The administration centre of the hospital was nicer than the bit sick people occupied. Here the smell of antiseptic on squeaky linoleum was exchanged for carpet and fresh air. Logan found himself a helpful young woman with bleached-blonde hair and an Irish accent and sweet-talked her into going through last night’s shift records.
‘Here you go,’ she said, pointing to a screenful of numbers and dates on her computer. ‘Nurse Michelle Henderson. . . Did a double shift last night. Got off at about half-nine.’
‘Half-nine? Thanks: thanks a lot. You’ve been very helpful.’
She smiled back at him, pleased to have been of assistance. If there was anything else she could do for him, just give her a call. Anytime. She even gave him a business card. Luckily Logan didn’t see the look on WPC Watson’s face as he accepted it.
‘Well?’ she demanded as they rode the lift back to the ground floor.
‘Henderson gets off shift at nine-thirty. Nine-fifty she’s on camera, changed and ready to go home. Ten-thirty she’s back in her uniform again, leaving the building.’ Watson opened her mouth, but Logan carried on, grim triumph in his voice. ‘We were looking for someone covered in blood. Mrs Henderson just got changed and walked right out of there as if nothing ever happened.’
They grabbed a pair of uniformed officers from the search party and called back to base. DI Insch was not in the best of moods when the call was put through: he sounded as if someone had been massaging his backside with red-hot pokers. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demanded, before Logan could get a word in. ‘I’ve been trying to call you for the last hour!’
‘Still at the hospital, sir. All mobile phones have to be switched off. . .’ But mostly he’d switched it off so Colin Miller couldn’t call him back.
‘Never mind that! Another kid’s gone missing!’
Logan felt his heart sink. ‘Oh no. . .’
‘Aye. I want you to get your arse over here to Duthie Park: the Winter Gardens. I’m pulling in all the search teams. Bloody weather’s getting worse, snow’s going to make any evidence we’ve got disappear. This is now our number one priority!’
‘Sir, I’m just on my way to arrest Nurse Michelle Henderson—’
‘Who?’
‘Lorna Henderson’s mother. The kid we found in Roadkill’s steading. She was at the hospital last night. She blames Roadkill for her daughter’s death and the break-up of her marriage. Motive and opportunity. The Fiscal agrees: apprehension and search warrants.’
There was a moment’s silence on the other end of the phone, then a muffled conversation as Insch gave someone else a hard time. And then the inspector was back. ‘OK,’ he said, sounding as if he was about to clobber someone. ‘Pick her up, chuck her in a cell and get your backside over here. Roadkill’s not getting any more dead. This kid might still be alive.’
They stood on the top step in the snow while Logan rang the doorbell again. ‘Greensleeves’ started up for the fourth time.
Watson asked Logan if he wanted her to kick it down, her breath fogging in the chilly air, nose and cheeks bright red. Behind them the two uniforms they’d liberated from the hospital search team expressed their agreement. Anything to get out of the freezing cold.
He was just about to give her the nod when the door opened a crack and Nurse Michelle Henderson’s face appeared. Her hair looked like a chimpanzee had slept in it.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked, the chain still on the door. Her words reeked of stale gin.
‘Open up, Mrs Henderson.’ Logan held up his warrant card. ‘You remember us. We need to talk to you about what happened last night.’
She bit her lip and looked at the four of them, standing there like carrion crows against the falling snow. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I have to get ready for work.’
She went to close the door, but WPC Watson already had her boot wedged into the thin gap. ‘Open up or I’ll break it down.’
Mrs Henderson looked alarmed. ‘You can’t do that!’ she said, clutching the neck of her dressing gown closed.
Logan nodded and pulled a thin sheaf of paper from his inside pocket. ‘We can. But we don’t have to. Open up.’
She let them in.
It was like stepping into an oven. Michelle Henderson’s little flat was a lot tidier than it had been the last time they were here. Everything was dusted, the carpet hoovered, even the Cosmopolitans on the coffee table had been stacked in a neat pile. She sank into one of the lumpy brown armchairs, drawing her knees up under her chin, like a small child. It made her bathrobe fall open and when Logan sat on the sofa he took care not to avail himself of the view.
‘You know why we’re here, don’t you, Michelle?’ he said.
She wouldn’t look him in the eye.
Logan let the silence grow.
‘I . . . I have to get ready for work,’ she said, but made no move to get up, just hugged her knees all the tighter.
‘What did you do with the weapon, Mrs Henderson?’
‘If I’m late then Margaret can’t get away. She has a toddler to pick up from nursery. I can’t be late. . .’
Logan gave the nod and the pair of PCs left the lounge to give the house a quick once-over.
‘You got blood all over your clothes, didn’t you?’
She flinched, but didn’t say anything.
‘Did you plan it?’ Logan asked. ‘Make him pay for what he did to your daughter?’
More silence.
‘We’ve got you on tape, Mrs Henderson.’
She stared hard at a spot on the carpet that had somehow eluded the hoover.
‘Sir?’
Logan looked up to see one of the PCs standing in the doorway clutching a mound of blanched clothes. There was a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, rugby shirt, two socks and a pair of trainers all bleached almost white.
‘Found these hanging over a radiator in the kitchen. They’re still damp.’
‘Mrs Henderson?’
No response.
Logan sighed. ‘Michelle Henderson, I’m arresting you for the murder of one Bernard Duncan Philips.’
Duthie Park was a well-manicured stretch of parkland on the banks of the River Dee, complete with duck pond, bandstand and fake Cleopatra’s Needle. It was a favourite spot for families, its wide-open spaces and ranks of mature trees giving plenty of scope for children to play. Even buried under a foot of crisp white snow there were signs of life. Snowmen in various stages of construction punctuated the white plain like standing stones: silent watchmen, lords of all they surveyed.
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 Ins
pector 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.
Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae) Page 36
