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

by Stuart MacBride

  ‘You see,’ said Logan as the fat man hurried off to get it for them, ‘sometimes even Miss Marple gets it right.’

  25

  Garvie wasn’t at work, where a frosty-faced man in jeans and a polo shirt told Logan in no uncertain terms what he thought of the police harassing innocent men until they had to be signed off for stress. So they tried the ex-porn star’s flat in Danestone. The sun was hidden behind the building, casting a long, blue shadow across the frost-bleached grass and glittering grey tarmac. Rickards leant on the bell again and again, until finally an upstairs window cracked open and a bleary face peered out. ‘Go away!’

  Logan put on his best, friendly smile. ‘Come on Frank, let us in: it’s freezing out here.’

  ‘I’m not well.’ And it looked like he was telling the truth: dark purple bags under his eyes, a day’s worth of blue-grey stubble stretched across his double chin and pallid cheeks.

  ‘I can get a warrant if you like?’

  The man’s face went even paler, then disappeared. Thirty seconds later a low buzzing sound came from the door lock. They pushed through into the stairwell, marching up to the third floor. Things had changed in the twenty-four hours since they’d searched Garvie’s apartment. Now the word PERVERT!!! was sprayed across the front door in dripping scarlet paint.

  Garvie hurried them into the flat, slamming the door and locking it behind him. The tiny hallway stank of disinfectant and the lingering taint of burning paper and excrement. They settled in the dark lounge, curtains drawn, the only light coming from the huge projection screen, with one of the starships Enterprise whooshing across it. Garvie hit pause and the music stopped. Up close Logan could see a line of fresh bruising wrapped around the ex-porn star’s throat. As if someone had tried to strangle him. Garvie slumped down onto the large black leather sofa, knocking over two empty wine bottles that clunked and rattled on the laminate floor. ‘Is this going to take long?’ He couldn’t even look at them.

  ‘Depends on you, sir.’ Logan settled into a matching black armchair. ‘We. . .’ he trailed off. ‘That new?’ Pointing at a stainless steel hook bolted to the ceiling. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed it before.

  Garvie barely glanced at it. ‘No. What do you want?’

  ‘Tea with milk would be nice. Rickards, do the honours would you?’ The constable nodded, and headed off into the kitchen. Soon the sound of drawers and cupboards being opened and closed filtered into the living room. ‘We’ve got a problem, Frank,’ said Logan, holding up the Victorian film canisters. ‘When we searched your house we found these.’

  Garvie’s eyes flashed up, then back down to his lap. ‘I don’t know anything about those.’

  ‘They were in your bedside cabinet with your home movies and socks. Ring any bells?’

  ‘I. . .’ And then he was silent again.

  ‘They’re stolen property. Someone broke into ClarkRig Training Systems and made off with these and a number of other items from your ex-employer’s private collection. Bit of a coincidence that, isn’t it?’

  Garvie stared at the films. ‘I didn’t steal them!’

  ‘Come on Frank, you knew Clark had these, you knew what they were worth, you broke in and—’

  ‘I bought them!’

  Logan sat back, looking sceptical. ‘Bought them?’

  ‘From a guy. In the pub. I. . .’ he coughed, cleared his throat, and tried again. ‘I knew they were Zander’s. I was going to give them back to him. I just . . . didn’t get round to it. . .’

  ‘And does this guy in the pub have a name?’

  ‘I. . .’ Garvie’s eyes went back to his curry-stained jogging bottoms. ‘I never met him before.’

  Logan stood, shaking his head sadly. ‘You’ve got to be one of the worst liars I’ve ever seen. Frank Garvie, I’m arresting you for possession of stolen goods, you do not have to say anything—’

  ‘Ron! Ron Berwick. He sometimes sells stuff round the pubs in Bridge of Don – has a place outside Balmedie. I didn’t have anything to do with it, I swear!’

  ‘Where outside Balmedie?’

  And Garvie told them everything.

  The afternoon was crisp and clear, frost still dusting the shadowed grass and skeletal brambles like icing sugar. Up above, the eggshell-blue sky faded to hazy white on the horizon, a thin, dark blue line marking the sea, just visible from the small clump of houses nearly eight miles north of Aberdeen. They’d been a farm steading at one point, a wide, horseshoe-shaped, single-storey granite barn for cattle or pigs, but someone had turned them into six terraced houses with lots of varnished wood and dormer windows, a row of single garages sitting off to the left. According to Control, Ronald Berwick lived in the end house, with his wife, three kids and a Labrador.

  ‘Er, sir,’ said Rickards, wriggling in the driver’s seat of their scabby CID Vauxhall, watching as half a dozen firearms-trained officers piled out the back of an unmarked filthy-white van, ‘is this not a bit. . .’ He pointed at the men and women scurrying towards Ronald Berwick’s house, dressed all in black: black body armour, black scarves wound round their faces, bulky black helmets on their heads, bent nearly double over their black Heckler and Koch MP5 machine pistols, Glock nine millimetres strapped to their hips. ‘Well . . . over the top?’

  ‘No.’ It had taken some doing to convince the inspector running the control room to let him have a firearms team, but there was no way Logan was going to have a repeat of what happened last time he’d raided a property for stolen goods. He never wanted to attend another police funeral, let alone be responsible for one.

  Two of the black-clad officers flattened themselves on either side of the front door, a third standing ready with the hand-held black battering ram, while the others hurried round the back. A wee boy’s face appeared in the window of one of the houses opposite, nose pressed against the glass, eyes wide. A metallic bleep came from Rickards’ Airwave handset and the lead officer’s voice crackled into the car: ‘Team One – we are in position.’

  Another bleep: ‘Team Two – aye, we’re roond the back. Nae sign of any bugger.’

  Logan gave the word and the door was battered off its hinges, falling into the hallway while the three SAS-style bobbies charged inside, shouting, ‘POLICE! ON THE FLOOR NOW! NOBODY MOVE!’ Five minutes later the head firearms officer appeared where the front door used to be and gave the thumbs up. And all without a single shot being fired.

  Berwick’s home smelled of fresh paint. There wasn’t a single picture on the walls, the lounge carpet covered with newspapers, a stepladder stood by the electric fireplace, open tins of magnolia sitting next to it. A shout came from the back of the house, ‘I said keep your hands where I can see them!’ followed by a terrified shriek.

  Logan hurried through the lounge into a small hallway where a black-clad, gun-wielding PC was pointing her machine pistol in through an open door. ‘I’m not going to tell you again!’ Someone inside whimpered. Peering round the door Logan saw a terrified man in his early thirties sitting on the toilet, trousers round his ankles, bare legs trembling, face pale, eyes screwed shut, and hands in the air.

  ‘Ronald Berwick?’

  ‘Please don’t kill me!’

  Logan told the constable to lower her weapon. ‘When you’ve finished up there Mr Berwick, I’d like a word with you in the kitchen. And don’t forget to wash your hands.’

  The kitchen-cum-dining-room was just as bare as the rest of the house, as if someone had stripped the life out of it. A large, American-style fridge sat in the corner, humming away quietly to itself without a single magnet or kid’s drawing to break up the monotony. The walls were equally spartan: no calendar, no knick-knacks, no flowers, nothing.

  Ronald Berwick was marched through from the bathroom at gunpoint and forced to make nine cups of tea: six for the firearms squad, one each for Rickards and Logan, and one for himself. He even managed to produce a packet of Penguin biscuits. ‘There we go,’ said Lo
gan as the man jittered his way into a seat at the kitchen table, ‘how you feeling?’

  Berwick stared at him. ‘I was having a crap and someone kicked the bathroom door in and stuck a machine gun in my face, how the hell do you think I’m feeling? Scared the shit out of me.’

  Logan tried not to smile. ‘I’ve got a warrant to search these premises for stolen goods.’

  The man groaned. ‘Great. First Margaret, now this.’ He sagged forwards till he was hunched over his mug, staring gloomily into the depths muttering, ‘Fucking fuck, fuck, fuckering fuck. . .’

  They went through every room in the house, but there was no sign of stolen Victorian sexual ephemera. ‘OK,’ said Logan after one of the firearms officers stuck their head down from the loft hatch to tell him there was nothing in the attic, ‘let’s try the garage then.’

  They trooped outside. The little boy who’d watched them break down Berwick’s front door had been joined by his younger sister, staring at the policemen as if they were the most exciting thing to happen round here for ages. By the time Berwick had led Logan and his team to the last garage on the row they were bustling out the door, desperate not to miss a single moment.

  Logan let Rickards do the honours, unlocking the red garage door and hauling it up. Inside it was like Aladdin’s cave for electrical appliances, none of them in their original packaging. There were boxes full of digital cameras, DVD recorders, iPods, laptop and desktop computers, silverware, picture frames, candlesticks, DVDs, CDs, jewellery, digital camcorders. . .’ Good God!’ Logan was impressed in spite of himself. ‘How many houses did you have to knock over to get all this?’

  Berwick suddenly found his shoes of all-consuming interest. ‘I’ve never seen these things before in my life.’

  ‘Oh, come on. You know fine well we can just cart all this stuff down to the station and check it against our burglary reports. Everything in here’s going to be clarted in your fingerprints. Why not save us all the trouble and tell us who you stole them from? It’ll look much better for you in court.’

  There was a moment’s silent contemplation, then a long-suffering sigh. ‘Fuck. Who told you?’

  ‘Give us the addresses and I’ll make sure the PF knows you cooperated.’

  ‘It was Margaret, wasn’t it? Vindictive bitch. Not bad enough she takes my kids and everything in the building society, no, she’s got to shop me to the bloody police too.’ He stood, watching Rickards squeeze his way into the garage glory hole. ‘You married, Inspector?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant,’ said Logan. ‘And no.’

  Berwick nodded. ‘Good. That’s where the fucking trouble starts. You go out and do your best to put food on the table. Keep a roof over their heads. Then she starts going out at night on her own, when she’s supposed to be looking after the kids. “Visiting friends”. Lying bitch.’

  Deep in the garage, Rickards pulled a box from the pile and rummaged about in it, coming out with a translucent, purple dildo. ‘Sir, I’ve found something!’

  Logan groaned. ‘Put on a pair of gloves for God’s sake!’

  ‘Course, you know what she was doing, don’t you?’ said Berwick, as Rickards snapped on a pair of latex gloves and started hefting out various items of sexual apparatus. ‘She was screwing the guy who came to install our broadband. There’s me, risking life and liberty to keep her in hair dye and French classes, and she’s off shagging some internet geek.’ He seemed to shrink. ‘And get this, when I confront her, she’s the one who acts all hurt! How dare I follow her! What happened to trust? She’s shagging someone else and I’m getting a bollocking for not trusting her. . . Fucking women.’

  Rickards held a round metal canister aloft. ‘Kitty-Cat Katy!’

  ‘I go out on a job and when I come back she’s gone. Took the kids and everything else that wasn’t nailed down. Hired a removal truck: you believe that?’ Berwick sniffed, watching the PC in his garage happily digging through the stuff from Zander Clark’s Victorian porn collection. ‘Found a note in the kitchen: “I’ve left you. Mother always said I could do better, so now I have.”’ He shook his head. ‘Tell you, never trust a bloody woman, they’ll fuck you over every time.’

  It was well after six but Logan was still sitting in DI Steel’s incident room, surrounded by ever expanding piles of paperwork, filling in all the forms that came with actually solving a burglary. Rickards was on the other side of the desk, trying to match up the list of items collected from Ronald Berwick’s garage with the properties he said he’d stolen them from. They hadn’t recovered everything on the burglary reports, but then Logan hadn’t really expected to. In his experience most people padded out their claim with at least two things they’d never owned in the first place, but always fancied – figuring the insurance company wouldn’t mind treating them. And Berwick had been flogging stuff down the pubs to finance his redecorating binge.

  Logan put the finishing touches to another set of forms and sent them to the laser printer in the corner, creaking his way out of his chair to go get them when the machine had finished squeaking and whirring. ‘How many’s that?’ he asked, stapling the new sheets together and adding them to the pile.

  Rickards looked up from his screen. ‘I’ve done twenty.’

  Logan nodded, then checked his watch. ‘So we should be finished about . . . seven, half-seven?’ He stifled a yawn. ‘After that, we’re going for a pizza. Not often—’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ the familiar, telltale blush was working its way across Rickards’ face. ‘I’ve got a . . . ehm . . . meeting to go to tonight.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Logan slumped back behind his desk and called up the next burglary report. ‘Let me ask you something,’ he said, starting in on the form, ‘what kind of people are into that kind of thing?’

  ‘Well. . .’ the constable cleared his throat, going an even deeper shade of embarrassed scarlet. ‘It . . . we. . .’ The door clattered open and a look of relief bloomed on Rickards’ face, until he realized it was DI Steel standing in the doorway with hair like a startled grey squirrel, two patches of dark blue shadowing the armpits of her blouse.

  ‘Well?’ she demanded, ‘Is it true?’

  Logan nodded, pointing at the steadily growing pile of completed forms. ‘Sixty-two break-ins.’

  ‘Sixty-two? Ha – that’s nearly all of them! You try to fit him up with the rest?’

  ‘Yes, but he’s not having any of it. They’re probably his, but he’s sold the stuff, so we’ve got no evidence.’

  ‘Ah well, can’t complain I suppose. Sixty-two. . .’ She stuck her hands in her pockets, and beamed happily. ‘All those burglaries cleared up and wee Sean Morrison in custody; my crime statistics’ll look bloody brilliant this month. Right, soon as the paperwork’s done we’re goin’ out on the toot. My treat. You, me and Spanky.’

  The constable sent Logan a panicked look. ‘Spanky. . . ?’

  ‘Actually, ma’am, Rickards was just telling me he has to go see his mum tonight, so it’ll just be you and me.’

  Steel actually looked disappointed. ‘Aye? You sure Spanky? Clearin’ up sixty-two break-ins needs a celebration. . .’ She left a long enough pause for Rickards to change his mind, but the constable just blushed furiously and apologized instead. She shrugged. ‘Ah well, means more beer for us.’

  An hour later and Rickards was long gone – hurrying off to get rubbered up, or whatever it was he did with his BDSM mates, grinning from ear to ear because Logan had told him he’d done an excellent job today, carefully downplaying Steel’s new pet name for the constable. After all, knowing what the inspector was usually like, ‘Spanky’ was getting off lightly. Logan pulled the final report from the printer, powered everything down, flicked off the lights, yawned, and headed downstairs to the main reception desk. It was quiet and empty, so he let himself in the side door, heading round the back of the two-way mirror, where Big Gary was busily slurping his way through a vast mug of coffee and getting chocolate digestive crumb
s all over a copy of the Evening Express.

  ‘Mmmmphmm mph?’ he asked as Logan helped himself to a biscuit.

  ‘No idea. I’ve been on days non-stop for a week now and I’m knackered.’

  Big Gary washed down his mouthful with a slug of coffee. ‘Your shift pattern’s for shite, you know that, don’t you?’ He pulled a thick ledger from the shelf. ‘Take three days off and then you’re on nights Saturday.’ He gave Logan a big fat wink. ‘And that puts you back in step with the lovely Miss Watson.’

  Logan smiled. ‘About bloody time too.’ It’d be nice to spend some time together for a change. He checked his watch – she was on days, so that meant she’d be home right now. Maybe he could swing her an invite to Steel’s burglary celebration? He dug out his mobile and called the inspector – from the sound of things she was already in the pub.

  ‘Laz!’ Probably on her second whisky. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Just finished, I—’

  ‘Good. Get your arse over here!’

  ‘Do you mind if Jackie joins us tonight?’

  ‘Why would I mind? Hell, for sixty-two break-ins I’d even buy Rennie dinner.’ The sound of someone shouting, ‘Yay!’ in the background.

  Smiling, Logan hung up and called the flat, getting the answering machine. Again. He tried Jackie on her mobile. ‘How’d you like to come to dinner with me and DI Steel? She’s buying.’

  There was a small pause, then, ‘I’d love to, but I can’t. Janette called: she’s locked herself in the bathroom with a bottle of vodka and a photo album, so that’s my evening screwed again. Tell you, if I ever get my hands on her bloody fiancé, I’m going to wring his sodding neck.’

  ‘Oh. . .’ Logan frowned, trying to picture Janette and coming up empty. ‘You are remembering about tomorrow night though, aren’t you?’

  ‘Tomorrow. . . Oh shite!’ She swore for a bit, then asked, ‘No way we could put it off till next week?’

  ‘It’s her fifty-fifth birthday party, so no.’