Stuart MacBride - Broken Skin

Steel tried again. ‘So then you attacked her.’

‘No. I went home and had beans on toast. Then I read the paper. And they were saying about this guy who goes after women with a knife and how he… how he has sex with them. Sex … And I thought … I … I went out and waited for her … She wouldn’t even say hello…’

‘Shite. Could he no’ have just been making it up?’ DI Steel stood, smoking by the open window in her office. Outside, the sun was setting: gilding the granite spines of Marischal College with sparkling light, deep blue shadows creeping in around the edges, ready to smother it all.

‘I’ve called Laura Shand,’ said Logan, from the other side of the desk. ‘She’s going to come in and make a formal ID.’ He tried to look nonchalant. ‘Are you going to tell DI Insch?’

‘What, that we’ve buggered his case?’ Steel sighed, then examined the glowing tip of her cigarette. ‘I should probably give these things up. Then again …’ she took a long, deep drag. ‘Fuck it.’ She pulled out her mobile and fiddled with the buttons, before holding it to her ear. ‘Insch? … Yeah, it’s me Steel … Uh huh, I told him to get the files… Uh huh … No. Watt’s copped for it. Macintyre didn’t rape Laura… Hello? Insch?’ She pursed her lips and blew a kiss at her phone, before switching the thing off and sticking it back in her pocket. ‘He hung up.’

‘Oh …’ Logan could see what was coming, and didn’t want to be anywhere near when it did. ‘Er, Inspector, if you don’t need me, I think I’d better-’ A loud bang from somewhere down the corridor outside Steel’s office, like someone slamming a door. ‘You know,’ he stood, inching his way towards the exit, ‘I should go get an ID book made up and-’ Too late.

The door burst open: DI Insch, looking very, very angry, his face swollen and red. He poked a fat finger at DI Steel. ‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at!’

She sighed, took one last puff on her cigarette and threw it out of the window. ‘My job, OK? I don’t like it any more than-’

‘You had no right interviewing-’

‘Watt confessed. His story matches Laura Shand’s-’

‘HE’S LYING!’ Little white flecks of spit flew in the evening light.

‘Oh grow the fuck up.’ Steel slumped into her tatty office chair. ‘And close the bloody door: you want the rest of the station to hear you acting like an arsehole?’

It took an obvious effort, but DI Insch, still scarlet and trembling with rage, stepped into the small office and closed the door behind him. Trapping Logan inside. ‘Did it ever occur to you,’ said Insch, through gritted teeth, ‘that your flasher’s just confessing for the attention! He’s an exhibitionist, remember?’

‘Then how come everything matches? Eh?’ Steel leant forward and waved Laura Shand’s file at him. ‘Not just one or two things, everything ! He had her bloody panties in a kitchen drawer!’

‘Oh, really? Well that’s convenient , isn’t it? You get an arrest and my whole case gets screwed. You cast doubt on Laura Shand’s rape and-’

‘We didn’t do it on sodding purpose! I was just fishing — trying out the old “we know you’ve been naughty” bit — and he fell for it. Could have been anything, flashing, stolen radios-’

‘The Shand MO was identical!’

Steel threw her hands in the air. ‘He read about it in the papers: man plus knife plus woman equals sex.’ Emphasizing each and every word: ‘He — had — her — knickers — in — his — kitchen! He raped her!’

‘He …’ Insch scowled. ‘He must have seen it happen. He watched Macintyre rape her, and then he took the knickers. Something to remind himself-’

‘Give it up.’ Steel sighed and ran a tired hand across her wrinkly face. Pulling it out of shape. ‘For Christ’s sake: Macintyre might have raped the others, but he didn’t do Laura.’

‘But-’

‘NO! Get it through your thick head: he didn’t do this one!’

Insch loomed over her desk, voice low and menacing. ‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’

‘You!’ Steel shoved her chair back and stood, leaning in close until her nose was inches from Insch’s. ‘You’ve been a right miserable cunt for months now! Whatever’s eating your fat arse it’s not my bloody fault! So stop taking it out on the rest of us! Watt raped Laura Shand — END OF STORY!’

Insch actually went dark purple for a moment, then turned on his heel and stormed off, slamming the door behind him hard enough to make Logan’s fillings vibrate.

FHQ was eerily silent in the wake of Insch’s storming out. There was barely a whisper as Logan left DI Steel’s office and wandered back to his little cubicle in the CID room. It took him nearly twenty minutes to check his email and make up an identification book for Laura Shand to look at when she came in — Iain Watt’s face hidden amongst pictures of eleven others from the Scottish Criminal Records Office database. It was a formality more than anything else: with Watt’s confession and the forensic evidence, he’d be on the first bus back to Peterhead Prison, whether she could identify him or not.

And then Logan really couldn’t put it off any longer: he called the front desk and asked Big Gary where Jackie was.

‘ No idea .’ Was the reply. ‘ She went to ProfessionalStandards first thing, but they can’t have fired or suspended her, or they’d’ve had me in there as her Federation rep .’ There was a faint slurping sound, as if Gary was in the middle of a mug of tea. ‘Probably just a smack on the wrists .’

‘Yeah … thanks Gary.’ Logan hung up and tried her mobile: it rang and rang, then beeped over to voicemail. There was no point asking Professional Standards — they wouldn’t tell him anything — so he went for a walk instead, wandering the corridors and asking if anyone had seen PC Watson.

He found her in the basement records room, where the old files went to die, sorting through the ancient unsolved investigations and swearing under her breath — a constant, violent monologue about what would happen if she ever got her hands on that bastard from the Daily Mail . She dumped a dusty box onto the concrete floor and yanked the lid off, glaring at the contents.

Logan closed the door behind him and wandered over. ‘Hey you.’ She looked up, still glaring and he backed off a couple of paces, hands up in surrender. ‘Whoa, whatever it is, I’m sorry!’

Jackie went back to scowling at the open box. ‘Can you believe this shite?’ She hauled out an ancient bundle of files held together by an elastic band so old it was beginning to flake away in brittle brown shards. ‘Half these bloody things don’t even match the sodding inventory. Lazy bastards …’

‘You OK?’

She shrugged and started scribbling down a list of the contents into a large notebook. ‘I mean, look at it. Not like it’s hard to keep track of what’s in a bloody box, is it?’

‘Jackie?’

‘I mean, some of this stuff goes back thirty, forty years! Why the hell couldn’t they do it properly in the first place?’ Throwing the pile of files back in the box, the vitrified rubber band shattering into a thousand pieces. ‘Fucking thing!’

‘Jackie. It’s OK.’

‘Get the prehistoric bastards out of retirement and make them come down here and inventory their own bloody case files.’ She dragged another bundle out and began scribbling in her notebook again. ‘Should have solved them in the first place! Who cares about some daft sod getting beaten up twenty years ago — it’s not like we’re going to catch whoever did it any time soon, is it?’ There were angry tears, glinting at the corners of her eyes.