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

      ‘Steve!’ Rennie said, preparing to haul off and smack him again, ‘What happened?’

      PC Steve’s eyes were wild, darting between the steading and his bleeding hand. ‘Rat!’

      Someone dragged their belt out from underneath their boiler suit and wrapped it around Steve’s wrist, pulling hard.

      ‘Jesus, Steve,’ said the Bastard Simon Rennie, peering at the hole in his friend’s hand. ‘That must’ve been one big rat!’

      ‘Fucking thing was like a Rottweiler! Ah, bastard that hurts!’

      They stuffed a plastic bag with snow and stuck Steve’s bleeding hand into it, trying not to notice as the snow inside slowly turned from white to pink and then to red. Logan wrapped the whole lot in a spare boiler suit and told PC Rennie to take him to the hospital, lights and music all the way.

      Miller and Logan stood side by side as the lights flickered into life on top of the patrol car. It did a messy three point turn on the slippery road before creeping off into the blizzard, siren blazing.

      ‘So,’ said Logan as the flashing lights were swallowed by the snow. ‘How are you enjoying your first day on the Force?’

       23

      Logan stayed at the farm as long as he could, examining animal carcases with the rest of the team. Even with all that protective gear on he felt dirty. And everyone was on pins and needles after the rat attack. No one wanted to join PC Steve in A&E waiting for a tetanus and rabies shot.

      In the end, he had to call it a day: he still had work to do back at Force HQ. They dropped an ashen-faced Colin Miller off at the gate to the farm track. He was knackered, going straight home to drink a bottle of wine. Then he was going to climb into the shower and exfoliate until he bled.

      The gaggle of reporters and television cameras outside the farm had thinned out. Now only the hardcore remained, sitting in their cars with the engines running and heaters going full blast. They leapt from the warm safety of their vehicles as soon as Logan’s car appeared.

      No comment was all they got.

      DI Insch wasn’t in the incident room when Logan got back to FHQ. Getting an update from the team manning the phones was an uncomfortable experience. Even after the inspector’s speech they obviously still thought Logan was shite in a suit. No one actually said anything, but their reports were curt and to the point.

      Team one: door-to-door – ‘Have you seen this man?’ – had generated the usual raft of contradictory statements. Yes, Roadkill had been seen talking to the boys, no he hadn’t, yes he had. The Hazlehead station had even set up a roadblock to ask drivers if they’d seen something on their way into and out of town. A long shot, but worth a try.

      Team two: Bernard Duncan Philips’s life story. They’d been the most successful. There was a large manila folder sitting on the inspector’s desk containing everything anyone knew about Roadkill. Logan perched himself on the edge of the desk and flicked through the collection of photocopies, faxes and printouts. He stopped when he got to the report on the death of Bernard’s mother.

      She’d been diagnosed with bowel cancer five years ago. She’d been ill for a long time, unable to cope. Bernard had come home from St Andrews, leaving a PHD behind, in order to look after his sick mother. Her GP had insisted she get help, but she refused. Bernard was on mummy’s side and chased the man off the family farm with a pickaxe. Which was when they spotted the mental problems.

      Then her brother, who’d found her face down on the kitchen floor, made her go to the hospital. Exploratory surgery and bingo: cancer. They tried treating it, but the cancer had spread to her bones by February. And in May she was dead. Not in the hospital, but in her own bed.

      Bernard shared the house with her for two months after she died. A social worker had gone to check on Bernard. The smell had met her at the farmhouse door.

      So Bernard Duncan Philips got a two-year spell in Cornhill, Aberdeen’s only ‘special needs’ hospital. He responded well to the drugs so out he had gone into the care of the community. Which roughly translated meant they wanted the bed freed up for some other poor sod. Bernard buried himself in his work: scraping dead animals off the road for Aberdeen City Council.

      Which explained a lot.

      Logan didn’t need an update on team three: he’d seen enough at first hand to know they weren’t getting anywhere fast. Making them go through all that stuff in the waste containers hadn’t helped, but at least now they knew they hadn’t missed anything. At the rate they were going it’d be Monday at the earliest before they’d worked their way through all three steadings-worth of animal corpses. Providing the superintendent authorized the overtime.

      Logan’s mini incident room was empty by the time he got there. The lab results had come back on the vomit Isobel had found in the deep cut in the little girl’s body. The DNA didn’t match the sample from Norman Chalmers. And Forensics still hadn’t come up with anything else. The only thing tying him to the girl was the supermarket till receipt. Circumstantial. So they’d had to let Norman Chalmers go. At least he’d had the good sense to go quietly, rather than in a barrage of media attention. His lawyer must have been gutted.

      There was a neatly typed note sitting on Logan’s desk, summarizing the day’s sightings. He scanned through them sceptically. Most looked like utter fantasy.

      Next to it was the list of every female TB sufferer under the age of four in the whole country. It wasn’t a big list; just five names, complete with addresses.

      Logan pulled over the phone and started dialling.

      It was gone six when DI Insch stuck his head round the door and asked if Logan had a moment. The inspector had a strange look on his face and Logan got the feeling this wasn’t going to be good news. He put one hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and told the inspector he’d just be a minute.

      The other end of the phone was connected to a PC in Birmingham who was, at that moment, sitting with the last girl on Logan’s list. Yes she was still alive and was Logan aware that she was Afro-Caribbean? So probably not the dead white girl lying on a slab in the morgue then.

      ‘Thanks for your time, Constable.’ Logan put the phone down with a weary sigh and scored off the final name. ‘No luck,’ he said as Insch settled on the edge of the desk and started rummaging nosily through Logan’s files. ‘All children in the right age group treated for TB are alive and well.’

      ‘You know what that means,’ said Insch. He had hold of the statements Logan had picked out as being nearest to Norman Chalmers and his wheelie-bin. ‘If she’s had TB and been treated, it wasn’t in this country. She’s—’

      ‘—not a British national,’ Logan finished for him before burying his head in his hands. There were hundreds of places in the world still regularly suffering from TB: most of the former Soviet Union, Lithuania, every African nation, the Far East, America. . . A lot of the worst places didn’t even keep national records. The haystack had just got an awful lot bigger.

      ‘You want some good news?’ asked Insch, his voice flat and unhappy.

      ‘Go on then.’

      ‘We’ve got an ID on the girl we found at Roadkill’s farm.’

      ‘Already?’

      Insch nodded and placed all of Logan’s statements back in the wrong order. ‘We looked through the missing persons list for the last two years and ran a match on the dental records. Lorna Henderson. Four and a half. Her mother reported her missing. They were driving home from Banchory, along the South Deeside road. They’d had a row. She wouldn’t shut up about getting a pony. So the mother says: “If you don’t shut up about that damn pony you can walk home”.’

      Logan nodded. Everybody’s mum had done that at one time or another. Logan’s mother