Stuart Macbride - Cold granite

'He was just walking along like nothing had happened. Like Peter wasn't dead!' Lumley's face flushed red, the crimson rising from the dirty neck of his overalls. 'I grabbed him…I…I was only going to talk to him. Tell him what I thought of him…' He bit his lip and stared down at the stitching holding his cushion together. 'He started to yell and I hit him. Just to shut him up. Make him stop. Only I couldn't. Stop. Just kept on hitting and hitting and hitting…'

Jesus, thought Logan, and we'd thought he'd been attacked by a mob. It was only one man!

'And then…then it started to snow again. It was cold. I washed the blood off my hands and face with handfuls of snow and then I went home.' He shrugged. 'Told Sheila what happened and she packed her bags and left.' A tear ran down his cheek, leaving a thin trail of clean skin behind. He sniffed and tried to take another drink out of his empty beer can. 'I'm a monster…just like him…' He looked into the empty tin and saw only darkness. 'So he's dead, eh?' Lumley crushed the can in his fist.

Insch and Logan shared a frown. 'Of course he's bloody dead,' said Insch. 'Someone turned him into a sieve.'

A bitter smile twisted Lumley's tear-streaked face. 'Good fuckin' riddance.'

*

Outside, tiny flakes of delicate white drifted out of the dark orange sky. Grey clouds lit from below by the city streetlights. Logan and Insch watched Jim Lumley being bundled into the back of a patrol car and driven away.

'Well,' said the inspector, his breath pluming out in great clouds of white. 'Wrong man, right reason. Fifty, fifty.' He pointed the open end of a packet of fizzy cola bottles at Logan. 'No? Ah well.' Insch helped himself to a handful, popping them into his mouth one at a time as they walked back to his mud-splattered Range Rover.

'You think they'll do him?' asked Logan as Insch started the car up and set the heaters going full pelt.

'Aye. Probably. Shame he didn't do the stabbing though. Would've been nice and neat.'

'Back to the hospital?' asked Logan.

'Hospital?' Insch checked the clock on the dashboard. 'It's nearly one in the morning! She'll string me up.' The inspector's wife was not known for her generous nature when it came to late nights. 'I've got uniforms taking statements. We'll go through them in the morning. Half the place is asleep anyway.'

Insch dropped him off at his flat, and Logan watched the car scrunch its way carefully down the street and away before letting himself in. The little red light was flashing away on his answering machine. For a brief second, Logan thought it might be WPC Jackie Watson, but when he pressed play it was Miller's voice that crackled out of the speakers. He'd heard about Roadkill being stabbed and wanted an exclusive update.

Grunting, Logan hit 'Delete' and slumped off to bed. Wednesday started as it meant to go on. Just out of the shower, Logan was too slow to get the phone before the answering machine kicked in. Another call from Miller wanting Logan to spill the beans. Logan didn't bother picking up; just let the reporter prattle away to himself as he went through to the kitchen to fix himself some tea and toast.

On the way out of the flat he paused for just long enough to delete Miller's message without listening to it. He doubted it would be the last call he'd get from the reporter today.

The morning briefing was a subdued affair, with DI Insch doing a lot of yawning as he took everyone through the events of last night, both at the hospital and in interview room number three. The order of the day was going to be door-to-door. Again.

Logan hung back at the end of the briefing, sharing a smile with WPC Watson as she filed out to start questioning doctors, nurses and patients. He still owed her a pint.

Insch was parked in his usual spot, on the edge of the desk, one haunch up on the wood while he rummaged through his suit pockets for something sweet. 'Sure I had some fruit pastilles…' he muttered as Logan came up and asked him what the plan was for the morning. Coming up empty on the confectionery front, he asked Logan to get Cameron Anderson into an interview room on his own. 'You know the drill,' he said. 'Nice burly PC standing in the corner glowering at him for a bit. That'll make his sphincter clench.'

By the time nine o'clock came around Cameron Anderson had been sitting in a baking-hot interview room, with a hostile-looking PC for nearly an hour and, as Inch had predicted, he was squirming.

'Mr Anderson,' said Insch with zero warmth as they finally sat down to begin the interview. 'How nice of you to take time out of your busy, busy schedule!' Cameron looked terrified and exhausted, as if he'd been up all night crying.

'I take it,' said Insch, helping himself to a fruit sherbet, 'that you've concocted some other miraculous interpretation for the evening's events? Perhaps aliens did it?'

Cameron's hands trembled on the tabletop. His voice was thin and quiet, shaking like his hands. 'Geordie and me never met until I was ten. His mum went down with breast cancer, so he came to live with us. He was bigger than me…' Cameron's voice dropped so low that Logan had to ask him to speak up for the tape. 'He did things. He…' A single tear ran down his cheek. Cameron bit his lip and told them about his brother.

Geordie had come up from Edinburgh three weeks earlier. He was doing some business for his boss. Something to do with getting planning permission. He was spending money like it was going out of fashion. Gambling mostly. Only he wasn't winning. Then the thing with the planner didn't work. He'd spent all the bribe money by then anyway. So he tried threats. And then he had to get out of town quick.

'He pushed the planner under a bus,' said Insch. 'He's in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary with a shattered skull and pelvis. He's going to die.'

Cameron didn't look up, just went on with his story. 'A week later Geordie comes back. Said his employer wanted to know what had happened to all the money. He didn't have it and there were people from the bookies coming round to my flat. They took Geordie away. When he came back the next day he was peeing blood.' He shuddered, his eyes glistening. 'But Geordie had a plan. He said someone was looking for something special. Something he could get his hands on.'

Logan scooted forward in his chair. That was what Miller had said. That someone was after 'livestock'.

'I didn't see him again for a couple of days. He had this big suitcase with him and there was this girl inside. She was drugged. He…he said she was the answer to all our troubles. He was going to sell her to this man and get enough to pay off the bookies and give his boss the bribe money back. No one was going to miss her.'

'What was her name?' asked Logan, his voice cold in the oppressive heat of the room.

Cameron shrugged, the tears beginning to well up over his bottom lid, a small sparkling drip forming at the end of his nose. 'I…I don't know. She was foreign. From somewhere Russian I think. Her mother was a tart in Edinburgh, brought over special. Only she died of an overdose. So the kid was, you know, going spare…' He sniffed. 'Geordie bagged her up before anyone else came to claim her.'

'So you and your brother were going to sell a four-year-old girl to some sick bastard?' The menace in Insch's voice wasn't very well concealed. Colour had risen up the fat man's cheeks and his eyes sparked like black diamonds.

'I had nothing to do with it! It was him! It was always him…'

Insch glowered, but said nothing more.

'She couldn't speak any English, so he taught her to say things. You know,' he buried his head in his trembling hands, 'dirty things. She didn't know what they meant.'

'And so you abused her. You taught her to say: "fuck me in the ass" and then you made her do it.'