Stuart MacBride - Shatter the Bones

How the hell was he going to explain this one?

‘About bloody time.’ Logan thumped his mug of coffee down as DC Rennie ambled in through the pub’s front door, paused just inside, looked around, then waved.

Idiot.

Logan pressed send on his phone — ‘SHUGGIE, I’M FUCKING WARNING YOU: BRING MY BLOODY CAR BACK!’

‘Morning, Sarge. Been swimming?’ Rennie’s pearl-white grin flashed out from his fake tan.

Logan stuffed his phone back in his pocket. ‘Are you really that desperate for a boot up the arse?’

‘OK… Not in a great mood then.’ He pointed over his shoulder. ‘Got the car out front. You want a lift back to the station, or-’

‘Where is it?’

Frown. ‘Er… Out front. By the disabled spaces.’

Logan scrunched his eyes shut. Gritted his teeth. ‘Not your car, my bastarding car!’

A shuffle of feet. ‘You weren’t serious about that, were you?’

A young woman appeared at the table, clutching a pot of coffee. She smiled a train-track smile, light sparkling off her braces. ‘Would you like some more ice? Or a refill or something?’

Logan forced a smile. ‘No, I’m fine, just on our way.’ He reached down and unwrapped the soggy tea-towel from his left ankle. A few chunks of half-melted ice fell to the carpet. The skin was angry pink and swollen, four parallel dark-red lines burning and stinging where Uzi’s teeth had ripped through his trouser leg and slashed across the ankle. At least it wasn’t bleeding any more.

He handed the towel over. ‘Thanks.’

Rennie watched until she disappeared through the door marked, ‘STAFF ONLY’. He ran a hand through his spiky blond hair. ‘Nice arse.’

‘I told you to run a bloody GPS trace!’

‘I thought you were joking. I mean, you know, why would you want a trace on your own car? How can you not know where your car is?’

‘Surrounded by idiots…’ Logan limped out of the front door, shoes squelching with every step, Rennie scurrying along behind.

‘What happened to your leg?’

It wasn’t difficult to spot the constable’s CID pool car outside the pub — it was the manky Vauxhall with the dashboard overflowing with burger wrappers and empty crisp packets. Hailstones battered off the dirty paintwork, making a little drift of white across the windscreen wipers.

Inside it smelled much the same as every other CID vehicle — that mix of stale sweat, cigarette smoke, and something going mouldy under one of the seats.

Rennie got in behind the wheel. ‘Where to?’

‘Make the sodding call.’

There was a brief pause, then the constable pulled out his Airwave handset and punched in the number for Control. ‘Yeah, Jimmy, I need a GPS trace on Charlie Delta Seven? … Er … no. He’s not answering his mobile… Or his Airwave.’ Rennie glanced over at Logan, clocked the glower, and faced front again. ‘Look just do us a GPS trace, OK? … What ?’ The constable sat up straight in his seat. ‘No: Jimmy, don’t you bloody dare put him-’ A cough. ‘Chief Inspector Finnie, yeah, I was just… DS McRae? Er…’ Rennie stared at Logan, eyes bugging, mouth making a squiggly line across his face.

Logan mouthed, ‘No!’ waved both hands, palm out, shaking his head.

‘Hold on…’ Rennie held the handset out. ‘It’s for you.’ Bastard.

Logan took the Airwave. ‘Sir?’

‘Tell me, Detective Sergeant, did I accidentally give you the day off and forget all about it?’

‘Well, no, but-’

‘Then perhaps you’d like to explain why you’re not currently interviewing Frank Baker like I told you?’

Logan peered out through the hail-flecked windscreen. How the hell did Finnie know he wasn’t-

‘Superintendent Green tells me he’s been waiting for you to appear for the last fi fteen minutes.’

‘He’s what ? Look it’s bad enough we’ve-’

‘It would be nice , Sergeant, if for once I thought I could actually depend on a member of my team to act like a professional. I don’t care if you think it’s a waste of time or not — get round there, interview Baker, and try not to behave like a petulant bloody child!’

And then there was silence.

Logan held out the handset and read the little grey-and-black LCD screen: ‘CALL TERMINATED’

Perfect.

Just. Bloody. Perfect.

Logan rapped his knuckles on the car’s passenger window.

Superintendent Green looked up from the laptop he was poking away at, and stared at Logan for a moment, then a smile crawled across the lower half of his face, going nowhere near his eyes. Bzzzzzz — the window slid down a couple of inches. ‘Been on our holidays, have we, Sergeant?’

Warm air curled out into the cold morning. The hail had died off, replaced by a frigid drizzle.

Logan forced a smile of his own. ‘Pursuing other avenues of enquiry, sir .’

‘Yes…’ Green turned to the uniformed constable sitting in the driver’s seat. ‘Wait for me.’ He snapped the laptop closed and slipped it into an oversized leather satchel. Stepped out into the horrible morning. Looked Logan up and down. Raised an eyebrow. ‘Is your suit meant to look like that?’

Logan glanced at his left trouser leg. The fabric was torn and tattered, stained dark-grey with blood, rain, and dirt. Muddy paw prints on his chest. ‘I thought you were in a hurry?’

‘After you.’

The fabrication yard where Frank Baker worked was a small industrial unit bolted onto a large warehouse, cut off from the road by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. As if anyone was going to break in and make off with a two tonne chunk of drilling pipe. They lay stacked up around the building, held in place with wooden chucks and ratchet straps.

Green marched towards the door marked, ‘ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION!’

‘Punctuality is the sign of an effective police officer, Sergeant.’

Tosser. How could Logan be late for an unscheduled meeting?

‘Really, sir? I always thought it was catching criminals and preventing crimes.’

Green paused for a moment, then pushed through into a small room that smelled of industrial grease and coffee. A large woman with a bowl haircut looked up from a stack of forms and stared at them over the top of her glasses. No, ‘Hello?’ No, ‘Can I help you?’

The superintendent glanced around the room — Health and Safety posters, framed photo of an oil rig, calendar with kittens on it, shelves groaning with lever-arch files. ‘I want to speak to Frank Baker.’

She puckered her lips. ‘He’s working.’

Green thrust his warrant card under her nose. ‘Now.’

Inside, the warehouse was vast: filled with machinery, forklift trucks, and more pipes. A radio boomed out something poppy, competing with the bangs, clangs, and thrum of heavy equipment. The machine-gun pops of welding.

Frank Baker didn’t look the same without his nice clean suit. Instead he was wearing a pair of grubby orange overalls with a padded green jacket on top, the chest and shoulders covered with pinhole burns. Big leather gloves, steel toecap boots. A thick red line across his forehead from the welding mask he’d just thumped down on a length of rust-flecked pipe. ‘I don’t appreciate you bastards coming here every day.’

‘Then answer the bloody question!’ Green crossed his arms, legs shoulder-width apart, chin up.

Baker scowled at Logan. ‘I’ve been through all this: with you, with the wrinkly old woman, so-’

‘It’s just a couple of follow-up-’

‘And you’re going to go through it all again for us .’ Green stepped closer and Baker flinched.