Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin. Stuart MacBride

Logan’s father had taken with them on every summer caravan holiday to Lossiemouth. Right now it was hissing away to itself, boiling a kettle of water for tea.

      Roadkill – it was hard to think of him as Bernard – sat on a rickety wooden chair, poking away at a small fire. It was a two bar electric job, as dead as the animals in buildings one through three. But it seemed to give him pleasure. He jabbed at it with an elaborate iron poker, humming a tune to himself that Logan couldn’t quite make out.

      The man from the council was surprisingly calm now that Roadkill was here. He laid out the situation in small, easy-to-understand words: the mounds of dead animals had to go.

      ‘I’m sure you understand, Bernard,’ he said, poking at his clipboard with a finger, ‘that you can’t keep dead animals here. There’s a considerable risk to human health. How would you feel if people started getting sick because of your dead animals?’

      Roadkill just shrugged and poked at the fire again. ‘Mother got sick,’ he said and Logan was struck by the lack of an accent. He’d always assumed that someone employed by the council to scrape dead animals off the road would sound a lot more ‘local’. Some of the people round here were almost unintelligible. But not Roadkill. It was clear that the man sitting on a creaking dining chair, jabbing away at a dead electric fire, had suffered some sort of classical education. ‘She got sick and she went away,’ Roadkill went on, looking up for the first time. ‘Now she’s with God.’ He was a good-looking man, under all the dirt and grime and beard. Proud nose, intelligent slate-grey eyes, weather-reddened cheeks. Give him a bath and a visit to the barber’s and he wouldn’t look out of place at the Royal Northern Club, where the city’s elite held court over expensive five-course lunches.

      ‘I know, Bernard, I know.’ The man from the council smiled reassuringly. ‘We’re going to send a crew in tomorrow to start clearing out the buildings. OK?’

      Roadkill dropped the poker. It hit the concrete floor with a clatter that reverberated off the bare stone walls. ‘They’re my things,’ he said, his face working itself up to tears. ‘You can’t take away my things! They’re mine.’

      ‘They have to be disposed of, Bernard. We have to make sure you’re safe, don’t we?’

      ‘But they’re mine. . .’

      The man from the council stood, motioning for Logan and Constable Steve to do the same. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, I really am. The team will be here at half past eight on the dot. You can help them if you like.’

      ‘My things.’

      ‘Bernard? Would you like to help them?’

      ‘My special dead things. . .’

      They drove back into town with the windows down, trying to get rid of the smell of Bernard Duncan Philips’s farm. It clung to their clothes and their hair, rancid and foul. It didn’t matter that the drizzle had given way to heavier rain, seeping in through the open windows: getting wet was a small price to pay.

      ‘You wouldn’t think it to look at him,’ said the man from the council as they worked their way along Holburn Street, making for the council’s main headquarters at St Nicholas House. ‘But he used to be a really bright lad. Degree in medieval history from St Andrews University. Or so I’m told.’

      Logan nodded. He’d suspected as much. ‘What happened?’

      ‘Schizophrenic.’ The man shrugged. ‘He’s on medication.’

      ‘Care in the community?’ asked Logan.

      ‘Oh he’s perfectly safe,’ said the man from the council, but Logan could hear the tremor in his voice. That was why he’d been so insistent on a police escort. Care in the community or not, he was scared of Roadkill. ‘And he does a good job, he really does.’

      ‘Scraping up dead animals.’

      ‘Well, we can’t just leave them to rot at the side of the road, can we? I mean it’s not too bad with rabbits and hedgehogs, the cars sort of smush them into paste and the crows and things take care of what’s left. But cats and dogs and things. . . You know. . . People complain if they have to drive past a rotting labrador every morning on the way to work.’ He paused as a bus pulled out in front of them. ‘I don’t know what we’d do without Bernard. Before he was released into the community we couldn’t get anyone to do it for love nor money.’

      Now he actually stopped to think about it, it had been a long time since Logan had seen a dead animal on an Aberdeen street.

      The man from the council dropped them off outside Force HQ, thanking them for their help and apologizing for the smell before driving off into the rain.

      Logan and PC Steve sprinted for the main door, their feet sending up fountains of water with every step. They were both soaked by the time they pushed through into reception.

      The pointy-faced desk sergeant looked up as they squelched their way across the Grampian Police Crest set into the lino: a thistle topped with a crown, above the words ‘SEMPER VIGILO’.

      ‘DS McRae?’ he said, stretching himself out of his chair like a curious parrot.

      ‘Yes?’ Logan was waiting for some sort of ‘Lazarus’ comment. Those bastards Big Gary and Eric must have told the whole bloody station about it.

      ‘DI Insch says you’re to go straight to the incident room.’

      Logan took a look down at his soaking trousers and wringing suit. He was desperate to climb into a shower and a dry set of clothes. ‘Can it not wait fifteen, twenty minutes?’ he asked.

      The sergeant shook his head. ‘Nope. The DI was very specific. Soon as you got back: straight to the incident room.’

      While PC Steve went off to get dry, Logan grumbled his way through the building to the lifts, mashing the button with an angry finger. Up on the third floor he stomped his way down the corridor. The walls were already punctuated with Christmas cards. They were pinned to the corkboards, in between ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WOMAN?’ and ‘DOMESTIC ABUSE. . . THERE’S NO EXCUSE!’ and all the other wanted and information posters the media office put out. Tiny bursts of cheer among all the misery and suffering.

      The incident room was crowded and bustling. PCs, WPCs and DCs charged about clutching sheets of paper, or answered the constantly bleating phones. And in the middle of it all Detective Inspector Insch sat on the edge of a desk, peering over someone’s shoulder as they scribbled down notes with a phone clamped between their shoulder and their ear.

      Something had happened.

      ‘What’s up?’ asked Logan after he’d squelched his way through the crowd.

      The inspector held up a hand for silence, leaning closer so he could read what was being written. Finally he sighed with disappointment and turned his attention to Logan. An eyebrow shot up as he saw the state of his detective sergeant. ‘Go for a swim did you?’

      ‘No, sir,’ said Logan, feeling water trickling down the back of his neck into his already sodden collar. ‘It’s raining.’

      Insch shrugged. ‘That’s Aberdeen for you. Could you not have dried yourself off before coming in here, dripping all over my lovely clean incident room?’

      Logan closed his eyes and tried not to rise to the bait. ‘The desk sergeant said it was urgent, sir.’

      ‘We’ve lost another kid.’

      The car was steaming up too quickly for the blowers to deal with. Logan had cranked them, and the heating, up to full pelt, but the outside world remained obscured behind misty windows. DI Insch sat in the passenger seat, chewing away thoughtfully as Logan squinted through the windscreen at the dark, rain-soaked streets, trying to get them through town to Hazlehead and the place where the latest child had gone missing.

      ‘You know,’ said Insch, ‘since you came back to work we’ve had two abductions, found a dead girl, a dead boy and dragged a corpse with no knees