Logan McRae Crime Series Books 4-6: Flesh House, Blind Eye, Dark Blood. Stuart MacBride

the kitchen worktop. ‘You want a scoof?’ He waggled it at the man lying on the lounge floor – hands and feet bound with black plastic cable-ties. ‘No?’ Wiseman smiled. ‘How about one of these, then?’ He took a running kick at the man’s stomach, hitting him hard enough to lift the fucker off the floor, sending him rolling onto his back, groaning behind the strip of silver duct-tape.

      Wiseman squatted next to him as the flat was momentarily lit by another firework. ‘I should carve you up, you old fuck. Carve you into little bits.’ He pulled one of his knives out and held the blade against the old man’s cheek, just hard enough to break the skin. ‘You’d be surprised how little difference there is between us and the animals. We all come apart the same way …’

      Another mouthful of beer. ‘Fifteen years you took from me Brooks. Fifteen fucking years in that shitehole prison with fucking rapists and paedophiles. You see this?’ He pointed at the scar that ran diagonally across his face. ‘They jumped me in the showers. Fuckers held me down and pulled a sharpened spoon through my face. Dragged it across the bone. Slow and deliberate.’ He shuddered and drank again. ‘Fucking rapists telling me I’m sick. Thinking they’re better than me. That they’ve got the fucking right!’

      Wiseman stood and slammed another boot into Brooks’s stomach. ‘“Gonnae peel yer face!” “Gonnae skin yer fuckin’ heid!” They would’ve too, guard hadn’t come.’

      Flash – one, one thousand – two, one thousand – BOOM! Crackle …

      ‘My, my, my. Will you look at the time?’ He grabbed a handful of the old man’s jacket and heaved him up. ‘You’ve got an appointment.’

      The corridor outside the flat was deserted, just as Wiseman knew it would be. No one to see him drag Brooks into the stairwell and up three flights of stairs to the roof. The fire door was locked, but not alarmed. It didn’t take much to kick it open.

      Wind whipped across the concrete roof, and suddenly Brooks seemed to realize what was going to happen. He started struggling.

      ‘Bit fucking late for that, don’t you think?’ Wiseman hauled the old man to the chest-high wall that ran round the edge. ‘You remember what you said the night you arrested me? No?’ He ripped the gag from Brooks’ mouth, taking a big clump of moustache with it.

      ‘Aaaaaaagh … God damn, fucking, bastard—’

      Wiseman bounced the old git’s head off the wall.

      ‘You told me you knew people. That I wouldn’t last a month in prison. That the only way I’d get out would be in a body-bag.’

      ‘You …’ Brooks coughed, a smear of blood on his lips. ‘You sick f—’

      Wiseman punched him in the stomach and the old man collapsed to the ground. ‘Those going to be your last words are they?’ He pulled the boning knife out again and sliced through the thin plastic strips holding Brooks’ wrists together. Then did the same with the ankles.

      ‘Ffffff …’ The old bastard tried to get to his feet, but his legs didn’t seem to be working.

      ‘Here.’ Wiseman took a handful of shirt at the back of Brooks’ neck, then grabbed the old bastard’s belt and hauled him up. ‘Let me help you …’

      Right over the wall and into thin air.

      A huge ball of red, green and silver lit up the night sky.

      For a moment the old man seemed to float, and then gravity got her claws into him. Brooks screamed: arms and legs pinwheeling as his body got smaller and smaller and smaller … all the way down to the concrete car park, eighteen floors below.

      He hit the ground like a meat piñata, flying debris setting off car alarms.

      Wiseman peered over the edge at the smear of red, lit by the flashing orange indicators of wailing motorcars. Then he went back downstairs to the flat, picked up his empty beer cans, locked the door, and headed off into the night.

       20

      Logan waited in the pre-dawn gloom trying not to stand in anything red. Which was easier said than done: who knew one old man could go so far? The impact zone lay in the strip of concrete between the two tower blocks. Ex-DCI Brooks covered at least a dozen feet in every direction – tarmac, pavement, wall … The cars were the worst: metallic paint pebble-dashed with shrivelled, crimson bubbles, glittering in the IB spotlights like dried-up ladybirds. Not the best accompaniment to a Monday-morning hangover.

      Someone from the Environmental Health team marched over, sipping tea from a polystyrene cup, her white paper oversuit unzipped to the waist. ‘You going to be much longer?’

      ‘Don’t think so.’ Logan watched DI Steel mooching about on the far side of the blue-and-white Police tape, mobile phone clamped to her ear. ‘Think you’ll be able to shift all this?’

      The woman shrugged. ‘You should see some of the crap we have to deal with.’ She pulled a huge aerosol out of her pocket. ‘Trichloroethylene: it’ll bleach through pretty much anything. Don’t fancy owning any of those cars, Christ knows what it’s going to do to the paintwork.’

      ‘Hoy, Lazarus!’ Steel – shouting across Garry Brooks’ personal Ground Zero. ‘Get them going.’

      ‘You heard the lady.’ Logan skirted the taped-off scene as the Environmental Health team pulled up their hoods, strapped on their facemasks, and got to work with the trichloroethylene.

      Steel lit a cigarette, watching them spraying away, the thick stench of bleach oozing out in a fine mist, caught by the morning breeze, glowing in the building’s security lights. ‘No’ exactly my idea of fun …’

      ‘How’d Insch take it?’

      ‘How do you think?’ She took a long drag. ‘The guy you’ve looked up to for twenty-five years does a belly-flop off an eighteen-storey building. No’ exactly ice-cream and balloons, is it?’ A small crowd of onlookers had gathered on the outskirts of the car park. More peered out of the windows of the tower block, watching as the Environmental Health team covered everything in industrial bleach. ‘He’s coming in.’

      Logan hadn’t expected anything else. Suspended or not, Insch wouldn’t trust them not to screw this up. ‘Wiseman?’

      ‘Probably.’ Steel looked from the blood-splashed car park all the way up to the roof. ‘That or Brooks decided to go in for a bit of freestyle plummeting.’ She sucked in a lungful of smoke. ‘Maybe he was wracked with guilt for screwing up the Flesher inquiry? If he’d done a proper job in the first place, they’d never have let the bastard go.’

      She dragged the last gasp from her cigarette, then flicked it out into the puddle of drying blood. ‘How’s your vertigo?’

      From the roof, eighteen floors up, the car park looked a long, long way down. The Environmental Health had finished with the spraying and were now trying to wash the remaining bleachy sludge down the nearest drain with a hose.

      Steel sidled up next to Logan and peered over the wall. ‘Jesus, how far you think that is?’

      ‘A hundred, hundred and fifty feet?’

      ‘Hmm …’ She howched, and spat, watching as the glob disappeared. ‘Enough time for a good long scream. You’d think someone would’ve noticed.’

      ‘Fireworks. The Council had their big display—’

      Looks like Brooks wasn’t the only one who had a bad one last night.’ She turned and stared at Logan’s bruised face. ‘Twice in two days?’

      Logan put a hand up to his cheek: it was still swollen, even after an evening of cold compresses and malt whisky. ‘It’s nothing.’

      ‘Word is Watson lamped you one.’

      ‘When’s