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

      They did. His hands were like wounded birds, flapping away on top of the table. His gaze was far and distant. He wasn’t even in the same room as them.

      Logan glanced at the clock on the wall. Seven-twenty. Past the time when Roadkill started asking for his medicine yesterday. ‘Sir,’ he said to Insch, ‘can I have a word with you outside?’

      They walked to the coffee machine, passing an array of interested faces. The word was all round the station, on the radio, and probably the evening news. The Aberdeen Child-killer was behind bars. Now all they had to do was get him to talk.

      ‘What’s on your mind, Sergeant?’ asked Insch, punching in the number for white coffee, extra sugar.

      ‘We’re going to get nothing out of Roadkill tonight, sir. He’s schizophrenic. He needs to take his medication. Even if we got a confession out of him it’d get ripped to shreds in court. Mentally ill suspect, denied medication, confesses after a three-hour interrogation? What would you do?’

      Insch blew across the top of his plastic cup of coffee and sipped experimentally at the liquid. When he spoke at last it was with the voice of a very tired man. ‘You’re right of course.’ He sat the coffee down on the nearest table and hunted through his pockets for something sweet. In the end Logan had to offer him one of his extra strong mints.

      ‘Thanks. I’ve been thinking the same thing for the last hour. Just didn’t want to let it go. Just in case.’ He sighed. ‘Just in case Peter Lumley’s still alive somewhere.’

      It was wishful thinking and they both knew it. Peter Lumley was dead. They just hadn’t found his body yet.

      ‘What about the crime scene?’ asked Logan.

      ‘What about it?’

      ‘The dead girl we found might not be the only one in the pile.’ The next bit was what had been causing him trouble since the farmhouse. ‘And then there’s David Reid. He was abandoned. The MO just doesn’t fit. Roadkill’s a collector. He wouldn’t just leave the body lying out like that.’

      ‘Maybe he likes them rotted before he hoards them.’

      ‘If it is him, he cut the genitals off David Reid. They’ll be at the farm somewhere.’

      Insch screwed up his face. ‘Shite. We’re going to have to go through every last carcase he’s got out there looking for it. Talk about your proverbial needle in a haystack.’ He mashed his features with a pair of tired hands. ‘Right.’ He took a deep breath and straightened his back. The authority had returned to his voice. ‘We’re going to have to do this the hard way. If we can’t get a confession out of Philips we’ll tie him to the bodies. The little girl we found at his home; no problem there. And there must be something linking him to David Reid and Peter Lumley. I want you to get a dozen uniform question everyone where the children were last seen. Get me a witness. We’re not letting the bastard get away again.’

      That night Logan’s dreams were full of rotting children. They ran through the flat, wanting to play. One sat on the living room floor, little chunks of skin falling onto the polished floorboards, bashing away at a xylophone Logan had been given for his fourth birthday. Clank and clink and boing, a cacophony that was more like a phone ringing than music.

      And that’s when he woke up.

      Logan staggered through to the lounge and grabbed the ringing phone from its cradle. ‘What?’ he demanded.

      ‘An’ a merry Christmas to you too.’ Colin Miller.

      ‘Oh God. . .’ Logan tried to rub some life into his face. ‘It’s half-six! What is it with you and mornings?’

       ‘You found another body.’

      Logan shuffled to the window and looked for Miller’s expensive automobile in the darkened street. There was no sign of it. At least that meant he was to be spared a visit from the cheerful fairy this morning.

      ‘And?’

      There was a pause on the other end of the phone. ‘And you arrested Bernard Philips. Roadkill.’

      Stunned, Logan let the curtain fall back. ‘How the hell did you know that?’ There was nothing in the press pack to identify who’d been arrested, just the normal: ‘a suspect has been taken into custody and a report sent to the Procurator Fiscal’.

       ‘You know how: it’s ma job. Poor wee thing, rottin’ away in that pile of crap. . . I want the inside track, Laz. I’ve still got stuff on Geordie Stephenson you don’t know. Everybody wins.’

      Logan couldn’t believe his ears. ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek after what you did to DI Insch yesterday!’

       ‘Laz, that’s just business. He screwed you over and I took him down a couple of pegs. Did I write one bad word about you? Did I?’

      ‘That’s not the point.’

       ‘Ah, loyalty. Like it. Good quality in an officer of the law.’

      ‘You made him look like an idiot.’

       ‘Tell you what: I lay off the pantomime dame and you and me has a chat over breakfast?’

      ‘I can’t do that. I need to get Insch to clear anything I say, OK?’

      There was another pause.

       ‘You gotta be careful what you do with your loyalty, Laz. Sometimes it can do you more harm than good.’

      ‘What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

       ‘Take a look at the morning’s paper, Laz. See whether or not you need a friend in the press.’

      Logan settled the phone back in its cradle and stood in the darkness of the lounge, shivering. There was no way he could just go back to bed now. Not until he knew what Miller had done. What the morning paper contained.

      Half past six. His own copy wouldn’t be delivered for another hour and a bit. So he dressed quickly and slid his way through the ankle-deep snow up to the Castlegate and the nearest newsagent.

      It was a small shop, the kind that tried anything once. The walls were festooned with shelves: books, pots, pans, light bulbs, tins of kidney beans. . . Logan found what he was looking for on the floor by the counter – a thick bundle of fresh papers, still wrapped in protective plastic to keep the snow from soaking into the newsprint.

      The proprietor, a stocky man with three fingers missing on his left hand, a greying beard and a gold tooth grunted a good morning as he slit the plastic open. ‘Jeezuz,’ he said, picking a paper off the top of the pile, holding it up so Logan could see the front page. ‘They had the bastard an’ they let him go! Can you fuckin’ believe that?’

      There were four photographs, slap bang in the middle of the page: David Reid, Peter Lumley, DI Insch and Bernard Duncan Philips. Roadkill was out of focus, bent over a shovel full of squashed rabbit, his wheelie-bin sitting next to him on the road. The two boys smiled out from school photographs. Insch was in full panto get-up.

      Above the lot the headline screamed ‘HOUSE OF HORROR: DEAD GIRL FOUND IN PILE OF ROTTING ANIMALS!’ and underneath that ‘KILLER RELEASED FROM POLICE CUSTODY ONLY HOURS EARLIER’. Colin Miller strikes again.

      ‘Buncha fuckin’ clowns: that’s what they are. Tell you: five minutes alone with this sick bastard. That’ll do me. Got fuckin’ grandchildren that age.’

      Logan paid for his paper and left without saying a word.

      It had started to snow again. Thick white flakes drifted down from the dark sky, the clouds lit dark-orange, reflecting back the streetlights. All the way up Union Street the twelve days of Christmas glittered and sparkled, but Logan didn’t see any of it. He stood outside the newsagent, reading by the light of the shop window.

      There