Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae)

by Stuart MacBride

  Logan hadn’t recognized the name, but he knew the face: it was Roadkill.

  They sat on a makeshift bench just inside steading number five. Mr Bernard Duncan Philips, AKA Roadkill, had made something like a home in here. A large bundle of blankets, old coats and plastic sacks were piled in the corner, obviously serving as a bed. There was a rough crucifix on the wall above the nest, a half-naked Action Man taking the place of Christ on the home-made cross.

  A mound of empty tin cans and egg cartons sat next to the bed, along with a small Calor Gas cooker. It was one of the little ones Logan’s father had taken with them on every summer caravan holiday to Lossiemouth. Right now it was hissing away to itself, boiling a kettle of water for tea.

  Roadkill – it was hard to think of him as Bernard – sat on a rickety wooden chair, poking away at a small fire. It was a two bar electric job, as dead as the animals in buildings one through three. But it seemed to give him pleasure. He jabbed at it with an elaborate iron poker, humming a tune to himself that Logan couldn’t quite make out.

  The man from the council was surprisingly calm now that Roadkill was here. He laid out the situation in small, easy-to-understand words: the mounds of dead animals had to go.

  ‘I’m sure you understand, Bernard,’ he said, poking at his clipboard with a finger, ‘that you can’t keep dead animals here. There’s a considerable risk to human health. How would you feel if people started getting sick because of your dead animals?’

  Roadkill just shrugged and poked at the fire again. ‘Mother got sick,’ he said and Logan was struck by the lack of an accent. He’d always assumed that someone employed by the council to scrape dead animals off the road would sound a lot more ‘local’. Some of the people round here were almost unintelligible. But not Roadkill. It was clear that the man sitting on a creaking dining chair, jabbing away at a dead electric fire, had suffered some sort of classical education. ‘She got sick and she went away,’ Roadkill went on, looking up for the first time. ‘Now she’s with God.’ He was a good-looking man, under all the dirt and grime and beard. Proud nose, intelligent slate-grey eyes, weather-reddened cheeks. Give him a bath and a visit to the barber’s and he wouldn’t look out of place at the Royal Northern Club, where the city’s elite held court over expensive five-course lunches.

  ‘I know, Bernard, I know.’ The man from the council smiled reassuringly. ‘We’re going to send a crew in tomorrow to start clearing out the buildings. OK?’

  Roadkill dropped the poker. It hit the concrete floor with a clatter that reverberated off the bare stone walls. ‘They’re my things,’ he said, his face working itself up to tears. ‘You can’t take away my things! They’re mine.’

  ‘They have to be disposed of, Bernard. We have to make sure you’re safe, don’t we?’

  ‘But they’re mine. . .’

  The man from the council stood, motioning for Logan and Constable Steve to do the same. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, I really am. The team will be here at half past eight on the dot. You can help them if you like.’

  ‘My things.’

  ‘Bernard? Would you like to help them?’

  ‘My special dead things. . .’

  They drove back into town with the windows down, trying to get rid of the smell of Bernard Duncan Philips’s farm. It clung to their clothes and their hair, rancid and foul. It didn’t matter that the drizzle had given way to heavier rain, seeping in through the open windows: getting wet was a small price to pay.

  ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him,’ said the man from the council as they worked their way along Holburn Street, making for the council’s main headquarters at St Nicholas House. ‘But he used to be a really bright lad. Degree in medieval history from St Andrews University. Or so I’m told.’

  Logan nodded. He’d suspected as much. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Schizophrenic.’ The man shrugged. ‘He’s on medication.’

  ‘Care in the community?’ asked Logan.

  ‘Oh he’s perfectly safe,’ said the man from the council, but Logan could hear the tremor in his voice. That was why he’d been so insistent on a police escort. Care in the community or not, he was scared of Roadkill. ‘And he does a good job, he really does.’

  ‘Scraping up dead animals.’

  ‘Well, we can’t just leave them to rot at the side of the road, can we? I mean it’s not too bad with rabbits and hedgehogs, the cars sort of smush them into paste and the crows and things take care of what’s left. But cats and dogs and things. . . You know. . . People complain if they have to drive past a rotting labrador every morning on the way to work.’ He paused as a bus pulled out in front of them. ‘I don’t know what we’d do without Bernard. Before he was released into the community we couldn’t get anyone to do it for love nor money.’

  Now he actually stopped to think about it, it had been a long time since Logan had seen a dead animal on an Aberdeen street.

  The man from the council dropped them off outside Force HQ, thanking them for their help and apologizing for the smell before driving off into the rain.

  Logan and PC Steve sprinted for the main door, their feet sending up fountains of water with every step. They were both soaked by the time they pushed through into reception.

  The pointy-faced desk sergeant looked up as they squelched their way across the Grampian Police Crest set into the lino: a thistle topped with a crown, above the words ‘SEMPER VIGILO’.

  ‘DS McRae?’ he said, stretching himself out of his chair like a curious parrot.

  ‘Yes?’ Logan was waiting for some sort of ‘Lazarus’ comment. Those bastards Big Gary and Eric must have told the whole bloody station about it.

  ‘DI Insch says you’re to go straight to the incident room.’

  Logan took a look down at his soaking trousers and wringing suit. He was desperate to climb into a shower and a dry set of clothes. ‘Can it not wait fifteen, twenty minutes?’ he asked.

  The sergeant shook his head. ‘Nope. The DI was very specific. Soon as you got back: straight to the incident room.’

  While PC Steve went off to get dry, Logan grumbled his way through the building to the lifts, mashing the button with an angry finger. Up on the third floor he stomped his way down the corridor. The walls were already punctuated with Christmas cards. They were pinned to the corkboards, in between ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?’ and ‘DOMESTIC ABUSE. . . THERE’S NO EXCUSE!’ and all the other wanted and information posters the media office put out. Tiny bursts of cheer among all the misery and suffering.

  The incident room was crowded and bustling. PCs, WPCs and DCs charged about clutching sheets of paper, or answered the constantly bleating phones. And in the middle of it all Detective Inspector Insch sat on the edge of a desk, peering over someone’s shoulder as they scribbled down notes with a phone clamped between their shoulder and their ear.

  Something had happened.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Logan after he’d squelched his way through the crowd.

  The inspector held up a hand for silence, leaning closer so he could read what was being written. Finally he sighed with disappointment and turned his attention to Logan. An eyebrow shot up as he saw the state of his detective sergeant. ‘Go for a swim did you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Logan, feeling water trickling down the back of his neck into his already sodden collar. ‘It’s raining.’

  Insch shrugged. ‘That’s Aberdeen for you. Could you not have dried yourself off before coming in here, dripping all over my lovely clean incident room?’

  Logan closed his eyes and tried not to rise to the bait. ‘The desk sergeant said it was urgent, sir.’

  ‘We’ve lost another kid.’

  The car was steaming up too quickly for the blowers to deal with. Logan had cranked them, and the heating, up to full pelt, but the outside world remained obscured behind misty windows. DI Insch sat in the passenger seat, chewing away thoughtfully as Logan squinted through the windscreen at t
he dark, rain-soaked streets, trying to get them through town to Hazlehead and the place where the latest child had gone missing.

  ‘You know,’ said Insch, ‘since you came back to work we’ve had two abductions, found a dead girl, a dead boy and dragged a corpse with no knees out the harbour. All in the space of three days. That’s a record for Aberdeen.’ He poked about in his packet of fizzy, jelly shapes, coming out with what looked like an amoeba. ‘I’m beginning to think you’re some sort of jinx.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘It’s playing merry hell with my crime statistics,’ said Insch. ‘Nearly every bloody officer I’ve got is either out there searching for missing children or trying to find out who the little girl in the bin-bag was. How am I supposed to get the burglaries and the frauds and the indecent exposures sorted out if I don’t have any bloody uniforms left?’ He sighed and offered the bag to Logan.

  ‘No thank you, sir.’

  ‘I tell you, rank has fewer privileges than you think.’

  Logan looked across at the inspector. Insch was not the sort of officer who normally indulged in self-pity. At least not as far as Logan knew. ‘Like supervising uniforms, you mean?’ he asked.

  At this a smile broke over DI Insch’s large features. ‘Did you like Roadkill’s little collection?’

  So he had known all about the steadings full of rotting animal corpses. He had done it on purpose.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve been sick so many times in my life before.’

  ‘How was Constable Jacobs?’

  Logan was about to ask who Constable Jacobs was, when he realized the inspector was talking about PC Steve: the naked drunkard. ‘I don’t think he’ll forget this morning in a hurry.’

  Insch nodded. ‘Good.’

  Logan thought the large man was going to say something more, but Insch just stuffed another sweetie in his mouth and smiled evilly to himself.

  Hazlehead was right on the edge of city, just a stone’s throw from the countryside proper. On the other side of Hazlehead Academy only the crematorium stood between civilization and the rolling fields. The Academy had a reputation for drugs and violent pupils, but it wasn’t a patch on places like Powis and Sandilands, so things could have been worse.

  Logan pulled the car up in front of one of the tower blocks near the main road. It wasn’t as big as the ones in town, being a mere seven storeys, and was surrounded by mature, cadaverous trees. The leaves had come off late this year, coating the ground in slimy black clots that clogged the drains and made them overflow.

  ‘You got an umbrella?’ asked the inspector, taking a good long look at the horrible weather.

  Logan admitted that he had, in the boot, so Insch made him get out of the car and fetch it, not stepping out into the downpour until Logan had the brolly open and was standing right next to the car door.

  ‘Now that’s what I call service,’ said Insch with a grin. ‘Come on then, let’s go see the family.’

  Mr and Mrs Lumley had a corner apartment near the top of the tower block. To Logan’s surprise the lifts didn’t reek of piss, nor were they scrawled all over with badly-spelled graffiti. The lift doors opened onto a well-lit corridor and halfway down they found a uniform rummaging about in his nose.

  ‘Sir!’ he said, snapping upright and abandoning his excavations as soon as he saw the inspector.

  ‘How long you been here?’ asked Insch, sneaking a peek over the PC’s shoulder at the Lumley home.

  ‘Twenty minutes, sir.’ There was a tiny stationhouse less than two hundred yards from the tower blocks. Little more than a couple of rooms really, but it did the job.

  ‘You got someone going door-to-door?’

  The PC nodded. ‘Two PCs and a WPC, sir. The area car’s off broadcasting a description.’

  ‘When did he go missing?’

  The constable dragged a notebook out of his pocket, flicking it open at the right page. ‘The mother called at ten-thirteen. The child had been playing outside—’

  Logan was shocked. ‘In this weather?’

  ‘Mother says he likes the rain. Dresses up like Paddington Bear.’

  ‘Aye, well. . .’ said Insch, stuffing his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Takes all sorts. Friends?’

  ‘All at school.’

  ‘I’m glad someone is. Have you checked with the school, just in case our little friend has decided to go learn something?’

  The PC nodded. ‘We called them straight after the friends. They’ve not seen him for almost a week and a half.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Insch with a sigh. ‘Right, come on then, out the way. We’d better see the parents.’

  Inside, the flat was all done up in bright colours, just like the house at Kingswells, where David Reid used to live before he was taken, strangled, abused and mutilated. There were pictures on the walls, like the Erskine’s house in Torry, but the kid was a scruffy-looking boy of about five, with a mop of red hair and a face full of freckles.

  ‘That was taken two months ago, at his birthday party.’

  Logan turned his attention from the wall to the woman standing in the lounge doorway. She was quite simply stunning: long, curly red hair hanging loose on her shoulders, a small upturned nose and wide green eyes. She’d been crying. Logan did his best not to stare at her considerable bosom as she showed them into the living room.

  ‘Have you found him?’ This from a tattered-looking man in blue overalls and socks.

  ‘Give them time, Jim, they’ve only just got here,’ said the woman, patting him on the arm.

  ‘Are you the father?’ asked Insch, perching himself on the edge of a bright blue sofa.

  ‘Stepfather,’ said the man, sitting back down again. ‘His father was a bastard—’

  ‘Jim!’

  ‘Sorry. His dad and me don’t get on.’

  Logan started a slow inspection of the cheerful room, making a show of examining the photos and the ornaments, all the time watching Jim the stepfather. It wouldn’t be the first time a stepson had fallen foul of mum’s new husband. Some people took to their partner’s kids as if they were their own, others looked at them as a constant reminder that they weren’t first. That someone else had shagged the one they loved. Jealousy was a terrible thing. Especially when vented on a five-year-old child.

  OK, every photo on the wall showed the three of them looking as if they were having a great time, but people didn’t tend to put up pictures of the bruises, cigarette burns and broken bones in the living room.

  Logan was particularly taken with a scene on a beach somewhere hot, in which everyone was in their swimming gear, grinning at the camera. The mother’s figure was breathtaking, especially in a bottle-green bikini. Even with the scar where she must have had a Caesarean section.

  ‘Corfu,’ said Mrs Lumley. ‘Jim takes us away somewhere nice every year. Last year it was Corfu, this year it was Malta. Next year we’re taking Peter to Florida to see Mickey Mouse. . .’ She bit her bottom lip. ‘Peter loves Mickey Mouse . . . he. . . Oh God, please find him!’ And with that she dissolved into her husband’s arms.

  Insch cast Logan a meaningful glance. Logan nodded and said, ‘Why don’t I make us all a nice cup of tea? Mr Lumley, can you show me where the things are?’

  Half an hour later Logan and Inspector Insch were standing at the bottom of the tower block’s stairwell, looking out at the driving rain.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Insch, ferreting out his bag of fizzy sweeties.

  ‘The stepfather?’

  Insch nodded.

  ‘He seems genuinely fond of the kid. You should have heard him banging on about how Peter’s going to play for the Dons when he grows up. I don’t see him as the wicked stepdad.’

  The inspector nodded again. While Logan had been making the tea and questioning the dad, Insch had been gently pumping the mother for information.

  ‘Me neither. The kid’s not had any history of accidents, or mysteri
ous illnesses, or trips to the doctor.’

  ‘How come he wasn’t in school today?’ asked Logan, helping himself to one of Insch’s sweets.

  ‘Bullying. Some big fat kid’s been beating the crap out of him ’cos he’s ginger. Mother’s keeping him off until the school do something about it. She’s not told the stepfather though. She thinks he’d go nuts if he knew someone was picking on Peter.’

  Insch stuffed a fizzy thing into his mouth and sighed. ‘Two kids missing in two days,’ he said, not bothering to disguise the sadness in his voice. ‘Christ, I hope he’s just run away. I really don’t want to see another dead kid in the morgue.’ Insch sighed again, his large frame deflating slightly.

  ‘We’ll find them,’ said Logan with a conviction he didn’t feel.

  ‘Aye, we’ll find them.’ The inspector stepped out into the rain, without waiting for Logan to open the brolly. ‘We’ll find them, but they’ll be dead.’

  12

  Logan and Insch drove back to Force Headquarters in silence. The sky had darkened overhead, storm clouds spreading from one horizon to the other, blotting out the daylight, turning the city dark at two in the afternoon. As they drove the streetlights flickered on, their yellow light making the day seem even darker.

  Insch was right of course: they wouldn’t find the missing children alive. Not if it was the same man who’d snatched them. According to Isobel the sexual abuse had all happened post mortem.

  Logan slid the car across Anderson Drive on autopilot.

  At least Peter Lumley had lived a bit first. Poor bloody Richard Erskine had nothing but an overprotective mother. Somehow Logan couldn’t see her taking Richard to Corfu and Malta and Florida. Far too dangerous for her little darling. Peter was lucky he had a nice stepdad to take care of him. . .

  ‘You been seen by the Spanish Inquisition yet?’ asked Insch as Logan negotiated the roundabout at the end of Queen Street. A large statue of Queen Victoria sat in the middle on a huge granite plinth. Someone had stuck a traffic cone on her head.

  ‘Professional Standards? No, not yet.’ He still had that little treat to look forward to.