Stuart MacBride - Dark Blood

‘Oh buggering hell! All of it?’

‘Yup.’

Dildo hauled a box out and thumped it down on the scuffed floorboards. ‘Got to be twenty below in here, and this’ll take sodding ages.’

‘You get cracking and I’ll go see what I can do.’

By the time Logan returned, trundling a battered oil-filled radiator in front of him, the man from Trading Standards was surrounded by iPhones. He held one up to the light and sniffed. ‘Definitely fake.’

Logan peered at it. ‘Looks OK to me.’ He uncoiled an extension lead and plugged the radiator in. ‘Should help a bit.’

‘Watch.’ Dildo pressed something and the screen came to life, revealing a display that looked nothing like it did on the TV adverts. ‘They make them by the bucket-load in China, ship them over hidden in containers. You know how much this costs to make? Peanuts…Well, prawn crackers anyway.’ He pointed at the radiator. ‘That thing working yet?’

‘Give it a minute.’

Logan picked up one of the iPhone boxes. It had all the documentation and everything. ‘So they’re crap then?’

‘Depends on your definition of crap. You can make phone calls, and you can run a couple of applications, play MP3s, but that’s about it.’

He stuffed it back in the box. ‘Hair straighteners are fake too. And the portable DVD players.’ Dildo grabbed a cardboard box marked up with the Grant’s Vodka logo, clinked it down on the floor, and hauled the flaps open. Then took out a clear glass bottle and handed it over. ‘What do you see?’

Logan shrugged. The bottle was cold, deep-chilled in the fridge-like warehouse. ‘Vodka?’

‘Try again.’

Logan turned it over. ‘Cheap vodka?’

‘God, it’s like teaching a monkey to yodel…’ Dildo prodded the red-and-silver label. ‘Now do you see anything?’

‘You, being a dick?’

‘Read the sodding label!’

Logan did. According to the bottle it was Grant’s Vodka, seventy centilitres, thirty-seven-and-a-half-percent. Produced and bottled in Great Britain, Glen Catrine Distilers, Catrine, Ayrshire, Scotland. ‘So?’

‘How do you normally spell “Distillers”?’

‘D-I-S-T-I–L-L…Oh.’ Logan stared at the label again.

Dildo grinned. ‘Do you think a genuine distillery might actually be able to spell the word “Distillers”?’

‘It’s counterfeit.’

Dildo took the bottle back. ‘There’s two or three bottling plants for this stuff somewhere down the south of England. Trading Standards have been after them for years — shut one down and two months later another one springs up.’ He stuck the bottle back in the box.

‘Who the hell makes fake Grant’s Vodka? It sells for, what: eight quid a bottle? If you’re going to counterfeit something, counterfeit the expensive stuff.’

‘Mate, I’ve seen faked Tetley tea bags, Surf washing powder, Heinz baked beans.’ Dildo held his hands against the radiator’s peeling paint. ‘Boots were selling fake Colgate in 2008. Toothpaste. Someone managed to slip it into the wholesalers and they didn’t notice for nearly a fortnight. I mean, nobody got hurt, it was still toothpaste, but it sure as hell wasn’t Colgate. Trust me: if you can sell it for a profit, someone, somewhere, is counterfeiting it.’

Logan stood there for a minute, staring at the boxes and boxes from Polmont’s flat. Then down at the pile of hair straighteners, still in their original — fake — packaging. They were the kind that made a good Valentine’s Day present for a loved one, if you wanted to let them know you weren’t a tight-arsed skinflint…

‘Dildo?’

‘I don’t think this thing’s working.’ He slapped the radiator.

‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

Logan lowered the two mugs carefully down on top of a case of not-Grant’s Vodka. Then pulled out the evidence bags he’d wedged under his arms.

Dildo pulled a face. ‘What, did you fly to India and pick the tea leaves yourself? I’m freezing here.’

‘Don’t moan. Couldn’t find the milk.’ Which was a lie. What he’d had difficulty locating were the items confiscated from Angus Black when he’d been picked up. The IB had signed them back into evidence after checking for fingerprints and PC Sniffles had promptly filed them in the wrong place.

Logan stuck the evidence bag on one of the shelves. ‘Did you get anything out of our friend the used car salesman, by the way?’

Blank look. ‘Remind me?’

‘Kevin Middleton, got a dealership out by Kirkton of Skene?’

‘Oh, yeah: Sicknote paid him a visit yesterday. Impounded one cut-and-shunt, a pair of “unsafe for road use”, and three clocked four-by-fours. Result.’

‘Speaking of results…’ Logan held up the evidence bag with the hair straighteners in it. ‘These look fake to you too?’

Dildo groaned. ‘Have I not got enough to do with all this stuff?’

‘Humour me.’

‘Tea.’ He helped himself to a mug, wrapping his gloved hands around it, shrouding his face in steam. Getting condensation in his goatee beard. ‘Open the box and check the grub screws on the handle. If they’re hexagonal heads, the thing’s real.’

Logan did, getting Amido black fingerprint powder all over his hands. ‘Phillips screwdriver.’

‘Fake.’

They went through the same process with the rest of Angus Black’s merchandise — Dildo drinking his tea and straddling the radiator, calling out instructions and occasionally asking to see something. Everything was counterfeit.

‘Perfect.’ Logan smiled and downed the rest of his lukewarm tea. ‘I’ve got to get back to the station, you be OK here?’

‘In the cold? On my own? You ungrateful sod.’

‘And you won’t need a lift back, will you? I mean, you’ll have to get the Shop Cop van down here to cart all this stuff away when you’re finished, right?’

Dildo stared at him. ‘You’re a rotten bastard, McRae, I ever tell you that?’

Logan scooped everything back into their respective evidence bags and hurried off. ‘Thanks, Dildo.’

He weaved his way through the stacks of seized items with Dildo’s parting shot echoing around him.

‘A rotten bastard!’

Logan barged through the door and clunked it shut behind him, finding himself in a little airlock festooned with posters for local bands he’d never heard of, the doormat soggy with melted snow. He stomped his feet, adding to the mush, then pushed through into the pub proper.

The Tilted Wig was once the exclusive drinking hole of lawyers and their assistants from the Sheriff Court across the road, but ever since the High Court had taken over the old Clydesdale Bank building on the corner of Marischal Street and Union Street — next door — the clientele had become a little less exclusive. Now they let anyone in.

Logan brushed the snow off his shoulders and scanned the faces. Just after twelve and one or two were making serious efforts to not see any more of the afternoon if they could possibly help it. Like Angus Black, sitting at a scuffed wooden table, basking in the glow of the one-armed bandit, a pint of heavy, and three empty shot glasses. He polished off a fourth and added it to the graveyard.

‘It didn’t go well then?’ Logan settled into the chair opposite.

Angus looked up, closed his eyes, and swore. ‘Have you not done enough damage?’ He took a bite out of his pint, then went back to staring at the table.

‘Nope.’ Logan dumped the evidence bag with the iPod Nanos in front of him. ‘Recognize these?’

‘Trial’s in six weeks. My brief says I’m looking at fourteen years. You believe that? For a little bit of H? Who’s it hurting?’ He went back to his pint. ‘Like living in Nazi Germany.’