Stuart MacBride - Dark Blood

Someone looms into view over his shoulder — Elvis quiff, big nose, tufty eyebrows. ‘Afternoon, Guv. Sitting comfortably?’ Elvis has a tartan pillowcase in his hand. He drops it to the floor.

Julie pulls up a chair, wrong way round, and straddles it. Smiles down at Graeme’s crotch. ‘Didn’t think it was that cold.’

He tries on his best Senior Police Officer Glower, but she just laughs.

‘Neil?’

A fist slams into the side of Graeme’s head. Ringing in his ears. The taste of blood. Lights flashing on and off. Then a throbbing ache.

‘Now, Babe, you need to think really hard about this, because if you get the answer wrong you lose ten points and we move on to the water round. And trust me, you won’t like the water round. Understand?’

Graeme stares at her. Then nods.

‘Good. Neil, you can take the gag off.’

A harsh ripping noise, eye-watering agony. ‘Fuck…’

Elvis holds up the duct tape, grinning. ‘Got half his beard off in one go! Can we do his eyebrows next?’

‘Bastards…’ Breath hissing through gritted teeth.

‘OK, Babe: here’s your starter for ten.’

He can hear her chair scraping closer.

‘Where’s Richard Knox?’

‘No, I can barely hear you.’ Logan stuck his finger in his ear as they juddered up the hill past the truncated concrete pyramid of the Shell building, heading south. A massive eighteen-wheeler passed them in the outside lane, sending filthy grey-brown spray all over the car, the windscreen wipers struggling to clear it, leaving two diarrhoea-coloured rainbows across the glass.

‘I said, where the bastarding hell are you?’

‘Nigg roundabout. Should be with you in ten minutes.’

If the car didn’t die by then.

‘Listen, I found a possible motive for abducting Danby — million-and-a-half in seized-’

‘I don’t care. Just got a call from Susan, she’s got these stomach cramps…’

Oh no.

Logan swallowed. ‘She all right?’

‘Course she’s not, she’s having bloody stomach cramps!’ Silence. ‘What if she loses the baby?’

More silence.

‘I’m sure she’ll be fine. It’ll all be fine.’ That was what you were meant to say, wasn’t it?

Steel coughed. Sniffed. Cleared her throat. ‘Sod it, I’m taking her to A amp;E. You’re in charge: give the search another couple hours then wind it down. Make it look like we tried.’

‘Do you want…’

But Steel was gone. He was talking to a dead phone.

‘Sod it.’ Logan jabbed the car’s cigarette lighter with his thumb, and when it popped up he pulled a cigarette from the packet and sooked it into life.

Butler immediately started making pantomime coughing noises.

‘Fine…’ Logan ground it out in the overflowing ashtray. ‘Happy?’

‘Bad enough I’ve got to drive this rattletrap without catching your second-hand smoke.’

‘Just drive, OK?’

The gritters were out in force — two of them taking up both lanes of the dual carriageway, huge rusty yellow things topped with flashing orange lights, strafing the road with salt and sand. All the cars hanging back to avoid having the paint battered off their bonnets.

Butler took the second exit at the next roundabout, heading into Cove, weaving through the suburban streets for the south-east corner.

Jimmy Evans’s house sat on its own at the end of a long, rutted driveway, potholes and ice making Logan’s tatty little Fiat slither and jerk as Butler got them as close to the brightly lit house as possible.

A series of patrol cars and police vans snaked back from a snow-covered driveway, blocking the lane.

‘We’ll have to walk from here.’

Sunlight speared down from a crystal blue sky, making the fields glitter, the snow crunchy underfoot, the sound of dogs and police chatter ringing in the crisp air.

The Police Search Advisor met them at the front door, scratching an armpit. With thinning, scraggy blonde hair and a pointy nose, he looked a bit like a meerkat with mange. ‘So.’ He squinted at Logan. ‘It true you’re in charge now?’

‘That a problem?’

‘Hey, long as you sign off on the overtime, I’m happy.’ He held out a stack of reports and Logan flicked through them.

‘You want to summarize this for me?’

More scratching. ‘No sign of Knox anywhere.’

There was a shock. ‘IB?’

The POLSA took his hand out of his armpit for long enough to point at a familiar filthy Transit van. ‘Still doing the guest bedroom. Family’s cleared out, so we’ve got the run of the place.’

‘Door-to-doors?’

He blinked, then did a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, staring out at the snow-covered fields. ‘Erm…There’s no one living anywhere near, if you don’t count the sheep, so-’

‘Back there, where the lane joins the main road. There’s houses overlooking the entrance — they might’ve seen a car coming or going.’

The rest of Constable Meerkat’s face turned as pink as his nose and ears. ‘Ah, OK. I’ll get that organized…’

The Airwave handset clipped to Butler’s shoulder started bleeping and she moved away a couple of paces to answer it, then came back and handed the thing to Logan. ‘Control.’

‘McRae.’

‘Aye, hud oan, puttin’ you through…’

Click.

‘Sergeant, it’s Dr Frampton, we met at the -’

‘Steve Polmont crime scene, yes, I remember.’

‘I tried getting in touch with DI Steel, but it seems she’s unavailable?’

‘Yeah…’ According to the paperwork, there wasn’t so much as a footprint beyond the back garden.

‘We’ve got a result from the soil sample we took yesterday, from the flat where Knox escaped. A footprint just inside the hallway?’

‘Uh-huh?’ Logan handed the search reports back to the POLSA. Steel was right — the search was a waste of time, but at least it looked as if they were doing something. Knox was long gone.

‘We ran it against the national soil database, and there’s about a dozen places it could have come from in Aberdeenshire, I’ve emailed the results to you.’

‘Hold on…’ He pulled out the scrap of paper he was using as a surrogate notebook, and pinned it to the roof of the nearest patrol car with the side of his hand, pen poised. ‘Want to give me the edited highlights?’

Pause. ‘The sample has a pH of five-point-five and carbon’s sitting around three-point-six percent. Add in silt at eleven percent and that makes it Cairnrobin. You see, the general SSKIB values for soils like these -’

‘Place names. Honestly, it’ll be quicker if you just give me place names.’

‘Oh. I see.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Yes, well Cairnrobin is a pretty small series — there’s only three hundred and ninty-five hectares in the whole of Scotland — in isolated pockets around Cove, Menie House, and near the mouth of the Ythan at Sleek of Tarty.’

Logan crabbed them out on the paper, then put his hand over the mouthpiece, leant over to the POLSA. ‘Any signs of a break in?’

‘Back door — the lock’s been gouged with a screwdriver.’

He went back to the call.

‘… time. You see, a soil sample is like a fingerprint -’

‘Thanks Doctor. That’s great. I’ll be in touch.’ He hung up before she could launch into anything else.

Logan stood there, tapping the handset against his chin.

Butler raised an eyebrow. ‘Something?’

He turned to the POLSA, and slapped his hand on the roof of the patrol car. ‘You got keys for this?’

Turned out it wasn’t even locked. Logan slipped into the passenger seat and fired up the little grey laptop mounted on the dashboard, using it to log into his Grampian Police email address.