Shatter the Bones

by Stuart MacBride

  The door yanked open and there he was: Darren McInnes, fists and jaw clenched, lips flecked with spittle, lank yellow-grey hair flying about his head. ‘Bugger off out of it!’ His breath stank like an ashtray.

  He must have had the television and radio turned up full volume, because the noise was almost deafening, a TV advert for toothpaste fighting against Jenny and Alison’s version of Wind Beneath My Wings.

  Strange – they hadn’t heard it through the closed door… Logan held up his warrant card. ‘Remember me, Mr McInnes?’

  McInnes took a step back, eyes narrowed, goatee beard jutting out. ‘I told you: I’ve never even met Alison and Jenny McGregor.’

  ‘That’s not why we’re here.’

  DC Leggett waved. ‘Fit like the day, Darren: keepin’ well?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  The constable stepped over the threshold into the hallway, forcing McInnes to back up again. ‘You’ll no’ mind if we come in for a fly cup, eh? Thirsty work keeping tabs on registered sex offenders.’

  ‘On the scrounge, are you? Well you can bugger off. I’m not running a soup kitchen.’

  Leggett backed him up another couple of paces, making enough room for Logan to step inside and close the front door. The hallway was crowded with stacks of dusty cardboard boxes, piled up between the doors – high enough to brush the ceiling.

  ‘Now, now, Darren, you’re no’ refusing to cooperate with a supervising authority, are you?’

  ‘You’ve got no business barging in here. This is my home. I’ve got rights.’

  ‘Aye.’ Another couple of steps and they were in the kitchen. A portable radio sat on top of a stained fridge, blaring out the instrumental bit of the song. Leggett flipped the switch, killing the racket. Now it was just the television, shouting to itself in the lounge. ‘And right now you have the right to stick the kettle on and produce a packet of chocolate biscuits.’ He leant back against the working surface as McInnes stuck a dirty kettle under the cold tap, then slammed the thing down on the worktop and plugged it in. ‘Not supposed to be having a visit till next week…’

  Logan stared at him, keeping his face neutral. ‘We know.’

  McInnes froze for a moment, then opened a cupboard and pulled out three chipped mugs. ‘Don’t play clever buggers with me, Sergeant. I’m not some moron you can intimidate and manipulate. I haven’t done anything wrong, and you know it.’ He dropped a teabag in each mug. ‘You’re fishing.’

  ‘Trisha Brown.’

  There wasn’t even a pause. ‘Never heard of her.’

  ‘Really? Because we’ve got a witness who saw you assault and abduct her.’

  ‘They’re lying.’ The kettle gave a low growl. ‘When we take your car down to the station, how much do you want to bet it’s full of her DNA, hair, fibres, blood?’

  The theme tune to Friends blared out of the lounge. McInnes cleared his throat. ‘So what if there is? She’s a prostitute, isn’t she? Maybe I picked her up?’

  ‘Thought you said you’d never heard of her?’

  ‘I don’t have any milk.’

  Leggett shook his head. ‘Darren, you silly sod. She’s no’ even your type.’

  ‘Maybe I like to pick up prostitutes now and then. I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Would you rather I was hanging around the school gates like some dirty-mac-wearing pervert?’

  ‘Darren…’

  Logan turned and headed back out into the hall. The TV and radio couldn’t have been on earlier – the only noise coming from inside the house had been the doorbell. That meant McInnes had switched them on and turned the volume up full before he answered the door.

  He was trying to hide something…

  In the lounge, on the telly, a collection of tossers were dancing about in a fountain. Logan picked up the remote and thumbed the standby button.

  Silence.

  The room was littered with newspapers and magazines, a handful of tatty dog-eared paperbacks, the wallpaper and roof stained a mottled orangey-brown. There was a tin of tobacco balanced on the arm of the sagging sofa, empty pouches of Golden Virginia lying on the carpet like fallen leaves.

  Logan closed his eyes, listening.

  He could hear them in the kitchen: ‘If I want to use prostitutes it’s my business, nobody else’s.’

  ‘You swore blind last week you’d no’ had a shag for three years!’

  ‘Why should I indulge your prurient interest?’

  A click and the radio burst into deafening life again. ‘…to say that everyone at Scotia Lift are rooting for Alison and Jenny. We’ve raised two thousand pounds for the fund!’

  Logan stuck his head back into the kitchen. ‘Turn that bloody radio off.’

  ‘This is my home, you can’t come in here and—’

  ‘Where is she? She’s here, isn’t she?’

  ‘And it’s the weather and traffi c coming up, right after Bohemian Rhapsody…’

  ‘I want you both to leave. You’ve no right—’

  Logan tried the first door off the hallway: a bathroom, the pale-blue suite streaked with muddy green beneath the taps. The next door opened on a bedroom that had the earthy, choking smell of mildew. Then a single bedroom, the duvet a rumpled heap on top of the sagging mattress.

  McInnes marched out into the hall. ‘What are you doing? You’ve got no right to search my home! I demand you leave—’

  ‘Why’s this one locked?’ Logan gave the door handle a rattle.

  ‘It’s the garage. I don’t want anyone breaking in.’

  ‘Open it.’

  ‘I… I don’t have the key. I lost it.’

  Leggett nodded. ‘That’s nae a problem: I can kick it in for you in a jiffy.’

  ‘No, no, it’s… Hold on.’ He walked over to a little wooden box mounted on the wall, opened it, pulled out a Yale key on a yellow plastic tag and handed it to the constable. ‘This is harassment.’

  ‘Ta.’ A rattle, a clunk, and the door swung open.

  It was a garage. Bare breezeblock walls, concrete floor, a fluorescent striplight dangling from the roof beams. Empty. No Trisha Brown.

  McInnes folded his arms. ‘See?’ His voice echoed back from the featureless space. ‘I told you she wasn’t here. Now I want you to leave my home so I can make a formal complaint to your bosses.’

  Brilliant – another disaster.

  Logan turned on the spot, looking around the box-crowded hallway. ‘Have you got an allotment? Shed? Anything like that?’

  ‘No.’ McInnes pulled his shoulders back, one arm flung towards the front door. ‘Now get out.’

  The sound of Frank Sinatra crackled through a tinny little speaker somewhere in Leggett’s jacket. He dug out a scuffed mobile phone and flipped it open. ‘Guv? … Aye… No, we’re paying Darren McInnes a visit, says he’s sworn off wee girls for prostitutes… Aye, that’s fit I said… Aye…’

  Logan ran a hand through his hair. ‘We’re still going to take your car in for testing.’

  ‘I told you – I picked her up and paid for sex.’

  A frown. ‘Fit? Henry MacDonald?’ Leggett stepped back into the kitchen, his voice barely audible over the radio. ‘Did he? Whit, frank and beans? … Just the beans. Ah weil, least he’s left himself something tae pee through.’

  Logan took another look into the garage. How could she not be here? ‘Does this place have an attic?’

  ‘No. And before you ask, there’s no basement either. Now are you going to leave or not?’

  ‘Aye, I think so… Did you?’ Leggett stuck his head out of the kitchen and stared at McInnes. ‘Oh aye…? Hud oan.’ He held the phone against his chest. ‘DI Ingram says he knows you fine, Darren. Says he supervised you when you got oot of Peterheed the first time and they gave you that cooncil hoose in Kincorth.’

  Logan stared at the kitchen doorway, then the next one along. Then at the huge stack of cardboard boxes in between.

  ‘Says you�
��ve never had a hoor in your life.’

  ‘What would he know about it? The man’s an idiot. I used to go with them all the time. Now are you going to leave, or do I have to call my lawyer?’

  There was something wrong… Logan peered past Leggett into the kitchen, then in through the next door to the manky bathroom. The space between the two doors – the space full of floor-to-ceiling boxes – was too wide. Both rooms should have shared a dividing wall, but they had to be at least eight foot apart. He reached up and took a box from the top of the pile, exposing a section of white-painted architrave. There was another door, hidden away behind the boxes. And these ones didn’t look anywhere near as dusty as the others stacked up in the hallway. As if they’d been recently moved.

  Logan dumped the box on the musty carpet and grabbed another one.

  ‘Aye… I’ll tell him it’s—’

  A dull clunk.

  He stuck the box on top of the first, then hauled the next off the pile. ‘Leggett: give me a hand.’ One more box. ‘Leggett?’

  Another box on the pile. He could just see the door handle. ‘Constable, any time you want to lend a hand, you can…’ Logan turned.

  Constable Paul Leggett was sprawled out on the kitchen floor, one arm reaching through into the hallway, a patch of dark sticky red oozing down his forehead, his mobile phone lying against the skirting board opposite.

  Shite…

  Where the hell was—

  A shadow, moving fast. He ducked and a whatever it was crumped into a cardboard box, tearing straight through to the insides, sending the whole pile tumbling down on top of him. Its weight battered into him, sending him crashing to the carpet, the bulky shapes thumping into his legs, arms and chest. A clang of hidden metal as a box bounced off his shoulder.

  One of them burst open spilling books across the mildewed carpet, the corner of a hardback cracked into the bridge of Logan’s nose. Sharp flaring pain, a bright yellow glow, and the smell of burning pepper.

  He scrambled backwards, trying to get out from under the pile.

  McInnes grabbed the end of his makeshift club and pulled it free. It was some sort of trophy: a white marble plinth, with a golden pillar, and a little man mounted on the very top. The dusty figurine looked as if he was playing bowls.

  ‘I told you to leave my house.’ McInnes hefted the trophy like a hammer. ‘Told you, but you wouldn’t listen. Nobody ever listens.’

  Logan’s nose was full of burning pepper, his eyes watering. ‘Darren McInnes, I’m arresting you for obstructing, assaulting, molesting or hindering an officer in the course of their duty. You do not have to say anything—’

  The heavy stone plinth took a gouge out of the plaster-board.

  McInnes lunged, swinging the trophy, following Logan down the hall, backing him towards the door, not giving him time to do anything but dodge the next blow.

  ‘Cut it out! Don’t make me—’ The edge caught him just above the right elbow. Burning needles exploded up and down his arm. ‘Agh, fuck!’

  ‘I TOLD YOU TO GET OUT!’

  Logan whipped back his foot, then pistoned it forward, slamming his heel into McInnes’s knee.

  McInnes squealed and collapsed into a stack of cardboard boxes, clutching his knee with one hand, the bowling trophy hanging limp in the other, face creased up, teeth bared.

  Logan struggled upright, grabbed the first thing he saw –

  the collected works of William Shakespeare – and smashed it into McInnes’s face. The bowling trophy clattered to the floor; blood spurted from the old man’s mouth. He raised a hand, but Logan rammed the book, spine-first, into his nose.

  McInnes went down, covering his face and head, bleating as Logan smashed the book into his ribs. He curled one leg up against his chest, the other sticking out an awkward angle.

  Logan dropped the book, breathing hard. He spat; a glob of red-flecked foam trickled down the wall. He wiped a hand across his mouth and chin: it came away dripping with blood.

  DC Leggett groaned.

  Logan lurched over. ‘Paul?’ He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the dusty carpet next to him. ‘You OK?’

  ‘No…’ Leggett reached up and touched the gash in his forehead. Flinched. ‘Ayabastard…’

  ‘You’ll live.’ The avalanche of boxes had almost cleared the space in front of the hidden door. Logan crawled over and hauled the last box out of the way, leaving a bloody hand print on the cardboard. He glanced back at McInnes – curled up on the floor, crying, clutching his knee – then turned the door handle.

  Locked.

  It flew open on the second kick, the boom reverberating around the house.

  Logan stepped into an L-shaped room with bare breeze-block walls, loops of grey electrical cable protruding from metal ducting, one corner done up with plasterboard nailed to raw wooden struts. Modular metal shelves lined several of the walls, a washing machine and tumble dryer sitting beside a big chest freezer, sheets of water-bloated chipboard nailed up where windows should have been.

  He picked his way across the bare concrete floor to the corner, glanced back at McInnes again – still crying, still trying to hold his ruptured knee together – then stepped into the long leg of the L-shaped room.

  Trisha Brown was crumpled against a storage radiator, naked, one arm handcuffed to the supports. Her wrist was a solid ring of raw flesh, blood smeared from her fingertips halfway to her elbow. Her other arm… Logan looked away. Human limbs weren’t meant to bend like that. Her legs were worse: twisted and broken and covered in scabs and weals, pale thighs dotted with little red burns and bite marks.

  The sharp smell of urine and pine disinfectant, overlaid with BO and shit.

  ‘Trisha?’ He swallowed. ‘Trisha, can you hear me?’ He knelt beside her, felt for a pulse. Strong, pounding. ‘Trisha, it’s going to be OK.’ He put a hand under her chin and raised her head. ‘Fuck…’ Her nose was buckled to the left, both eyes swollen shut, her chin lopsided, her lips cracked and bleeding, her cheek misshapen – probably broken – every inch of skin covered in a violent rainbow of bruises. ‘Are you—’

  Her head snapped forward, mouth wide, jagged stumps of teeth flashing in bloody gums.

  Logan flinched back, snatching his hand out of the way. She wobbled, shoulders twitching, then slumped back against the battered radiator. A cross between a growl and a hiss escaped her battered lips.

  Jesus.

  Logan turned away, marched around the corner and back into the hall. ‘YOU!’ He took a handful of McInnes’s long greasy grey hair. ‘Where’s the key?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  Logan hauled. ‘Where’s the fucking key?’

  The old man screamed, let go of his knee and grabbed at Logan’s hand, trying to keep it from hauling the scalp off his head. ‘In the box! In the box!’

  Logan dragged him across the hall to the little wooden box mounted on the wall – the one the garage door key had come from – McInnes screaming and crying, his good leg scrabbling at the carpet, the other one dragging through the debris.

  It wasn’t difficult to spot the handcuff key – Logan snatched it from its hook and hauled McInnes through the door with him, into the unfinished room.

  Chapter 46

  ‘What was I supposed to do?’ Darren McInnes sat in the back of the patrol car, hands cuffed behind his back, a medical cool-pack strapped to his swollen knee.

  The front door opened and someone in a green jumpsuit backed out onto the garden path, holding up one end of a metal-framed stretcher.

  McInnes gave a little laugh, then winced, watching as Trisha was carried over to the waiting ambulance. ‘She was my first, did you know that? My first real life little girl.’

  Logan looked at him. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Before her it was just pictures, but then I got out of prison and they gave me a council flat just round the corner from her house… She was so small and so pretty and I remember she fell off her bike and broke her arm, and I just wante
d to make her feel loved, so I—’

  ‘If you don’t start exercising your right to remain silent, I swear to God…’

  A sigh. ‘Her mother was out of her face most of the time, or desperate for a fix, or down the docks renting her arse out so she could pay for the next high. Busy single mother like that needs a babysitter.’

  ‘McInnes—’

  ‘I’m dying.’ He turned and smiled at Logan. The skin around his right eye was already an angry dark blue and purple, the lids swollen and puffy, the white stained with red. ‘Cancer – all through my liver and kidneys. Doctor gave me three months, that was four weeks ago. Funny, isn’t it? Smoked like a chimney all my life; everyone always said it’d be lung cancer that did it.’

  ‘That supposed to make me feel sorry for you?’

  ‘I don’t care what you think.’ McInnes’s smile turned into a grin. ‘Oh, I knew you’d find me eventually – but I’ll be dead long before it gets anywhere near court. Can’t blame me for going out in style.’

  ‘You think this is funny?’

  ‘Took me two weeks to track Trisha down, and in the end there she was: not two hundred yards from her mum’s house. Staggering along, begging for money.’ He sighed as they shut the ambulance doors. ‘Thought it would be rather fitting – to end my life the way it started, with her. But…’ McInnes shook his head. ‘She was a lot more fun when she was five.’

  Logan climbed out into the warm morning sun and slammed the door shut before McInnes had another accident.

  One of the paramedics walked around the side of the ambulance, spotted Logan, and headed over. He nodded towards the patrol car, with its greasy-haired black-eyed occupant. ‘You the one buggered his knee?’

  Logan could feel the heat rushing up his cheeks. ‘It was self defence. He—’

  ‘Bastard should be taken out and shot.’ The paramedic scowled through the windscreen. ‘She’ll be lucky if they can save her legs, forget walking again. Had to give her three times as much morphine to get her settled.’

  Logan didn’t tell him that probably had as much to do with Trisha’s tolerance for opiates as the amount of pain she was in.