The Blood Road

by Stuart MacBride

  Tufty grinned. ‘Get your clothes on, you filthy sod. You’re utterly nicked!’

  Tufty propelled No-Longer-Naked Norman the Naughty Knob Noodler down the hallway – both hands securely cuffed behind his back in ‘pat the dog’ position.

  The filthy sod snivelled and sniffed. ‘Please, this is all a misunderstanding, yeah?’

  Tufty picked ‘SERGEANT MCRAE’ from the contacts list on his phone and set it ringing as he gave Norman another push towards the front door.

  ‘You don’t have to arrest me: I’m not hurting anyone! How am I hurting anyone?’

  The Sarge’s voice whumped out of the phone, a bit tinny and boomy like he was in a car. ‘Tufty?’

  ‘Guv? I’ve just arrested someone.’ He followed Norman into the rain, grabbing a handful of checked shirt to stop him getting away while the house door got locked.

  ‘Who?’

  A couple of teeny kids danced about on next-door’s lawn in wellies and waterproofs.

  Norman lunged at them. ‘Leo, get Mum, yeah? Please get Mum! Get Mum!’

  Tufty tightened his grip. ‘Shut up you.’ Then pinned the phone between his ear and shoulder so he could dig out the pool car’s keys and plip the locks. ‘Caught him in Chalmers’ house. He’d broken in and was giving himself a wee treat on the garage floor right under where she was hanged.’

  ‘Help! Mr Ghent! Police brutality!’

  On the other side of the road, an old bloke with grey hair and a Metallica T-shirt looked up from putting out his wheelie bin. Sniffed. Then shuffled off to get the recycling.

  ‘Let me guess, hipster hairdo and a brand-new Kermit the Frog tattoo?’

  ‘AKA: Norman Clifton. Stark naked on the floor, hammering away like he was playing Whack-a-Mole.’ He steered the aforementioned pervert towards the parked pool car.

  ‘Bet he’s got another spare key: confiscate it. And did you find that phone yet?’

  Tufty plipped the locks and ‘assisted’ Norman into the back, holding his head down so he wouldn’t bash it on the roof. ‘Not even looked yet, Guv. I’ve been too busy getting No-Longer-Naked Norman here dressed again.’ Tufty thumped the door shut and leaned on the roof. ‘Think he might have something to do with it? Maybe he’s the type who lets himself into other people’s houses in the dead of night and Whack-a-Moles away while they’re lying there sleeping? Maybe he finds Lorna Chalmers all unconscious with booze and antidepressants and decides, “Way-hey, my luck’s in tonight!”’

  ‘Could be. Get him processed and stuck in a cell. And not a nice one either, one of the scabby ones next to someone with a smack habit and Tourette’s. Soon as his solicitor’s had access, I want the hipstery wee pervert in an interview room.’

  ‘Hurrah: finally someone to grill like sausages!’

  ‘No. No sausages for you until you find that phone.’

  Oh poo…

  Tufty sagged. ‘Guv.’ He hung up and opened the car door. Loomed inside with his scary police-officer face on. ‘Right, Norman, one chance and one chance only: how did you get into Mrs Chalmers’ home? Did you break in, or have you got a key? You’ve got a key, haven’t you?’ Tufty stuck his hand out. ‘Give.’

  Norman Clifton blinked at him, bottom lip wobbling like strawberry jelly on a washing machine, and burst into tears.

  A big grey slab sat on the other side of the junction, with ‘THE JAMES HUTTON INSTITUTE’ on it, complete with strange wavy logo and a bunch of arrows pointing the way to various access routes and bits of the campus.

  Steel followed the one marked ‘Reception’, driving through a set of wrought-iron gates and onto a winding, narrow road through the trees. ‘…the upshot of which is: you and Ginger McHotpants take the kids that week and I take Susan to Reykjavik for pickled fish and naked fireside-wriggling on a bearskin rug.’

  Logan put his phone away. ‘OK, one: no. Two: don’t be disgusting. That’s a horrific image to plant in anyone’s mind. And three: stop calling Tara “Ginger McHotpants”!’

  Steel reached across the car and thumped him on the arm. ‘Who are you calling a horrific image? Think your naked body is anyone’s idea of a Monet oil painting? Because I’ve seen it, and believe me, it isn’t.’

  He stared at her. ‘We swore never to talk about that ever again!’

  ‘I still have nightmares.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Well I got Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from seeing your—’

  ‘Don’t!’ Her finger hovered centimetres from his nose. ‘Just don’t.’

  Fair enough.

  The Hutton Institute campus emerged from the trees – an old two-storey granite building tacked onto a massive white shopping-mall-style extension that completely dwarfed it.

  The car park was empty, except for a red Porsche four-by-four parked near the reception.

  Steel slid the pool car in next to it. Then sat there, hands still on the wheel, frowning out at the institute. ‘Might wait here. Dr Famptonstein always gives me the willies with her,’ Steel put on her best B-movie vampire voice, ‘“the soil is the life, ah … hah … haaaaah…” shtick.’

  Logan climbed out. ‘Don’t be such a big boy’s pants. And don’t look at me like that: apparently we’re not allowed to say “big girl’s blouse” any more. It’s sexist.’

  ‘Pfff…’ She locked the car and scuffed her way towards reception. Shaking her head. ‘And they made you an inspector…’

  Dr Frampton fiddled about with what looked like a huge espresso machine, but probably cost about half a million. Pressing buttons with her purple-nitrile-gloved fingers. Peering at the display through a pair of little round glasses.

  The units and workbenches were littered with expensive-looking bits of equipment, sample containers, more equipment, computers, cupboards marked ‘HAZARD!’…

  Steel slouched in the corner, eyes down, poking away at her phone.

  Logan leaned against a worktop – not touching anything. ‘Sorry to drag you in on your day off.’

  Dr Frampton looked up from her … whatever it was. ‘Well, I suppose. I’ve got a conference in South Korea next week so it doesn’t hurt to clear the decks a bit. I can knock off a couple of outstanding analyses before Edward’s got the joint out resting and the roasties in the oven.’ A smile. ‘I’ll be heading off to Seoul with a clear conscience for a change.’ Then over to the screen hooked up to the thing. ‘Come on, little mass spectrometer, work for Mummy…’ A bleep and data filled the screen. ‘There we go.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s a mixture of noncalcareous gleys with peaty gleys, and going by the mineral distribution … that gives us…’ She shuffled across to a desktop computer and punched things into the keyboard. Waved Logan over.

  A map of Aberdeenshire appeared, covered in bruise-pattern swirls of blue and red and yellow and brown and purple.

  ‘The blue bits are all the areas in the northeast with mineral gleys, but ours are from this bit, west of Newtonhill.’ A click and the map zoomed in. ‘Our samples also contain coprostanol and 24-ethyl coprostanol, plus an unusually high ratio of plant sterols to fatty alcohol levels—’

  ‘Doctor?’ Logan gave her a pained smile. ‘Bearing in mind that we don’t all have PhDs in organic chemistry…’

  ‘Sorry. OK, in layperson’s terms: we’ve got good biomarkers for faeces here. Most likely porcine. So you’d be looking for a pig farm…’ Her fingers danced across the keyboard again. ‘Which gives us eight possible locations, but when we factor in the organic aggregates…’ Clickity click. ‘Et voila.’

  She made a flourishing hand gesture and turned the screen to face Logan.

  He peered in closer. A blue amoeba sat in the middle of a yellow splodge, overlaid on an Ordnance Survey map. West of Portlethen, not far from where the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route carved its way through the countryside. ‘And you’re sure?’

  ‘The soil never lies, Logan. It speaks to us from beyond the grave, whispering its secrets to those prepared to listen.’

&n
bsp; Steel didn’t bother looking up from her phone. Just took a deep breath and went, ‘Ah … hah … haaaaa…’

  ‘And in this case, I mean that literally. There are traces of cadaverine in the sample. And where there’s cadaverine…?’

  Great.

  Logan covered his face with his hands. ‘Oh God, not another dead body…’

  29

  Steel kicked a stone across the weed-flecked concrete, phone clamped to her ear. ‘Nah, I’m fannying about on a disused pig farm in the middle of sodding nowhere.’

  It must have been quite impressive in its day, but that day was long gone. Someone had panned in all the farmhouse windows – possibly the same someone that had daubed ‘MALKY WAZ HERE!!!’ across the front of it in drippy red paint. The house was surrounded by a collection of crumbling outbuildings, their corrugated-metal roofs sagging in rusty grandeur.

  A huge metal barn stood off to one side, the far corner collapsed – trapping big round bales of rotting hay beneath.

  Logan turned.

  Downhill, the fields were a mess. Thigh-high swathes of docken and reeds. Uphill, it wasn’t much better. Whin and broom hunched in jagged green herds, reaching along the fence line as if they planned on devouring the place.

  Steel sent another stone on its clattering way. ‘Oh come on, Susan! Don’t blame me, it’s no’ my fault.’

  Between the farmyard and the devouring gorse lay the decomposing hulks of about two hundred pig arks, their dull brown semi-circular roofs making a regular grid pattern across the hillside. And right at the top, diggers and bulldozers growled, prowling the ridge.

  Posts and ropes and survey poles marked out a strip of land from there, straight down the hill, through the farmyard, the outbuildings, the farmhouse, and out the other side. Wide enough to fit two lanes, a central reservation, and the road verges either side.

  Goodbye, Nairhillock Farm.

  Logan wandered over to the farmhouse.

  ‘What?’ Steel raised her voice, no doubt making sure he could hear her. ‘Because, Buggerlugs McRae thinks it’s OK to drag me in on my day off to ferry him about the place. … Aye, I told him that too.’

  The door was wasp-stripped and swollen. The grey wood flecked with speckles of red paint. He gave it a couple of kicks. It juddered in an inch – so not locked – then wedged to a halt.

  ‘What? No! Did she?’ A throaty laugh. ‘Bet she did…’

  Logan waded into the weeds and around the side. More weeds. And no sign that anyone else had tried to force their way through them.

  He pushed between rattling spears of rosebay willowherb, sending puffs of white drifting off into the dank air. Peered in the windows.

  A bedroom rotted on the other side of the broken glass, its lath and plaster swollen and distended, freckled with mould and mildew. What was left of a wooden bedframe and a sagging mattress.

  The back door was swollen and jammed too.

  Living room – peeling wallpaper, manky furniture, a swathe of bird droppings beneath a couple of house martin nests up in the corner.

  Kitchen – crumbling units with the doors hanging off, a hole in the wall the size of a bulldog, an ancient range cooker puffed up with rust. The remains of a table and skeletal chairs. All the charm of a biopsy.

  He stepped out in front of the building again.

  Steel was still mooching about. ‘I don’t know, do I? Depends when Herr Oberleutnant Von Arseface decides to stop wasting everyone’s time with this jiggery piggery pokery.’

  Logan crossed the yard, making for the metal farm gate – wide open on sagging hinges.

  ‘You liked that did you?… Yeah, thought you would.’

  He leaned on it, frowning.

  All those rusty pig arks, stretching up the hill. Regular as the squares on a chessboard.

  The grass was tussocked and dark green, littered with thick-stalked docken – the colour of dried blood. Animal trails snaked away through the undergrowth.

  ‘So, come on then: what are you wearing?’

  Logan climbed onto the gate.

  ‘Well, that’s no’ very erotic, is it? Joggy bottoms? Least you could do is make something sexy up!’

  More dark grass. More docken…

  There – a rectangle of lime-green grass, about a hundred feet into the field. From the ground, it’d been hidden behind one of the pig arks, but from up here on the gate it stood out like a neon sign. And now he’d seen it, it was obvious what else was wrong with the scene. The pig ark in front of that lime-green rectangle wasn’t in line with the others. Two-hundred-odd rusty metal semicircles and this was the only one out of place.

  ‘Ooh, that’s better!’

  He clambered down from the gate and waded into the grass, keeping clear of the animal trails. No point disturbing potential evidence.

  Steel gave a dirty chuckle. ‘You saucy minx…’

  A perfect rectangle of pale green, peppered with the twisted, stunted stalks of docken. Like they’d been covered with something for a long time, sheltered from the light. The grass between it and the misplaced pig ark was flattened and torn, gouged with scrape marks that ended at the mini Anderson-shelter shape.

  Logan peered inside.

  The grass inside the pig ark was dark green, but rutted and mismatched, filthy with clods of soil. A brown seam marked the joint between the clumps and the rest of the field. Spade marks?

  He squatted down, grabbed a handful of grass and pulled. A chunk, about the size of a placemat, lifted away like a grimy toupee revealing churned earth underneath.

  Logan curled his top lip. Sniffed.

  There was something lurking beneath the rich dark-brown scent of newly turned earth. Something… He leaned in and sniffed again.

  Gah!

  Rancid meat. Like a stack of suppurating roadkill, or those floorboards at the foot of his stairs.

  He stood, wiped his hands on his trousers. Backed away from the ark.

  Steel’s voice battered out behind him. ‘Hoy! You finished twatting about yet?’

  Logan turned and pulled his phone out.

  She tapped her watch. ‘Lunchtime!’

  It took three rings for someone to pick up. ‘Control.’

  ‘Yes. This is Inspector McRae: I’m going to need an SE team.’ He peered into the sty again. ‘And tell them to bring their shovels.’

  The sky darkened like a bruise.

  The Scenes Examination Transit sat next to Logan’s pool car, its back doors open – exposing the cages of equipment and rows of seating inside. A scruffy blue Fiat Panda four-by-four was parked on the other side, with an immaculate Range Rover nearest the farmhouse.

  Isobel checked her watch. ‘Is this going to take long? I have DNA results pending.’

  Logan shrugged. ‘Don’t look at me: I told Control to let you know what was going on, not get you out here.’

  A blue plastic marquee hid the pig ark from view. The lightning-flash of photography made the walls glow, casting the silhouettes inside as larger-than-life distorted monsters.

  Someone in full SOC regalia exited the tent, carrying a blue plastic evidence crate, lugging it towards the farmyard.

  The Procurator Fiscal clasped his hands behind his back, feet shoulder-width apart, as if he was at parade rest. Not the tallest of men, in a blue pinstripe suit and long red tie. Glasses, grey hair, and a military moustache. A voice about three times larger than he was: ‘There might not even be a body in there. Cadaverine does not a human cadaver make, it could be a dead dog, or chicken…’ He looked around him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Or pig.’

  Oh for God’s sake.

  Logan sighed. ‘Look, I called Control and asked for an SE team, OK? It’s not my fault they mobilised everyone and their Uncle Jim.’

  ‘So you say.’ Isobel folded her arms. ‘I managed to pull what looks like saliva from DS Chalmers’ cheek, two centimetres below her left eye.’

  ‘What, someone spat on her?’

  ‘Not spat, no. The saliva acted
as an adhesive, fixing the hairs on that part of her cheek upwards: opposite to their direction of growth. So I’d say whoever it was licked her.’

  The Procurator Fiscal’s moustache twitched. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the saliva belongs to our killer and he’s in the database?’

  She shook her head. ‘We won’t know until the results come in.’

  A filthy Vauxhall lurched its way up the rutted farm track towards them. Because it wasn’t as if Logan didn’t have enough people to deal with.

  The SE tech with the evidence crate stopped in front of Logan and pulled down their facemask – revealing scarlet lipstick, stubble and a deep manly voice. ‘That’s us finished with the fingerprints and photographs.’

  Behind him, two of his fellow SOC-suited techs backed out of the marquee, hauling the pig ark with them, one foot at a time. A lone voice wafted down the hill, ‘One, two, three: heave!’ The ark moved another foot.

  Logan peered into the crate – brown paper evidence envelopes, the forms printed on them all filled in with red biro. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Nah.’ He shook his head. ‘A bunch of smudges and that’s it. I’m not going to bet the farm on it, but I’d say they looked like leather gloves. You can tell by the grain patterns.’ He stomped off towards the van. ‘Gotta go get the shovels.’

  ‘One, two, three: heave!’

  The Procurator Fiscal rocked on his parade-ground shiny shoes. ‘I don’t like it when murderers lick the people they kill. Next thing you know, you’ve got three more victims and the media are screaming “Serial Killer Stalks Aberdeenshire!”’

  ‘One, two, three: heave!’

  The filthy Vauxhall lumped to a halt beside the SE Transit and DS Robertson climbed out. She stared up at the hill with its blue marquee, then stomped over. Nodded at the PF and Isobel. ‘Professor. Fiscal.’ Grimaced at Logan. ‘Could you not give over discovering dead bodies, Guv? The boss is doing his nut. I swear he’s going to pop something.’

  The Procurator Fiscal held up a finger. ‘Now let’s not jump to any conclusions. It’s not necessarily a dead human body, DS Robertson. Cadaverine is produced by—’