Shatter the Bones (21 page)

Idiot.

Logan pressed send on his phone – ‘S
HUGGIE
, I’
M
F
UCKING
W
ARNING
Y
OU
: B
RING
M
Y
B
LOODY
C
AR
B
ACK
!’

‘Morning, Sarge. Been swimming?’ Rennie’s pearl-white grin flashed out from his fake tan.

Logan stuffed his phone back in his pocket. ‘Are you really
that
desperate for a boot up the arse?’

‘OK… Not in a great mood then.’ He pointed over his shoulder. ‘Got the car out front. You want a lift back to the station, or—’

‘Where is it?’

Frown. ‘Er… Out front. By the disabled spaces.’

Logan scrunched his eyes shut. Gritted his teeth. ‘Not your car,
my
bastarding car!’

A shuffle of feet. ‘You weren’t serious about that, were you?’

A young woman appeared at the table, clutching a pot of coffee. She smiled a train-track smile, light sparkling off her braces. ‘Would you like some more ice? Or a refill or something?’

Logan forced a smile. ‘No, I’m fine, just on our way.’ He reached down and unwrapped the soggy tea-towel from his left ankle. A few chunks of half-melted ice fell to the carpet. The skin was angry pink and swollen, four parallel dark-red lines burning and stinging where Uzi’s teeth had ripped through his trouser leg and slashed across the ankle. At least it wasn’t bleeding any more.

He handed the towel over. ‘Thanks.’

Rennie watched until she disappeared through the door marked, ‘S
TAFF
O
NLY
’. He ran a hand through his spiky blond hair. ‘Nice arse.’

‘I told you to run a bloody GPS trace!’

‘I thought you were joking. I mean, you know, why would you want a trace on your own car? How can you not know where your car is?’

‘Surrounded by idiots…’ Logan limped out of the front door, shoes squelching with every step, Rennie scurrying along behind.

‘What happened to your leg?’

It wasn’t difficult to spot the constable’s CID pool car outside the pub – it was the manky Vauxhall with the dashboard overflowing with burger wrappers and empty crisp packets. Hailstones battered off the dirty paintwork, making a little drift of white across the windscreen wipers.

Inside it smelled much the same as every other CID vehicle – that mix of stale sweat, cigarette smoke, and something going mouldy under one of the seats.

Rennie got in behind the wheel. ‘Where to?’

‘Make the sodding call.’

There was a brief pause, then the constable pulled out his Airwave handset and punched in the number for Control. ‘Yeah, Jimmy, I need a GPS trace on Charlie Delta Seven? … Er … no. He’s not answering his mobile… Or his Airwave.’ Rennie glanced over at Logan, clocked the glower, and faced front again. ‘Look just do us a GPS trace, OK? …
What
?’ The constable sat up straight in his seat. ‘No: Jimmy, don’t you bloody dare put him—’ A cough. ‘Chief Inspector Finnie, yeah, I was just… DS McRae? Er…’ Rennie stared at Logan, eyes bugging, mouth making a squiggly line across his face.

Logan mouthed, ‘No!’ waved both hands, palm out, shaking his head.

‘Hold on…’ Rennie held the handset out. ‘It’s for you.’ Bastard.

Logan took the Airwave. ‘Sir?’

‘Tell me, Detective Sergeant, did I
accidentally
give you the day off and forget all about it?’

‘Well, no, but—’

‘Then
perhaps
you’d like to explain why you’re not currently interviewing Frank Baker like I told you?’

Logan peered out through the hail-flecked windscreen. How the hell did Finnie know he wasn’t—

‘Superintendent Green tells me he’s been waiting for you to appear for the last fi fteen minutes.’

‘He’s
what
? Look it’s bad enough we’ve—’

‘It would be
nice
, Sergeant, if for
once
I thought I could
actually
depend on a member of my team to act like a professional. I don’t care if you think it’s a waste of time or not – get round there, interview Baker, and try not to behave like a petulant bloody child!’

And then there was silence.

Logan held out the handset and read the little grey-and-black LCD screen: ‘C
ALL
T
ERMINATED
’

Perfect.

Just. Bloody. Perfect.

Logan rapped his knuckles on the car’s passenger window.

Superintendent Green looked up from the laptop he was poking away at, and stared at Logan for a moment, then a smile crawled across the lower half of his face, going nowhere near his eyes.
Bzzzzzz
– the window slid down a couple of inches. ‘Been on our holidays, have we, Sergeant?’

Warm air curled out into the cold morning. The hail had died off, replaced by a frigid drizzle.

Logan forced a smile of his own. ‘Pursuing other avenues of enquiry,
sir
.’

‘Yes…’ Green turned to the uniformed constable sitting in the driver’s seat. ‘Wait for me.’ He snapped the laptop closed and slipped it into an oversized leather satchel. Stepped out into the horrible morning. Looked Logan up and down. Raised an eyebrow. ‘Is your suit meant to look like that?’

Logan glanced at his left trouser leg. The fabric was torn and tattered, stained dark-grey with blood, rain, and dirt. Muddy paw prints on his chest. ‘I thought you were in a hurry?’

‘After you.’

The fabrication yard where Frank Baker worked was a small industrial unit bolted onto a large warehouse, cut off from the road by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. As if anyone was going to break in and make off with a two tonne chunk of drilling pipe. They lay stacked up around the building, held in place with wooden chucks and ratchet straps.

Green marched towards the door marked, ‘A
LL
V
ISITORS
M
UST
R
EPORT
T
O
R
ECEPTION
!’

‘Punctuality is the sign of an effective police officer, Sergeant.’

Tosser. How could Logan be late for an unscheduled meeting?

‘Really, sir? I always thought it was catching criminals and preventing crimes.’

Green paused for a moment, then pushed through into a small room that smelled of industrial grease and coffee. A large woman with a bowl haircut looked up from a stack of forms and stared at them over the top of her glasses. No, ‘Hello?’ No, ‘Can I help you?’

The superintendent glanced around the room – Health and Safety posters, framed photo of an oil rig, calendar with kittens on it, shelves groaning with lever-arch files. ‘I want to speak to Frank Baker.’

She puckered her lips. ‘He’s working.’

Green thrust his warrant card under her nose. ‘Now.’

Inside, the warehouse was vast: filled with machinery, forklift trucks, and more pipes. A radio boomed out something poppy, competing with the bangs, clangs, and thrum of heavy equipment. The machine-gun pops of welding.

Frank Baker didn’t look the same without his nice clean suit. Instead he was wearing a pair of grubby orange overalls with a padded green jacket on top, the chest and shoulders covered with pinhole burns. Big leather gloves, steel toecap boots. A thick red line across his forehead from the welding mask he’d just thumped down on a length of rust-flecked pipe. ‘I don’t appreciate you
bastards
coming here every day.’

‘Then answer the bloody question!’ Green crossed his arms, legs shoulder-width apart, chin up.

Baker scowled at Logan. ‘I’ve been through all this: with you, with the wrinkly old woman, so—’

‘It’s just a couple of follow-up—’

‘And you’re going to go through it all again for
us
.’ Green stepped closer and Baker flinched.

‘I have to work here.’

‘Oh. Oh, I
see
.’ The superintendent winked. ‘They don’t know you’re a pervert. That you like to interfere with little boys—’

‘Keep your voice down!’

‘A filthy kiddie-fiddling paedophile, who—’

‘SHUT UP! SHUT YOUR DIRTY MOUTH!’ Baker grabbed the handle of his arc welder.

Green leaned in close. ‘Or
what
, Frank?’

Tears sparked in the corner of Baker’s eyes.

A huge man in filthy overalls wandered over, a baseball cap turned the wrong way around on his massive head, face creased with dirt around a clear patch where his safety goggles must have sat. ‘Everything OK, Frankie?’

Baker bit his lip. ‘Yeah… Thanks, Spike.’

Spike stared at them for a bit. ‘Any trouble, give us a shout.’ Then he turned and lumbered away.

Baker waited till he was well out of earshot. ‘I
told
them: I volunteer at a vet’s in town every Saturday. It’s not illegal, OK? It’s not against my SOPPO. I’ve not done anything wrong. So go away and leave me
alone
!’

‘No, no, no, Frank – that’s not how it works.’ Green smiled. ‘You tell me everything I want to know, or I’ll make sure every sweaty-arsed bastard in this place knows your grubby little secret.’

‘Sir?’ Logan cleared his throat. ‘That’s not really—’

‘You want that, Frank? You want them all to find out what you do to little boys?’

‘This isn’t fair!’

‘You think what’s happening to Alison and Jenny is fair?’ Baker closed his eyes and sagged. ‘Please, I just want to be left alone…’

Green leaned on the roof of Rennie’s pool car. Staring off into the middle distance, chin up. Posing. Again. ‘Well, that was … interesting.’

Logan hauled open the door and threw his notebook onto the driver’s seat. ‘That is
not
the way we do things.’

It had stopped raining, though from the look of the deep-grey layer of cloud blanketing the city that probably wouldn’t last. Still freezing as well.

Superintendent Green curled his top lip. ‘Really? What a shock: something else Grampian Police
doesn’t
do. Tell me, Sergeant, what
do
you do?’

‘Frank Baker is a registered sex offender – do you have any idea what’ll happen to him if his workmates find out?’

‘That’s hardly my—’

‘They’ll beat the shit out of him; he’ll get fired; and he’ll
disappear
! How are we supposed to manage him if we don’t know where he is?’

Green’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sergeant McRae, are you always this resistant to the chain of command?’

‘You had no business storming in there like something off the bloody
Sweeney
!’

The superintendent drummed his fingers on the roof.

‘When Chief Inspector Finnie told me you were “wilful” I wasn’t expecting full-on insubordination.’

Logan gritted his teeth. ‘I thought we were meant to be on the same side.’

‘Did you now?’

‘Yes,
sir
.’ Logan glanced towards the huge warehouse. Spike, Baker’s huge friend was standing in the doorway, staring back at him. Then he turned and melted away into the shadows. ‘Anything else?’

There was a pause. A cold smile. ‘Well, I’d better get back and check on the team. We need a strategy for Thursday – hostage exchange tends to be where you end up with dead bodies.’ Green stepped back from the car. ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

Logan clambered into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. ‘Not if I fucking see you first.’

Rennie looked up from his book. ‘Sarge?’

‘Nothing.’ He hauled on his seatbelt. ‘I want that GPS fix on Charlie Delta Seven
now
.’

‘Already doing it.’ He stuck the book on the dashboard and dug out his Airwave handset.

Logan tilted his head sideways, frowning at the title. ‘
The Accidental Sodomist
?’

‘It’s literature: shortlisted for the Booker this year. Emma says I need to broaden my horizons, and— Hold on. Aye, Jimmy, how you getting on finding Charlie Delta Seven for me? … Uh-huh… No. Still no sign of him… Yeah, if you can…’ Rennie put a hand over the mouthpiece and nodded at the book in Logan’s hands. ‘You can borrow it when I’m finished. It’s about this concert pianist from Orkney who moves to Edinburgh ’cos he’s in love with his cousin, and ends up shagging a bunch of mental… Yeah? It is? Cheers, thanks Jimmy.’

‘Well?’

Rennie cranked the key in the ignition. ‘We have a winner.’

* * *

‘There … over by the trees.’

Logan squinted through the rain-flecked windscreen. ‘Where? It’s all bloody trees.’

Gairnhill Woods lay three-and-a-bit miles west of the city, part of a little conjoined network of Forestry Commission land. Quiet and secluded.

Pale grey cloud curled around the tops of Scots pines and spruce, the light flat and lifeless as a thin drizzle made the undergrowth shine.

The windscreen wipers squealed their way across the glass again.

‘There,’ Rennie poked a finger at a little car park off to the right of the road. Charlie Delta Seven, AKA: Logan’s crappy blue Vauxhall, sat in the far corner, under a drooping branch.

No other car to be seen.

Rennie smiled. ‘This where you left it?’

‘You’re an idiot, you know that, don’t you?’ Logan undid his seatbelt. ‘Block it in, then we’ll go take a look.’

The constable licked his lip. Looked from Logan to the abandoned pool car. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on? Just in case?’

‘Shuggie Webster; dirty big dog. If you see him, arrest the bastard. Try not to get bitten.’

‘OK…’ Rennie eased his car up the dirt track and parked directly across the back of Charlie Delta Seven.

Logan opened the door and climbed out into the rain. It misted on his face, making his breath steam out around his head. Got to love summer in Aberdeen.

He pulled out his pepper spray and inched his way around to Charlie Delta Seven’s driver’s door. Peered in through the window.

Empty. ‘Think he’s done a runner?’ Rennie appeared on the other side. ‘Might have nipped into the woods for a slash?’

‘If he hasn’t taken a dump in the driver’s seat…’ Logan hunkered down and peered up at the space behind the door handle. Then took a pen from his pocket and clacked it about in there.

A faint shadow fell across him. Then Rennie sniffed. ‘No offence, Sarge, but you look like a spaz.’