Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin. Stuart MacBride

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      Insch was still in the incident room, giving orders and taking reports. From the look of things they’d had no joy in locating either Richard Erskine or Peter Lumley. The thought of those two little kids, out there, probably dead, took the edge off Logan’s good mood. He had no business grinning like a loon.

      He cornered the inspector and asked him who was in charge of the missing kneecaps case.

      ‘Why?’ asked Insch, his large face full of suspicion.

      ‘Because I’ve got a couple of leads for them.’

      ‘Oh aye?’

      Logan nodded, the grin seeping back onto his face as he repeated what Colin Miller had told him over lunch. When he’d finished Insch looked impressed.

      ‘Where the hell did you get all this?’ he asked.

      ‘Colin Miller. The journalist from the Press and Journal. The one you told me not to piss off.’

      Insch’s expression became unreadable. ‘I said don’t piss him off. I didn’t say anything about climbing into bed with him.’

      ‘What? I didn’t—’

      ‘Is this the first little chat you and this Colin Miller have had, Sergeant?’

      ‘I’d never seen him before yesterday.’

      Insch scowled at him, keeping silent; waiting for Logan to jump in and fill the uncomfortable pause with something incriminating.

      ‘Look, sir,’ said Logan, unable to stop himself. ‘He came to me. You can ask the front desk. He told me he had something that would help us.’

      ‘And what did you have to give him in return?’

      There was another pause, this one even more uncomfortable.

      ‘He wanted me to tell him about the investigation into the abductions and killings.’

      Insch stared at him. ‘And did you?’

      ‘I . . . I told him I’d have to run any information past you first, sir.’

      At this DI Insch smiled. ‘Good lad.’ He pulled a bag of wine gums out of his pocket and offered them to Logan. ‘But if I find out you’re telling me lies I’ll break you.’

       13

      Logan’s free lunch had turned into rampant indigestion. He’d lied to DI Insch and hoped to God he wasn’t going to get found out. After Colin Miller had told him all about the man with no kneecaps, Logan had reciprocated, detailing the missing child investigations. He’d been convinced he was doing good: establishing a rapport with an informant, building bridges with the local press. But Insch had acted as if he was selling secrets to the enemy. Logan had asked Insch for permission to tell Miller everything he’d already told him. And in the end Insch had agreed. God help him if the inspector ever found out the exchange had happened before he’d given the OK.

      Someone else Logan didn’t want finding that out was the inspector from Professional Standards, currently sitting on the opposite side of the interview room table, dressed in an immaculate black uniform. All parallel creases and shiny buttons. Inspector Napier: thinning ginger hair and a nose like a bottle opener. Asking lots and lots of questions about Logan’s return to the force, his recuperation, his status as police hero, and his lunch with Colin Miller.

      Smiling sincerely, Logan lied for all he was worth.

      Half an hour later he was back in his commandeered office, looking up at the map on the wall, rubbing at the burning sensation sitting in the middle of his chest. Trying not to think about getting fired.

      The blue business card Miller had given him was sitting in his top pocket. Maybe the reporter was right. Maybe he did deserve better than this. Maybe he could write a book about Angus Robertson: Catching the Mastrick Monster. It had a kind of ring to it. . .

      WPC Watson had been in while he was out having lunch, leaving a fresh stack of printouts next to his witness statements. Criminal and civil records of everyone on his list. Logan sifted through it, not liking what he found. Not one of them had form for kidnapping, killing and disposing of young girls’ bodies in a bin-bag.

      But Watson had been thorough. For each person she’d provided a break-down by age, telephone number, place of birth, national insurance number, occupation, length of time they’d lived at their current address. He had no idea how she’d managed to get hold of all this stuff. Just a shame none of it was of any use.

      Rosemount had always been something of a cultural melting pot and that was reflected in Watson’s list: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness, Newcastle. . . There was even a couple from the Isle of Man. Now that was exotic.

      Sighing, he pulled the stack of statements over again, the ones he’d marked as being close enough to number seventeen to share a wheelie-bin. He read the bio WPC Watson had produced and then re-read the corresponding statement, trying to get some picture of them from their words. It wasn’t easy: every time uniform took a statement they put it into police-statement-speak, a sort of bizarre, stilted English that was so far removed from the way people really spoke it was almost laughable.

      ‘I proceeded to work that morning,’ Logan read aloud, ‘having first removed the rubbish bag from my kitchen and placed it into the communal bin outside the building. . .’ Who the hell spoke like that? Normal people ‘went to work’: ‘proceeding to work’ was something only policemen did.

      He turned back to the front page of the statement to see who had been so weirdly misquoted. The name was sort of familiar: someone from Norman Chalmers’s building. Anderson. . . Logan smiled. It was the man whose bell they’d rung so that they could get into the building without Chalmers knowing. The one WPC Watson thought was up to something.

      According to her write-up Mr Cameron Anderson was in his mid-twenties and hailed from Edinburgh: which explained why he had a first name like Cameron. He worked for a firm of sub-sea engineers making remote operated vehicles for the oil industry. Somehow Logan could picture the nervous young man fiddling about with little remote-controlled submarines.

      The next person on the list wasn’t much more help and neither was the one after that, but he worked his way slowly through them anyway. If the killer was here they didn’t jump off the page and tell him about it.

      Finally Logan put the last statement on top of the pile and stretched, feeling his back pop and crack. A yawn threatened to tear his head in half and he let it rip, ending with a tiny, almost inaudible, burp. It was a quarter to seven and Logan had been poring over these damned statements for most of the day. It was time to go home.

      Out in the hallway the building was quiet. The bulk of the administrative work got done during the day and after the admin staff went home the place was a lot less noisy. Logan stopped off at the incident room to see if anything had happened while he’d been cloistered in the office looking at statements.

      There was a small contingent of uniform in the room: two of them answering the phone while the remaining two got on with filing the reports generated by the last shift. He wasn’t surprised to hear they’d had exactly the same amount of success as him. Bugger all.

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