Stuart MacBride - Dark Blood

She backed off, hands up. ‘Hey, I’m only telling you what was in the note.’

‘Little bastard. How could he say that?’ Logan buried his face in his hands. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? Parents make a formal complaint and I get hauled up in front of Professional Sodding Standards again.’

Which explained why Big Gary wouldn’t look him in the eye when he’d signed in at the station this morning.

Steel came lumbering up the corridor. ‘Called the number: Danby’s wife. She spoke to him last night, hung up after the line went quiet for a while. Says he falls asleep in front of the telly a lot.’ Steel looked Samantha up and down. ‘Hey, Red.’

‘Inspector.’

Silence.

‘So, tell me.’ Steel smiled. ‘Collar and cuffs: they match?’

‘…I need to get back to the scene.’ Samantha marched back towards Danby’s hotel room, her cheeks bright pink.

Logan closed the stairwell door. ‘Did you have to do that?’

‘Love-life’s in the crapper, remember? Got to get my jollies where I can.’ She made for the lifts, dragging Logan behind her. ‘Come on, we’ve got an auld mannie to visit.’

Sunlight struggled through the blinds into the over-warm room. Unlike the rest of the hospital, the victim support suite had plush carpets, a soft sofa with stain-free cushions, a coffee table with gaily-coloured coasters and up-to-date magazines. And a camera sitting in the corner on a tripod, the red light glowing to show it was recording.

An old man crouched in a floral-print armchair, his clawed fingers picking at the seam of his trousers. His face was a mess of green and purple bruises, a bite mark clear on the wrinkled skin of his left wrist. Even so, the doctors said he’d got off lightly compared to Harry from Sacro. Small mercies.

His voice was barely a whisper. ‘Want to go home.’

‘I know, Jimmy, I know. We just need to ask you a few more questions…’ The Family Liaison officer shifted on the sofa. ‘Can you describe the man who attacked you?’

‘Don’t want to be here. Want to go home.’

Sitting in the little observation room next door, Logan watched DI Steel reach forward and take one of Jimmy’s hands. ‘It’s OK, Jimmy, we’ll take you home soon. We just want to make sure we catch whoever hurt you.’

Her voice came from a small speaker bolted to the wall on the dark side of the two-way mirror.

Logan settled back in his plastic chair and picked up the copy of that morning’s Aberdeen Examiner, abandoned on the little desk where the DVD recorder and TV screen sat. The front page headline screamed, ‘TYNESIDE SEX-BEAST STRIKES AGAIN — RICHARD KNOX ON RAPE RAMPAGE IN THE NORTH EAST’ above a photo of Jimmy Evans’s bruised face. Christ knew how Colin Miller managed to get his hands on the victim before the police.

According to the paper, Jimmy Evans was a retired shipbuilder from Sunderland, who’d moved to the north-east of Scotland after the death of his wife. An unremarkable man who’d lived an unremarkable life, right up until yesterday afternoon. He’d come home and discovered someone breaking into his garage, tried to be a have-a-go hero, and ended up with Richard Knox.

There was a lurid account of the attack, and then a little tagline saying, ‘COMMENT ON PAGE 6’.

Sod the commentary, Logan flipped through the rumpled newsprint, looking for Douglas Walker’s suicide note. He found it on pages nine and ten, printed like a screen-grab, complete with the first few replies and comments from the art student’s Facebook friends.

Steel had been right, a chunk of it was in poetry. According to the accompanying article, Walker was a naive young man who’d got caught up in things he didn’t understand and been persecuted by the police because of it.

The note claimed he’d been interviewed all weekend, never allowed to sleep, pressured to make a confession. And the harassment had kept up once he’d been released on bail. Never ending. Poking and prodding. Until Douglas Walker just couldn’t take it any more.

He was sorry.

Lying tosser.

Twice. Logan had interviewed him twice. And never at home.

Through in the victim support lounge Steel and the FLO were still trying to tease information out of Knox’s latest victim.

Logan pulled out his phone, grimacing as his fingers touched the evidence bag with his puke-stained notebook in it. He pulled that out too and dumped it on the desk.

Should really throw the thing out. But it had Douglas Walker’s statement in it, his handing over of the holdall full of counterfeit notes, and his agreement to come into the station voluntarily. All the stuff Professional Standards would need to see.

He picked up his new mobile and called Colin Miller.

‘Laz, foos yer doos, my sheepshaggin’ friend?’

‘Where did you get the exclusive?’

‘What, no witty repartee?’ Sigh. ‘Which one? Got three in the paper the day: Sex Scandal Rocks Local School, Drug Dealers’ Vigilante Fears, or Tyneside Sex-Beast -’

‘That one: how did you get hold of Jimmy Evans before we did?’

‘The auld mannie? His son emailed me.’

Logan flipped back to the paper’s front page. Colin’s Aberdeen Examiner email address was printed under his by-line. ‘Email?’

‘Member of the BlackBerry generation, Laz. Online twenty-four-seven. Found out just in time to get it in: hold the front page, the whole works. Brilliant, so it was.’ Pause. ‘So…what do you think? Knox has to be escalatin’, right? First his Sacro handler and now the old boy. Two in two days.’

‘I’m not giving you a quote, Colin.’

‘Aw, come on, man. I’ll make it, “sources close to the investigation” if you like?’

Logan put the paper back on the tabletop. ‘Tell me about Jimmy Evans and I’ll think about it.’

‘The son’s up visitin’ from Sunderland with his wife — they come back from some party, and there’s the old man in the back garden, wanderin’ in the snow, wearing nothing but his jim-jams. They bundle him into the car and drive him straight to A amp;E. Son emails me from the waiting room, cos he’d seen my stuff in the papers.’

‘They didn’t search the house?’

‘Laz, if your dad was workin’ on a dose of hypothermia with his face all battered, would you?’

‘I’m not your enemy, Logan.’ The Chief Inspector took a sip of tea, peering at him over the rim of the mug.

‘All I’m saying is I should be out there, searching the house.’

‘Oh, I’m sure DI Steel can manage without you for an hour or so.’ Chief Inspector Young — filling in while Professional Standards’ arch bastard Superintendent Napier was off at a conference somewhere — smiled. He had broad shoulders; short hair greying at the temples; big meaty fists, the knuckles criss-crossed with scar tissue; and small, dark eyes, surrounded by starburst wrinkles. The kind of man you’d want standing in front of you on crowd control, or forcing entry into a drug dealer’s flat.

The Professional Standards Unit wasn’t exactly Logan’s favourite part of Force Headquarters, which was a shame, considering how often he had to visit. Young shared his office with another chief inspector, who’d excused himself as soon as Logan arrived — giving them a bit of privacy for the bit where Chief Inspector Young bent Logan over the desk and, as Biohazard Bob so gleefully put it, proceeded without the aid of lubricant.

Young nodded at the photocopied complaint sitting in the middle of the desk. ‘And you never visited Douglas Walker at his home?’