Stuart MacBride - Shatter the Bones

‘I heard about sixty people snuff it during a strangle-wank every year. Silly sods. Only takes seven pounds of pressure to collapse your carotid artery and that’s you. True story.’

Logan stuck the photo back on the wall. Davina Pearce had a good eye for light and shadow, specializing in moody black-and-whites. Urban decay was a recurring theme — boarded-up tenements, rusting cars, skips full of random shapes, sagging chain-link fencing, a broken bottle, the sun setting over a burnt-out Volkswagen.

The portraits were good too, but they didn’t have the same intensity as the landscapes and still lifes. Davina did like to pose for her own photographs though. There was one of her in jeans and a bra, looking back over her shoulder at the camera in some derelict house: walls covered with graffiti, the floorboards stippled with bars of light. Artistic and a bit sinister at the same time. A tattoo sprawled across her shoulder, a Chinese dragon, breathing fire… Samantha would’ve loved it.

Logan pulled the photo off the wall.

Still not been up to see her today. Still not worked up the courage to sit in that little room and listen to the machines breathing for her. Hold her cold hand and pretend everything was going to be OK.

That was what happened when you were completely useless. When you couldn’t protect the people you loved. When you couldn’t even find the bastards responsible…

He stared at the photograph in his hands, felt his eyes widen. Maybe not quite so fucking useless after all.

Logan flipped it over, and there, between the blobs of Blu-Tack was another sticker: ‘SELF-PORTRAIT, B amp;W, 18-55MM 1/2SEC AT F/16? DERELICT INDUSTRIAL UNIT, FARBURN INDUSTRIAL PARK’.

He grabbed all the exterior shots, checking the stickers for one that matched the time stamp on the other image.

There was only one that came anywhere near: a high, padlocked gate outside a blocky grey building with boarded-up windows and one of those big up-and-over doors you could get a forklift through. The company name was partially obscured by a birch tree growing through the fence. But that didn’t matter — all they had to do was drive through the industrial estate until they found the building in the picture.

He shoved the picture of Davina posing in the graffiti-covered room into Rennie’s hands. ‘Recognize the backdrop?’

The constable leaned forward, squinting. ‘Yeah… Erm, no. Kinda…?’

‘Here’s a clue for you: it was in the video where they cut off Jenny McGregor’s toes.’

Every step’s like someone’s jamming burning ice into her feet, but she grits her teeth and swallows the screams down, keeping them deep inside where they can boil and shake.

Mummy holds a finger up to her lips and makes a ssssssssshing noise. Then opens the door slow and quiet. It’s another room, all covered in scribbles and paint like the one they had to stay in, but there’s no bed, just a bunch more doors. She marches over to one on the far side.

Jenny wipes her damp eyes with her grubby sleeve, takes a deep wobbly breath and shuffles after her. The bandage on her left foot’s soggy, like she’s stepped in a puddle of tomato sauce, every step leaving a smeared footprint on the dirty carpet.

And it hurts .

‘Come on, baby; nearly there; who’s Mummy’s good little girl?’

Good Little Girl. She’s a Good Little Girl.

Jenny stops for a moment, breath hissing in and out between her teeth, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Mummy tries the door, then says a bad word. She grabs the handle and twists it left and right, pulls, snarls, shakes it back and forward. Then steps back and gives the door a kick with her bare foot.

She tries another door. Locked. And another. It’s locked too. ‘You BASTARD!’ Mummy slams her hand into the wood and it BOOMs around the dark, smelly room.

Then a cold metal voice rattles in the shadows. ‘Come on, I mean: you’ve got to be fucking kidding, right?’ A monster steps out of the gloom, his white suit glowing as he moves into a beam of sunlight. His name badge says ROGER. ‘Like I’m going to leave the place unlocked so you can just walk out? How thick do you think I am, Alison?’

Mummy turns and flattens herself against the door. ‘You have to let us go.’

‘I have to do fuck all.’ He holds up a shiny thing. It takes Jenny a moment to realize it’s a big knife. ‘Now, are you going to get back in your room like a good little girl, or do I have to drag you back there in bits?’

Logan grabbed the handle above the passenger door as Rennie threw the car into a hard left, the Vauxhall’s back end drifting out as they jumped the lights onto George Street. A white van blared its horn, an old lady in a Mini made wanking gestures.

‘Repeat, we need a firearms team out at Farburn Industrial Estate, Stoneywood ASAP.’

‘Hud oan…’

There was a click, a pause, and then Finnie’s voice boomed out of the Airwave handset. ‘What’s going on?’

Logan told him about the photograph from Davina Pearce’s wall.

‘And you think that’s enough to get a fi rearms team scurrying-’

‘I’m telling you, it’s the exact same room from the video- Watch out for the bus!’

‘You sure I can’t use the siren?’ The car jerked out into the middle of the road and back again. Shops and taxis and lorries and people blurred past the passenger window.

‘Look, it’s half-seven: we’ve got less than five hours till the deadline. If they’re-’

‘Hold on.’ The line went quiet. And then Finnie was back: ‘This better not be another wild goose chase like Stephen Clayton.’

‘Tell you what: if it is you’ve got my resignation on your desk first thing tomorrow.’ Not as if he was throwing much away with that one.

Another pause. ‘Deal. A fi rearms team is on its way.’

‘How about that one?’ Rennie pointed through the wind-screen at a disused mini-warehouse.

Logan compared it to the photograph. ‘Keep going.’

The pool car kerb-crawled its way through the industrial estate. That was the trouble with somewhere like this at quarter to eight on a Wednesday evening — almost every single building looked deserted: everything closed up and dark, chain-link fences and padlocked gates.

The purple-black clouds had spread across the sky, a faint drizzle specked the car windows, a rainbow arcing over the massive, ugly, abandoned 1970s-style complex of concrete and glass that used to house BP.

‘Charlie Delta Twelve, this is Foxtrot Tango Two … where the hell are you?’

Logan thumbed the button. ‘Wellheads Road. Still looking for the target unit.’

‘Turning onto Riverview Drive now.’ The voice on the other end dropped to a whisper. ‘Word to the wise: we’ve got that SOCA tosser following in a car with DS Taylor, Steel, and Finnie. Just so you know.’

Steel and Green in a car together — poor bloody Doreen, there was no way that would end well.

Rennie took a left, down a little road between two hulking warehouses. ‘You know, Guv, we could always engineer a wee incident where someone accidentally shoots Green in the bollocks. In all the confusion.’

‘Don’t tempt me… There!’ Logan smacked his hand on the dashboard. ‘There: the one with the green roof!’

It even had the tree growing through the fence.

A big faded sign was bolted to the front of the building, ‘CAMBERTOOLS? THE DOWNHOLE E.O.R. SOLUTION SPECIALISTS’. The bottom floor was harled in dirty grey; a couple of boarded-up windows stared blindly out into the rubbish-strewn car park. The upper floor was clad in the same green corrugated iron as the roof, the paint chipped and peeling in places, stained with seagull droppings. The big warehouse door wore a dirt-streaked sign, ‘CONDEMNED BUILDING. NO ENTRY’. The one on the fence read, ‘WARNING: THIS SITE PATROLLED BY GUARD DOGS’.