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

for a positive identification, the DNA test inconclusive.

      They’d tried again in ’95, fighting Wiseman’s appeal. DNA testing had come on a bit since 1990, but the only human blood they could extract from the evidence shared so many markers with Wiseman’s own that even an idiot defence lawyer could have poked holes in the prosecution case. So good old Detective Chief Inspector Brooks had tried to suppress the evidence.

      The defence managed to get hold of it anyway and that was it – case dismissed.

      Wiseman’s original confession was given pride of place at the very back of the file, in its own clear plastic evidence pouch, obviously typed by someone with more fingers than brain cells:

      I did it. I did it and I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt her, but I did. Their was a lot of blood. Afterwards I did not know what to do, so I proceeded to dispose of the body by cutting it up and getting rid of the parts. I do not remember ware I burried them. I had been drinking.

      There was another page and a half – a tortured mass of bad typing, poor spelling and twisted lies, and then, at the end, a shaky signature. As if the writer’s hand had just been slammed in a drawer. There was a second version of the confession, all neatly typed by someone who could spell. Wiseman’s signature wasn’t any better on that one.

      Logan pushed the file away, wondering how the hell someone like Brooks had ever made it to the rank of detective superintendent; the bastard was little more than a criminal himself. And Insch had helped him. Mr Everything-Has-To-Be-Done-By-The-Book had beaten a suspect in custody and forced him to sign a confession. No wonder Wiseman went after him…

      Lunch was a baked potato in the canteen, eaten one-handed as he re-read the SOC report on the derelict butcher’s shop where Ian and Sharon McLaughlin’s remains had been found. He stuck the report back in the folder and pulled out Faulds’s tatty copy of Smoak With Blood, flicking through till he got to the chapter on the same scene.

      When God makes man, he does so from the simplest of materials. Our bodies, our minds, the blood that courses through our veins, are no different from those of the animals we slaughter for food. A pig, a cow, a human being: after the butcher’s tender ministrations it’s all just meat. We are all just meat.

      It was an anonymous tip-off that led police to the disused butcher’s shop on Palmerston Road, within spitting distance of the railway station; the rumble of passing freight trains making the ground shudder beneath their feet as they picked through the debris-strewn interior. Rats scuttled through the piles of broken plaster and crumbling furniture. The floor and walls spattered where pigeons had passed judgement on a shop closed for eighteen years and turned into a storage shed.

      Today, the sign outside says ‘Property Management’, but in January 1988 it was the final resting place for my parents. Or would have been, if not for that anonymous phone call in the dead of night.

      Logan flicked through the file – finding reference to a call made from a public phone box in Torry. The note said it was a woman’s voice: drunk and scared. They thought it was probably a working girl, looking for somewhere to take a punter. Or maybe one of the city’s growing homeless population, looking for a place to drink themselves to sleep. Brooks put out the usual appeals, but no one came forward.

      The fridges at the back of the shop had been cleared of their contents, the detritus piled up in the serving area. In here the walls were smeared with filth, mildew reaching out of the corners: a permanent shadow that not even the pathologist’s spotlights could banish. My parents hung from hooks in the ceiling.

      That sounds more dramatic than it actually was. Although the smell was appalling (the power being long gone, and the fridges at ambient temperature) there was little to show that the cuts of meat hanging there had once been someone’s mother and father. My mother and father. Now just meat.

      And on those filthy walls were written the words that would forever be emblazoned upon my soul. A message from the man who would become known as ‘the Flesher’.

       “From ancient times, our origins we draw,

       When priests were cons’crate to keep God’s law,

       When sacerdotal sacrifice and feasts,

       Made alters smoak with blood of slaughter’d beasts…’

       A message written in blood. The blood of my parents.

      After a period of sober reflection involving jam sponge and custard, Logan grabbed a cup of tea and went back to the history room. The file said Brooks traced the quotation scrawled on the butcher’s shop wall to Trinity Hall – home of the Seven Incorporated Trades – a 1960s concrete box of a building with delusions of grandeur, on Holburn Street, not far from McFarlane’s…

      ‘Smoak with blood’ – a line from a painting belonging to the butchers’ trade incorporation, AKA: ‘the Fleshers’. And that was how he got his name.

      Logan’s tea was stone cold by the time he’d finished reading all the interview transcripts: Brooks had hauled in every butcher in the city, whether they were members or not. That was when the fixation with Wiseman started.

      ‘Wakey, wakey.’ DI Steel meandered into the room, bringing a waft of stale cigarette with her. ‘Half two: ready to be told what a clever little boy you are?’

      Logan looked up from Wiseman’s first ever brush with the police. ‘Give me a minute, I – hey!’

      Steel snatched the transcript from his hand. ‘Let’s see what’s so important …’ her lips moving as she read. ‘Jesus,’ she turned it over in her hands, peering at the biro notes scribbled on the back, ‘Basher Brooks strikes again. You see these? “He’s obviously hiding something.” “Shifty.” “Evasive.” “Reeks of guilt…” Talk about keeping an open mind.’ She stuck it back on Logan’s desk. ‘Anyway, come on: arse in gear. Pat on the back time.’

       30 minutes later

      ‘Bastarding cock-weasel son-of-a-bitch!’ Steel hurled herself into Logan’s seat. ‘Can you believe this shite? Fucking bastard!’ She stood, swore some more, kicked the filing cabinet, called Chief Constable Brian Anderson a ‘Sheep-shagging prick.’ And collapsed back into the chair again.

      ‘Well,’ said Logan, picking his words carefully, ‘it could be worse …’

      ‘How? How could it possibly be worse?’

      ‘Could’ve been DCI Finnie.’

      ‘That … cock?’ She scrubbed her hands across her face. ‘How could they say I’m no’ pro-active enough? How? How much more pro-fucking-active could I be? Did we no’ just catch Leith?’

      Logan settled himself in behind the other desk, bracing himself for the oncoming rant. Ten minutes later she was still at it.

      ‘Course you know what this is really about, don’t you? Can’t have a lowly woman heading up a high-profile case like this. Nooooo. That needs a baldy-headed bastard, doesn’t it?’ She put on a broad Banff and Buchan accent for, ‘“I think it’d be mare appropriate fer DCS Bain tae tak a mair active role…” Wankers didn’t take the damn thing off Insch, did they?’ Steel sat and seethed in silence for a while, then pulled out her cigarettes, turning the pack over and over in her hands. ‘Do us a favour, eh? Go see how the fat git’s doing.’

      ‘What, now?’

      ‘No, no’ now: tonight. I know he’s been a toss-pot lately, and he smacked you in the face … but … well … take him a bag of jelly babies or something.’

      ‘I can’t, I’ve got something on tonight.’ Which was a lie. Logan just couldn’t face dealing with Insch’s grief on top of all the guilt. Not yet.

      ‘Insch is one of us, Laz, we’ve got no right abandoning him. No’ with his wee girl dead like that.’

      ‘But