Dying Light

34

Garlogie Woods again. Logan pulled the filthy CID car up onto the grass verge about a hundred yards down from the packed lay-by. Steel had spent the trip out brooding and smoking while Logan drove. DC Rennie, however, had cleared himself a little nest in the piles of chip papers and pizza boxes that cluttered the back of the car — the damn thing was still filthy from Operation Cinderella — and discovered the foot well to be full of painful, eye-watering pornography. Showing remarkable strength of character, Rennie ignored it, sticking to Logan’s report on Jamie McKinnon’s murder instead, desperate to get it finished so he could go and start interviewing up at the prison when they were finished here.

The inspector clambered out of the car without a word and squelched her way through the rain-soaked undergrowth back to the lay-by, squeezing past the line of cars and vans parked up on the verge. Everyone and their dog were here: a canine unit sitting in the middle of the churned-up mud, flanked by one of the search team minibuses and what looked like Doc Wilson’s car. For once Logan was glad he was working with Steel rather than Insch. Given the inspector’s last encounter with the duty doctor, Logan didn’t want to be around when those two ran into each other again.

He waited on the grass verge while Rennie rummaged about in the boot, coming out with handfuls of latex gloves and evidence bags which he secreted about his person, making the pockets of his suit bulge. Logan locked the car, before asking Rennie what he was doing out here. ‘Thought Steel wanted you to look into Jamie McKinnon’s death.’

DC Rennie gave the same nervous smile he’d been wearing back at FHQ. ‘The inspector says I have to learn to multi-task. Says she doesn’t trust many people to do this one, just you and me, sir.’ Logan gave a humourless laugh. ‘Trusting’ wasn’t exactly the word he’d use to describe his relationship with DI Steel right now.

The gate to the dirt track leading into the forest had been jemmied open, a pair of fresh tyre tracks gouged into the dirt leading off up the hill. A uniformed constable examined their warrant cards and waved them through. The track was pitted and slithery with mud; heather bushes grew on either side, their little purple and white spears waving in the breeze as Logan and Rennie picked their way along the verge. Broom grew in dark green profusion to their right, the brown, brittle seed casings rattling in the breeze like a nest of venomous snakes. And on the other side, tall pine trees, the forest floor beneath them carpeted with fallen needles, soaked almost black with the rain, studded with red mushrooms and luminous green ferns. ‘You going to this thing tomorrow then?’ asked Rennie, as they waded through the wet grass.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘The funeral? You know, Trevor Maitland?’

Oh shit. Logan winced; he’d forgotten all about it. How the hell was he supposed to stand there and look Maitland’s widow in the eye? What was he supposed to say — I’m sorry I screwed up and got your husband killed? Great bloody comfort that would be. ‘What happened with that search on the Pirie woman?’ he asked, changing the subject.

‘Eh? Oh, right...’ Rennie shook his head. ‘Jesus, what a munt she was! The Cruickshanks have filed about twenty complaints against her since Christmas: drunken, abusive behaviour mostly. Even tried for an antisocial behaviour order, but no luck so far. Banned for drink driving about three months ago — Mr Cruickshank tipped the local station off — done for assault last year, two counts of possession, but she got off with a warning. Rumours she was involved in some sort of kiddie porn ring, all anonymous complaints, but the Westhill station recognized the voice—’

‘Gavin Cruickshank again?’

‘Bingo.’ They reached the top of the hill and started down the other side, still following the rutted tracks in the mud. ‘There’s piles more, but basically she’s a dirty scumbag and Mr Cruickshank’s had it in for her ever since she moved in. Last complaint was made on the Tuesday night when she thumped him one.’

Logan grunted. No wonder Ailsa thought the woman had something to do with her disappearing husband. She certainly would’ve had a motive. That’s if Gavin wasn’t screwing a pole-dancer on a foreign beach somewhere, while his poor wife fretted and worried.

‘What about Ritchie, the Shore Lane Stalker?’

Rennie shrugged. ‘Have to ask the inspector about that. Playing it close to her chest.’

That figured. She wouldn’t want to share even the slightest hint of glory...

The forest suddenly opened up into a large, waterlogged dip. This was as far as the Identification Bureau van had got. It was abandoned halfway down the track, its rear wheels partially submerged in watery brown slime, the sides covered with fresh sprays of mud. There was a line of blue and white POLICE tape leading off into the trees just up ahead, and Logan and Rennie followed it. Two hundred yards in and they came across the cordon marking the outermost edge of the crime scene. A bored-looking WPC with a clipboard made them change into SOC boiler suits and overshoes before signing them in. The IB had put up a makeshift canopy of blue plastic, stringing it up between the trees on the periphery of the clearing. Smack bang in the middle of this impromptu marquee was a red fabric suitcase, identical to the last one, wedged under the bole of a fallen tree, partially covered by a layer of pine needles and soil, with fern fronds piled on top as camouflage. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Logan, watching as one of the IB team squatted down in front of the case and started delicately clearing off the greenery, needles and dirt into a large evidence pouch. ‘Why buy a bright-red suitcase if you’re going to hide the damn thing in a forest? I mean, it’s always going to stick out like a sore thumb, isn’t it? Why not buy a green one, or black? Why red?’

Rennie shrugged. ‘Wanted it to be found?’

‘Then why take it out into the middle of the bloody woods and hide it under a fallen tree? Why bury it under leaves and stuff?’

A thoughtful pause and then: ‘Maybe to make it easy to find, but look like it’s hard to find, so you’d find it but think it wasn’t meant to be found, even though you only really found it because someone wanted it to be found?’

Logan looked at him. ‘Did that make sense when it was inside your head?’ Cos it lost something in translation.’

Doc Fraser was already there, his medical bag sitting next to him on a roll of plastic sheeting while he leant against a tree and read the paper, waiting for the IB to finish taking samples, photographs, video, dusting for prints... He looked up from the P&J’s farming section and smiled. ‘Whatho, chaps,’ he said in a mock English accent, ‘smashing evening for a spot of the old dismembered-corpse routine, don’t ya think?’

Logan pointed at the milling throng of IB technicians. ‘Any sign of the PF yet?’ Doc Fraser shook his head: no one here but us chickens — not even DI Steel, who by rights should have got there before Rennie and Logan. Grumpy Doc Wilson was about somewhere, but given his recently acquired permanent foul mood the pathologist hadn’t bothered to make conversation and he’d sodded off into the woods to make some phone calls. There was a crash and a clatter from down the track they’d just walked up and DI Steel emerged, looking a little flustered, hauling at the backside of her boiler suit.

‘Call of nature,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask.’ The inspector took a quick stroll round the fallen tree, following the IB’s little raised path. ‘So,’ she said to Doc Fraser when she’d made a complete circuit, ‘you going to hang about here all day reading the paper, or you planning on actually doing some work?’

The suitcase’s lock came off in one piece and was dropped carefully into an evidence bag by a nervous-looking IB techie. ‘You know,’ said Steel as Doc Fraser gripped the top of the case, ‘we’re all going to look like a right bunch of idiots if this is a Cocker Spaniel.’

Fraser opened the case.

The smell wasn’t a patch on the dismembered Labrador, but it was still strong enough to make them all gag. There, lying in a pool of putrid liquid, was a large, grey-white chunk of meat. Definitely not a Cocker Spaniel. It had the word AILSA tattooed on its chest.

Rennie drove foot flat to the floor, rallying along the country roads making for Westhill while Logan phoned the Wildlife Investigation Officer who’d worked the dog-torso case. Had he spoken to a Mrs Clair Pirie when he was going through the list of missing black Labradors? No, he hadn’t, because Mrs Pirie hadn’t reported her dog missing. DI Steel sat up front in the passenger seat, a grin stretching her face wide. The Procurator Fiscal had been ecstatic — a search and arrest warrant was being rushed through. Her office promised it would be faxed to the Westhill police station by the time the inspector’s team got there. Alpha Two Nine was following on behind, having difficulty keeping up with Rennie’s driving.

The PF’s office was as good as its word and twelve minutes later Rennie pulled up outside Clair Pirie’s house in Westfield Gardens. Alpha Two Nine was parked round the back, on the entrance road to Westhill Academy — just in case. Next door, Cruickshanks’ Repose was in darkness, no car in the driveway, no answer when Logan phoned. But the television flickered in Clair Pirie’s lounge, making bruise-coloured shadows lurch and sprawl across the wallpaper.

‘Right,’ said Steel, holding a hand out to Rennie. ‘Warrants.’ The constable handed over the wad of faxed documents, all duly signed and countersigned. ‘Let’s do it.’

Rennie knocked on the front door, forgoing the broken bell, and settled back to wait. Behind him Steel shifted excitedly from foot to foot, like she was a little kid waiting for her turn at the ice-cream van. Eventually, grumbling and swearing, Clair Pirie opened the door, took one look at Rennie standing on her doorstep and slammed it shut again. ‘Fuck off!’ she shouted through the rippled glass, ‘I’m not in.’

Steel shoved Rennie out of the way, squaring up to the closed door. ‘Don’t be bloody stupid. Open this door now, or I’ll have it kicked in.’

‘You can’t do that!’

‘Really?’ Steel dragged the warrant out of her pocket and pressed it against the glass. ‘Clair Pirie: I have a warrant here to search these premises. You can either... Damn!’ The large silhouette had disappeared from the glass. Steel grabbed her radio. ‘Heads up, people — she’s doing a runner!’ She slapped Rennie on the shoulder. ‘What the hell you standing there for? Break it down!’

DC Rennie slammed his foot into the wood and the door sprang backwards. At the other end of the hall they could see the kitchen window, and through that into the back garden where they had a perfect view of Mrs Pirie’s backside as she clambered over the garden fence. Her large rear-end froze at the top and then she dropped back into the ruined flowerbed, shoulders slumped — closely followed by a uniformed constable from Alpha Two Nine.

DI Steel steepled her fingers and grinned. ‘Excellent.’

The Identification Bureau van arrived at twenty past nine, having just finished up in Garlogie Woods. Gavin Cruickshank’s torso was now on its way back to the morgue. They started in the bathroom: bathtubs being a popular location for the hacking up of dead bodies. People were always so keen to not make a mess. Steel left Mrs Pirie in the tender care of DC Rennie while she and Logan went upstairs to watch the IB team work. Willing them to find something.

The bathroom was a mess: a pile of dirty towels lying in the corner; dusty plastic tampon wrappers lying on the floor by the toilet; slivers of old soap decaying in a little dish attached to the shower. Mildew spread grey tendrils across the corner above the medicine cabinet and limescale turned the off-pink tiles a dirty grey. Very homely. ‘Manky cow...’ Dirty Moustache was kneeling by the side of the bath, working a cotton swab about in the plughole. It came out clarted in pubic hair.

It didn’t look as if the bathtub had been used to hack up a body, but when they tested it for blood the thing lit up like a Christmas tree. Little crusts of congealed haemoglobin in the waste pipe, overflow, under the bath’s handles, behind the scratched chrome taps.

DI Steel let out a delighted whoop and charged down the stairs to the lounge, where the Pirie woman was fidgeting on a floral-print couch. ‘Guess what?’ Steel said, leaning over a cluttered coffee table to grin in Clair Pirie’s face. ‘You’re fucked!’

DI Steel was determined to interview Clair Pirie on her own. Logan may have identified the body and given them a suspect, but she still wasn’t speaking to him. So he had to stay behind with Rennie and keep an eye on things while she went back to FHQ to take all the bloody credit. As usual.

The search team was already going through the attic, so rather than sit about twiddling their thumbs, Logan and Rennie pitched in, starting with the lounge. They found nothing more incriminating than a couple of roaches down the back of the sofa, still smelling faintly of cannabis resin. The IB was still working in the kitchen so Logan pushed through an unlocked internal door into the garage. It took both of them to get the rusty, up-and-over garage door closed, the metal groaning and squealing as they heaved, shutting out the crowd that had begun to gather from the time Steel had driven off with Clair Pirie. The Evening Express was the first paper to send a journalist, but they were still blissfully free of television cameras so far. Oddly there was no sign of Colin Miller; he was usually pretty quick off the mark whenever the POLISH tape went up.

Rennie picked his way through a mound of debris piled up against the back wall of the garage, while Logan contemplated the chest freezer. Years of filth and grime had left it a nasty nicotine-stained grey with suspicious brown splodges of rust streaking the surface. It took him two attempts to open the lid, a thick layer of frost and ice cracking and skittering across the garage’s concrete floor. Unlike the freezer at Chib’s house, this one was packed with mystery meat and long-forgotten packets of sweet corn. He was a third of the way down, fingers burning with cold, when DC Rennie shouted that he’d found something crammed down the back of a pile of old Daily Mails. It was a boning knife with a seven-inch, single-sided blade — scooped near the handle, straight for most of its length and curved at the tip.

Logan pulled out his phone and called Steel, wandering through the house as it rang. It bleeped over to voicemail and he left a message about the knife. That, plus the body and the blood in the bathroom meant there was no way Pirie was ever going to be able to wriggle out of this. Not even Hissing Sid could get her off. Next he tried Jackie’s mobile, hoping to spend a couple of minutes not talking about work or bloody soap operas with Rennie. No answer, so he dialled Colin Miller and settled back against the kitchen table, looking out through the French windows at the silent bulk of Westhill Academy — lit up in the darkness by a row of streetlights. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang before a recording of Miller’s Glaswegian crackled in Logan’s ear, telling him that if he left his name, number and a short message the reporter would get right back to him. ‘Colin, it’s Logan. Wanted to know if you were still alive after Isobel got her hands on you, you dirty stop-out. I—’

A rectangle of light blossomed in the back garden next door. Ailsa Cruickshank was home. ‘Damn.’ He hung up. No one had been able to track her down; she didn’t know her husband was dead yet. And with DI Steel gone Logan was the senior officer on site.

With a sigh, he headed next door and broke the news as gently as he could, taking a WPC from the search team with him for moral support. Her husband wasn’t on some foreign beach with a pole-dancer after all; his torso was lying on a slab in the morgue. Logan didn’t know which was worse — discovering your husband was a lying, adulterous bastard, or a dismembered corpse.