Стюарт Макбрайд - All That’s Dead

‘Please!’

Logan looked across the room to ‘THE DEVIL MAKES WORK’, down at the wheel brace in his hands, then marched over there and rammed the metal rod between the chain and the freezer, turning it like a ship’s wheel, tightening the chain. It pulled the lid shut, sealing in Professor Wilson’s sobs.

Come on...

He leaned into it, pushing, twisting, teeth gritting, the muscles in his arms screaming at him, the scar tissue across his stomach joining in. Getting louder. Another heave, putting all his weight into it. Still nothing.

He glanced at Steel. ‘Little... help?’

She grabbed one end and he took the other, the pair of them straining and straining and straining until between them they’d managed to bend the wheel brace.

‘Buggering flaps of sharny shite!’ Steel staggered off a couple of paces, panting.

More thumping from inside the chest freezer as Professor Wilson started screaming again — but the lid remained securely closed, held there by the tightened chain.

She wiped a hand across her forehead and pointed at ‘THREE MONKEYS’. ‘We not going to open that one?’

Three Monkeys: that had to be Councillor Lansdale. Missing for the longest. And Mhari hadn’t bothered to put a chain on his chest freezer. Yeah, no prizes for guessing what they’d find in there.

Logan huffed out a breath. ‘Suppose we’d better.’

He unwound the wheel brace from the chain around ‘THE DEVIL MAKES WORK’.

Professor Wilson must’ve found a last reserve of panicked energy, because the lid bounced up again. ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE! I DEMAND YOU GET ME OUT OF HERE!’ Screaming and crying. ‘PLEASE!’

Steel grimaced at Logan. ‘He never shuts up, does he?’

Logan raised the bent wheel brace and hammered the padlock off the last chest freezer. Raised the lid. Cold white light spilled out of ‘THREE MONKEYS’.

She stepped up beside him and stared down at the twisted, bloody shape at the bottom of the chest freezer. Lansdale: skin a pale candle-wax yellow, where it wasn’t bright red, all of it covered in a thin sheen of jagged frost, partially wrapped in the remains of a shower curtain.

Logan closed the lid.

The world exploded with light and noise as the Air Ambulance howled from the field behind the building. Its search beams swept across Renfield House as it turned, then they were gone, fading with the bellowing roar of the helicopter’s engines.

Logan watched it disappear.

Then shook his head and started back towards the front door.

The SE Transit was parked right outside, a line of white-suited figures making their way in and out of the building. Carrying things in blue plastic evidence crates. A diesel generator grumbled in the background, work lights blazing away behind the house’s broken windows.

PC Greeny’s patrol car was parked there too, its blue-and-whites casting flickering shadows in the brambles and ivy.

Steel scuffed her way through the front door and down the steps. Stuck her e-cigarette in her gob and her hands in her pockets as she lumped across the grass to Logan. Vaping up a storm. ‘Any news?’

‘They’re not hopeful.’

‘Aye...’ She nodded. Looked away. ‘And before you say anything: don’t. You never think it’s going to happen, do you? Not to people you know.’

‘Not even if those people are “dicks”?’

‘Oh, you can hope it happens, but see when it does?’ A shudder rippled its way through her. Then she jerked her head towards the house. ‘Still, could be worse, I suppose.’

A uniformed officer led a shuffling figure down the steps and over to the patrol car. Scott Meyrick, wrapped in a crinkly golden space blanket. Crying, head down, one hand covering his face as he was helped inside.

Steel puffed out a thick bank of strawberry fog. ‘Meyrick’s in shock, but he’ll keep till the regular ambulance gets here, long as Greeny remembers to crank up the car’s heater.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Shirley says Lansdale’s frozen to the bottom of the chest freezer. All that blood. They’ll have to cart the whole thing off to Aberdeen, if they can get a spare van with enough room.’

‘Meyrick say anything?’

‘Pfff... They attacked him in his house, battered him over the head. Next thing he knows, he’s waking up in a chest freezer — it’s chained shut, but they’ve left him enough slack to let air in. Then, about two, three hours ago he hears screaming. After that, Mhari padlocks the freezers and turns them on. Leaves him to die.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Yup.’ She pointed in a vague southward direction, where the helicopter had gone. ‘What about Wilson?’

‘Tough as old boots. He’ll live.’ Logan scrubbed a hand across his face. ‘You know who Hardie and the rest are going to blame, don’t you?’

‘Hardie? He’s one of them dicks we were talking about.’ She pulled the e-cigarette from her mouth and spat into the long grass. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’

Probably.

‘The fifth chest freezer, the empty one — “Wallace”?’

‘Aye: Mhari Powell’s no’ finished yet.’

A low throbbing hum infused Aberdeen Royal Infirmary’s High-Dependency Unit. The lights were dimmed, blanketing the ward in a sticky warm gloom that marked the boundary between the living and the not dead yet. The clinging on and fighting.

Hopefully.

Logan leaned against the corridor wall, looking in through the window to one of the darkened rooms.

They’d given King the hospital bed nearest the wall, not that he knew it. He lay there, still as a corpse, as a team of three nurses hooked him up to machines and bags. Wires and pipes and tubes everywhere. Most of the nails had been removed — replaced by blood-spotted gauze patches and the occasional section of fibreglass cast — but the ones in his head still glittered in the bedside light. Whatever antiseptic they’d swabbed him down with had left mottled orange-brown blotches on his pale skin, like a botched fake tan.

Logan checked his watch: five past three.

Four hours in surgery didn’t seem a lot, considering. Yet there King was. Still breathing.

‘Inspector McRae?’

Logan turned.

A woman stood in the middle of the corridor, in blood-smeared scrubs and hospital clogs, hairnet on her head, bags beneath her drooping eyes. Facemask dangling under her chin. A name badge with ‘MR KATE HILLS’ on it. ‘I’ve seen some things in my time, but this?’ She shook her head. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood. We’re pushing fluids. Will it make a difference?’ A shrug.

‘Is he going to...?’

She took off her hairnet and sagged even further. ‘The irony is, if it wasn’t for the chest freezer he’d probably be dead already. Yes, you’ve got an air-tight seal, but the cold lowers your metabolic rate so you don’t consume so much oxygen, and you don’t bleed out so fast. Which means more time for clotting to occur. But still.’ She reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic box — about the size of a takeaway container. When she held it up to the light, the galvanised clout nails inside glimmered a dull red. ‘Seventy-five millimetres long, that’s about three inches in old money. You can cause a lot of internal damage with thirty of them.’ She handed it to him. ‘You’ll need to sign for that.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I don’t even want to touch the ones in his skull till he’s stronger. Assuming he survives the night.’

Logan raised his eyebrows at her and she shrugged again.

‘Thirty / seventy. At best.’

The same chance they had of finding Mhari and Haiden at Ceanntràigh Cottage.

She gave Logan a pained smile. ‘To be honest, he’s lucky he made it this far.’