Stuart MacBride - The Missing and the Dead

Logan pointed at the floor, where four drill holes marked out a relatively clean rectangle on the ancient linoleum. ‘They haven’t fitted a new cash machine?’

‘What’s it look like to you? Course they haven’t. Insurance company are playing silly buggers. Oh, you’re not covered for that, you’re not covered for this, have you not read the small print?’ His face soured. ‘Thieving bunch of scum. Come the revolution, they’re first against the wall.’

The wee man scuffed the toe of his trainers over the clean rectangle. ‘Only agreed to cough up for the window yesterday. Had thirty-five thousand quid’s worth of my stock nicked, and do they care? Do they hell.’

‘It was only twenty-seven thousand last week.’

He jammed his hands in his pockets. ‘Inflation. Now, what do you want? I don’t do discounts for plod till you catch the thieving sods who robbed me.’

Logan looked up at the security camera, mounted above the door. ‘I need to see the footage from the raid.’

The front door bleeped again, and a wee girl in denim shorts and a Chainsaw Teddy T-shirt skipped in, all smiles, dimples, and pigtails, a Hello Kitty skateboard tucked under one arm.

‘You! Get out, you’re banned. Go on!’ He grabbed Logan’s arm. ‘Look, I’ve got the police here. You get out of here now, or he’ll arrest you!’

She stuck her middle finger up at the pair of them, spat on the floor, then turned and skipped back out of the shop again. Couldn’t have been much more than five years old.

The shopkeeper let go of Logan’s arm, and spread his hand across his own chest, fingertips trembling. ‘They’re like jackals.’

‘What about the CCTV?’

‘They come in here in packs and they steal and they make threats and they break things and they spit.’

‘Do you have security footage, or don’t you?’

He sniffed. ‘Don’t. What we had, the police took after the robbery.’

Which meant it would be locked away in the evidence store at Queen Street, Aberdeen. No way they’d let Logan anywhere near it. But it’d been worth a try.

Logan stopped on his way back to the door. ‘Why you?’

‘Of course, you try to talk to the parents, but do they do anything? Of course not. Between you and me, they’re scared of their own children.’

‘Why did the Ram-Raiders pick this place? All the other shops they’ve hit are Co-ops. Why you?’

He straightened a stack of toilet rolls. ‘I’m a hardworking businessman who pays his taxes and does the right thing and these people are the scum of the earth. Come the revolution-’

‘Yeah, I heard. Up against the wall.’ Logan pointed at the patch where the cash machine had been. ‘Why you? Someone come round threatening you, or wanting protection money? Something like that?’

‘The children. All the time. Money, threats, spitting. I should get a gun to protect myself.’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’ Logan opened the door. ‘And take down that stupid reward sign. You’re not breaking anyone’s legs.’

‘Children? They’re not children, they’re monsters .’

The door bleeped shut as Logan stepped out onto the pavement again.

OK, so Broch Braw Buys was a non-starter for CCTV. No sign of cameras on the chip shop next door, but the Kenyan Bar and Lounge had one of the black dome security cameras above the door on Gallowhill Road. There was another next to the painted sign, and a third above the door on Finlayson Street.

Perfect.

Logan knocked on the barred gate. No reply.

A couple of posters sat in the recess behind the gate, either side of the door. One was for the open-mike night on Tuesdays, and the other was for the new and improved Pubwatch scheme. ‘ALL SECURITY CAMERAS IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT ARE CONNECTED TO FRASERBURGH POLICE STATION. AGGRESSION TOWARDS STAFF OR OTHER CLIENTS WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.’

Even better.

Fraserburgh’s Cellblock Gospel Singers roared their way through ‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’ somewhere below Logan’s feet, giving every verse the full-throated Whitney Houston warble. The viewing equipment was temporarily stacked on a scarred desk, jammed into the corner of a disused office while the viewing suite waited for a fresh lick of paint that never came.

‘Anything else?’ He shifted the phone to his other hand and had a sip of tea.

It sounded as if Big Paul was checking his paperwork. ‘We’re still after witnesses to that hit-and-run. Couple of house-breakings to look into. Someone’s been smashing windows in Inverboyndie. And I want to make a nuisance of myself on Newton Drive — our old friend Lumpy Patrick’s dealing again. Going to disrupt his business.’

‘Good.’ Logan checked his notepad. ‘I need you to send Kate over to backfill at Fraserburgh again. And I want you to take a swing past Frankie Ferris’s place on Rundle Avenue every couple of hours. Let’s make it a bad day to be dealing drugs all round. Other than that, you, Penny, and Joe have a good shift. I’ll see you when I see you.’

‘Right, Sarge.’

Logan slid the next cartridge out of the rack and into the machine. Had a slurp of tea while it whirred and groaned. Then Gallowhill Road filled the screen.

The camera had obviously been set up to monitor events outside the front of the Kenyan Bar, that bit of the picture was sharp and clear, the rest of the street was caught in the distorting glare of the wide-angle lens. Getting more stretched and distorted the further away things got from its target area.

Logan spooled the controller forward. The time-stamp in the bottom-right corner wheeched along at thirty times normal speed.

Right on cue, a dark green Mitsubishi Warrior drove past the pub, slammed on its brakes, then reversed at speed through the window of Broch Braw Buys. All in perfect silence. The back end kicked up as it smashed through the glass, sending packets and tins flying. Two masked men leapt out — one from the passenger side, the other from the back — and battered in through the broken window. Forty-five seconds later, the Warrior leapt forward, yanking the cash machine from its moorings and out into the street. The thing got heaved into the four-by-four’s loadbed, and they were off.

One minute and fifty seconds from start to finish.

Longer than it took them to ram-raid the Co-op in Portsoy, but then they’d had a lot more practice by then.

Logan sat back in his seat and tapped fingertips against the desk. One minute, fifty seconds. That wasn’t brave, it was idiotic — the shop was, what, a three-minute walk from the police station? Less than a minute in a car. You’d have to be pretty sure of yourself before risking that.

Mind you, it’d probably take a minute and a half to call 999 and tell them what was going on. Call it a minute to get over the shock in the first place. Then another five minutes for a team to scramble from the station. One more to actually get there …

Nearly nine minutes.

By the time the police turned up at Broch Braw Buys, the Ram-Raiders could be in Rosehearty without even breaking the speed limit.

Still, it was a big risk.

Either they were very, very lucky, or really knew what they were doing.

And given how many other cash machines they’d wheeched out of convenience stores, it couldn’t be luck.

Logan sent the recording spinning backwards again. No way they picked Broch Braw Buys at random. They would’ve cased the joint, made sure they knew where the machine was inside the shop.

He drummed his fingertips against the desktop.

If you were smashing a stolen four-by-four backwards through a shop window, would you grit your teeth and go with it, to hell with the consequences? Or would you cruise by first, making sure no one was standing behind all the notices and special offers, ready to be flattened? Maybe drop off a spotter to give you a call when it was safe to go.