Stuart MacBride - 22 Dead Little Bodies

Wheezy stuffed his phone back in his pocket and lurched over, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Eyebrows down. Shoulders hunched. Hands curled into fists. ‘Sodding goat-buggering hell.’

Baird grinned at him. ‘Good news?’

‘Postmortem result on Gordy Taylor. Pathologist says he’d scoofed down about a litre of rough whisky before he died: stomach was sloshing with it. Official cause of death is asphyxia caused by aspiration of regurgitated particulates.’

‘Choked on his own vomit.’

‘We knew that yesterday.’ Logan folded his arms. ‘So why all the swearing?’

‘Lab’s got a new piece of kit in, so they rushed through the tox report as an excuse to play with it. Gordy’s blood was full of sleeping pills, painkillers, and...’ he checked his notebook then took his time pronouncing the word in little chunks, ‘bro-ma-dio-lone.’

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘It’s a fancy way of saying “rat poison”.’

The smile died on Baird’s face. ‘Poor Gordy.’

‘According to the labs, it was probably soaked into whole grain wheat: you know the stuff they sell in tubs coloured bright blue? You use it to bait traps. Only Gordy didn’t have any wheat in his stomach, or in the puddle of vomit he was lying in.’

‘That’s all we need.’ Logan let his head fall back and stared at the sky for a beat. A breath hissed out of him. The other stuff — the drugs — that was easy enough to explain. Gordy breaks into someone’s house, raids their medicine cupboard, decides he fancies getting high on whatever he finds, it doesn’t react well with the booze, he throws up and dies. But rat poison?

And what had Logan done when the poor sod had been hit by a car and assaulted? Blamed him for being a drunken idiot. Told him it was basically his own fault.

Wonderful: more guilt.

Logan squeezed it down with all the rest. ‘Any ideas?’

Wheezy spluttered a bit. Then spat. ‘Lab says if you dumped the rat bait in milk, water, or alcohol, you could leach the bromadiolone out of the poisoned wheat. And as his stomach was full of whisky...’

‘So he drinks a bottle of supermarket McTurpentine laced with rat poison and dies.’

‘Nope. Apparently, it takes a day, day and a half for bromadiolone to kick in. It thins the blood and causes internal bleeding — he’d have popped like a water balloon during the postmortem.’

Baird nodded. ‘So whoever did it didn’t know it’d take thirty-six hours. I mean, it’s not suicide, is it? You don’t kill yourself with rat poison, you kill other people.’

‘Doesn’t matter if he choked on his own vomit or not, he would’ve been dead by Wednesday anyway.’ Wheezy’s shoulders slumped an inch. ‘Suppose it’s not my problem any more then. Have to hand it over to the Major Investigation Team.’

Logan patted him on the shoulder. ‘Welcome to Police Scotland.’

‘Sod Police Scotland. I miss Grampian Police.’

‘Better head back to the ranch and get the paperwork started.’

A sigh. ‘Guv.’ Then Wheezy slouched off.

Baird screwed up one side of her face. ‘Rat poison.’

‘Not our problem any more.’ Logan pushed through into the shopping centre.

‘Yeah, but still... It’s a CID case, we should be the ones chasing it down.’

They marched past the juice bar and into one of the atrium spaces, queuing for the escalator behind a group of schoolkids in squint uniforms.

‘That’s the way things work now. Fighting it will get you nothing but ulcers. And possibly a reprimand, so—’ Logan’s phone launched into ‘The Imperial March’ as they glided slowly upwards. That would be Steel, calling up to whinge about Napier.

Baird raised an eyebrow and tilted her head at his pocket. ‘You going to answer that?’

‘Nope.’

‘What if it’s important? Maybe they’ve found Skinner’s kids?’

As if they could be that lucky. But maybe Baird was right.

He pulled the phone out and hit the button as they hit the top of the escalator. ‘What?’

Steel’s voice was low and whispery. ‘I need you to set off the fire alarm.’

Typical.

‘I’m not setting off the fire alarm.’ Logan followed Baird past a couple of shops, then through a bland grey door marked ‘STAFF ONLY’.

‘Don’t be a dick! Had to fake a dose of the squits so I could get away and phone you. Napier’s lurking outside the ladies’, making sure I don’t do a runner. How untrusting is that?’

‘I’m in the Bon Accord Centre.’ His voice echoed back from the corridor walls. ‘Doubt that setting off the fire alarm here’s going to help you any.’

‘You rotten sod! This is no time to do your shopping, get your puckered rectum back here and rescue me!’

A handful of doors sat at the end of the corridor. Baird knocked on the one with ‘SECURITY’ on it.

‘I can’t come back, I’m busy .’

‘Busy my sharny arse. If you don’t get back here right now, I’m—’

Logan made a grating hissing noise. ‘... lo? Hello? Whhhhh...’ More hissing. ‘... an you hear me? Hello?’

‘How thick do you think I am?’

Ah well, it’d been worth a try. ‘Look: I can’t come back and rescue you, because I’m trying to find your missing kids. We’re...’

There was a clunk, the security door opened an inch, and a little old lady in a brown peaked cap peered out. ‘Can I help you?’

‘Got to go.’ Logan hung up and produced his warrant card. ‘Police Scotland. We need to see Saturday’s ANPR data for the Loch Street car park.’

‘Oh.’ She squinted at Logan’s ID, then nodded. ‘Better come in then.’ She opened the door wide, revealing a turd-brown uniform with sweetcorn-coloured buttons and piping. ‘You looking for anything specific?’

The room was small, lined with television monitors showing multiple views of the shopping centre. People going about their shoppy business, dragging stroppy toddlers and stroppier boyfriends behind them.

Baird took out her notebook. ‘Dark-blue BMW M5, parked here sometime before two.’ She rattled off the registration number as the old lady sank into a swivel chair and pulled a keyboard over.

Grey fingers flew across the keys. ‘Of course, I should really be asking to see a warrant — data protection and all that — but it’s my last day on Friday, so sod it.’ A line of letters popped up on the screen. ‘Here you go. Got it coming in at twelve oh three.’

Logan leaned on the desk. ‘When did it leave?’

More lightning keystrokes. ‘That’s odd...’ A frown, then she leaned forward and peered at the screen. Another frown. Then she put her glasses on. ‘Oh, no — here we go. Left at three twenty-two.’

Over an hour and a half after John Skinner did his Olympic diving routine onto the cobblestones.

Baird wrote the details down in her notebook. ‘We were right — he had an accomplice.’

Logan hooked a thumb at the bank of screens. ‘Can you bring up the car park CCTV footage for then?’

The old lady’s fingers clattered across the keys again, and half of the monitors filled with concrete, pillars, and cars. ‘There you go.’

He flicked from screen to screen. ‘Anyone see Skinner’s car?’

‘Guv?’ Baird tapped one in the top left corner of the display. ‘That not it there?’

A dark-blue BMW was heading down the ramp to the exit, only it wasn’t doing it under its own steam, it was being towed by a truck with ‘ABERTOW VEHICLE SERVICES ~ PARKING ENFORCEMENT’ stencilled along the side.

You wee beauty.

‘Baird?’

‘I’m on it.’ She pulled out her phone, poked at the screen then held it to her ear as she pushed out of the room. ‘Control? I need the number for a local company...’