All That's Dead

by Stuart MacBride

  Turned some more sausages.

  Naomi and Jasmine screeched their way past again.

  ‘PEW! PEW! PEW!’

  ‘You two monsters: go wash your hands for dinner.’

  ‘DIE, SPACE FIEND!’

  And they were gone again.

  Typical.

  A voice behind him: ‘Sure you’ve got enough sausages? Think the supermarket might still have a couple left.’ Tara stepped out through the patio doors, carrying a bowl of salad and four plates. The cowboy boots made her even taller – a clean white T-shirt and spotless blue jeans rounding off the cowboy-who’s-never-been-near-a-horse-in-his-life look. Her wolf-blue eyes narrowed in the sunlight, making tiny wrinkles on her heart-shaped face. Her long mahogany hair glowing like— ‘Is there something wrong?’

  Logan blinked. ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Only you’re staring at me like I’ve got a bogey hanging out of my nose.’

  ‘Oh. Right. No.’ A smile. ‘The only bogies here are the octopussy kind.’

  She popped the salad and plates on the table as the kids battered past again.

  ‘PEW! PEW!’

  ‘You heard your dad: wash up, horrors!’

  They didn’t listen to her, either.

  Tara helped herself to a swig of his beer. ‘I swear to God, those kids take more after Steel than they do Susan. They’re like drunken wolverines with ADHD and no volume control.’

  Yup.

  He grabbed a pork-and-apple sausage with his tongs, and held it up. ‘You want yours fruity, spicy, or Cumberlandy?’

  She stepped up behind him and slipped her hands into the pockets of his apron. Gave him a very suggestive smile. ‘I do like a spicy sausage!’ And then her hands went a-wandering.

  ‘Arrgh!’ Logan danced away a couple of steps, clacking his tongs at her in self-defence. ‘Hands off the cook’s sausage, you pervert. This is a food preparation area!’

  She polished off his beer. ‘You hear about this missing constitutional scholar? Professor Watson?’

  ‘Wilson.’

  ‘Met him at an Aberdeen University do last year. I know we’re not supposed to talk ill of the dead, but by God that man was a dick.’

  Logan shifted some of the more cooked sausages off onto a plate and opened another packet of Cumberlands. ‘Was?’

  ‘Well, you know, what with him being dead and all.’

  The thick pink tubes sizzled as they hit the hot grill. ‘Don’t believe everything you read on social media. There’s no proof he’s dead, just a bunch of Alt-Nat trolls out flapping their gums.’

  ‘Alt-Nat, Brit-Nat, Unionistas, Independunces, Remoaners, Brexshiteers …’ She toasted him with the empty bottle. ‘Got to love civilised discourse in the modern age.’

  ‘Well, there’s always—’

  ‘PEW! PEW! PEW!’

  Naomi and Jasmine battered across the garden, once around the patio furniture, and disappeared into the house again. Squealing and screaming and laughing.

  Logan sighed. ‘Think it’s too late to call animal control and have them taken away?’

  ‘Probably.’

  Cthulhu burst out through the patio doors, only slowing when she realised she was being watched and it might not look cool for a big stripy cat to be running away from an eleven-year-old girl and her three-and-a-bit-year-old sister. Cthulhu popped up onto the table and settled down for a wash, licking her big furry white paws, massive plumey tail held out at a jaunty angle.

  Tara ruffled the fur between Cthulhu’s ears, setting her purring. ‘You ever think about having a kid of your own?’

  ‘Are Tweedlehorror and Tweedlemonster not enough?’

  ‘Wanking into a cup, so your Lesbian Lothario boss could impregnate her wife with a turkey baster doesn’t count.’ Tara lowered her head, looking up at him through her eyelashes. ‘So … what would you think?’

  He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Stared at her. ‘You’re not … I mean, we … Are you …?’

  She put a hand on her lower stomach and smiled at him – wide eyed, sappy, and serene. ‘The seed of our love has taken root, Logan, and soon it will blossom for all the world to see!’

  Oh God.

  ‘I … We … But …’ Wait a minute. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  She grinned.

  ‘I nearly had a heart attack then! Are you trying to kill me a third time?’

  ‘You should’ve seen your face, it was an absolute—’

  ‘PEW! PEW! PEW!’ Naomi stampeded out of the patio doors again, shooting everyone with her laser gun. ‘PEW! PEW-PEW-PEW!’

  Tara grabbed her, sweeping her up, turning her upside down and dangling her head-first over a wooden planter full of herbs. ‘Have you washed your hands yet?’

  Naomi shrieked, giggled, and wriggled. ‘You’ll never take me alive, copper!’

  ‘Go wash your hands or there’s no sausages for you.’

  The little monster went limp. ‘It’s a fair cop.’

  ‘Darn tootin’ it is.’ Tara set her down, the right way up.

  Naomi smiled at her, all sweetness and light. Then scampered off. ‘Sayonara, suckers!’

  Tara shook her head. ‘Yeah … On second thoughts, let’s not have kids. There’s enough horror in the world already.’

  Oh God, oh God, oh God.

  Nicholas threw back his head and howled his pain into the gloom.

  Fire burned up and down his arms, pulsing in waves that matched the beat of his heart. Up and down and up and down. Searing. Scorching. Urgent.

  Tears spilled down his cheeks; his chest ached with sobbing, every breath tasting of bitter sweat and hot metal.

  He kicked out against the lid again, slamming his foot into it. The thing barely moved, held fast by the padlocked chain around the outside.

  A white plastic box, smeared with blood. His blood. It saturated the bandages that covered his arms from the elbow down, the damp surface busy with the fat greasy bodies of bluebottles.

  They glittered in the thin sliver of light that crept through the one-inch gap where the lid had been propped open. One inch: just enough so he wouldn’t suffocate. Because that would be quick, wouldn’t it? Too easy. Much better to make him endure a slow lingering hard death. Trapped in this hideous box. His small plastic coffin – too short to lie down flat in, not deep enough to sit up properly, the sides pressing in against his burning shoulders.

  A lifetime spent studying constitutional law and legislation. Lecturing. Educating. Trying to make people understand the truth about how democracy and civilisation really work. And this is how it will end.

  In a gloomy plastic box.

  Eaten alive by bluebottles and pain.

  Nicholas dragged in another foul breath and screamed.

  — this is why we can’t have nice things —

  9

  Something horrible and tinny blared out of the clock radio, followed by, ‘Goooooood Morning Aberdeeeeeeen! It’s six o’clock – I know, I know – and you’re listening to OMG it’s Early!, with me, Rachel Gray.’

  Urgh …

  Logan peeled his eyes open and blinked at the ceiling. The curtains were shut, but bright-white light glowed around the edges, as if the aliens had come to abduct everyone.

  ‘We’ve got a great show for you this sunny June morning. So wakey, wakey, hands off snakey, it’s time to rock!’

  ‘Noooo!’ Tara’s hand appeared from beneath the duvet and bashed him on the head. Voice a pained mumble, ‘Make it stop! Make it stop!’

  He fumbled with the controls. ‘Gnnn …’

  ‘Here’s the Foo Fighters with “Learning to Fly”, fight that Foo, guys, we can’t—’

  Silence.

  Tara grumbled, turned over – taking a good quantity of the duvet with her – and said something very unladylike.

  Logan lay there grimacing. Six in the morning. Who got up at six in the morning? Then he sighed, rolled out of bed, and slouched his way through to the shower.

  Sod this for
a game of soldiers …

  Light spilled in through the kitchen windows, making the tabletop glow as Cthulhu sat in the middle of it washing her bum.

  Logan stuck the slice of toast in his mouth, holding it there with his teeth as he ripped open a sachet of chicken-and-liver and schloched it into the bumwasher’s favourite bowl. It lay there, in a jellied slab, like some foul internal organ. He put it next to her biscuits and dipped into the fridge for the big Tupperware box of barbecued sausages and the smaller one of leftover fried onions. Chewed on his toast as he carried both out into the hall and dumped them by the front door.

  No chance of forgetting them there.

  Brushed toast crumbs off his black Police Scotland T-shirt.

  Yawned.

  Slumped.

  Mornings used to be a lot easier.

  He fastened his inspector’s epaulettes and stared up the stairs, listening for signs of life.

  Nothing. Because they were all still asleep. Because none of them needed to be at work by seven. Jammy buggers.

  ‘God, I miss being off on the sick …’

  He tucked his box o’sausages under one arm, balanced the onions on top and bumbled his way out the front door, into the searing bright morning. The day had barely started and it was already far too hot. Like living in a deep-fat fryer. God knew what it’d be like by lunchtime.

  He plipped the locks on his Audi and hurried down the steps.

  Froze.

  Sod.

  Hurried inside again and grabbed his peaked cap off its hook at the bottom of the stairs.

  Checked his watch: six thirty-seven.

  ‘Gah!’

  No doubt about it: whoever invented mornings was a sadist.

  It wasn’t easy, limping his way up the Bucksburn station stairs, a waxed-paper cup of scalding coffee in one hand, the big box of sausages – topped with the container of onions and his flat cap – in the other. But he hadn’t dropped anything yet.

  He was halfway up when Shona burst out of the PSD office, stomping her way down towards him, face flushed and creased, teeth bared. Deep wrinkles slashed their way across her forehead, barely concealed by a sweaty brown fringe. Mid-forties, going on homicidal.

  He tried his best cheery voice, ‘Happy birthday, Shona!’

  She didn’t stop. ‘Bloody printer hates me!’

  ‘Oh fine, fine. Thanks for asking. You?’

  Shona stomped past him, the muscles bulging in her clenched jaw as she forced the words out, ‘You lot better have chipped together and bought me a sledgehammer! Cos when I get back, that printer’s dead! DEAD!’

  He stayed where he was as she growled her way down to the bottom and away through the double doors.

  ‘Yup. Great to be back.’ Logan limped up to the top and pushed through into the main office.

  It wasn’t as busy as yesterday – most of the desks were unpersoned – but Shona’s was really easy to spot. Mylar balloons bobbed in the air above it, streamers hung in rainbow-coloured drapes all over the cubicle walls, a big banner with “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!” pinned to the wall.

  Subtle.

  Logan nodded to a couple of officers in the process of logging on to their computers as he made his way across to his desk. Or at least, it used to be his desk. Someone had colonised it with Lord of the Rings stuff – posters and film stills on every available vertical surface, an ‘Eye of Sauron’ mug, and a tableau of action figures Blu-Tacked in place on top of the monitor: Gandalf and Frodo facing off against Saruman, an Orc, and, for some unknowable reason, Postman Pat.

  He stared at the Tolkien shrine. ‘What happened to all my Gary Larsons?’

  Probably went in the bin the day after they signed him off on the sick. Insensitive bunch of bastards.

  Logan dumped his sausage collection on the desk, adjusted his seat, and powered up his crummy old police computer. Might as well do a bit of digging on—

  ‘Is Tufty!’

  He swivelled his office chair around and there was Tufty, hurrying across the office towards him: eyes wide and twitchy, bags underneath them, a laptop clasped to his chest and a tin of Red Bull in his other hand. Talking much faster than any normal person ought to.

  ‘Boss, Guv, Sarge! Sarge, Sarge, Sarge, Sarge …’

  OK.

  ‘I’ve been an inspector for two years, you half-baked spud. And shouldn’t you be off interviewing academics?’

  ‘Too early. Too early. They don’t start till nine and it’s only five to seven and I’ve been up all night and is that coffee?’ He squirrelled his way over to Logan’s desk and stood there, vibrating. A weird grin on his face as he stared at Logan’s latte.

  ‘How much Red Bull have you had?’

  ‘Been up all night working on the social media side of things, because I can do that in my spare time, right? Just cos I can’t do it in work time doesn’t mean I can’t do it when it’s home time, so I did it at home. Yes indeedy. Home, home, home, home, home.’ He put his laptop on top of Logan’s sausages and cracked open the Red Bull.

  ‘No, seriously, you need to stop drinking that stuff.’

  ‘But I has a success!’ The grin got even more manic. ‘There’s a dark web, lurking below the surface if you know where to look. I did run an algorithm on the first tweet about Professor Wilson and tracked the language usage across a selection of Alt-Nat accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Messageboards. FourChan, ThreeChan, TwoChan, OneChan, we have liftoff!’

  ‘Right.’ Logan took the tin of Red Bull from Tufty’s hand. ‘This is for your own good.’

  ‘But see, I did find the same person running multiple accounts!’

  ‘So you know who they are?’

  ‘Ah … Not yet. It’s always anonymous usernames and fakeity pseudonyms, and I don’t have enough resources to run through all the social media accounts that aren’t Alt-Naty so I can’t find linguistic markers in the outside real world cos that’ll take a lot of very big computers and all I’ve got’s a laptop and can I have my Red Bull back?’ Reaching for it.

  ‘Definitely not. You’re wired enough as it—’

  ‘Course if they’ve geotagged their posts I could use that to cross-reference their location with the nearest cell-towers and did you know you only need four tagged posts to identify an anonymous account with ninety-five percent accuracy?’

  ‘Great! So, get online and—’

  ‘You’d have to access the customer dataset of every mobile-phone company in the UK to do it, but you could maybe get a warrant …’ Tufty stuck his bottom lip out, showing off his teeth in some sort of weird bulldog impersonation. ‘Ooh! Or I could try hacking in and—’

  ‘No! No hacking things!’

  He sagged, going from bulldog to dewy-eyed puppy. ‘But Saaa-arge!’

  Logan stood and hooked a finger at him. ‘Follow me, Caffeine Boy.’ Marching across the open-plan office with Tufty scampering alongside – laptop clasped to his chest again.

  ‘Not Caffeine Boy. Caffeine Boy’s a sidekick’s name, I’m … SUPERTUFTY!’

  Everyone turned to watch as he did the pose in the middle of the room.

  ‘Fighting crime, one bad guy at a time!’ Shadowboxing, one-handed. ‘Biff! Pow! Kerrrunk!’

  Yeah, there was no way Tufty was ever making sergeant. The top brass had a strict no-weirdos policy. Mind you, Karl had made it all the way to Inspector, so maybe it was more of a guideline?

  Logan knocked on Karl’s door, not waiting for an answer before opening it and ushering Supertufty inside.

  Karl was perched on his mushroom again, wearing a pair of big magnifying spectacles that made him look like a character in a sci-fi film. ‘Well, well, who’s this invading my sanctuary at this early hour? Hmmmmm?’

  ‘Oooh …’ Tufty stared at the collected computer kit in its racks and boxes. ‘Cool!’

  Logan thumped a hand down on his shoulder. ‘Tufty, this is Inspector Montgomery. Karl, this is Constable Quirrel. He’s weird, but harmless, so you’ve got a lot in common.’


  A wave from Tufty. ‘Hello, Boss. Or do you like “Guv” better? We can stick with “Inspector”, if that works? Ooh, Ooh, or how about, “Maz Kanata”?’

  Karl peered at him over the top of his big glasses. ‘I have no idea who that is.’

  ‘It’s this really, really wise old character from Star Wars: The Force—’

  Logan hit him.

  ‘Ow!’

  Idiot.

  ‘Tufty’s been looking into the Professor Wilson social-media thing, and he’s found something, haven’t you, Tufty?’

  ‘I have, Tufty.’

  ‘Intriguing.’ Karl patted the worktop beside him. ‘Pull up a stool, kind Sir Tufty, and let us break bread. Well, we can share a Tunnock’s teacake, but symbolically it’s the same thing.’

  ‘Aye, aye, Inspector!’

  Logan shook his head. ‘Don’t let him have any more caffeine. And if you need to put him down for a nap, do it somewhere no one’s going to fall over him.’

  Tufty hopped up onto a spare stool and beamed at Karl. ‘Have you heard about using geotagged posts to identify anonymous accounts from mobile-phone-cell-tower records?’

  Light the geek touchpaper and stand well back.

  Logan reversed from the room. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ Closed the door. ‘God, imagine what would happen if they bred …’

  A shudder.

  Some things were too horrible to contemplate.

  Ah well, back to work.

  He’d nearly made it as far as his desk, when the main doors opened and someone backed in, arms full: Rennie, getting a bit on the chunky side, with a deep tan and bleached blond hair waxed into spiky curls.

  Rennie turned, slow and careful. A big box of doughnuts acted as a tray, heaped up with tinfoil parcels and greasy paper bags and two of those cardboard things designed for carrying six take-out coffees at one time.

  Logan nodded at the vast collection. ‘On a diet again?’

  ‘And I got you a Poseidon’s Surprise too, you ungrateful spudge.’

  What the hell was a Poseidon’s Surprise?

  Rennie winked at him. ‘How did you enjoy getting up at a proper time this morning? Bit of a strain after twelve months off?’