Stuart Macbride - Cold granite

'No seriously,' said Logan. 'I hope you fall and break your bloody leg. Or your neck.' But he waited until the door had closed and Insch was well out of earshot.

When Roadkill was finally reunited with his personal possessions Logan forced a smile onto his face and escorted him to the car park at the back of the building. A flustered-looking PC grabbed them just as Logan was signing for yet another car. 'Desk sergeant says you've got another two messages from a Mr Lumley.'

Logan groaned. The Lumley's Family Liaison Officer should have been handling these calls. He had enough on his plate as it was. He felt guilty almost immediately. The poor sod had lost his son. The least he could do was return the man's phone calls. He rubbed at the headache growing behind his eyes.

'Tell him I'll see to it when I get back, OK?'

*

They went out the back way. The front of Force Headquarters was all lit up, television camera spotlights making everything stand out in sharp relief. There were dozens of them. Roadkill's face was going to be all over the country before the end of the day. And it didn't matter if he was innocent or not, by breakfast time tomorrow half the nation would know his name.

'You know, it might be a good idea if you took a couple of weeks off work. Let the idiots forget about it?'

Roadkill had his hands wrapped round the safety belt, tugging it gently every six seconds, making sure it was still working. 'Need to work. Man has no purpose without work. It defines us. Without definition we do not exist.'

Logan raised an eyebrow. 'OK…' The man wasn't just schizophrenic: he was crazy.

'You say "OK" too much.'

Logan opened his mouth, thought better of it and closed it again. There was no point arguing with a crazy person. If he wanted to do that he could go home and talk to his mother. So instead he drove them through the fading rain. By the time they'd reached Roadkill's small farm on the outskirts of Cults it had stopped entirely.

He took the car as far up the drive as there was road. The council clear-up crew had been hard at work all day. Two large metal waste containers loomed in the car's headlights. They were each the size of a minibus, their yellow paintwork chipped and scratched, sitting in the weeds next to steading number one. Huge padlocks kept the container doors shut, as if anyone was going to break in to get at the rotting animal corpses inside.

Logan heard a small sob from beside him and realized the padlocks were probably a good idea.

'My beautiful, beautiful dead things…' There were tears running down Roadkill's bruised cheek into his beard.

'You didn't help them?' Logan asked, pointing at the containers.

Roadkill shook his head, his long hair swinging back and forth like a funereal curtain. His voice was tortured and low.

'How could I help the Visigoths sack Rome?'

He got out of the car and walked over the trampled weeds and grass to the steading. The door was lying open, letting Logan's headlights fall on the bare concrete floor. The piles of dead animals were gone. One steading down, two more to go.

Logan left him sobbing gently outside the empty farm building.

The evening didn't go exactly as Logan had planned. WPC Jackie Watson was still at the pub when he finally got there, but she was also still smarting from his reprimand. Or maybe there was a lingering smell of Roadkill about him, even though he'd had the car windows open all the way back? 'Oh, how the stench of you clings Whatever it was, she spent most of her time speaking to the Bastard Simon Rennie and a WPC Logan didn't recognize. No one was rude to him, but they didn't exactly fall over themselves to make him feel welcome. This was supposed to be a celebration! He'd found Richard Erskine. Alive!

Logan called it a night after only two pints and sulked his way home, via the nearest chip shop.

He didn't see the dark grey Mercedes lurking under the streetlight outside his flat. Didn't see the heavy-set man get out of the driver's seat and pull on a pair of black leather gloves. Didn't see him crack his knuckles as Logan balanced the cooling fish supper in one hand while the other hunted for his keys.

'You didn't call.'

Logan almost dropped his chips.

He spun around to see Colin Miller standing with his arms crossed, leaning back against a very expensive-looking automobile, his words wreathed in fog. 'You were supposed to call me by half-four. You didn't.'

Logan groaned. He'd meant to speak to DI Insch, but somehow never got around to it. 'Yeah, well,' he said at last. 'I spoke to the DI…He didn't feel it was appropriate.' It was a barefaced lie, but Miller wouldn't know that. At least it would sound as if he'd tried.

'No appropriate?'

'He thinks I've had quite enough publicity for one week.' Might as well be hung for a lying bastard as a lamb. 'You know how it is…' He shrugged.

'No appropriate?' Miller scowled. 'I'll show him no' a-fuckin'-propriate.' He pulled out a palmtop and scribbled something onto it. The next morning started with about a dozen road traffic accidents. None of them fatal, but all blamed on the inch of snow that had fallen overnight. By half-eight the skies were gunmetal-grey and low enough to touch. Tiny flakes of white drifted down on the Granite City, melting as soon as they hit the pavements and roads. But the air smelled of snow. It had that metallic tang which meant that a heavy fall wasn't far away.

The morning's Press and Journal had hit Logan's doormat like a tombstone. Only this time the funeral wasn't his. Just his fault. Right there on the front page was a big picture of Detective Inspector Insch done up in his pantomime villain outfit. It was one of the show's publicity shots and Insch had on his best evil snarl. 'D.I. PLAYS THE FOOL WHILE OUR CHILDREN DIE' ran the headline.

'Oh God.'

Under the photo it said: 'IS PANTO REALLY MORE IMPORTANT THAN CATCHING THE PAEDOPHILE KILLER STALKING OUR STREETS?'

Colin Miller strikes again.

Standing at the sink, he read how the inspector had been 'prancing around on stage like an idiot, while local police hero Logan McRae was out searching for little Richard Erskine'. And the rest of the article went downhill from there. Miller had done a first-rate hatchet job on DI Insch. He'd made a well-respected senior police officer look like a callous bastard. There was even a quote from the Chief Superintendent saying that this was 'a very serious matter that would be thoroughly investigated'.

'Oh God.'

'COUNCIL WORKER ATTACKED BY CONCERNED PARENTS' barely made it onto page two.

*

Insch was in a foul mood at the morning briefing and everyone did their damnedest to make sure they didn't do or say anything to set him off. Today was not a good day to screw up.

As soon as the briefing was over Logan scurried away to his little incident room, doing his best not to look guilty. He only had one WPC today: the one womanning the phones. Every other available officer was going to spend today looking for little Peter Lumley. Someone had stuck a rocket up Insch's backside and he was determined to share the experience. So it would be just Logan, the WPC, and the list of possible names.

The team he'd had working their way through Social Services' 'at risk' register had turned up exactly nothing. All the little girls were right where they should have been. Some of them had 'walked into the door' and one had 'fallen down the stairs after burning herself on the iron', but they were all still alive. A couple of the parents were now facing charges.

But that wasn't the only thing Logan had to worry about now. Helping DI Steel on the Geordie Stephenson inquiry seemed to consist of DI Steel smoking lots of cigarettes while Logan did all the work.

There was a new map of Aberdeen pinned to the wall, this one covered with little blue-and-green pins marking every bookmaker in town. The blue ones were 'safe' – not the kind of place that took your kneecaps if you failed to pay up. The green ones were kneecap territory. The Turf 'n Track was marked in red. So was the harbour where they dragged the body out of the water. And next to it was a post mortem head-and-shoulders photo of Geordie Stephenson.