Logan McRae Crime Series Books 4-6: Flesh House, Blind Eye, Dark Blood. Stuart MacBride

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СКАЧАТЬ along at the back, making popping noises with her nicotine gum.

      Strange, old-fashioned paintings in ornate golden frames hung on one side of the corridor, their paint blackened by the passage of time. Each had a coat of arms on it, some decoration, and a wodge of text, nearly indecipherable in the low light. On the other side it was all portraits, sour-faced old men in various disapproving poses.

      ‘Bloody hell,’ said Steel, interrupting an involved anecdote about the first Flesh House being built in 1631 to stop people slaughtering animals in the streets, ‘who ordered the ugly blokes with a side order of extra ugly?’ She pointed at one of the portraits. ‘My cat’s arse is prettier than that.’

      ‘Ah … yes …’ The old man glanced at Alec’s camera. ‘Actually, that’s—’

      ‘Jesus! This one looks like a wart with a moustache!’

      ‘And, er … this,’ said Call-Me-Ewan, changing the subject, ‘is the Fleshers’ coat of arms.’

      The painting was about the same size as Logan’s kitchen table. A red shield – with three knives, an axe, and one of the little Aberdeen castles on it – sat in the middle, a severed ram’s head on the left, a bull’s on the right. Beneath each head was a passage of flowery script, ancient varnish making the words crackle.

      Steel squinted at the text: ‘“When sacerdotal sacrifice and feasts, made altars smoak with blood of slaughtered beasts…”’

      The old man sighed. ‘You have to understand that the Fleshers date back to a time when Aberdeen was in her infancy – all the trades do. If you look in our books, you’ll see the same family names year after year, century after century. Generations of butchers all dedicated to supporting their trade and the community.’ He ticked the points off on his fingers: ‘Alms to the poor, funding public works, providing social care long before the NHS was even dreamt of. What’s happening now has nothing to do with the trade. We shouldn’t be stigmatized just because some … because someone hijacked the words from this painting.’

      ‘It’s OK,’ said Steel, ‘you can call him a cock-sucking arse-weasel. I won’t faint.’ Wink. ‘So come on then, how many people had access to this twenty years ago?’

      ‘This painting’s over a hundred and seventy-eight years old, Inspector. We have open days a couple of times a year: show members of the public around the hall, explain things to them, give them a bit of the history of the things we have here.’

      ‘So you’re saying it could have—’

      ‘And each trade has a big annual dinner dance. The members invite their friends and family, clients sometimes.’ He stared at the paintings. ‘We’ve had to cancel ours. No one wants to accept an invitation from the Fleshers with all these horrible things going on …’

      Which wasn’t surprising. Logan pulled out his list of names from 1990. ‘You weren’t interviewed during the original investigation?’

      ‘No, my uncle died in seventy-four – I went back to Cupar for six months to help get everything in order, stayed for nineteen years. Didn’t come up again till ninety-three.’ He smiled. ‘Missed all the excitement.’

      ‘Do you recognize any of these names?’

      Ewan produced a pair of half-moon glasses and polished them on the hem of his cardigan. Even then he had to hold the list at arm’s length, going through the names one by one. ‘Oh aye, he’s still here … so’s he … poor Charles took pancreatic cancer … this one’s moved to Australia to be with his grandkids … no idea – before my time … pneumonia … Alzheimer’s … you know, I haven’t seen Peter for ages. Think he’s in a nursing home now …’ and on it went. Ewan seemed to sag as he got to the end of the list. ‘Sorry. Seeing them all written down like this … death gets us all in the end …’

      He took off his glasses and started down the corridor again. ‘Would you like to see the Dead Man’s Gallery?’

      It was more like a passageway than a gallery – a long, thin space next to the main hall, lined with huge gilt frames containing dozens of little black and white photographs. ‘When I first joined,’ said Ewan, pointing at old-fashioned pictures of stiff, formal men with wild Victorian facial hail, ‘I’d show guests round here and we’d laugh at all the beardie-wierdies. Look at this one.’ It was a young man with huge sideburns and mutton chops that reached well past the collar of his starched shirt. ‘Like something out of Abbot and Costello Meet the Wolf Man, isn’t he? It’s not till you start seeing the faces of people you know in here that it really hits you: these were men. They had hopes and dreams, just like you and me. Families who loved them. Wives and children who mourned …’

      He led them down to another huge frame, this one with a tiny plaster coat of arms at the top: red background, curved knives. The frame was only half full and some of the photos were even in colour, fading away to that strange seventies orange tone. Wide lapels, brown suits, and more sideburns.

      ‘And these,’ said Ewan, ‘are our recently deceased members. There’s Charles, I was telling you about him. Simon, Craig, Thomas… This is John: he was in the second wave on D-Day. And that’s my old mentor Edward. Lovely man; orphan, grew up in a children’s home, came from nothing and ended up with three butcher’s shops and a house in Rubislaw Den. Couldn’t have kids of his own so they adopted a little girl from a broken home.’ He pointed at a man with a ludicrous comb-over. ‘Robert there took in a wee boy with polio. Jane and I had two girls of our own, but I never forgot Edward’s example. So we adopted our youngest, Ben. Abandoned on the steps of St Nicholas Church the day after he was born. How could someone just throw away a life like that? Madness …’ Ewan stared at the photos in silence for a moment. Then went through them one by one: ‘Cancer, cancer, heart attack, pneumonia, cancer, Thomas had a stroke two weeks after his wife died; Edward and Sheila went in a car crash. Robert took an aneurysm on Union Street.’

      He tapped the glass. ‘One day I’ll be in there. And people will come in and laugh at my photo. I’ll be dead, but I’ll always be part of something. That’s important, isn’t it? Not to disappear into nothing …’

      ‘Pierdolona kurwa fuck.’ Andrzej Jaskólski jabbed at the start button again. ‘Work jebany piece of shit!’ He kicked the metal wall, but the mill still wouldn’t start. Typical: the boilers go down for two days and now the pierdolone bone mill was broken too. ‘Go to UK,’ said his wife, ‘earn lots of money, come back and set up own clinic in Warsaw. Be rich man.’ Kurwa mać. Degree in Orthopaedic Therapy and he ends up working in stinking rendering plant in stinking abattoir in stinking arse end of nowhere Scottish backwater.

      Another kick. ‘Start, dirty bitch fuck!’

      One more kick and the machine rumbled into life, the huge steel teeth at the bottom of the trough grinding through bones and off-cuts and fat.

      Only no chopped up bones fell into the next hopper.

       Ja pierdole!

      He grabbed the long wooden pole that leant against the wall – still not laughing at the kurwo foreman’s joke – and jabbed at the mass of bones.

      Poke, jab, poke. A sudden clunk, and the pile slumped. Grinding noise. Bone and gristle fragments chugged into the next hopper, ready to be torn up into even smaller pieces.

      Andrzej Jaskólski turned to put the pole back where he’d got СКАЧАТЬ