Stuart Macbride - Cold granite

'No! No! We couldn't…' A blush raced over his face. 'Geordie said she had to be, you know, still a virgin.'

Logan's face creased up in disgust. 'So you made her suck your dick?'

'It was Geordie's idea! He made me do it!' The tears spilled down Cameron's face. 'Only once. I only did it once. When the old man came round. He was beating up Geordie and I tried to stop him. Then the girl came in and she's saying these things Geordie taught her. And she grabs the old man and he pushes her away and she falls and hits her head and she's dead.' He looked imploringly into Insch's cold eyes. 'He told me he was going to kill Geordie, then he was coming back for me!' Cameron rubbed the back of his sleeve over his eyes, wiping away the tears. But more sprang up in their place. 'I had to get rid of her! She was lying on the fireplace and she was naked and dead. I tried to cut her up, but I couldn't. It was…it was…' he shuddered and wiped at his eyes again. 'So I wrapped her up in tape. I…poured bleach in her mouth to…you know…make it clean again.'

'Then you had to find a bin-bag to put her in.' Cameron nodded and a sparkling drop fell from his nose, splashing onto the tabletop between his trembling hands.

'And then you threw her out with the trash.'

'Yes…I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…' After his statement, after Cameron Anderson had admitted sexually abusing a four-year-old girl, they put him back into his cell and arranged for him to appear in the Sheriff Court the next day. There wasn't any celebration. Somehow, after Cameron's confession, no one was in the mood.

Back in the incident room Logan sighed and unpinned the little girl's photo from the wall, feeling hollow inside. Catching the man who had abused her and disposed of her body as if it was nothing more than household rubbish, had left him feeling dirty by association. Ashamed to be human.

Insch settled himself down on the edge of the table and helped Logan stack up the statements. 'Wonder if we'll ever know who she was?'

Logan scrubbed at his face with his hands, feeling the first rasp of stubble under his fingers. 'I doubt it,' he said.

'Anyway,' Insch dumped the statements into the case file and gave an expansive yawn, 'we've still got enough on our plate to worry about.'

Roadkill.

This time they took one of the pool cars to the hospital, WPC Watson driving.

Aberdeen Royal Infirmary was a lot busier than it had been the night before. They arrived just in time to see lunch getting served: something boiled with boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage.

'Remind me to go private,' said Insch as they passed a housekeeper trundling a steaming trolley that reeked of cabbage.

They gathered all the PCs who'd been questioning the patients and staff together in an empty day room to get their updates. There wasn't much worth listening to, but they went through them all anyway, thanking the uniformed officers for their work. No one had seen, or heard anything. They'd even been through the security tapes: no blood-soaked figures running off into the night.

The inspector gave something like a rousing speech, and sent them all back to work. That left only Logan and Watson. 'You two better go make yourselves useful too,' said Insch, beginning the familiar hunt through his suit. 'I'm off to speak to that doctor we saw last night.' He ambled off, still hunting for the elusive confectionery.

'So,' said WPC Watson, trying to sound efficient. 'Where do you want to start?'

Logan thought about her legs, poking out from beneath his T-shirt in the kitchen. 'Er…' he said, deciding that now was neither the time nor the place. 'How about we go take a look at those security tapes. See if there's anything that's been missed.'

'You're the boss,' she said and threw in a jaunty little salute.

Logan tried to keep his mind on work as they walked through the hospital, making for the security guard's station. But it wasn't working. 'You know,' he finally mustered the courage to say as they reached the lift. 'I still owe you a pint from last night.'

Watson nodded. 'I hadn't forgotten, sir.'

'Good.' He punched the lift button and tried to look casual, resting against the railing that ran round the inside of the elevator. 'How about tonight?'

'Tonight?'

Logan felt the colour starting to rise into his cheeks. 'If you're busy it's OK. You know, some other night…' Idiot.

The lift shuddered to a halt and WPC Watson smiled at him. 'Tonight would be good.'

Logan was too happy to say anything else until they got to the security room. It was compact: a long black desk with a wall of little television screens above it. A bank of video recorders whirled away, taping everything that went on. And in the middle of all this sat a youngish man with bleached-blond hair and spots dressed in standard security-guard brown with yellow trimmings and a peaked cap. Looking like a jobbie in a hat.

He explained that there were no security cameras watching the room where the murder took place, but they did have them in all the main corridors, A amp;-E, and all the exits. Some of the wards had them too, but there were 'issues' with videoing sick people getting medical attention. Privacy and stuff.

There was a pile of tapes from the previous night. The search team had already been through them, but if Logan wanted to have another pass it was OK by him.

That was when Logan's mobile phone went off, the sound loud and intrusive in the small room.

'You know,' said the guard sternly, 'mobile phones have to be switched off!'

Logan apologized, but this would only take a minute.

It was Miller again. 'Laz! Beginning to think you'd fallen off the arse of the earth, man.'

'I'm kind of busy right now,' said Logan, turning his back on the spotty youth with the turd-brown uniform. 'Is it urgent?'

'Kinda depends on what your point of view is. You anywhere near a telly?'

'What?'

'Television. Moving pictures-'

'I know what television is.'

'Aye, well, if you're near one: turn it on. Grampian.'

'Can you get regular television on any of these things?' Logan asked the security jobbie.

The spotted youth said no, but Logan could try one of the rooms down the corridor.

Three minutes later they stood in front of a flickering television screen with an American soap opera dribbling away on it. Behind them, on the bed, an old woman with purple-rinsed hair was snoring it up, her teeth floating in a glass.

'Gee, Adelaide,' said a suntanned blond with perfect teeth and a washboard stomach. 'Are you saying that baby's mine?'

Dramatic music, close-up of over-made-up brunette with pneumatic breasts; cut to commercial. Stair-lifts. Crisps. Washing powder. And then the face of Gerald Cleaver filled the screen. He was sitting in a wingback leather chair, wearing a cardigan, looking all avuncular and wholesome. 'They tried to make me look like a monster!' he said and the camera cut to a shot of him walking a jolly labrador. 'They accused me of terrible crimes I didn't commit!' Another camera jump, this time to Cleaver sitting on a low drystone dyke, looking earnest and pained. 'Read about my year of hell, only in this week's News of the World!'

'Oh God,' said Logan as the paper's logo spun on the screen. 'That's all we need.'

Logan and Watson grumbled their way back to the security office. Berating the paper and its decision to give Gerald Cleaver money for his story. The spotty youth in the shitty-brown uniform was in the process of charging into action, straightening his peaked cap as he went.

'Trouble?' asked WPC Watson.

'Someone's stealing Mars Bars from the gift shop!' And off he ran.

They watched him disappear round the corner, feet and elbows flying in his haste to reach the scene of the crime. Watson gave a wry smile. 'How the other half live…'