Stuart Macbride - Cold granite

Logan risked a look at DI Insch. His face was like thunder. Napier looked as if his head was about to explode.

'Sir?'

'If this trouble with the press continues, if the bad publicity keeps coming, we will have no alternative: DI Insch will be suspended on full pay, pending an examination of his conduct. We will be forced to hand the child murder investigations over to Lothian and Borders Police.'

'But…but, sir: that's not right!' Logan's eyes darted between the superintendent and the inspector. 'DI Insch is the best person for this job! This isn't his fault!'

The man behind the desk nodded his head and smiled at DI Insch. 'You were right. Loyalty. Let's make sure it doesn't come to that then, Sergeant. I want this leak found. Whoever's been feeding Miller information, I want it stopped.'

Insch growled. 'Oh don't you worry, sir. When I find the guilty party I will make sure they never speak to anyone ever again.'

Napier stiffened in his seat. 'Just make sure you stay within the rules, Inspector,' he said, clearly annoyed that Insch had usurped his responsibility for finding the mole. 'I want a formal disciplinary hearing and a dismissal from the force. No comeback. No shortcuts. Understood?'

Insch nodded, but his eyes were like coals in his angry pink face.

The superintendent smiled. 'Excellent. We can make this all go away. We just need a conviction. Philips is in custody. We know he's the killer. All we have to do is get forensic evidence and witnesses. You've got that in hand.' He stood up behind his desk.

'You'll see. Two weeks from now this will all be over and we'll be all back to normal. Everything will be fine.'

Wrong.

DI Insch walked Logan back to the main incident room, grumbling and swearing under his breath the whole way. He wasn't happy. Logan knew the superintendent's idea to butter Colin Miller up didn't sit well with Insch's view of the world. The reporter had the whole country calling him incompetent. Insch wanted revenge, not his DS off playing patty cake.

'Honestly, I didn't talk to Miller,' said Logan.

'No?'

'No. I think that's why he did it. The thing with the panto and now this. I wouldn't give him anything without going through you. He didn't like that.'

Insch didn't say anything, just pulled out a packet of jelly babies and started biting their heads off. He didn't offer the bag to Logan.

'Look, sir. Can't we just issue a statement? I mean: the body had been there for years. Letting him go after he was beaten up couldn't change that.'

They'd reached the incident room door and Insch stopped. 'That's not the way it works, Sergeant. They've sunk their teeth into my arse; they won't let go that easily. You heard the super: if this goes on much longer, I'm off the case. Lothian and Borders will be running the show.'

'I didn't mean for this to happen, sir.'

Something like a smile flickered onto Insch's face. 'I know you didn't.' He offered the open bag of jelly babies and Logan took a green one. It tasted like five pieces of silver. Insch sighed. 'Don't worry: I'll have a word with the troops. Let them know you're not a rat.'

But Logan still felt like one.

'Listen up!' said DI Insch, addressing the uniforms sitting at desks, answering phones, taking statements. They went quiet as soon as they saw him. 'You've all seen my picture in the paper this morning. I let Roadkill go on Wednesday night, and the next day a girl's body turns up in his collection of dead things. Turns out I'm an incompetent arse with a penchant for dressing up in funny clothes when I should be out fighting crime. And you'll also have read that DS McRae told me not to let Roadkill go. But being an idiot I did it anyway.'

Angry murmurs started, all directed at Logan. Insch held up a hand and there was instant silence. But the glaring continued.

'Now I know you think DS McRae's a shitebag right now, but you can forget it. DS McRae did not go to the papers. Understood? If he tells me any of you have been giving him grief…' Insch made a throat-cutting gesture. 'Now get your arses back to work and tell the rest of the shift. This investigation will continue and we will get our man.' Half past ten and the post mortem was well underway. It was a nasty, rancid affair and Logan stood as far from the dissecting table as he could. But it wasn't far enough; even with the morgue's extractor fan going full belt the smell was overpowering.

The body had burst when the IB tried to lift it out of the pile at the farm. They'd had to scrape what was left of the internal organs off the steading floor.

Everyone in the room was wearing protective gear: white paper boiler suits, plastic shoe-covers, latex gloves and breathing masks. Only this time Logan's mask wasn't full of menthol chest rub. Isobel paced slowly up and down the table, prodding the corpulent flesh with a double-gloved finger, making detailed and methodical notes into her dictaphone. The bit of rough – Brian – trailed along after her like some sort of demented puppy. Floppy-haired wanker. DI Insch was again conspicuous by his absence, having used Logan's guilty conscience to get out of it, but the PF and the back-up pathologist were there. Keeping as far away from the rotting corpse as possible without being somewhere else.

It was impossible to tell if the child had been strangled like David Reid. The skin was too heavily rotted around the throat. And something had been nibbling away at the flesh. Not just little wriggly white things either, and God knew there were enough of those, but a rat or a fox or something. A cold sweat beaded Isobel's forehead as her running commentary faltered. Carefully, she lifted the internal organs out of the plastic bag they'd been shovelled into, trying to identify what it was she held in her hands.

Logan was convinced he'd never get the smell out of his nostrils. Little David Reid had been bad, but this one was a hundred times worse.

'Preliminary findings,' said Isobel when it was finally over, scrubbing and scrubbing at her hands. 'Four cracked ribs and signs of blunt trauma to the skull. Broken hip. One broken leg. She was five. Blonde. There's a couple of fillings in her rear molars.' More soap, more scrubbing. It looked as if Isobel was trying to get clean all the way down to the bone. Logan had never seen her so shaken up by work before. 'I'd estimate the time of death between twelve and eighteen months ago. It's hard to be sure with so much decomposition…' She shivered. 'I'll need to run some laboratory tests on the tissue samples to be sure.'

Logan placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. 'I'm sorry.' He wasn't sure what for. That their relationship had fallen apart? That once Angus Robertson was put away, they had nothing in common? That she'd had to suffer what she suffered on that tower block rooftop? That he hadn't got to her sooner…That she'd just had to carve up a badly decomposed child like a turkey?

She smiled sadly at him, but tears sparkled at the edges of her eyes. For a moment there was a connection between them. A shared moment of tenderness.

And then Brian, her assistant, ruined it all. 'Excuse me, Doctor, you have a phone call on line three. I've put it through to the office.'

The moment was gone and so was Isobel. Roadkill was undergoing psychiatric evaluation by the time Logan was heading across town to the steadings and their gruesome contents. He didn't hold out any hopes of Bernard Duncan Philips being found fit to stand trial. Roadkill was a nutjob and everyone knew it. The fact he kept three farm buildings full of dead animals he'd scraped off the road was a bit of a giveaway. Not to mention the dead child. The smell was still clinging to him.

Logan wound the car's windows down as far as he dared, wisps of snow flickering in to melt in the heat of the blowers. That post mortem was going to stay with him for a long, long time. Shuddering, he turned the heat up again.