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

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       40

      A muffled scream. The sound of a body hammering against metal. Heather sat up, groggy, blinking in the darkness.

      Boom, boom, boom. ‘Help me! I don’t want to die!’ A woman’s voice, muffled, coming from somewhere outside the prison.

      ‘Kelley?’

      ‘How can it be Kelley? She’s asleep.’ Duncan was right – Kelley’s breathing came soft and rhythmic from the other side of the bars.

      ‘Kelley! Wake up! Can you hear that?’

      Boom, boom, boom. ‘HELP ME!’

      ‘Mmmph?’

      ‘There’s someone out there!’ Heather stood and felt her way into the darkness. ‘Hello?’

      ‘HELP ME!’ Boom, boom, boom.

      She put her ear against the prison’s metal wall.

      Boom, boom, boom.

      ‘Hello?’

      ‘Heather?’ Kelley yawned, shifting in the dark. ‘Heather? What’s going on?’

      ‘There’s someone out there… Hello?’ She banged her palm against the wall.

      ‘Help me! He killed my little sister! He killed Sandra! HELP ME!’

      ‘We can’t, we’re locked in!’

      ‘I DON’T WANT TO DIE!’ More screaming, then crying. And eventually silence.

      Heather backed away from the wall – her foot caught on the edge of the mattress and she stumbled backwards, arms flailing out for balance as she fell. BANG: the back of her head bounced off the bars.

      Muffled noises.

      ‘Heather?’

      ‘Honey, are you all right?’

      ‘Heather?’

      And the Dark took her.

      Rennie stifled a yawn. Stretched. Shivered. Then had a bit of a scratch at his trousers. ‘God I’m knackered… You see the papers this morning?’

      Logan looked up from the chest of drawers that lurked in the corner of the little room. ‘Did you check under the mattress?’ ‘Turrabrae Guesthouse’ was the most depressing B&B he’d ever been in: the walls were covered with cheap woodchip wallpaper; water stains on the ceiling; threadbare brown and orange carpet that was probably fashionable back in the seventies and hadn’t been changed since; a single bed that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a medieval torture chamber.

      So far this morning they’d visited two of the three abattoir workers who’d provided Marek Kowalczyk with an alibi for the night Tom and Hazel Stephen were snatched. And ‘Turrabrae Guesthouse’ was easily the worse. Piotr Nowak – alibi number three – wasn’t exactly living in the lap of luxury.

      Rennie sniffed. ‘You ever thought about getting married?’

      Logan pulled out the bottom drawer and carefully picked through the pile of paired-off socks. ‘You’re not my type.’

      ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot. You know, with Laura?’

      ‘Mattress!’

      ‘Eh? Oh, aye …’ The sound of rummaging. ‘Course it wouldn’t be for a while yet. Have to save up for a house.’

      The sock drawer contained nothing but socks. Logan gave the whole thing one last tug – pulling it out of the unit and onto the swirly brown carpet – then peered into the hole. Two magazines, both explicit, but nothing illegal.

      He stuck the magazines back where they’d come from and replaced the drawer, then stood at the little window, looking out at the dismal day in all its grey glory. Twenty to eleven on a cold November morning and it was probably warmer outside than in here. He could see DI Steel standing halfway down the garden path, smoking cigarettes and fiddling with her underwear. Logan let the curtain fall back. ‘You come all the way from Poland looking for a better life and what do you get? A manky box-room in a crappy little B&B and a job shovelling sheep heads into a skip.’

      ‘Give us a hand …’ Rennie was fighting with the saggy mattress, its stripy fabric stained and fraying round the edges. Logan helped him raise it all the way up, where gravity promptly folded it in half. Swearing, Rennie struggled it to the floor beside the single bed.

      It was a divan and the base unit looked just as bad as the fusty mattress.

      Logan’s phone made strangled metal chicken noises – Control calling to say they couldn’t get through to DI Steel, but Logan was to tell her the Polish police had just faxed over details on Kowalczyk and the three abattoir workers who’d alibied him. Only Piotr Nowak had prior, and it wasn’t for cannibalism – he was part of a gang who broke into industrial estates and stole anything not nailed down.

      Logan hung up as Rennie wrestled the saggy mattress back where came from, grumbling about bedbugs and pee stains.

      ‘Not so fast.’

      A pained look slid onto the constable’s face. ‘What?’

      ‘You didn’t check the base unit.’

      ‘Oh bloody hell …’ Rennie heaved the mattress back onto the floor again.

      It took both of them to heave the wooden-framed base up onto its side, and when they did they discovered an Aladdin’s cave. Assuming Aladdin had fallen on hard times, and instead of gold, jewels and coins he’d taken to hoarding pens, Post-its, staplers, telephones and four-hole punches. The divan was stuffed with office supplies, some still bearing little ‘PROPERTY OF ALABA MEATS LTD.’ stickers. There were even a couple of fax machines and a laptop.

      And right at the back: a holdall that looked eerily familiar.

      Rennie picked up a packet of Blu-Tack. ‘Not exactly the great train robbery, is it?’

      Logan slipped on a second pair of latex gloves and pulled the holdall from the pile of pilfered stationary. It was identical to the one Marek Kowalczyk was carrying on the abattoir’s CCTV tape, only it wasn’t full of blood and meat, it was full of whiteboard markers and DL envelopes.

      ‘Oh … bugger.’