Stuart MacBride - Shatter the Bones

He scrambled backwards, trying to get out from under the pile.

McInnes grabbed the end of his makeshift club and pulled it free. It was some sort of trophy: a white marble plinth, with a golden pillar, and a little man mounted on the very top. The dusty figurine looked as if he was playing bowls.

‘I told you to leave my house.’ McInnes hefted the trophy like a hammer. ‘Told you, but you wouldn’t listen. Nobody ever listens.’

Logan’s nose was full of burning pepper, his eyes watering. ‘Darren McInnes, I’m arresting you for obstructing, assaulting, molesting or hindering an officer in the course of their duty. You do not have to say anything-’

The heavy stone plinth took a gouge out of the plaster-board.

McInnes lunged, swinging the trophy, following Logan down the hall, backing him towards the door, not giving him time to do anything but dodge the next blow.

‘Cut it out! Don’t make me-’ The edge caught him just above the right elbow. Burning needles exploded up and down his arm. ‘ Agh, fuck !’

‘I TOLD YOU TO GET OUT!’

Logan whipped back his foot, then pistoned it forward, slamming his heel into McInnes’s knee.

McInnes squealed and collapsed into a stack of cardboard boxes, clutching his knee with one hand, the bowling trophy hanging limp in the other, face creased up, teeth bared.

Logan struggled upright, grabbed the first thing he saw -

the collected works of William Shakespeare — and smashed it into McInnes’s face. The bowling trophy clattered to the floor; blood spurted from the old man’s mouth. He raised a hand, but Logan rammed the book, spine-first, into his nose.

McInnes went down, covering his face and head, bleating as Logan smashed the book into his ribs. He curled one leg up against his chest, the other sticking out an awkward angle.

Logan dropped the book, breathing hard. He spat; a glob of red-flecked foam trickled down the wall. He wiped a hand across his mouth and chin: it came away dripping with blood.

DC Leggett groaned.

Logan lurched over. ‘Paul?’ He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the dusty carpet next to him. ‘You OK?’

‘No…’ Leggett reached up and touched the gash in his forehead. Flinched. ‘Ayabastard…’

‘You’ll live.’ The avalanche of boxes had almost cleared the space in front of the hidden door. Logan crawled over and hauled the last box out of the way, leaving a bloody hand print on the cardboard. He glanced back at McInnes — curled up on the floor, crying, clutching his knee — then turned the door handle.

Locked.

It flew open on the second kick, the boom reverberating around the house.

Logan stepped into an L-shaped room with bare breeze-block walls, loops of grey electrical cable protruding from metal ducting, one corner done up with plasterboard nailed to raw wooden struts. Modular metal shelves lined several of the walls, a washing machine and tumble dryer sitting beside a big chest freezer, sheets of water-bloated chipboard nailed up where windows should have been.

He picked his way across the bare concrete floor to the corner, glanced back at McInnes again — still crying, still trying to hold his ruptured knee together — then stepped into the long leg of the L-shaped room.

Trisha Brown was crumpled against a storage radiator, naked, one arm handcuffed to the supports. Her wrist was a solid ring of raw flesh, blood smeared from her fingertips halfway to her elbow. Her other arm… Logan looked away. Human limbs weren’t meant to bend like that. Her legs were worse: twisted and broken and covered in scabs and weals, pale thighs dotted with little red burns and bite marks.

The sharp smell of urine and pine disinfectant, overlaid with BO and shit.

‘Trisha?’ He swallowed. ‘Trisha, can you hear me?’ He knelt beside her, felt for a pulse. Strong, pounding. ‘Trisha, it’s going to be OK.’ He put a hand under her chin and raised her head. ‘Fuck…’ Her nose was buckled to the left, both eyes swollen shut, her chin lopsided, her lips cracked and bleeding, her cheek misshapen — probably broken — every inch of skin covered in a violent rainbow of bruises. ‘Are you-’

Her head snapped forward, mouth wide, jagged stumps of teeth flashing in bloody gums.

Logan flinched back, snatching his hand out of the way. She wobbled, shoulders twitching, then slumped back against the battered radiator. A cross between a growl and a hiss escaped her battered lips.

Jesus.

Logan turned away, marched around the corner and back into the hall. ‘YOU!’ He took a handful of McInnes’s long greasy grey hair. ‘Where’s the key?’

‘I don’t-’

Logan hauled. ‘Where’s the fucking key?’

The old man screamed, let go of his knee and grabbed at Logan’s hand, trying to keep it from hauling the scalp off his head. ‘In the box! In the box!’

Logan dragged him across the hall to the little wooden box mounted on the wall — the one the garage door key had come from — McInnes screaming and crying, his good leg scrabbling at the carpet, the other one dragging through the debris.

It wasn’t difficult to spot the handcuff key — Logan snatched it from its hook and hauled McInnes through the door with him, into the unfinished room.

‘What was I supposed to do?’ Darren McInnes sat in the back of the patrol car, hands cuffed behind his back, a medical cool-pack strapped to his swollen knee.

The front door opened and someone in a green jumpsuit backed out onto the garden path, holding up one end of a metal-framed stretcher.

McInnes gave a little laugh, then winced, watching as Trisha was carried over to the waiting ambulance. ‘She was my first, did you know that? My first real life little girl.’

Logan looked at him. ‘Shut up.’

‘Before her it was just pictures, but then I got out of prison and they gave me a council flat just round the corner from her house… She was so small and so pretty and I remember she fell off her bike and broke her arm, and I just wanted to make her feel loved, so I-’

‘If you don’t start exercising your right to remain silent, I swear to God…’

A sigh. ‘Her mother was out of her face most of the time, or desperate for a fix, or down the docks renting her arse out so she could pay for the next high. Busy single mother like that needs a babysitter.’

‘McInnes-’

‘I’m dying.’ He turned and smiled at Logan. The skin around his right eye was already an angry dark blue and purple, the lids swollen and puffy, the white stained with red. ‘Cancer — all through my liver and kidneys. Doctor gave me three months, that was four weeks ago. Funny, isn’t it? Smoked like a chimney all my life; everyone always said it’d be lung cancer that did it.’

‘That supposed to make me feel sorry for you?’

‘I don’t care what you think.’ McInnes’s smile turned into a grin. ‘Oh, I knew you’d find me eventually — but I’ll be dead long before it gets anywhere near court. Can’t blame me for going out in style.’

‘You think this is funny ?’

‘Took me two weeks to track Trisha down, and in the end there she was: not two hundred yards from her mum’s house. Staggering along, begging for money.’ He sighed as they shut the ambulance doors. ‘Thought it would be rather fitting — to end my life the way it started, with her . But…’ McInnes shook his head. ‘She was a lot more fun when she was five.’

Logan climbed out into the warm morning sun and slammed the door shut before McInnes had another accident.

One of the paramedics walked around the side of the ambulance, spotted Logan, and headed over. He nodded towards the patrol car, with its greasy-haired black-eyed occupant. ‘You the one buggered his knee?’