Stuart MacBride - Dying Light

Jamie was in tears as they pushed their way out of the ward, Steel making the call to her friend on the Drugs Squad to set up Jamie’s full body-cavity search.

Ailsa stood at the kitchen sink washing the breakfast things in hot soapy water. Normally she would have done the washing up straight after breakfast, but she was a bit behind today. Gavin had bought her a dishwasher, he was good like that, but somehow it seemed so wasteful to put it on just for a couple of plates, and she couldn’t bear the thought of the breakfast dishes festering in there all day, so she always did them by hand, staring out of the kitchen window through the fence, watching the schoolchildren troop across the grass and in through the doors. Praying that one day, she’d have one of her own... But it was late and they were all gone now, leaving the playground empty and silent, waiting for the morning break to come. She sighed and scrubbed dried-on egg off the good plates.

Gavin had been in a foul mood last night. He’d had to work late yet again — even though he’d promised — and when he finally got home the horrible woman next door was out in the garden. Staggering about, screaming and swearing at her boyfriend. Gavin had dumped his briefcase in the hall and marched right round there to give them a piece of his mind. She had never, ever, heard her husband use language like that before. But it didn’t make any difference to the harpy next door: she just started shouting and swearing at Gavin instead. Then she got violent! Screaming obscenities and swinging punches... Gavin came in with the beginnings of a black eye. He called the police, not that it ever did any good. After that he didn’t want to eat the supper she’d made for him, preferring instead to drink a huge amount of whisky. And even though the schedule they’d got from the doctor said they had to try every night while she was ovulating, he said he couldn’t. Not after a long day in the office and the fight. He was going to have another drink and watch the television. So Ailsa had gone to bed alone.

That horrible woman next door had ruined everything...

With a sigh, Ailsa stacked the last mug on the draining board. The noise next door was getting worse again, the yelling, the foul language, the sound of something breaking. Then the pointy-faced boyfriend limped out into the back garden, covering his head with his hands as a beer bottle sailed out through the French windows. The horrible woman lurched out after it, drunk at half past ten in the morning, swigging from another bottle. The boyfriend tried to get out of the way, but she grabbed him by the collar and punched him in the face! She was going to beat him up again: right there in the back garden, where everyone could see!

He staggered back, blood streaming from his crooked nose and she tried to swing for him again, missing, collapsing on the grass. Crying. The boyfriend turned and ran into the house, screaming that he was leaving her, that he’d had enough, slamming the door behind him.

Ailsa never saw him again.

The horrible woman rolled over onto her back, like a beached whale in jogging pants, and started to snore. Ailsa shuddered — maybe she should call the police?

But she didn’t. Instead she picked up the dishtowel and started to dry.

The nurse who’d seen to Jamie McKinnon’s fingers wasn’t exactly the most attractive woman ever to don a blue uniform: bobbed brown hair, squinty nose, pointy ears and thinnish lips, but DI Steel was smitten from the outset. She perched on the edge of the nurse’s desk, giving the young woman her undivided attention while she told them all about Jamie McKinnon’s visitors last night. Two men, both neatly dressed in suits. One with really nice teeth and short blond hair, the other with shoulder-length black hair and a moustache.

A little warning bell went off in the back of Logan’s head. ‘They didn’t have Edinburgh accents by any chance, did they?’

They did.

Steel protested, but eventually Logan managed to drag her away from the nurses’ station and up to the hospital’s security office, where a lone guard kept an eye on a bank of CCTV monitors. He was dressed in the standard turd-brown uniform with brass buttons and yellow trimmings that looked disturbingly like chunks of sweet corn. It took a little persuasion, but eventually he showed them last night’s tapes. There wasn’t a camera in Jamie McKinnon’s ward, but there was one in the corridor not far from it. Logan ran through the tape, watching the fast-forward flicker of motion as the machine played back yesterday evening. The system was only set up to record an image every couple of seconds and the doctors, nurses and civilians jerked past in a strange stop-motion ballet. Two large figures twitched into view, drifting along the corridor to disappear suddenly outside Jamie’s ward. The timestamp at the bottom of the screen said ten seventeen. Regular visiting hours ended at eight. When they re-emerged the timestamp said ten thirty-one. Fourteen minutes of dislocating Jamie McKinnon’s fingers and threatening his family. Logan hit the pause button. Now the figures were walking towards the camera he had a good view of their faces. The picture quality wasn’t great, but it was good enough: the bloke in the suit with the short blond hair was the same ‘corporate investment facilitator’ Miller had met for breakfast in the pub. And the man at his side was a dead ringer for the driver who’d been waiting in the car outside while Miller agreed to write a puff piece on McLennan Homes’ latest business venture. ‘And we have a winner.’

‘What?’ Steel was slouched in her chair, not really paying attention to the screen, or to the clockwork animation people on it.

‘This one,’ said Logan, poking the screen with his finger. ‘Works for Malcolm McLennan.’

It was DI Steel’s turn to swear. ‘You sure?’

‘Yup. So anything your mate digs out of Jamie McKinnon’s arse belongs to Malk the Knife.’

Eleven o’clock and they were back in the car again, heading for the HQ of Aberdeen’s main local newspaper. DI Steel sat in the passenger seat, worrying away at her thumbnail, her expression conflicted.

Jamie McKinnon was being kept under close supervision, not even toilet breaks allowed, until Steel’s mate from the Drugs Squad turned up with his long rubber glove. She was determined to pin something on the two thugs from down south. The trouble would be getting any sort of case together. Somehow Logan didn’t see Jamie McKinnon having the balls to stand up in court and say, ‘Yes, Your Honour, those are the men that forced six kilos of heroin up my backside.’ Not if he didn’t want to end up filling a shallow grave out in the Grampian hills somewhere. But you never knew your luck.

Logan took the car up across Anderson Drive and onto the Lang Stracht. The Press and Journal — local news since 1748 — shared a squat, concrete, sprawling box of a building with its sister paper, the Evening Express , on a small industrial estate packed with car dealerships and warehouses. Inside it was all one huge, open-plan office. It always amazed Logan that the place was so quiet, just the ever-present hummmmm of the air-conditioning and the odd muffled conversation overlaying the soft, plastic clickity-clack of people typing on word processors. Colin Miller, however, was hunched over his computer, hammering away at the keyboard as if it had recently called his mother a schemie whore. The desks around him were packed with piles of paper, mugs of congealing coffee and bespectacled journalists. Every head within an eight-desk radius snapped up as Logan tapped Miller on the shoulder and asked for a quiet word.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Can you no’ see I’m busy?’