Dying Light

by Stuart MacBride

  ‘Says who?’ She was slowly inching the door shut.

  ‘I want you to tell me about it. Right now. Before I arrest you and drag you down to the station.’ Logan flashed her an insincere smile. ‘Up to you.’

  She closed her eyes and swore. ‘OK, OK.’ She jammed her hands in her dressing-gown pockets and stomped back into the house, leaving the front door open for them. They followed her through a cluttered hall to the kitchen, where a smeared window looked out on a rectangle of chewed-up grass and dog toys, the borders around the edge a collection of churned mud and weeds. The kitchen was a mess of pizza boxes, clear plastic takeaway containers still swimming with grease, empty tins of lager, dirty washing spilling out of an overflowing laundry basket, and the smell of something festering in the sink.

  There was an unopened stack of bills on the table and Logan picked one up. It was addressed to Mrs Clair Pirie, with what looked like FINAL REMINDER just visible through the plastic window. ‘Mr Pirie about is he, Clair?’

  She snatched the brown envelope from his hands and stuffed it into an already overflowing drawer. ‘None of yer damned business. Filthy bastard fucked off years ago.’

  ‘I see.’ Logan watched her stab the kettle’s ‘on’ button and pick a teabag from a pile of desiccated brown circles slouching in a saucer. ‘Not for us, thanks. So you live here alone?’

  ‘No… aye, I mean yes: alone.’ Shifty, shifty, shifty. Logan leant back against the working surface and stared at her in silence as the kettle growled and rumbled to a boil. ‘OK, OK,’ she said at last. ‘Jesus… My boyfriend used to stay here, OK? We was goin’ to put him on the council tax next time. But we split up, OK? Satisfied? Bastard walked out on me.’ The dried-up husk of a teabag was hurled into a dirty mug, chased with boiling water.

  ‘Tell us about the people next door, Clair.’

  ‘She’s an interferin’ cow – puttin’ up fuckin’ posters about other people’s fuckin’ dogs, cheeky bitch. And he’s an arsehole. Bastard’s round here complainin’ the whole time. Never fuckin’ happy.’

  ‘That why you hit him?’

  A small smile flickered over her face, before disappearing once more. ‘He started it. Comin’ round here and swearing a blue fuckin’ streak. No fuckin’ manners at all.’ She wrenched open the fridge, dragged out a carton of milk and slopped some in on top of the teabag. A horrific stench slithered out into the kitchen, mouldy cheese and the unmistakable sickly-sweet smell of meat long past its sell-by date. But Clair didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘You hear he’s gone missing?’

  She froze, the dirty mug to her lips. ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘Since Wednesday, day after you assaulted him.’ Logan watched her eyes and there was definitely something there. He just didn’t know what it was yet. ‘Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  She shrugged. ‘Nothin’ to do with me. Probably run off with one of his tarts anyway. Left that soppy cow of a wife. Just fuckin’ abandoned her…’ Clair fished the teabag out of the mug with a fork and hurled it into the dirty sink. ‘It’s what you fuckin’ men do, isn’t it?’

  *

  Back outside in the sunshine Rennie gasped for air. ‘Jesus,’ he said, waving a hand in front of his nose. ‘What a stink! No’ surprised her husband left her. Woman’s a bloody slob… What?’ He looked at Logan who was staring at the front of the house.

  ‘Do me a favour, OK? I want you to get onto Control and have them do a full check: everything they have on Mrs Clair Pirie.’

  ‘Think she’s got something to do with Cruickshank going missing?’

  ‘Nope. My money’s still on Ibiza, Hayley the pole-dancer and her tiny leather bikini. But she is up to something.’

  They went next door to Cruickshanks’ Repose. Ailsa appeared, dressed in a blue-and-white-striped apron and rubber gloves, blonde hair tied back. Stunning. Her face went white when she saw Logan standing on her top step. ‘Oh, God.’ She wrung her yellow-rubber-gloved hands, making them squeak. ‘Something’s happened!’

  Logan tried for a reassuring smile. ‘It’s OK, Mrs Cruickshank, nothing’s happened: we’re just here to have a little chat, OK? Can we come in?’

  ‘Oh, of course. I’m sorry… Would you like some tea? It’s no problem.’

  She sat them down in a pristine lounge and went to put the kettle on. As soon as she was out of sight, Rennie leaned over and hissed at Logan, ‘OOOH! Suits you, sir!’

  ‘Would you grow up! The woman’s husband’s missing.’

  ‘I know, but Jesus, how the hell do you leave that? She’s bloody gorgeous! I would! Would you?’

  ‘Shut up – she’ll hear you.’

  Rennie looked longingly at the kitchen door. ‘Tell you: she could keep the rubber gloves on, I’d—’

  ‘Constable – I’m warning you!’

  Rennie stared at the carpet. ‘Sorry, sir. Must be the shock of my nadgers still working after Suzie Bloody McKinnon’s kneecap vasectomy.’ Logan couldn’t help smiling.

  Ailsa Cruickshank returned bearing a tray topped with mugs of tea and chocolate biscuits. As Rennie helped himself to a Penguin, she perched herself on the edge of the sofa and fidgeted with a cushion. Logan cleared his throat, not looking forward to what was going to come next. ‘Er…’ he said, wondering how he was going to tell her that her darling Gavin was probably off having lots of holiday sex with a pole-dancer. ‘I was wondering if you’ve heard from your husband at all?’

  She sighed, deflating slightly. ‘No. No I haven’t.’

  ‘I see…’ Go on: tell her. ‘Er… when you reported your husband missing, did they ask you about other things not being there: his toothbrush, change of clothes, passport. That kind of thing?’

  ‘You don’t think he’s… Gavin wouldn’t just leave me without saying anything! He wouldn’t.’

  Logan bit his lip and nodded. ‘OK. Well, just in case, do you think we could take a look?’

  Ailsa took them upstairs to the master bedroom, unaware of DC Rennie’s eyes locked onto her backside as she climbed up in front of them. The house was decorated in soft shades, everything carefully coordinated. The bed linen matched the curtains, carpet and overstuffed cushions lying on a wicker chair in the corner. In fact the only disorderly part of the room was the huge collection of detective novels – all hers, she explained with an apologetic smile, Gavin didn’t like to read. She rummaged about in a chest of drawers, digging out a pair of burgundy EU passports. One hers, one Gavin’s. His toothbrush was still in the bathroom. His razor, moisturizer, facial scrub, and hair gel still in the medicine cabinet. But that didn’t prove anything. Given the kind of life Gavin Cruickshank led, he probably had identical toiletries in the bathroom of every woman he was shagging. And a lot of people in the oil-service industry had second passports; it helped when you had to get visas organized for contracts in Azerbaijan, or Angola, or Nigeria… So all in all this proved nothing, just gave Logan a chance to put off the inevitable and Rennie a chance to stare at her backside as they went from room to room. Back down in the lounge, Logan took a deep breath and told her the bad news. She stood there in stunned silence for almost a minute before the tears started. Logan and Rennie let themselves out.

  They sat in the car, Logan swearing softly, Rennie gazing wistfully back at the house. ‘You sure I shouldn’t just pop back in there and comfort her, sir? Bit of a shoulder to cry on and all…’ He stopped when he saw the expression on Logan’s face. Cleared his throat and started the car. ‘Fair enough.’

  Logan took one last look over his shoulder, not surprised to see a suspicious pair of piggy eyes staring at him from the house next door. She was definitely up to something.

  The morgue at Grampian Police Headquarters had a strange smell of cheese and onion when Logan arrived seven minutes early for Jamie McKinnon’s post mortem. The guest of honour was already there, lying flat on his back in the middle of the cutting table, naked as the day he was born. But other than that the place was deserted. There wouldn’t be
a big turnout for Jamie’s farewell performance – after all, this was just another junkie suicide. Because he’d topped himself in prison they’d have to go the whole hog and do a Fatal Accident Enquiry, but it wasn’t likely to explode into a public scandal. Jamie’s only surviving relative was his sister and as she’d given him the drugs in the first place she was in no position to complain about his death in custody. So today it would just be Logan and DC Rennie in the cheap seats, not so much as a deputy procurator fiscal to keep them company. Though where the hell Rennie had got to was anyone’s guess. Isobel slouched through into the cutting room at two minutes to four, not bothering to cover a jaw-cracking yawn. She scrubbed up in the sink without saying hello.

  Logan sighed. Might as well make the gesture: ‘Rough night last night?’

  ‘Hmmm?’ She looked up from drying her hands, face set in the same scowl she was wearing this morning. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘OK…’ This was obviously going to be one of those ‘fun’ post mortems.

  ‘Look if you must know, Colin didn’t come home last night.’ She pulled a green plastic apron from the roll by the sink and put it on over her surgical get-up. It was long enough to cover the toes of her Wellington boots.

  ‘Oh?’ Sounded as if Miller was in for a world of hurt when he got back from work today. ‘What was his excuse?’

  The scowl grew darker. ‘I haven’t spoken to him yet.’ She threw a tray of surgical instruments down on the trolley next to Jamie’s corpse. ‘It’s four o’clock: where the hell is everyone?’

  Isobel’s assistant Brian was the first one to turn up, full of apologies, closely followed by DC Rennie. Doc Fraser was the last to show: a full eight minutes late and completely unrepentant. He’d been ready at three, he said, something else came up and was it OK if he did his expenses, only he was two months behind and needed the cash. Taking Isobel’s silent scowl as a ‘yes’, he popped his briefcase up on the next cutting table along, spreading out reams of paper and receipts on the shining stainless steel surface.

  With an exasperated sigh Isobel started in on the preliminary examination. She narrated her way around the corpse, finding evidence of at least a dozen separate violent incidents. The most recent set of contusions weren’t even old enough to bruise properly. It looked as if someone had held Jamie down so someone else could punch him repeatedly in the stomach. There were even little marks around his mouth, probably caused by a hand being clamped over it to stop him from screaming. No wonder the poor sod had killed himself.

  And then it was time to open him up, but for once Logan got the feeling Isobel was just going through the motions. She sliced through flesh and tissue in a half-hearted, distracted way, as if there was something else on her mind. Probably what she was going to do to Colin Miller when she got her hands on him. The morgue phone rang while Isobel was lifting out the contents of Jamie’s lower abdomen. Brian scampered off and answered it, speaking in hushed tones, telling whoever it was on the other end that the pathologist was in the middle of someone right now, but if they wanted to call back, she’d be done in about an hour. Pause. Then a hand over the mouthpiece as he simpered at Isobel, ‘I’m sorry, Dr MacAlister, but there’s a phone call for you.’

  She stopped, Jamie’s liver in her hands, speaking slowly and carefully through gritted teeth. ‘I’m busy: take a message!’

  Brian’s face contorted itself into an ingratiating smile. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but they say it’s urgent.’

  Isobel swore under her breath. ‘What is it?’ Brian hurried over to the cutting table, taking the phone with him, holding it to her ear as she severed the last strip of connective tissue and lifted the liver free. ‘Yes, this is Dr MacAlister… What? … No, you’ll have to speak up.’ Jamie’s liver was dark, dark purple, hanging like a vast slug between her gloved fingers. ‘He’s what?’ Her eyes went wide above her mask. ‘Oh my God!’ The liver slapped against the tabletop then slithered to the tiled floor at her feet.

  Isobel turned and ran out of the sterile area, past the fridges, discarding blood-soiled latex gloves, mask and apron on the way. Logan ran after her, catching up as she charged up the stairs to the rear podium. ‘Isobel? Isobel!’ She pointed a key fob at her large Mercedes and jumped in behind the wheel, still wearing her blood-smeared green scrubs. Logan grabbed the door handle before she could slam it shut. ‘Isobel, wait! What is it?’

  ‘I HAVE TO GO!’ She grabbed the door and slammed it shut, flooring the accelerator, leaving twin trails of black rubber on the tarmac.

  ‘Fine,’ he muttered to himself as her car raced down the ramp, round the corner and out of sight. ‘Be like that then.’

  33

  Back in the morgue, Doc Fraser was slowly lumbering his way into a set of surgical greens while Brian washed the little bits of grit and fluff off Jamie McKinnon’s liver. ‘Any idea what that was about?’ asked Logan as Brian patted the slab of purple offal dry with green paper towels.

  ‘No idea,’ he said, laying the thing in a kidney dish. ‘It was the hospital and they said it was urgent, but other than that, nothing.’

  ‘OK, ladies,’ said Doc Fraser, snapping on his latex gloves. ‘If you don’t mind we’ll get through this one sharpish. I’ve still got all those bloody expense forms to fill in.’

  The rest of the post mortem went by in a haze, Doc Fraser cutting, hefting, weighing and examining Jamie’s innards, taking tissue samples for Brian to preserve in tiny plastic tubes full of formalin. It wasn’t long before Brian was stuffing Jamie’s organs back where they’d come from, using a well-practised blanket stitch to sew the body back up again.

  ‘Well,’ said Doc Fraser, pinging his gloves into a pedal bin like elastic bands. ‘I’ll have to go through the Ice Maiden’s tape before I can give you the full monty, but it looks like your boy here didn’t actually die of an overdose. OK, the silly wee bastard shot himself so full of shite there was no way he was going to survive, but it was the diced carrots that killed him.’ Logan looked puzzled. ‘I’d guess,’ said Fraser as Jamie was wheeled past on a gurney, heading for cold storage, ‘that he’d been on the wagon for a bit, so the effects of the dose were magnified. Heroin, and lots of it. There’s a whole heap of diamorphine still in his bloodstream; your lad snuffed it before his system could absorb it all. Fell unconscious and choked on his own vomit. Classic rock star death.’

  Logan nodded sadly. That explained why they’d found the body with the syringe still sticking out of it. Normally a heroin overdose would only kick in a couple of hours after the injection. Then Logan remembered the fresh bruises: the hand clamped over Jamie’s mouth, the marks around the wrists where he’d been held down and punched… Or maybe just held down, the hand preventing him from screaming for help while someone forced a syringe into his arm, saying, ‘No one rats on Malk the Knife!’ He shuddered. That kind of thing would be right up Chib Sutherland’s alley. ‘Any chance he didn’t do it to himself?’

  The pathologist paused, halfway out of his scrubs. ‘Don’t remember Isobel saying anything about it…’ He looked thoughtful for a moment before telling Brian to get Jamie back out of the fridges: they had some more slicing and dicing to do.

  It took Doc Fraser twelve and a half minutes to determine whether or not the overdose was self-inflicted. There was a cluster of old injection points in the crook of Jamie’s arm, the skin rough and pockmarked, and in the middle of them a little black dot ringed with a faint purple halo. Jamie had only been an occasional user, but he would have known better than to ram the needle right through the vein and muscle and into the bone. Doc Fraser dug around with a pair of tweezers, coming out with a sliver of metal that matched the tip of the syringe found with the body. There was only one needle mark, he explained, because the broken needle was only partially withdrawn from the hole, before being pushed into the vein properly. Doc Fraser was embarrassed at having missed it the first time round; he’d thought Isobel had already looked at the injection site, when she’d obvi
ously been saving it for last.

  Logan told him not to worry about it and spent the next hour and a half filling in the usual pile of paperwork and online forms that followed a suspicious death, before printing the whole lot out. He was going to sneak up to DI Steel’s office and dump it in her in-tray while no one was about. Avoid the inevitable confrontation. His conscience got the better of him by the time he’d climbed the stairs: Jamie McKinnon had been murdered and, like it or not, Logan owed it to him to set the wheels in motion properly. With a sigh, he stomped his way up to the inspector’s incident room. It was bedlam: piles of reports; a queue of uniformed officers waiting to present them; mobile whiteboards with maps of various forests stuck to them, clarted in red and blue pen; phones going; people all talking at once. And sitting at the centre of the tornado was DI Steel. Logan took a deep breath and marched up to the front of the queue, sticking his paperwork under the inspector’s nose. She snatched it and skimmed through the first couple of pages, swearing as she read. ‘What the hell do you mean suspected murder? I thought the wee shite was supposed to have killed himself.’

  ‘Looks like he might have had a little help.’

  ‘Fuck, that’s all I bloody need, another sodding murder enquiry.’ She screwed up her face, the wrinkles all aligning into a starburst centred on her nose. ‘And it’s Craiginches! Who the hell’s going to talk to us? Might as well interview the bloody pavement! Waste of bloody time…’ Steel chewed thoughtfully on the inside of her cheek for a bit, then shouted across the room. ‘Rennie! Get your arse over here.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘I have decided to give you a chance to fuck something up all on your ownsome.’ She thrust Logan’s report into the constable’s hands. ‘Read that, then get up to Craiginches and find me whoever killed Jamie McKinnon. I want a written confession and a packet of Embassy Regals on my desk by this time tomorrow.’

  A look of fear crawled over DC Rennie’s face. ‘Ma’am?’