Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae)

by Stuart MacBride

  ‘She been on the game long?’

  The inspector shook her head. ‘Not that I can tell. No arrests for soliciting on her record. Not even a warning.’

  Logan didn’t say anything, but he couldn’t help thinking of the woman he’d spoken to down the docks: the one with the PVC raincoat, black lace bustier and all the bruises. The minute she realized he was a policeman she’d offered him a bribe, or a free ride on the venereal express. Maybe there was a reason Michelle Wood hadn’t received so much as a caution. Maybe one of Aberdeen’s fine, upstanding boys in blue had been getting freebies.

  ‘Right.’ Steel dropped her cigarette butt and ground it into the carpet with a scuffed shoe. ‘While I’m gone I want you to make sure everything’s up and running properly. I don’t trust any of these bastards to get it right.’

  Logan was surprised. ‘You don’t want me to come with you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Her dad’s going to have enough to deal with without a house full of bloody policemen.’

  Logan was on his way down to the incident room when a familiar, hawk-nosed, ginger-haired bastard stuck his head out into the corridor and asked for a moment of his time. Inspector Napier smiled like a scar as Logan settled uncomfortably into the rickety plastic chair in front of the desk. ‘So, Sergeant McRae.’ The inspector leaned back in his seat and smiled his post-surgery smile again. ‘I take it you are familiar with the nature of the case now being headed up by DI Steel?’ Logan carefully admitted that he was, wondering where this was going. ‘Well,’ said Napier, ‘I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the importance of a quick and decisive result. One that will stand up in court. You see,’ he picked up a silver pen, slowly twisting it back and forth in his fingers, ‘I know that you have . . . “friends” in the media. These people will try to protect you should things go wrong.’ The smile became colder. ‘It might be wise for you to ensure that they do not use Inspector Steel as a scapegoat.’ Significant pause. ‘In the interests of teamwork.’

  An uncomfortable silence filled the space between them.

  ‘What if it’s her fault?’

  Napier waved a hand, as if shooing a troublesome fly. ‘Are you aware of the fable about the fox and the chicken? The chicken burns down the farmer’s barn and blames the fox. The farmer shoots the fox and then eats the chicken. . .’ He pointed the silver pen at Logan’s chest making it clear who the poultry was in this scenario. The inspector’s chilly, unsettling smile disappeared. ‘I will supply the sage and onion.’

  15

  Their new incident room – courtesy of the Chief Constable the minute this became a serial case – was huge, the walls covered with maps of Aberdeen and scribbled-on whiteboards. The middle of the room was taken up with phones and computers, the monitors flickering in the overhead light as uniformed officers took calls and entered the details into HOLMES. There was already a huge stack of automatically generated actions waiting for him, so Logan pulled up a chair and started working his way through the lot; sorting them into two piles he called ‘To Do’ and ‘Bollocks’. The system’s greatest strength was that it would churn its way through endless reams of data, automatically picking out connections and patterns. Its greatest weakness was that it frequently didn’t have a sodding clue what it was doing. He was just finishing when DI Steel finally got back from speaking to Michelle Wood’s father.

  ‘How did it go?’

  The inspector shrugged and started flicking half-heartedly through Logan’s pile of ‘Bollocks’, turfing them one after the other into the bin. ‘How do you think it went? Telling some poor bastard his daughter’s been battered to death by a psycho, and her naked body was abandoned in the fucking woods for three days before someone fell over it in the fog. . . oh and by the way, your little girl was fucking strangers for money.’ She sighed and ran a hand over her face. ‘Sorry, been a shitty week.’ Logan handed her the ‘To Do’ pile and she whittled that one down too; there weren’t many actions left by the time she was finished. She palmed them off on the admin officer, telling him to get them cleared by the end of the day.

  ‘Right,’ she said as the man grumbled away to get the personnel organized. ‘Plan of action?’

  ‘Well, what do you want to do about Jamie McKinnon?’

  ‘Leave him where he is, we’ve still got plenty tying him to Rosie’s murder.’ Steel pulled out a packet of king-size cigarettes and started fiddling with the silver paper insert. ‘If we get someone else in the frame for both tarts we’ll do McKinnon for the fast-food jobs instead. But if anyone asks, we’re dealing with the killings like they’re part of the same pattern.’

  ‘OK.’ Logan grabbed a magic marker and started drawing up a rough map of the docks on one of the whiteboards. ‘Rosie Williams was found here. . .’ He drew a blue circle on Shore Lane. ‘Do we know if Michelle Wood worked the docks?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘If she did, then we’ve got a hunting ground. We put in some surveillance: unmarked cars. . .’ He picked up a green pen and started putting ‘X’es where a rusty Vauxhall could be parked without attracting too much attention.

  ‘What bloody good are unmarked cars going to do us?’ asked Steel, corkscrewing a finger into her ear. ‘Dirty bastards pick up women down there the whole time. How’re we going to spot our man: pull them all over and ask?’ She dropped her voice an octave and put on a broad east London accent. ‘“Excuse me, sir, ’ave you picked up this tart wiv the intention of beatin’ ’er to death, or just givin’ ’er a serious knobbin’?”’ She smiled pityingly at him. ‘Good plan: I can see that working.’

  Logan scowled at her. ‘If you’ll let me finish. We get a couple of WPCs done up as bait and they do the rounds. If someone tries to take them anywhere we’ve got them wired for sound: the unmarked cars follow and we catch the guy in the act. What do you think?’

  Steel wrinkled her nose and took a good look at Logan’s crude diagram. ‘Don’t think it stands a chance in hell, but what have we got to lose?’ she said at last. ‘Go pick yourself out a couple of WPCs. Remember, this bloke did Rosie Williams and Michelle Wood so he can’t be all that fussy. I want a couple of pugglers.’ Logan said he’d see what he could do.

  It was the perfect day for drying towels: sun shining, light breeze and no midges. Ailsa smiled, taking pleasure from the simple domesticity of it all. Gavin had promised to come home from work on time for a change. So tonight was going to be special: she was still ovulating after all.

  She pulled the last towel from the basket and pegged it up on the line. All done. And then she caught the tell-tale, clinging stench of cigarette smoke, drifting through the fence from next door’s garden. It was the pointy-faced boyfriend, his features bruised and battered. Again. Why he stayed with that horrible, drunken, abusive, violent woman Ailsa just couldn’t understand. Surely any sane man would have left her the first time she broke his nose. Or the second. Or third. . .

  The boyfriend was smoking with his head back against the metal whirly washing thing. Wincing as he breathed out, one hand flinching over his ribs, unaware that Ailsa was watching him. He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt out into the knee-deep grass where it disappeared among the weeds.

  A loud shout from inside the house and the boyfriend jumped. In that moment his eyes caught Ailsa’s and she knew he was every bit as trapped by this horrible harridan as she and Gavin were. She was like a mincing machine for the soul, grinding them up until nothing was left but a bloody pulp. Shoulders slumped in defeat, the boyfriend turned and limped into the house.

  Ailsa watched him go with a shudder. There, but for the grace of God. . .

  While the inspector was off on yet another extended fag break, Logan trolled through Michelle Wood’s post mortem report. The killer had managed to snap one of her legs, both arms, and almost all of her ribs. Internal organs ruptured, probably caused by her attacker stamping on her stomach. Head battered repeatedly with fists, feet, a rock. . . Someone had r
eally gone to town on her. Logan sighed, looking at a crime scene photograph: a big, full-colour eight-by-ten glossy of Michelle’s plastic-bag-smothered head. There was no doubt about it: their boy was getting better at it. Every attack worse than the last, until. . .

  Logan swore. How the hell could he have missed it? He shouted for DC Rennie. ‘Grab your notebook: I want you to find out who patrols the docks, someone who knows the layout and the girls, we—’

  ‘Excuse me, sir?’ It was PC Steve. He hung his head round the door and smiled uncertainly in Logan’s direction. ‘DI Insch wants to see you.’

  Logan groaned, wondering what he’d done wrong now. ‘OK,’ he told Rennie, ‘you go: get me a name. I want to speak to them.’ Then he remembered the Aberdonian pimp and the Lithuanian teenager. ‘And show those identikit pictures round again – someone must know who they are.’

  There was a new corkboard on the wall of DI Insch’s incident room, divided up into six sections – each square taken up by a name, a face and a post mortem photograph. The small head in the bottom right corner was connected to the blackened face above it with a thin red ribbon. The inspector stood in front of the board with his skeletal admin officer, pointing at things while she took notes in longhand. Insch glanced up, saw Logan and called him over, dismissing the woman with a couple of fizzy cola bottles.

  ‘What can I do for you, sir?’

  ‘This lot.’ Insch tapped a photograph of a human head that looked like a side of barbecued pork. ‘Remember we got that list of Graham Kennedy’s school chums?’ He stuffed a handful of the sweets into his mouth, mumbling as he chewed. ‘Graham you know, but this is Ewan, Mark, Janette and Lucy.’ Poking the post mortem photos one by one, leaving behind little sparkling fingerprints. ‘All identified by their dental records. According to the hospital the wee girl,’ he didn’t poke her picture, ‘belonged to Lucy. Gemma . . . poor wee sod.’ Sigh. ‘Anyway, we got five names from Graham’s granny: one, two three, four. One missing.’

  ‘So, who wasn’t on the menu that night?’

  ‘Karl Pearson. Twenty-four. Lives with his mum and dad in Kingswells, or he did until about three weeks ago. They got a call from him looking for some money Wednesday before last, but that was it. Haven’t heard from him since.’ He pulled a holiday snap from his inside pocket showing a lumpy young man with a broken nose and a single eyebrow stretched across his face. He looked like the kind of person who would quite happily start a fight at a football match, just for the hell of it.

  Logan studied the picture for a minute. ‘You think he’s the torch?’

  Insch nodded. ‘Been in trouble a couple of times for burning things that weren’t his. Neighbours’ sheds, an abandoned caravan, that pitch-and-putt hut down at the beach.’

  ‘That was him?’

  ‘The very man. I’ve put out a lookout request, but I also have a couple of addresses.’ An evil smile split the inspector’s huge, bald head. ‘Thought you might fancy the exercise.’

  ‘What about your DS, you know, the bearded one?’

  ‘What, Beattie?’ DI Insch stuck his hands in his pockets, making the already groaning material bulge alarmingly. ‘Bugger that. Lazy sod couldn’t catch clap in a Dundee whorehouse, let alone crooks.’

  ‘I’m supposed to be helping DI Steel, she—’

  ‘Already OK’d it with me. You’re not needed till the operation tonight. Grab your coat.’

  ‘But—’

  Insch dropped his voice, laying a huge ham-like hand on Logan’s shoulder. ‘Thought you wanted off the Screw-Up Squad: this is your chance.’ He turned and lumbered out of the room, grabbing PC Steve by the collar on his way past. Logan hesitated, looking from the inspector to the photo gallery of death. Bloody DI Steel, trading him off to Insch without even consulting him! Muttering obscenities, Logan followed on behind.

  The first address for Karl Pearson was no use, neither were numbers two, three or four. No one had seen him in ages. Four down, two to go. Address number five was halfway up a block of flats in Seaton – down where the River Don meets the sea – one of a set of four seventeen-storey buildings with spectacular views out over the water. Lovely on a clear summer’s day and bloody freezing in the dead of winter, when the wind roared in off the North Sea, fresh from the Norwegian fjords. Logan and Insch headed inside, leaving PC Steve downstairs to watch the front door.

  Sixth floor, corner apartment. Insch marched straight up to Karl Pearson’s alleged flat and did his policeman’s knock, putting his weight behind it. Making the door boom and rattle as if God himself had come to announce judgment day.

  No response.

  Insch launched into his wrath-of-God routine again and a door cracked open down the hall. The occupant took one look at the huge man pounding on the corner flat’s door and hurried back inside.

  ‘Think they’ll call the police?’ asked Logan.

  ‘Doubt it, but just in case. . .’ Insch dragged out his mobile phone and called Headquarters, letting them know that the thug trying to break into the corner flat was him, so not to bother sending out a squad car. While he was doing that, Logan squatted down and peered in through the letterbox. A small hallway decorated with Aberdeen Football Club posters and pages torn from FHM magazine – half-naked women and footballers: an adolescent boy’s dream – coats hanging on a set of hooks, mirror on the other side, scabby-looking golf clubs leaning in the corner, a little mudslide of junk mail on the mat. There was a door at the far end, slightly ajar, leading into what looked like a kitchen. Four more doors led off the little corridor, but only one of them was open and Logan couldn’t really see into the room. He was about to give up when suddenly he got the feeling someone was staring at him. . . And then his eyes drifted to the hall mirror again. Someone was staring at him through the reflected lounge door, only Logan was pretty sure they couldn’t actually see him. They couldn’t see anything, not with their throat lying wide open like that, dark brown blood covering everything.

  He sat back on his heels and let the letterbox flap snap shut.

  ‘You still on the phone to HQ?’ he asked Insch.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Better tell them to call off the search: we’ve found Karl Pearson.’

  16

  The Identification Bureau were delighted to have an indoor corpse for a change, it meant they didn’t have to fight with that bloody SOC tent. Karl Pearson’s lounge was decorated in much the same way as the hall, with posters and magazine pages, only the naked ladies in here were a lot more hard-core. The IB team had put down their little metal walkway and then proceeded to cover the whole place in black fingerprint powder; empty the flat’s vacuum cleaner into an evidence bag; take samples of blood – not difficult, considering how much of it there was in the lounge; argue about whether or not one of the naked women – pictured playing with a variety of battery-operated devices – was Detective Sergeant Beattie’s wife; photographed everything and stood quietly by as Doc Wilson pronounced the naked man tied to a dining-room chair with his throat cut dead. ‘Amazing the things these doctors can diagnose nowadays,’ said Insch, leaning against the far wall. He was wearing the biggest set of white paper coveralls the IB boys had, but it was fighting a losing battle against the inspector’s huge frame. ‘Care to hazard a guess at time of death?’

  Doc Wilson favoured Insch with a withering glance. ‘No,’ he said, snapping his medical bag shut. ‘What is it with you people? You always want a bloody time of death off the poor bloody GP! You know what? I haven’t got a bloody clue. OK? Satisfied? You want a time of death? Ask a fucking pathologist.’ He straightened up and made for the door, pausing on the threshold to run an appraising eye over the inspector’s straining SOC suit. ‘Tell you what, I’ll give you a time of death, free of charge. Eighteen months if you don’t do something about your bloody weight.’ And he was out of there before Insch could do much more than go beetroot red and splutter.

  Logan groaned; that was all they needed, Do
c Bloody Wilson lighting the blue touch paper and running like buggery. Leaving the rest of them to deal with the explosion. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ he tried. ‘Wilson’s had a weasel up his arse all week. He’s just being a wanker for the sake of it.’

  Insch turned a baleful eye on Logan. ‘You tell that bastard, if I ever see him at one of my crime scenes again, I will personally make sure he ends up in the FUCKING MORGUE!’ Everyone else in the room went very quiet. ‘I WILL FUCKING WELL DECLARE DEATH ON HIM!’ Spittle flew from Insch’s mouth. Logan had seen him angry plenty of times, but never anything like this. Trembling with the effort, Insch walked quietly into the kitchen and slammed the door behind him so hard every loose object in the flat rattled. From the apartment upstairs came the sound of a television being turned up.

  ‘Jesus,’ whispered the IB cameraman. ‘Touched a nerve, or what?’

  DI Insch was still sulking in the kitchen when the duty pathologist arrived: Doc Fraser this time, rather than Isobel, much to Logan’s relief. Fraser agreed with the duty doctor’s diagnosis: Karl Pearson was indeed dead. Logan could go ahead and call the funeral directors to come pick up the body. The post mortem would be at three. And now that the formalities were out of the way, Logan was free to examine the victim without upsetting anyone. Just as long as he didn’t actually touch anything.