Shatter the Bones. Stuart MacBride

pole goes into a little hole. All he has to do is lift the thing up and he’ll be off!’ Logan wrenched the bedroom door open.

      A woman crouched in the corner wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of ripped jeans. Stick thin, all elbows and ribs, sunken eyes glittering like polished coal. Hands cuffed behind her back. Chapped and faded lips, pulled back over yellowing teeth. ‘We didn’t do nothing!’

      A small child – couldn’t have been more than three-years-old – was perched in her lap, wearing a filthy pair of Ben 10 pyjamas. Snot silvered the wee boy’s top lip, something brown smeared around his mouth.

      One of the forced entry team was standing over them, fiddling with a mobile phone.

      Logan brushed past, making for the window. ‘You better not be updating your bloody Twitter account, Archie.’

      The pudding-faced constable blushed and stuck the phone in his pocket.

      Logan stared into the back garden. There was a man in the middle of the wilderness, fighting with a rotary washing line while a black dog patrolled the knee-high grass around him. Shuggie Webster.

      At least Ellen had been bright enough to cuff him to the complicated lever joint that attached the four arms to the pole.

      He was getting a bit enthusiastic… Hauling, tugging, swearing, trying to break either the handcuffs or the whirly, getting tangled up in dirty yellow washing line. A big ugly fly caught in a plastic spider’s web. He turned himself upside down, both feet planted against the whirly’s arms, straining.

      Logan opened the bedroom window. ‘He’s going to dislocate his wrist if he isn’t careful.’

      PC Ferguson sidled up. ‘Don’t get any brighter, do they?’

      ‘Hoy! Shuggie!’

      The man froze, still dangling upside down.

      ‘Cut it out. You’ve been caught.’

      The dog stopped its patrolling and turned to bark and snarl up at them.

      The constable with the mobile phone appeared at Logan’s shoulder. ‘Bugger me … That’s a big dog.’

      The stick-thin woman shoulder-charged Archie, hands still cuffed behind her back, sending him stumbling into Ferguson. Both officers went crashing to the bedroom floor in a tangle of limbs and swearing.

      She shoved past Logan to the open window. ‘Shuggie! Pull the thing out the ground, you daft fuck!’

      Logan grabbed her, tried to haul her back, but she lashed out with a knee.

      Boiling oil flared out from his groin, curdling in the pit of his stomach, making his knees buckle. He steadied himself against the tatty wallpaper. Oh Christ that hurt.

      ‘Shuggie! PULL THE FUCKING WHIRLY OUT THE GROUND!’

      Outside, Shuggie finally seemed to understand. He squatted down as far as he could with one wrist cuffed to the articulated joint, wrapped his other hand around the pole, and hauled the whole thing out of the ground. He teetered for a moment, turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, then fell on his bum, tangled in the yellow plastic washing line again.

      ‘GET UP YOU DAFT CUNT!’

      Logan cleared his throat, gritted his teeth, grabbed the skeletal woman again and threw her onto the bed – she bounced off the mattress and went spinning over the other side, disappearing from view with a thud.

      The little boy wailed, tears and snot running down his puffy pink face.

      PC Ferguson was back on his feet, leaning out of the window. ‘COME BACK HERE YOU WEE SHITE: YOU’RE STILL UNDER ARREST!’

      ‘Fucking police bastards!’ The woman crawled upright, eyes thin slits, graveyard teeth bared, a smear of blood from her cracked lips. Then she charged, head down, like a greasy battering ram.

      Logan lurched out of the way … or tried to.

      She slammed into his stomach. Pain ripped across his scars, digging deep into his guts, tearing all the breath from his throat as they thudded into the bedroom wall, then down to the carpet. All he could do was curl up around the fire and try not to throw up. Barely feeling the harsh nip of her teeth sinking into his arm through his suit jacket. The dull thunk of her forehead battering into his right ear.

      And then she was gone. Screaming. ‘Let me go you bastard! Let me fucking go! RAPE! Fucking … RAPE!’

      Logan peeled open one watering eye to see her a foot-and-a-half off the ground, legs flailing about. Archie was standing behind her, arms wrapped around her waist, holding her up.

      ‘Calm down!’

      ‘RAPE! RAPE!’

      And all the way through it, the kid kept on screaming.

      6

      ‘How’s the balls?’ PC Ferguson handed Logan another packet of frozen chips from the gurgling freezer. The kitchen reeked of cannabis and stale fat, the extractor hood above the cooker covered in a dark-brown greasy film.

      Leaning back against the working surface, Logan pressed the bag of frozen chips against his aching stomach. ‘You found him yet?’

      ‘We should maybe take you to the hospital?’

      ‘Greg: have – you – found – him?’

      The constable pinched his face into a painful chicken’s bum. ‘Well, there’s a funny story, and—’

      ‘You let him get away, didn’t you?’

      ‘It wasn’t—’

      ‘Why the hell didn’t you have anyone watching the back? I told you to get someone watching the back!’

      ‘But it—’

      ‘For God’s sake, Greg, did you sleep through the bloody risk assessment and planning meeting? Two out front, two out back to catch any runaways!’

      PC Greg Ferguson stared at his shoes. ‘Sorry, Guv. It all kinda got away from me. A bit…’

      ‘A bit? He was handcuffed to a bloody whirly!’

      ‘It’s just … I’ve been having a tough time at home, with wee Georgie ill and Liz on the tablets, and her mum moving in … and I can’t…’ He ran a finger around the collar of his black fleecy top. ‘I can’t go up in front of the rubber-heelers again. Bain’s thinking about making us up to sergeant, and we could really do with the extra dosh…’

      Logan slumped back, stared up at a strange brown stain on the ceiling. ‘Way I see it we’ve got three options. One: I dob you in.’

      ‘Please, Sarge, you—’

      ‘Two: I take the heat and let Professional Standards tear me a new one.’

      Ferguson broke out a thin smile. ‘Would you really do that for—’

      ‘No I bloody wouldn’t. Three: we come up with some sort of cover story…’ Logan straightened.

      Ellen, the officer who’d given everyone a leg-up through the lounge window, lurched into the kitchen, face all pink and glistening. She puffed and panted her way across to the sink, set the cold tap running, and stuck her head under the stream of water. ‘Bloody hell…’

      Ferguson licked his teeth. ‘Did you…?’

      She turned, dripping all over the kitchen floor. ‘They should rope … rope him in … for the 2012 Olympics. If the bugger can … can run that fast handcuffed … to a rotary drier … he’ll walk the five hundred metres…’ She stuck her head back under the tap again. ‘Swear I watched him hurdle a … six foot fence like it … like it wasn’t even there.’

      ‘Oh God…’ Ferguson covered his face with a hand. ‘I’m screwed.’

      ‘Ellen?’