Dark Blood. Stuart MacBride

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       6

      ‘Aw, Jesus, not again!’ Detective Sergeant Mark MacDonald wrinkled his nose, then slapped a hand over his face, hiding his wee goatee beard. ‘Ack…’ He grabbed a folder from his in-tray and fanned it back and forth, sending paperwork fluttering across Logan’s desk.

      ‘What are you…’ Logan frowned, and then the smell hit him. ‘Bloody hell, Bob!’

      DS Bob Marshall just grinned. If God existed, He hadn’t been paying a lot of attention when He’d put Bob together. Big ears stuck out at right-angles from a square head with a bald patch at the back and a single, thick eyebrow at the front. Arms like hairy string. A monkey in a machine-washable suit.

      ‘Christ!’ Mark blinked, then hauled the door open. ‘What’ve you been eating?’

      Bob patted the sides of his stomach. ‘Can’t beat cauliflower cheese and chips.’

      ‘Oh no it’s everywhere…’ Logan stood, backing away into the corner of the little walled-off section of the CID office, built to house the detective sergeants. Six desks – four for dayshift, two for night – all but one covered in drifts of paperwork and ring binders, monitor, keyboard, and overflowing in-tray. The walls were just about visible between the procedural flowcharts, a corkboard covered with mugshots and memos, a whiteboard with each DS’s name written above a list of active cases, another one with a schematic of some drug dealer’s house scrawled in blue marker pen. And a yellow-and-black biohazard triangle mounted above Bob’s desk.

      Mark wafted the door open and closed, and open and closed… ‘Never mind fucking Iraq, bloody United Nations should invade your arse. That’s a weapon of mass destruction, right there!’

      ‘I can’t help it if I’m talented.’

      Gradually the smell faded, and people got back to work.

      Logan finished a report on two indecent exposures in Trinity Cemetery – you’d have to be a brave man to wave your willy about in January in Aberdeen – then called up his internet browser and went looking for Billy Adams. 12,900,000 results in Google.

      He refined the search criteria, narrowing it down to Newcastle. 358 results. Apparently there was a featherweight boxer called Billy Adams in the fifties, a guitarist with Dexy’s Midnight Runners in the eighties, a bunch of businessmen, some football fans… Then Logan included Knox’s name in the search.

      An article from the Newcastle Evening Chronicle was top of the list: ‘MISSING OFFICER’S BODY FOUND.’

      There were more links to the Newcastle Journal, News Post Leader, Sunday Sun, Morpeth Herald, and Whitley Bay News Guardian. Even a few of the national broadsheets had got in on the act. Logan clicked on the Chronicle link.

      Under the headline was a photo of a blue SOC tent, the kind you put up to preserve a crime scene. It was surrounded by patchy bushes with some trees and the leg of a pylon in the background, an IB technician in protective gear walking towards the camera, carrying a black plastic box. Further down the article there was another photo: a smiling man with short blond hair, squint nose, blue eyes. According to the caption, it was ‘DETECTIVE INSPECTOR BILLY ADAMS (42)’

      Apparently they’d found his body in the family Ford Mondeo on a patch of wasteland to the north of Newcastle. The story didn’t have a lot of detail on the cause of death – not surprisingly – concentrating instead on how police search teams had been looking for Adams since he’d gone missing from his home the Wednesday before. There was a quote from his wife. One from the detective inspector who’d headed up the search. Another from the young man who’d found the car. And a small potted history of DI Adams’s career. Drug seizures, three murder enquiries, one high-profile kidnapping that ended in disaster…

      Logan dug the phone out from under a pile of partially completed crime reports and called Northumbria Police Headquarters.

      ‘Well?’ Detective Inspector Beardy Beattie’s office was crowded with box files – piled up on the carpet, the shelves, the windowsill, even the visitor’s chair. So Logan had to stand. The only place not covered in boxes was Beattie’s desk. That СКАЧАТЬ