Stuart MacBride - Dying Light

DC Rennie looked so much like a plainclothes policeman it was scary. Even in jeans and a leather jacket something about him just screamed ‘LOOK AT ME: I’M A POLICEMAN!’ Not surprisingly they didn’t have a lot of luck speaking to the ladies plying their trade around Aberdeen harbour that night. And their punters weren’t stopping either, not with DC Conspicuous hanging around. So all Logan and Rennie got for their night’s work was several filthy mouthfuls of abuse.

Come half past twelve they’d been around the neighbourhood half a dozen times. There was still no sign of the fourteen-year-old Lithuanian, or her minder. ‘Sod this for a game of soldiers.’ DC Rennie slumped back against the railing that separated Regent Quay from the docks proper. ‘How many times are we going to go round and round in circles, getting shouted and spat at?’ He flinched, and slowly looked up into the sky. Thin raindrops were beginning to fall, making little needle streaks in the streetlights. ‘Shite, that’s all we bloody need.’

Logan had to agree. ‘Come on, let’s get back to the station.’ There wasn’t a single tart out tonight he hadn’t spoken to yesterday, and he still had an identikit picture to put together and a canine post mortem to chase up. They were getting nowhere here.

She smiles at him as he pulls up in his car. Smiles at him, but stays in the doorway. Keeping dry. Lovely fuckin’ day this was turning out to be: first Jason won’t eat his Ready Brek, then he’s late for school and she’s got such a sodding hangover! How’s she supposed to deal with Jason’s dickhead teacher with a dirty vodka hangover? And then PC Plod and his mate scare off the first nibble she’s had all fuckin’ night! Should be out there catching fuckin’ crooks, not hassling women trying to make a living!

The window buzzes down and he has to lean across the passenger seat to say hello. She always stands on the passenger side. Some dirty bastard drove up, wound down his window and grabbed her tits once. Didn’t ask, didn’t pay. Just grabbed her nipples like a fuckin’ vice, and drove off laughing. There’s a lot of sick bastards out there. He asks her how much and she gives him the list. Jacking the prices up a bit,’ cos the car looks new and he’s obviously not short of cash. He thinks about it as the rain really starts hammering down... Maybe she’s hiked the price up too much? Shit. Not like she doesn’t need the fuckin’ money; Jason goes through shoes like the things were free. She opens her raincoat a little, letting him see the red lace bra she’s almost wearing — two sizes too small and uncomfortable as hell, but it always gets the bastards going — and he smiles. Sort of. She keeps herself in good shape, and it shows. So what if her complexion’s not the best: she makes up for it where it counts.

‘You want to get in?’ he asks her. And it’s her turn to think about it. After all, that old tart got herself beaten to death a couple of nights ago. But it’s a nice car, and it’s pissing with rain. And she really, really needs the cash... She jumps in. The car has that lovely new, leathery-plastic smell to it, the upholstery clean, the interior spotless, not like that piece of shit she has to drive. This thing must have cost a fortune. She pulls the seatbelt over her breasts, giving him another flash of red lace, and he smiles. He has a nice smile. For a moment the Julia-Roberts-Pretty-Woman-Fantasy flashes through her brain. Just like it does every time she meets a client who’s good to her. Doesn’t want it too rough, or anything disgusting. He’ll look after her and she won’t have to fuck strangers for money any more. He tells a joke and she laughs as he puts the car in gear and drives them out into the rainy night. He’s really nice, she can tell. She has a sixth sense about that kind of thing.

Nearly one in the morning and the morgue was, appropriately, deathly quiet. The only sounds were Logan’s shoes squeaking on the tiles and the hum of the overhead lights. The cutting tables sparkled in the middle of the floor, the huge extractor fan set into the ceiling, waiting to whisk away the smell of death. Good job it worked better than the one in Logan’s kitchen: that wouldn’t whisk away the smell of frying onions, let alone decaying Labrador. ‘Hello?’ The morgue was supposed to be manned twenty-four hours a day, but as he wandered past the loading bay, the fridges, the cutting room and the viewing suite there wasn’t a living soul to be seen. ‘Hello?’ He finally found someone in the pathologist’s office, sitting with her back to the door, feet up on the desk, headphones on, reading a huge Stephen King novel and drinking Lucozade. Logan reached out and tapped the woman on the shoulder. There was a loud shriek; Stephen King and Lucozade went flying as she scrambled to her feet and whirled round. ‘FOR FUCK’S SAKE! YOU NEARLY GAVE ME A HEART ATTACK!’ Logan winced and she peeled off her headphones. ‘Christ!’ she said, the metallic tssshk-tssshk-tssshk of something loud hissing out of the earpieces. ‘I thought you were...’ then she stopped, clearly not wanting to tell Logan she’d thought the dead had risen up to claim her. Carole Shaw: Deputy Anatomical Pathology Technician, slightly chubby, shortish, early thirties with long curly blonde hair, little round spectacles and a MORTICIANS DO IT WITH DEAD BODIES! T-shirt on under an open white lab coat. The latter now stained sticky-orange with ejected Lucozade.

‘Good book?’ asked Logan innocently.

‘Bastard. Nearly sodding wet myself...’ She bent down and grabbed her book off the floor, cursing as the neon-orange fizzy drink soaked into the pages. ‘What the hell do you want?’

‘Labrador’s torso, brought in for post mortem Wednesday afternoon. Got the results back yet?’

She shuddered. ‘Christ, I remember that one. Bloody hell, how come when a rotting, suppurating carcass gets dragged in here for some poor bugger to cut up, it’s always yours?’

Logan didn’t smile. Last year it had been a little boy and a little girl, neither of them much over four years old. Both of them dead a long time. ‘Just lucky I guess,’ he said at last.

‘Here.’ She rummaged through a filing cabinet, emerging with a slim Manila folder. ‘Fido was dismembered with a boning knife: seven-inch single-sided blade — scooped near the handle, straight for most of its length and curved at the tip. They come in most kitchen sets, so nothing distinctive. Find the knife and we’ll probably be able to match it, but the carcass is pretty far gone... can’t guarantee anything.’ She flipped through the pages, her lips moving as she skimmed the text. ‘Here we go... one thing might help: Fido was drugged before he was killed. Amitriptyline: prescription antidepressant. Works a bit like a sedative, so they give it to people who’re wound up, anxious, calms them down. We got what looks like minced beef and about half a bottle of the things from the stomach contents. And you do not want to know what that smelled like.’

Logan agreed. He didn’t. ‘What about the suitcase?’

Carole shrugged. ‘Pretty standard fare. ASDA in Dyce, Bridge of Don, Garthdee and Portlethen all had them on special a couple of months ago. Sold hundreds of the things.’ Logan swore and she nodded. ‘Also, fingerprints: bugger all. Same for fibre: clean as a whistle. Whoever did this wasn’t keen on getting caught.’

The rest of Logan’s night was spent getting together e-fit identikit pictures of the Lithuanian fourteen-year-old and her pimp, then shoving them under the noses of everyone in the station; putting the pictures up on the intranet and briefing pages; emailing them to all the other stations in the area — hoping someone could ID them.