The Missing and the Dead. Stuart MacBride

      As soon as he clunked the passenger door shut again, she was reversing through the potholes. Did a sharp three-pointer, then accelerated off.

      He turned. Picked his way around the police van. Punched Deano’s badge number into the Airwave.

      But before he could press send, Tufty appeared, scrambling across the pebbled beach, both arms held out as if he was walking the high wire. He paused. Slithered back a couple of steps. Waved. ‘Sarge? Over here.’

      Logan followed him across the pebble beach, avoiding the road. Broken kelp roots clung to the high-tide mark, pale and weathered, like a thousand human tibias. Everything smelled of ozone and salt, underpinned by a thin smear of rotting fish. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Guy was down here taking photos for some urban-decay-project-thing. Young lad doing an HND in photography at Aberdeen College. Peed himself. Then battered it over to Macduff on his bike. Saw us at the harbour, and that was that.’

      A nod. Pebbles crunched and shifted under Logan’s feet. ‘You confiscate the camera?’

      ‘Deano got the SD card.’ Tufty pointed off to the right, towards a crumbling concrete embankment. ‘This way.’

      ‘Why didn’t your student call nine-nine-nine? Thought everyone had a mobile phone now.’

      Tufty flashed a wee smile and a shrug. ‘Panicked. Says he couldn’t remember the number. Bit of a climb, sorry …’ He clambered up the embankment, then up onto the grass. Then over an outcrop of lichen-covered rock.

      ‘You sure you know where you’re going?’

      ‘Deano said there’s no way anyone would come this way carrying a body. So, you know, common approach path.’ More clambering and scrambling, and they were up on a ridge above the swimming pools. Tufty nodded. ‘Down there.’

      The site was split into two halves. In front of the main buildings were a set of wide amphitheatre steps in dark-grey stained concrete, the edges picked out in decaying whitewash. They enclosed a D-shaped shallow pool – dry as an abandoned riverbed – the wall between it and the main swimming area crumbling and partially collapsed. On the other side of the wall, water came halfway up. A stony beach at one side that couldn’t have been an original feature, speckled with broken pipes and other bits of rusting flotsam. Then the sea wall, and then the blue expanse of the North Sea.

      A dark shape was hunched at the far side of the pool, a line of black-and-yellow tape trailing from one hand: ‘CRIME SCENE – DO NOT ENTER’. Deano. He stuck both arms up and waved them. ‘Sarge!’

      It took a moment to pick out the body. Grey against grey.

      Not a mistake then.

      A couple of inches below the ridge they stood on lay the decaying flat roof of some sort of ancient pump house. No way in hell Logan was risking standing on that. ‘Where’s this common approach path go, then?’

      Tufty pointed. ‘Far as we can tell, he’d take her in a straight line from the entrance over there, along the side, take the walkway between the two bits, and dump her in the pool.’ His shoulders drooped. ‘I wanted to do some searching, but Deano won’t let me go down. Says I’ve got to stay up here.’

      Proper procedure. Wonders would never cease.

      Logan eased himself down the rock face and onto the amphitheatre steps. No way to get to where Deano was without crossing the killer’s route. Well, except for picking his way along the sea wall, but it looked narrow and slippery with green slime. And according to the sign at the entrance, it was a two-metre drop from there to the rocks, so sod that.

      Assuming there was a killer.

      He pointed at Tufty. ‘As of now, you’re acting Crime Scene Manager. You record the time and the date and everyone who’s been near the body. Guard the entrance and make sure no one gets past you till I say so. No one. Don’t care if it’s the Chief Constable himself, he cools his heels in the car park till I say otherwise. Understand?’

      ‘Sarge.’

      Good.

      He went right, dropped into the D-shaped inshore pool and made his way through the rubble and rubbish to the other side.

      Deano jabbed a metal spike into a crack in the crumbling concrete at his feet, then looped the tape through the pig’s tail at the top. Moved on to the next spike, unspooling a trail of crime-scene yellow behind him. He sighed. ‘Poor wee sod.’

      Logan stopped, level with the tape, and peered over the crumbling walkway. ‘Suspicious?’

      A grimace. ‘When’s a dead kid not?’

      ‘True.’ He scrambled up and ducked under the yellow-and-black cordon.

      The wee girl couldn’t be much more than five or six. The same age as Jasmine. Same hair colour …

      Something knotted in the middle of his chest, compressed by the stabproof vest’s squeezing fist until it was hard and sharp.

      But it wasn’t her.

      Breath hissed out of him.

      Deano put the roll of tape down. ‘You OK, Sarge?’

      Blink. Logan coughed the lump out of his throat. ‘Yeah. It’s … She looks like Jasmine.’

      The girl lay on her front, three feet from the dirty concrete wall and the ramp down into the pool. She was half-in, half-out of the water. Head, arms and torso floating amongst the detritus, lower half stranded on the rocks.

      One leg lay straight out behind her, the small red shoe pointing back towards the main building. Looked as if the strap across her ankle had got caught on a rusting length of broken pipe. Holding her in place. The other leg stuck out at nearly ninety degrees. White socks and a grey dress. All covered with a thin dusting of white crystals.

      Her grey jumper was sodden – torn between the shoulders, and at the elbows, showing the white shirt underneath. A school uniform.

      Skin was pale as snow, covered in small scratches and tiny triangular holes. Her hands swollen and white. Neck bent at an unnatural angle.

      Her cheek rested against a submerged rock. Eyes open, staring out through the murky water. Mouth open. Pale blonde hair floating around her face. A big dent in her forehead.

      Deano tied the length of tape off on the last metal post. ‘You sure you’re OK?’

      A shrug. ‘Yeah. Bit of a surprise, that’s all.’

      ‘See if I thought it was my daughter, I’d skin the scumbag alive …’ He sniffed. ‘Well you know: if I actually had any kids.’

      Logan picked his way down the ramp, boots slithering on the weed-covered concrete, and squatted down at the edge of the water. Licked the tip of his index finger, then tapped it against the snagged red shoe. Pressed the finger against his tongue. Salt.

      ‘Deano, when’s high tide?’

      ‘No idea. Can find out, though.’

      ‘Definitely not an accident?’ Inspector McGregor was cranked up to full volume, trying to compete with the siren of the car she was in. ‘You’re sure?’

      ‘As I can be, without screwing up the scene.’ Logan marched back to the road, pulling off his blue nitrile gloves and stuffing them into an empty carrier bag. Fingers trembling, struggling with the plastic. ‘Looks as if someone battered her head in, but there’s no sign of blood on the walkway, or the wall, or the steps. So she didn’t do it falling into the pool. Best guess: she was dead by the time she hit the water. Probably had been for a couple of hours. Must’ve been completely submerged at one point – her skirt, legs and shoes are covered in salt crystals.’ He stopped, blew out a breath. ‘Poor wee soul was only five or six.’

      The second-hand roar of the siren wailed from his Airwave’s speaker.

      ‘Guv?’