Dying Light (9 page)

Steel swung off Union Street opposite Marks and Spencer, heading down Market Street. As the
harbour drifted past Logan peered around, but Shore Lane was hidden from view by a dirty big supply boat. The clanging and bashing of containers being loaded and unloaded echoed through the rain.

‘So what about our hairy friend’s post mortem?’ the inspector asked as they headed along the north bank of the River Dee, taking the scenic route to Craiginches Prison. He told her about the knife and the suitcase and the antidepressant. Steel just snorted. ‘Lot of bloody good that does us.’

‘Well, the drugs are prescription only, so—’

‘So they might be the
killer’s
! Or the killer’s wife’s, or his mother’s, or their neighbour’s, or granny’s…’ She wound down the window and flicked the dying remains of her cigarette out into the rainy sunshine. ‘Damn things could be Gulf War surplus for all we know. Hell, they might not even have been prescribed locally!’ said Steel, swinging around the roundabout onto Queen Mother Bridge. ‘What we going to do? Phone up every doctor’s office and pharmacy in the country and ask for a list of patients’ names and addresses?’

‘We could get them to narrow it down a bit; just ask for details of anyone with mental problems who’s been prescribed the drug.’

‘“Mental problems?”’ She laughed. ‘If they didn’t have mental problems they wouldn’t be on anti-bloody-depressants, would they?’ She looked across the car at him. ‘Jesus, Lazarus, how’d you get to be a DS? They giving out sergeant’s stripes
free with boxes of Frosties?’ Logan just scowled at the dashboard. ‘Aye, well,’ she smiled at him. ‘When we get back to the ranch you can go find one of them tree-hugging wildlife crime officers to chase it up. Dead dog’ll be right up their street. We’ll start paying attention again if it comes to anything.’

HM Prison Craiginches was segregated from the outside world by twenty-four-foot-high walls, and a small black metal plaque saying, ‘P
RIVATE
P
ROPERTY
K
EEP
O
UT
’, as if the razor wire wasn’t enough of a hint. It was surrounded on three sides by residential streets – the houses festooned with burglar alarms – but on the fourth side there was nothing between the prison’s north wall and the River Dee but the dual carriageway to Altens and a very steep bank. DI Steel parked in a bay marked ‘S
TAFF
O
NLY
’ and sauntered round to the front door, with Logan slouching along at her heels. Twelve minutes later they were sitting in a shabby little room with a chipped Formica table and creaky plastic seats complete with brown, slug-shaped cigarette burns. There was a tape recorder bolted to the wall, but no video, just the bracket and a couple of loose wires. They sat there for another five minutes, counting the ceiling tiles – twenty-two and a half – before Jamie McKinnon was finally shepherded round the door by a bored-looking prison officer. Logan popped a couple of fresh tapes into the machine and launched into the standard names, dates and location speech.
‘So then, Jamie,’ said DI Steel when he’d finished. ‘How’s the food? Good? Or is Dirty Duncan Dundas still wanking into the porridge?’ Jamie just shuddered and started picking at the skin around his fingernails, hacking away at it until the quick showed deep pink underneath. It didn’t look as if prison agreed with McKinnon; a thin sheen of sweat covered his face and there were dark bags under his eyes. He had a split lip and a bruised cheek. Steel settled back in her seat and grinned at him. ‘The reason we’re here, my little porridgemuncher, is that there’s a
tiny
problem with your alibi: someone saw you and Rosie Williams going at it like knives the night she got herself battered to death! How’s about that for wacky coincidence?’

Jamie slowly slumped forward until his face was flat on the tabletop, his arms wrapped over his head.

‘You want we should give you a couple of minutes to think up some new lies, Jamie?’ asked the inspector.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt her…’

‘Aye, we know that,’ Steel pulled out her cigarettes and popped one in her mouth without offering them around. ‘So why’d you do it then?’

‘Been drinking… Down the Regents Arms… This bloke kept going on how she was nothing but a posh wank. No’ even that…’ He shivered. ‘Followed him into the toilets and beat the shite out of him. Talking ‘bout Rosie like that. Like she was just a whore…’

Steel’s reply came out in a cloud of cigarette smoke: ‘She
was
a whore, Jamie, sold her arse on the streets for—’

‘SHUT UP! SHE WAS NOT A WHORE!’ He jerked up and slammed his fists on the table, making it jump. His face was flushed, eyes sparkling and damp.

Logan sighed and stepped in, playing the good cop. ‘So you taught him a lesson for insulting your woman. I can understand that. What happened next? Did you go looking for her?’

Jamie nodded, eyes fastening on Logan, ignoring the inspector. ‘Yes… I wanted to tell her: it has to stop! She has to stay home, look after the kids. No more going out on the streets…’ He sniffed and wiped his nose on the back of his sleeve.

‘What happened when you found her, Jamie?’

He looked down at his picked-at fingers. ‘I’d been drinking.’

‘We know that, Jamie: what happened?’

‘We had this argument… She… She said she needed the money. Said she couldn’t stop.’ Jamie laid down another trail of silver on his sleeve. ‘I told her I’d support her. I was getting something together, she wouldn’t have to worry… But she wasn’t having any of it: kept going on and on about how I couldn’t support her and the kids…’ He bit his bottom lip. ‘So I hit her. Just like that. And she started screaming at me. So I hit her again. Just to make her stop…’

Logan let the silence hang for a bit, while DI Steel dribbled smoke down her nose. ‘Then what did you do?’

‘Threw up in the toilet. Washed the blood off my hands… She was lying on the floor, all bruised… So I picked her up and put her to bed.’

Steel snarled. ‘Put her to bed? That what they’re calling it these days? “Putting someone to bed”? What a lovely euphemism for strangling someone in an alleyway! Like fucking poetry that is.’

Jamie ignored her. ‘Next day she was covered in bruises. Threw me out. Said she never wanted to see me again. But I never meant to hurt her!’

Logan sat back in his seat and tried not to groan. ‘It’s
Monday
night we want to know about, Jamie. What happened on Monday night?’

‘Went to see her, on the street.’ He shrugged. ‘Wanted to say I was sorry… show her I was making good money… You know, from the fast-food jobs? I could take care of her and the kids. I loved her… But she wouldn’t talk to me: said she had to earn a living… didn’t want anything to do with me… had clients to see. I’d have to pay…’

‘And did you?’

Jamie hung his head. ‘I… Yes.’

DI Steel spluttered, sending ash sparking from the end of her fag. ‘So you forked out to screw your ex? Jesus, how fucking twisted is that?’

Logan scowled at her. ‘Then what happened, Jamie?’

‘We did it in a doorway and… and I cried and told her I loved her and I was so sorry for what I’d done, but I loved her so much I couldn’t stand to see her out there with other men…’ His red eyes filled with tears. ‘I was making good money now, I could do it, we could be together…’ He wiped his eyes with the same silvered sleeve.

Steel inched forward in her seat, bathing Jamie in a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘She said no though, didn’t she? She said no and you hit her. You hit her and you kept hitting her ’cos she wouldn’t take a slimy wee shite like you back. You killed her,’ cos it was that or pay for it your whole life. Pay to screw her in alleyways, just like hundreds of other desperate wee fucks.’

‘NO! She said she’d think about it! She was going to come back to me! We were going to be a family!’ The tears were falling freely now, running down his chubby cheeks, his scarlet nose streaming as sobs shook his body. ‘God, she’s dead! She’s dead!’ He crumpled to the tabletop, shoulders heaving.

Logan’s voice was soft. ‘Did you hit her again, Jamie? Did you kill her?’

He could barely make out the reply. ‘I loved her…’

The ride back from Craiginches was spent with DI Steel smoking and swearing furiously. Now that Jamie McKinnon had admitted to paying for sex with Rosie the night she died, Logan’s disappearing Lithuanian witness was worthless. And so was any DNA evidence they got from the hundreds of discarded condoms. Things had been a lot simpler when McKinnon was just denying everything. She pulled up outside Logan’s flat and demanded the tapes of the interview. He handed them over and asked if she didn’t want him to do the paperwork: taking them into evidence, releasing one copy to Jamie McKinnon’s defence lawyer. ‘Do I buggery,’ was her response. ‘Bloody things screw up my investigation.’ She took the recordings, turned them upside down and picked a loop of tape free with a nicotine-stained fingernail. Then did ‘Flags Of All Nations’ with it, sending reels of shiny brown ribbon spooling out into the interior of the car. ‘Far as anyone’s concerned there was something
wrong with the machine OK? No tape was ever made. We forget anything that was said and go back to proving Jamie McKinnon did it.’ Logan tried to protest but the inspector was having none of it. ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘We both
know
he did it! It’s our job to make sure he doesn’t get away with it.’

‘What if he didn’t do it?’

‘Of course he did it! He’s got form for beating her up ’cos she was on the game. He goes and pledges his undying love and she makes him fork out for a knee-trembler in an alleyway. Then goes off to shag someone else. He’s overcome with rage and kills her. The end.’ She shook her head. ‘Now get your arse out of my car. I’ve got things to do.’

Logan spent the rest of the afternoon pottering about the flat. Sulking. So much for the Rosie Williams murder being his ticket out of the Screw-Up Squad. The way DI Steel was going they’d end up with no admissible evidence and a fully compromised case. The woman was a bloody menace. By seven thirty there was still no sign of Jackie, so he went out to the pub and to hell with everyone else. Archibald Simpson’s wasn’t an option: being just around the corner from Force Headquarters and full of cheap beer, the bar was a regular haunt for off-duty police, and he’d had enough dirty looks about getting PC Maitland shot to last him for one week, thank you very much. So instead he wandered up Union Street to the Howff, sitting on a creaky beige sofa in the farthest
corner of the basement-level bar, nursing a pint of Directors and a packet of dry-roasted. Brooding over Jackie and her foul temper. And then another pint. And another. And a burger – smothered in chilli so hot it made his eyes water – and then another pint, getting maudlin. PC Maitland – Logan couldn’t even remember his first name. Until the screwed-up raid he’d never worked with the guy, only knew him as the bloke with the moustache who shaved his head for Children In Need one year. Poor bastard. Two pints later and it was time to lurch blearily home, via a chip shop for jumbo-haddock supper; most of which he abandoned, uneaten, in the lounge, before staggering off to bed alone.

Saturday morning started with a hangover. The bathroom cabinet was devoid of massive blue-and-yellow painkillers – the ones Logan had been given after Angus Robertson had performed un-elective surgery on his innards with a six-inch hunting knife – so he had to make do with a handful of aspirin and a mug of strong instant coffee, taking it into the lounge to see what kind of cartoons were on. There was a shape on the couch and his heart sank. Jackie, all wrapped up in the spare duvet, blinking blearily as he froze in the doorway. He hadn’t even heard her come in last night. She took one look at him, mumbled, ‘Don’t want any coffee…’ and pulled the duvet over her head, shutting him, and the rest of the world, out.

Logan went back to the kitchen, closing the door behind him.

Saturday, their only full day off together, and Jackie still wasn’t speaking to him. Obviously she’d rather sleep on the couch than share his bed. What a great bloody weekend
this
was turning out to be. He checked the clock on the microwave. Half past nine. Outside the kitchen window the rain was just coming on again, not the sunshine-and-rainbows rain of yesterday, but the heavy-grey-skies-and-freezing-wind kind of rain. It leached the warmth out of everything, making the city grey and miserable all over again. Matching Logan’s mood. He dressed and headed out, meandering up Union Street, taking perverse pleasure in getting cold and wet. ‘Playing the martyr’ as his mum used to say. And she should know, she was a bloody dab hand at it.

He moped about the shops for a bit: bought a CD by some band he’d heard on the radio last week, two newish crime novels and a couple of DVDs. Trying to take his mind off everything that was wrong and failing miserably. Jackie hated him, Steel was a pain in the arse, PC Maitland was dying… He gave up on the shopping and wandered across Union Terrace, down School Hill and onto Broad Street. Drifting inexorably back towards the flat through the rain. At the corner of Marischal College, where the pale grey spines of its elaborate Victorian-Gothic frontage raised their claws to the clay-coloured skies, he stopped.
Straight ahead and it was back to the flat. Turn left and it was a stone’s throw to Force Headquarters. It wasn’t a tough choice, even if he was supposed to be off. He could always kill some time poking his nose into someone else’s investigation. DI Insch was usually good for a… Logan screwed up his face and swore; the dead squatter – he
still
hadn’t told Insch about Graham Kennedy. Bloody idiot. Miller had given him the name days ago! Sodding DI Steel and her malfunctioning tape recorder act.

The desk sergeant barely spoke to Logan as he squelched in through the front doors and dripped his way across the patterned linoleum of reception.

DI Insch’s incident room was carefully orchestrated chaos – phones being manned, information being collated and entered into HOLMES, so the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System could automatically churn out reams and reams of pointless actions at the press of a button. Now and then it came out with something that made all the difference to an investigation, but most of the time: crap. Maps of Aberdeen were stuck up on the walls, coloured pins marking the locations of significant events. The inspector was sitting on a desk at the front of the room, resting one large buttock on the groaning wood while he read through a pile of reports and chewed on a Curly Wurly.

‘Afternoon, sir,’ said Logan, squelching in, hands
in his pockets, damp underwear beginning to make its presence felt.

Insch looked up from his paperwork, the chocolate-toffee-lattice sticking out of his large, pink face like a DNA-shaped cigar. ‘Sergeant.’ He nodded and went back to his reports. Two minutes later he handed them to a harassed-looking, cadaverous WPC and told her she was doing a great job, no matter what anyone else said. The admin officer didn’t bother to thank him. As she stormed off back to the collating, Insch turned and beckoned Logan over. ‘Bit overdressed for bath time aren’t you?’

Logan didn’t rise to the bait. ‘I was wondering how you were getting on with your fatal arson attack.’

Insch frowned, the strip lighting gleaming off his bald, pink head. Suspicious. ‘Why?’

‘Got a possible ID for one of your victims: Graham Kennedy. Supposed to have been a minor dealer.’ That made a smile blossom on the inspector’s face.

‘Well, well, well. There’s a name I’ve not heard in a while. You—’ Insch picked a PC at random and sent him off to phone round the dental practices in Aberdeen. Insch wanted to know who treated Graham Kennedy: dental records, X-rays the whole lot. It was the only way they were going to identify his charred corpse in the morgue. For once luck was actually on their side; the fourth dental practice the PC tried had done a whole
heap of fillings on one Graham Kennedy less than eight months ago.

They couriered the X-rays straight over to the morgue and ten minutes later Doc Fraser confirmed the identification: Graham Kennedy was now officially dead. The enquiry finally had somewhere to start.

Insch grabbed PC Steve and told him to go get everything Records had on Graham Kennedy and meet them in the car park, then bellowed for a DS Beattie to get his backside in gear: they were going to break the news to Graham Kennedy’s next of kin. And have a bit of a rummage through his things.

‘Er, sir,’ said Logan, following in the inspector’s wake, ‘I kinda hoped I could come with you on the shout?’

Insch raised an eyebrow and mashed the lift button with a fat finger. ‘Oh aye? And what about DI Steel? You’re supposed to be working for her. “More immediate supervision”, remember?’

Logan opened and closed his mouth. ‘Come on, sir! I didn’t ask to be transferred! And anyway, it’s my day off. I’ve—’

‘You’ve got a day off and you want to go on a shout?’ Insch looked at him suspiciously. ‘You gone mental or something?’

‘Please, sir. I need to get out of Steel’s team. It’s driving me mad! Nothing gets done by the book: even if we do get a result, it’s going to be so tainted any defence lawyer worth half a fart
will tear it to shreds! If I don’t get some sort of success under my belt, I’m going to be stuck there till they fire me, or I go completely off my head.’

Insch shook his head, a small smile on his face. ‘I hate to see a grown man beg.’ A puffing, bearded detective sergeant appeared at the end of the corridor, dragging on a huge, multicoloured weatherproof jacket. DI Insch waited until he’d run the length of the corridor and come to a screeching halt in front of them, before telling him he wasn’t needed after all. He’d be taking DS McRae along instead. Swearing quietly, the bearded bloke slouched back the way he’d come.

The inspector grinned. ‘Just like to see the fat wee bugger run for his money,’ he said happily. Logan knew better than to say anything about pots and kettles.

As they marched downstairs to the car park, Insch quizzed him on DI Steel’s cases, wanting to know everything about the battered prostitute and the Labrador in the suitcase. And by the time they were through all that, a red-faced PC Steve Jacobs was waiting for them by the back door, clutching a small stack of A4 printouts: Graham Kennedy’s rap sheet. Insch pointed his key fob at a muck-encrusted Range Rover and plipped open the locks. ‘Right,’ he said, striding out into the rain, ‘PC Jacobs, you can do the honours. DS McRae, in the back, and don’t stand on the dog food.’

The inside of Insch’s car smelled as if something wet and shaggy had set up residence. There was
a big metal grille separating the back seat from the boot and a soggy, black nose was pressed against it as soon as Logan clambered into place, trying not to tread on the jumbo-sized bag of Senior Dog Mix in the foot well. Lucy – the inspector’s ancient Springer Spaniel – was pretty, in a manipulative, big-brown-eyed kind of way, but every time it rained she stank like a tramp on a bad day.

‘Where to, sir?’ asked PC Steve as they cruised slowly up Queen Street.

‘Hmm?’ The inspector was already immersed in Graham Kennedy’s file. ‘Oh, Kettlebray Crescent: let’s get our esteemed colleague’s opinion on the scene of the crime before we go tell Kennedy’s granny her wee boy’s dead… And the car does come with an accelerator, Constable: pedal on the floor, next to the big rectangular one. Try and use it, or we’ll be here till bloody Christmas.’

Fourteen Kettlebray Crescent was a mess. Vacant windows stared out at the street, surrounded by dark streaks of soot. The roof was gone, collapsed in on itself as the flames raged through the building. Now faint, rainy daylight filtered into the house’s shabby interior. The buildings on either side hadn’t fared too badly; the fire brigade had arrived quickly enough to save them. But not the six people who’d been in number fourteen. Insch grabbed an umbrella from the boot and marched off into the fire-ravaged house, leaving Logan and
PC Steve to scurry along behind getting wet. A mobile incident room was abandoned outside the building: a cross between a Portakabin and a caravan, only without the windows. The standard black-and-white checked ribbon ran around the outside, with the S
EMPER
V
IGILO
thistle logo in the middle. Like a bow on a grubby, unwanted Christmas present.

They ducked under the blue-and-white P
OLICE
tape stretched across the burnt-out building’s garden gate and walked up the path to the front door. It was hanging off its hinges, battered in by the fire brigade as soon as they realized someone was actually in there, but by then it was too late. Logan stopped at the doorframe: there were about two dozen three-inch screws poking through the wood, their shiny steel points grabbing the space where the door should have been. Inside it was like something out of
Better Homes and Infernos
. The walls in the hallway were stripped back to the plaster and lathe, black and covered in soot. ‘Er … sir?’ asked PC Steve, hanging back, peering into the gutted building from the outside. ‘Are you sure this is safe?’

The upper floor was missing, leaving the building little more than a burnt-out shell, the ground floor covered in broken slates and charcoaled wooden beams. Rain fell steadily through the gaping hole where the roof used to be, drumming off the inspector’s brolly. He stood in a relatively clear patch and pointed up at one of the
windows on the upper floor. ‘Main bedroom: that’s where the petrol bombs came in.’

Logan risked a clamber over the shifting, rain-slicked slates, to peer out into the street beyond. The mud was slowly washing off the inspector’s filthy car, the expectant nose of a smelly spaniel pressed against the rear window, looking up at the building where six people had been burned to death. Screaming until their lungs filled with scalding smoke and flame, falling to the floor in agony as their eyes cooked and their flesh crackled … Logan shuddered. Did it actually smell of burning people in here, or was it just his imagination? ‘You know,’ he said, looking away from the window and back into the hollowed-out building, ‘I heard it takes twenty minutes for the human brain to die once the flow of blood’s stopped… all the electrical impulses, firing away to themselves, till there’s no charge left…’ The ruined face, staring up at him out of the body-bag in the morgue: eyes, nose and lips gone. ‘Do you think it was like that for them? Already dead, but still feeling themselves burn and cook?’