Stuart MacBride - Flesh House

Logan dug out his notebook. ‘Door-to-door turned up nothing — no one saw anyone coming or going from the house last night. Closest we’ve got are the next-door neighbours: they heard the kid, Justin, crying from about three o’clock this morning. When he hadn’t stopped by noon they tried the doorbell. No reply. They’ve got a key in case of emergencies so they let themselves in...’ Logan’s gaze drifted past the inspector’s bulk to the blood-spattered kitchen. ‘No sign of Mr or Mrs Inglis, but Justin was upstairs in his room. He’d barricaded himself in with a rocking chair and his toy box.’

Faulds picked a silver photo frame off the mantelpiece: mother and child grinning at the camera, the not-so-golden sands of Aberdeen beach stretching away behind them. ‘They didn’t hear anything last night?’

‘Neighbours say the Inglises weren’t exactly the most stable of couples. They’d be OK for a couple of months, then they’d go ballistic at one another. Throw things, screaming rows — usually about money — she put him in hospital once with concussion.’

‘Hmm... so we could be looking at a domestic here. Fight gets out of hand, someone gets seriously hurt.’

‘I’ve been on to the hospital, no one called Inglis admitted.’

Faulds put the photo back where he’d found it. ‘Perhaps she’s killed him this time? She needs to get rid of the body, so—’

‘Sorry sir, their car’s parked about a two-minute walk away. The boot’s still full of shopping and there’s no sign of blood.

‘Well...’ The Chief Constable thought about it. ‘The harbour’s at the bottom of the road, isn’t it? She could have dragged her husband’s body down there and thrown him in.’

Insch didn’t quite laugh, but it sounded close. ‘And then vanished into thin air, leaving her three-year-old son trapped in his bedroom with no food, water or access to a toilet? The poor wee sod had to crap in his wardrobe. No, this was Wiseman. He knows we’re on to him and he’s escalating again. Just like last time. The Inglises are already dead.’

Darkness. Darkness and slow, numbing pain. God, everything hurt! Her skull throbbed, her throat was full of burning sand... cramp rampaged down her left leg and she choked back a scream as the muscle convulsed. Screaming only made her throat feel worse.

She rode it out, face screwed up in agony, then tried to work some life back into her limbs. It wasn’t easy, not with her ankles strapped together and her wrists bound behind her back. Curled up on a filthy mattress that stank of fear and piss. And meat.

‘Duncan?’ it came out as a painful croak. ‘Duncan, you’ve got to stay awake...’

Duncan didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything for at least — what, an hour? Two? It was difficult to tell in the foetid darkness. ‘Duncan, you’ve got a concussion: you have to stay awake!’

They were going to die. They were going to die in the stink and the black and no one would ever find them... Heather blinked hard. Tears weren’t going to help anyone. She had to get out of here. Had to save Justin. Had to find and save her son. And tears weren’t going to help.

But she cried anyway.

INTERIOR: small house in Aberdeen, festooned with ornaments. Two men in the background wearing white SOC coveralls dust for prints.

TITLE: Chief Constable Mark Faulds — West Midlands Police

VOICEOVER: So what do you think the chances are of finding them alive?

FAULDS:Well, obviously we have to hope, but the reality of the situation is that killers like Wiseman... I’m allowed to call him a killer on television, aren’t I?

VOICEOVER: I think he was acquitted wasn’t he?

FAULDS:Yes, but that doesn’t really mean anything, does it? Let out on appeal because of a technicality isn’t the same as being found not guilty. And he was given another fifteen years for beating that rapist to death in the prison showers.

VOICEOVER: Yeah, but probably better safe than sorry. Or we can film two versions: one where you name Wiseman, one where we just say ‘The Flesher’. How about that?

FAULDS:OK. Ahem. [coughs] The reality of the situation is that serial killers in this kind of situation... hold on, I said situation twice. Can we start over?

Logan and Insch stood in the kitchen, listening to Faulds making a mess of his third take. The inspector shook his head, then closed the door, saying, ‘Bloody amateurs...’

The IB had left the place in a mess, as usual. All the surfaces were covered in a thin film of fingerprint powder — black on the kitchen units, white on the granite worktop. Little yellow tags marked the drops of drying blood, a smeared handprint on a kitchen cabinet, a clump of human hair stuck to a door handle, a broken tooth by the fridge-freezer...

‘Look at him, can’t even get a simple speech to camera right. How the hell was he ever a professional actor? Unbelievable.’ Insch shut the door as Faulds launched into yet another take. ‘What’s he been saying about the case?’

Logan shrugged. ‘Not much. We spent the morning in the morgue watching them poke little chunks of meat. And then we dug out the Flesher files from the archives. There’s bloody heaps of—’

‘What about me?’

‘You?... er... nothing.’

Insch scowled at the ruined kitchen, chewing on the inside of his cheek. Logan could almost hear the Machiavellian wheels turning inside that huge pink head.

‘I don’t get it:’ said Logan, ‘if you can’t stand Faulds, why did you ask him up here in the first place?’

‘Because that was the deal. If you get a Flesher case, you call in the old investigating team — doesn’t matter if you want their “help” or not, the useless sods turn up anyway. And lucky old me: Chief Constable Faulds had nothing better to do.’ The inspector brooded for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision.’ Call Control: get someone going through the CCTV footage. Whoever took the victims used a car, or a truck, or a van. Find it. And you’d better get the press office to set up a conference. Circulate the Inglises’ photos. See if anyone saw anything.’ He stopped for a moment, staring at a child’s drawing of a ghost surrounded by happy skeletons, pinned to the refrigerator. ‘Poor wee sod... We’ll need to talk to the kid. Find out if he saw— Bloody hell.’

His phone was screeching out ‘The Lord High Executioner’ from The Mikado . Insch pulled the thing out, groaned, then hit the button. ‘Hello Gary... Yes... Yes I know you did, but— Because it’s an ongoing investigation, that’s why... No...’ he rolled his eyes and stomped out of the kitchen, barging past Faulds and the cameraman on his way to the front door.

He slammed it behind him.

Faulds sighed. ‘I see his temper’s not improved much.’

‘Yes... well, he’s under a lot of pressure, sir.’

‘He a good governor?’

Logan thought about it. ‘He puts a lot of criminals behind bars.’

‘Which is a diplomatic way of saying, “utter bastard”.’

He couldn’t argue with that.

The press conference was not a happy place. As soon as the prepared statement had been read the savaging began: Wiseman was on the loose, people were dying and apparently it was all Grampian Police’s fault. The Chief Constable went straight into damage limitation mode, but it didn’t take a genius to tell what tomorrow’s headlines were going to be like.

When the briefing was finally over, Logan told Insch the good news: ‘Social says we’re OK to speak to the Inglis kid, but we need to keep it brief.’