Dying Light (10 page)

There was an uncomfortable silence. And then PC Steve said, ‘Jesus, sir, morbid much?’ Insch had to agree. They picked their way carefully through the debris and back outside; there was nothing else to see here anyway.

Logan stood on the top step, looking up and down the deserted street. ‘What did you find when you searched the other buildings?’

‘Not a bloody thing.’

Logan nodded and wandered out into the road, slowly turning through three hundred and sixty degrees, taking in the boarded-up houses on both sides of the street. If he was the sick bastard who’d screwed the door shut so that three men, two women and a nine-month-old baby girl would be roasted alive, he’d want to hang about and watch them burn. That would be where the fun was. He crossed the road, trying the door handles, looking for one that wasn’t locked… Two houses up, something caught his eye, something grey and squishy, trapped in the corner of the doorframe. It was nearly invisible: a disposable tissue, soaked transparent by the rain and slowly disintegrating. He pulled out a small, clear evidence baggie and turned it inside out, using it like a makeshift mitten to scoop up the tissue before flipping the baggie round the right way again, trapping the contents inside. A shadow fell across the doorway.

‘What is it?’ DI Insch.

Logan risked a sniff at the open evidence bag. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, it’s a wankerchief. Your man probably stood here to watch the place burn, listen to them scream as they died, tossing himself off to the smell of roasting human flesh.’

Insch wrinkled his nose. ‘PC Jacobs was right: you are a morbid bastard.’

The woman next door was drunk again. Out in her back garden with the radio blaring Northsound One, staggering about in time to the music, swigging from a bottle of wine, not caring that it was pouring with rain. She just wasn’t right in the head, that much had been clear from the moment they’d moved in: her and her strange, pointy-faced boyfriend and their huge black Labrador. He was a lovely dog, a great slobbery lump of affection, but there had been no sign of him for nearly two weeks. The woman said he’d probably run away. That he was an ungrateful bastard and didn’t deserve a home.

She said the same thing about her boyfriend.

Shaking her head, Ailsa Cruickshank turned away from the window and finished making the bed. The woman next door didn’t care that her dog was missing, so it had been up to Ailsa to make up little laminated posters and fix them to the lampposts and shop windows all over Westhill. Never let it be said that she didn’t do her bit.

Outside, the noise got even worse as the woman started singing along with some rap ‘song’ with the swearwords bleeped out. Only the woman next door wasn’t censored like the radio; she roared out the obscenities at the top of her voice. Shuddering, Ailsa went through to the lounge and turned her own television up loud. The woman wasn’t right in the head: everyone knew it – she was on tablets. Abusive, drunken, violent; she was every neighbour’s worst nightmare.
How were Ailsa
and Gavin supposed to start a family with that harpy
screeching and yelling next door?
Gavin and the woman were at loggerheads the whole time, arguing over the noise, the language, calling the police… Ailsa shook her head sadly, watching as her neighbour slipped on the rain-soaked grass, clanged her head off the whirly washing line and lay there crying for a minute, before swearing and screaming, hurling her wine bottle to explode against the fence. Ailsa shivered: she was going to end up hurting someone; she just knew it.

Union Grove looked a lot more posh than it actually was: a long avenue of granite tenements branching off Holburn Street in the city’s west end, lined with parked cars and the occasional tree. Brooding in the rain. The address they had for Graham Kennedy was a top-floor flat in one of the grubbier buildings, the communal front door caked with layers of blue and green blistered paint. The street was empty, except for a trio of small
kids standing in a doorway across the road eating crisps, watching the police with interest. A patrol car, Alpha Four Six, was already sitting out front as PC Steve parked Insch’s Range Rover half a mile from the kerb, getting an earful from the inspector for his efforts. Blushing furiously he shoogled the car forwards and backwards until the pavement was within walking distance. He was told to stay behind and watch the spaniel.

On the inspector’s orders Alpha Four Six had brought a family liaison officer, a nervous young man with a permanently runny nose and two left feet. After a damp handshake he hurried after Insch and Logan into the building, out of the rain, confessing on the way that this was his first case. Insch took pity on the man and gave him a fruit pastille, for which he was obscenely grateful. The stairs up to the top floor were covered in a shabby, threadbare carpet, the walls in peeling flock wallpaper. Everything had that unmistakable, stinging reek of cat piss. Flat number five: brown door, fading brass number screwed to the wood and a plaque bearing the legend ‘M
R
& M
RS
K
ENNEDY
’.

‘Right,’ said Insch, offering round the fruit pastilles again, ‘this is how it works: we go in, I announce the death.’ He pointed the packet of sweets at Logan. ‘DS McRae has a bit of a poke about while the family are still in shock.’ The pastilles came round to point at Mr Runny Nose. ‘You make the tea.’ The young man looked as if he was about to complain at being relegated to
tea-boy, but Insch cut him off at the pass. ‘You’ll get to use all that touchy-feely crap they taught you once we’ve gone. Till then: I take milk, two sugars and DS McRae’s just milk. OK?’

The family liaison officer mumbled ‘OK’ as Logan rang the bell. And then they waited. And waited. And waited… Finally a light blossomed in the fanlight above the door. Sounds of shuffling and an old lady’s voice saying, ‘Who is it?’

‘Mrs Kennedy?’ Insch held his warrant card up in front of the spy hole. ‘Can we come in please?’ The chain rattled and the door opened a crack, revealing a weather-beaten face with big glasses and a grey perm. She eyed the policemen on her doorstep with concern. There had been a lot of break-ins in the street over the last couple of years – one old lady had ended up in hospital. The inspector handed her his warrant card and she held it at arm’s length, peering at it over the top of her spectacles. The inspector’s voice was soft: ‘Please, it’s important.’

The door closed, there was some rattling and then it opened all the way, exposing a grubby hallway that ran right to left, peppered with seventies-style plywood doors. She led them into a large lounge done up in faded-yellow wallpaper with orange and red roses on it. A pair of rickety couches sat in the middle of a swirly-patterned carpet, wood and fabric groaning alarmingly as Insch sat down and the old lady fussed over a large orange tabby cat the size of a beach ball.

‘Mrs Kennedy,’ said Insch as the huge cat hopped up onto the coffee table and started licking its bum. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news for you: it’s your grandson, Graham. He was one of the people who died in the fire on Monday night. I’m sorry.’

‘Oh my God…’ She clutched at the cat, dragging it away from its ablutions. It sagged into her lap, legs stuck out at right angles, like an over-inflated set of ginger bagpipes.

‘Mrs Kennedy, do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt your grandson?’

She shook her head, her eyes filling up with tears. ‘Oh God, Graham… You shouldn’t have to bury your grandchildren!’ The family liaison officer was dispatched to make the tea while Logan surreptitiously excused himself and had a quick look round the flat. It was a big place, shabby, but nothing a couple of coats of paint wouldn’t fix. He poked from room to room, peering under beds, into wardrobes and drawers. All the time the muted tones of DI Insch and the sobbing woman leaked through the closed lounge door. Kitchen, bathroom, spare room, Mrs Kennedy’s bedroom with its certificates of merit and group photographs of school children… Only one of the doors leading off the hallway was locked: from the look of things the stairs up to the attic, but Graham’s room was open, the bed made, the clothes all neatly folded and put away, all the socks paired off, not so much as a porn mag under the bed. It didn’t fit the image Logan had of Graham
Kennedy from reading his criminal record. Minor assault, breaking and entering, possession with intent… Small stuff mostly, but it all added up. He got back to the living room just in time to hear DI Insch say, ‘We’ll let ourselves out.’ Leaving the family liaison officer behind.

They stopped at the communal front door, looking out at the rain drumming on the car roofs. ‘Well?’ asked Insch.

‘Nothing. Place is clean as a whistle. If he kept any gear, he wasn’t doing it at granny’s house.’

Insch nodded and pulled out the last of the fruit pastilles, munching sadly. ‘Poor cow: she raised him pretty much single-handed. Graham’s parents died when he was three, then her husband snuffs it a year later.’ He sighed. ‘That’s her whole family gone now.’

‘She say anything about what Graham was up to?’

The inspector shook his head. ‘Far as she was concerned he was a perfect little angel. Said he only got into trouble because of his friends – who she never approved of. Been leading him astray ever since secondary school.’

‘Don’t suppose she happens to know their—’

DI Insch held up a notebook with five names scribbled on it. ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’ He stuffed the notebook back in his pocket. ‘Right, back to the station. You’re supposed to be off and I’ve got an investigation to run.’

* * *

When Logan finally got back to the flat Jackie wasn’t there, just a note pinned to the fridge: G
OT
E
XTENDED
N
IGHT
S
HIFT
– B
ACK
T
OMORROW
. N
O
‘L
OVE
J
ACKIE
’, or even ‘F
OND
R
EGARDS
’. So he’d had to fend for himself, which involved a fourteen-inch pizza and two bottles of wine.

Sunday didn’t exactly get off to an auspicious start: he woke up alone, mooched about the flat feeling like crap, then microwaved the last two slices of pizza for breakfast. Standing naked in the kitchen, munching on a reheated spicy beef with extra cheese and staring morosely out at the intermittent rain, he had to admit the diet wasn’t going too well. His scar-crossed stomach wasn’t so much washboard-flat as mangle-bulgy. And feeling more than a little unsettled.

Jackie still wasn’t back by half ten, so Logan took off. She didn’t want to speak to him? Sod her. He had better things to do with his time than mope about the flat like a bloody lovesick teenager. He just didn’t know what those things were. So he went looking for them on the streets of Aberdeen.

There was an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective playing at the Belmont theatre. That would do. A whole day watching Cary Grant getting chased by aeroplanes, Norman Bates peeping on guests in the shower, James Stewart almost falling off rooftops…
North by North West
was just reaching its climax when Logan’s mobile went off, the bleeping and pinging cutting across the fight on
Mount Rushmore. Angry muttering filled the small theatre as Logan cursed and dragged the phone out of his pocket. His finger was going for the off button when he recognized the number: Detective Inspector Steel. ‘Damn.’ Apologizing, he hurried down the aisle and out into the corridor, closing the doors behind him before taking the call.

DI Steel brought him up to speed with eight words: Jamie McKinnon. Attempted suicide. Accident and Emergency. Now!

Aberdeen Royal Infirmary was the biggest hospital in the North-east of Scotland, but you wouldn’t know that to look at its A&E waiting room. The floor had that nasty, sticky thing going for it, a faint reek of vomit easily discernible through pine disinfectant. A short Asian nurse escorted them through the building to a large public ward, most of which was taken up with elderly men and the smell of boiled cabbage. Jamie McKinnon had been in surgery for a little over an hour, but now he was sitting up in bed, looking groggy, with a big, purple bruise covering one side of his face, the eye swollen almost shut, his top lip split and raw. He flinched as DI Steel plonked herself down on his bed.

‘Jamie, Jamie, Jamie,’ she said, patting his hand. ‘If you missed me, you just had to say. You didn’t need to do all this just to get my attention.’

He pulled his hand away and scowled at her with his good eye.

‘I’m no’ speaking to you. Bugger off.’

Steel smiled at him. ‘Prison’s done nothing to dull your razor-sharp wit, has it, Jamie my boy?’

Jamie just stared at the far wall.

‘So.’ Steel bounced up and down on the bed, making the springs squeak. ‘Why’d you do it, Jamie? Racked with guilt about killing your woman? Looking for the quick way out? Much better you just talk to me. A lot less painful.’ She kept it up for a full ten minutes, teasing him, poking fun, being bitchy about Rosie Williams, the love of his life. Not surprisingly Jamie didn’t tell her anything.

Logan – who’d spent the interview cringing with embarrassment at the inspector’s crass technique – waited until she’d stomped off for a cigarette, leaving him alone with Jamie McKinnon, before saying anything. ‘You know, you don’t have to go through this on your own, Jamie. The prison has counsellors. You could—’

‘Who the fuck does she think she is?’

‘What?’

‘Wrinkly old hag, coming in here, treating me like dirt! I’m no’ dirt! I’m a fucking human being!’

‘I know you are, Jamie.’ Logan settled himself down in the spot Steel had vacated. ‘Who did the number on your face?’

Jamie raised a hand to his swollen eye, touching the puffy flesh with tender fingers. ‘Don’t want to talk about it.’

‘You sure? Some bastard takes his bad day out on you and you’re OK with that?’

A big, shuddering sigh escaped Jamie McKinnon. He slumped further into the pillows. ‘Don’t know his name. John something or other. He wanted some… stuff.’ He shrugged. ‘You know, but I didn’t have any! I’m in prison, for fuck’s sake. Where the hell am I going to get smack from? Only he says he knows I’ve got it and why won’t I sell it to him?’

‘So he beat you up?’

McKinnon forced a brave smile. ‘Didn’t beat me up. I fucked him over good…’ Logan recognized a bare-faced lie when he heard one.

‘How come he thought you were holding?’

A shrug, and the forced smile disappeared. ‘Don’t know.’

Logan settled back and gave him a blank stare, letting the silence grow. Jamie shifted uncomfortably, making the starchy white sheets crackle. ‘Look, I know… I
used
to know people, OK? I could get hold of things.’

‘What kind of things?’

McKinnon looked at him as if he was stupid. ‘You bloody well know what kind of things.’

‘So this violent scrotum thought your friends would supply you some stuff, even if you were inside?’

A small, humourless laugh and Jamie bit his lip, not hard, but enough to open up the split in it, fresh red oozing up through the yellow-scarlet crust. ‘Won’t be getting nothing for no one any more…’

‘No?’ Logan had a shrewd idea who Jamie’s suppliers had been, and where they were now: filling a collection of body-bags in Isobel’s morgue. ‘Where you going to get your stuff from now?’

There was a long pause, and then: ‘I didn’t kill her.’

‘I know you say that, Jamie, but there’s forensic evidence and witnesses and you’ve battered her before—’

Jamie sniffed, tears starting. ‘I loved her.’

Logan frowned. No matter what Steel said, he was beginning to get the nasty feeling that Jamie might actually be telling the truth. ‘Tell me about what happened that night. Right from the start.’