Stuart MacBride - Dying Light

Their new incident room — courtesy of the Chief Constable the minute this became a serial case — was huge, the walls covered with maps of Aberdeen and scribbled-on whiteboards. The middle of the room was taken up with phones and computers, the monitors flickering in the overhead light as uniformed officers took calls and entered the details into HOLMES. There was already a huge stack of automatically generated actions waiting for him, so Logan pulled up a chair and started working his way through the lot; sorting them into two piles he called ‘To Do’ and ‘Bollocks’. The system’s greatest strength was that it would churn its way through endless reams of data, automatically picking out connections and patterns. Its greatest weakness was that it frequently didn’t have a sodding clue what it was doing. He was just finishing when DI Steel finally got back from speaking to Michelle Wood’s father.

‘How did it go?’

The inspector shrugged and started flicking half-heartedly through Logan’s pile of ‘Bollocks’, turfing them one after the other into the bin. ‘How do you think it went? Telling some poor bastard his daughter’s been battered to death by a psycho, and her naked body was abandoned in the fucking woods for three days before someone fell over it in the fog... oh and by the way, your little girl was fucking strangers for money.’ She sighed and ran a hand over her face. ‘Sorry, been a shitty week.’ Logan handed her the ‘To Do’ pile and she whittled that one down too; there weren’t many actions left by the time she was finished. She palmed them off on the admin officer, telling him to get them cleared by the end of the day.

‘Right,’ she said as the man grumbled away to get the personnel organized. ‘Plan of action?’

‘Well, what do you want to do about Jamie McKinnon?’

‘Leave him where he is, we’ve still got plenty tying him to Rosie’s murder.’ Steel pulled out a packet of king-size cigarettes and started fiddling with the silver paper insert. ‘If we get someone else in the frame for both tarts we’ll do McKinnon for the fast-food jobs instead. But if anyone asks, we’re dealing with the killings like they’re part of the same pattern.’

‘OK.’ Logan grabbed a magic marker and started drawing up a rough map of the docks on one of the whiteboards. ‘Rosie Williams was found here...’ He drew a blue circle on Shore Lane. ‘Do we know if Michelle Wood worked the docks?’

‘Who knows?’

‘If she did, then we’ve got a hunting ground. We put in some surveillance: unmarked cars...’ He picked up a green pen and started putting ‘X’es where a rusty Vauxhall could be parked without attracting too much attention.

‘What bloody good are unmarked cars going to do us?’ asked Steel, corkscrewing a finger into her ear. ‘Dirty bastards pick up women down there the whole time. How’re we going to spot our man: pull them all over and ask?’ She dropped her voice an octave and put on a broad east London accent. ‘“Excuse me, sir,’ ave you picked up this tart wiv the intention of beatin’ ’er to death, or just givin’ ’er a serious knobbin’?”’ She smiled pityingly at him. ‘Good plan: I can see that working.’

Logan scowled at her. ‘if you’ll let me finish . We get a couple of WPCs done up as bait and they do the rounds. If someone tries to take them anywhere we’ve got them wired for sound: the unmarked cars follow and we catch the guy in the act. What do you think?’

Steel wrinkled her nose and took a good look at Logan’s crude diagram. ‘Don’t think it stands a chance in hell, but what have we got to lose?’ she said at last. ‘Go pick yourself out a couple of WPCs. Remember, this bloke did Rosie Williams and Michelle Wood so he can’t be all that fussy. I want a couple of pugglers.’ Logan said he’d see what he could do.

It was the perfect day for drying towels: sun shining, light breeze and no midges. Ailsa smiled, taking pleasure from the simple domesticity of it all. Gavin had promised to come home from work on time for a change. So tonight was going to be special: she was still ovulating after all.

She pulled the last towel from the basket and pegged it up on the line. All done. And then she caught the tell-tale, clinging stench of cigarette smoke, drifting through the fence from next door’s garden. It was the pointy-faced boyfriend, his features bruised and battered. Again. Why he stayed with that horrible, drunken, abusive, violent woman Ailsa just couldn’t understand. Surely any sane man would have left her the first time she broke his nose. Or the second. Or third...

The boyfriend was smoking with his head back against the metal whirly washing thing. Wincing as he breathed out, one hand flinching over his ribs, unaware that Ailsa was watching him. He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt out into the knee-deep grass where it disappeared among the weeds.

A loud shout from inside the house and the boyfriend jumped. In that moment his eyes caught Ailsa’s and she knew he was every bit as trapped by this horrible harridan as she and Gavin were. She was like a mincing machine for the soul, grinding them up until nothing was left but a bloody pulp. Shoulders slumped in defeat, the boyfriend turned and limped into the house.

Ailsa watched him go with a shudder. There, but for the grace of God...

While the inspector was off on yet another extended fag break, Logan trolled through Michelle Wood’s post mortem report. The killer had managed to snap one of her legs, both arms, and almost all of her ribs. Internal organs ruptured, probably caused by her attacker stamping on her stomach. Head battered repeatedly with fists, feet, a rock... Someone had really gone to town on her. Logan sighed, looking at a crime scene photograph: a big, full-colour eight-by-ten glossy of Michelle’s plastic-bag-smothered head. There was no doubt about it: their boy was getting better at it. Every attack worse than the last, until...

Logan swore. How the hell could he have missed it? He shouted for DC Rennie. ‘Grab your notebook: I want you to find out who patrols the docks, someone who knows the layout and the girls, we—’

‘Excuse me, sir?’ It was PC Steve. He hung his head round the door and smiled uncertainly in Logan’s direction. ‘DI Insch wants to see you.’

Logan groaned, wondering what he’d done wrong now. ‘OK,’ he told Rennie, ‘you go: get me a name. I want to speak to them.’ Then he remembered the Aberdonian pimp and the Lithuanian teenager. ‘And show those identikit pictures round again — someone must know who they are.’

There was a new corkboard on the wall of DI Insch’s incident room, divided up into six sections — each square taken up by a name, a face and a post mortem photograph. The small head in the bottom right corner was connected to the blackened face above it with a thin red ribbon. The inspector stood in front of the board with his skeletal admin officer, pointing at things while she took notes in longhand. Insch glanced up, saw Logan and called him over, dismissing the woman with a couple of fizzy cola bottles.

‘What can I do for you, sir?’

‘This lot.’ Insch tapped a photograph of a human head that looked like a side of barbecued pork. ‘Remember we got that list of Graham Kennedy’s school chums?’ He stuffed a handful of the sweets into his mouth, mumbling as he chewed. ‘Graham you know, but this is Ewan, Mark, Janette and Lucy.’ Poking the post mortem photos one by one, leaving behind little sparkling fingerprints. ‘All identified by their dental records. According to the hospital the wee girl,’ he didn’t poke her picture, ‘belonged to Lucy. Gemma... poor wee sod.’ Sigh. ‘Anyway, we got five names from Graham’s granny: one, two three, four. One missing.’