Stuart Macbride - Cold granite

A smile played round Doug's toothless mouth. 'You are so full of shite.'

'You think? Hell, Dougie, I've seen some of the things left behind after Malkie's boys have finished with somebody. Arms, legs, willies…You don't stand a chance.' Logan gave a friendly wink. 'But tell you what: you tell us all about Simon and Colin McLeod and their debt collection methods, and I'll make sure you get locked away somewhere Malkie can't get at you.'

And at this Doug actually started laughing.

Logan frowned. 'What?'

'You haven't-' The word was interrupted by a cough, a dry wheeze that shook the old man's frame. 'Haven't got-' Another cough, this one deeper, working its way slowly into his chest. 'Got a-' Again. 'Got a fuckin' clue-' This time the whole bed rattled as Doug racked back and forth, a shaking, thin hand almost covering his mouth. Finally he slumped back into his pillows, wiping his hand down the front of his pyjamas. It left a black and red smear. 'Have you, Mr Pig?'

'Do you want me to get a doctor?' Logan asked.

The old man laughed bitterly, the laugh dissolving into yet more coughing. 'No point,' he wheezed, the breaths coming ragged and fast. 'Saw one of the buggers this mornin'. I told you Mr Pig: I got me the cancer. Only it's no a year or two any more. Doctor says now it's a month.' He thumped his chest with a bloodstained hand. 'One big tumour.'

Dust motes drifted by in the silence that followed, each one a spark of gold in the heady sunlight.

'Now fuck off and let me die in peace.'

*

Bernard Duncan Philips didn't have a private room. He had to share a double in intensive care. His narrow hospital bed was surrounded by equipment, monitors, ventilators; you name it they'd plugged it into Roadkill's battered body. Logan and Watson stood in the doorway, sipping the lukewarm, plastic-flavoured coffee the PC had finally delivered.

Desperate Doug had looked bad, but Roadkill looked worse. White bandages separated by bruises. They'd put both his arms and one of his legs in plaster since Logan had seen him last. As if he was in a Carry On film.

The oxygen mask was gone, replaced by a tube with a nosepiece in the middle, the clear plastic line looped over his ears and taped to his cheeks to stop it from falling out.

'Can I help you?'

It was a short woman, dressed in a nurse's uniform: sky-blue slacks and a short-sleeved top with an upside-down watch pinned over the left breast.

'How is he?'

The nurse examined Logan with a practised eye. 'You family?'

'No. Police.'

'You don't say.'

'How is he?'

She picked the chart off the end of Roadkill's bed, skimming it. 'Well, he's doing a lot better than we thought. Surgery went well. He actually came round for an hour this morning.' She smiled. 'Bit of a surprise that. I put money on "coma". Still: win some, lose some.'

It was the last time Logan saw Roadkill alive. DI Steel wasn't surprised he'd got nothing out of Desperate Doug. Instead she just sat back in her chair, feet up on the desk, and puffed smoke rings at the ceiling.

'If you don't mind me asking, ma'am,' said Logan, fidgeting in the seat on the opposite side of her desk, 'how come you didn't go and interview him yourself?'

She smiled languidly at him through a haze of smoke. 'Dougie and me go way back. When I was first in uniform and he was in his prime…' Her smile became wry. 'Let's just say that we had a bit of a falling out.'

'What are we going to do about him?'

She sighed, sending cigarette smoke drifting across her desk like a wall of fog. 'We go to the Procurator Fiscal and we give him the forensic evidence. He reads it and he says, it's enough to go to court on, and we say great. And then Dougie's lawyer says my client is going to snuff it in under a month. And the PF says well in that case bugger it. Why waste the money?' She worked a chipped nail in between her teeth, dug something out and stared at it for a moment before flicking it away. 'He'll be dead before this thing comes to court. Let sleeping Dougs die, I suppose.' She stopped, as if something had suddenly occurred to her. 'You did check with his doctor, didn't you? He is dying, isn't he? Not just pulling your dick?'

'I checked. He's really dying.'

She nodded, the glowing tip of her fag bobbing up and down in the semidarkness. 'Poor old Doug.'

Somehow Logan found it difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy for the man, but he kept his mouth shut.

Back in the incident room Logan took down Geordie Stephenson's photograph. Both the one from Lothian and Borders Police and the one from the morgue. Now that Desperate Doug MacDuff was dying no one would ever be found guilty of Geordie's murder. But the man had no wife, no kids, no brothers or sisters. No one to claim his body. No one was going to miss Malk the Knife's enforcer. No one except Malk the Knife. And what was he going to do to Dougie? The old man would be dead in a month anyway. And it'd be painful: the doctor said so. All Malkie could do was put him out of his misery and Doug knew it. Maybe that was why he'd laughed when Logan had talked of retribution. Either way it didn't matter.

He stuffed everything relating to Geordie Stephenson's death into the file, including his report on yesterday's shenanigans. There would be some paperwork to tidy the thing off, but other than that the case was as dead as Geordie.

With that all packed away, the only thing left in Logan's little incident room was the unknown girl. Her dead face looked down at him with blank eyes.

One down, one to go.

Logan sat down and waded through the statements once more: everyone living within easy access of the communal bins. One of them had killed the girl, stripped her, tried to hack her up, wrapped her body in brown packing tape and stuffed it into the bin. And if it wasn't Norman Chalmers, who was it?

Sunset painted the sky above Rosemount in violent orange and scarlet flames. From street level, hemmed in on all sides by long lines of grey three-storey tenements, it was only visible as ribbons of iridescent colour. Here and there sulphurous-yellow streetlights flickered and hummed in the crisp December air, giving the buildings a jaundiced pallor. It wasn't even five o'clock yet.

Against all the odds WPC Watson had managed to find them a parking spot in front of the building Norman Chalmers lived in. The communal bin stood directly in front of the front door. It was a large black barrel, chest height, flattened at the sides and chained to a post. That was where the girl must have been dumped. Where the scaffies collected her from, taking her body to the council tip along with all the other garbage.

Forensics had been all over the bin and come up with nothing except the fact that someone in the building was into leather-fetish pornography.

'How many buildings we going to do?' asked Watson, balancing a pile of statements against the steering wheel.

'Start from the middle and work out. Three buildings each side: that's seven buildings. Six flats in each…'

'Forty-two flats? God, it'll take us for ever!'

'Then there's the other side of the road.'

Watson looked up at the building next to her, then back at Logan. 'Can we not get some uniforms in to do it?'

Logan smiled. 'You are uniform, remember?'

'Yeah, but I'm doing something: driving you about and all that. This'll take ages!'

'Longer we sit here, longer it'll take.'

They started with the building Chalmers lived in.

Ground floor left: an old lady with shifty eyes, urine-yellow hair and breath that stank of sherry. She refused to open the door until Logan had shoved his warrant card through the letterbox and she'd phoned the police station just to make sure he wasn't one of these paedophiles she'd heard about. Logan didn't point out she was about ninety years safe from people like that.