Broken Skin (24 page)

35

Half past two and Logan was getting ready to shut down his computer when DC Rennie swore his way into the room, holding a wodge of damp paper towels against his cheek. 'Bastard fucking shite bastard fuck ...'

'What happened to you?'

'Your bloody beardy-weirdie took a swing at me! Took three of us to get him in a bloody cell.'

'He's a primary school teacher.'

'He's a bastard!' Pulling away the damp towels and fingering the angry red welt beneath. 'I was on a promise tonight as well ...' Rennie stopped and glowered at the tissue, then hurled it into the bin. 'Insch wants to know if you need a lift tonight. To the rehearsal?'

Logan shook his head. 'I'm going home. Anyway, thought you lot only met on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday.'

'Two weeks till we're on, so it's pretty much every night from now till--'

'So who's supposed to watch Macintyre then?'

Rennie blushed. 'I can come back later if--'

'It's Jackie, isn't it? For God's sake!' If she was supposed to watch the footballer's house every night for the next two weeks she'd be in a permanent foul mood. 'What if she's supposed to be on nights, or the back shift?'

Rennie shrugged. 'I'm just doing what I'm told.'

'This is stupid.' Logan stood. 'We know Macintyre's not hunting in Aberdeen any more; all we have to do is stick his number plates into the ANPR system and call Tayside if he leaves the city.'

'Er ... the inspector doesn't want anyone else knowing about--'

'Yeah? Well guess what? I don't care.' He grabbed his coat and headed downstairs, Rennie trailing along behind him like some sort of bloody puppy, yapping away about how Insch wouldn't like it and wouldn't it be better to just keep their heads down ...

The windowless CCTV room was quiet, lit by a wall of little fourteen-inch television screens: seventy-one of them flickering away, showing different views of Aberdeen. Three operators sat at the central desk, headphones on, working the cameras by remote control and drinking mugs of tea. Logan grabbed the inspector in charge and asked if he could have a word in the review suite across the corridor. 'Can you do me a favour?' he asked when the door was shut, leaving Rennie standing outside, looking anxious. 'I need these number plates in the ANPR.' Scribbling down the registrations for all of Rob Macintyre's vehicles. Being personalized vanity plates, they were easy enough to remember.

The inspector took the list, holding the thing as if it was poisonous. 'Why?'

'Because you owe me.'

He thought about it. 'We can't just stick number plates in the system willy-nilly. I mean there's an audit trail and--'

'If any of those cars leave town - you give me a call. Day or night. Pretend Insch said to watch them a couple of weeks ago.'

'Insch?' The inspector looked down at the list, frowned, then said, 'These Rob Macintyre's cars? Coz if they are, they're already in the system. They were set up ages ago. No one told us to stop monitoring them, so we didn't.'

In Aberdeen, the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system monitored every car entering or leaving the city by a major road, recording the licence plate and searching for it in the local and national databases. If the car was on the 'watch' list, it got pinged. Rob Macintyre's cars were
all
on the watch list. None of them had been ID'd leaving Aberdeen. Logan read through the log files again and swore. 'What about Dundee?'

The inspector shook his head. 'Nothing. If they'd clocked his car they'd have called us. It's all the same database.'

'Damn ...' Logan sat back on the desk in the small room. 'Do us a favour and give them a call, OK?'

'It won't do any good. They--'

'Get them to pull their CCTV for the road into Dundee - maybe he's obscured his number plate? He could have got one of those special ones off the internet--'

'Believe it or not, we've already done it. Insch was in here shouting the odds when the first copycat rape happened. Same again with the second.
We
checked.
Tayside
checked. Macintyre just wasn't there.'

Out in the corridor Rennie was trying, and failing, to chat up one of the admin assistants. Logan marched right past, through the door and down the stairs. Rennie scurried after him. 'Er ... he's not going to tell anyone, is he? Insch'll kill me if he--'

'It can't be Macintyre - his car would've set off the ANPR. It has to be a copycat. That, or it was never Macintyre in the first place.'

Rennie groaned. 'The Inspector isn't going to like that.'

'Tough.' He passed through the back door and out into the snow-shrouded car park.

'So,' said Rennie, sliding in the icy slush, 'you coming, then? To the rehearsal?'

'No.'

'Aw, come on! Please, Insch thinks--'

'I don't care! I'm not spending my evening watching you lot ponce about on stage forgetting your lines. So you can stop pouting: I'm not going.'

36

The Baptist church hall was every bit as cold and depressing as Logan had expected: dark wooden floorboards, stained by years of dirty shoes, pockmarked with tiny high-heel dimples; someone had given the room a coat of magnolia a long time ago, but it had been ignored ever since, the paintwork flaking and peeling as if the place had a nasty dose of eczema. The inspector sat at a small, collapsible desk, watching as his gentlemen from Japan and schoolgirls lurched through the operetta.

Insch's cast were ...
challenged
was probably the polite way to put it. They didn't know their lines, forgot where they were supposed to be and when they were supposed to be there, sending the inspector into regular, purple-faced fits about timing, places, and learning the bloody words. The only person he didn't yell at was Debbie Kerr: AKA Debs - the woman playing Katisha - and Logan could see why. She was the only one of them who seemed to have any clue what she was doing. Rennie certainly didn't - Logan had seen more coordinated jellyfish.

He lasted two whole hours before making his excuses, picking his moment carefully, when the inspector was too busy shouting to notice.

There wasn't much of a queue in the Ashvale chip shop that night, just a couple of tweedy-looking women peering at the menu, arguing over whose turn it was to pay. Logan got two haddock suppers with pickled onions, Irn-Bru, and a polystyrene cup of mushy peas to go, stuffing the plastic bag of fish and chips down the front of his jacket, vinegar-scented steam rising up around his face as he hurried along Great Western Road.

The snow had kept up a slow, relentless pace: fat, wet flakes of white that stuck to his hair and jacket, piled up in the gardens, or turned to turd-brown slush in the gutters. When he was young, the snow and the rain had hit long before Christmas, making the school holidays a time for sledging, pornographic snowmen, and being pelted with snowballs, but as the years went by the season for snow had become erratic. Now it came anytime between December and April, the blizzards howling in to turn the world all Dr Zhivago. The north-east of Scotland, twinned with Siberia.

By the time he reached Macintyre's road his hands, feet and face were frozen, but sweat trickled down the small of his back. The result of marching along in a thick padded jacket with a bag of fish suppers stuffed up his simmit.

Jackie was parked in the same space as before, where she could watch the footballer's house without sitting right in front of it. She looked surprised to see him as he climbed in beside her. 'I didn't--'

'Fish and chips.' Logan, dug the bags out from under his jacket. 'Thought you'd be tired of cold sandwiches and cups of thermos coffee.' She accepted a paper parcel and unfolded it, filling the car with warm, tasty smells.

'Thanks.' They ate in silence.

Sunday morning should have involved nothing more strenuous than a lie-in and a late breakfast. Instead it creaked and groaned after a night spent in the passenger seat of a manky Vauxhall Vectra. Predawn had turned the sky purple, slowly lightening between the silent grey buildings, making the snow glow pink in the gloom. Jackie was fast asleep in the driver's seat, legs splayed out like a frog, snoring gently with her mouth open. Very feminine. But at least they were on speaking terms again.

Logan tried to stretch, yawned, shook his head, then checked his watch. Six twenty-two. He knew this was a complete waste of time - the ANPR would have picked Macintyre up if he really was driving to Dundee to attack women - but if it meant an end to the fighting and angry silences, he was prepared to put up with an uncomfortable night in a filthy car. Even if it was his day off.

There was a light on in one of Macintyre's upper rooms and had been for nearly fifteen minutes. The front door opened and Macintyre stepped out into the early morning cold, a heavy holdall in one hand, a mobile phone clamped to his ear with the other. Logan leant over and shook Jackie's shoulder.

She surfaced with a, 'Phff, emem, neghe ...' blinking and yawning, as Macintyre locked up then climbed into his brand-new silver Audi with the personalised number plates.

She didn't pull out until Macintyre was down at the end of the street, indicating left onto Great Western Road. Right would have taken him to the junction with South Anderson Drive and the road to Dundee. Left went towards the town centre.

They followed him at a safe distance, joining a convoy of cars crawling along behind a council gritter, its yellow flashing lights reflecting back from dark and lifeless shop windows all the way down Union Street, then along King Street too ... Macintyre took a right halfway down, and so did Jackie, leaving the main road for a snow-covered side street, hanging back as far as possible.

The footballer pulled into the car park opposite Pittodrie Football Stadium, but Jackie kept on going, drifting past, then stopping at the end of the road, where they could watch Macintyre climb out of his car, march round the back, take out the large holdall, then swagger off towards the players' entrance. Giving some slope-foreheaded troglodyte a high five on the way.

'Sod it,' said Logan, 'he's just going to morning practice.'

But just before the footballer disappeared into the ground, Logan could have sworn he looked directly at them and winked.

The Inversnecky Cafe was something of an institution in Aberdeen: a dark green, single-storey building, lurking on the seafront along with half a dozen other ice cream places and restaurants, facing out towards the grey, wintry North Sea. The amusement arcade on the corner was open, but it was unlikely to be doing a lot of business on a freezing cold Sunday morning: There was no one about to see the bright flashing lights but bulldog-sized seagulls who waddled grumpily along the cold pavement, tearing into discarded chip papers and burger cartons.

Surprisingly, Colin Miller was already waiting for Logan as he pulled into one of the parking spots opposite. The reporter was huddled round the side of the building, puffing away on a cigarette, looking out over the sea, oblivious to everything but the crashing waves and screeching gulls.

'Didn't know you smoked.'

Miller cringed, dragged back from the middle distance. 'I don't. And if you tell Izzy any different

I'll fuckin' do you. She's mad enough at me as it is.' He looked better than he had outside Garvie's flat the other night. The stubble was gone, but the bags under his eyes were as dark as the clouds lowering over the water. At least he was dressed more like his old self: an expensive suit with scarlet woollen scarf and heavy black overcoat. He pulled the cigarette from his lips with black leather fingers and coughed long and hard, then flicked the butt out into the road.

It was warm inside the cafe, the hiss and gurgle of an espresso machine sounding over a radio tuned to Northsound Two: the weather report predicting doom and gloom for the week ahead. It was busier than Logan had been expecting, couples and families down for the full fried Scottish heart attack experience. No one went to the Inversnecky for a bowl of muesli and half a grapefruit. A tall, gangly man, with a hairline that wasn't so much receding as running hell for leather, took their order and left them to find their own table. Miller picked the one closest to the heater, complaining the whole time about how come they couldn't get any decent weather in this shit-hole town for a change.

'It's March,' said Logan settling in opposite, 'what did you expect - a heat wave? Not exactly the Costa Del Sol, is it?'

The reporter scowled, rubbing his gloved hands in the heater's warm glow. 'No, Aberdeen's the Costa Del Shite.' He looked up to see the man from the counter standing over him with two coffees and a raised eyebrow. 'Aye, no offence like.'

'You're going to get spit in your breakfast, you know that, don't you?' said Logan when he'd gone.

'Nah, Martin's all right, I come here often enough. He knows what I'm like.'

And so did Logan. 'Come on then - why all the secrecy?' There had been a mysterious message waiting on Logan's answering machine when he'd got back to the flat after the unofficial stakeout:
'Meet me at the Inversnecky, nine o'clock, you're buying
.
'

'Eh? Oh ...' Miller shrugged and stirred an extra packet of sugar into his mug. 'Wanted to get out the house, you know? Only been a day and a bit and she's already goin' stir crazy. Next six months are goin' tae be a soddin' nightmare.'

'Try the next eighteen years. Maybe longer - my brother didn't leave home till he was thirty-two.' Logan grinned. 'And if it's a girl, you've got boyfriends to worry about, teenage pregnancy, drugs, tattoos, piercings--'

'Gonnae no dae that?'

'Why?'

'Just gonnae no! Bad enough as it is without you stirring.'

The door jingled open and a red-nosed couple stomped in from the wintry outdoors, bringing a blast of cold air with them. Miller shivered, even though they were practically sitting on top of the heater. 'And get this,' he said, pulling a disgusted face, 'They want me to do a "Baby Diary". Fuckin' investigative journalist and they want me to do puff pieces on changing shitey nappies ...' He went off on a whinge, complaining about how he wasn't appreciated, and how
The Scotsman
had offered him a huge chunk of money to move down to Edinburgh and work for them. And how he was seriously considering it, even though Logan knew there was no way in hell Miller would ever return to the central belt. Not if he wanted to keep the fingers he had left. He finally stopped whinging when their breakfasts arrived.

Logan grabbed the tomato sauce. 'You know I asked you to dig up some dirt on--'

'DC Simon Allan Rennie, twenty-five, five foot eleven, went to Powis Academy - suspended six days for getting into a fight with his maths teacher. Lives in a flat on Dee Street ...'

Logan listened to Miller detailing the minutiae of Rennie's life between bites of sausage, bacon, mushroom and egg. The reporter knew everything: from who the DC's first girlfriend was, to the number of complaints made against him by members of the public in the last three years. But the upshot was that the Bastard Simon Rennie was clean. 'How the hell do you know all this?'

Miller smiled, piling beans up on a corner of toast. 'Findin' stuff out is what I do.' Not like him to be so modest. He stuck the forkful in his mouth and chewed smugly. 'Now, you goin' tae ask me about your boy Garvie?'

'What about him?' Logan put down his cutlery.

'Up to his ears in debt. See all that shite he had in his house - computers and home cinema and gadgets and that - owed a fortune. So he rents some stuff out on the side.'

Logan scooted forward in his seat, lowering his voice to a whisper. 'Let me guess: hardcore bondage pornography?'

'Fuck's sake, man, it's no' the bloody Dark Ages!' A sudden silence hit the dining room and all eyes turned to the reporter as he laughed. 'You can get as much of that crap you want off the internet for free - no, he was rentin' out server space. Encrypted server space. The kind you use for data you
really
don't want people findin' out about.'

And Logan thought about the memory stick they'd found smashed to smithereens in Garvie's flat. 'What was it?'

That was where Colin Miller's encyclopaedic knowledge ground to a halt. 'No idea.
Yet
. But you can bet it's gonna be splashed all over the front page soon as I find out.'