Stuart MacBride - Flesh House

‘Ffffff...’ The old bastard tried to get to his feet, but his legs didn’t seem to be working.

‘Here.’ Wiseman took a handful of shirt at the back of Brooks’ neck, then grabbed the old bastard’s belt and hauled him up. ‘Let me help you...’

Right over the wall and into thin air.

A huge ball of red, green and silver lit up the night sky.

For a moment the old man seemed to float, and then gravity got her claws into him. Brooks screamed: arms and legs pinwheeling as his body got smaller and smaller and smaller... all the way down to the concrete car park, eighteen floors below.

He hit the ground like a meat pinata, flying debris setting off car alarms.

Wiseman peered over the edge at the smear of red, lit by the flashing orange indicators of wailing motorcars. Then he went back downstairs to the flat, picked up his empty beer cans, locked the door, and headed off into the night.

Logan waited in the pre-dawn gloom trying not to stand in anything red. Which was easier said than done: who knew one old man could go so far? The impact zone lay in the strip of concrete between the two tower blocks. Ex-DCI Brooks covered at least a dozen feet in every direction — tarmac, pavement, wall... The cars were the worst: metallic paint pebble-dashed with shrivelled, crimson bubbles, glittering in the IB spotlights like dried-up ladybirds. Not the best accompaniment to a Monday-morning hangover.

Someone from the Environmental Health team marched over, sipping tea from a polystyrene cup, her white paper oversuit unzipped to the waist. ‘You going to be much longer?’

‘Don’t think so.’ Logan watched DI Steel mooching about on the far side of the blue-and-white POLICE tape, mobile phone clamped to her ear. ‘Think you’ll be able to shift all this?’

The woman shrugged. ‘You should see some of the crap we have to deal with. She pulled a huge aerosol out of her pocket. ‘Trychloroethylene: it’ll bleach through pretty much anything. Don’t fancy owning any of those cars, Christ knows what it’s going to do to the paintwork.’

‘Hoy, Lazarus!’ Steel — shouting across Garry Brooks’ personal Ground Zero. ‘Get them going.’

‘You heard the lady.’ Logan skirted the taped-off scene as the Environmental Health team pulled up their hoods, strapped on their facemasks, and got to work with the trychloroethylene.

Steel lit a cigarette, watching them spraying away, the thick stench of bleach oozing out in a fine mist, caught by the morning breeze, glowing in the building’s security lights. ‘No’ exactly my idea of fun...’

‘How’d Insch take it?’

‘How do you think?’ She took a long drag. ‘The guy you’ve looked up to for twenty-five years does a belly-flop off an eighteen-storey building. No’ exactly ice-cream and balloons, is it?’ A small crowd of onlookers had gathered on the outskirts of the car park. More peered out of the windows of the tower block, watching as the Environmental Health team covered everything in industrial bleach. ‘He’s coming in.’

Logan hadn’t expected anything else. Suspended or not, Insch wouldn’t trust them not to screw this up. ‘Wiseman?’

‘Probably.’ Steel looked from the blood-splashed car park all the way up to the roof. ‘That or Brooks decided to go in for a bit of freestyle plummeting.’ She sucked in a lungful of smoke. ‘Maybe he was wracked with guilt for screwing up the Flesher inquiry? If he’d done a proper job in the first place, they’d never have let the bastard go.’

She dragged the last gasp from her cigarette, then flicked it out into the puddle of drying blood. ‘How’s your vertigo?’

From the roof, eighteen floors up, the car park looked a long, long way down. The Environmental Health had finished with the spraying and were now trying to wash the remaining bleachy sludge down the nearest drain with a hose.

Steel sidled up next to Logan and peered over the wall. ‘Jesus, how far you think that is?’

‘Sixty, seventy feet?’

‘Hmm...’ She howched, and spat, watching as the glob disappeared. ‘Enough time for a good long scream. You’d think someone would’ve noticed.’

‘Fireworks. The Council had their big display—’

Looks like Brooks wasn’t the only one who had a bad one last night.’ She turned and stared at Logan’s bruised face. ‘Twice in two days?’

Logan put a hand up to his cheek: it was still swollen, even after an evening of cold compresses and malt whisky. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Word is Watson lamped you one.’

‘When’s the post mortem?’

‘Eh? Half eight, they’re rushing it through’ cos he’s an ex-cop. And stop changing the subject.’

Logan leant on the wall, staring out over the city as the sun rose from the watery depths of the North Sea, washing the granite buildings with gold. ‘Insch and I were supposed to meet Brooks on Saturday night. He was trying to pump us for details on the Wiseman case.’

‘Sounds like Basher Brooks. Silly sod could never let it— Arse...’ Her phone was ringing. ‘Hello?... Aye... Did he?... Oh.’ Her face fell. ‘Aye, well, no surprise there... No, no, it’s OK. See you then.’ She hung up. ‘They were doing a quick check at the mortuary, making sure they’d no’ left any bits of Brooks behind. Ligature marks round wrists and ankles.’

‘Definitely Wiseman then.’ Not suicide: murder.

The mortuary smelt like a butcher’s shop, the numerous chunks of Ex-DCI Brooks arranged to make a whole, slightly flattened person, as Isobel dictated her way through the remains.

Most of the jumpers Logan had seen were from six or seven storeys high — broken bones, internal bleeding — but Brooks looked as if he’d been torn apart, then battered with a sledgehammer.

‘You fancy pizza for lunch?’ whispered Steel, while Isobel wrestled with the deflated football that used to be Brooks’ head.

Logan grimaced.

‘OK, OK, not pizza. Curry? Sushi? How about...’ she trailed off when she realised Isobel and the Procurator Fiscal were staring at her. Steel shrugged. ‘Didn’t have any breakfast.’

Isobel put Brooks’ head back on the dissecting table. ‘Can we all please remain silent while I’m dictating!’

No one said anything.

‘Thank you.’ She picked up the head again. ‘Evidence of severe impact trauma consistent with a fall of eighty to a hundred feet—’

‘There’s a surprise.’

‘Inspector! I’m not going to—’

The door flew open and crashed against a trolley full of sterilized implements sending them pinging and clanging to the mortuary floor: DI Insch. His white oversuit stretched nearly to bursting point. His face dark, dark red.

The PF looked up and frowned. ‘Inspector, you shouldn’t be—’

The fat man elbowed his way to the dissecting table. ‘He was my friend!’

‘That’s why you shouldn’t be here.’ The Procurator Fiscal looked round for support, but everyone had developed a sudden interest in the mortuary walls.

Everyone except Isobel: ‘For goodness sake! I’m trying to carry out a post mortem and if I don’t get silence I’ll eject the lot of you! This will be a closed session. Do I make myself clear?’

Insch rounded on her. ‘Don’t you dare —’

Steel laid a hand on his arm. ‘Come on, David.’

‘Get your bloody hands off me! I’m—’

‘Let’s no’ burn any more bridges. Eh? Brooks wouldn’t want that. Would he?’

The fat man’s eyes sparked with tears. ‘He was my friend.’

‘I know.’ She pulled him towards the door. ‘Come on, you and me’ll go have a cuppa. Laz’ll look after him. Won’t you Laz?’

Logan nodded, and the inspector let himself be led out of the sterile cutting room. For a moment everyone relaxed... and then Isobel peeled off DCI Brooks’ face.