‘Afternoon, sir,’ said Logan, squelching in, hands in his pockets, damp underwear beginning to make its presence felt.
Insch looked up from his paperwork, the chocolate-toffee-lattice sticking out of his large, pink face like a DNA-shaped cigar. ‘Sergeant.’ He nodded and went back to his reports. Two minutes later he handed them to a harassed-looking, cadaverous WPC and told her she was doing a great job, no matter what anyone else said. The admin officer didn’t bother to thank him. As she stormed off back to the collating, Insch turned and beckoned Logan over. ‘Bit overdressed for bath time aren’t you?’
Logan didn’t rise to the bait. ‘I was wondering how you were getting on with your fatal arson attack.’
Insch frowned, the strip lighting gleaming off his bald, pink head. Suspicious. ‘Why?’
‘Got a possible ID for one of your victims: Graham Kennedy. Supposed to have been a minor dealer.’ That made a smile blossom on the inspector’s face.
‘Well, well, well. There’s a name I’ve not heard in a while. You—’ Insch picked a PC at random and sent him off to phone round the dental practices in Aberdeen. Insch wanted to know who treated Graham Kennedy: dental records, X-rays the whole lot. It was the only way they were going to identify his charred corpse in the morgue. For once luck was actually on their side; the fourth dental practice the PC tried had done a whole heap of fillings on one Graham Kennedy less than eight months ago.
They couriered the X-rays straight over to the morgue and ten minutes later Doc Fraser confirmed the identification: Graham Kennedy was now officially dead. The enquiry finally had somewhere to start.
Insch grabbed PC Steve and told him to go get everything Records had on Graham Kennedy and meet them in the car park, then bellowed for a DS Beattie to get his backside in gear: they were going to break the news to Graham Kennedy’s next of kin. And have a bit of a rummage through his things.
‘Er, sir,’ said Logan, following in the inspector’s wake, ‘I kinda hoped I could come with you on the shout?’
Insch raised an eyebrow and mashed the lift button with a fat finger. ‘Oh aye? And what about DI Steel? You’re supposed to be working for her. “More immediate supervision”, remember?’
Logan opened and closed his mouth. ‘Come on, sir! I didn’t ask to be transferred! And anyway, it’s my day off. I’ve—’
‘You’ve got a day off and you want to go on a shout?’ Insch looked at him suspiciously. ‘You gone mental or something?’
‘Please, sir. I need to get out of Steel’s team. It’s driving me mad! Nothing gets done by the book: even if we do get a result, it’s going to be so tainted any defence lawyer worth half a fart will tear it to shreds! If I don’t get some sort of success under my belt, I’m going to be stuck there till they fire me, or I go completely off my head.’
Insch shook his head, a small smile on his face. ‘I hate to see a grown man beg.’ A puffing, bearded detective sergeant appeared at the end of the corridor, dragging on a huge, multicoloured weatherproof jacket. DI Insch waited until he’d run the length of the corridor and come to a screeching halt in front of them, before telling him he wasn’t needed after all. He’d be taking DS McRae along instead. Swearing quietly, the bearded bloke slouched back the way he’d come.
The inspector grinned. ‘Just like to see the fat wee bugger run for his money,’ he said happily. Logan knew better than to say anything about pots and kettles.
As they marched downstairs to the car park, Insch quizzed him on DI Steel’s cases, wanting to know everything about the battered prostitute and the Labrador in the suitcase. And by the time they were through all that, a red-faced PC Steve Jacobs was waiting for them by the back door, clutching a small stack of A4 printouts: Graham Kennedy’s rap sheet. Insch pointed his key fob at a muck-encrusted Range Rover and plipped open the locks. ‘Right,’ he said, striding out into the rain, ‘PC Jacobs, you can do the honours. DS McRae, in the back, and don’t stand on the dog food.’
The inside of Insch’s car smelled as if something wet and shaggy had set up residence. There was a big metal grille separating the back seat from the boot and a soggy, black nose was pressed against it as soon as Logan clambered into place, trying not to tread on the jumbo-sized bag of Senior Dog Mix in the foot well. Lucy – the inspector’s ancient Springer Spaniel – was pretty, in a manipulative, big-brown-eyed kind of way, but every time it rained she stank like a tramp on a bad day.
‘Where to, sir?’ asked PC Steve as they cruised slowly up Queen Street.
‘Hmm?’ The inspector was already immersed in Graham Kennedy’s file. ‘Oh, Kettlebray Crescent: let’s get our esteemed colleague’s opinion on the scene of the crime before we go tell Kennedy’s granny her wee boy’s dead. . . And the car does come with an accelerator, Constable: pedal on the floor, next to the big rectangular one. Try and use it, or we’ll be here till bloody Christmas.’
Fourteen Kettlebray Crescent was a mess. Vacant windows stared out at the street, surrounded by dark streaks of soot. The roof was gone, collapsed in on itself as the flames raged through the building. Now faint, rainy daylight filtered into the house’s shabby interior. The buildings on either side hadn’t fared too badly; the fire brigade had arrived quickly enough to save them. But not the six people who’d been in number fourteen. Insch grabbed an umbrella from the boot and marched off into the fire-ravaged house, leaving Logan and PC Steve to scurry along behind getting wet. A mobile incident room was abandoned outside the building: a cross between a Portakabin and a caravan, only without the windows. The standard black-and-white checked ribbon ran around the outside, with the SEMPER VIGILO thistle logo in the middle. Like a bow on a grubby, unwanted Christmas present.
They ducked under the blue-and-white POLICE tape stretched across the burnt-out building’s garden gate and walked up the path to the front door. It was hanging off its hinges, battered in by the fire brigade as soon as they realized someone was actually in there, but by then it was too late. Logan stopped at the doorframe: there were about two dozen three-inch screws poking through the wood, their shiny steel points grabbing the space where the door should have been. Inside it was like something out of Better Homes and Infernos. The walls in the hallway were stripped back to the plaster and lathe, black and covered in soot. ‘Er . . . sir?’ asked PC Steve, hanging back, peering into the gutted building from the outside. ‘Are you sure this is safe?’
The upper floor was missing, leaving the building little more than a burnt-out shell, the ground floor covered in broken slates and charcoaled wooden beams. Rain fell steadily through the gaping hole where the roof used to be, drumming off the inspector’s brolly. He stood in a relatively clear patch and pointed up at one of the windows on the upper floor. ‘Main bedroom: that’s where the petrol bombs came in.’
Logan risked a clamber over the shifting, rain-slicked slates, to peer out into the street beyond. The mud was slowly washing off the inspector’s filthy car, the expectant nose of a smelly spaniel pressed against the rear window, looking up at the building where six people had been burned to death. Screaming until their lungs filled with scalding smoke and flame, falling to the floor in agony as their eyes cooked and their flesh crackled. . . Logan shuddered. Did it actually smell of burning people in here, or was it just his imagination? ‘You know,’ he said, looking away from the window and back into the hollowed-out building, ‘I heard it takes twenty minutes for the human brain to die once the flow of blood’s stopped . . . all the electrical impulses, firing away to themselves, till there’s no charge left. . .’ The ruined face, staring up at him out of the body-bag in the morgue: eyes, nose and lips gone. ‘Do you think it was like that for them? Already dead, but still feeling themselves burn and cook?’
There was an uncomfortable silence. And then PC Steve said, ‘Jesus, sir, morbid much?’ Insch had to agree. They picked their way carefully through the debris and back outside; there was nothing else to see here anyway.
Logan stood
on the top step, looking up and down the deserted street. ‘What did you find when you searched the other buildings?’
‘Not a bloody thing.’
Logan nodded and wandered out into the road, slowly turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in the boarded-up houses on both sides of the street. If he was the sick bastard who’d screwed the door shut so that three men, two women and a nine-month-old baby girl would be roasted alive, he’d want to hang about and watch them burn. That would be where the fun was. He crossed the road, trying the door handles, looking for one that wasn’t locked. . . Two houses up, something caught his eye, something grey and squishy, trapped in the corner of the doorframe. It was nearly invisible: a disposable tissue, soaked transparent by the rain and slowly disintegrating. He pulled out a small, clear evidence baggie and turned it inside out, using it like a makeshift mitten to scoop up the tissue before flipping the baggie round the right way again, trapping the contents inside. A shadow fell across the doorway.
‘What is it?’ DI Insch.
Logan risked a sniff at the open evidence bag. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, it’s a wankerchief. Your man probably stood here to watch the place burn, listen to them scream as they died, tossing himself off to the smell of roasting human flesh.’
Insch wrinkled his nose. ‘PC Jacobs was right: you are a morbid bastard.’
11
The woman next door was drunk again. Out in her back garden with the radio blaring Northsound One, staggering about in time to the music, swigging from a bottle of wine, not caring that it was pouring with rain. She just wasn’t right in the head, that much had been clear from the moment they’d moved in: her and her strange, pointy-faced boyfriend and their huge black Labrador. He was a lovely dog, a great slobbery lump of affection, but there had been no sign of him for nearly two weeks. The woman said he’d probably run away. That he was an ungrateful bastard and didn’t deserve a home.
She said the same thing about her boyfriend.
Shaking her head, Ailsa Cruickshank turned away from the window and finished making the bed. The woman next door didn’t care that her dog was missing, so it had been up to Ailsa to make up little laminated posters and fix them to the lampposts and shop windows all over Westhill. Never let it be said that she didn’t do her bit.
Outside, the noise got even worse as the woman started singing along with some rap ‘song’ with the swearwords bleeped out. Only the woman next door wasn’t censored like the radio; she roared out the obscenities at the top of her voice. Shuddering, Ailsa went through to the lounge and turned her own television up loud. The woman wasn’t right in the head: everyone knew it – she was on tablets. Abusive, drunken, violent; she was every neighbour’s worst nightmare. How were Ailsa and Gavin supposed to start a family with that harpy screeching and yelling next door? Gavin and the woman were at loggerheads the whole time, arguing over the noise, the language, calling the police. . . Ailsa shook her head sadly, watching as her neighbour slipped on the rain-soaked grass, clanged her head off the whirly washing line and lay there crying for a minute, before swearing and screaming, hurling her wine bottle to explode against the fence. Ailsa shivered: she was going to end up hurting someone; she just knew it.
Union Grove looked a lot more posh than it actually was: a long avenue of granite tenements branching off Holburn Street in the city’s west end, lined with parked cars and the occasional tree. Brooding in the rain. The address they had for Graham Kennedy was a top-floor flat in one of the grubbier buildings, the communal front door caked with layers of blue and green blistered paint. The street was empty, except for a trio of small kids standing in a doorway across the road eating crisps, watching the police with interest. A patrol car, Alpha Four Six, was already sitting out front as PC Steve parked Insch’s Range Rover half a mile from the kerb, getting an earful from the inspector for his efforts. Blushing furiously he shoogled the car forwards and backwards until the pavement was within walking distance. He was told to stay behind and watch the spaniel.
On the inspector’s orders Alpha Four Six had brought a family liaison officer, a nervous young man with a permanently runny nose and two left feet. After a damp handshake he hurried after Insch and Logan into the building, out of the rain, confessing on the way that this was his first case. Insch took pity on the man and gave him a fruit pastille, for which he was obscenely grateful. The stairs up to the top floor were covered in a shabby, threadbare carpet, the walls in peeling flock wallpaper. Everything had that unmistakable, stinging reek of cat piss. Flat number five: brown door, fading brass number screwed to the wood and a plaque bearing the legend ‘MR & MRS KENNEDY’.
‘Right,’ said Insch, offering round the fruit pastilles again, ‘this is how it works: we go in, I announce the death.’ He pointed the packet of sweets at Logan. ‘DS McRae has a bit of a poke about while the family are still in shock.’ The pastilles came round to point at Mr Runny Nose. ‘You make the tea.’ The young man looked as if he was about to complain at being relegated to tea-boy, but Insch cut him off at the pass. ‘You’ll get to use all that touchy-feely crap they taught you once we’ve gone. Till then: I take milk, two sugars and DS McRae’s just milk. OK?’
The family liaison officer mumbled ‘OK’ as Logan rang the bell. And then they waited. And waited. And waited. . . Finally a light blossomed in the fanlight above the door. Sounds of shuffling and an old lady’s voice saying, ‘Who is it?’
‘Mrs Kennedy?’ Insch held his warrant card up in front of the spy hole. ‘Can we come in please?’ The chain rattled and the door opened a crack, revealing a weather-beaten face with big glasses and a grey perm. She eyed the policemen on her doorstep with concern. There had been a lot of break-ins in the street over the last couple of years – one old lady had ended up in hospital. The inspector handed her his warrant card and she held it at arm’s length, peering at it over the top of her spectacles. The inspector’s voice was soft: ‘Please, it’s important.’
The door closed, there was some rattling and then it opened all the way, exposing a grubby hallway that ran right to left, peppered with seventies-style plywood doors. She led them into a large lounge done up in faded-yellow wallpaper with orange and red roses on it. A pair of rickety couches sat in the middle of a swirly-patterned carpet, wood and fabric groaning alarmingly as Insch sat down and the old lady fussed over a large orange tabby cat the size of a beach ball.
‘Mrs Kennedy,’ said Insch as the huge cat hopped up onto the coffee table and started licking its bum. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: it’s your grandson, Graham. He was one of the people who died in the fire on Monday night. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh my God. . .’ She clutched at the cat, dragging it away from its ablutions. It sagged into her lap, legs stuck out at right angles, like an over-inflated set of ginger bagpipes.
‘Mrs Kennedy, do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt your grandson?’
She shook her head, her eyes filling up with tears. ‘Oh God, Graham. . . You shouldn’t have to bury your grandchildren!’ The family liaison officer was dispatched to make the tea while Logan surreptitiously excused himself and had a quick look round the flat. It was a big place, shabby, but nothing a couple of coats of paint wouldn’t fix. He poked from room to room, peering under beds, into wardrobes and drawers. All the time the muted tones of DI Insch and the sobbing woman leaked through the closed lounge door. Kitchen, bathroom, spare room, Mrs Kennedy’s bedroom with its certificates of merit and group photographs of school children. . . Only one of the doors leading off the hallway was locked: from the look of things the stairs up to the attic, but Graham’s room was open, the bed made, the clothes all neatly folded and put away, all the socks paired off, not so much as a porn mag under the bed. It didn’t fit the image Logan had of Graham Kennedy from reading his criminal record. Minor assault, breaking and entering, possession with intent. . . Small stuff mostly, but it all added up. He got back to the living room just in time
to hear DI Insch say, ‘We’ll let ourselves out.’ Leaving the family liaison officer behind.
They stopped at the communal front door, looking out at the rain drumming on the car roofs. ‘Well?’ asked Insch.
‘Nothing. Place is clean as a whistle. If he kept any gear, he wasn’t doing it at granny’s house.’
Insch nodded and pulled out the last of the fruit pastilles, munching sadly. ‘Poor cow: she raised him pretty much single-handed. Graham’s parents died when he was three, then her husband snuffs it a year later.’ He sighed. ‘That’s her whole family gone now.’
‘She say anything about what Graham was up to?’
The inspector shook his head. ‘Far as she was concerned he was a perfect little angel. Said he only got into trouble because of his friends – who she never approved of. Been leading him astray ever since secondary school.’
‘Don’t suppose she happens to know their—’
DI Insch held up a notebook with five names scribbled on it. ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’ He stuffed the notebook back in his pocket. ‘Right, back to the station. You’re supposed to be off and I’ve got an investigation to run.’
When Logan finally got back to the flat Jackie wasn’t there, just a note pinned to the fridge: GOT EXTENDED NIGHT SHIFT – BACK TOMORROW. No ‘LOVE JACKIE’, or even ‘FOND REGARDS’. So he’d had to fend for himself, which involved a fourteen-inch pizza and two bottles of wine.
Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae) Page 50
