Stuart MacBride - Dying Light

The fourth round was Logan’s. He lurched back to the table bearing a tray full of glasses and snacks: crisps for the normal people, pork scratchings for Doc Fraser. He was handing out the drinks when someone swore, grabbed him by the sleeve and pointed up at the television hanging from the ceiling in the corner. DI Steel stared down at him from the screen, a serious expression on her face as she said something to camera, the words inaudible in the noisy pub. Her craggy face was illuminated by the staccato flash of cameras, then she sat down and the picture cut to the Chief Constable who made some sort of speech. And then it was stock shots of Shore Lane and pictures of the victims before Michael Dunbar had got his fists on them.

Logan closed his eyes and swore. He’d royally screwed up any chance he had of getting credit for solving the Suitcase Torso Murder and Steel wasn’t likely to give him any for the Shore Lane Stalker either, not after their shouting match in the hallway. It was time for some serious drinking.

Logan lurched out of the taxi and paused, not falling forward, not falling backward, but teetering between the two as the rusty Ford did a three-pointer in the crowded street and slunk off into the night. With a frown he turned and watched the back of the car disappear round the corner and out of sight. Arse. He’d meant to ask it to wait for him. Taking a deep breath he tucked his shirt back into his trousers and strode purposefully towards Dr Isobel MacAlister’s front door. Miller used to have a flat in this part of town, but he’d sold it and moved in with the Ice Maiden instead. ‘May they have many, many happy years together,’ Logan told the huge rhododendron bush lurking in the evening light, dark green leaves glittering like burnished liver as the sun began its slow slither towards night. He leaned on the bell, and a deeply conservative biiiiiing-bonnnnnnnng sounded from the other side of the frosted glass. This was a fancy neighbourhood: Rubislaw Den, money territory. Four-storey granite buildings worth a not-so-small fortune, some of which had been in the family for generations. Lawyers, accountants, bigwigs in the oil industry. People who had four foreign holidays a year and sent their children to private schools. Logan leaned on the bell again.

The light was on above the door. They had to be in.

He squatted down to peer through the letterbox and tipped over onto his backside, scrabbling upright in time to see a shadow loom through the glass on either side of the door. A nervous voice came through the wood. ‘Who is it?’

‘Isobel? It’s me,’ said Logan, before thinking about it and adding, ‘Logan.’ After all, just because they’d shared an attempted murderer and a bed for seven months, there was no reason to expect her to remember who he was.

The door didn’t open. ‘Are you alone?’

‘Am I alone?’ Logan took a pace back and nearly fell off the top step. ‘Well, I’m still living with WPC Watson, but I think the new deputy PF likes me as well...’ He grinned. Two women. Tee-hee. ‘Can Colin come out to play?’

The door cracked open an inch and a worried face peered out at him. Isobel looked terrible: pale, drawn, deep purple bags under her eyes, lines creasing the skin between her eyebrows and down the sides of her mouth. As if she’d aged a dozen years since last week. ‘You’re drunk.’

Logan saluted her. ‘And you fiddle with dead people for money. But I can respect that. Where’s Colin?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Don’t know what?’

Colin Miller was in bed, curled in around himself, grey and shivering, his hands wrapped in white bandages. Logan took one look at Miller’s huddled form and suddenly got a lot more sober. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

Miller looked up from the bed and stared at him. The reporter’s face was swollen and bruised, dark purple tinged with green spreading out from his left cheek, another across his chin, his nose squinter than it had been a couple of days ago. ‘Me? What happened to me? I’ll tell you what fuckin’ happened to me: YOU FUCKIN’ HAPPENED!’

Logan flinched back. ‘But... I didn’t do anything!’

‘Had to play the big detective, didn’t you? Had to push your fuckin’ nose in where it didn’t belong!’ He was half out of bed now, struggling not to use his bandaged hands. ‘He recognized you, you stupid prick. You fucked about with him in the pub, even though I told you not to, and he fuckin’ recognized you !’ Miller’s naked feet sank into the deep, blue carpet as he lurched towards Logan, holding up his hands. ‘Then you arrested him and he knew I’d screwed him over!’ Cos there you fuckin’ were! ’

‘Colin, I—’

‘HE TOOK MY FUCKIN’ FINGERS!’ The reporter was crying now, face scarlet beneath the bruises, spittle flying from his twisted mouth, exposing cracked and missing teeth. ‘My fingers...’ Miller buried his head in his stiff, bandaged hands and sobbed. ‘My fingers...’

They sat in the kitchen, an open bottle of Bowmore sitting on the tabletop along with three glasses, even though Colin wasn’t there. Dying sunlight drifted in through the kitchen window, painting the varnished wood with amber, the shadows slipping from pale violet to deep blue as the sun set. Isobel was slumped in a chair on the opposite side of the table, clutching her emptied glass as Logan slugged in another stiff measure of malt whisky. But he was sticking to water. ‘What happened?’

Isobel took a deep drink, shuddering as the neat spirit went down. ‘He says they grabbed him outside the house. Bundled him into a car and took him out into the woods somewhere. Tied him to a chair and hacked off his fingers, one joint at a time, with a pair of poultry shears.’ Her voice was low, matter of fact, as if she was speaking for the benefit of the tape recorder at a post mortem. ‘Left hand: little finger, distal, middle and proximal phalanx; ring finger, distal and middle. Right hand: distal phalanx from the little finger, all bones from the ring finger. Each finger severed at the interphalangeal joints. One bone at a time.’ She took another long swig, nearly emptying the glass. ‘They... they left him in a lay-by. Dialled for an ambulance using his mobile phone and left him there.’ She shuddered. ‘The surgeons managed to reattach three sections. They don’t know if they’ll take or not.’

Logan slopped another huge whisky into her glass. ‘I’m sorry.’ Miller was right: this was all his fault.

She looked up at him, as if seeing him for the first time, then stood and crossed to the fridge, coming back with a blue plastic container, placing it down on the table between them. Gingerly Logan popped off the lid and frowned at the contents: small grey-white tubes, like albino chipolata sausages. Then he recognized a fingernail on the end of one.

‘Jesus!’

Isobel didn’t move. ‘He threw up under the anaesthetic.’

‘Threw...? He’d eaten them?’ Silence. Logan put the lid back on the box. ‘Isobel, I never meant for this to happen, I—’

‘No? Well guess what: it did.’ The last of the sun disappeared behind a wall of granite and the kitchen settled into awkward twilight. ‘I want you to find them and I want you to hurt them. Understand?’

‘Will Colin testify?’

‘They said if he talks to the police they’ll come back and finish the job.’ She poured herself another drink, her hand trembling, spilling Bowmore on the tabletop. ‘You don’t involve him. You find them and you hurt them!’

‘But—’

‘He’s your friend! You owe him. You owe me.’

Logan didn’t take a taxi back into town. Instead he walked through the gathering dusk, brooding. Colin Miller had lost nearly half his fingers because of him. The reporter was right: he just couldn’t keep his nose out. Couldn’t leave Miller alone with Chib in the pub, had to know what was going on. Drunken singing came from up ahead and a party of under-dressed girlies lurched out of the Windmill Inn, belting out something unrecognizable at the top of their lungs, hugging lampposts, wolf-whistling at the passing cars.