Stuart MacBride - Close to the Bone

‘ Jewellery. .? ’ A yawn. ‘ I don’t care. Sleep. Need sleep. . ’

‘OK, well, in that case you go back to bed and I’ll get Chalmers to look into it.’

Silence. ‘ Chalmers? ’

‘We’ve found one of your missing tramps: Roy Forman. He was our necklacing victim.’

A thump, a crash, some swearing, then: ‘ I’ll be right in. ’

Logan hung up. Now they knew who the victim was it was going to be a lot easier to solve. Connect Agnes Garfield to Roy ‘Fusty’ Forman, and that would be that. How hard could it be? He swivelled back and forth in his chair a couple of times.

Then stopped.

There was a sheet of paper sitting in his in-tray, on top of Steel’s half-completed budget analysis. It was a PNC search for Nichole Fyfe’s ex-boyfriend Robbie Whyte. Guthrie must have dropped it off while Logan was off visiting the Kintore crime scene.

He picked it up and skimmed through it. Shoplifting, assault, blah, blah, breaking into people’s cars and nicking things, joyriding. .

A smile stretched across Logan’s face.

‘Oh, you little beauty.’

The viewing suite still smelled of old Pot Noodles, but now came with an extra stale-biscuity whiff of cheesy feet.

Dr Goulding huffed a breath onto his little rectangular glasses, polished them on a cloth, then slipped them back onto his long, hooked nose. Ran a hand through the thick black hair on top of his head, cut short like animal pelt, grey flecks spreading their way around his temples. A pair of flaming dice sat in the middle of his bottle-green tie. He reached out and pressed play on the video console. ‘This is the interesting bit.’

Logan scooted his chair closer as the crackling screen filled with the interior of interview room two. Robbie Whyte was sitting in the dead seat — the one bolted to the floor — Goulding in the one opposite him, the legs and stomach of PC Guthrie just poking into the side of the frame.

Whyte gave his lopsided shrug again. ‘ I don’t know. I found it .’

The on-screen Goulding nodded. ‘ You found a dog’s head .’ Not a question, just a statement.

‘ I know she still loves me. . ’

‘ Sometimes, Robbie, it’s hard for us to accept that the huge feelings we have aren’t shared by others. ’

‘ No: she loves me. I know she does .’ He sat back in his seat and stared up at the camera. ‘ There was this summer we got a caravan in Lossiemouth. Was a friend’s dad’s and we stayed there for a whole fortnight. Just her and me and Wee Robbie. Caught fish and cooked them under the stars and smoked so much weed one night we saw a kelpie. . ’

‘ I see. You named the dog, “Wee Robbie”. Was that your idea, or Nichole’s? ’

‘ Going to get married and have kids. Boy and a girl. Always wanted a son, you know? Someone to be a chip off his old man’s block. ’

A nutjob who’d cut the head off his own dog. Yeah, that was something to aspire to.

The real-life Goulding pressed pause. ‘So when she left, she not only rejected him, she rejected his future child as well. A double blow. Then, when his mother died, that was the final straw. He couldn’t cope any more.’

‘He gave the dog the same name he was going to give his kid? ’

‘You asked if Robert Whyte would be capable of murder. .’

Silence.

Logan poked Goulding in the shoulder. ‘Well? ’

‘In killing the dog — the emotional surrogate for an unborn son and his potential future with the woman he loves — Robert’s metaphorically killing himself and everything he’s hoped for over the last eight or nine years. He’s a dead man. You can’t hurt the dead.’

‘Could he necklace someone? Or torture them to death? ’

‘My opinion is that Mr Whyte is a danger to himself and others. I’ll organize a Mental Health Officer to take a look at him, and we’ll get him sectioned for seventy-two hours for tests. If that goes the way I think it will, we’ll be looking at a Compulsory Treatment Order under Section Seven of the Mental Health — Care and Treatment — Scotland Act 2003.’

Logan poked him again. ‘I know a private security guy who speaks just like that.’

A sniff. ‘Sometimes it’s important to be formal. Robert’s mental health is-’

‘Did — he — kill — them? ’

Goulding frowned and puffed out his cheeks. ‘It’s much more likely he’d kill the object of his affections, then he’d kill himself.’

‘According to the PNC,’ Logan held up the sheet of paper Guthrie had dumped on his desk, ‘he’s got form for joyriding. And possession of a controlled substance, three convictions for assault, two for unlawful removal, and he just hacked the head off a dog he named after the son he wanted to have.’

‘That doesn’t-’

‘Robbie used to dump the cars he stole in the Joyriders’ Graveyard, where we found Roy Forman’s body. He’s obsessed with Nichole Fyfe, the necklacing was his way of getting her attention. And when that didn’t work, he killed the dog.’ Logan sat back in his seat. Game, set, and match.

Goulding sighed, opened his briefcase and slid his notebook away inside. ‘They should never have got involved with each other in the first place. Robbie Whyte’s needy, and co-dependent. Nichole Fyfe. . Well, she’s an actress.’ He clunked the briefcase shut and ran a finger back and forward across the tumblers on the lock. ‘They hold their emotions much closer to the surface, because they have to display and manipulate them when they perform. They feed off the external validation, then wonder why their personal lives don’t live up to the hype. Which is why they’re prone to high levels of drug and alcohol abuse.’ A sigh. ‘It was never going to work.’

‘He’s got form .’

‘Logan, think about it: the stressor event was his mother dying. She’s been in hospital for the last month and a half with pancreatic cancer. She died yesterday afternoon — I called an oncologist I know and checked. Apparently Robert barely left her bedside.’

‘But he could have-’

‘She died. The grief caused a mental collapse in Robbie. He went out and got drunk. And somewhere on the way to the bottom of a bottle, he decided giving Wee Robbie’s head to Nichole Fyfe would be a perfect expression of his undying love. If his mother hadn’t died, he’d still be just another creepy stalker ex-boyfriend.’

So much for that.

Logan checked his watch: five minutes till Steel’s latest update meeting. Just enough time to grab another coffee before getting shouted at for wasting time with this. He stood. ‘I’m still going to check his alibi.’

‘Of course you are.’ Goulding stayed where he was, smiling up at Logan with those dead-fish eyes. ‘Actually, while I’ve got you, why don’t we have a quick chat? ’

‘I’ve got. . a thing. . meeting. You know update on the necklacing-’

‘How are you getting on with the talking therapy? ’

Sodding hell. This again. ‘I’m doing it, OK? ’

‘And is it helping? Because if not, you can always-’

‘I said I’m doing it.’

Goulding nodded. ‘Good.’ He pulled on his suit jacket and straightened his ugly tie. ‘Well, you have my number. .’

Logan stuck his coffee mug down on the desk. ‘I know what I said, but it’s a bit more complicated than it looked. .’

‘In the name of Satan’s nipples, Laz, you told me it was him!’

Steel’s office was crowded: DI Bell slumped in the visitor’s seat like a partially shaved bear someone had stuffed into a shirt and tie; DI Leith leaning against the filing cabinets, Logan by the whiteboard, Biohazard Bob and DS Chalmers hovering in the background by the door.