Stuart MacBride - Shatter the Bones

Logan stared at him, keeping his face neutral. ‘We know.’

McInnes froze for a moment, then opened a cupboard and pulled out three chipped mugs. ‘Don’t play clever buggers with me, Sergeant. I’m not some moron you can intimidate and manipulate. I haven’t done anything wrong, and you know it.’ He dropped a teabag in each mug. ‘You’re fishing.’

‘Trisha Brown.’

There wasn’t even a pause. ‘Never heard of her.’

‘Really? Because we’ve got a witness who saw you assault and abduct her.’

‘They’re lying.’ The kettle gave a low growl. ‘When we take your car down to the station, how much do you want to bet it’s full of her DNA, hair, fibres, blood?’

The theme tune to Friends blared out of the lounge. McInnes cleared his throat. ‘So what if there is? She’s a prostitute, isn’t she? Maybe I picked her up?’

‘Thought you said you’d never heard of her?’

‘I don’t have any milk.’

Leggett shook his head. ‘Darren, you silly sod. She’s no’ even your type.’

‘Maybe I like to pick up prostitutes now and then. I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Would you rather I was hanging around the school gates like some dirty-mac-wearing pervert?’

‘Darren…’

Logan turned and headed back out into the hall. The TV and radio couldn’t have been on earlier — the only noise coming from inside the house had been the doorbell. That meant McInnes had switched them on and turned the volume up full before he answered the door.

He was trying to hide something…

In the lounge, on the telly, a collection of tossers were dancing about in a fountain. Logan picked up the remote and thumbed the standby button.

Silence.

The room was littered with newspapers and magazines, a handful of tatty dog-eared paperbacks, the wallpaper and roof stained a mottled orangey-brown. There was a tin of tobacco balanced on the arm of the sagging sofa, empty pouches of Golden Virginia lying on the carpet like fallen leaves.

Logan closed his eyes, listening.

He could hear them in the kitchen: ‘If I want to use prostitutes it’s my business, nobody else’s.’

‘You swore blind last week you’d no’ had a shag for three years!’

‘Why should I indulge your prurient interest?’

A click and the radio burst into deafening life again. ‘…to say that everyone at Scotia Lift are rooting for Alison and Jenny. We’ve raised two thousand pounds for the fund!’

Logan stuck his head back into the kitchen. ‘Turn that bloody radio off.’

‘This is my home, you can’t come in here and-’

‘Where is she? She’s here, isn’t she?’

‘And it’s the weather and traffi c coming up, right after Bohemian Rhapsody …’

‘I want you both to leave. You’ve no right-’

Logan tried the first door off the hallway: a bathroom, the pale-blue suite streaked with muddy green beneath the taps. The next door opened on a bedroom that had the earthy, choking smell of mildew. Then a single bedroom, the duvet a rumpled heap on top of the sagging mattress.

McInnes marched out into the hall. ‘What are you doing? You’ve got no right to search my home! I demand you leave-’

‘Why’s this one locked?’ Logan gave the door handle a rattle.

‘It’s the garage. I don’t want anyone breaking in.’

‘Open it.’

‘I… I don’t have the key. I lost it.’

Leggett nodded. ‘That’s nae a problem: I can kick it in for you in a jiffy.’

‘No, no, it’s… Hold on.’ He walked over to a little wooden box mounted on the wall, opened it, pulled out a Yale key on a yellow plastic tag and handed it to the constable. ‘This is harassment.’

‘Ta.’ A rattle, a clunk, and the door swung open.

It was a garage. Bare breezeblock walls, concrete floor, a fluorescent striplight dangling from the roof beams. Empty. No Trisha Brown.

McInnes folded his arms. ‘See?’ His voice echoed back from the featureless space. ‘I told you she wasn’t here. Now I want you to leave my home so I can make a formal complaint to your bosses.’

Brilliant — another disaster.

Logan turned on the spot, looking around the box-crowded hallway. ‘Have you got an allotment? Shed? Anything like that?’

‘No.’ McInnes pulled his shoulders back, one arm flung towards the front door. ‘Now get out.’

The sound of Frank Sinatra crackled through a tinny little speaker somewhere in Leggett’s jacket. He dug out a scuffed mobile phone and flipped it open. ‘Guv? … Aye… No, we’re paying Darren McInnes a visit, says he’s sworn off wee girls for prostitutes… Aye, that’s fit I said… Aye…’

Logan ran a hand through his hair. ‘We’re still going to take your car in for testing.’

‘I told you — I picked her up and paid for sex.’

A frown. ‘Fit? Henry MacDonald?’ Leggett stepped back into the kitchen, his voice barely audible over the radio. ‘Did he? Whit, frank and beans? … Just the beans. Ah weil, least he’s left himself something tae pee through.’

Logan took another look into the garage. How could she not be here? ‘Does this place have an attic?’

‘No. And before you ask, there’s no basement either. Now are you going to leave or not?’

‘Aye, I think so… Did you?’ Leggett stuck his head out of the kitchen and stared at McInnes. ‘Oh aye…? Hud oan.’ He held the phone against his chest. ‘DI Ingram says he knows you fine, Darren. Says he supervised you when you got oot of Peterheed the first time and they gave you that cooncil hoose in Kincorth.’

Logan stared at the kitchen doorway, then the next one along. Then at the huge stack of cardboard boxes in between.

‘Says you’ve never had a hoor in your life.’

‘What would he know about it? The man’s an idiot. I used to go with them all the time. Now are you going to leave, or do I have to call my lawyer?’

There was something wrong… Logan peered past Leggett into the kitchen, then in through the next door to the manky bathroom. The space between the two doors — the space full of floor-to-ceiling boxes — was too wide. Both rooms should have shared a dividing wall, but they had to be at least eight foot apart. He reached up and took a box from the top of the pile, exposing a section of white-painted architrave. There was another door, hidden away behind the boxes. And these ones didn’t look anywhere near as dusty as the others stacked up in the hallway. As if they’d been recently moved.

Logan dumped the box on the musty carpet and grabbed another one.

‘Aye… I’ll tell him it’s-’

A dull clunk.

He stuck the box on top of the first, then hauled the next off the pile. ‘Leggett: give me a hand.’ One more box. ‘Leggett?’

Another box on the pile. He could just see the door handle. ‘Constable, any time you want to lend a hand, you can…’ Logan turned.

Constable Paul Leggett was sprawled out on the kitchen floor, one arm reaching through into the hallway, a patch of dark sticky red oozing down his forehead, his mobile phone lying against the skirting board opposite.

Shite…

Where the hell was-

A shadow, moving fast. He ducked and a whatever it was crumped into a cardboard box, tearing straight through to the insides, sending the whole pile tumbling down on top of him. Its weight battered into him, sending him crashing to the carpet, the bulky shapes thumping into his legs, arms and chest. A clang of hidden metal as a box bounced off his shoulder.

One of them burst open spilling books across the mildewed carpet, the corner of a hardback cracked into the bridge of Logan’s nose. Sharp flaring pain, a bright yellow glow, and the smell of burning pepper.