Jamie McCreath – four in two weeks' time, the day before Christmas Eve – had disappeared. He'd been on a trip to the park with his mother, a distraught woman in her mid-twenties with long red hair the colour of autumn leaves escaping from under a knitted hat with a ridiculous gold tassel on top. She cried on a bench in the Winter Gardens while a flustered-looking woman with a small child in a pushchair did her best to comfort her.
The Winter Gardens – a large Victorian structure, white-painted steel holding up tons of glass, protecting the cactus and palm trees from the snow and ice outside – were a hive of activity, crawling with uniformed police officers.
Logan found DI Insch standing on an arched wooden bridge spanning a blue, dappled pool full of gold-and-copper fish. 'Sir?'
The inspector glanced over his shoulder, a frown sitting on his round features, making him look bullish and impotent. 'You took your bloody time.'
Logan tried not to rise to the bait. 'Mrs Henderson's keeping her mouth shut. But we found all the clothes she was wearing drying on the radiator. Every last one of them bleached within an inch of their lives.'
'IB?' asked Insch.
'I've got them going over the washing machine and the kitchen. Those clothes must have been saturated with blood. We'll find it.'
The inspector nodded, lost in thought. 'At least that's something,' he said at last. 'I've had a call from the Chief Constable: this is the last kid that goes missing. Four of Lothian and Borders finest are on their way up the road as we speak.'
Logan groaned. That was all they needed.
'Aye,' said Insch. 'Show the poor thick parochial bobbies how to do it properly.'
'What happened?'
The inspector shrugged. 'Too much publicity, too little progress.'
'No, here-' Logan indicated the verdant jungle sprawling under glass all around them. 'What happened with the kid?'
'Ah. Right.' He straightened up and pointed towards the entrance, hidden behind a large clump of tropical rainforest. 'Mother and child enter the Winter Gardens at eleven fifty-five. Jamie McCreath likes the fishies, but the birdies frighten him. Aye, and so does that bloody talking cactus. So they come in here and he sits on the edge of the bridge and watches the fishies swimming about. Mrs McCreath spots a friend and says hello. They talk for a while, about fifteen minutes she thinks, and next thing she knows Jamie is nowhere to be seen. So she starts looking for him.' He held out a large hand and traced it along the paths that crossed and bordered the pond. 'No sign. She's seen the papers and the telly, so she starts to panic. Screams the place down. Her friend calls 999 on her mobile, and here we are.' He let the hand fall back to his side. 'We've got four search teams going through the place: under every bush, bridge, into every storeroom. You name it. Another two teams are out in that-' Insch inclined his head towards the fogged up glass, indicating the park outside. 'We'll get more teams doing the park when they arrive.' Logan nodded. 'What do you think?' Insch slowly sank forward, his elbows on the railings that bordered the wooden bridge, his face closed, staring down at the fish swimming languidly below. 'I'd love to think he's just wandered off, bored. That he's outside building a snowman…But deep down? I think he's got him.' He sighed. 'And he's going to kill him.'
35
Insch ordered the mobile incident room brought down to Duthie Park. It was little more than a glorified caravan, a grubby white rectangular box with 'Grampian Police' written on the outside and a small, sectioned-off interview room inside. The rest of the space was taken up by a couple of desks, a microwave and a kettle. The latter was going full time, filling the claustrophobic room with belching clouds of white steam.
The search teams weren't having any success and the snow was hungrily eating up any evidence there was, the wind sweeping it across the park, filling every indentation, making everything uniformly white and rounded.
Logan sat at the desk nearest the door, getting a chill in his kidneys every time the thing was opened and another frozen body staggered in, stomped their feet clean of snow on the carpet and looked hungrily at the kettle. He was hammering away at a laptop, a list of all known sex offenders in the city scrolling past his eyes. If they were lucky they'd find someone living near enough to the park to make it an attractive hunting ground. It was a big 'if: the other two bodies had been found on the other side of the city. One on the banks of the Don, the other in Seaton Park. Both a stone's throw away from the river that cut through the northernmost third of the city.
'Maybe we're looking for a different man?' he said aloud, causing Insch to look up from his pile of reports.
'Don't even think about it! One sick bastard abducting children is enough!'
Logan shivered as the door banged open again and a red-nosed WPC stumbled in from the snow. While she begged a cup of Bovril, Logan went back to his list of perverts, rapists and paedophiles. There were two registered in Ferryhill, the area directly butting onto Duthie Park, but they were both down for raping women in their mid-twenties. They weren't likely to kidnap, kill and abuse four-year-old boys, but Logan sent a couple of patrol cars anyway. Just to be sure.
More and more negative reports were coming in from the search teams. Insch had abandoned any hope of finding Jamie McCreath in the Winter Gardens and had sent everyone off to comb the park instead.
Logan's eyes drifted across a familiar name and he stopped. Douglas MacDuff: Desperate Doug. He wasn't a registered sex offender, but he was on the list as a suspect for some rapes twenty-odd years ago. The rest of the names were only recognizable because Logan had been through this exercise just last week, looking for suspects who might have taken little David Reid, or Peter Lumley.
A headache was beginning to nip him between the eyes. That was what he got for sitting here in a perpetual draught, hunched over this damn laptop. Achieving nothing. It was hard to believe this was only Wednesday. He'd been back on the job for eleven days now. Eleven days without a break. So much for the working time directive. Grunting, he rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to get the growing pain to shift.
When he opened his eyes again he was staring at another familiar name: Martin Strichen, 25 Howesbank Avenue. The man who could fell slimy lawyer bastards with a single blow. And Slippery Sandy had the brass neck to say that Cleaver going free was the police's fault…A small smile flickered onto Logan's face as he played the moment of impact in his head. Bang. Right on the nose.
Insch looked up from the shivering WPC's report. 'What's so damn funny?' he asked Logan, his expression making it clear that there was nothing to laugh about.
'Sorry, sir, I was just remembering when Slippery Sandy got his nose broken.'
The annoyed look slid off Insch's face. Maybe there was something to smile at after all. 'Bang!' he said, slapping a fat fist into the other palm. 'I've got it on video now. Going to get someone to cut it to disk so I can use it as a screensaver on the computer. Bang…'
Logan grinned and looked back down at the laptop. There were plenty more names on the list to go through. Ten minutes later he was standing in front of the large-scale map of Aberdeen laminated and mounted on the mobile incident room's far wall. They'd marked it up in red and blue pen, just like the map back at Force HQ: red for where the kids had been abducted, blue for where the bodies had been found. Only now there was a red circle over Duthie Park as well.
'Well?' Insch demanded at last, when Logan had been standing there, motionless, for five minutes.
'Hmm? Oh, I was wondering about the parks connection. We found Peter Lumley in Seaton Park, Jamie McCreath was snatched from Duthie Park…' Logan picked up a blue marker pen and tapped it against his teeth.
'And?' There wasn't a lot of patience in Insch's voice.
'David Reid doesn't fit.'
With a growl of low menace, Insch asked Logan what the hell he was talking about.
'Well,' Logan prodded the map with the pen, 'David Reid was snatched from the amusement arcades down at the beach and dumped by the river in the Bridge of Don
. No parks.'
'We've been through all this!' Insch glowered.
'Yes, but back then we only had the two disappearances. Maybe not enough to see a pattern.'
The door battered open, bringing with it a howling gale and WPC Watson. She clattered it shut again and banged her feet, making a miniature snowstorm on the linoleum. 'God, it's freezing out there!' she said, her nose like a cherry, her cheeks like apples, her lips like two thin strips of purple liver.
Insch let his glare leave Logan, roam towards Watson and return. Oblivious to the inspector's gaze, she wrapped her gloved hands around the kettle, stealing as much heat from it as she could.
'There has to be something,' said Logan, staring at the map, the blue marker pen clicking off his top teeth again, 'something we're not seeing. A reason this kid is different?' He stopped. 'Or maybe he isn't different at all…all these places have something in common…'
Hope shone in Insch's eyes. 'What?'
Logan shrugged. 'No idea. I know there's something, but I can't put my finger on it.'
And that was when Detective Inspector Insch finally lost his temper. He slammed his fist down on top of the desk, making the piles of paper dance and demanded to know what the blue fucking hell Logan thought he was playing at? There was a child missing out there and all he could do was play silly fucking games? His face was glowing beetroot-red, spittle arcing in the incident room's fluorescent lights as he tore a strip off of the first target to have presented itself since the McCreath child had gone missing.
'Er…' said Watson when Insch paused for breath.
The inspector snapped such a baleful look in her direction that she actually took a step backwards, holding the hot kettle to her chest like a shield. 'What?' he roared.
'They're all maintained by the council?' she said, getting the words out as quickly as possible.
Logan turned back to the map. She was right. Every single place he'd marked was maintained by the council's Parks Department. The Lumley's house had a chunk of ground right next door to it, and the beachfront where David Reid disappeared from was public property too. And so was the riverbank where he was found.
Something went click in Logan's head.
'Martin Strichen,' he said, pointing at the laptop's screen. 'He's on the sex offenders list. He always gets community service with the Parks Department.' He poked the map, smudging the blue circle he'd drawn over Seaton Park. 'That's how he knew those toilets weren't going to be used until spring!'
Watson shook her head. 'Sorry, sir, but Strichen was done for masturbating in a women's changing room, not fiddling with small boys.'
Insch agreed, but Logan wasn't going to be put off so easily. 'It's a swimming pool, right? So what do mothers take to the swimming pool? Children! The kids are too young to leave them on their own in the male changing rooms, so the mothers have them in with them! Little naked girls and-'
'-little naked boys,' Insch finished for him. 'Bastard. Get an APB out. I want Strichen and I want him now!' They had the lights and sirens going all the way from Duthie Park to Middlefield, only switching them off as they got within earshot of Martin Strichen's house. They didn't want to scare him off.
25 Howesbank Avenue was a middle terrace house in a sweeping street on the north-west corner of Middlefield. There was nothing behind the row of white-harled buildings except a small belt of scrubby grassland and then the disused granite quarries. After that it was a steep climb down to Bucksburn with its paper mills and chicken factory.
The wind was howling along the back of the houses, kicking up a curtain of snow from the frozen ground to mix with the fresh, icy flakes falling from above. It clung to the building's walls as if someone had wrapped them in glittering cotton wool. Christmas trees sparkled and flashed in the darkened windows; jolly Santas stuck to the glass. And here and there someone had tried to recreate old-fashioned leaded windows with black electrical tape and spray-on snow. Classy.
Watson pulled the car up around the corner from the house, where it couldn't be seen.
Insch, Watson, Logan, and a uniformed PC Logan still thought of as the Bastard Simon Rennie, all clambered out into the snow. It had taken the Fiscal exactly three minutes to approve an apprehension warrant for Martin Strichen.
'Right,' said Insch, looking up at the house. It was the only one on the street that didn't have a Christmas tree merrily sparkling away in the front window. 'Watson, Rennie: you go round the back. No one in, no one out. Give us a bell when you get there.' He held up his mobile phone. 'We'll take the front.'
The uniformed contingent hunkered down into the ripping, ice-laden wind and disappeared around the back of the terraced row.
Insch looked at his DS with an appraising eye. 'You going to be up to this?' he asked Logan.
'Sir?'
'If this gets rough: are you up to it? I'm not having you drop down dead on me.'
Logan shook his head, feeling the tips of his ears burn in the bitter gale. 'Don't worry about me, sir,' he said, his breath whipped away by the wind before it could make a cloud of vapour. 'I'll hide behind you.'
'Aye,' said Insch with a smile. 'Just make sure I don't fall on you.'
The phone in the inspector's pocket buzzed discreetly. Watson and Rennie were in place.
Number 25 had a front door that hadn't seen a coat of paint in years. The peeling blue revealing bloated grey wood underneath, sparkling with frost. A pair of rippled glass panes were set into it, revealing a darkened hall.
Insch tried the doorbell. Thirty seconds later he tried the doorbell again. And a third time.
'All right! All right! Hold your bloody horses!' The voice came from deep within the small house, followed by blossoming light that oozed through the glass.
A shadow fell across the hall, bringing with it muttered swearing, not quite low enough to be inaudible.
'Who is it?' It was a woman, and her voice, rough from years of booze and fags, had all the welcome of a rabid Rottweiler.
'Police.'
There was a pause. 'What's the little bastard done now?' But the door remained shut.
'Open the door please.'
'The little bastard's not here.'
Colour was beginning to travel up DI Insch's neck. 'Open this damn door now!'
Click, clunk, clatter. The door opened a crack. The face that peered out at them was hard and lined, a cigarette dangling out of one corner of the twisted, thin mouth. 'I told you: he's no here. Come back later.'
Insch wasn't having any more of this. Pulling himself up to his full height, he leant his considerable weight on the door and shoved. The woman on the other side staggered back and he stepped over the threshold and into the small hallway.
'You can't come in here without a warrant! I have rights!'
Insch shook his head and marched past her, through a small kitchen, and opened the back door. Watson and Rennie staggered in out of the cold, snow whipping past them into the dingy room.
'Name?' demanded Insch, pointing a fat finger at the outraged woman. She was dressed for the next ice age: thick woollen jumper, thick woollen skirt, heavy woollen socks, big fleecy slippers and, over the top of it all, an extra large cardigan in dung-brown. Her hair looked as if it had been styled in the nineteen fifties and not touched since. It glistened in greasy-looking curls, held tight to her head with hairgrips and an off-brown net.
She crossed her arms, hitching up her sagging bosoms. 'You got a warrant, you tell me.'
'Everyone watches too much bloody television,' muttered Insch, pulling the apprehension warrant out and slapping it in her face. 'Where is he?'
'I don't know.' She scrabbled backwards towards the dingy lounge. 'I'm not his keeper!'
The inspector took a step forward, his face purple, veins standing out on his face and neck. The old woman flinched.
Logan's voice cut through the tension. 'When did you last see him?'
She swivelled her head. 'This morning. Went to do his bloody community service. Little bastard'
s always doing community service. Dirty little pervert. Can't get a bloody job, can he? To busy playing with himself in bloody changing rooms for that.'
'OK,' said Logan. 'Where was he working today?'
'I don't bloody know, do I? The little bastard calls them in the morning and they tell him where he's supposed to go.'
'Calls where?'
'The council!' She almost spat at him. 'Where else? Number's on the phone table.'
There was an occasional table, not much bigger than a postage stamp, with a grubby cordless phone on it and a small pad marked 'Messages'. A letter was pinned to the mahogany-effect wood by the phone's base unit. It bore the crest of Aberdeen City Council: three towers, bordered by what looked like barbed wire, on a shield supported by a pair of rampant leopards. Very regal. It was Martin Strichen's community service notice from the Parks Department. Pulling out his mobile phone, Logan punched in the number and spoke to the man responsible for handing out Strichen's work details.
'Want to take a guess?' he said when the call was over.
'Duthie Park?' said Insch.
'Bingo.' They dragged details of Martin's car out of his mother while PCs Rennie and Watson searched the house. Watson returned, grim-faced, holding a clear plastic evidence wallet containing a pair of secateurs.
Once Mrs Strichen heard what her little boy had done, she was more than happy to help the police lock him up for life. He deserved it, she said. He'd never been any good. She wished she'd strangled him at birth, or better yet stabbed him in the womb with a coat hanger. God knew she'd drunk enough gin and whisky to kill the little bastard off when she was carrying him.
'Right,' said Insch when she'd stomped off upstairs to the toilet. 'It's highly unlikely he's going to come back here to the loving arms of his delightful mother, not after we get his name and description out to the media. But you never know. Watson, Rennie, I want you to stay here with the Wicked Witch of Middlefield. Keep well clear of the windows: I don't want anyone knowing you're here. If her boy does come home: call for backup. You only tackle him if it's safe.'
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