Logan called it a night after only two pints and sulked his way home, via the nearest chip shop.
He didn’t see the dark grey Mercedes lurking under the streetlight outside his flat. Didn’t see the heavy-set man get out of the driver’s seat and pull on a pair of black leather gloves. Didn’t see him crack his knuckles as Logan balanced the cooling fish supper in one hand while the other hunted for his keys.
‘You didn’t call.’
Logan almost dropped his chips.
He spun around to see Colin Miller standing with his arms crossed, leaning back against a very expensive-looking automobile, his words wreathed in fog. ‘You were supposed to call me by half-four. You didn’t.’
Logan groaned. He’d meant to speak to DI Insch, but somehow never got around to it. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said at last. ‘I spoke to the DI. . . He didn’t feel it was appropriate.’ It was a barefaced lie, but Miller wouldn’t know that. At least it would sound as if he’d tried.
‘No appropriate?’
‘He thinks I’ve had quite enough publicity for one week.’ Might as well be hung for a lying bastard as a lamb. ‘You know how it is. . .’ He shrugged.
‘No’ appropriate?’ Miller scowled. ‘I’ll show him no’ a-fuckin’-propriate.’ He pulled out a palmtop and scribbled something onto it.
The next morning started with about a dozen road traffic accidents. None of them fatal, but all blamed on the inch of snow that had fallen overnight. By half-eight the skies were gunmetal-grey and low enough to touch. Tiny flakes of white drifted down on the Granite City, melting as soon as they hit the pavements and roads. But the air smelled of snow. It had that metallic tang which meant that a heavy fall wasn’t far away.
The morning’s Press and Journal had hit Logan’s doormat like a tombstone. Only this time the funeral wasn’t his. Just his fault. Right there on the front page was a big picture of Detective Inspector Insch done up in his pantomime villain outfit. It was one of the show’s publicity shots and Insch had on his best evil snarl. ‘D.I. PLAYS THE FOOL WHILE OUR CHILDREN DIE’ ran the headline.
‘Oh God.’
Under the photo it said: ‘IS PANTO REALLY MORE IMPORTANT THAN CATCHING THE PAEDOPHILE KILLER STALKING OUR STREETS?’
Colin Miller strikes again.
Standing at the sink, he read how the inspector had been ‘prancing around on stage like an idiot, while local police hero Logan McRae was out searching for little Richard Erskine’. And the rest of the article went downhill from there. Miller had done a first-rate hatchet job on DI Insch. He’d made a well-respected senior police officer look like a callous bastard. There was even a quote from the Chief Superintendent saying that this was ‘a very serious matter that would be thoroughly investigated’.
‘Oh God.’
‘COUNCIL WORKER ATTACKED BY CONCERNED PARENTS’ barely made it onto page two.
Insch was in a foul mood at the morning briefing and everyone did their damnedest to make sure they didn’t do or say anything to set him off. Today was not a good day to screw up.
As soon as the briefing was over Logan scurried away to his little incident room, doing his best not to look guilty. He only had one WPC today: the one womanning the phones. Every other available officer was going to spend today looking for little Peter Lumley. Someone had stuck a rocket up Insch’s backside and he was determined to share the experience. So it would be just Logan, the WPC, and the list of possible names.
The team he’d had working their way through Social Services’ ‘at risk’ register had turned up exactly nothing. All the little girls were right where they should have been. Some of them had ‘walked into the door’ and one had ‘fallen down the stairs after burning herself on the iron’, but they were all still alive. A couple of the parents were now facing charges.
But that wasn’t the only thing Logan had to worry about now. Helping DI Steel on the Geordie Stephenson inquiry seemed to consist of DI Steel smoking lots of cigarettes while Logan did all the work.
There was a new map of Aberdeen pinned to the wall, this one covered with little blue-and-green pins marking every bookmaker in town. The blue ones were ‘safe’ – not the kind of place that took your kneecaps if you failed to pay up. The green ones were kneecap territory. The Turf ’n Track was marked in red. So was the harbour where they dragged the body out of the water. And next to it was a post mortem head-and-shoulders photo of Geordie Stephenson.
He wasn’t much to look at. Not now he was dead anyway. The bouffant hairstyle was all flattened to his head and the porn-star moustache stood out, heavy and black, against the waxy skin. It was odd, but seeing the dead man’s photograph Logan got the feeling he’d seen him somewhere before.
According to the information Lothian and Borders Police had sent up, Geordie Stephenson had been quite a character in his youth. Assault mostly. A bit of collecting for small loan sharks. Breaking and entering. It wasn’t until he started working for Malk the Knife that he stopped getting caught. Malk was very particular about his employees staying out of prison.
‘How’d you get on then?’ It was DI Steel, hands rammed deep in the pockets of her grey trouser suit. Yesterday’s ash-coated blouse was gone, replaced by something shimmery in gold. The bags under her eyes were a deep, saggy purple.
‘Not too great,’ Logan plonked himself down on the desk and offered the inspector a chair. She sank into it with a sigh and a small fart. Logan pretended not to hear.
‘Go on then.’
‘OK.’ Logan pointed at the map. ‘We went through all the bookies marked in green. The only one that looks likely is this one—’ he poked the red pin, ‘Turf ’n Track—’
‘Simon and Colin McLeod. Lovely pair of lads.’
‘Not as lovely as their clientele. We got to meet one of their regulars: Dougie MacDuff.’
‘Shite! You’re fucking kidding me!’ She pulled out a battered pack of cigarettes. They looked as if she’d sat on them. ‘Dirty Doug, Dougie the Dog. . .’ she excavated a slightly flattened fag from the pack. ‘What else did they use to call him?’
‘Desperate Doug?’
‘Right. Desperate Doug. After he choked that guy with a rolled-up copy of the Dandy. You’d’ve still been in nappies.’ She shook her head. ‘Fuck me. Those were the days. I thought he was dead.’
‘Got out of Barlinnie three months ago. Four years for crippling a builder’s merchant with a ratchet screwdriver.’
‘At his age? Good old Desperate Doug.’ She popped the cigarette in her mouth, and was at the point of lighting it when the WPC on the phones gave a meaningful cough and pointed at the ‘NO SMOKING’ sign. Steel shrugged and stuffed the offending fag in her top pocket. ‘So how’s he looking these days?’
‘Like a wrinkly old man.’
‘Aye? Shame. He was fucking tasty in his day. Quite the lady-killer. But we couldn’t prove it.’ She drifted off into silence, her eyes focused on the past. Eventually she sighed and came back to the here and now. ‘So you think the McLeod brothers are our likely lads?’
Logan nodded. He’d read their files again. Hacking off someone’s kneecaps with a machete was right up their street. The McLeods had always been hands-on when it came to debt control. ‘Problem’s going to be proving it. There’s no way in hell either of them’s going to