Cold Granite (26 page)

Logan brushed a clearing in the dust-covered glass of one, and a happy-looking woman smiled back at him. He made the clean patch bigger and a little boy appeared, grinning at the camera, wearing a smart new set of clothes, his hair al combed straight. There was a striking family resemblance. Bernard Duncan Philips and his mother in better times. Before he started col ecting dead things. Before there was a little girl's corpse in steading number two.

The kitchen was cramped and dark. Piles of cardboard boxes lined the room, the constant damp making them sag at the corners. Mildew covered the wal s, lending the place a smel of desolation. And in the middle of the room sat a tatty kitchen table with two treacherous-looking chairs.

Bernard Duncan Philips, AKA Roadkil , was slumped in one of them, DI Insch leaning against the sink opposite. Between them a smal candelabrum flickered. Only two of its five sockets had any candles in them, and they were little more than stubs. No one said a word as Logan entered.

Insch's face was like stone, scowling down at the sagging figure. He must have been thinking the same thing as Logan: they'd had him last night and they'd let him go. And now they had another dead child on their hands.

I've sent the duty doctor home.' Logan's voice was swal owed by the gloom.

'What did he say?' asked Insch, not taking his eyes off Roadkil .

'It's probably a little girl. We don't know how old. She's been dead for a long time.

Maybe years.'

Insch nodded and Logan knew he was feeling relieved. If the kid had been dead for years then it didn't matter that they'd let Roadkil go last night. No one had died because of that.

'Mr Philips here has declined to comment. Haven't you, Mr Philips? You won't tel me who she is, or when you kil ed her. Funny how we've now got two dead girls on our books, isn't it? Even funnier how we've got some sick bastard running round kil ing little boys and sticking things up their arses. Cutting off their dicks.'

Logan frowned. David Reid had turned up dead and mutilated in a ditch on the other side of the city. Roadkil liked to keep his dead things. He wouldn't leave a prize like that lying out in the open.

'You know,' said Logan, trying to play good cop. 'We could make this a lot easier for you, Bernard. You tel us what happened. In your own words, OK? I'm sure you didn't mean for al this to happen, did you?'

Roadkil slumped forward until his head rested on the scarred tabletop.

'Was it an accident, Bernard? Did it just happen?'

'They're taking them al away. Al my beautiful dead things.'

Insch slammed his huge fist down on top of the table, making the candelabrum and Roadkil jump. Hot wax spattered onto the wood. Bernard Duncan Philips slowly sank back down to the tabletop, covering his head with his arms.

'You're going to jail. You hear that? You're going to Peterhead Prison, with al the other sick bastards. The paedophiles, rapists, murderers. You going to be someone's bitch up there?

Going to find the love of your life in some hairy-arsed Weegie bastard? 'Cos if you don't start talking to us I'm going to make sure you get shacked up with the skankiest arse-raping bastard they've got up there!'

It was designed to get a response. But it failed. In the uneasy silence Logan could hear a quiet tune. Roadkil was humming something to himself. It sounded like 'Abide with me'.

The kitchen window fil ed with light and Logan cleared a hole in the grubby glass. The Identification Bureau van was struggling its way up the track. It stopped outside steading number two. There was another car behind it. Something sleek and expensive which was having trouble with the snow-covered drive. By the time it drew level with the farm buildings, the technicians had started humping their equipment from the warmth and safety of the van into the charnel house.

The car's driver clambered out into the snow. It was Isobel.

Logan sighed. 'That's IB and the pathologist.' He watched her turn her col ar up and slither around to the boot of her car. She was wearing a long camel-coloured coat over her tan suit. She struggled out of her Italian leather boots and into a pair of wel ies before clumping her way into the steading.

Thirty seconds later she was out in the snow again, bent double, breathing hard. Trying not to be sick. A grim smile spread itself over Logan's face. It wouldn't do to appear human in front of the lower ranks.

Insch pushed himself away from the sink and produced a pair of handcuffs. 'Come on, Philips. On your feet.'

Logan watched as the bedraggled figure was read his rights and the cuffs were snapped into place, hands behind his back. Then Insch dragged Roadkil out of the kitchen and off into the snow.

Alone in the house, Logan blew out the candles and fol owed.

21

This time Roadkil 's 'appropriate adult' was a rundown man in his early fifties, thinning on top and sporting a ridiculous little moustache. Lloyd Turner: an ex-schoolteacher at Hazlehead Academy who'd recently lost his wife and wanted something to take his mind off being alone al the time. He sat at the table next to Bernard Duncan Philips, facing the combined scowls of Detective Inspector Insch and DS Logan McRae.

The smal room smel ed. Not just the usual, inexplicable whiff of cheesy feet, but the stale sweat and rotting animal odour that Roadkil exuded. The bruises Logan had seen last night had blossomed. Dark purple and green spread over the prisoner's face, disappearing into his matted beard. His hands fluttered on the tabletop, the skin dirty, the nails black. The only clean thing about him was the white paper boiler suit the Identification Bureau had given him when they'd taken his clothes away for forensic examination.

Logan and Insch had spent three hours getting exactly nowhere. The only thing they could get out of Roadkil was that someone was stealing al his precious dead things. They'd tried being nice; they'd tried being nasty. They'd tried getting the ex-teacher with the moustache to talk to him, to explain the seriousness of the situation. Nothing.

DI Insch rocked back in his seat, making the plastic creak. 'Right,' he said with a sigh.

'Let's try this again shal we?'

Everyone round the table grimaced, except for Roadkil . He just went on humming.

Abide with bloody me. It was beginning to drive Logan mad.

The teacher put up his hand. 'I'm sorry, Inspector. I think it's quite clear Bernard is not in any fit state to be interrogated.' He cast a sideways glance at the smel y man sitting next to him.

'His mental state is a matter of record. He needs help, not incarceration.'

Insch slammed his chair forward. 'And the kiddies lying dead in the morgue need to be safe and sound at home, not kil ed by a twisted weirdo!' He crossed his arms, straining the seams on his shirt, making himself look even bigger. 'I want to know where Peter Lumley is, and how many other little kiddies he's kil ed.'

'Inspector, I understand that you're only doing your job, but Bernard isn't in any fit state to answer questions. Look at him!'

They did. His hands were like wounded birds, flapping away on top of the table. His gaze was far and distant. He wasn't even in the same room as them.

Logan glanced at the clock on the wal . Seven-twenty. Past the time when Roadkil started asking for his medicine yesterday. 'Sir,' he said to Insch, 'can I have a word with you outside?'

They walked to the coffee machine, passing an array of interested faces. The word was al round the station, on the radio, and probably the evening news. The Aberdeen Child-kil er was behind bars. Now al they had to do was get him to talk.

'What's on your mind, Sergeant?' asked Insch, punching in the number for white coffee, extra sugar.

'We're going to get nothing out of Roadkil tonight, sir. He's schizophrenic. He needs to take his medication. Even if we got a confession out of him it'd get ripped to shreds in court.

Mental y il suspect, denied medication, confesses after a three-hour interrogation? What would you do?'

Insch blew across the top of his plastic cup of coffee and sipped experimental y at the liquid. When he spoke at last it was with the voice of a very tired man. 'You're right of course.'

He sat the coffee down on the nearest table and hunted through his pockets for something sweet. In the end Logan had to offer him one of his extra strong mints.

'Thanks. I've been thinking the same thing for the last hour. Just didn't want to let it go.

Just in case.' He sighed. 'Just in case Peter Lumley's stil alive somewhere.'

It was wishful thinking and they both knew it. Peter Lumley was dead. They just hadn't found his body yet.

'What about the crime scene?' asked Logan.

'What about it?'

'The dead girl we found might not be the only one in the pile.' The next bit was what had been causing him trouble since the farmhouse. 'And then there's David Reid. He was abandoned. The MO just doesn't fit. Roadkil 's a col ector. He wouldn't just leave the body lying out like that.'

'Maybe he likes them rotted before he hoards them.'

'If it is him, he cut the genitals off David Reid. They'l be at the farm somewhere.'

Insch screwed up his face. 'Shite. We're going to have to go through every last carcase he's got out there looking for it. Talk about your proverbial needle in a haystack.' He mashed his features with a pair of tired hands. 'Right.' He took a deep breath and straightened his back. The authority had returned to his voice. 'We're going to have to do this the hard way. If we can't get a confession out of Philips we'l tie him to the bodies. The little girl we found at his home; no problem there. And there must be something linking him to David Reid and Peter Lumley. I want you to get a dozen uniform question everyone where the children were last seen. Get me a witness. We're not letting the bastard get away again.'

*

That night Logan's dreams were full of rotting children. They ran through the flat, wanting to play. One sat on the living room floor, little chunks of skin fal ing onto the polished floorboards, bashing away at a xylophone Logan had been given for his fourth birthday. Clank and clink and boing, a cacophony that was more like a phone ringing than music.

And that's when he woke up.

Logan staggered through to the lounge and grabbed the ringing phone from its cradle.

'What?' he demanded.

'An' a merry Christmas to you too.' Colin Mil er.

'Oh God...' Logan tried to rub some life into his face. 'It's half-six! What is it with you and mornings?'

'You found another body.'

Logan shuffled to the window and looked for Mil er's expensive automobile in the darkened street. There was no sign of it. At least that meant he was to be spared a visit from the cheerful fairy this morning.

'And?'

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. 'And you arrested Bernard Philips.

Roadkil .'

Stunned, Logan let the curtain fal back. 'How the hel did you know that?' There was nothing in the press pack to identify who'd been arrested, just the normal: 'a suspect has been taken into custody and a report sent to the Procurator Fiscal'.

'You know how: it's ma job. Poor wee thing, rottin'away in that pile of crap...I want the inside track, Laz. I've stil got stuff on Geordie Stephenson you don't know. Everybody wins.'

Logan couldn't believe his ears. 'You've got a bloody cheek after what you did to DI Insch yesterday!'

'Laz, that's just business. He screwed you over and I took him down a couple of pegs. Did I write one bad word about you? Did I?'

'That's not the point.'

'Ah, loyalty. Like it. Good quality in an officer of the law.'

'You made him look like an idiot.'

'Tel you what: I lay off the pantomime dame and you and me has a chat over breakfast?'

'I can't do that. I need to get Insch to clear anything I say, OK?'

There was another pause.

'You gotta be careful what you do with your loyalty, Laz. Sometimes it can do you more harm than good.'

'What? What the hel is that supposed to mean?'

'Take a look at the morning's paper, Laz. See whether or not you need a friend in the press.'

Logan settled the phone back in its cradle and stood in the darkness of the lounge, shivering. There was no way he could just go back to bed now. Not until he knew what Mil er had done. What the morning paper contained.

Half past six. His own copy wouldn't be delivered for another hour and a bit. So he dressed quickly and slid his way through the ankle-deep snow up to the Castlegate and the nearest newsagent.

It was a smal shop, the kind that tried anything once. The wal s were festooned with shelves: books, pots, pans, light bulbs, tins of kidney beans...Logan found what he was looking for on the floor by the counter - a thick bundle of fresh papers, stil wrapped in protective plastic to keep the snow from soaking into the newsprint.

The proprietor, a stocky man with three fingers missing on his left hand, a greying beard and a gold tooth grunted a good morning as he slit the plastic open. 'Jeezuz,' he said, picking a paper off the top of the pile, holding it up so Logan could see the front page. 'They had the bastard an' they let him go! Can you fuckin' believe that?'

There were four photographs, slap bang in the middle of the page: David Reid, Peter Lumley, DI Insch and Bernard Duncan Philips. Roadkil was out of focus, bent over a shovel full of squashed rabbit, his wheelie-bin sitting next to him on the road. The two boys smiled out from school photographs. Insch was in ful panto get-up.

Above the lot the headline screamed 'HOUSE O F H ORROR: D EAD G IRL F OUND I N P

ILE O F R OTTING A NIMALS!' and underneath that 'Kil er Released From Police Custody Only Hours Earlier'. Colin Mil er strikes again.

'Buncha fuckin' clowns: that's what they are. Tel you: five minutes alone with this sick bastard. That'l do me. Got fuckin' grandchildren that age.'

Logan paid for his paper and left without saying a word.

It had started to snow again. Thick white flakes drifted down from the dark sky, the clouds lit dark-orange, reflecting back the streetlights. Al the way up Union Street the twelve days of Christmas glittered and sparkled, but Logan didn't see any of it. He stood outside the newsagent, reading by the light of the shop window.