Stuart MacBride - The Missing and the Dead

Why was Broch Braw Buys the only non-Co-op hit by the Cashline Ram-Raiders? It wasn’t as if it was anything special — just another wee shop. Maybe there was some sort of personal connection? A grudge against the owner? It wasn’t the first in the series, so it wasn’t as if they were getting their eye in. Or maybe it was simply an easy shop to hit?

Might be worth popping past tomorrow when it was open and having a word with the owner. See if he’d made any enemies in the last few months.

Probably a waste of time, but you never knew …

Around, over the bridge, past the Spotty Bag Shop, and along Carmelite Street.

A gaggle of women in short skirts and high heels clacked and cackled their way along the pavement. They all wore pink Stetsons, except for the one in the middle who had a white veil and learner plates on. They cheered and waved as Logan drove past.

Give it a couple of hours and at least one of them would be face-down in a pub toilet, or being sick in a bus shelter.

‘Shire Uniform Seven from Control, safe to talk?’

He hit the button. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Got a Sergeant Creegan for you from Kirkwall station.’

There was a click , then a man’s voice came from the Airwave’s speaker, sounding a lot more Inverness than Orkney. ‘Hullo? Yes, are you the one who put a lookout request on the Copper-Tun Wanderer ? Cause we’ve found it.’

‘Great. Thanks. Is the skipper there: Charles Anderson?’ Logan eased past the much smaller, much older graveyard opposite Banff’s little Tesco supermarket. Ancient lichen-flecked headstones, squeezed in cheek to jowl. No more room for the dead.

‘Ah … Yes, and no.’

‘So he’s not there?’

A troupe of lads in tight jeans, tattoos, and numbered T-shirts lurched across the road, two of them holding up a bloke in a kiss-me-quick porkpie hat. All of them singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ with the complete lack of skill and self-awareness that comes free with lots and lots of booze. Looked as if the stag do had headed out a lot earlier than the hen night. Eight o’clock and they were already lurching.

‘We found the boat on the rocks, off the coast of South Ronaldsay. There was a fire on board, looks like Friday night. It’s pretty much a hulk now, everything burnable’s burned. There’s not much left of the wheelhouse, or Mr Anderson.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Very. Looks like part of the roof came down on him.’

At least with Steel’s monkeys back off to Aberdeen, there were plenty of parking spaces in front of the station again. Logan reversed into the one by the front door.

‘OK. Well, thanks for letting me know.’ Not exactly a great result, but at least they could stop looking for him now. Mind you, with Anderson dead, they might never find out what happened to the wee girl they’d hauled out of the water at Tarlair.

The stag party must’ve been on their way to the Ship Inn, because they lurched along the road on the other side of the public car park. Skirted a woman, standing on her own by the wall that separated the road from the bay. Their rendition of ‘Flower of Scotland’ segued into a chorus of wolf whistles and blown kisses as they passed her.

She turned to watch them go, then went back to staring out across the water.

‘Suppose he’d just had enough. Happens sometimes with fishermen. They want to go out like Vikings.’

Logan grabbed his peaked cap and climbed out into the warm evening. ‘You’re saying it wasn’t an accident?’

‘Best guess: two bottles of whisky, two litres of petrol, and a match. Nothing left but bones and ash. Hell of a way to die.’

And maybe Hell was where Charles Anderson deserved to be.

Logan ran through his warrant request one last time. Changed a couple of words, then emailed it off to Inspector McGregor. OK, so DCI McInnes had been very clear about Logan keeping his nose out of Operation Troposphere, but that didn’t mean Klingon, Gerbil, and their new mate Martyn Baker should get away with battering Jack Simpson half to death.

Next up — more paperwork …

The tradesmen’s entrance banged, then the sound of heavy feet thumped along the corridor.

PC Penny Griffiths stuck her head into the Sergeants’ Office. A small woman, red hair pulled back from her round face. Big smile. ‘Evening, Sarge, you want a tea? Joe’s making.’

‘Thanks. How’s it out there?’

She pursed her lips for a moment, eyebrows up. ‘Well, we had to caution a bloke in a stupid porkpie hat for peeing off the harbour wall, but other than that it’s pretty you-know-what.’

Good. And with any luck it would stay you-know-what till the shift ended.

Penny pointed back into the main office, where the newspapers were hung over Maggie’s cubicle wall. ‘You see the late editions? They got someone for killing Stephen Bisset. Mad, isn’t it? Can you imagine what those poor kids must be going through?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

She turned to go. ‘We’ve got doughnuts as well, if you want one?’

‘You’re a star, Penny — and anyone who says different is a moron.’

Soon as she was gone, he wandered out into the main office and helped himself to the Aberdeen Examiner . Its headline — ‘PERVERT VOLUNTEER ARRESTED FOR BISSET KILLING’ — sat above a photo of a smiling man with a bald head, soup-strainer moustache, and soul-patch. He was in a bar with a couple of other people, their features pixelated out by the newspaper. It was captioned, ‘MARLON BRODIE WROTE AN ONLINE JOURNAL ABOUT EXTREME SEXUAL PRACTICES’.

They didn’t give the web address, but it didn’t take long to Google it up.

According to the home page, Brodie was taking his inspiration from a book called TheEncyclopaedia of Unusual Sexual Practices by someone called, appropriately, Brenda Love. It looked as if Brodie was flitting his way through the A-to-Z of kinks in no particular order, then arranging his adventures into categories, along with musings and plans for the future.

Logan skimmed through a couple of pages. Pausing to wince at the one about Brodie getting an ex-girlfriend to staple his scrotum to the kitchen table. Then laugh at the photo where he had a bash at anaclitism — anyone who found wearing a nappy sexy had no business posting pictures of themselves doing it on the internet. Another laugh at the failed attempt to negotiate a threesome to check troilism off the list. Another wince for the bee-sting fetish — complete with before and after photos that had Logan crossing his legs. And finally, a rather sad story about Brodie paying a woman he’d met at a party to let him have sex with her armpit. Axillism? Apparently also known as ‘having a bagpipe’.

Took all sorts.

Logan found the button to arrange Marlon Brodie’s posts by date order, rather than topic, and there it was, top of the list: pseudonecrophilia.

Joe appeared in the doorway, mug in one hand, brown paper bag in the other. ‘One white tea, one jammy doughnut.’ He’d dumped his protective gear, leaving a black Police T-shirt stretched tight across a huge barrel chest. The same DIY-style haircut as Logan’s sat above a big square face with a scar through one thick eyebrow.

‘Ta.’ Logan reached for the mug. ‘Did you manage to dig anything up on Charles Anderson?’

‘Other than the fact he’s dead?’

The tea was hot and milky. ‘Well, that’s a good start.’

‘Family man. Coached the under-twelves five-a-side team in Macduff for a couple of years.’

‘Any hints he was doing more than coaching them?’

‘Nope.’

‘But?’ Logan dipped into the brown paper bag, and came out with a sugary disc of squidgy delight.