Stuart MacBride - Dying Light

Blushing, but unable to help himself, Logan looked up to see the smug, slimy face of Councillor Andrew Marshall. ‘You sure?’ he hissed, not wanting to draw any more attention than they already had.

She nodded. ‘At private party, when I come Aberdeen first, him and bald friend both at same time. “Spit roast”, is right? When bald man in mouth and other man is up—’

Logan didn’t need to hear any more; given the Councillor’s taste in magazines it was pretty clear where he would have been. He paid for their chips and walked her across the road to eat them. She was so engrossed she didn’t even notice they’d walked all the way around the Arts Centre and were heading up the ramp onto the rear podium. In fact it wasn’t until Alpha Six Two honked its horn to get past that she suddenly realized where she was: Grampian Police Force Headquarters. Screaming curses in Lithuanian she hurled her remaining chips at Logan and turned to run, but he grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and dragged her, kicking and screaming, into the building.

Half an hour later Logan jumped into DI Steel’s CID pool car and handed the inspector a white pudding supper, with the obligatory pickled egg.

‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been waiting bloody ages!’

Logan grinned and sank down in the driver’s seat. ‘Oh, here and there.’

‘What?’ she said, chewing suspiciously on a handful of chips. ‘What’s so damn funny?’

‘I just picked up a prostitute.’

‘Oh aye?’ She picked up her white pudding and ripped a bite out of it, chewing round the words. ‘What’s the matter, WPC Watson not dirty enough for you,’ cos I can—’

He didn’t let her finish. ‘A fourteen-year-old Lithuanian prostitute to be precise. Called Kylie.’ This got a blank look. ‘Saw Jamie McKinnon having sex with Rosie Williams the night she was murdered?’

Steel groaned and shovelled in another handful of chips. ‘What fucking good is that to me?’ Bits of chewed potato were falling onto her blouse. ‘Bastard already admitted shagging her. And if it was the same guy who killed Rosie and Michelle Wood, then it doesn’t matter who saw McKinnon there.’

‘But just in case — it puts him at the scene. We don’t have any evidence remember? You destroyed...’ He stopped when he saw the expression on the inspector’s face. ‘I mean, the tape machine wasn’t working.’

‘And you’d better fucking remember that.’

‘There’s something else, if you’re interested?’ He smiled and let the question hang as Steel took another huge bite out of her white pudding. As if she was trying to castrate the thing. ‘This fourteen-year-old girl says Councillor Marshall’s shagged her up the arse while she was sucking someone else’s dick.’

There was a sudden explosion of half-chewed white pudding coating the inside of the windscreen while DI Steel choked.

Logan winked. ‘Thought you’d like that.’

Thursday started much like any other day, unfortunately. Not enough sleep and what little he’d managed to grab after Operation Cinderella packed up for the night was riddled with dreams of dead children, damp and rotten, the flesh falling from their bones as they skipped and danced through his flat, their eyes like runny-yolked eggs. No wonder he felt dreadful. He was definitely going to check up on PC Maitland today. Pop past and see how he was doing. Offload a bit of the guilt.

DI Steel was in the incident room, speaking to DI Insch and fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. Logan was too tired to bother listening in, so he slouched over to his desk instead and tried to figure out what he was going to do about Steel. She’d told him in no uncertain terms that he was to have nothing more to do with Kylie — she’d be taking over the underage sex thing personally. And if he breathed a word of it to anyone she’d have his balls.

There was a plastic bag full of videotapes sitting on Logan’s desk, each one bearing a sticky label with ‘OPERATION CINDERELLA NIGHT 2’ scribbled on it, and next to that a big Manila folder: the criminal records of one Chib Sutherland. Sighing, Logan got himself a mug of coffee and started to read.

Chib was every bit as lovely as Colin Miller had implied. Most of his formative years were spent in borstal for knifing some attendant at the children’s home he was staying in, then on to a serious life of violent crime. Right up to the time he started working for that great philanthropist, Malcolm McLennan — AKA Malk the Knife. He’d taken the boy in and moulded him in his own image: a vicious wee thug who wouldn’t get caught any more. According to Lothian and Borders he was in the frame for at least eight murders, though there was never enough hard evidence to do him for any of them. But people had gone missing, never to be seen again. Then there were the bodies that had been found, battered and mutilated. Everyone knew Chib was responsible; there just wasn’t any way to prove it. Not when any witnesses were so conveniently struck down with amnesia, or a cricket bat.

‘Hoy, Lazarus.’ Logan looked up to see DI Steel hovering over the desk, smiling at him with yellowed teeth. ‘Good news,’ she said, ‘in a crappy sort of way. Seems like the big boys down south have decided to lend little old Grampian Police a helping hand. Isn’t that just fucking swell?’ When Logan didn’t answer she slapped a couple of sheets of A4 on top of the report he was reading. ‘They’ve sent us up a preliminary psychological offender profile! Wow! According to Insch, you’ve already worked with the specky-four-eyed git who wrote it, so guess what?’ The inspector beamed and punched him on the shoulder. ‘You have “experience”. I want to know what all the shite in that report means, and — more importantly — if any of it’s worth the paper it’s written on. And don’t take too long: Mr Clinical Psychologist is on his way up the road as we speak. I want some sort of synopsis before he gets here at eleven.’ Logan tried not to groan. Instead he poked the plastic bag full of videotapes and asked the inspector what she expected him to do with them all. ‘I don’t bloody care, do I,’ she said. ‘Take them home and record over them if you like, it’s not like we’re ever going to watch the bloody things anyway.’ She stopped, halfway to the door. ‘Oh, and don’t forget what we talked about last night.’ The threat was implicit: tell anyone and you’re screwed .

Dr Bushel was exactly as Logan remembered: arrogant, self-satisfied, balding and immaculately dressed. The strip lights sparkled off his little round glasses as he stood at the front of the briefing room taking a select group of Grampian’s finest through his psychological profile for their potential serial killer. There wasn’t anything here that Logan hadn’t already told DI Steel after reading the report, but it was all new to the Assistant Chief Constable, the deputy CC, and the head of CID. The killer would be white, male, in his mid to late twenties, have intimacy issues, and have used a prostitute before, but found it a humiliating experience. The beating was a sign of his hatred towards women, the intensity of his rage acting as a pointer to buried conflict with his mother. He would have a menial job, but be articulate enough to lure Michelle Wood into his car. Socially adequate. He took his victims’ clothes, not as a trophy, but because he wanted to humiliate them. And possibly for some sort of masturbatory fantasy. He would strike again.

Once the doctor had finished his presentation, DI Steel started asking the questions Logan had raised in private earlier, framing each one as if she was pulling it out of the blue, thinking on her feet. Putting on a show for the senior brass while Logan sat and fumed in disgust.