Stuart MacBride - Broken Skin

Frank Garvie was hanging from the stainless steel hook in the ceiling. Twitching.

The loop started up again.

It took the IB ‘team’ twenty minutes to turn up: a lone woman in white SOC coveralls, clutching her sample case and trying not to yawn. ‘Is this it?’ asked Logan as she looked around the now-silent flat.

She shrugged. ‘Iain’s retirement bash. I’m the only one on call.’ She stopped at the living room door and had a good long stare at the body. It was dressed from head to toe in dark red rubber, the material stretched nearly to bursting point, polished and glittering, a zipped mask obscuring the face. Thin black wires trailed from the crotch and backside to a small case sitting on the floor. The body didn’t dangle from the ceiling, but hung slack, legs bent, toes resting on the floor. White silk rope, pulled taut by the body’s weight, reached from the hook in Garvie’s ceiling to the slipknot at the back of his neck — the cord buried so deeply in the shiny rubber around the throat it was nearly invisible.

‘Death been declared?’ she asked scanning the carpet for footprints.

‘Got the ambulance men to do it.’ But Logan had checked first. Garvie wasn’t just dead, he was cold — he’d been dead for hours. The deafening racket had come from a DVD — Buffy the VampireSlayer , season four. He must have had the disk on ‘play all’ and when the episodes were over, and Garvie was gone, it jumped back to the main menu, and the never-ending loop of music.

The IB tech nodded. ‘OK, well, you go wait outside and I’ll let you know when it’s OK to come back in. I’ll need-’

‘Shoes and suit. I know.’

‘Good, now bugger off, I’ve got about three people’s jobs to do.’

Logan was sitting in the back of Alpha Thirteen, three hours later, eating a sandwich from the twenty-four-hour supermarket up the road, when the pathologist finally appeared. ‘Look out,’ said the PC as Isobel’s familiar silver Mercedes parked behind their patrol car, ‘the Wicked Witch of the West’s here.’

Colin Miller emerged from the Mercedes’s driver seat, and hurried round to the passenger side, helping Isobel out into the faint drizzle. Fussing over her till she slapped his hands away and glowered at him. Then apologized.

She stood for a moment, breathing heavily, one hand pressed into the small of her back, the other cupping her bulging stomach. Then waddled towards the flats.

Logan stuffed the rest of his sandwich back in the carrier bag and climbed out to join her, hesitated halfway down the path, then turned back to the Mercedes and opened the passenger door. ‘You look rough.’

Miller tried to give Logan the finger, but the effect was ruined by the prosthetics in his gloves, making it look as if he was trying for a deformed shadow puppet instead. He gave up. ‘This the same Garvie you arrested for the Fettes kid’s death?’

‘You know I can’t tell you any-’

‘Thought we was supposed to be friends again. What? I’m good enough to go diggin’ up dirt on your polis buddies, but you’ll no’ tell me about your suicides?’

‘Touche. Frank Garvie: used to work in adult films with Jason Fettes.’

The reporter stared past Logan’s shoulder at the block of flats. ‘Did he now …’

‘You can’t print anything about this, OK? We’re-’

‘DS McRae?’ It was the PC from Alpha Thirteen, waving an Airwave handset at him. ‘Control.’

Logan turned back to Miller, ‘Look, no printing stuff without my OK!’

‘Aye, aye. Nothin’ wrong with havin’ a poke about though, is there?’

‘DS McRae?’ the PC again.

‘Yes, fine, I heard you the first time! And you,’ He looked at the reporter, thinking about giving him a lecture on social responsibility and the victim’s right to privacy …’ Try not to get me fired.’

Control was a chief inspector with a clipped Aberdonian accent, wanting an update on the Garvie suicide and how long Alpha Thirteen was going to be tied up for: after all, there was a whole city out there to patrol, even if it was quarter to three on a dreich Friday morning. Logan passed on what they knew and hurried into the flats after Isobel, catching up with her before she’d got as far as the first landing. She was leaning against the wall halfway up the stairs, breathing heavily.

‘Are you OK?’

Isobel grimaced, running a hand back and forth across the top of her bump. ‘I’ve got heartburn, swollen ankles, a foot in my bladder, the little sod does gymnastics at two in the morning, I’m boiling the whole time, and I’m the size of a bouncy castle. And I’m really not looking forward to tomorrow.’

‘Why don’t you just go home, it’s only a suicide after all, we can always-’

‘You actually think I’m going to miss the last crime scene I’ll see for six months? No chance.’

Up at the top of the stairs he helped her clamber into the biggest white paper oversuit they had, the zip barely making it over her bump. ‘Erm, Isobel …’ He handed her a pair of latex gloves. ‘When we were together …’ This was stupid.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

She scowled at him. ‘What?’

He took a deep breath, looked her in the eye, and said: ‘When we were together, did you ever see anyone else?’ Watching closely for a reaction, not expecting the one that he got. Her bottom lip trembled, her eyes filled with tears and she started to cry. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t-’ She hit him, a stinging slap on the chest. ‘Ow!’

‘How could you ask me that?’ Advancing on him as he backed away. ‘How the hell can you — ‘she hit him again, ‘ask — ‘and again, ‘me — ’ and once more for luck, ‘that?’

‘I’m sorry!’ His back bumped into the wall. ‘I …’ He came within a hair’s breadth of telling her about Jackie and Rennie, but the words wouldn’t come. Logan closed his eyes and hung his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

She must have heard something in his voice, because she laid a gentle hand on his arm and told him not to worry, some day he and PC Watson would have a baby of their own. He would have laughed, but got the feeling it would come out strangled and frightening, so he opened the door to Garvie’s flat instead.

The IB tech was standing halfway down the hall, fiddling about with a laptop, cables snaking back into the lounge. She saw them stepping over the threshold and waved them back. ‘Give us a minute, I’m doing the last three-sixty …’ a pause, then an electronic bleep. ‘OK, you can go in. I’ve done fibre, prints, body fluids, video and photos. No sign of forced entry, all the windows are locked, curtains drawn. Got some good prints off the gimp suit …’ She yawned, not bothering to cover her mouth, showing off a vast array of good, old-fashioned Scottish fillings. ‘Phhhhh … What time is it?’ Logan told her and she swore, rubbed a hand over her face then started packing the spherical picture kit away, sticking the goldfish-bowl-on-a-tripod back in its case, muttering about having to be up this late when everyone else was out on the pish.

Isobel circled the body, peering at it, gently poking the musculature through the fingerprint-powdered suit. She stopped, sniffed, then prodded the rubber where it bulged over the silk rope. Frowning.

‘Something wrong?’ Logan asked.

‘Perhaps …’ she peeled back the hood, exposing Garvie’s neck, her latex gloves squeaking on the dark rubber, then sank her fingers into the exposed, waxy skin. ‘Cold … I’d expect the body to be stiffer than this.’

‘Well, he was twitching when we got here-’

She looked appalled. ‘Then why the hell didn’t you cut him down?’