Stuart MacBride - Flesh House

The cameraman cursed, fiddled with his focus, then gave a determined nod.

‘Aye, thought as much.’

They tried round the back. The stench of decay was even stronger: definitely rotting meat. Logan froze. ‘Might be a good idea to get the IB down here. If it’s a body—’

‘Wimp.’ Steel picked her way into the undergrowth. Following her nose. This had been a proper country garden at one point: a small orchard sat in front of a crumbling brick wall, leaves the colour of cider, fruit blackened and rotting on the yellowy grass. A greenhouse with no glass. A shed on the brink of collapse, the wood disintegrating, the contents long surrendered to mould and decay.

The stench was coming from the other side of a clump of brambles: a sheep, lying on its side, bloated and covered with flies and maggots. Logan gagged. So did Steel and Alec.

‘Jesus,’ she said, when they’d backed off upwind, out of the reek, ‘wish I’d no’ had that bacon buttie now.’ She shuddered, then lit another cigarette, holding the smoke deep in her lungs, as if trying to fumigate them. ‘Well, don’t just stand there,’ she pointed at the carcass, ‘off you go and get it shifted.’

‘Are you out of your—’

‘You never read books, Laz? Reginald Hill? Dalziel and Pascoe? No?’ She shook her head, obviously disappointed. ‘Suppose you’ve got a deid body to get rid of — where better to stick it than under a rotting sheep? Who’d go looking underneath that?’

‘Oh, come off it! That’s not—’

‘Sooner you do it, the sooner it’s done.’ She smiled at him. ‘Chop, chop.’

It became something of a mantra: ‘Fucking Steel and her fucking, rotting, bastarding son of a bitching fuck... fuck...’ mumbled over and over under his breath as Logan took one look at the mouldering sheep, decided there was no way in hell he was going to touch it with his bare hands and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. He looked up at Alec, filming away, face wrinkled in disgust.

‘You want to put that down and give me a hand here?’

Alec shook his head. ‘Fly on the wall. Remember? Not supposed to interfere. Besides...’ He shifted from one foot to the other, peering into the long grass and thickets of weeds. ‘What if there’s rats?’

Swearing, Logan grabbed the animal’s hind legs and pulled. There was a moment’s resistance... and then both back legs came off with a sickening wet noise and a roiling carpet of maggots. Logan’s stomach lurched.

The inspector shouted at him from a safe distance: ‘Stop sodding about! It’s not going to bite you.’

Logan’s mantra started up again. He fought his way through the weeds to the mouldering shed and raked through the rusting contents until he found a garden fork. It only had two of its four tines left, but it was better than nothing. He dragged it back to the sheep, took a deep breath, held it, jammed the fork under the sheep and heaved the thing over onto its back. Where it promptly burst.

He said goodbye to his pie.

‘Well?’ Steel shouted, when he’d finished vomiting, ‘Anything?’

He scowled at her. ‘No.’

‘You didn’t dig about where the sheep was, could be a shallow grave in there.’

Logan said ‘Fuck’ a lot, then poked his new-found fork in the ground. Trying to ignore the filthy yellow-brown liquid that crawled with wriggling white flecks. ‘There’s nothing here!’

‘Ah, well. Worth a try.’ Steel stuck her hands in her pockets and sauntered over to the back door. ‘You coming then?’

The place was a mess: peeling wallpaper, holes in the ceiling, lath visible through crumbling plaster. The kitchen was blanketed with spiders’ webs and dust, all the appliances torn out, the window boarded-up, the room shrouded in darkness. The bathroom was even worse. Everything downstairs stank of mildew and neglect.

Upstairs wasn’t much better. It must have been a large farmhouse at some point, but when the council turned it into a halfway house for the mentally disturbed they’d subdivided the first floor into tiny bedrooms. Just big enough for a single bed, a bedside cabinet and a wardrobe. Most of the furniture was gone, but a couple of pieces — too nasty, cheap and knackered to be worth anything — had been left behind to rot like the sheep.

There were some signs of occupancy: discarded takeaway containers; empty lager tins and cider bottles; used condoms... but none of it looked recent, the debris dusty and speckled with fly shit.

Alec stuck his head into the tiny room Steel and Logan were searching. ‘Through here!’

There was a room at the very back of the building, twice as big as the others. An open fireplace sat in the middle of the far wall, the hearth full of twigs and bones. An abandoned green parka sprawled on the bare floorboards. A pile of crumpled Special Brew tins in the corner. An old sleeping bag with a hole in the side — white kapok stuffing sticking out. The smell of mould.

Alec scurried round filming everything, looking pleased with himself.

‘Aye, very clever,’ Steel told him, ‘we’d no’ have found it without you. What with us going through all the rooms one at a time and all.’

There was a newspaper lying by the prolapsed sleeping bag: a copy of the Daily Mail with the headline ‘CANNIBAL CHAOS HITS NORTH EAST HOSPITALS!’ Logan snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and picked the thing up. ‘It’s yesterday’s paper.’ The Aberdeen Examiner might have got the drop on everyone with Colin Miller’s story, but it was all over the place by the Saturday morning editions.

Steel stared out of the window at the overgrown back garden and its stinking sheep. ‘We’re screwed. This place’s been under observation since what? Yesterday lunchtime? Wiseman went out in the morning, got himself a paper, couple of rowies, came back, had breakfast, and sodded off out again. If he’d been back we’d’ve seen him...’ She screwed up her face. ‘How the hell could we miss him?’

‘Maybe he’s—’

Steel threw a finger in Logan’s direction. ‘Don’t! OK? Don’t even start. He must have spotted one of the cars on the way back here!’ For a moment it looked as if she was going to kick the mound of empty beer cans all over the room. ‘Bastard! We could have had him!’

Sunday afternoon and the phones were going non-stop: people calling in from all over the North East to say that they’d seen Wiseman, or had eaten something that was supposed to be pork or veal but was probably person. Would they get Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease?

Logan listened for a minute to a PC trying to calm someone down on the other end of the phone. ‘No,’ she was saying, ‘you’re not going to get mad cow disease... No, sir, variant CJD is... There are only seven people in the whole of the UK with the disease at the moment, sir, so it’s highly unlikely... Yes, sir, it is impossible to say for sure.’ She slumped forward till her head was nearly resting on the desk. ‘Yes, sir... Environmental Health have set up a special hotline for... Yes...’ She gave him the number, hung up, and then her phone started ringing again. ‘Oh, bugger off.’ Click. ‘Hello, Grampian Police, can I help you?’

Logan left her to it and headed back to the history room.

Rennie was already there, contemplating a copy of the Daily Mail and mining his nostrils for little savoury nuggets. He stopped, snapping upright and wiping his finger on the underside of the desk as soon as he realized he had company.

‘Sir.’ He grinned. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’

‘Your brain’ll fall out your nose if you don’t stop picking it.’

‘Ahem. Yes... well...’ Rennie grabbed a pile of forms. ‘I’ve been going over those INTERPOL results Insch wanted.’