A Litter of Bones

by J D Kirk

  “Seems a stretch,” said Ben.

  “It is. I’m not saying he did it, I’m saying we need to talk to him. Any time anything happens with the Petrie case, Henderson is right there, front and centre,” Logan said. “But not today. Today, right after one of our officers was attacked, he’s nowhere to be seen. I want to know why.”

  Caitlyn’s phone rang. She hurried back to her desk and picked up the receiver.

  “Detective Sergeant McQuarrie,” she said, then she tucked the handset between her ear and her shoulder, and started making notes.

  Tyler popped up from behind his screen. “Henderson’s driving a red Vauxhall Mokka, boss. 2014 plate. Putting a shout out for it now.”

  “Good,” Logan said, then, “Shite.”

  “Boss?” Tyler asked.

  “No, not you. I forgot I meant to talk to Tom Fisher and ask him about the cat story. Sinead, can you chase up the paper again? Find out where that woman lives.”

  Sinead nodded and picked up her phone.

  “We have anything back on the cat I brought in?” Logan asked.

  “Aye, didn’t you get the note?” Ben answered. “Moira got the local vet to take a look. Injuries were inflicted deliberately, he reckons.”

  Logan had been expecting that answer, but hoping for a different one. He groaned, rubbing his temples to nurse the headache that was building behind his eyes.

  “God. OK. Right.”

  “What’s with the cat anyway, boss?” asked Tyler.

  “Petrie used to… I don’t know. Torture them, I suppose,” Logan explained. “Cut them open, break their bones. The usual mental bastard script.”

  He leaned on his desk, taking some of the weight off his feet. His eyes went to the battered cardboard folder he’d left there earlier, and his mind went back a decade or more.

  “When we initially tracked Petrie down, we… There was a cupboard in his flat, and it was…”

  Logan sucked in his bottom lip, then spat it out again. “I opened it, and there was just… death. Just all this death, that came tumbling out onto the carpet at my feet.”

  “Death?” Tyler looked around at the others. “I don’t follow.”

  “There was an old poem I heard once. Or, I don’t know, a song, maybe. It had this line in it. ‘A litter of bones strewed the mighty bestiarium.’ That’s what popped into my head when I opened the door. Can’t even remember where I heard it.”

  He stared blankly at the folder on the table, as if seeing through it.

  “A litter of bones. Cats. Dogs.”

  He swallowed.

  “Children.”

  Logan gave himself a shake and straightened. “We thought they were all in there. The boys, I mean. I thought we’d found them all. If I’d known we hadn’t, I wouldn’t…”

  He course-corrected.

  “I would have made more of an effort to catch Petrie. Before he fell.”

  He contemplated the folder for a while longer, then snatched it up with both hands. “Let’s get this stuff up on the board,” he said, flicking the folder open. “Henderson’s our first priority, but let’s see if we can make some connections. If it was him, how did he get that teddy bear? How did he find out about the house and the text on the envelope? Was it Petrie? If so, we need to know when they spoke, what was said, and what else Henderson knows.”

  There was a clack as DS McQuarrie put down the phone. “Report from the crime scene, sir. The bones in the cupboard at the house?”

  “Yes?” said Logan, then he held his breath.

  “Not Dylan Muir’s. Not even human, sir. Sheep.”

  Logan’s heart plunged down into his stomach. “Sheep?”

  “Aye, sir. A lot of the bones had been broken. Deliberately, they think.”

  “Damn it!” Logan kicked his chair, sending it clattering across the floor. “I thought we’d found him. I thought we’d got him.”

  “It’s unfortunate, Jack, but not our priority,” Ben reminded him. “This isn’t that case, you said so yourself. Dylan might still be there, but for now we need to focus on Connor.”

  “Aye. Aye, you’re right,” Logan agreed. “What about the sketch artist? Any luck with the junkie, do we know?”

  “Not that I know of, but I can check,” said Ben, headed for the door.

  “Show Bamber a picture of Henderson. See if that jogs his memory.”

  “Good idea,” said Ben. “You’re no’ just a pretty face.”

  Caitlyn cleared her throat. “There’s something else, sir. Update on HOLMES. The DNA on the teddy? The one they couldn’t identify? They’ve got a match.”

  “Henderson?” Logan guessed.

  “No, sir,” Caitlyn replied. She looked at her screen again, checking the information for the fourth or fifth time.

  “It’s Dylan’s, sir. It’s Dylan Muir’s.”

  Logan staggered, like he’d been physically struck. The room spun. First one way, then the other, the walls blurring as his brain tried to process this new revelation.

  Tried, but failed.

  How could Dylan Muir’s genetic material be on Matthew Dennison’s teddy bear? The boys had been taken six years apart. There had been traces of Dylan’s DNA in Petrie’s flat, but not in the cupboard. Not on Matthew Dennison’s remains.

  He steadied himself against the Big Board, pulling himself together.

  There were dozens of ways the bear could’ve been cross-contaminated, he told himself. Hundreds. Maybe Petrie had stored it alongside something of Dylan’s. Kept it in his schoolbag, perhaps, which had never been recovered. Stuffed it in one of the boy’s shoes.

  There were explanations. Lots of explanations. Plausible explanations.

  And yet, the room was still spinning, Logan’s heart was still racing, and nausea was churning through his insides.

  He’d had a suspicion before. No, not a suspicion, a concern. A dread. A nagging fear that ate away at him some nights when he lay awake, and wormed its way into his nightmares while he slept. He had always dismissed it, pushed it away, beaten it down. It didn’t make sense. He refused to let it make sense.

  And yet, it did. Here, now, it was perhaps the only thing that did, and the realisation of that fact knocked the air from Logan’s lungs and threatened to bring him to his knees.

  Someone connected to the original case.

  Someone close to it.

  Closer, even, than himself.

  “The sketch artist,” Logan said, closing his eyes to block out the whirling, twirling walls. “Tell him to forget Bamber.”

  “Oh. Right. Want me to send him home?” Ben asked. He was standing over by the door, the update from Caitlyn having stopped him in his tracks.

  Logan shook his head. “Get him in here. I need him to try draw someone else.”

  “Who?” asked Ben.

  Reaching into the folder, Logan took out a photo of smiling, three-year-old Dylan Muir, his hand buried in a bag of Monster Munch. “Him. I want him to draw him,” he said.

  “But twenty years older.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The clock ticked, the hands simultaneously counting forwards and counting down. Logan tried not to look at it, to focus instead on the scratching of the pencil on the paper, the look of concentration on the artist’s face as he carried out his task.

  How long did Connor have left now? A few hours, at best. At worst, he’d been dead from the moment Hamza had discovered him in that house. Teams were sweeping the forest surrounding the building. Nothing, so far, but there was a lot of ground to cover.

  “How’s it going now?” Logan asked for the third or fourth time.

  The artist was an older guy. Thin, prissy, face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle. He sat with his legs crossed, his pad resting on a knee, half a dozen pencils tucked into the top pocket of his shirt.

  “Getting there,” he said.

  He’d been getting there for the past twenty minutes now. Logan had taken a look over his shoulder a couple of times, but
there hadn’t looked like it was going to be anywhere useful.

  Ben had warned him he was expecting too much. The guy wasn’t a trained sketch artist, he was a high school art teacher. Sure, he could probably pull together something half-decent from a detailed description, but asking him to accurately predict what a three-year-old would look like as an adult was a big leap from there.

  Logan looked around the Incident Room at the others. Aside from Ben, who was reading the Petrie case file at his desk, the others were all on phone calls. There had still been no sign of Ken Henderson or his car. Tyler was talking to the CCTV boys to see if it had been picked up heading back down the road to Glasgow, but cameras were few and far between along the route, and the line of enquiry was looking increasingly like another dead end.

  Sinead was still trying to get through to the newspaper. She’d found a couple of numbers for the publisher who owned the paper, and was working her way down from there until she reached the local editor.

  Caitlyn, meanwhile, was back onto the lab. Logan wanted to know if they could tell how recent the sample of Dylan Muir’s DNA had been, or take a stab at how old he’d been when he’d come into contact with the teddy bear.

  She was looking pretty animated, and her voice was stern, so Logan guessed he wasn’t going to get the information anytime soon.

  “Getting there. Almost done,” said the artist, correctly predicting Logan’s question before he could ask it.

  Across the room, Sinead stood up, the phone still cradled to her ear. “Thank you. No… That’s… Yes, thank you. You’ve been very helpful,” she said into the receiver, her eyes meeting Logan’s.

  “Well?” he asked, before she’d even had a chance to hang up. “You find out where the cat lady lives?”

  “No, sir,” Sinead said. “I spoke to the editor. Got her mobile from her boss. They’re not running any cat story this week.”

  “I don’t care when they’re going to run it, I just need to know where the woman lives.”

  “No, I mean, there is no cat story, sir. She knew nothing about it,” Sinead said. “And she doesn’t know anything about a Tom Fisher, either. He doesn’t work there. Never has.”

  “Ta-daa!”

  The artist turned the pad. Logan knew what was going to be on it before he saw it.

  “Shite!” Logan spat. He raced out of the room, skidded along the corridor, then launched himself through the reception area and out to the front of the station.

  Cameras flashed. Microphones were switched on. A sea of faces turned his way.

  “Where is he? Where’s Tom Fisher?” he demanded, suddenly wishing he’d brought the pad. “The kid at the press conference. The one who asked if Petrie might not be guilty. Where is he?”

  There was some confused murmuring. A few of the journalists glanced around, but most had started to fire questions at him.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Is he involved?”

  “Is Connor Reid still alive?”

  Logan growled. “Ah, get it up ye,” he told them, then he turned and thundered back inside.

  Moira buzzed him in without a word, the expression on his face making it very clear that he was not in the mood for a debate.

  He was barking orders before he’d even entered the office. “Ben, Caitlyn, coordinate from here. Find me everything you can on Tom Fisher, starting with his address. Tyler, Sinead, you’re with me.”

  Everyone jumped to it. The art teacher got up from his chair, looking uncertain.

  “Someone mentioned I’d get forty quid,” he said.

  Logan’s eyebrows practically knotted themselves together. “What?”

  “For the…” He gave a little wave of his sketchpad. “For the drawing.”

  “Oh, for fu—” Logan spat. “Ben, give him forty quid, then get rid of him. Keep that drawing.”

  Grumbling, DI Forde reached for his wallet. Grabbing his coat, Logan turned and stalked back towards the exit, beckoning Tyler and Sinead with one finger.

  “Right. You two, get a shifty on.”

  “Where we going, boss?” Tyler asked, falling into step behind the DCI.

  Logan raised his phone, the map screen open, a red flag standing proud in the centre.

  “There,” he said. “Wherever the hell that is, we’re going there.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Logan sat behind the wheel of his Ford Focus, watching Tyler pinch-zoom in on the map screen of the DCI’s phone. He had parked up just along the road from a little Co-op supermarket, across from a building that, Sinead had told him, had been one of the small local polis stations until the new soulless monstrosity had been built on the outskirts of town.

  “So, if the kid is right, he found the cat up there,” Tyler said, pointing ahead to where a row of green wheelie bins stood with their backs to the metal mesh of a fence.

  “That seem right?” Logan asked, glancing in his rear-view mirror.

  “That’s the way he’d walk to school, aye,” Sinead agreed. “I drop him at the road end here, and he walks the rest of the way himself.”

  “Right. Tyler, you’re with me. Sinead, wait here, up front. I’ll leave you the keys. If Fisher’s around, I don’t want him seeing the uniform and getting spooked.”

  “You mean Dylan, boss,” said Tyler.

  “I mean Fisher. He might not even know that he ever was Dylan Muir,” Logan said. “What do you remember from when you were three?”

  Tyler nodded. “Aye. Suppose you’re right.”

  “I’m always right, son,” Logan told him. He caught the look on the younger officer’s face, and thought of DC Khaled lying in the ICU at Glasgow Royal. “Well, most of the time. Now, come on. Let’s see what we can see. Sinead, up front, but don’t get out of the car in case he spots you.”

  “What am I meant to do, clamber through?”

  “Bingo,” Logan told her. “I’ll leave the keys in the ignition. We’ve got radios. If he shows face, call us. Don’t engage unless you absolutely have to.”

  He and DC Neish both opened their doors and stepped out onto the pavement. The sun had tucked in behind a growing bank of grey cloud, and Tyler shivered in the cool March breeze.

  “Chilly, innit?”

  Logan glanced both ways along the street, then stalked across it. “Hadn’t noticed.”

  There was nothing on the ground that corresponded with the flag Harris had placed on the map. Logan had been hoping for… something. A clump of fur and a blood trail, ideally, leading directly to someone’s front door, although he knew he wouldn’t get that lucky. He never got that lucky.

  So, he hadn’t been expecting to find anything that conclusive, but he’d hoped for something. A suggestion of something, even. A hint that they were on the right lines here, and that this wasn’t just a waste of what little time Connor Reid might have left.

  Tyler gagged as he poked around in the last of the bins. “Fucking hell,” he grimaced. “Why do all bins smell like that? Doesn’t matter what they’ve had in them, they’ve all got that same smell.”

  “Aye,” Logan agreed, not really listening.

  The houses around were all two-storey terraced, with short paths leading to numbered doors. They were not dissimilar to Sinead’s house, or the Reids’ home. A little older, maybe, the Highland weather having tired the construction out a little more, but more or less the same.

  “Should we start knocking on doors, boss?” Tyler asked. “See if anyone’s seen him around?”

  “Not yet,” Logan said. “We’ll do another once up and down of the street, see if we can find where the cat was left. Or, if we’re lucky, where it crawled to. It hasn’t rained this morning, and it was bleeding pretty badly, so there should be… In fact…”

  He looked back down the street in the direction of the Focus. “Ask Sinead to give her brother a ring. Try to get him to pinpoint where he found it, or at least narrow it down. If there’s still nothing, then we’ll start the door knocking.”

>   “Right, boss,” Tyler said, setting off in the direction of the car.

  He’d only gone half a dozen steps when he stopped and looked down at the vehicle beside him. At first, Logan thought he was checking his reflection in the window, but then he stepped back, frowning.

  Logan saw it a moment later.

  “Red Vauxhall Mokka,” he said.

  “2014 plate,” Tyler added, checking out the front of the vehicle.

  “That’s Ken Henderson’s car,” Logan said. His voice was low. Gruff. “Come on,” he said, walking off.

  Tyler looked from the car to the house it was parked outside. “What?” he asked, then he hurried after the DCI.

  “Stop looking back at the house,” Logan warned him. “Once we’re around the corner, phone in to the station. Find out who owns that house. There’s plenty of parking along this street. Henderson could’ve parked anywhere, but he’s right outside that gate.”

  They took a right at the end of the block, turning into an alleyway that ran between one end terrace and the next.

  “Get us back-up. Tell them to stay out of sight, and no sirens. Last thing we need to do is spook him.”

  Logan stopped and took the radio from his inside pocket. Beside him, Tyler got dialling on his phone.

  “Sinead. You see the red Mokka parked along the street near where we were standing? Keep lookout on that house. Let me know if there’s movement, no matter how small.”

  “Will do, sir,” came the reply. “Is that Henderson’s car?”

  “Aye. It is. So, eyes peeled, constable,” he told her. “Shout if there’s anything.”

  Logan and Tyler both finished their conversations at the same time.

  “Caitlyn’s on it,” Tyler said. “DS McQuarrie, I mean.”

  He leaned out and looked along the front of the row of houses. “So… it’s Henderson, then?” he said. “Not Dylan Muir, or Tom Fisher, or whatever we’re calling him.”