Dark Blood. Stuart MacBride

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      ‘Are you out of your bloody mind?’ DI Steel slammed the office door behind her. ‘Did I say you could sit down?’

      Logan hauled himself up out of her visitor’s chair. ‘He was being a wanker.’

      ‘Course he was: he’s a sodding superintendent, it’s his job to be a wanker! But you … you’re making a fucking calling out of it!’ She jabbed Logan in the chest with a red-painted fingernail. ‘What did I tell you outside in the car park?’

      ‘He started it.’

      She threw her hands in the air. ‘That’s it. I give up. You want to screw up your career? Go ahead. Be my sodding guest.’ She barged past and collapsed in her chair, running a hand across her forehead. ‘Get out of my sight. Go on: bugger off and play with the Diddy Men or something. I don’t want to look at you any more.’

      Logan let himself out.

      The Offender Management Unit offices smelled of new paint and sausages. The walls were papered with mugshots and SOPOs, interspersed with the occasional cartoon clipped out of the Aberdeen Examiner. A whiteboard, mounted above a gurgling radiator, was covered with grey magnetic strips, each one bearing the name of someone on the Sex Offenders’ Register due a trip to court in the not too distant future.

      Logan stood at an unwashed window and stared out, past the dead wasps and fly carcasses, at the rainy streets of Bucksburn. Dual carriageway. A roundabout. Some houses. A McDonald’s. Grey clouds… Being on the second floor didn’t help the view any.

      ‘I hear you went off on one at the MAPPA meeting this morning.’

      Logan turned to find PC Hamster from Knox’s house standing in the doorway, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, ginger hair plastered to her head from the rain. What was her name, Irvine? Something like that. ‘It wasn’t—’

      ‘About time someone stood up to these buggers down south.’ She chucked a folder into someone’s in-tray. ‘Stephen Beech was bad enough – comes up here from Cambridge because he fancies living by the sea, and we have to look after him round the clock. OK, Sacro did the day-to-day stuff, but it still cost a sodding fortune: two hundred grand a year to watch one rapist. You believe that? Now every bastard thinks we’re the perverts’ Butlins of the North.’

      She closed her eyes, groaned, then ran a hand through her wet hair. ‘God, what a week…’

      Logan knew how she felt.

      PC Irvine sighed. ‘Anyway, better get going. I’ll drive. Paul’s meeting us there.’

      Logan followed her out through the door. ‘Do you believe Knox when he says he’s found God?’

      ‘Doesn’t really matter does it? Sex offenders aren’t sex offenders because they think it’s going to be fun, they’re sex offenders because somewhere down the line it’s been ingrained into them.’ She led the way down the corridor, past a mothballed HOLMES suite, heading for the stairs.

      She shoved the door to the stairwell open. ‘For Knox, raping old men is normal behaviour. Probably can’t understand why everyone’s not doing it. We’re the perverts in his eyes.’

      They passed a couple of uniformed officers, humping a collection of dusty file boxes up the stairs.

      Irvine smiled. ‘Careful there, Jim, don’t want people to see you working.’

      ‘Screw you, Barbara.’ But he was grinning when he said it.

      ‘And that’s kinda the problem.’ She pushed out through the back door and into the dreich afternoon. Drizzle drifted down from a slate-grey sky, cold and damp. The rear car park was virtually empty, just a pair of battered patrol cars – front bumpers buckled, side panels a mix of scrapes, dents and rust; a grubby white van with the council logo on the side; a brand-new Volvo estate; and Logan’s manky brown Fiat. ‘Deep down Knox doesn’t really believe he’s done anything wrong.’

      Irvine pointed a key fob at the council van. Stopped. Gave the fob a jiggle. Tried again. Swore. Marched over and rammed the key in the door lock. ‘Bloody thing.’

      Logan shifted a stack of paperwork from the passenger seat into the footwell, then clambered in. He hauled on his seatbelt as Irvine started the van up. A rumbling diesel rattle, the gearstick vibrating like an over-sized sex toy.

      She wrestled with the wheel and the van inched out of the car park. ‘God I miss power steering…’

      They circled the Bucksburn roundabout, heading along the dual carriageway back towards town.

      ‘So,’ Irvine dragged the steering wheel to the left, juddering them around one of Aberdeen City Council’s world-beating collection of potholes, ‘what’s the story? You with us full time now? Just paying a flying visit? Seeing how the other half lives?’

      Logan shrugged. ‘Let’s just say I’m not flavour of the month with my guv’nor.’

      ‘Ah,’ her voice was monotone, ‘so you’re here as punishment.’

      ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

      ‘No, no, it’s OK. I mean, what sort of loser wants to spend all day dealing with rapists, flashers, and paedophiles, right?’

      ‘It was Steel’s idea, I’m just—’

      ‘Slumming it with the Diddy Men?’

      ‘It’s not—’

      She grinned at him. ‘I’m pulling your leg. It’s OK, I like what I do. Might sound weird, but I get a lot of satisfaction out of keeping people’s kids, and wives, and girlfriends—’

      ‘And grandads.’

      ‘—and grandads safe. Someone has to do it, right? And I happen to be good at it.’

      ‘No pervert left behind.’

      Irvine shrugged. ‘Something like that, yeah.’

      ‘How’s it going, Richard?’ Constable Irvine settled on the dusty couch, dumped her bag on the floor, and dug out a bundle of badly photocopied forms, held together with a pair of green treasury tags. The blotchy cover read ‘ACCUTE-2007 SCORING GUIDE’.

      The dusty lounge was silent for a moment, just the tick … tick … tick of the carriage clock and the creak of floorboards from a room above.

      Logan leant back against the windowsill. The place still had that oppressive, throat-clogging taint of mildew, the air cold enough to make his breath steam.

      Knox had taken the armchair nearest the broken electric fire. Knees together, arms wrapped around that same tatty carrier bag from Asda. He sniffed. ‘OK, I suppose.’

      ‘Good. That’s good.’

      More silence.

      Knox coughed.

      Logan checked his watch. God this was exciting.

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