Стюарт Макбрайд - The Blood Road

Logan dumped his teabag in the bin and stirred in a glug of semi-skimmed from a carton with a ‘STOP STEALING MY MILK YOU THIEVING BASTARDS!!!’ Post-it note on it.

He sat back down at the rickety table and poked out a text message on his phone:

As it’s Friday, how about Chinese for tea? Bottle of wine. Bit of sexy business...?

SEND.

It dinged straight back.

TS TARA:

Make it pizza & you’ve got a deal.

Excellent. Now all he needed was—

A strangled scream echoed down the corridor and in through the open break-room door.

Logan put his tea down and poked his head out.

‘Stop bloody struggling!’ The sergeant was missing her hat, teeth bared and stained pink — presumably from the split bottom lip. Hair pulled up in a bun. Arms wrapped around the throat of a whippet-thin man in filthy trainers and a tracksuit that was more dirt than fabric. Both hands cuffed behind his back. Struggling in the narrow corridor.

A PC staggered about at the far end, by the front door, one hand clamped over his nose as blood bubbled between his fingers and fell onto his high-viz jacket. ‘Unnnngghh...’

All three of them: drenched, soggy, and dripping.

Captain Tracksuit lashed his head to the side, broken brown teeth snapping inches from the sergeant’s face.

She flinched. ‘Calm down, you wee shite!’

He didn’t. ‘AAAAAAAAAAAARGH!’ Bellowing it out in an onslaught of foul fishy breath. It went with the bitter-onion stink of BO.

Logan pointed. ‘You need a hand?’

The sergeant grimaced at him. ‘Thanks, sir, but I think we’ve got this. So if you don’t mind—’

Captain Tracksuit McStinky shoulder-slammed her against the wall, hard enough to make the whiteboard jitter and pens clatter to the floor. ‘GETOFFME, GETOFFME, GETOFFME!’

‘You sure you don’t want a hand?’

‘ Quite sure.’

McStinky spun away and she snatched a handful of his manky tracksuit. It ripped along the zip, exposing a swathe of bruised xylophone ribs. Then he lunged, jerking his forehead forward like a battering ram.

She barely managed to turn her face away — his head smashed into her cheek instead of her nose. She stumbled.

‘Because it’s no trouble, really.’

McStinky kept on spinning, both hands still cuffed behind his back. ‘I never touched him! It was them! IT WAS THEM!’ Dance-hopping back a couple of paces then surging closer to bury one of those filthy trainers in her ribs. Then did it again.

‘Aaaaargh! OK! OK!’

Logan stepped out of the break room and grabbed the chunk of plastic that joined both sides of McStinky’s handcuffs and yanked it upwards like he was opening a car boot.

McStinky screamed as his arms tried to pop out of their sockets. He pitched forward onto the floor, legs thrashing. Bellowing out foul breaths as Logan kept up the pressure. Leaning into it a bit. Up close, the BO had a distinct blue-cheesiness to it and a hint of mouldy sausages too.

The sergeant scrambled backwards until she was sitting up against the corridor wall. Spat out a glob of scarlet.

McStinky roared. ‘DON’T LET THEM EAT ME!’

The PC with the bloody nose staggered over and threw himself across McStinky’s legs, struggling a set of limb restraints into place. ‘Hold still!’

Logan held out his hand to the other officer. ‘Let me guess: Sergeant Savage? Logan McRae. I need to talk to you about DI Bell.’

Logan leaned against the corridor wall, mug of tea warm against his chest. The station’s rear door was wide open, giving a lovely view of PC Broken Nose and Sergeant Savage ‘assisting’ McStinky into the back of the patrol car parked next to Logan’s Audi.

Rain bounced off the cars’ roofs, sparked up from the wet tarmac, hissed against the world like a billion angry cats.

Ding.

He pulled out his phone and groaned.

HORRIBLE STEEL:

Come on, it’s only one night. One wee teeny weeny night.

A quick reply:

I’m busy.

Sergeant Savage slammed the patrol car’s door shut, then lurched into the station again. Wiped the rain from her face. Scowled. ‘God, I love Fridays.’

Logan nodded at the car. ‘He’s nice.’

McStinky thrashed against his seatbelt, screaming — muffled to near silence by the closed car door — while PC Broken Nose stuck two fingers up to the window.

Savage peeled off her high-viz jacket. ‘You wanted to talk about DI Bell.’

‘Don’t you want to take your friend straight to the cells?’

‘Jittery Dave? Nah, he’s off his face. They won’t let us book him in till they know he won’t OD or choke on his own vomit. And the hospital won’t take him: not while he’s violent. So he can sit there and chill out for a bit. Smithy’ll keep an eye on him.’ She prodded at her split lip and winced. There was blood on her fingertip. ‘Why the sudden interest in Ding-Dong?’

‘You hear what happened this morning?’

‘Been chasing Jittery Dave since I got on shift. I’ve run a sodding marathon already today — never mind Mo Farah, we should put a couple of druggies in for the next Olympics.’

‘OK.’ Logan led the way back into the break room. ‘You were Bell’s sidekick.’

She bristled a bit. ‘I worked with him, yes.’

‘How was he as a boss?’

‘Good. Yeah. Fair. Didn’t hog all the credit. Actually listened .’

Logan stuck the kettle on and dug a clean mug from the cupboard. ‘What about his state of mind?’

‘He blew his brains out in a caravan. What do you think?’

Teabag. ‘I think someone wouldn’t do that without a very good reason. What was his?’

She looked away. Shrugged. ‘The last case we worked on. It was... tough for him.’

‘Tough how?’

‘Ding-Dong... Look: Aiden MacAuley was three when he was abducted. He was out with his dad, in the woods near their house. Fred Marshall attacked them. Killed the father, abducted Aiden.’

‘Fred Marshall?’

‘And we couldn’t lay a finger on him. We know he did it — he boasted about the attack to a friend of his down the pub. Told him all the grisly details about bashing Kenneth MacAuley’s brains out with a rock. Never said what happened to the kid, though. So we dragged Marshall in and grilled him. Again and again and again. But in the end, we didn’t have a single bit of evidence to pin on him.’

The kettle rattled to a boil and Logan drowned the teabag.

Savage prodded at her split lip again. ‘Course, we couldn’t tell Aiden’s mother any of that. We’re banging our heads against the Crown Office, but far as she’s concerned it looks like we’re doing sod-all to find her son and catch the guy who killed her husband.’

‘So what happened with Fred Marshall?’

‘It really weighed on Ding-Dong. We were a good team, you know? And now he can’t get it out of his head: he can’t sleep, he’s stressed all the time...’ Another shrug. ‘Then Ding-Dong’s whole personality changes. He’s jumpy, nervous, irritable. Shouting at you for no reason.’

She stared at the tabletop. Shook her head.

Somewhere in the station, that phone started ringing again.

‘He... He came to my house... about two in the morning. Told me I was to look after his wife. That I had to protect her from the press and the rest of the vermin. And that was the last time I saw him.’ Savage cleared her throat. ‘Until I had to ID his body in the mortuary.’

She shook her head. Blinked. Wiped at her eyes. Huffed out a breath. ‘Anyway... Nothing we can do about it now, is there?’

‘You ID’d the body?’

‘What was left of it. According to the IB, he rigged the caravan to burn before sticking a shotgun in his mouth. The whole thing went up like a firelighter.’ Deep breath. ‘The smell was... Yeah.’