Cold Granite (35 page)

Insch folded his arms and settled back in his seat. 'So you took the little girl back to your

"col ection".'

'Always take them home. Always.' Sniff. 'Can't just throw them out like garbage. Not dead things. Not things that used to be alive inside.'

And with that Logan was forced to remember a single leg sticking out of a bin-bag in the middle of the council tip. 'Did you see anything else?' he asked. 'When you picked her up. Did you see anything: a car, or a lorry or anything like that?'

Roadkil shook his head. 'Nothing. Just the dead girl, lying at the side of the road. Al broken and bleeding and stil warm.'

The hairs went up on the back of Logan's neck. 'Was she alive? Bernard, was she stil alive when you found her?'

The ratty figure sank down against the table, resting his head in his arms on the chipped Formica top. 'Sometimes the things get hit and they don't die right away. Sometimes they wait for me to come and watch over them.'

'Oh Christ.'

They put Roadkil back in his cel and reconvened in the interview room: Logan, Insch and Roadkil 's appropriate adult.

'You do know you're going to have to release him, don't you?' said Mr Turner.

Logan raised an eyebrow, but Insch said: 'Your arse I wil .'

The ex-schoolteacher sighed and settled back into one of the uncomfortable plastic seats. 'The most you have on him is failing to report an accident and the il egal disposal of a body.' He rubbed at his face. 'And we al know the Crown Prosecution Service isn't going to take this for criminal trial. One good psychiatric report and the whole thing goes nowhere. He hasn't done anything wrong. Not by his reckoning anyway. The girl was just another dead thing found at the side of the road. He was doing his job.'

Logan tried not to nod his head in agreement. Insch wouldn't have appreciated it.

The inspector ground his teeth and stared at Mr Turner, who shrugged. 'I'm sorry, but he's not guilty. If you don't release him I'm going to go to the press. There are stil enough cameras out there to get this al over the morning news.'

'We can't let him go,' said Insch. 'Someone wil rip his head off if we do.'

'So you admit that he's done nothing wrong then?' There was something distinctly patronizing about the way Turner said it, as if he was back in the classroom again and DI Insch had just been caught behind the bike sheds.

The inspector scowled. 'Listen, sunshine: I ask the leading questions in here, not you.' He rummaged in his pockets for something sweet and came up empty-handed. 'With Cleaver going free, the great, good and stupid of the community are on the lookout for anyone even slightly dodgy. Your boy had a dead girl in his shed. He's going to be top of their list.'

'Then you'l have to provide him with protective custody. We'l speak to the press: get them to understand that Bernard is innocent. That you've decided to drop al the charges.'

Logan cut in. 'No we haven't! He's still guilty of hiding the body!'

'Sergeant,' said Mr Turner with condescending patience, 'you have to understand how this works. If you try to take any of this to court, you're going to end up losing. The Procurator Fiscal won't stand for another cock-up. He's got enough egg on his face with the Cleaver fiasco.

Mr Philips wil go free. Question is: how much tax payers' money do you want to waste getting there?'

Logan and DI Insch stood in the empty incident room, looking down at the growing bustle of activity in the car park. Mr Turner had been as good as his word. He was standing in front of the cameras, enjoying his moment in the spotlight. Tel ing the world that Bernard Duncan Philips had been absolved of al charges, that the system worked.

The ex-teacher had been right: the Procurator Fiscal didn't want to touch the case with a stick. And the Chief Constable wasn't that happy about it either. So Roadkil was off to stay at a safe house somewhere in Summerhil .

'What do you think?' asked Logan, watching as yet another camera crew joined the throng. It was almost eleven o'clock, but stil they came.

Insch glowered down at the assembled press. 'I'm screwed, that's what I think. First the bloody panto thing, then Cleaver gets away with twelve years of systematic child abuse, and now Roadkil 's back on the streets. How long did we have him banged up? Forty-eight hours?

Maybe sixty at a push. They're going to eat me alive...'

'How about we go to the media too? I could have a word with Mil er. See if he can put our side across?'

Insch gave a sad laugh. 'Smal -town Journalist Saves Police Inspector's Career from the Toilet?' He shook his head. 'Don't see it coming off, do you?'

'Worth a shot though.'

In the end, Insch had to admit he had nothing to lose.

'After al ,' said Logan, 'we've just prevented a serious miscarriage of justice. Surely that's got to count for something?'

'Aye. It should.' The inspector's shoulders sagged. 'But if it wasn't Roadkil and it wasn't Nicholson, then we've stil got a kil er out there, picking off children. And we haven't got a bloody clue who it is.'

27

By the time Logan climbed out of bed and into the shower, Sunday was tearing at the windows of his flat with wintry fingers. Snow, coming down in smal icy flakes, whipped back and forth in the gusting wind. It was cold, it was dark, and it was no longer the day of rest he'd been promised.

Struggling into a grey suit, with matching expression, Logan doddered around his warm home, trying to put off the moment when he'd have to step out into the bloody awful weather.

And then the phone went: the inimitable Colin Mil er looking for his exclusive.

Logan grumbled his way down the communal stairs to the building's front door. Half a ton of flying ice tried to get in as he struggled his way out into the frigid morning. The snow attacked him like frozen razorblades, slashing at his exposed face and hands, making his cheeks and ears sting.

The day was dark as a lawyer's soul.

Mil er's flash motor was waiting for him at the kerb, the interior lights on, something classical blaring out through the glass as the reporter hunched over a broadsheet newspaper.

Logan slammed the apartment door shut, not caring if he woke his neighbours. Why the hel should he be the only one up and about on a crappy day like this? He slipped and slithered his way around the car to the passenger seat, bringing a flurry of icy, white flakes with him.

'Watch the leather!' Mil er had to shout over the opera blaring from the car's stereo. He cranked down the volume a bit as the thin crust of snow slowly defrosted on Logan's heavy overcoat.

'What, no rowies today?' asked Logan, wiping ice out of his hair before it could turn into a frigid trickle down the back of his neck.

'Think I'm goin' tae let you spil greasy crumbs al over my nice new motor? This interview goes wel an' I'l buy yous an Egg McMuffin. OK?'

Logan told him he'd sooner eat a deep-fried turd. 'And how come you can afford a flash car like this? Thought all you reporters lived in penury.'

'Aye, wel ,' Miller shrugged and pulled away from the kerb. 'I did this bloke a favour once. Didn't publish a story...'

Logan raised an eyebrow, but Mil er wouldn't say any more.

Traffic was light at this time on a Sunday morning, but the weather slowed what little there was down to a crawl. Mil er slotted his car in behind a once-white truck, the top covered with a foot of icy snow, the rest of it covered with three inches of dirt. Some wag had scrawled the usual 'I W ISH M Y W IFE W AS T HIS D IRTY' and 'W ASH M E' in the grime. The writing glowed in Mil er's headlights as they slowly made their way across town to Summerhil .

The safe house didn't look any different to the others in the street: just another concrete box with a smal garden out front, buried under a growing blanket of white. Asagging wil ow tree stood forlorn in the middle, bent under the weight of snow and ice.

'Right,' said Mil er, parking behind a battered Renault. 'Let's go get us an exclusive.' The reporter's attitude towards Roadkil had changed dramatical y since Logan told him about the road accident. Bernard Duncan Philips was no longer to be strung up by his bal s until they popped. Now he was a victim of society's disposable culture, in which the mental y il could be thrown out into the community to fend for themselves.

Bernard Duncan Philips was roused from his bed by a large, plainclothes policewoman and prodded downstairs to perform for the reporter. Mil er's questioning technique was good, making Roadkil feel relaxed and important, while a snazzy digital recorder whirled silently in the middle of a coffee table that had seen better days. They went over his glittering academic career, ruined by his mother's ill health, then delicately tiptoed around the descent into mental il ness and the death of Mrs Roadkil Senior, God rest her soul. There was nothing there Logan hadn't got from the files, so he spent his time drinking over-strong tea, poured from a cracked brown pot. And counting the roses on the wal paper. And the blue silk bows. Between the pink stripes.

It wasn't until Mil er got onto the subject of Lorna Henderson, the dead girl in steading number two, that Logan started paying attention again.

But, good though he was, Mil er wasn't getting that much more out of his subject than DI Insch had. The whole topic made Roadkil twitchy. Agitated.

It wasn't right. They were his dead things. They were taking them away.

'Come on now, Bernard,' said the plainclothes WPC, womanning the teapot again.

'There's no need to get excited, is there?'

'My things. They're stealing my things!' He jumped to his feet, sending a plate of chocolate digestives clattering to the ground. A pair of wild eyes darted at Logan. 'You're a policeman! They're stealing my things!'

Logan tried not to sigh. 'They have to take them away, Bernard. You remember we came round with the man from the council? They were making people sick. Like your mum.

Remember?'

Roadkil screwed up his eyes tight. Teeth gritted. Fists pressed hard against his forehead.

'I want to go home! They're my things!'

The large policewoman put down the teapot and made soothing noises, as if the grubby, ranting man was a smal child with a skinned knee. 'Shoosh, shoosh,' she said, stroking Roadkil 's arm with a plump hand covered in rings. 'It's al right. Everything wil be al right. You'l be safe here with us. We won't let anything happen to you.'

Slowly, uncertainly, Bernard Duncan Philips sat back down on the edge of his seat, his left foot crunching a chocolate digestive to crumbs on the carpet.

But the interview went downhil from there. No matter how clever, or careful, Mil er's questions were they stil managed to upset Roadkil . And he just kept coming back to the same thing, time and time again: he wanted to go home: they were stealing his things.

Aberdeen beach was desolate and freezing. The North Sea raged, dark grey, between the whipping curtains of snow. The boom of granite-coloured waves smashing into the concrete beachfront punctuated the howling storm, sending spray twenty feet into the air, where the wind threw it against the shopfronts.

Most of the businesses hadn't bothered opening this morning. It wasn't as if there was going to be a lot of passing trade for the tourist shops, amusement arcades and ice-cream parlours. But Mil er and Logan were ensconced at a window table in the Inversnecky Cafe, wolfing down smoky bacon butties and drinking strong coffee.

'Wel that was a waste of bloody time,' said Mil er, picking a rubber band of bacon fat from his rol . 'You should be buyin' me breakfast after that. No the other way around.'

'You must've got something!'

Mil er shrugged and curled the fat into the unused ashtray. 'Aye: he's off his friggin'

trol ey. I got that loud and bloody clear. Mind you, no exactly news, is it?'

'I'm not looking for much,' said Logan. 'Just something that lets everyone know he didn't kil that little girl. He didn't do it so we had to let him go.'

The reporter wrapped himself around a large bite, chewing thoughtfully. 'Your bosses must be bricking it if they've asked you to come beggin' for a puff piece.'

Logan opened and shut his mouth.

Mil er winked at him. 'It's OK, Laz, I can run with this. Give it the patented Colin Mil er Midas Touch. We slap a copy of the X-rays on the front cover. Get the graphics department to knock us up some "kiddie gets smacked by Volvo" pictures. Bob's your uncle. But that's no going to come out til Monday. You see the tel y this mornin'? They're havin' a field day. Your pantomime dame's going to be out of a job by then. Letting Roadkil go. Twice.'

'He didn't kil that kid.'

'That's no the point, Laz. The public sees al these nasty things happenin': dead boys in ditches, dead lassies in bin-bags, children abducted left, right and centre. Cleaver goes free, even though we al know he did it. And now Roadkil 's out too.' He ripped another bite from his buttie. 'As far as they're concerned he's guilty.'

'But he didn't do it!'

'No one gives a toss about the truth any more. You know that, Laz.'

Gloomily Logan had to admit that he did. They sat and ate in silence.

'So how's your other story coming?' he asked at last.

'Which one?'

'When you told me you were backing off Geordie No-Knees you said you had safer fish to fry.'

The reporter took a slurp of coffee. 'Oh aye. That.' Mil er paused, gazing out through the window at the snow and the waves and the battling sea. 'No that wel .' He lapsed into silence.

Logan let the pause go on for long enough to make sure the details weren't going to come out of their own accord. 'Wel ? What was it?'

'Hmm?' Mil er dragged his attention back into the cafe. 'Oh right. There's this rumour that there's a bloke in the market for somethin' special. Somethin' no many people sel .'

'Drugs?'

The reporter shook his head. 'Nah. Livestock.'

Wel that sounded bloody daft. 'What? Pigs and chickens and cows and things?'

'No that kind of livestock.'

Logan sat back in his seat and examined the taciturn reporter. His face, usual y an open book, was closed and lined. 'So what kind of livestock is this buyer after?'