In the lounge, Mrs Erskine was weaving away on the couch, unable to sit still, or upright. A large cut-glass tumbler of clear spirit was clutched in her hands, a half-smoked fag between her lips. The bottle of vodka on the coffee table was well on its way.
Her friend, the next-door neighbour, the one who didn’t make tea for the police, was perched in an armchair, craning her long, wrinkly neck to see who the newcomer was. Her beady eyes sparkled as soon as she recognized him. Probably hoping that this was going to be bad news. Nothing like someone else’s suffering to make you feel good about yourself.
Logan plonked himself down on the couch next to Mrs Erskine. She looked around at him blearily, and an inch of fag ash tumbled down the front of her cardigan.
‘He’s dead isn’t he? My little Richard is dead?’ Her eyes were bloodshot from too much crying and too much vodka, her face creased and florid. She looked as if she’d aged ten years in the last ten hours.
The neighbour leaned forward eagerly, waiting for the moment of truth.
‘We don’t know that,’ said Logan. ‘I just need to ask you a couple more questions, OK?’
Mrs Erskine nodded and dragged in another lungful of nicotine and tar.
‘It’s about Richard’s father.’
She stiffened as if someone had run a thousand volts through her. ‘He hasn’t got a father!’
‘Bastard wouldn’t marry her,’ said the neighbour with obvious relish. This wasn’t as good as the kid being dead, but dragging up the painful past was a reasonable substitute. ‘Got her up the stick when she was just fifteen and then wouldn’t marry her. He was a shite!’
‘Yes.’ The unmarried Mrs Erskine waved the rapidly emptying glass of vodka in salute. ‘He was a shite!’
‘Course,’ the neighbour went on, her voice a theatrical whisper, ‘he still wants to see the child. Can you imagine that? Doesn’t want to make the kid legal, but he still wants to take him to Duthie Park and play bloody football!’ She leaned over and sloshed another huge shot of vodka into her friend’s glass. ‘There ought to be a bloody law.’
Logan’s head snapped up. ‘What do you mean, “he still wants to see the child”?’
‘I don’t let him anywhere near my little soldier.’ Miss Erskine raised the tumbler unsteadily to her lips and swallowed about half in one go. ‘Oh, he sends little presents and cards and letters, but I throw them all straight in the bin.’
‘You told us the father was dead.’
Miss Erskine looked at him, puzzled. ‘No I didn’t.’
‘Might as well be bloody dead. The amount of bloody good he is.’ The neighbour said with a smug flourish. And suddenly Logan got a much better picture of what had happened. WPC Watson had told him the father was dead because that’s what the rancid old bitch of a neighbour had told her.
‘I see,’ said Logan slowly, trying to keep his voice neutral. ‘And has the father been informed that Richard’s gone missing?’ It was the second time he’d asked that question in the space of an hour. He already knew the answer.
‘It’s none of his bloody business!’ shouted the neighbour, getting as much venom into her voice as she could. ‘He gave up all his bloody rights when he wouldn’t make his bloody child legal. Imagine leaving that poor boy to go through life as a bastard! Anyway, the little shit must know by now—’ she pointed at an open copy of the Sun lying on the carpet. The headline screamed: ‘PAEDOPHILE SICKO STRIKES AGAIN!’
Logan closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The bitter old battleaxe was getting on his nerves. ‘You need to tell me Richard’s father’s name, Mrs. . . Miss Erskine.’
‘I don’t see why!’ The neighbour leapt to her feet. Now she was playing the noble defender, protecting the poor pissed cow on the sofa. ‘It’s none of his bloody business what’s going on!’
Logan turned on her. ‘Sit down and shut up!’
She stood there, mouth agape. ‘You . . . you can’t talk to me like that!’
‘If you don’t sit down and button it, I’m going to have the nice constable here take you down to the station and charge you with giving a false statement. Understand?’
She sat down and buttoned it.
‘Miss Erskine: I need to know.’
Richard’s mother finished her drink and got unsteadily to her feet. She lurched once to the left and then staggered off in the opposite direction: to the sideboard, where she proceeded to rummage about in a low cupboard shelf, scattering bits of paper and small boxes over the floor.
‘Here!’ she said triumphantly, holding a deckle-edged cardboard folder with gold ribbons embossed on the side. Just the sort of thing they used to give you when you got your photograph taken at school. She almost threw it at Logan.
Inside was a boy, maybe a little over fourteen. He had a huge pair of eyebrows and a slight squint, but the resemblance to the missing five-year-old was unmistakable. In the corner of the picture, over the mottled blue-and-grey photographer’s background, were the words: ‘TO MY DARLING ELISABETH, I WILL LOVE YOU FOR ALL ETERNITY, DARREN XXX’ written in a child’s artificially neat handwriting. Pretty heady sentiments for someone just clearing puberty.
‘He was your childhood sweetheart?’ asked Logan, turning the brown photo-folder over in his hands. There was a golden sticker with the photographer’s name, address and telephone number and another, white paper, spelling out ‘DARREN CALDWELL: THIRD YEAR, FERRYHILL ACADEMY’.
‘He was a bastard!’ said the friend again, relishing every syllable.
‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘Last I heard he’d upped sticks and moved to Dundee of all places! Dundee!’ The friend stuck another fag in her mouth and lit it. She sucked air through it, making the tip glow fiery-red before hissing the smoke out of her nose. ‘Little bastard can’t wait to get away, can he? I mean here’s his kid, growing up without a father and he buggers off to Dundee first chance he gets!’ She took another deep drag. ‘Ought to be a bloody law.’
Logan didn’t point out that, since Darren Caldwell wasn’t allowed to see his son, it made no difference where he stayed. Instead he asked Miss Erskine if he could keep the photograph.
‘Burn it for all I care,’ was all she said.
Logan let himself out.
It was still chucking it down outside and the foosty-looking BMW was still parked where it had a good view of the front of the house. Keeping his head covered, Logan sprinted for the pool car. Cranking the heating up, he set the blowers on full and made his way back to Force Headquarters.
Outside the big concrete-and-glass building there was a knot of television cameras, most of them sporting a serious broadcast journalist looking seriously into the camera and making serious statements about the quality of Grampian Police. The WPC he’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding: Sandy the Snake had really whipped up a storm.
Logan tucked the CID car into the car park around the back, steering well clear of the reception area on his way to the incident room.
The room was a flurry of activity again. But this time the whirlwind was centred around a harassed-looking press officer who was standing, clutching a clipboard to her chest, trying to get details out of the four officers on duty while every phone in the place went off. As soon as she clapped eyes on Logan her face lit up. Here was someone to share the stress.
‘Sergeant—’ she started, but Logan held up a hand and grabbed one of the few silent phones.
‘Just a minute,’ he said, dialling the records office.
The phone was picked up almost immediately.
‘I need to get a vehicle check on one Darren Caldwell,’ he said, doing a quick bout of mental arithmetic. Darren had knocked up Miss Erskine when she was fifteen, plus nine months for gestation, plus five years for the kid’s age. Presuming they were in the same class when their ‘eternal love’ turned physical Darren had to be twenty-one – twenty-two by now. Give or take a few months. ‘He’s in his early twenties and allegedly
living in Dundee. . .’ He nodded as the officer on the other end of the phone recited the details back to him. ‘Yeah, that’s right. How quick can you get that for me? OK, OK, I’ll hold.’
The press officer was standing in front of him, looking as if someone had dropped a live herring down her pants. ‘The press are all over us!’ she wailed while Logan held on for his vehicle check. ‘That bloody Hissing Sandy Lawyer Bastard is calling us every shade of shite under the sun!’ Her face was florid, the beetroot tinge extending from her blonde fringe all the way down her neck like sunburn. ‘Do we have anything to tell them? Anything at all? Anything that makes us look like we’re getting somewhere?’
Logan put one hand over the mouthpiece and told her they were pursuing several lines of enquiry.
‘Don’t give me that!’ She almost exploded. ‘That’s the shite I give them when we haven’t got a bloody clue! I can’t tell them that!’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t just conjure arrests out of thin. . . Hello?’
The voice on the phone was back: ‘Aye, I’ve got fifteen Darren Caldwells in the north-east. Mind, only one of them lives in Dundee and he’s in his late thirties.’
Logan swore.
‘But I’ve got one Darren Caldwell, twenty-one, livin’ in Portlethen.’
‘Portlethen?’ It was a little town about five miles south of Aberdeen.
‘Aye. Drives a dark red Renault Clio. You want the registration number?’
Logan said he did, closed his eyes and thanked God something was starting to go his way. A witness had seen a child matching Richard Erskine’s description getting into the back of a dark red hatchback. He copied down the registration number and address, thanked the man on the other end of the phone and beamed at the agitated press officer.
‘What? What? What have you got?’ she demanded.
‘We’re hoping an arrest will be imminent.’
‘What arrest? Who are you arresting?’
But Logan was already gone.
14
The PC he’d grabbed from the locker room sat behind the wheel of the CID pool car, breaking the speed limit, heading south. Logan sat in the passenger seat, watching the dark countryside whip past the window. Another PC and a WPC sat in the back. Traffic was light at this time of night and it wasn’t long before they were drifting slowly past the address Logan had been given for Darren Caldwell.
It was a new-looking bungalow on the south side of Portlethen, part of a winding development of identical, new-looking bungalows. The front garden was little more than a few square feet of grass, bordered with wilted roses. Some limp red petals still clung to the flower heads: the rain had battered off the rest. They lay in a soggy heap at the base of the bushes, turning a sickly shade of brown in the streetlights.
Sitting in the small lock-block drive was a dark red Renault Clio.
Logan got the driver to park around the corner. ‘OK,’ he told the PCs, unbuckling his seatbelt, ‘we’re going to take this nice and easy. You two work your way round the back. Let me know when you’re in place and we’ll ring the doorbell. If he runs: you grab him.’ He turned to the WPC in the back, wincing as the movement pulled at the scars on his stomach. ‘When we get to the house I need you to keep out of sight. If Caldwell sees police on his doorstep he’s going to freak. I don’t want this turning into a siege. OK?’
Everyone nodded.
It was freezing cold as Logan climbed out of the car. The rain had changed from thick, heavy drops back into a fine, icy drizzle that leached all the warmth out of his hands and face by the time they reached the front door. The two PCs had disappeared around the back.
A couple of lights were on in the house, the sound of a television seeping out from the lounge. A toilet flushed and Logan reached for the doorbell.
The phone blared in Logan’s pocket. He cursed quietly and punched the pickup. ‘Logan.’
‘What’s going on?’ It was Insch.
‘Can I call you back, sir?’ he whispered.
‘No you bloody well can’t! I just got a call from HQ. They tell me you’ve commandeered three uniforms and are off arresting someone! What the hell is going on?’ There were some muffled noises from the earpiece and the sound of a band striking up. ‘Shite,’ said Insch. ‘I’m on. You better have a damn good explanation when I get off stage, Sergeant, or I’ll. . .’ A woman’s voice, terse and insistent, just too faint for Logan to make out the words, and then: ‘All right, all right. I’m coming.’ And then the line went dead.
The WPC stood on the doorstep looking at him with her eyebrows arched.
‘He’s about to go on stage,’ explained Logan, stuffing the phone back in his pocket. ‘Let’s get this over and done with. If we’re lucky we can meet him in the bar after the show with some good news for a change.’
He rang the bell.
A thin bout of male swearing drifted out of the bathroom window. At least they knew someone was home. Logan leaned on the bell again.
‘Hold on! Hold on, I’m coming!’
About a minute and a half later a shadow fell over the part-glazed front door and a key was rattled in the lock. The door swung open and a face popped into the gap.
‘Hello?’ it said.
‘Darren?’ asked Logan.
The face frowned, a pair of thick black eyebrows sinking down over eyes that didn’t quite look in the same direction. Darren Caldwell might be five and a bit years older than his school photograph, but he hadn’t changed that much. His jaw was a little wider and his hair looked styled, rather than cut by his mum, but it was definitely the same man.
‘Yes?’ said Darren, and Logan gave the door a sudden shove.
The young man staggered backwards, tripped over a little nest of tables and fell full length on the floor. Logan and the WPC stepped inside, closing the door behind them.
‘Tsk, tsk.’ Logan shook his head. ‘You should get a security chain fitted, Mr Caldwell. Makes it harder for people to come in uninvited. You never know who’s out there.’
The young man scrabbled to his feet, balling his fists. ‘Who are you?’
‘You have a lovely home, Mr Caldwell,’ said Logan, letting the WPC get between him and the possibility of physical violence. ‘You don’t mind if we take a look around?’
‘You can’t do this!’
‘Oh yes I can.’ Logan pulled the search warrant out and waved it in his face. ‘Now where shall we start?’
The house was a lot smaller on the inside than it looked. Two bedrooms, one with a double bed covered in a yellowy-grey crocheted blanket crammed into it, jars of moisturiser cluttering up the vanity unit; the other with a single bed up against one wall opposite a little computer desk. A barely-dressed young woman pouted from a poster above the bed. Very saucy. The bathroom contained the nastiest avocado-coloured suite Logan had seen in a long time and the kitchen was just big enough for all three of them to stand in, as long as they didn’t move about too much. The lounge was taken up by a widescreen television and a huge, lime-green sofa.
There was no sign of the missing five-year-old boy.
‘Where is he?’ asked Logan, poking about in the cupboards, pulling out tins of beans and soup and tuna.
Darren looked left and right, almost at the same time. ‘Where’s who?’ he said at last.
Logan sighed and slammed the cupboard doors.
‘You know bloody well “who”, Darren. Where’s Richard Erskine. Your son? What have you done with him?’
‘I’ve not done nothing to him. I’ve not seen him for months.’ He hung his head. ‘She won’t let me.’
‘You’ve been seen, Darren. People reported your car.’ Logan tried to peer out through the kitchen window, but all he could see was himself staring back, reflected in the glass.
‘I. . .’ Darren sniffed. ‘I used to drive round there. See if I could get a glimpse of him, you know, out playing or something? But she wouldn’t let him out, would she?
Wouldn’t let him be like the other kids.’
Logan flicked the light-switch off, plunging the kitchen into darkness. Without the light turning the window into a mirror he could see out into the back garden. The pair of policemen he’d dispatched to watch the back were there, shivering away in the cold drizzle. There was a shed in one corner.
Smiling he snapped the lights back on, making everyone squint.
‘What?’
‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Darren by the collar, ‘let’s go take a look in the shed.’
But Richard Erskine wasn’t in there. Just a Flymo, a couple of trowels, a bag of fertilizer and a pair of secateurs.
‘Arse.’
They stood in the lounge, drinking piss-poor tea. The room was crowded with two soggy PCs, the WPC, Darren Caldwell and Logan. The man of the house sat on the sofa, looking more and more unhappy with every minute that passed.
‘Where is he?’ asked Logan again. ‘You’re going to have to tell us sooner or later. Might as well be now.’
Darren scowled at them. ‘I haven’t seen him. I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘OK then,’ said Logan, perching on the arm of the lime-green settee, ‘where were you yesterday morning at ten a.m.?’
Darren sighed theatrically. ‘I was at work!’
‘And you can prove this, can you?’
A nasty grin burst into life on Darren’s face. ‘Fuckin’ right I can. Here—’ he snatched the phone off the low coffee table and thrust it at Logan, before dragging a copy of the Yellow Pages out from beneath a pile of Hello! magazines. ‘Broadstane Garage,’ he said, pulling the thick, yellow directory open and flicking through it with angry fingers. ‘Call them. Go on: speak to Ewan. He’s my boss. Ask him where I was. Go on.’
As he took the phone and the Yellow Pages, Logan had a nasty thought: what if Darren was telling the truth?
Broadstane Garage had a display ad: something cheesy with a smiling spanner and a happy nut and bolt. The advert said ‘OPEN 24 HOURS’ so Logan dialled the number. The ringing tone sounded in his ear, over and over and over. He was just about to hang up when a gruff voice shouted: ‘Broadstane Garage!’ in his ear.
Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae) Page 14