Dying Light

17

DI Steel didn’t want anyone else present while she ‘interviewed’ Councillor Marshall, didn’t even want to take him into the station until she’d had a chance to talk to him. In private as it were. So Logan was sent off to swear the rest of the team to secrecy and search the councillor’s car, discovering a number of scary-looking marital aids and a couple of specialist magazines so hard-core the pictures made his eyes water. But he’d collected the lot, sealing them away in clear plastic evidence pouches, not wanting to touch anything he’d found.

Steel had commandeered Logan’s pool car, parking it further down the docks where she could talk to Councillor Marshall without being disturbed. Now the only signs of life inside the rusty Vauxhall were the fiery-orange tip of the inspector’s cigarette and the smoke slowly curling its way out of the open car window. Logan, on the other hand, sat in the councillor’s people carrier, bundled up against the cold wind whistling in through the ruined back window. He’d driven it out from the alley to the harbour’s entrance, where he could keep one eye on the Vauxhall and the other on Shore Lane.

There wasn’t much business being done tonight. The presence of multiple plainclothes police officers had pushed the genuine working girls into the surrounding streets, leaving Shore Lane completely under WPC Menzies’ dominion. WPC Davidson had performed a similar trick on James Street, doing more to clear prostitution from Aberdeen’s red light district than months and months of community policing. So there was the answer: you want to cut down on the sex trade, don’t bother with initiatives and public awareness campaigns, just put a couple of unattractive WPCs out there selling their wares on the streets, and back them up with about two dozen plainclothes CID pimps. Problem solved.

Logan turned up his collar and shivered. Summer was in the process of buggering off and autumn wasn’t going to hang about for long. It was going to be another cold, wet end of year. Still, he thought, at least he wasn’t done up in stockings, suspenders and a push-up bra that would put Hannibal Lecter off his sausages. Right on cue, WPC Menzies reported in, complaining about the cold and her sore nipple and wishing death and hellfire on every slimy wee bastard out trolling the docks at this time of night. Did they really have another four and a half hours of this to go?

At long last the inspector’s passenger door cracked open and a hunched, cowed figure stepped out. He turned and said something before marching, head down, towards the harbour gates and his damaged car. Logan jumped out and held the driver’s door open for him, grinning. The man crawled sheepishly in behind the wheel and started the engine, almost squealing in terror as Logan called out a cheery, ‘Drive safely, Councillor!’

Eyes darting and fearful, the man raced away from the scene of his disgrace as fast as the speed limit would allow. Logan stood there, waving, until the car disappeared from view, then picked up the bagful of seized pornographic material and hurried over to the waiting, smoke-filled Vauxhall. ‘Christ, it’s freezing out there!’ he said, cranking the heaters up and wringing his hands over the vent. ‘You get much out of Mr Marshall?’ DI Steel didn’t answer, just asked him what he’d found when he’d searched the councillor’s car. Logan held up the plastic bag and started digging evidence pouches out of it, listing the things off as he went, finishing with the pièce de résistance: a huge red rubber phallus with separate power/motion control, covered with spines and nobbles. Steel set them twitching, vibrating and rotating by playing with the dials and buttons. The whole thing buzzed and throbbed in its clear plastic evidence pouch, like some sort of malevolent insect larva struggling to get free.

‘Classy,’ said Steel, reading the device’s name off the side: ‘THE ANAL ADVENTURER. Fun for all the family.’ She pushed another button and the end started to pulse and judder. ‘Jesus.’ She nearly dropped it. ‘It’s alive! ALIVE!’ Grinning she clicked the thing off and threw it over her shoulder into the back of the car. ‘So nothing illegal then, just hella-dodgy?’

Logan agreed. ‘What about you? You get anything out of our friend on the council?’

‘Yup.’ Steel’s smile was almost as obscene as the huge, battery-operated rubber willy now lying on the back seat, but she didn’t say any more.

‘Going to share?’ Logan asked at last.

‘Nope.’

Half past eleven came and went without much happening. By the time midnight was sounding on the St Nicholas Kirk bells WPC Menzies had only been propositioned three times, including Councillor Marshall. WPC Davidson hadn’t fared much better either, netting a total of four. Not one of the blokes looked like a good fit for the killer, but they’d been detained anyway. Tomorrow morning someone would check out their alibis for the Monday and Friday nights. Logan didn’t hold out much hope.

Stifling a yawn, he asked DI Steel if she wanted him to pick up something to eat while they were waiting? After all, they’d been on duty since about eight yesterday morning...

‘Eight?’ She snorted. ‘I started at seven. Mind you, had a couple hours’ kip in the afternoon. Makes the world of difference.’

Logan looked at her. ‘I wouldn’t know. I was at a crime scene with DI Insch for most of the morning and then in a post mortem till half five.’

Steel frowned at him. ‘What the hell did you do that for? You knew we were going to be out here all night!’

‘You told Insch I’d help him!’

‘Did I?’ The inspector shrugged. ‘Ah well, never mind.’ She dug a hand into her jacket pocket, coming out with a stained neoprene wallet from which she extracted a twenty. ‘Go make yourself useful. White pudding supper with extra salt and vinegar... oh, and a pickled egg. And some tomato sauce if they’ve got it. And get something for yourself, if it’ll wipe that skelped-arse expression off your face.’

Logan had to concentrate very hard on not slamming the car door. He marched up Marischal Street to the Castlegate, grumbling all the way. The sooner they caught this bastard the better. After that he could go back to working for Insch, or DI McPherson. Anyone other than DI Bloody Steel.

This close to midnight the streets were still pretty busy, taxis mostly. Taxis, buses and drunkards. People going on from the pubs to the casinos, or nightclubs, or specialist venues boasting erotic dancing. There was a pool of fresh vomit sitting in the middle of the pavement at the top of the street, steaming gently, and Logan picked his way around it, trying not to get too close to the green-looking young man staggering about next to it. In defiance of the weather the silly sod was dressed in a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved Aberdeen Football Club top, the shiny red material streaked with regurgitated curry.

There was a chip shop not too far down George Street and he placed Steel’s order, getting himself a jumbo haddock with pickled onions and a couple of tins of Irn-Bru, munching on the burning-hot chips as he walked back down to the docks. The AFC vomiter was gone, but a group of giggling girlies dressed in miniskirts, cropped tops and high heels filled the void by hurling abuse at passers-by. They staggered across the pedestrian crossing from the other side of the road, swigging at bottles of Bacardi Breezer, asking Logan for some of his chips, and calling him a ‘miserable cunt’ at the top of their lungs when he refused. Sighing Logan kept on going, over the crest and down the hill. The haddock was good, fresh and flaky and moist and, shit: that was his phone. He juggled his fish supper out of the way, wiping his greasy fingers on the paper it came wrapped in, before pulling the noisy clanging mobile out into the cold night air.

‘Hello? This DS McRae?’ A man’s voice. Logan admitted that it was. ‘Right, right, got a message you wanted to speak to me. pc taylor?’

Logan had to think for a moment. ‘Constable Taylor,’ he said at last, trying to fold the paper back over the top of his chips to keep the heat in. ‘You patrol the docks, don’t you? Shore Lane, Regent Quay, that kind of thing?’

‘Aye.’

‘I’m looking for a young girl, fourteen to sixteen, been working Shore Lane. Lithuanian, not been in town long, pretty, hair like something out of an old rock video. Said her name was Kylie Smith. I want her and/or her pimp.’

Silence for a moment and then, ‘Doesn’t ring any bells, but I can ask around.’

‘Good. Next: woman, Caucasian, mid-forties, PVC raincoat, black lace top, long boots. Short permed blonde hair. Looks like a regular. Recently had the crap beaten out of her — I need to speak to her urgently.’

The answer was immediate this time. ‘Sounds like Agnes Walker, Skanky Agnes to her friends. On some sort of methadone programme I think.’

‘You got a home address?’ PC Taylor didn’t have it on him, but he’d find out. Logan thanked him and hung up. DI Steel’s chips were still fairly warm by the time Logan made it back to the car. She wolfed the lot without a word while Logan skoofed his way through a tin of Irn-Bru.

‘Right,’ said Steel, sooking the last of the salt off her fingers and settling down in her seat. ‘Back to the grindstone.’ She was snoring within fifteen minutes.

Logan sighed. It was going to be a long night.

Around about half two he roused the inspector. His back was beginning to ache from sitting in the car all night watching nothing happen. While Steel blinked, yawned and lit up yet another cigarette, Logan stepped out into the darkness to stretch his legs, breath misting about his head, caught beneath the harbour’s arc lights. A massive blue-and-green supply vessel was docked behind them, the windows dark and empty, reflecting back the silent cityscape. Distant sounds of clanging came from around the docks, the spark and flash of welding on a Russian boat, its red paintwork streaked with rust and grime. The clatter of a ship’s door slamming shut. The whine of a crane. Drunken singing.

Hands rammed deep in his pockets, Logan set off on a lap of the streets that made up Aberdeen’s red light district. The nightclubs would be chucking out soon, one final upsurge in business for the working girls, a drunken knee-trembler in a filthy doorway, or a once in a lifetime opportunity to be battered to death and abandoned in a ditch somewhere. And it wasn’t as if the police had any idea where, when or even if the killer would strike again. Tonight, tomorrow, the day after... And suppose he did strike, how would they know? If he didn’t take the bait, grabbed one of the real working girls instead of Operation Cinderella’s ugly sisters, Grampian Police wouldn’t find out until the body turned up. Then there would be hell to pay. Logan scowled at the darkened alleys leading off the road, picturing the headlines: LOCAL WOMAN SNATCHED WHILE POLICE LOOK ON! or SERIAL KILLER STRIKES UNDER POLICE NOSES! or even just DS McRAE SCREWS UP AGAIN!!! ‘It was my plan,’ said disgraced former Police Hero, Logan (Lazarus) McRae. ‘It was a sack of s***, but I made them go through with it anyway. All we had to do was watch the streets, and we couldn’t even manage that. He snatched her and we couldn’t do a b***** thing.’ Grampian Police gave notice today of DS McRae’s immediate suspension...

He turned left off Commerce Street, just shy of a tiny corporation car park — little more than a triangle of tarmac with a pay-and-display machine — empty now but for an unmarked Transit Van full of policemen. He resisted the urge to give them a wave. The wind was beginning to get up, freezing cold gusts that leached the feeling from his cheeks and made his ears sting. He wandered past the tile shop and the mini business park, peering down the side streets as he went. There weren’t many girls left on the game tonight. Either frightened off by the cold or the huge police presence. Maybe the killer would be too? Maybe he couldn’t get it up if there was an army of constables and CID watching. Or maybe his dick shrivelled up in the cold and no amount of pounding some poor cow’s skull in with a rock would help. Whatever it was, Logan got the feeling their man wasn’t going to show tonight. This had all been one huge waste of time.

She’s been standing on this street corner for ages, and it’s bloody freezing. Shifting from foot to foot, trying to get some sort of circulation going, she cups her hands to her mouth and blows. Breath comes out in a fog, momentarily warming her fingertips, but even that small relief is soon whipped away in the icy wind. ‘Fuckit,’ she says to herself under her breath. If she didn’t need the money so much... By all rights she should be at home tonight, curled up in front of the fire with a bottle of vodka and something nice on the telly. But that would be asking for too much, wouldn’t it? God forbid Joe should get off his arse and go to work for a change. No: much better he should raid the fucking housekeeping and bugger off with the money for the electric. What the hell were they supposed to do with no bloody electricity? The sodding card meter was already down to its last flicker. So Joe goes out on the piss and she has to go out on the game. In the freezing cold. Just so they can have enough fucking electricity to see by. ‘Selfish fuckhead.’ He hadn’t even left her enough for a packet of fags. She’d had to beg some off Joanna. She scrunched up her face and scowled at the deserted street. Enough was enough. The lazy bastard had to go. It wasn’t as if he was even good to her. No, it was always demands and complaints and... A car. She pulled herself upright and tried for a smile as it slowed down. It was a nice car, one of those new ones they were advertising on the telly. Whoever it was, they weren’t short of a bob or two. She wriggled her bra down, getting as much cleavage on show as possible.

Maybe tonight wouldn’t be such a let down after all.