Insch dropped him off at his flat, and Logan watched the car scrunch its way carefully down the street and away before letting himself in. The little red light was flashing away on his answering machine. For a brief second, Logan thought it might be WPC Jackie Watson, but when he pressed play it was Miller’s voice that crackled out of the speakers. He’d heard about Roadkill being stabbed and wanted an exclusive update.
Grunting, Logan hit ‘DELETE’ and slumped off to bed.
Wednesday started as it meant to go on. Just out of the shower, Logan was too slow to get the phone before the answering machine kicked in. Another call from Miller wanting Logan to spill the beans. Logan didn’t bother picking up; just let the reporter prattle away to himself as he went through to the kitchen to fix himself some tea and toast.
On the way out of the flat he paused for just long enough to delete Miller’s message without listening to it. He doubted it would be the last call he’d get from the reporter today.
The morning briefing was a subdued affair, with DI Insch doing a lot of yawning as he took everyone through the events of last night, both at the hospital and in interview room number three. The order of the day was going to be door-to-door. Again.
Logan hung back at the end of the briefing, sharing a smile with WPC Watson as she filed out to start questioning doctors, nurses and patients. He still owed her a pint.
Insch was parked in his usual spot, on the edge of the desk, one haunch up on the wood while he rummaged through his suit pockets for something sweet. ‘Sure I had some fruit pastilles. . .’ he muttered as Logan came up and asked him what the plan was for the morning. Coming up empty on the confectionery front, he asked Logan to get Cameron Anderson into an interview room on his own. ‘You know the drill,’ he said. ‘Nice burly PC standing in the corner glowering at him for a bit. That’ll make his sphincter clench.’
By the time nine o’clock came around Cameron Anderson had been sitting in a baking-hot interview room, with a hostile-looking PC for nearly an hour and, as Inch had predicted, he was squirming.
‘Mr Anderson,’ said Insch with zero warmth as they finally sat down to begin the interview. ‘How nice of you to take time out of your busy, busy schedule!’ Cameron looked terrified and exhausted, as if he’d been up all night crying.
‘I take it,’ said Insch, helping himself to a fruit sherbet, ‘that you’ve concocted some other miraculous interpretation for the evening’s events? Perhaps aliens did it?’
Cameron’s hands trembled on the tabletop. His voice was thin and quiet, shaking like his hands. ‘Geordie and me never met until I was ten. His mum went down with breast cancer, so he came to live with us. He was bigger than me. . .’ Cameron’s voice dropped so low that Logan had to ask him to speak up for the tape. ‘He did things. He. . .’ A single tear ran down his cheek. Cameron bit his lip and told them about his brother.
Geordie had come up from Edinburgh three weeks earlier. He was doing some business for his boss. Something to do with getting planning permission. He was spending money like it was going out of fashion. Gambling mostly. Only he wasn’t winning. Then the thing with the planner didn’t work. He’d spent all the bribe money by then anyway. So he tried threats. And then he had to get out of town quick.
‘He pushed the planner under a bus,’ said Insch. ‘He’s in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary with a shattered skull and pelvis. He’s going to die.’
Cameron didn’t look up, just went on with his story. ‘A week later Geordie comes back. Said his employer wanted to know what had happened to all the money. He didn’t have it and there were people from the bookies coming round to my flat. They took Geordie away. When he came back the next day he was peeing blood.’ He shuddered, his eyes glistening. ‘But Geordie had a plan. He said someone was looking for something special. Something he could get his hands on.’
Logan scooted forward in his chair. That was what Miller had said. That someone was after ‘livestock’.
‘I didn’t see him again for a couple of days. He had this big suitcase with him and there was this girl inside. She was drugged. He . . . he said she was the answer to all our troubles. He was going to sell her to this man and get enough to pay off the bookies and give his boss the bribe money back. No one was going to miss her.’
‘What was her name?’ asked Logan, his voice cold in the oppressive heat of the room.
Cameron shrugged, the tears beginning to well up over his bottom lid, a small sparkling drip forming at the end of his nose. ‘I . . . I don’t know. She was foreign. From somewhere Russian I think. Her mother was a tart in Edinburgh, brought over special. Only she died of an overdose. So the kid was, you know, going spare. . .’ He sniffed. ‘Geordie bagged her up before anyone else came to claim her.’
‘So you and your brother were going to sell a four-year-old girl to some sick bastard?’ The menace in Insch’s voice wasn’t very well concealed. Colour had risen up the fat man’s cheeks and his eyes sparked like black diamonds.
‘I had nothing to do with it! It was him! It was always him. . .’
Insch glowered, but said nothing more.
‘She couldn’t speak any English, so he taught her to say things. You know,’ he buried his head in his trembling hands, ‘dirty things. She didn’t know what they meant.’
‘And so you abused her. You taught her to say: “fuck me in the ass” and then you made her do it.’
‘No! No! We couldn’t. . .’ A blush raced over his face. ‘Geordie said she had to be, you know, still a virgin.’
Logan’s face creased up in disgust. ‘So you made her suck your dick?’
‘It was Geordie’s idea! He made me do it!’ The tears spilled down Cameron’s face. ‘Only once. I only did it once. When the old man came round. He was beating up Geordie and I tried to stop him. Then the girl came in and she’s saying these things Geordie taught her. And she grabs the old man and he pushes her away and she falls and hits her head and she’s dead.’ He looked imploringly into Insch’s cold eyes. ‘He told me he was going to kill Geordie, then he was coming back for me!’ Cameron rubbed the back of his sleeve over his eyes, wiping away the tears. But more sprang up in their place. ‘I had to get rid of her! She was lying on the fireplace and she was naked and dead. I tried to cut her up, but I couldn’t. It was. . . it was. . .’ he shuddered and wiped at his eyes again. ‘So I wrapped her up in tape. I . . . poured bleach in her mouth to . . . you know . . . make it clean again.’
‘Then you had to find a bin-bag to put her in.’
Cameron nodded and a sparkling drop fell from his nose, splashing onto the tabletop between his trembling hands.
‘And then you threw her out with the trash.’
‘Yes . . . I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. . .’
After his statement, after Cameron Anderson had admitted sexually abusing a four-year-old girl, they put him back into his cell and arranged for him to appear in the Sheriff Court the next day. There wasn’t any celebration. Somehow, after Cameron’s confession, no one was in the mood.
Back in the incident room Logan sighed and unpinned the little girl’s photo from the wall, feeling hollow inside. Catching the man who had abused her and disposed of her body as if it was nothing more than household rubbish, had left him feeling dirty by association. Ashamed to be human.
Insch settled himself down on the edge of the table and helped Logan stack up the statements. ‘Wonder if we’ll ever know who she was?’
Logan scrubbed at his face with his hands, feeling the first rasp of stubble under his fingers. ‘I doubt it,’ he said.
‘Anyway,’ Insch dumped the statements into the case file and gave an expansive yawn, ‘we’ve still got enough on our plate to worry about.’
Roadkill.
This time they took one of the pool cars to the hospital, WPC Watson driving.
Aberdeen Royal Infirmary was a lot busier than it had been the night before. They arrived just in time to see lunch getting se
rved: something boiled with boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage.
‘Remind me to go private,’ said Insch as they passed a housekeeper trundling a steaming trolley that reeked of cabbage.
They gathered all the PCs who’d been questioning the patients and staff together in an empty day room to get their updates. There wasn’t much worth listening to, but they went through them all anyway, thanking the uniformed officers for their work. No one had seen, or heard anything. They’d even been through the security tapes: no blood-soaked figures running off into the night.
The inspector gave something like a rousing speech, and sent them all back to work. That left only Logan and Watson. ‘You two better go make yourselves useful too,’ said Insch, beginning the familiar hunt through his suit. ‘I’m off to speak to that doctor we saw last night.’ He ambled off, still hunting for the elusive confectionery.
‘So,’ said WPC Watson, trying to sound efficient. ‘Where do you want to start?’
Logan thought about her legs, poking out from beneath his T-shirt in the kitchen. ‘Er. . .’ he said, deciding that now was neither the time nor the place. ‘How about we go take a look at those security tapes. See if there’s anything that’s been missed.’
‘You’re the boss,’ she said and threw in a jaunty little salute.
Logan tried to keep his mind on work as they walked through the hospital, making for the security guard’s station. But it wasn’t working. ‘You know,’ he finally mustered the courage to say as they reached the lift. ‘I still owe you a pint from last night.’
Watson nodded. ‘I hadn’t forgotten, sir.’
‘Good.’ He punched the lift button and tried to look casual, resting against the railing that ran round the inside of the elevator. ‘How about tonight?’
‘Tonight?’
Logan felt the colour starting to rise into his cheeks. ‘If you’re busy it’s OK. You know, some other night. . .’ Idiot.
The lift shuddered to a halt and WPC Watson smiled at him. ‘Tonight would be good.’
Logan was too happy to say anything else until they got to the security room. It was compact: a long black desk with a wall of little television screens above it. A bank of video recorders whirled away, taping everything that went on. And in the middle of all this sat a youngish man with bleached-blond hair and spots dressed in standard security-guard brown with yellow trimmings and a peaked cap. Looking like a jobbie in a hat.
He explained that there were no security cameras watching the room where the murder took place, but they did have them in all the main corridors, A&E, and all the exits. Some of the wards had them too, but there were ‘issues’ with videoing sick people getting medical attention. Privacy and stuff.
There was a pile of tapes from the previous night. The search team had already been through them, but if Logan wanted to have another pass it was OK by him.
That was when Logan’s mobile phone went off, the sound loud and intrusive in the small room.
‘You know,’ said the guard sternly, ‘mobile phones have to be switched off!’
Logan apologized, but this would only take a minute.
It was Miller again. ‘Laz! Beginning to think you’d fallen off the arse of the earth, man.’
‘I’m kind of busy right now,’ said Logan, turning his back on the spotty youth with the turd-brown uniform. ‘Is it urgent?’
‘Kinda depends on what your point of view is. You anywhere near a telly?’
‘What?’
‘Television. Moving pictures—’
‘I know what television is.’
‘Aye, well, if you’re near one: turn it on. Grampian.’
‘Can you get regular television on any of these things?’ Logan asked the security jobbie.
The spotted youth said no, but Logan could try one of the rooms down the corridor.
Three minutes later they stood in front of a flickering television screen with an American soap opera dribbling away on it. Behind them, on the bed, an old woman with purple-rinsed hair was snoring it up, her teeth floating in a glass.
‘Gee, Adelaide,’ said a suntanned blond with perfect teeth and a washboard stomach. ‘Are you saying that baby’s mine?’
Dramatic music, close-up of over-made-up brunette with pneumatic breasts; cut to commercial. Stair-lifts. Crisps. Washing powder. And then the face of Gerald Cleaver filled the screen. He was sitting in a wingback leather chair, wearing a cardigan, looking all avuncular and wholesome. ‘They tried to make me look like a monster!’ he said and the camera cut to a shot of him walking a jolly labrador. ‘They accused me of terrible crimes I didn’t commit!’ Another camera jump, this time to Cleaver sitting on a low drystone dyke, looking earnest and pained. ‘Read about my year of hell, only in this week’s News of the World!’
‘Oh God,’ said Logan as the paper’s logo spun on the screen. ‘That’s all we need.’
34
Logan and Watson grumbled their way back to the security office. Berating the paper and its decision to give Gerald Cleaver money for his story. The spotty youth in the shitty-brown uniform was in the process of charging into action, straightening his peaked cap as he went.
‘Trouble?’ asked WPC Watson.
‘Someone’s stealing Mars Bars from the gift shop!’ And off he ran.
They watched him disappear round the corner, feet and elbows flying in his haste to reach the scene of the crime. Watson gave a wry smile. ‘How the other half live. . .’
A second security guard – a heavy-set man in his early fifties, with a comb-over and eyebrows like a terrier – was now manning the console. He was swigging from a bottle of Lucozade, his head buried in a copy of the morning’s paper. ‘KIDDIE-KILLER SUSPECT STABBED TO DEATH!’ was splashed across the front page. When Logan told him why they were there, he grunted and waved at a pile of labelled video tapes.
Settling down at a console with a tape player, Logan and Watson started to wade their way through the videos. The search team that had been here before had made things a lot easier, winding the tapes forward to when Roadkill was murdered. Slowly, Logan and Watson worked their way through them all, the security guard slugging away at his Lucozade and sucking his teeth in the background.
Figures jumped and jerked across the screen, the camera only taking one frame every three or four seconds, making everything look like experimental Canadian animation. The faces were pretty blurred, but it was still possible to make people out when they got closer to the camera. Half an hour later Logan had recognized a handful of the hundreds of faces that had drifted through various parts of the hospital: the doctor who’d treated Desperate Doug; the nurse who thought he was a monster for beating up an old man; the PC who was supposed to be guarding the geriatric hitman; the doctor who’d declared death on Roadkill last night; the surgeon who’d spent seven hours stitching Logan’s insides back together; and Nurse Henderson, her black eye clearly visible on the tape as she stomped along, dressed in her street clothes – rugby shirt, trainers and jeans, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder.
‘How many more tapes have we got to go?’ asked Logan as Watson gave a huge yawn and stretch.
‘Sorry, sir,’ she said, composing herself. ‘Two more exit tapes and that’s the lot.’
Logan slipped the next one into the machine. A side entrance to the hospital. Faces flashed by, talking and laughing, or people with their heads down as they stepped into the biting wind. Nothing suspicious. The last one was the main A&E reception area. The tape here ran at normal speed, ready to capture the all too common flare-ups of antisocial behaviour that came with a hard night’s drinking. Logan recognized more faces here: he’d arrested a lot of them. Peeing in doorways, petty larceny, vandalism. One bloke had been done for ‘giving himself a treat’ in Union Terrace gardens with a wine bottle. But again, there was nothing out of the ordinary here. Not if you didn’t count the sudden explosion as two staggering drunks launched themselves at a huge bounc
er who had his arm in a makeshift sling. Screams, overturned chairs, more blood. Nurses trying to pry them apart. And then, at last, a blurry police constable charged into the crowded room and put an end to the whole thing with three liberal doses of CS spray. After that it was mostly rolling about on the ground, screaming. But no sign of Roadkill’s murderer.
Logan sat back in his seat and rubbed at his eyes. The time stamp on the video said ten-twenty. The PC with the CS spray stayed to make sure everyone was still alive. Ten twenty-five: PC hero accepts a cup of tea before returning to his vigil outside Roadkill’s door. Ten-thirty . . . Logan was getting bored with this. They weren’t going to find anything on the tapes.
And that was when Nurse Henderson came back into view, the black eye a lot more noticeable. Logan frowned and paused the tape.
‘What?’ Watson squinted at the tableau.
‘Notice something?’
WPC Watson confessed that she didn’t, so Logan tapped the screen, right on top of Nurse Henderson, still carrying the overnight bag. ‘She’s wearing her uniform.’
‘So?’
‘She was wearing her civilian clothes in the other tape.’
Watson shrugged. ‘So she got changed.’
‘She’s still carrying the bag. If she got changed, why didn’t she leave her bag in the lockers?’
‘Maybe they don’t have lockers?’
Logan asked the older security guard if the nurses’ changing room had lockers in it.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘But if you think I’m showin’ you a video tape of nurses gettin’ changed: you’ve got another bloody think comin’!’
‘This is a murder investigation!’
‘I don’t care. You’re no’ seein’ any tape of naked nurses.’
Logan bristled. ‘Listen, sunshine—’
‘We’ve no got cameras in there.’ He grinned, showing a perfect set of dentures. ‘We tried, but the governors were havin’ none of it. Didn’t trust us to keep our minds on the job. Shame. I coulda made a fortune floggin’ those tapes. . .’
Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae) Page 35
