‘Superintendent Green tells me he’s been waiting for you to appear for the last fifteen minutes.’
‘He’s what? Look it’s bad enough we’ve—’
‘It would be nice, Sergeant, if for once I thought I could actually depend on a member of my team to act like a professional. I don’t care if you think it’s a waste of time or not – get round there, interview Baker, and try not to behave like a petulant bloody child!’
And then there was silence.
Logan held out the handset and read the little grey-and-black LCD screen: ‘CALL TERMINATED’
Perfect.
Just. Bloody. Perfect.
Logan rapped his knuckles on the car’s passenger window.
Superintendent Green looked up from the laptop he was poking away at, and stared at Logan for a moment, then a smile crawled across the lower half of his face, going nowhere near his eyes. Bzzzzzz – the window slid down a couple of inches. ‘Been on our holidays, have we, Sergeant?’
Warm air curled out into the cold morning. The hail had died off, replaced by a frigid drizzle.
Logan forced a smile of his own. ‘Pursuing other avenues of enquiry, sir.’
‘Yes …’ Green turned to the uniformed constable sitting in the driver’s seat. ‘Wait for me.’ He snapped the laptop closed and slipped it into an oversized leather satchel. Stepped out into the horrible morning. Looked Logan up and down. Raised an eyebrow. ‘Is your suit meant to look like that?’
Logan glanced at his left trouser leg. The fabric was torn and tattered, stained dark-grey with blood, rain, and dirt. Muddy paw prints on his chest. ‘I thought you were in a hurry?’
‘After you.’
The fabrication yard where Frank Baker worked was a small industrial unit bolted onto a large warehouse, cut off from the road by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. As if anyone was going to break in and make off with a two tonne chunk of drilling pipe. They lay stacked up around the building, held in place with wooden chucks and ratchet straps.
Green marched towards the door marked, ‘ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION!’
‘Punctuality is the sign of an effective police officer, Sergeant.’
Tosser. How could Logan be late for an unscheduled meeting?
‘Really, sir? I always thought it was catching criminals and preventing crimes.’
Green paused for a moment, then pushed through into a small room that smelled of industrial grease and coffee. A large woman with a bowl haircut looked up from a stack of forms and stared at them over the top of her glasses. No, ‘Hello?’ No, ‘Can I help you?’
The superintendent glanced around the room – Health and Safety posters, framed photo of an oil rig, calendar with kittens on it, shelves groaning with lever-arch files. ‘I want to speak to Frank Baker.’
She puckered her lips. ‘He’s working.’
Green thrust his warrant card under her nose. ‘Now.’
Inside, the warehouse was vast: filled with machinery, forklift trucks, and more pipes. A radio boomed out something poppy, competing with the bangs, clangs, and thrum of heavy equipment. The machine-gun pops of welding.
Frank Baker didn’t look the same without his nice clean suit. Instead he was wearing a pair of grubby orange overalls with a padded green jacket on top, the chest and shoulders covered with pinhole burns. Big leather gloves, steel toecap boots. A thick red line across his forehead from the welding mask he’d just thumped down on a length of rust-flecked pipe. ‘I don’t appreciate you bastards coming here every day.’
‘Then answer the bloody question!’ Green crossed his arms, legs shoulder-width apart, chin up.
Baker scowled at Logan. ‘I’ve been through all this: with you, with the wrinkly old woman, so—’
‘It’s just a couple of follow-up—’
‘And you’re going to go through it all again for us.’ Green stepped closer and Baker flinched.
‘I have to work here.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ The superintendent winked. ‘They don’t know you’re a pervert. That you like to interfere with little boys—’
‘Keep your voice down!’
‘A filthy kiddie-fiddling paedophile, who—’
‘SHUT UP! SHUT YOUR DIRTY MOUTH!’ Baker grabbed the handle of his arc welder.
Green leaned in close. ‘Or what, Frank?’
Tears sparked in the corner of Baker’s eyes.
A huge man in filthy overalls wandered over, a baseball cap turned the wrong way around on his massive head, face creased with dirt around a clear patch where his safety goggles must have sat. ‘Everything OK, Frankie?’
Baker bit his lip. ‘Yeah … Thanks, Spike.’
Spike stared at them for a bit. ‘Any trouble, give us a shout.’ Then he turned and lumbered away.
Baker waited till he was well out of earshot. ‘I told them: I volunteer at a vet’s in town every Saturday. It’s not illegal, OK? It’s not against my SOPPO. I’ve not done anything wrong. So go away and leave me alone!’
‘No, no, no, Frank – that’s not how it works.’ Green smiled. ‘You tell me everything I want to know, or I’ll make sure every sweaty-arsed bastard in this place knows your grubby little secret.’
‘Sir?’ Logan cleared his throat. ‘That’s not really—’
‘You want that, Frank? You want them all to find out what you do to little boys?’
‘This isn’t fair!’
‘You think what’s happening to Alison and Jenny is fair?’
Baker closed his eyes and sagged. ‘Please, I just want to be left alone …’
25
Green leaned on the roof of Rennie’s pool car. Staring off into the middle distance, chin up. Posing. Again. ‘Well, that was … interesting.’
Logan hauled open the door and threw his notebook onto the driver’s seat. ‘That is not the way we do things.’
It had stopped raining, though from the look of the deep-grey layer of cloud blanketing the city that probably wouldn’t last. Still freezing as well.
Superintendent Green curled his top lip. ‘Really? What a shock: something else Grampian Police doesn’t do. Tell me, Sergeant, what do you do?’
‘Frank Baker is a registered sex offender – do you have any idea what’ll happen to him if his workmates find out?’
‘That’s hardly my—’
‘They’ll beat the shit out of him; he’ll get fired; and he’ll disappear! How are we supposed to manage him if we don’t know where he is?’
Green’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sergeant McRae, are you always this resistant to the chain of command?’
‘You had no business storming in there like something off the bloody Sweeney!’
The superintendent drummed his fingers on the roof. ‘When Chief Inspector Finnie told me you were “wilful” I wasn’t expecting full-on insubordination.’
Logan gritted his teeth. ‘I thought we were meant to be on the same side.’
‘Did you now?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Logan glanced towards the huge warehouse. Spike, Baker’s huge friend was standing in the doorway, staring back at him. Then he turned and melted away into the shadows. ‘Anything else?’
There was a pause. A cold smile. ‘Well, I’d better get back and check on the team. We need a strategy for Thursday – hostage exchange tends to be where you end up with dead bodies.’ Green stepped back from the car. ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
Logan clambered into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. ‘Not if I fucking see you first.’
Rennie looked up from his book. ‘Sarge?’
‘Nothing.’ He hauled on his seatbelt. ‘I want that GPS fix on Charlie Delta Seven now.’
‘Already doing it.’ He stuck the book on the dashboard and dug out his Airwave handset.
Logan tilted his head sideways, frowning at the title. ‘The Accidental Sodomist?’
‘It’s literature: shortlisted for the
Booker this year. Emma says I need to broaden my horizons, and – Hold on. Aye, Jimmy, how you getting on finding Charlie Delta Seven for me? … Uh-huh … No. Still no sign of him … Yeah, if you can …’ Rennie put a hand over the mouthpiece and nodded at the book in Logan’s hands. ‘You can borrow it when I’m finished. It’s about this concert pianist from Orkney who moves to Edinburgh ’cos he’s in love with his cousin, and ends up shagging a bunch of mental … Yeah? It is? Cheers, thanks Jimmy.’
‘Well?’
Rennie cranked the key in the ignition. ‘We have a winner.’
‘There … over by the trees.’
Logan squinted through the rain-flecked windscreen. ‘Where? It’s all bloody trees.’
Gairnhill Woods lay three-and-a-bit miles west of the city, part of a little conjoined network of Forestry Commission land. Quiet and secluded.
Pale grey cloud curled around the tops of Scots pines and spruce, the light flat and lifeless as a thin drizzle made the undergrowth shine.
The windscreen wipers squealed their way across the glass again.
‘There,’ Rennie poked a finger at a little car park off to the right of the road. Charlie Delta Seven, AKA: Logan’s crappy blue Vauxhall, sat in the far corner, under a drooping branch.
No other car to be seen.
Rennie smiled. ‘This where you left it?’
‘You’re an idiot, you know that, don’t you?’ Logan undid his seatbelt. ‘Block it in, then we’ll go take a look.’
The constable licked his lip. Looked from Logan to the abandoned pool car. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on? Just in case?’
‘Shuggie Webster; dirty big dog. If you see him, arrest the bastard. Try not to get bitten.’
‘OK …’ Rennie eased his car up the dirt track and parked directly across the back of Charlie Delta Seven.
Logan opened the door and climbed out into the rain. It misted on his face, making his breath steam out around his head. Got to love summer in Aberdeen.
He pulled out his pepper spray and inched his way around to Charlie Delta Seven’s driver’s door. Peered in through the window.
Empty.
‘Think he’s done a runner?’ Rennie appeared on the other side. ‘Might have nipped into the woods for a slash?’
‘If he hasn’t taken a dump in the driver’s seat …’ Logan hunkered down and peered up at the space behind the door handle. Then took a pen from his pocket and clacked it about in there.
A faint shadow fell across him. Then Rennie sniffed. ‘No offence, Sarge, but you look like a spaz.’
‘When I joined CID there was a DI: right bastard, always storming about shouting at everyone. Had to deliver a death message to this drug dealer’s family – their son managed to choke on his own vomit in custody.’ Logan stood. ‘So while DI Cole’s inside breaking the bad news, their other kid nips outside and jams a wodge of chewing gum right up under the door handle where you can’t see it.’
The constable shrugged. ‘Could be worse, dog shite would—’
Then he stuck a dirty razorblade in the chewing gum. DI Cole swapped the tips of two fingers for a dose of Hepatitis C.’ Logan clunked the car door open. ‘Never hurts to check.’
Inside, Charlie Delta Seven looked every bit as crappy as it had when Shuggie nicked it. Only now it stank of wet dog.
‘So, you think he’s still about somewhere?’ Rennie clacked open his extendible baton. ‘SHUGGIE! SHUGGIE WEBSTER: COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!’
Logan stood. Laid a hand on the bonnet. It was cold. ‘Car’s been here at least an hour.’ He turned around, looking out at the damp brown earth of the car park. ‘Must have had a back-up vehicle here … Or maybe someone was off having a walk in the woods, and he nicked theirs instead. Or he was meeting someone …’
Rennie collapsed his truncheon again. ‘Want me to call it in?’
‘What, and let everyone know Shuggie Webster stole my pool car? No thanks. What Professional Standards don’t know, won’t hurt them.’ Logan stepped out from under the canopy of green needles. The rain was getting heavier again, pitter-pattering against the undergrowth. ‘Can you smell something?’
‘What if Shuggie’s knocked down some old dear, or something?’
He held a finger to his lips. ‘Shh …’ The car park was surrounded with dense green ferns, their long fractal fronds waving in the thickening rain. Someone had forced a path into them, at thirty degrees to the official trail that led off into the woods.
Logan picked his way around a puddle. Dark stains turned the mud black around the trampled ferns. He stepped to the side, making sure he wasn’t treading on anything that looked important as he crept closer.
‘Sarge?’
He waved Rennie back. ‘Give us a second.’
Standing on his tiptoes, he could just see into a little flattened clearing at the end of the path. It couldn’t have been much more than five-foot across, the undergrowth trampled, ferns and grass stained a shiny black.
Something lay off to one side: a dark mound, torn open, chunks of red, purple and white poking out. A curl of grey tubes, glistening on the darkened grass.
‘What?’ Rennie appeared at his shoulder. ‘What have you … Fuck me. Is that a dog?’
It was. A huge Rottweiler, by the look of what was left of its head.
Someone had hacked Shuggie Webster’s dog to death.
The Wildlife Crime Officer sat back on his haunches and shook his head. ‘What a bastard …’ A slow, steady rain beat a tattoo on the hood of his white SOC suit; a pair of purple gloves on his hands, blue plastic over-booties on his feet. ‘Who’d do this to a wee dog?’
The bright glare of a camera flash froze raindrops in mid-air. An IB technician shifted around for another shot. Logan nodded at the remains. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think someone needs taking out and shot, that’s what I think. Beautiful dog like that.’ The WCO reached out and stroked the dark fur on the back of the massive animal. ‘Lot of people think Rottweilers are these horrible aggressive dogs, but they’re big softies really …’
Yeah.
That’s exactly what Uzi was when he was trying to rip Logan’s throat out. ‘I meant: any idea what killed it?’
A long sigh, making the white paper oversuit rustle. ‘Well, I’m no pathologist, but looking at the size of the cuts … most of them to the dog’s back and shoulders …’ Another sigh. ‘A sword? There’s a lot of wee toerags buying those samurai swords off the internet these days. Or maybe a huge knife? Proper Rambo job. It’d have to be at least, what?’ He looked over at the IB technician he’d brought with him. ‘Eighteen inches long?’
The IB tech lowered his massive digital camera. ‘Give or take.’
About the same size as a machete.
Which explained where Shuggie Webster had gone, and why he’d left the CID pool car behind. Sodding hell. Now Logan had to call it in.
‘What about prints, fibres, that kind of thing?’
The IB tech slung the camera strap over his shoulder. ‘You want the full CSI treatment?’
Logan looked back at the hacked-up Rottweiler. There was no way Shuggie Webster would’ve gone quietly, not after someone did that to his dog. Chances were his mutilated corpse would be turning up soon enough. Any trace evidence they could find would help. As if today needed to get any shittier. ‘As much as you can give me, without Finnie throwing a wobbly about the cost.’
‘You’ll be lucky – all this rain, outdoors, public place … Can’t promise anything.’ He patted the WCO on the shoulder. ‘It’s OK, Dunc, you can take him away if you like. I’m done.’
They left him stuffing chunks of butchered Rottweiler into a white child-sized body-bag.
The IB tech dumped his sample kit next to a couple of Tesco carrier bags, lying flattened on the muddy ground, weighed down with stones. He removed one of the rocks, and peeled back the plastic. There was a perfectly rectangular pud
dle of plaster-of-Paris underneath. Pure white in the middle, greying at the edges. He poked it with a finger. Sighed. Then wiped the digit on his oversuit. ‘Still not convinced we’re going to get anything …’
‘What about fingerprints?’
‘I mean, the footwear marks weren’t exactly in the best of shape to start with, were they? Doesn’t help it’s pishing with rain.’
‘You could dust the car while you’re waiting for it to set? Maybe they touched the paintwork?’
He flopped the bag back into place, and weighed it down again. ‘I mean, mud’s great for taking footprints, but soon as it starts to rain again, they go all mooshy—’
‘Ernie: the car.’
‘Don’t be daft.’ He pulled off his facemask, exposing a little ginger goatee beard and a smile full of squint teeth. ‘What do you think fingerprint powder’s going to do on wet metal?’
‘Ah …’ Bugger.
‘Exactly.’ Ernie peeled back the hood of his SOC suit, exposing a high forehead barely holding onto a crown of yet more ginger. ‘Have to get it back to the ranch. Stick it somewhere dry for a couple of hours.’
‘Right …’
Rennie was sitting in his pool car, head stuck in The Accidental Sodomist again.
Logan knocked on the window.
A pause while the intellectual marked his place with a lottery ticket, then the window buzzed down. ‘Guv?’
‘Steel says I’m supposed to pick a minion: you’re it.’
Rennie grinned. Then hunched up one shoulder, scrunched up his face, and put on a ridiculous voice. ‘Yeth Maaaaathhhhhter … ?’
‘Get your lopsided arse back to FHQ – I want a breakdown of every kidnapping in the country for the last ten years.’
The constable paused, biro hovering over his notebook. ‘Ten years?’
‘You heard.’ Logan watched the Wildlife Crime Officer waddling backwards into the car park, dragging the white body-bag. ‘Find out who’s running the drug gang investigations this week – I’m looking for Yardies with a thing for machetes.’
Rennie scribbled it all down. ‘Ten years …’
‘And,’ Logan pointed at his abandoned pool car, ‘you’re taking that back to the station. Wear gloves. Don’t sign it back in, don’t let anyone else touch it. Park it in the garage and let it dry off till Ernie can dust it for prints. If Big Gary gives you a hard time, tell him it’s evidence.’
Logan McRae Crime Series Books 7 and 8 Page 17