Close to the Bone. Stuart MacBride

visible – scratched into the wood, then rendered almost invisible by layer upon layer of gloss paint.

      He gave the padlock a tug. Solid enough. But the trouble with these tumbler locks, especially the cheaper makes, was how easily you could crack the combination by levering the dials apart while you turned them, feeling for the click… There. Then the next one… Two more to go, and the hasp popped free of the lock.

      Chalmers stared at him. ‘How did you do that?’

      ‘Gets easier when they’re used a lot. Loosens everything up.’ Logan drew the bolt, and swung the door open.

      Inside, the little cupboard had been turned into a little room. A single mattress filled the available floor space, no sheets, just a sleeping bag and two stuffed toys: a teddy bear that looked as if one more go in the washing machine would finish it off, and a once-white rabbit turned Frankenstein’s monster with random-coloured patches and big clumsy stitching.

      A bookshelf sat at the tall end of the wedge-shaped cupboard, with more paperbacks, and plastic action figures: wizards, witches, and vampires. Half a dozen grey and black roses were long dead in a vase, tied up with a black ribbon. Very cheery.

      He beckoned Chalmers over. ‘This look more like it?’

      She climbed inside, kneeling on the mattress as she poked through the books on the shelf. ‘Harry Potter’s got a lot to answer for.’

      ‘She’s eighteen.’

      ‘Yeah…’ Chalmers pulled a hardback from the collection and frowned at it. ‘She’s got this same book upstairs.’ The front cover was some sort of dragon thing curled around a woman dressed like a gypsy. Chalmers opened it. Raised an eyebrow. Then turned it so the innards were facing Logan. ‘Interesting.’

      The book had been hollowed out. She pulled out a spiral-bound notebook, flicked through a few pages. ‘Oh dear…’

      ‘What?’

      ‘“Rowan looked at him lovingly. ‘I’m really glad you bit me Edward,’ she said enthusiastically, ‘this way we can be together forever when we get to magic school!’ He smiled at her knowingly, and thought about how much he loved her, because she was perfect. ‘I know,’ he said romantically, his eyes smouldering like a million suns falling into a million black holes, ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather battle the Dark Lord of the Werewolves with than you! You’re so much cleverer than that little swot Hermione.’ And she knew he meant it, because she was the only one who could make his cold dead heart beat again…”’ Chalmers turned the next couple of pages, pursed her lips. ‘Oh, look at that. Then they have sex on the carriage floor while Harry watches and plays with his wand. Then he sticks it up Edward’s…’ She shuddered, put the thing back in the book and slammed it shut. ‘God, I hate slashfic.’

      ‘Slashfic?’

      ‘Think really bad fan fiction, only you have everyone shagging each other. It’s kind of…’ She looked over Logan’s shoulder. ‘Mrs Garfield, did Agnes spend a lot of time in here?’

      Agnes’s mum was standing by the open living-room door, arms folded across her chest. ‘We keep that cupboard locked.’

      ‘So Agnes wasn’t allowed—’

      ‘She was obsessed with those bloody wizard books when she was younger. She’d… When she was little she’d sneak in there and play. I know we shouldn’t have indulged her, but we did. Keep meaning to clear it out, but every time I tried, she’d burst into tears and scream till she was sick.’ Mrs Garfield narrowed her eyes, then looked away down the hall. ‘What kind of grown woman wants to be a wee wizard boy in a stupid book?’

      Logan pulled on a smile. ‘Don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cup of tea, is there? DS Chalmers will lend a hand, won’t you, DS Chalmers?’

      She looked up at him from the cupboard. ‘I—’

      ‘Excellent. Milk and two for me, thanks.’ He stood back so she could climb out. ‘I just need to make a couple of calls – get the ball rolling – then I’ll be right through.’

      ‘You want tea?’ Mrs Garfield’s mouth hung open. ‘You’ve not done anything yet!’

      ‘Like I said, I need to make a few calls. And DS Chalmers needs to ask you some questions about Agnes’s friends.’

      Chalmers blinked. ‘I do? … Oh, right, yes, that’s right. Questions. Er, shall we?’

      As soon as they’d disappeared into the kitchen, Logan shut the lounge door again, then clambered into the cupboard under the stairs. There was just enough space to kneel at the tall end without banging his head on the sloping ceiling.

      He frowned up at it. Now there was something you didn’t see every day. A pentagram covered the plasterboard, scratched out in red ink. It sat within a couple of circles, with squiggles in various bits, and what looked like Latin around the outside.

      Why were teenagers such a bunch of freaks?

      A pair of wingnuts sat on the inside of the doorframe. Logan peered outside again. The bolt fitted into a metal bracket held in place by the wingnuts. So if you cracked the padlock, opened the door, unscrewed them, put the padlock back on the now unattached bolt mechanism, then climbed inside – you could pull the door shut, do up the wingnuts again, and no one would know you were in there. From the outside it’d look as if the cupboard was still locked.

      He shifted the action figures to one side of the shelf and picked his way through the books. Three of them were hollowed out hardbacks, like the one with Harry and Edward getting intimate. One held a notebook, with curly leaves and squiggles inlaid into the red leather cover. It was full of cramped black handwriting, interspersed with sketches of magic circles and other occult thingies. The next held a little woollen dolly, no bigger than the palm of his hand, with button eyes and a lock of brown hair fastened to its chest with a safety pin; a wizened chicken’s foot wrapped in tartan ribbon – like a really cheap kilt pin; a hairbrush; and a test-tube of something dark and viscous.

      Book number three was a lot more interesting. Logan tipped the contents out on the mattress. One pack of cherry-scented pipe tobacco. One old-fashioned long-necked pipe. One blister-pack sheet of little orange pills. And one clear plastic Ziploc bag with what looked like catnip in it. He opened the bag and took a sniff: the sweet, sweaty smell of marijuana.

      What kind of person smoked weed in a pipe, like an auld mannie?

      There was a lot of it too – enough to get a coach-load of students off their faces for a week. Enough to count as possession with intent to supply.

      Logan sat back on his haunches. Why would someone run away and leave that much pot behind? Maybe Agnes got into difficulties with her supplier, or another dealer, and needed to get out of town in a hurry?

      Assuming she actually managed to leave Aberdeen before they caught up with her…

      Well, while he was here, might as well be thorough.

      He unzipped the sleeping bag and turned it inside out: nothing. The mattress was old and saggy, soft enough that he could lift the corners up and over and poke at the floorboards underneath. More nothing. He let the corner fall back and a puff of fusty dust billowed out into the air.

      Logan turned and struggled to haul the mattress up from the short end of the cupboard. Bloody thing was like manoeuvring a dead body…

      There: a plastic folder lay on the floorboards. He grabbed it and the mattress thumped back into place. More dust.

      Inside the folder was a stack of press clippings about Witchfire being filmed in Aberdeen – the actors burbling about what a great script it was; the author hedging his bets as to whether it would be any good or not; some toad from the local council banging on about job creation and tourism opportunities; a photo op with the actors doling out soup to homeless people; another with a troupe of little kids in school uniform on the movie set, all grinning and holding