Close to the Bone (30 page)

Logan climbed the steps.

A voice came from the garden, shouting over the drone of a lawnmower. Reuben. ‘Chloe? What’s wrong? ’

‘He’s back!’

Wee Hamish twitched, left hand trembling on the blanket. ‘Mmmpht? ’ Then he blinked watery red-rimmed eyes at Logan. ‘Nnngnn, tmmmwht dn we nnn. . .? ’

Nurse Slessor thumped up the stairs onto the decking. Grabbed Logan by the arm. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Mowat, I told him you were asleep, but he wouldn’t—’

‘Get off me.’ Logan shook her free. ‘Hamish, we need to talk. And we need to talk
now
.’

Wee Hamish reached up and pulled off the oxygen mask. ‘Logan. . .’ A smile. ‘To what do we owe the honour? ’

‘I told him, but he wouldn’t listen.’ She grabbed Logan’s arm again. ‘Reuben!’

A crackle of feet on gravel, puffing and heeching, and then Reuben’s voice growled up from the garden. ‘Bloody hell you doing here? ’

‘Hamish, I mean it.’

Thump – a steel-toecapped boot on the bottom step. ‘Did you not learn your lesson last time? ’

Logan turned, shoulders back, chin out. ‘You want to try again, Fat Boy? ’

Reuben’s scarred face creased around dark slitted eyes. ‘You’re bloody
dead
.’

‘Come on then; won’t be the first time I’ve battered the living crap out of you, will it? ’

Wee Hamish gave a dry rattling laugh, that ended in a wheeze. ‘Children, children. Behave or you’ll not get any ice cream.’

Logan stared straight ahead. ‘This fat piece of shite ambushed me on my doorstep Sunday morning. And your nurse gave him a fake alibi.’

‘I see. . .’ A cough. A sigh. ‘Reuben, did you ambush Detective Inspector McRae? ’

‘Course I didn’t.’

‘Chloe, was Reuben with you at the time of this alleged assault? ’

‘Yes, Mr Mowat.’

Wee Hamish nodded. ‘There we are then, you must’ve been mistaken, Logan.’

‘
Mistaken
? I WAS THERE!’

A cold smile didn’t go anywhere near the old man’s eyes. ‘Reuben has an alibi. He tells me he didn’t attack you, and I believe him. That’s an end to it.’

‘Is it hell!’ Logan wrenched his arms free from Nurse Slessor’s grip and took a step towards Reuben.

The big man grinned, showing off gaps in his teeth. ‘Anytime you’re ready, sunshine.’

Another leathery sigh from the wheelchair. ‘Chloe, why don’t you go make us a nice pot of tea. Reuben, I’m sure you’ve still got plenty to be getting on with.’

Reuben shrugged one shoulder, licked his lips. ‘No skin off my nose.’ Then he turned and swaggered off, hands in his pockets, whistling the theme tune to
The Great Escape
.

Nurse Slessor sniffed, wiped her trainers on the decking floor – as if she was a bull about to charge – then nodded and walked inside, head held high.

Wee Hamish dangled the oxygen mask from a hook built into the side of the electric wheelchair. ‘There: everyone’s friends again.’

Unbelievable. ‘Reuben was waiting for me,
on my doorstep
, at six in the morning! How can you take that vicious bastard’s—’

‘Loyalty goes both ways, Logan. I can’t expect my people to be loyal to me if I don’t reciprocate.’ He fumbled with the joystick for a moment, then the wheelchair whined forward and left, right at the edge of the decking. Off in the middle distance, Reuben was climbing back onboard a ride-on lawnmower.

Wee Hamish pointed with a shaky finger, twisted with arthritis. ‘Reuben sees himself as an alpha male. And when I go. . . When I go he expects to take over the pack. You’re a challenge to his ascension, so he does the only thing that makes sense to him: he lashes out. You just have to be the bigger man, accept that, and move on.’

Just accept being ambushed and punched in the face?

Logan scowled out as the lawnmower puttered into life. ‘What if he’s got a gun next time? ’

26

A pair of fat magpies strutted up and down on the grass, white breasts like little waistcoats, as if they were barristers debating some obscure point of law in a murder trial.

The china cup shook in Wee Hamish’s hand, tea sloshing from one side to the other. ‘The real worry comes after I’m gone.’

Logan settled back in the folding wooden chair. ‘You’re not—’

‘Oh, don’t worry: they gave me six months three years ago. I’m going nowhere without a fight.’

Reaching into his pocket, Logan pulled out the two envelopes and placed them on the little round table. ‘We need to talk about these.’

‘I looked into your necklacing victim, by the way. We had a couple of . . .
meetings
about it last night. No one’s admitting anything.’

‘They wouldn’t, would they.’

Wee Hamish smiled. ‘Logan, when you do something high-profile like that, it says, “Look at me, look what I do to people who cross me!” You have to take ownership of it, or it’s worthless as a warning.’

‘It’s not drugs-related.’ It never was.

‘Of course, I should never have abdicated responsibility for that part of my portfolio. Letting Reuben have his head was a weakness on my part. A good captain knows every inch of his ship.’

Logan topped up his tea. ‘You need to tell Reuben to back off.’

‘One thing I discovered this morning, is that we’ve got a drugs war going on. Nothing big, just a little one: a
skirmish
between some of our local entrepreneurs and a group of businessmen from the Far East.’

‘If he threatens me, or mine, I’m going to come for him.’

‘Yes.’ Wee Hamish chewed on his bottom lip for a moment, eyes creased up. ‘I’ve been thinking about that too. When he finds out I’ve made you executor, he may become somewhat . . . vociferous.’

‘I mean it.’

‘He’s a simple soul, Logan, not suited to the role of commanding the ship. He won’t chart a course around the icebergs, he’ll call for ramming speed and head right for them.’ Wee Hamish stared out into the garden. ‘The sensible thing would be to cut his lifeboat loose. . . But I’m too soft-hearted, that’s my problem.’

Soft-hearted? Aye, right.

Wee Hamish nodded. ‘I think your wisest course of action would be to take care of that as soon as you hear the news, before he moves against you.’

‘I don’t want. . .’ A sigh. ‘I can’t be executor. What am I supposed to do, hand out bits of your empire to the rival factions, sit back and hope they don’t kill each other and everyone in their path? I’m a police officer.’

‘The alternative is that Aberdeen goes full-steam ahead into the iceberg.’

‘I can’t do it.’

Wee Hamish smiled at him. ‘Look at this skirmish between the local lads and our Oriental friends: fighting over cannabis farms. A small thing, but it’ll get out of hand without someone sensible at the helm. People will always want drugs, Logan. And as long as people want them, someone will supply them. Supply and demand. Controlling it as a central entity means continuity, cuts down on conflict, keeps everyone safe and in their place.’

‘So what am I supposed to do, swap my warrant card for a claw-hammer? ’

He reached across and laid a twitching hand on top of Logan’s. The skin was papery; hot as if something deep inside was burning.

‘You should do whatever you think best.’

Like run a bloody mile.

Logan parked the crumbling Fiat next to DCI Steel’s MX5, successfully lowering the tone of the whole rear podium. Then leaned forward until his head rested against the steering wheel and stifled a yawn, mobile phone still clamped to his ear. ‘He basically told me I had to kill Reuben.’

Samantha made a sooking noise, like she was a car mechanic about to deliver very bad news. ‘
Maybe he’s right?
’

‘I can’t kill—’

‘
What if he came after me, would you kill him then? Because if not you’re in trouble, buster!
’

‘Well, yes, but that’s—’

‘
What if he hurt Jasmine? Or your brother? Or your mum? . . . Well, maybe not your mum, but the others?
’

‘I’m a police officer.’

‘
You’re a wimp, more like. Remember the talk we had about growing a pair?
’

Someone knocked on the passenger window, and Logan flinched. He turned his head and looked across the car. DCI Steel peered in at him, mouthing something and pointing at her watch.

Back to the phone, voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I don’t want to kill anyone.’

‘
Might not have any choice
.’ And Samantha was gone.

Logan stuck the phone in his pocket and climbed out. ‘What? ’

‘Where the hell have you been? ’

‘Dr Graham wants to do a facial reconstruction on the skeleton too.’

‘Aye, I’ll bet she does. I’m no’ made of money.’ Steel hauled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one off her battered Zippo. ‘The Weegie buggers get here at two. I
need
a suspect, Laz.’

He locked the car and made for the steps down to the mortuary. ‘How about Agnes Garfield: your missing teenager.’

Steel clumped along behind him. ‘She’s only a kid.’

‘She’s eighteen, obsessed with this
Witchfire
book, psychotic, and off her medication.’

Empty crisp packets, cigarette butts, and plastic fizzy-juice bottles were piled up in little drifts on the stairs. Logan picked his way through them then punched his ID into the keypad. ‘The Kintore body was lying in the middle of a magic circle identical to the one witch-finders use in the book. All the cuts – that was Agnes looking for the Devil’s mark, that’s in the book too. There was a knot of bones outside the back door, like the ones outside my house:
they’re
in the book. Of course it’s her.’

Inside, the hum and roar of the extractor fans made the ceiling tiles rattle.

Logan stuck his head into the staff room, but it was empty. The pathologists’ office too. The red light was on above the cutting-room door: probably still working on the poor sod who’d ended up tried for witchcraft on a kitchen floor in an abandoned house.

Steel slapped him on the shoulder. ‘You know what this means, don’t you? If you’d no’ farted about and actually
done
something about finding her, none of this would’ve happened! She’d be banged up in the loony bin, and those poor sods would still be alive.’

‘Think I don’t know that? ’ He pushed through the door into the viewing area – a small room with two seats and a heavy red velvet curtain down one wall. He pulled at the cord behind it and they creaked open.

Dr Graham was on the other side of the glass, where the bodies were normally displayed, hunched over her clay-covered skull, tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth. She looked up and smiled at them. Then turned the reconstructed head around and held it up.

Steel squinted at it. Took a step forward until her nose was pressed up against the glass. ‘Does he look familiar to you? ’

‘Who the hell are you? ’ Steel picked up the reconstructed head, turning it back and forth while the kettle boiled.

The staff room was just cold enough to be uncomfortable. Half-size lockers took up most of one wall, each of them decor-ated with stickers and bits cut out of newspapers. The one with the ‘S
HEILA
D
ALRYMPLE
’ nameplate was covered in
My Little Pony
stickers and unicorns and teddy bears in tutus. A lime-green Post-it note glared out from the saccharine montage, with ‘S
TOP
S
TEALING
M
Y
B
LOODY
J
AFFA
C
AKES!!!!!
’ scrawled across it in angry letters. A faint whiff of ruptured bowel and rotting meat oozed in through the gap under the staff-room door that led out onto the ‘dirty areas’, the parts of the mortuary members of the public weren’t allowed to see. The places where the bodies were loaded, stored, and dissected.

Logan dumped teabags into mugs. ‘Maybe he’s one of Agnes Garfield’s teachers? Or a friend of the family? ’

Steel held the head out at arm’s length. Closed one eye. ‘Looks a bit like Burns from accounting. . .’ She swapped eyes. ‘Who the hell are you? Why do I know you? ’

Dr Graham fetched the milk from the little fridge. ‘What about the skeleton, would you like me to get cracking on that one too? If I can get a cast of the skull on the go by lunchtime I could start in on the tissue depth markers by five-ish? ’

‘You’ve no’ proved
this
one’s any good yet. . .’ More squinting. ‘There’s something missing.’

‘Well, it’s not an exact science, there’s lots of interpretation involved. You can’t just push a button and hey-presto it’s perfect, we have to make assumptions. Like, there’s no way to tell if the subject has a moustache, or tattoos, or a beard, or warts, or a—’

‘Beard!’ Steel put the reconstruction down on the coffee table, amongst the copies of
Hello!
and
Heat
. Severed head meets celebrity cellulite. ‘Give it a beard. Big bushy one and a ratty ’tache.’

‘Erm . . . OK.’ She scuttled out of the room.

Steel sniffed. ‘Still no’ convinced this isn’t just a big steaming pile of useless.’

Logan plonked a mug of tea down in front of her. ‘We need to up the hunt for Agnes Garfield. I’ve got, “Have you seen this girl?” posters up all over the place, but they’re sod-all use now she’s dyed her hair and changed her appearance. Have to get the papers involved, TV too; release that footage from the cash-machine security camera.’

‘Still don’t see it.’

Clunk, and Dr Graham was back with an armful of cotton wadding. She sank into one of the chairs, knocking a stack of gossip mags off the coffee table and onto the floor. ‘Oops.’ She picked up the head and fiddled the wadding around the jaw, pressing it into the clay. ‘It’s the stuff they use to pack the heads after they’ve removed the brain. . .’ Some more fiddling. A bit of a trim with a pair of scissors. Then she nodded and held the head up again. With the red-brown clay skin, and the grey wadding beard, he looked like a sunburned Santa Claus. ‘How’s that? ’

A slow smile unfurled across Steel’s face. ‘The very dab. . .’ She pointed. ‘Laz, look who it is.’

Logan stared at it. ‘Who? ’