Stuart MacBride - Shatter the Bones

Forward another couple of car-lengths. A huge eighteen-wheeler with the Baxters’ logo down the side hissed and juddered around onto Great Southern Road. A taxi blared its horn at a massive four-by-four, then it was Logan’s turn on the roundabout.

He accelerated out, turned right… and kept on going, right around the roundabout and back the way he’d come. Sod Superintendent Sodding Green and his sodding due diligence.

Five minutes later Logan was standing outside the house where they’d dropped off Trisha Brown’s wee boy so he could spend the night with his drug addict granny. It was worth a try.

The front door was scuffed, the wood dented, as if it’d been given a bit of a kicking. It wasn’t a bad neighbourhood, just a bunch of bland granite houses a few streets over from where Alison and Jenny McGregor lived. Logan tried the doorbell. No answer. Then he tried the handle, and the door swung open.

The Browns’ hallway was a minefield of broken furniture. A ratty purple sofa was twisted onto its side, half in and half out of the living room door. A glass-topped coffee table made glittering mosaic shards on the carpet.

When Shuggie said his Yardie mates had trashed the place, he wasn’t kidding…

‘Hello?’ Logan pressed the bell again, and a dull clunking buzz sounded somewhere down the hall. ‘Anyone home?’

Glass scrunched under his shoes. ‘Anyone?’

He peered into the lounge. More damage: TV smashed, armchairs broken, the floor littered with CDs. Fleetwood Mac lying by the door, the cover cracked.

Shattered jars and bottles littered the kitchen floor, covering the dirty linoleum with glass and sticky liquid. Pickled onions amongst a shattered jar of beetroot, like tiny eyes swimming in a sea of blood. Cupboard doors ripped from the units, the fridge dented and buckled.

It wasn’t random destruction, it was systematic. The stairs creaked as he climbed.

Bathroom: toilet smashed, grey-pink pedestal mat soaking wet. Sink cracked. The bath’s front panel kicked in, the mixer shower ripped from the wall.

Bedroom one: mattress gutted, its innards burst across the bare chipboard floor. Ripped clothes. A chest of drawers turned into a Picasso sculpture. A wardrobe lurching drunk-enly against the headboard. Curtains torn down.

The second bedroom wasn’t so bad. It actually looked as if someone had tidied up in here. A small pile of clothes sat in the corner: other than that, the floor was relatively clean. OK, so the wardrobe was living testimony to the miraculous powers of silver duct tape, and the mattress lay on the floor instead of a bed, but it had sheets and an almost-clean duvet cover… About four drawers were stacked, one on top of the other, by the window, overflowing with bras, socks, and pants.

Logan walked over to the room’s cracked window and looked out across the road at the houses on the other side. The neighbours must love it here. You save hard, buy your very own council house, and then Helen Brown moves in. Next thing you know you’ve got three generations of drug users living next door. Breaking into your house, shed, garage, car, anywhere they can nick something to sell and feed their habit.

And then a pair of Yardies turn up and wreck the place. Do a bloody good job of it too.

Ah well…

It’d been a long shot. Shuggie Webster wasn’t lying low at his girlfriend’s mum’s house. He was probably off licking his wounds in a squat somewhere. If the Yardies hadn’t killed him.

Logan checked his watch again. Twenty-five minutes to get back to the station in time for his bollocking. He turned and … stopped. Frowned.

The wardrobe — a cheap-looking flatpack job, all veneer-covered chipboard, papered with tatty photos cuts from the pages of Hello! and Heat and Bella — was creaking. It was moving too. Not much, just a little trembling back and forth motion, but it was definitely moving.

A smile crawled across Logan’s face. Shuggie Webster, you predictable little shite…

Time to come out of the closet.

Logan pulled out his pepper-spray, and popped the top off. He crept over to the rocking wardrobe. Grabbed the wooden handle. Threw it wide open. ‘You enjoying Narnia then, Shug-’

Something slammed into Logan’s stomach and he went staggering backwards. Then over, the room flipping through ninety degrees, and then thump . Flat on his back. Cold, sharp pain, as if six-inch metal screws were being twisted into his guts.

A small bare foot flashed past Logan’s nose. A hand, a blue sleeve. The rancid piddly smell of stale clothes, left too long in the washing machine. Scrabbling, swearing, then the slapping sound of naked feet on floorboards.

Logan shot a hand out, groping… Not finding anything. He rolled over onto his side, forced himself upright and lurched to the bedroom door. It sounded as if there were snakes in the hallway below — hissing and writhing. He stood at the top of the stairs, one hand on the wallpaper for support.

There was a little boy sitting on the bottom step, wearing grubby Ben 10 pyjamas, clutching his feet in both hands.

‘Ricky?’

The kid stood, limped, collapsed against the battered sofa poking out from the lounge door. A set of bloody footprints followed him across the glass-strewn carpet.

‘There you go.’ Logan clunked a tin of Irn-Bru down on the bare floorboards at the side of the mattress.

Ricky Brown wrapped his arms around his knees, face set in a line much harder than the two crusted streaks beneath his nose. He turned his head away.

‘How’s the feet?’

The response was too mumbled to make out.

Logan pulled up his tatty left trouser leg, showing off three parallel lines of scabs. ‘See, you’re not the only one.’

Ricky picked at a loose thread on the ribbons of towel Logan had wrapped around the little boy’s feet. The soles slowly soaking through in shiny red patches.

‘Where’s your mum, Ricky?’

A shrug. ‘Went out.’

Aha, so he could speak after all. ‘You know where she went?’

He shook his head, little more than a twitch. ‘Said someone killed Dad’s dog.’

‘Shuggie Webster’s your dad?’

‘This week.’ Another thread unravelled from the improvised bandage.

‘Do you know where he is?’

‘Mum went to get food and that.’ Pause. ‘You going to arrest me?’

Logan forced a laugh. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘Gran says it’s what you pig bastards do. You arrest people what haven’t done nothing wrong.’

‘No, Ricky, I’m not going to arrest you.’ He held out the Irn-Bru. ‘Did your mum say when she’s going to be back?’

‘Gran says you arrest people and you shag them up the arse. ’Cos you’re all paedos and poofs.’

‘Yeah, your granny sounds like a bundle of laughs.’ Logan cracked the ringpull off the tin, and helped himself to a swig. ‘Your mum and dad are messed up with some very bad people, Ricky. Now, I can help, but I need to know where they are.’

Silence. ‘Don’t you want your mum and dad to be safe?’

Ricky shifted his feet, leaving a red smear on the duvet cover.

‘OK, well, if you’re sure.’ Logan knocked back another gulp, then set the tin down back on the floor. ‘Right, I know a nice doctor who’ll fix you up, then we’ll see if we can find someone to look after you.’

‘She’s coming back for me.’

‘Never said she wasn’t.’

‘She told me last night.’

‘Yeah, well we’ll…’ Frown. ‘Last night? You’ve been on your own since last night? In the wardrobe?’

‘Said she’d come back soon as it was safe.’

And the nominees for ‘Mother of the Year’ are…