen

  DI Ben Forde and the rest of the Major Investigations Team eyed Logan warily as he stormed into the Incident Room with a face like thunder.

  “It’s out,” Logan barked. “They know. About the bear. They know.”

  “Shite,” Ben groaned.

  “Aye. Shite. You can say that again.”

  Logan paced back and forth, exorcising the tension that had been steadily building during the drive over.

  “Who knows?” asked DC Neish. He had been pinning photographs of the abduction scene to a board on the wall that was already heavily decorated with other pictures and notes. A school photograph of Connor Reid smiled out at Logan, jarring disturbingly with a blown-up version of the image that had been delivered to the parents earlier that day.

  “The press. Who do you think?” Logan snapped. “Someone told them. Someone blabbed.”

  He pointed to the only female detective in the room and clicked his fingers. “DC… sorry.”

  “McQuarrie, sir,” Caitlyn replied.

  “Ke
n Henderson. He’s a journalist. Freelance, but writes for the Herald, I think. Bring him in. Put him in cuffs, if necessary. Hogtie the bastard, if you have to.”

  Caitlyn glanced at DI Forde, then back to Logan. “On what pretext, sir?”

  Logan stopped pacing. “On the pretext that I said so,” he snapped.

  “Jack,” Ben soothed. “Wherever it came from, it didn’t come from in here.”

  For a moment, it looked like Logan might dispute that, but then he sighed and shook his head. “Aye. No. I know,” he admitted, his tone losing some of its edge. “But there’s a leak, so let’s find out where.”

  “On it, boss,” said Caitlyn. “Ken Henderson, did you say?”

  Logan nodded. “Aye. He might refer to himself as ‘Kenderson,’ though, on account on him being a massive arsehole. Get him in, and let me know when he’s here.”

  Caitlyn confirmed, unhooked her jacket from a hook by the door, then hurried out, already drawing her phone from her pocket as she left.

  With the immediate drama over, Tyler went back to pinning up the crime scene photos. DC Khaled sat at a desk, rifling through a depressingly small bundle of paperwork, and dividing it into different piles.

  “Hamza, wasn’t it?” Logan asked.

  “Aye, sir,” Hamza said, looking up. He had a hopeful look on his face, like he might be about to be reassigned to do something more interesting.

  “Know anything about computers?”

  “A bit, aye. Why?”

  Logan fished the Spar bag from inside his coat and deposited it on top of the paperwork piles. “See what you can get from that laptop, will you?”

  Hamza reached for the bag.

  “Wear gloves,” Logan instructed. “It could be evidence.”

  “Shouldn’t it go to forensics?” Hamza asked.

  “Eventually, aye. But take a wee look first, eh? See if anything jumps out.”

  “Right, sir.”

  While DC Khaled went to fetch himself a pair of gloves, Logan rounded on Tyler. “Come back to that later. We need to put out a shout. Ed Walker. Lives next door to the Reids, right-hand side looking from the front. Don’t know the number. I think he might be our man. I went round, but there was no-one home.”