Cold granite lm-1

by Stuart MacBride

  A gust of wind barged past Logan into the dark, smoky room, bringing a flurry of snow with it, setting the posters on the wall fluttering. Without looking around, a large man dressed like a tramp on his day off shouted, 'Shut the bloody door!'

  The wind ruffled the fur on the sleeping dog and its paws twitched as if it was chasing something. Something tasty. A rabbit; or a policeman.

  Watson and the two dog-handlers slipped in after Logan, closing the door behind them. They eyed up the sleeping Alsatian as if it was an unexploded bomb. Licking his lips in nervous anticipation, one of the handlers lowered the loop on the end of his pole at the mass of steaming grey and tan fur, and crept forward. If they could get it while it was asleep then maybe no one would have to get bitten. With all the punters' attention firmly fixed on the race, he tiptoed closer and closer, until the noose was hanging inches from the dog's grey muzzle. On the television a greyhound in a yellow bib charged over the finishing line, just a hair's breadth in front of one in blue. Two of the punters leapt to their feet and cheered. The other two swore.

  The sleeping dog's ears twitched at the sudden noise and up snapped his old, wolf-like head. For a heartbeat the dog just looked at the handler, with his pole and dangling noose.

  The handler went 'Eeek!' and lunged. But he wasn't fast enough. The old dog leapt to his feet and let out a volley of gunfire barks as the pole clattered against the three-bar fire, shattering one of the heating elements.

  Every face in the room turned to stare at the dog. And then at the four policemen.

  'Wharafuck?'

  Now all the punters were on their feet. Clenched fists and tattoos. Bared teeth, snarling, just like Desperate Doug's Alsatian.

  There was a crash at the far end of the shop and the door through to the back room burst open. Simon McLeod stood in the doorway, the annoyance on his face swiftly turning to anger.

  'We don't want any trouble.' Logan had to shout to be heard over the barking dog. 'We just want to speak to Dougie MacDuff.'

  Simon reached out a hand and switched off the lights. The room was plunged into darkness, the ghostly green-grey glow from the flickering television sets doing nothing more than highlighting shapes.

  The first one to cry out in pain was the dog-handler. A crash, a snarl, the sound of someone hitting the deck. A fist whistled past Logan's head and he ducked, flailing out with a fist of his own. There was a brief, momentary feeling of skin and bone breaking under his knuckles, a muffled cry, a splash of something wet on his cheek, and another crash. He hoped to hell he hadn't just flattened WPC Watson!

  The dog was still barking its head off, between snarling, biting noises. The televisions blared as the next race was announced and more greyhounds were loaded into the traps. A metal pole clattered into Logan's back and he stumbled forward, tripped over a supine body and fell headlong to the floor. A foot came down hard next to his head and then was gone again.

  White light spilled over the scene and Logan twisted his head round to see a hunched figure, silhouetted against the snowstorm outside. The figure dropped the plastic bag it was carrying. Four tins of Export and a bottle of Grouse clattered against the tatty linoleum.

  In that moment the room was revealed in the soft glow of winter daylight. One of the handlers was on the floor, his leather-padded arm being savaged by the snarling Alsatian. WPC Watson had blood streaming out of her nose and a large tattooed man in a headlock. The other handler was being punched in the guts while another punter held him down. And Logan was lying, half-sprawled, over someone in a boiler suit with a bloody gap where their front teeth used to be.

  The figure in the door turned and ran.

  Desperate Doug!

  Swearing, Logan hauled himself off the floor and lurched towards the closing door. A hand clutched his ankle and he pitched forward again, hitting the floor hard, feeling the scars in his stomach scream. The grip on his ankle tightened and another hand clapped onto his leg.

  Gasping in pain, Logan grabbed the fallen whisky bottle, gripped it like a club and swung. It battered his assailant's head with a dull clunk and the hands holding him went limp.

  Logan back-pedalled, struggled to his feet again and staggered through the door. The pain in his stomach was like fire. Someone had injected him with petrol and set it alight. Hissing through clenched teeth, he dragged his mobile out and told Quebec Three One to get their arses into the betting shop, now! He leant heavily on the railing that separated the shops from the car park. Desperate Doug might have done a runner, but he was hardly a spring chicken any more. He couldn't have got far.

  Left: nothing but empty road and parked cars, fading in and out of sight through the snow. Right: a grey wash of brick-and-concrete tenement blocks. More parked cars. Someone disappearing into one of the lifeless, gloomy buildings.

  Logan pulled himself off the railing and lurched after the disappearing figure. Behind him, Quebec Three One roared into the icy car park, lights and sirens going full blast.

  The wind drove needles of ice into his face as Logan pushed himself on. The pavement beneath his feet was treacherous, threatening to send him sprawling every time his feet hit the slush. He scrabbled up the path to the building Doug had vanished into, leaping the small flight of steps and banging through the front door. It was quiet and cold in the entrance and his breath fogged the air. Dark stains around the concrete doorways – spreading tree shapes from groin height to the ground – marked where someone had repeatedly urinated against their neighbour's door. The smell hung sharp and rancid in the freezing hallway.

  Logan screeched to a halt, breathing hard, eyes stinging in the urine reek. Doug could have gone to ground in any of these flats. Or he could be hiding just out of sight, behind the stairs. He inched forwards to look, but Desperate Doug wasn't there. The back door was ajar.

  'Damn.' Logan took a deep breath and ran through it, back out into the snow.

  The buildings were arranged so that between each row of three-and four-storey tenements there was a communal drying green. Not that it was particularly green, even at the best of times. Fresh footprints, slowly disappearing in the falling snow, heading for the tenement on the opposite side.

  Logan followed them at a run straight through the building opposite. Another street and another line of tenement buildings. A door slammed directly ahead and Logan slithered his way down the path, across the road, through the door, down the hallway, and out the other side again. Only this time there wasn't another row of bleak grey buildings: this time there was only a six-foot chainlink fence separating the drying green from a band of rough scrubland. An industrial estate was visible through the fence, and a couple of high-rise buildings behind that: Tillydrone.

  Desperate Doug MacDuff was clambering his way over the top of the high fence.

  'Hold it right there!' Logan legged it across the snow, slipping and sliding to a halt at the end of the drying green just in time to see Doug vanish from sight again. 'What are you, bloody Houdini?'

  Clambering up the chainlink, Logan suddenly realized how Desperate Doug had managed to disappear so suddenly. The fence marked the dividing line between the Sandilands Estate and the railway track north out of the city. Hidden by the scrubland and bushes was a deep, wide, man-made ravine with railway lines at the bottom. Doug had slithered his way down one side of the steep siding.

  The old man wasn't running very fast any more. He had slowed to a lurching jog, clutching one arm to his chest as he scuffed his way along the railway tracks.

  Logan pitched himself over the top of the fence and hit the ground hard. Immediately his feet went out from under him. Gravity did the rest. He tumbled down the bank like a boulder, scraping through gorse and bracken, smacking into the hard gravel at the bottom of the ravine. He hit with a cry of pain. Blood was seeping from a gash on the back of his hand. His head rang from its sudden stop against the gravel. But worst of all was the pain exploding in his belly. One year on and Angus Robertson, the Mastrick Monster, was still hurtin
g him.

  The high banks of the railway siding sheltered the bottom of the ravine from the wind. Here the snow fell steadily from the sky, drifting down like a blanket in the still air.

  Logan lay on his side, groaning, trying not to be sick, letting the snow settle on him. He couldn't even move. But he did have a perfect view of Desperate Doug as the old man risked a glance over his shoulder and saw the policeman who'd been chasing him lying, bleeding on the railway tracks. He stopped running and turned to watch Logan, his breath fogging the air in huge, ragged lungfuls.

  And then he started back up the tracks towards Logan. He dug in one of his pockets and something shiny sparkled in his hand. Something sharp.

  Ice water rushed through Logan's body. 'Oh God…'

  He tried to roll over, get to his feet before Desperate Doug reached him. But the pain in his stomach was too much, even with death walking slowly up the tracks towards him.

  'You didn't have tae follow me.' Doug's voice came out in jagged puffs. 'You could've just minded yer own bloody business. Now I'm gonnae have to teach you a lesson, Mr Pig.' He held up the shiny thing: it was a Stanley knife, the blade fully extended.

  'Oh God, no…' It was happening again!

  'I'm real fond of bacon, me.' Doug's face was bright red, creased and florid with broken veins. His milky, dead eye, the same colour as the snow, his twisted smile nicotine-brown. 'Thing 'bout bacon is, you gotta slice it nice and thin.'

  'Don't…' Logan desperately tried to roll over again.

  'Aw, now you're no goin' tae cry are you, Mr Pig? Gonnae greet like a bairn? Hell, wouldn't blame you like. It's gonnae fuckin' hurt!'

  'Don't…please! You don't have to do this…'

  'No?' Doug laughed, the sound turning into a thick, rattling cough and a stream of black-and-red spit. 'What,' he asked when he finally got his breath back, 'what have I got to lose? Eh? I've got the cancer, Mr Pig. Nice wee man at the hospital says I've got me one, maybe two years, tops. And they're gonnae be shitty years. And you bastards are after me, aren't ye?'

  Logan gritted his teeth and pushed against the ground, getting as far as his knees before Doug put a foot in the centre of his back and pushed. The ground slammed against Logan's chest. 'Aaaaaaaaaaaa…'

  'See, youse bastards are gonnae lock me up again. I'm no comin' out alive. No with the cancer eatin' ma lungs and bones. So what can they do to me if I slice you up? I'm dead before my sentence is up anyway. What's one more dead body, eh?'

  Logan groaned and rolled onto his back, feeling the snow falling cold against his face. Keep him talking. Keep him talking and someone might come. One of the uniform. WPC Watson. Anyone. God, please let someone come! 'Is that…is that why you killed Geordie Stephenson?'

  Doug laughed. 'What's this? You think we're gonnae have us a nice wee chat and I'm gonnae 'fess up tae everything? Keep the old fart talking and he'll spill his guts?' He shook his head. 'You watch too much television, Mr Pig. Only guts I'm gonnae spill are yours.' He waggled the Stanley knife and grinned.

  Logan kicked him in the knee. Hard. There was a loud pop and Doug collapsed, dropping the knife, clutching at his ruined kneecap. 'Ahyafucker!'

  Hissing through his teeth, Logan rolled onto his side and lashed out with his foot again, catching the old man on the side of the head, opening up a three-inch gash.

  Doug grunted, his hands covering his bleeding scalp as Logan aimed another blow at the old man's head. Two of his fingers snapped beneath Logan's boot. 'Fuckinbastard!'

  He might have been old and riddled with cancer, but Doug MacDuff had earned his reputation as a hard man in the toughest prisons Scotland had to offer. Earned it the hard way. Snarling, he scrabbled backwards, getting out of range. And then he lunged, wrapped his nicotine-stained hands around Logan's throat and squeezed, his face creased and brutal as he strangled himself a detective sergeant.

  Logan grabbed at the hands encircling his neck, trying to pull them away, but the man's grip was like iron. Already the world had started to take on a red tinge, his ears ringing with the pressure in his head. He let one hand go, curled it into a fist and smashed it off the side of Doug's face. The old man grunted, but didn't let go. Screwing his face up, Logan did it again and again, blood from Doug's wounds dripping down all around him, turning the snow pink. Fighting for his life, he slammed his fist into Doug's head, cracking the jaw, closing the milky, unseeing eye. Punching for all he was worth as the world started to go dark. Again and again and again…until at last the hands around Logan's throat went slack and the old man went limp, slumping over sideways to lie, bleeding in the falling snow.

  29

  They rushed Douglas MacDuff straight through Accident and Emergency and into a treatment room. He looked like death. His lined and wrinkled face was covered with a growing network of dark red bruises. His breathing was shallow and rattling. He hadn't regained consciousness in the ambulance on the way to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, just lay there, oozing blood from his battered face.

  The ambulance men hadn't spoken a word to Logan all the way over here. Not once they learned he was the one who'd beaten up the old age pensioner.

  Standing in silence, shivering, Logan watched as a nurse wired Desperate Doug up to a bank of monitors, bleeps and pings marking time with the old man's heart.

  She looked up to see Logan standing at the foot of the gurney. 'You're going to have to go,' she told him, unbuttoning the old man's shirt. 'He's been beaten up pretty badly.'

  'I know,' Logan left off the fact that he was the one who'd done it. His voice was rough, painful.

  'Are you a relative?' Her face was concerned and professional as she carefully peeled Doug's shirt open.

  'No. A police officer: DS McRae.'

  She stopped, her expression becoming cold. 'I hope you catch the bastard who did this and lock him away for life! Beating up an old man!'

  And then the doctor arrived: a short, balding man with a clipboard and a stressed expression. He didn't care that Logan was an officer of the law. Everyone was to leave so that the patient could be diagnosed and treated.

  'His name is Douglas MacDuff,' said Logan, trying to keep his gravelly voice level. 'He's the chief suspect in a murder investigation. He is to be considered extremely dangerous.'

  The nurse backed away from the gurney, wiping her hands down the front of her blue smock, the latex of her surgical gloves making a dull, squeaking sound beneath the regular ping and beep.

  Logan rubbed tenderly at his throat. 'I'll post a PC to watch him,' he said, swallowing painfully.

  The nurse gave him an uncertain smile, but the doctor was already poking and prodding Dougie's battered body. With a deep breath she squared her shoulders and went to work.

  Logan arranged for someone to stay by Desperate Doug's bedside and left them to it. Out in the hall he almost fell over a nurse pushing a trolley covered with bottles of pills. He turned to apologize and found himself looking into a familiar face. Only this time Lorna Henderson's mother was sporting a huge black eye. She'd tried to cover it up with six inches of make-up, but the bruising still shone through. 'Are you OK?' he asked.

  A nervous hand fluttered up to the puffy eye and she forced a smile onto her face. 'Fine,' she said, her voice brittle round the edges. 'Never better. How are you?'

  'Did someone hit you, Mrs Henderson?'

  She smoothed down her blue nurse's uniform and said no. She had walked into a door. It was an accident. That was all.

  Logan gave her one of DI Insch's patented silences.

  Slowly the fake smile slid away, leaving her pale and jowly again. 'Kevin came round. He'd been drinking.' She picked at the name badge pinned to her chest, not looking Logan in the eye. 'I thought he'd come back to me. You know, dumped that flat-chested tart. But he said it was all my fault that Lorna was dead. That I should have never made her get out of the car. That I killed her…' She looked up, tears making her eyes sparkle in the fluorescent lighting. 'I tried to make him understand we could get th
rough it together. Be there for each other. That I still loved him. That I knew he still loved me.' A single fat tear spilled over the edge and down her cheek. She wiped it away on the back of her hand. 'He got upset and shouted even louder. Then he…I deserved it! It was all my fault! He's never coming back…' Tears spilling down her face, she abandoned her trolley and ran.

  Logan watched her disappear through a set of double doors and sighed.

  WPC Watson was sitting in the waiting area, with her head back and a scrunched-up handful of toilet paper jammed against her face. It was bright red.

  'How's the nose?' asked Logan, plonking himself down on the next plastic chair along. Trying to keep himself from trembling.

  'Sore,' she said, peering at him from the corner of her eye, not moving her head. 'Ad leasd I don'd thing id's broken. How's the prisoner?'

  Logan shrugged and instantly regretted it. 'How's everyone else?' he asked, his voice coming out as a painful croak.

  WPC Watson pointed off down the corridor to the treatment rooms. 'One of the dog-handlers is gedding his ribs checked out. Everyone else is OK.' She smiled and winced. 'Oww…Someone from the bookies god their front teeth knocked out.' She peered at him again, watching as Logan rubbed a hand around his throat for the umpteenth time since sitting down. 'You OK?'

  Logan pulled down the collar of his shirt, exposing his neck in all its strangled glory.

  Watson winced again, but this time for him. Desperate Doug's finger marks stood out against the pale skin in red and purple. The two biggest bruises sitting on either side of the windpipe, where the old man's thumbs had tried to squeeze the life out of him.

  'Jesus, whad happened?'

  'I kind of fell down and couldn't get up.' Logan went back to rubbing his throat. 'Mr MacDuff wanted to make it permanent.' The knife blade flashing in the light. He shivered again.

  'The old bastard!'

  Logan almost smiled; it was nice to have someone on his side for a change. DI Insch was not so understanding. When they got back to Force Headquarters, Logan with another pocket full of painkillers and WPC Watson with confirmation that her nose wasn't broken, the message was delivered by the desk sergeant: Logan was to report to the inspector's office. Now!