Cold granite lm-1

by Stuart MacBride

  He was beginning to get the feeling DI Insch had been telling him something with that whole 'Privilege of Rank' speech. Something unpleasant. He ran a slow hand over his forehead, feeling the swollen lump of his brain through the skin.

  It was no surprise that Insch had read Steve the riot act. The drunken PC could have caused the whole force a lot of embarrassment. Logan could see the headlines now: 'Naked Copper Showed Me His Truncheon!' If he were Steve's superior officer he'd have given him a bollocking too.

  And that was when the penny dropped. Insch had said it right to his face: 'That's one of the privileges of rank: you supervise those further down the tree.' He was a detective sergeant, Steve a constable. They'd all gone out and got pissed and Logan hadn't done a bloody thing to stop the PC getting blootered and bollock-naked.

  Logan groaned.

  This assignment was as much a punishment for him as it was for Steve.

  Twenty-five minutes later they were climbing out of the Nervous Wee Shite's car in front of a dilapidated farm steading, the first outlying arm of a rambling croft on the outskirts of Cults. What little road there was disappeared into the undergrowth. A rundown farmhouse sulked at the end of the track, its grey stone weeping in the neverending rain. Derelict farm buildings sprawled around it, set in a wasteland of hip-deep grass and weeds. Ragwort and docken stuck up through the vegetation, their stems and leaves rust-brown beneath the winter sky. Two windows poked out of the building's slate roof like an empty, hostile stare. Below, a faded red door bore a big painted number six. Each of the rambling steadings had a number scrawled on them in white paint. Every surface was slick with the misty rain, reflecting back the flat, grey daylight.

  'Homely,' said Logan, in an attempt to break the ice. And then he smelled it. 'Oh Jesus!' He slapped a hand over his mouth and nose.

  It was the cloying, reeking stink of corruption. Of meat left for too long in the sun.

  The smell of death.

  11

  PC Steve lurched once, twice, and charged into the bushes to be noisily and copiously sick.

  'You see?' said the nervous man from the council. 'Didn't I tell you it was terrible? Didn't I?'

  Logan nodded and agreed, even though he hadn't paid attention to a single word on the way out.

  'The neighbours have been complaining about the smell since last Christmas. We've written letter after letter, but we never get anything back,' said the man, clutching his leather folder to his chest. 'The postman refuses to deliver here any more you know.'

  'Really,' said Logan. That explained why they never got a bloody reply. Turning his back on the retching constable, he started wading his way through the jungle. 'Let's go see if there's anyone in.'

  Not surprisingly, the man from the council let him go first.

  The main farm building had once been well cared for. There were little flecks of white paint on the crumbling stone, twisted rusting brackets where hanging baskets would have been. But those days were long gone. Grass was growing in the gutters, blocking the downpipe, and water dripped over the edge. The door hadn't seen a fresh coat of paint for years. Weather and wasps had stripped the last coat away, leaving bare, bleached wood and a small iron number was screwed in the middle, rendered illegible by rust and dirt. The handle didn't look much better. And over the lot was that big, white, hand-painted number six.

  Logan knocked. They stood back and waited. And waited. And waited. And…

  'Oh for God's sake!' Logan abandoned the door and stomped off through the undergrowth, peering into every window on the way.

  Inside, the house was shrouded in darkness. He could just make out mounds of furniture in the gloom: shapeless blobs obscured by the filthy glass.

  He finally made it back to the front. A perfectly trampled path in the long grass marked the route he'd taken. Closing his eyes, Logan tried not to swear. 'There's no one here,' he said. 'There hasn't been for months.' If someone was still living here, the grass would have been tramped flat between the road and the door.

  The council man looked at the house, then back at Logan, then at his watch and then fumbled his way into his leather folder and pulled out a clipboard.

  'No,' he said, reading off the top sheet of paper, 'this property is the residence of one Mr Bernard Philips.' He stopped and fiddled with the buttons on his coat and checked his watch again. 'He, er…he works for the council.'

  Logan opened his mouth to say something very, very rude, but shut it again.

  'What do you mean "he works for the council"?' he asked, slowly and deliberately. 'If he works for the council, why didn't you just serve notice when he turned up for work this morning?'

  The man examined his clipboard again. Doing his best not to meet Logan's eyes. Keeping his mouth shut.

  'Oh for God's sake,' said Logan. In the end it didn't really matter. They were here now. They might as well get it over with. 'And is Mr Philips at work right now?' he asked, trying to sound calm.

  The nervous man shook his head. 'He's got a day off.'

  Logan tried to massage away the headache pulsing behind his eyes. At least that was something. 'OK. So if he does live here-'

  'He does!'

  'If he does live here, he's not staying in the farmhouse.' Logan turned his back on the dark, neglected building. The rest of the farm buildings were arranged with almost casual abandon, and all had numbers painted on the front.

  'Let's try over there,' he said at last, pointing at the ramshackle structure with the number one painted on it. It was as good a place to start as any.

  A shaking, white-faced Constable Steve joined them outside the steading, looking even worse than he had first thing this morning. You had to give it to DI Insch: when he punished someone he did it properly.

  The door to steading number one had been clarted in cheap green paint. There was paint on the wood, up the walls on either side, on the grass beneath their feet…Logan gestured to the shivering constable, but PC Steve just stared back at him in mute horror. The smell here was even worse than before.

  'Open the door, Constable,' said Logan, determined not to do it himself. Not when he had some poor sod to do it for him.

  It took a while, but in the end PC Steve said, 'Yes, sir,' and took a good hold of the handle. It was a heavy sliding door, the runners buckled and flaky with rust. The constable gritted his teeth and yanked. It creaked open, letting out the most godawful smell Logan had ever encountered in his life.

  Everyone staggered back.

  A small avalanche of dead bluebottles tumbled out of the open door to lie in the misty drizzle.

  Constable Steve hurried off to be sick again.

  The building had been a cattle shed at some point: a long, low, traditionally-built farm steading, with bare granite walls and a slate roof. An elevated walkway ran down the centre of the building, bordered by knee-high wooden rails. It was the only empty area in the place. Everything else was filled with the rotting carcases of small animals.

  The stiff and twisted bodies were covered with a carpet of wriggling white.

  Logan took three steps back and bolted for a corner to be sick in. It was like being punched in the guts all over again, each heave sending ripples of pain through his scarred stomach. Steadings number one, two and three were full of dead animals. Number three wasn't quite packed yet: there was still a good ten or twelve feet of exposed concrete, free of corpses, but covered with a thick yellow ooze. The bodies of flies were crispy under foot.

  Somewhere around steading number two Logan had changed his mind: DI Insch wasn't someone who punished drunken PCs properly. He was an utter bastard.

  They opened and checked each of the buildings, and Logan's stomach lurched every time PC Steve dragged open a door. After what seemed like a week of retching and swearing they sat outside on a crumbling wall. Upwind. Clutching their knees and breathing through their mouths.

  The farm buildings were full of dead cats and dogs and hedgehogs and seagulls and even a couple of red deer. If it
had ever walked, flown or crawled it was here. It was like some sort of necromancer's ark. Only there was a hell of a lot more than two of every animal.

  'What are you going to do with them all?' asked Logan, still tasting the bile after half a packet of PC Steve's extra strong mints.

  The council man looked up at him, his eyes bright pink from repeated vomiting. 'We'll have to remove them all and incinerate the lot,' he said, running a hand over his wet face. He shuddered. 'It'll take days.'

  'Rather you than…' Logan stopped: something was moving at the end of the long drive.

  It was a man in faded jeans and a bright orange anorak. He tramped along the tarmacked portion of the road with his head down, seeing nothing more than his feet beneath him.

  'Shhhhhhhhh!' hissed Logan, grabbing the council man and the bilious PC. 'You go round the back there,' he whispered, pointing PC Steve at the building with the number two scrawled on the front.

  He watched the PC scurry off through the sodden undergrowth. When he was in place Logan grabbed a handful of the council man's jacket. 'Time to serve your papers,' he said, and stepped out onto the flattened grass.

  The man in the orange anorak was less than six foot away when he finally looked up.

  Logan hadn't recognized the name, but he knew the face: it was Roadkill. They sat on a makeshift bench just inside steading number five. Mr Bernard Duncan Philips, AKA Roadkill, had made something like a home in here. A large bundle of blankets, old coats and plastic sacks were piled in the corner, obviously serving as a bed. There was a rough crucifix on the wall above the nest, a half-naked Action Man taking the place of Christ on the home-made cross.

  A mound of empty tin cans and egg cartons sat next to the bed, along with a small Calor Gas cooker. It was one of the little ones Logan's father had taken with them on every summer caravan holiday to Lossiemouth. Right now it was hissing away to itself, boiling a kettle of water for tea.

  Roadkill – it was hard to think of him as Bernard – sat on a rickety wooden chair, poking away at a small fire. It was a two bar electric job, as dead as the animals in buildings one through three. But it seemed to give him pleasure. He jabbed at it with an elaborate iron poker, humming a tune to himself that Logan couldn't quite make out.

  The man from the council was surprisingly calm now that Roadkill was here. He laid out the situation in small, easy-to-understand words: the mounds of dead animals had to go.

  I'm sure you understand, Bernard,' he said, poking at his clipboard with a finger, 'that you can't keep dead animals here. There's a considerable risk to human health. How would you feel if people started getting sick because of your dead animals?'

  Roadkill just shrugged and poked at the fire again. 'Mother got sick,' he said and Logan was struck by the lack of an accent. He'd always assumed that someone employed by the council to scrape dead animals off the road would sound a lot more 'local'. Some of the people round here were almost unintelligible. But not Roadkill. It was clear that the man sitting on a creaking dining chair, jabbing away at a dead electric fire, had suffered some sort of classical education. 'She got sick and she went away,' Roadkill went on, looking up for the first time. 'Now she's with God.' He was a good-looking man, under all the dirt and grime and beard. Proud nose, intelligent slate-grey eyes, weather-reddened cheeks. Give him a bath and a visit to the barber's and he wouldn't look out of place at the Royal Northern Club, where the city's elite held court over expensive five-course lunches.

  'I know, Bernard, I know.' The man from the council smiled reassuringly. 'We're going to send a crew in tomorrow to start clearing out the buildings. OK?'

  Roadkill dropped the poker. It hit the concrete floor with a clatter that reverberated off the bare stone walls. 'They're my things,' he said, his face working itself up to tears. 'You can't take away my things! They're mine.'

  'They have to be disposed of, Bernard. We have to make sure you're safe, don't we?'

  'But they're mine…'

  The man from the council stood, motioning for Logan and Constable Steve to do the same. 'I'm sorry, Bernard, I really am. The team will be here at half past eight on the dot. You can help them if you like.'

  'My things.'

  'Bernard? Would you like to help them?'

  'My special dead things…' They drove back into town with the windows down, trying to get rid of the smell of Bernard Duncan Philips's farm. It clung to their clothes and their hair, rancid and foul. It didn't matter that the drizzle had given way to heavier rain, seeping in through the open windows: getting wet was a small price to pay.

  'You wouldn't think it to look at him,' said the man from the council as they worked their way along Holburn Street, making for the council's main headquarters at St Nicholas House. 'But he used to be a really bright lad. Degree in medieval history from St Andrews University. Or so I'm told.'

  Logan nodded. He'd suspected as much. 'What happened?'

  'Schizophrenic' The man shrugged. 'He's on medication.'

  'Care in the community?' asked Logan.

  'Oh he's perfectly safe,' said the man from the council, but Logan could hear the tremor in his voice. That was why he'd been so insistent on a police escort. Care in the community or not, he was scared of Roadkill. 'And he does a good job, he really does.'

  'Scraping up dead animals.'

  'Well, we can't just leave them to rot at the side of the road, can we? I mean it's not too bad with rabbits and hedgehogs, the cars sort of smush them into paste and the crows and things take care of what's left. But cats and dogs and things…You know…People complain if they have to drive past a rotting labrador every morning on the way to work.' He paused as a bus pulled out in front of them. 'I don't know what we'd do without Bernard. Before he was released into the community we couldn't get anyone to do it for love nor money.'

  Now he actually stopped to think about it, it had been a long time since Logan had seen a dead animal on an Aberdeen street.

  The man from the council dropped them off outside Force HQ, thanking them for their help and apologizing for the smell before driving off into the rain.

  Logan and PC Steve sprinted for the main door, their feet sending up fountains of water with every step. They were both soaked by the time they pushed through into reception.

  The pointy-faced desk sergeant looked up as they squelched their way across the Grampian Police Crest set into the lino: a thistle topped with a crown, above the words 'Semper Vigilo'.

  'DS McRae?' he said, stretching himself out of his chair like a curious parrot.

  'Yes?' Logan was waiting for some sort of 'Lazarus' comment. Those bastards Big Gary and Eric must have told the whole bloody station about it.

  'DI Insch says you're to go straight to the incident room.'

  Logan took a look down at his soaking trousers and wringing suit. He was desperate to climb into a shower and a dry set of clothes. 'Can it not wait fifteen, twenty minutes?' he asked.

  The sergeant shook his head. 'Nope. The DI was very specific. Soon as you got back: straight to the incident room.'

  While PC Steve went off to get dry, Logan grumbled his way through the building to the lifts, mashing the button with an angry finger. Up on the third floor he stomped his way down the corridor. The walls were already punctuated with Christmas cards. They were pinned to the cork-boards, in between 'Have You Seen This Woman?' and 'Domestic Abuse…There's No Excuse!' and all the other wanted and information posters the media office put out. Tiny bursts of cheer among all the misery and suffering.

  The incident room was crowded and bustling. PCs, WPCs and DCs charged about clutching sheets of paper, or answered the constantly bleating phones. And in the middle of it all Detective Inspector Insch sat on the edge of a desk, peering over someone's shoulder as they scribbled down notes with a phone clamped between their shoulder and their ear.

  Something had happened.

  'What's up?' asked Logan after he'd squelched his way through the crowd.

  The inspector held
up a hand for silence, leaning closer so he could read what was being written. Finally he sighed with disappointment and turned his attention to Logan. An eyebrow shot up as he saw the state of his detective sergeant. 'Go for a swim did you?'

  'No, sir,' said Logan, feeling water trickling down the back of his neck into his already sodden collar. 'It's raining.'

  Insch shrugged. 'That's Aberdeen for you. Could you not have dried yourself off before coming in here, dripping all over my lovely clean incident room?'

  Logan closed his eyes and tried not to rise to the bait. 'The desk sergeant said it was urgent, sir.'

  'We've lost another kid.' The car was steaming up too quickly for the blowers to deal with. Logan had cranked them, and the heating, up to full pelt, but the outside world remained obscured behind misty windows. DI Insch sat in the passenger seat, chewing away thoughtfully as Logan squinted through the windscreen at the dark, rain-soaked streets, trying to get them through town to Hazlehead and the place where the latest child had gone missing.

  'You know,' said Insch, 'since you came back to work we've had two abductions, found a dead girl, a dead boy and dragged a corpse with no knees out the harbour. All in the space of three days. That's a record for Aberdeen.' He poked about in his packet of fizzy, jelly shapes, coming out with what looked like an amoeba. 'I'm beginning to think you're some sort of jinx.'

  'Thank you, sir.'

  'It's playing merry hell with my crime statistics,' said Insch. 'Nearly every bloody officer I've got is either out there searching for missing children or trying to find out who the little girl in the bin-bag was. How am I supposed to get the burglaries and the frauds and the indecent exposures sorted out if I don't have any bloody uniforms left?' He sighed and offered the bag to Logan.

  'No thank you, sir.'

  'I tell you, rank has fewer privileges than you think.'