Cold Granite. Stuart MacBride

out of him.’

      Insch raised an eyebrow, causing the pink, hairless skin of his head to wrinkle. He didn’t speak.

      ‘I’m not saying he hasn’t been snatched.’ Logan shrugged. ‘But still …’

      ‘Point taken,’ said Insch, smoothing himself down. Unlike the filthy, smelly Range Rover he was immaculately turned out in his best suit and tie. ‘But if we play this down, and he turns up all strangled with his willy cut off, we’ll be up to our ears in shite.’

      Logan’s phone went off in an explosion of beeps and whistles. It was the Queen Street station. They’d picked up Duncan Nicholson.

      ‘What …? No.’ Logan smiled, the phone clamped to his ear. ‘No, stick him in a detention room. Leave him there to sweat till I get there.’

      By the time Logan and WPC Watson got back to Force Headquarters a full-blown search was underway. DI Insch had more than trebled the six uniforms Logan had drafted in to help and now more than forty police men and women, four dog-handlers and their alsatians, were out in the freezing rain, searching every garden, public building, shed, bush and ditch between Richard Erskine’s home and the shops on Victoria Road.

      The desk sergeant told them that Duncan Nicholson had been stuck in the mankiest detention room in the place. He’d been there for nearly an hour.

      Just to be on the safe side, Logan and WPC Watson stopped off at the canteen for a cup of tea and a bowl of soup. Lingering over the pea and ham while Nicholson sat in a room, all alone, and worried.

      ‘Right,’ said Logan, when they’d finished. ‘How’d you like to drag Mr Nicholson into an interview room? Give him the silent glower routine? I’ll check up on the search and pop along in about, fifteen, twenty minutes. He should be bricking it by then.’

      Watson stood, cast one last longing look at the thick slices of sponge pudding and steaming yellow custard, and headed off to make Duncan Nicholson’s life even more miserable.

      Logan got an update from the admin officer in the incident room: the search teams hadn’t turned up anything and neither had the door-to-door interviews. So Logan grabbed a cup of tea from the machine in the hallway and drank it slowly, filling in the time. Then took another painkiller. When twenty minutes had elapsed he headed down to interview room two.

      It was small and utilitarian, done up in a nasty shade of beige. Duncan Nicholson sat at the table, opposite a silent, scowling, WPC Watson. He was looking very uncomfortable.

      The room was no smoking and Nicholson obviously had a problem with that. There was a pile of shredded paper on the table in front of him and as Logan entered Nicholson jumped, sending little scraps of white fluttering to the scuffed blue carpet.

      ‘Mr Nicholson,’ said Logan, sinking down into the brown plastic chair next to Watson. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

      Nicholson shifted in his chair, little beads of sweat sparkling on his upper lip. He wasn’t a day over thirty-two, but looked closer to forty-five. The hair on top of his head was shaved down to the bone, blue-grey stubble showing between shiny patches of pink scalp. Each of his ears had been pierced in at least three places. The rest of him looked as if it had been thrown together on a Monday morning before the factory was properly awake.

      ‘I’ve been here for hours!’ he said, mustering up as much indignity as he could. ‘Hours! There was nae bog! I wis burstin’!’

      Logan frowned. ‘Dear, dear, dear. There’s obviously been some mistake, Mr Nicholson. You came forward of your own free will, didn’t you? No toilet? I’ll have a word with the duty sergeant. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.’ He smiled a disarming, friendly smile. ‘But we’re all here now, so shall we get started?’

      Nicholson nodded, smiling a little, feeling reassured. Feeling better.

      ‘Constable, would you do the honours?’ Logan passed Watson two brand new audiotapes and she unwrapped them, sticking one in each side of the recorder bolted to the wall before doing the same with a pair of videotapes. The machine clicked and bleeped as she pressed ‘RECORD’.

      ‘Interview with Mr Duncan Nicholson,’ she said, going through the standard names, date and time.

      Logan smiled again. ‘Now then, Mr Nicholson, or can I call you Duncan?’

      The man on the other side of the table cast a nervous glance at the camera in the corner of the room, over Logan’s shoulder. At last he nodded his shaved head.

      ‘So, Duncan, you found the body of David Reid last night?’

      Nicholson nodded again.

      ‘You have to say something, Duncan,’ said Logan, his smile getting wider by the minute. ‘The tape can’t hear you if you nod.’

      Nicholson’s eyes darted back to the staring glass eye of the video camera. ‘Er … Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I did. I found him last night.’

      ‘What were you doing down there in the middle of the night, Duncan?’

      He shrugged. ‘I wis … takin’ a walk. You know, had a row with the wife and went for a walk.’

      ‘Down the riverbank? In the dead of night?’

      The smile started to fade. ‘Er, yeah. I go down there sometimes to, you know, think an’ stuff.’

      Logan crossed his arms, mirroring the PC sitting next to him. ‘So you went down there to think. And just happened to fall over the murdered body of a three-year-old boy?’

      ‘Er, yeah … I just … Look, I …’

      ‘Just happened to fall over the murdered body of a three-year-old boy. In a waterlogged ditch. Hidden beneath a sheet of chipboard. In the dark. In the pouring rain.’

      Nicholson opened his mouth once or twice, but nothing came out.

      Logan left him sitting in silence for almost two minutes. The man was getting more and more fidgety by the second, his shaved head now as sweaty as his upper lip, the smell of second-hand garlic oozing out of him in nervous waves.

      ‘I’d been … drinking, OK? I fell down, nearly killed myself goin’ down that bloody bank.’

      ‘You fell down the bank, in the pouring rain, and yet when the police arrived there wasn’t a speck of mud on you! You were clean as a whistle, Duncan. That doesn’t sound like someone who’s just fallen down a muddy bank and into a ditch, now does it?’

      Nicholson ran a hand over the top of his head, the stubble making a faint scritching noise in the oppressive interview room. Dark blue stains marked his armpits.

      ‘I … I went home to call you. I got changed.’

      ‘I see.’ Logan switched the smile back on again. ‘Where were you on the thirteenth of August this year, between half past two and three in the afternoon?’

      ‘I … I don’t know.’

      ‘Then where were you between the hours of ten and eleven this morning?’

      Nicholson’s eyes snapped open wide. ‘This mornin’? What’s goin’ on? I didnae kill anyone!’

      ‘Who said you did?’ Logan turned in his seat. ‘Constable Watson, did you hear me accuse Mr Nicholson of murder?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      Nicholson squirmed.

      Logan produced a list of all the children registered missing in the last three years and placed it on the table between them.

      ‘Where were you this morning, Duncan?’

      ‘I was watching the telly.’

      ‘And where were you on,’ Logan leant forward and read off the list, ‘the fifteenth of March between six and seven? No? How about the twenty-seventh of May, half-four to eight?’

      They