Dying Light. Stuart MacBride

to bed”? What a lovely euphemism for strangling someone in an alleyway! Like fucking poetry that is.’

      Jamie ignored her. ‘Next day she was covered in bruises. Threw me out. Said she never wanted to see me again. But I never meant to hurt her!’

      Logan sat back in his seat and tried not to groan. ‘It’s Monday night we want to know about, Jamie. What happened on Monday night?’

      ‘Went to see her, on the street.’ He shrugged. ‘Wanted to say I was sorry … show her I was making good money… You know, from the fast-food jobs? I could take care of her and the kids. I loved her… But she wouldn’t talk to me: said she had to earn a living … didn’t want anything to do with me … had clients to see. I’d have to pay…’

      ‘And did you?’

      Jamie hung his head. ‘I… Yes.’

      DI Steel spluttered, sending ash sparking from the end of her fag. ‘So you forked out to screw your ex? Jesus, how fucking twisted is that?’

      Logan scowled at her. ‘Then what happened, Jamie?’

      ‘We did it in a doorway and … and I cried and told her I loved her and I was so sorry for what I’d done, but I loved her so much I couldn’t stand to see her out there with other men…’ His red eyes filled with tears. ‘I was making good money now, I could do it, we could be together…’ He wiped his eyes with the same silvered sleeve.

      Steel inched forward in her seat, bathing Jamie in a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘She said no though, didn’t she? She said no and you hit her. You hit her and you kept hitting her ’cos she wouldn’t take a slimy wee shite like you back. You killed her, ’cos it was that or pay for it your whole life. Pay to screw her in alleyways, just like hundreds of other desperate wee fucks.’

      ‘NO! She said she’d think about it! She was going to come back to me! We were going to be a family!’ The tears were falling freely now, running down his chubby cheeks, his scarlet nose streaming as sobs shook his body. ‘God, she’s dead! She’s dead!’ He crumpled to the tabletop, shoulders heaving.

      Logan’s voice was soft. ‘Did you hit her again, Jamie? Did you kill her?’

      He could barely make out the reply. ‘I loved her…’

      10

      The ride back from Craiginches was spent with DI Steel smoking and swearing furiously. Now that Jamie McKinnon had admitted to paying for sex with Rosie the night she died, Logan’s disappearing Lithuanian witness was worthless. And so was any DNA evidence they got from the hundreds of discarded condoms. Things had been a lot simpler when McKinnon was just denying everything. She pulled up outside Logan’s flat and demanded the tapes of the interview. He handed them over and asked if she didn’t want him to do the paperwork: taking them into evidence, releasing one copy to Jamie McKinnon’s defence lawyer. ‘Do I buggery,’ was her response. ‘Bloody things screw up my investigation.’ She took the recordings, turned them upside down and picked a loop of tape free with a nicotine-stained fingernail. Then did ‘Flags Of All Nations’ with it, sending reels of shiny brown ribbon spooling out into the interior of the car. ‘Far as anyone’s concerned there was something wrong with the machine OK? No tape was ever made. We forget anything that was said and go back to proving Jamie McKinnon did it.’ Logan tried to protest but the inspector was having none of it. ‘What?’ she demanded. ‘We both know he did it! It’s our job to make sure he doesn’t get away with it.’

      ‘What if he didn’t do it?’

      ‘Of course he did it! He’s got form for beating her up ’cos she was on the game. He goes and pledges his undying love and she makes him fork out for a knee-trembler in an alleyway. Then goes off to shag someone else. He’s overcome with rage and kills her. The end.’ She shook her head. ‘Now get your arse out of my car. I’ve got things to do.’

      Logan spent the rest of the afternoon pottering about the flat. Sulking. So much for the Rosie Williams murder being his ticket out of the Screw-Up Squad. The way DI Steel was going they’d end up with no admissible evidence and a fully compromised case. The woman was a bloody menace. By seven thirty there was still no sign of Jackie, so he went out to the pub and to hell with everyone else. Archibald Simpson’s wasn’t an option: being just around the corner from Force Headquarters and full of cheap beer, the bar was a regular haunt for off-duty police, and he’d had enough dirty looks about getting PC Maitland shot to last him for one week, thank you very much. So instead he wandered up Union Street to the Howff, sitting on a creaky beige sofa in the farthest corner of the basement-level bar, nursing a pint of Directors and a packet of dry-roasted. Brooding over Jackie and her foul temper. And then another pint. And another. And a burger – smothered in chilli so hot it made his eyes water – and then another pint, getting maudlin. PC Maitland – Logan couldn’t even remember his first name. Until the screwed-up raid he’d never worked with the guy, only knew him as the bloke with the moustache who shaved his head for Children In Need one year. Poor bastard. Two pints later and it was time to lurch blearily home, via a chip shop for jumbo-haddock supper; most of which he abandoned, uneaten, in the lounge, before staggering off to bed alone.

      Saturday morning started with a hangover. The bathroom cabinet was devoid of massive blue-and-yellow painkillers – the ones Logan had been given after Angus Robertson had performed un-elective surgery on his innards with a six-inch hunting knife – so he had to make do with a handful of aspirin and a mug of strong instant coffee, taking it into the lounge to see what kind of cartoons were on. There was a shape on the couch and his heart sank. Jackie, all wrapped up in the spare duvet, blinking blearily as he froze in the doorway. He hadn’t even heard her come in last night. She took one look at him, mumbled, ‘Don’t want any coffee…’ and pulled the duvet over her head, shutting him, and the rest of the world, out.

      Logan went back to the kitchen, closing the door behind him.

      Saturday, their only full day off together, and Jackie still wasn’t speaking to him. Obviously she’d rather sleep on the couch than share his bed. What a great bloody weekend this was turning out to be. He checked the clock on the microwave. Half past nine. Outside the kitchen window the rain was just coming on again, not the sunshine-and-rainbows rain of yesterday, but the heavy-grey-skies-and-freezing-wind kind of rain. It leached the warmth out of everything, making the city grey and miserable all over again. Matching Logan’s mood. He dressed and headed out, meandering up Union Street, taking perverse pleasure in getting cold and wet. ‘Playing the martyr’ as his mum used to say. And she should know, she was a bloody dab hand at it.

      He moped about the shops for a bit: bought a CD by some band he’d heard on the radio last week, two newish crime novels and a couple of DVDs. Trying to take his mind off everything that was wrong and failing miserably. Jackie hated him, Steel was a pain in the arse, PC Maitland was dying… He gave up on the shopping and wandered across Union Terrace, down School Hill and onto Broad Street. Drifting inexorably back towards the flat through the rain. At the corner of Marischal College, where the pale grey spines of its elaborate Victorian-Gothic frontage raised their claws to the clay-coloured skies, he stopped. Straight ahead and it was back to the flat. Turn left and it was a stone’s throw to Force Headquarters. It wasn’t a tough choice, even if he was supposed to be off. He could always kill some time poking his nose into someone else’s investigation. DI Insch was usually good for a… Logan screwed up his face and swore; the dead squatter – he still hadn’t told Insch about Graham Kennedy. Bloody idiot. Miller had given him the name days ago! Sodding DI Steel and her malfunctioning tape recorder act.

      The desk sergeant barely spoke to Logan as he squelched in through the front doors and dripped his way across the patterned linoleum of reception.

      DI Insch’s incident room was carefully orchestrated chaos – phones being manned, information being collated and entered into HOLMES, so the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System could automatically churn out reams and reams of pointless actions at the press of a button. Now and then it came out with something that made all the difference to an investigation, but most of the time: crap. Maps of Aberdeen were stuck up on the walls, coloured pins marking the locations of significant events. The