Stuart MacBride - Broken Skin

‘He’s right,’ said Insch as the racket was muffled by a slamming cell door, ‘we can’t touch Macintyre. Someone rapes my wife: you better believe I’m going to do something about it.’ He sighed, staring off into the distance for a moment. ‘Only I wouldn’t use a junkie toe-rag like McGillivray. I’d do the bastard myself.’

Half past two and Logan was getting ready to shut down his computer when DC Rennie swore his way into the room, holding a wodge of damp paper towels against his cheek. ‘Bastard fucking shite bastard fuck …’

‘What happened to you?’

‘Your bloody beardy-weirdie took a swing at me! Took three of us to get him in a bloody cell.’

‘He’s a primary school teacher.’

‘He’s a bastard!’ Pulling away the damp towels and fingering the angry red welt beneath. ‘I was on a promise tonight as well …’ Rennie stopped and glowered at the tissue, then hurled it into the bin. ‘Insch wants to know if you need a lift tonight. To the rehearsal?’

Logan shook his head. ‘I’m going home. Anyway, thought you lot only met on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday.’

‘Two weeks till we’re on, so it’s pretty much every night from now till-’

‘So who’s supposed to watch Macintyre then?’

Rennie blushed. ‘I can come back later if-’

‘It’s Jackie, isn’t it? For God’s sake!’ If she was supposed to watch the footballer’s house every night for the next two weeks she’d be in a permanent foul mood. ‘What if she’s supposed to be on nights, or the back shift?’

Rennie shrugged. ‘I’m just doing what I’m told.’

‘This is stupid.’ Logan stood. ‘We know Macintyre’s not hunting in Aberdeen any more; all we have to do is stick his number plates into the ANPR system and call Tayside if he leaves the city.’

‘Er … the inspector doesn’t want anyone else knowing about-’

‘Yeah? Well guess what? I don’t care.’ He grabbed his coat and headed downstairs, Rennie trailing along behind him like some sort of bloody puppy, yapping away about how Insch wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t it be better to just keep their heads down …

The windowless CCTV room was quiet, lit by a wall of little fourteen-inch television screens: seventy-one of them flickering away, showing different views of Aberdeen. Three operators sat at the central desk, headphones on, working the cameras by remote control and drinking mugs of tea. Logan grabbed the inspector in charge and asked if he could have a word in the review suite across the corridor. ‘Can you do me a favour?’ he asked when the door was shut, leaving Rennie standing outside, looking anxious. ‘I need these number plates in the ANPR.’ Scribbling down the registrations for all of Rob Macintyre’s vehicles. Being personalized vanity plates, they were easy enough to remember.

The inspector took the list, holding the thing as if it was poisonous. ‘Why?’

‘Because you owe me.’

He thought about it. ‘We can’t just stick number plates in the system willy-nilly. I mean there’s an audit trail and-’

‘If any of those cars leave town — you give me a call. Day or night. Pretend Insch said to watch them a couple of weeks ago.’

‘Insch?’ The inspector looked down at the list, frowned, then said, ‘These Rob Macintyre’s cars? Coz if they are, they’re already in the system. They were set up ages ago. No one told us to stop monitoring them, so we didn’t.’

In Aberdeen, the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system monitored every car entering or leaving the city by a major road, recording the licence plate and searching for it in the local and national databases. If the car was on the ‘watch’ list, it got pinged. Rob Macintyre’s cars were all on the watch list. None of them had been ID’d leaving Aberdeen. Logan read through the log files again and swore. ‘What about Dundee?’

The inspector shook his head. ‘Nothing. If they’d clocked his car they’d have called us. It’s all the same database.’

‘Damn …’ Logan sat back on the desk in the small room. ‘Do us a favour and give them a call, OK?’

‘It won’t do any good. They-’

‘Get them to pull their CCTV for the road into Dundee — maybe he’s obscured his number plate? He could have got one of those special ones off the internet-’

‘Believe it or not, we’ve already done it. Insch was in here shouting the odds when the first copycat rape happened. Same again with the second. We checked. Tayside checked. Macintyre just wasn’t there.’

Out in the corridor Rennie was trying, and failing, to chat up one of the admin assistants. Logan marched right past, through the door and down the stairs. Rennie scurried after him. ‘Er … he’s not going to tell anyone, is he? Insch’ll kill me if he-’

‘It can’t be Macintyre — his car would’ve set off the ANPR. It has to be a copycat. That, or it was never Macintyre in the first place.’

Rennie groaned. ‘The Inspector isn’t going to like that.’

‘Tough.’ He passed through the back door and out into the snow-shrouded car park.

‘So,’ said Rennie, sliding in the icy slush, ‘you coming, then? To the rehearsal?’

‘No.’

‘Aw, come on! Please, Insch thinks-’

‘I don’t care! I’m not spending my evening watching you lot ponce about on stage forgetting your lines. So you can stop pouting: I’m not going.’

The Baptist church hall was every bit as cold and depressing as Logan had expected: dark wooden floorboards, stained by years of dirty shoes, pockmarked with tiny high-heel dimples; someone had given the room a coat of magnolia a long time ago, but it had been ignored ever since, the paintwork flaking and peeling as if the place had a nasty dose of eczema. The inspector sat at a small, collapsible desk, watching as his gentlemen from Japan and schoolgirls lurched through the operetta.

Insch’s cast were … challenged was probably the polite way to put it. They didn’t know their lines, forgot where they were supposed to be and when they were supposed to be there, sending the inspector into regular, purple-faced fits about timing, places, and learning the bloody words. The only person he didn’t yell at was Debbie Kerr: AKA Debs — the woman playing Katisha — and Logan could see why. She was the only one of them who seemed to have any clue what she was doing. Rennie certainly didn’t — Logan had seen more coordinated jellyfish.

He lasted two whole hours before making his excuses, picking his moment carefully, when the inspector was too busy shouting to notice.

There wasn’t much of a queue in the Ashvale chip shop that night, just a couple of tweedy-looking women peering at the menu, arguing over whose turn it was to pay. Logan got two haddock suppers with pickled onions, Irn-Bru, and a polystyrene cup of mushy peas to go, stuffing the plastic bag of fish and chips down the front of his jacket, vinegar-scented steam rising up around his face as he hurried along Great Western Road.

The snow had kept up a slow, relentless pace: fat, wet flakes of white that stuck to his hair and jacket, piled up in the gardens, or turned to turd-brown slush in the gutters. When he was young, the snow and the rain had hit long before Christmas, making the school holidays a time for sledging, pornographic snowmen, and being pelted with snowballs, but as the years went by the season for snow had become erratic. Now it came anytime between December and April, the blizzards howling in to turn the world all Dr Zhivago. The north-east of Scotland, twinned with Siberia.

By the time he reached Macintyre’s road his hands, feet and face were frozen, but sweat trickled down the small of his back. The result of marching along in a thick padded jacket with a bag of fish suppers stuffed up his simmit.