The Missing and the Dead

33

Logan propped his pilfered notepad open against the steering wheel, and frowned at the short list of names doing lateshift in Banff that evening. Big Paul, Penny, Kate, and Joe. Of the four of them, Joe had the lowest shoulder number so the most time served. Logan called him on the Airwave. ‘Shire Uniform Seven. You there, Joe?’

‘Aye, Sarge. Safe to talk.’

Outside, Steel scuffed up the steps to her hotel with her phone clamped to her ear and her fake cigarette waving about like a conductor’s baton.

The wind was getting up, making her shirttails flap as she disappeared inside.

Logan pressed the button again. ‘Where are you?’

‘Castle Street. Me and Penny’s doing the rounds.’

‘Good. What about the others?’

‘Kate’s off to Fraserburgh for the night, and Big Paul’s away following up on a couple of tractor thefts around Portsoy.’

Nice and low-maintenance. Got to love it.

‘Do me a favour — nip back to the ranch when you’ve got a minute and run a full PNC on a misper for me: Charles “Craggie” Anderson. All his details are on the briefing slide. Go digging. I want to know if there’s any soft intelligence out there about him.’

A pause. ‘Am I looking for anything in particular?’

‘Yes, but I’m not prejudicing your enquiries.’

‘Then I’ll go digging.’

‘Thanks, Joe.’

He hooked his Airwave back in place. Stuck the notepad on the passenger seat. According to the dashboard clock, it was gone ten past six. Time to patrol.

‘All units, please be on the lookout for one Mark Lee, outstanding apprehension warrant for assault.’

Logan climbed into the Big Car and tossed his cap into the back.

The old woman stood at the front door of her tiny cottage, watching as he pulled away. One arm wrapped around herself, the other giving a small half-hearted wave. Holes in her cardigan, holes in the ancient slippers on her feet.

He called it in. ‘That shed break-in in King Edward: looks like they got away with a lawnmower, strimmer, and a chainsaw. Victim’s got no idea when it happened — any time over the last three weeks.’

‘Got that. Shed was locked?’

Nope. But then that meant the insurance company could weasel out of paying for what had been nicked. ‘Yeah, they popped one of the windows in. It’s boarded up now.’

‘OK. Thanks.’

He took the back roads, past fields and lonely farmhouses, turned amber and gold in the sunlight. A herd of sheep glowed like bronze statues against a field of emeralds.

Trees and hedges blurred by the windows.

‘Anyone in the vicinity of Cruden Bay, we’ve got reports of a fight outside the Golf Club …’

With any luck, they’d have stopped by the time a patrol car got there from Peterhead. The last thing they needed tonight was more people in the cells, taking up space till the courts opened for business on Monday morning.

Stubby’s voice growled out of the speakers. ‘Roger that, Control. Show Sierra Two One responding.’

Past the big graveyard on the outskirts of Macduff, the rows of the dead cold beneath the sun-warmed grass. Plenty of space for more to join them.

God, that was cheery.

Logan twisted his Airwave out of its clasp and thumbed Joe’s shoulder number into the keypad. ‘Joe, safe to talk?’

Silence.

Then, ‘Sorry, Sarge, we’re doing a stop-and-search.’

‘OK. I’m on my way back to the station. Wanted to know if you’d found anything out. Give me a shout when you’re free.’

‘Will do.’

The River Deveron was a sheet of beaten copper at the side of the road, glittering its way to the North Sea.

Why was Broch Braw Buys the only non-Co-op hit by the Cashline Ram-Raiders? It wasn’t as if it was anything special — just another wee shop. Maybe there was some sort of personal connection? A grudge against the owner? It wasn’t the first in the series, so it wasn’t as if they were getting their eye in. Or maybe it was simply an easy shop to hit?

Might be worth popping past tomorrow when it was open and having a word with the owner. See if he’d made any enemies in the last few months.

Probably a waste of time, but you never knew …

Around, over the bridge, past the Spotty Bag Shop, and along Carmelite Street.

A gaggle of women in short skirts and high heels clacked and cackled their way along the pavement. They all wore pink Stetsons, except for the one in the middle who had a white veil and learner plates on. They cheered and waved as Logan drove past.

Give it a couple of hours and at least one of them would be face-down in a pub toilet, or being sick in a bus shelter.

‘Shire Uniform Seven from Control, safe to talk?’

He hit the button. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Got a Sergeant Creegan for you from Kirkwall station.’

There was a click, then a man’s voice came from the Airwave’s speaker, sounding a lot more Inverness than Orkney. ‘Hullo? Yes, are you the one who put a lookout request on the Copper-Tun Wanderer? Cause we’ve found it.’

‘Great. Thanks. Is the skipper there: Charles Anderson?’ Logan eased past the much smaller, much older graveyard opposite Banff’s little Tesco supermarket. Ancient lichen-flecked headstones, squeezed in cheek to jowl. No more room for the dead.

‘Ah … Yes, and no.’

‘So he’s not there?’

A troupe of lads in tight jeans, tattoos, and numbered T-shirts lurched across the road, two of them holding up a bloke in a kiss-me-quick porkpie hat. All of them singing ‘Flower of Scotland’ with the complete lack of skill and self-awareness that comes free with lots and lots of booze. Looked as if the stag do had headed out a lot earlier than the hen night. Eight o’clock and they were already lurching.

‘We found the boat on the rocks, off the coast of South Ronaldsay. There was a fire on board, looks like Friday night. It’s pretty much a hulk now, everything burnable’s burned. There’s not much left of the wheelhouse, or Mr Anderson.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Very. Looks like part of the roof came down on him.’

At least with Steel’s monkeys back off to Aberdeen, there were plenty of parking spaces in front of the station again. Logan reversed into the one by the front door.

‘OK. Well, thanks for letting me know.’ Not exactly a great result, but at least they could stop looking for him now. Mind you, with Anderson dead, they might never find out what happened to the wee girl they’d hauled out of the water at Tarlair.

The stag party must’ve been on their way to the Ship Inn, because they lurched along the road on the other side of the public car park. Skirted a woman, standing on her own by the wall that separated the road from the bay. Their rendition of ‘Flower of Scotland’ segued into a chorus of wolf whistles and blown kisses as they passed her.

She turned to watch them go, then went back to staring out across the water.

‘Suppose he’d just had enough. Happens sometimes with fishermen. They want to go out like Vikings.’

Logan grabbed his peaked cap and climbed out into the warm evening. ‘You’re saying it wasn’t an accident?’

‘Best guess: two bottles of whisky, two litres of petrol, and a match. Nothing left but bones and ash. Hell of a way to die.’

And maybe Hell was where Charles Anderson deserved to be.

Logan ran through his warrant request one last time. Changed a couple of words, then emailed it off to Inspector McGregor. OK, so DCI McInnes had been very clear about Logan keeping his nose out of Operation Troposphere, but that didn’t mean Klingon, Gerbil, and their new mate Martyn Baker should get away with battering Jack Simpson half to death.

Next up — more paperwork …

The tradesmen’s entrance banged, then the sound of heavy feet thumped along the corridor.

PC Penny Griffiths stuck her head into the Sergeants’ Office. A small woman, red hair pulled back from her round face. Big smile. ‘Evening, Sarge, you want a tea? Joe’s making.’

‘Thanks. How’s it out there?’

She pursed her lips for a moment, eyebrows up. ‘Well, we had to caution a bloke in a stupid porkpie hat for peeing off the harbour wall, but other than that it’s pretty you-know-what.’

Good. And with any luck it would stay you-know-what till the shift ended.

Penny pointed back into the main office, where the newspapers were hung over Maggie’s cubicle wall. ‘You see the late editions? They got someone for killing Stephen Bisset. Mad, isn’t it? Can you imagine what those poor kids must be going through?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

She turned to go. ‘We’ve got doughnuts as well, if you want one?’

‘You’re a star, Penny — and anyone who says different is a moron.’

Soon as she was gone, he wandered out into the main office and helped himself to the Aberdeen Examiner. Its headline — ‘PERVERT VOLUNTEER ARRESTED FOR BISSET KILLING’ — sat above a photo of a smiling man with a bald head, soup-strainer moustache, and soul-patch. He was in a bar with a couple of other people, their features pixelated out by the newspaper. It was captioned, ‘MARLON BRODIE WROTE AN ONLINE JOURNAL ABOUT EXTREME SEXUAL PRACTICES’.

They didn’t give the web address, but it didn’t take long to Google it up.

According to the home page, Brodie was taking his inspiration from a book called TheEncyclopaedia of Unusual Sexual Practices by someone called, appropriately, Brenda Love. It looked as if Brodie was flitting his way through the A-to-Z of kinks in no particular order, then arranging his adventures into categories, along with musings and plans for the future.

Logan skimmed through a couple of pages. Pausing to wince at the one about Brodie getting an ex-girlfriend to staple his scrotum to the kitchen table. Then laugh at the photo where he had a bash at anaclitism — anyone who found wearing a nappy sexy had no business posting pictures of themselves doing it on the internet. Another laugh at the failed attempt to negotiate a threesome to check troilism off the list. Another wince for the bee-sting fetish — complete with before and after photos that had Logan crossing his legs. And finally, a rather sad story about Brodie paying a woman he’d met at a party to let him have sex with her armpit. Axillism? Apparently also known as ‘having a bagpipe’.

Took all sorts.

Logan found the button to arrange Marlon Brodie’s posts by date order, rather than topic, and there it was, top of the list: pseudonecrophilia.

Joe appeared in the doorway, mug in one hand, brown paper bag in the other. ‘One white tea, one jammy doughnut.’ He’d dumped his protective gear, leaving a black Police T-shirt stretched tight across a huge barrel chest. The same DIY-style haircut as Logan’s sat above a big square face with a scar through one thick eyebrow.

‘Ta.’ Logan reached for the mug. ‘Did you manage to dig anything up on Charles Anderson?’

‘Other than the fact he’s dead?’

The tea was hot and milky. ‘Well, that’s a good start.’

‘Family man. Coached the under-twelves five-a-side team in Macduff for a couple of years.’

‘Any hints he was doing more than coaching them?’

‘Nope.’

‘But?’ Logan dipped into the brown paper bag, and came out with a sugary disc of squidgy delight.

Joe sat back against the desk, arms folded. ‘Wife divorced him three years ago. Irreconcilable differences.’

‘They say what those differences were?’ The first bite of doughnut was yieldingly soft and sweet, with a wee squirt of raspberry jam in the middle. Mince and tatties, a burger, and a jammy doughnut, all in the same day. It was like having Christmas in May.

‘They had a son: Andrew. Went missing five years ago. Thinking was he’d been playing on the edge of the cliff by the family home and gone over the edge. Officers found a couple of toys up there, but no sign of the body — must’ve washed out to sea. Andrew was four.’

Poor wee sod.

A slurp of hot milky tea to wash the stodgy mouthful down. ‘No suggestion the father was involved?’

Joe shook his head. ‘Opposite. He was convinced someone had snatched his kid. Banged on about it to anyone who’d listen. Got bits in the paper, put up posters, but …’ A shrug. ‘Wee Andrew wasn’t that photogenic, so eventually everyone forgot about it.’

‘Except Charles “Craggie” Anderson.’

‘And there’s your irreconcilable differences. Ex-wife lives in Devon now. She wanted to up sticks and start over somewhere else. He wouldn’t budge.’

Another bite of squidgy doughnut. ‘If it was your kid, would you?’

A smile spread across Joe’s big square face. All teeth and menace. ‘If someone touched one of my kids, I’d rip their leg off and jam it up their backside like a lollypop stick.’ The smile faded. ‘You want to know the spooky coincidence? Andrew died five years ago, yesterday.’

The same day Charles Anderson set fire to the Copper-Tun Wanderer and gave himself a Viking’s funeral.

Did that make it more, or less likely that he’d been responsible for killing the little girl at Tarlair Swimming Pool? He might have been overcome with the grief of losing his son, or it might have been guilt …

Difficult to tell.

‘Sarge?’

Blink. Logan sooked the sugar off his fingertips. ‘Sorry, thinking. Thanks, Joe.’

‘No probs.’

Soon as he was alone, Logan read the last entry posted on Marlon Brodie’s exploration of kinky sex. Drummed his fingertips against the desktop. Frowned at the screen some more. Swore. Then logged into STORM.

A couple of clicks brought up the personnel working on the Major Investigation Team looking into Stephen Bisset’s death. Logan picked the DCI in charge from the list, poked her number into the phone and let it ring.

No answer. But then, it was nearly nine o’clock on a Saturday night. Have to find someone further down the pecking order who might actually still be working.

Logan dialled the next in line.

Luckily, the DI had a better work ethic than his boss.

He picked up on the fifth ring. ‘For God’s sake, what now?’

‘Detective Inspector Jackson? Sergeant McRae, B Division. I need to talk to you about the guy you’ve got in custody for killing Stephen Bisset.’

The rustling of paper came down the line. ‘McRae, McRae, McRae … Ah, right. It’s you. Wondered when you’d come sniffing about.’ Pause. ‘If you’re looking to put your oar in: don’t. You’ve done quite enough.’

‘It’s important. Did-’

‘Case should have been airtight and you blew it. Now if there’s nothing else, I’ve got work to do.’

Logan stuck two fingers up at the phone. ‘No, you’re fine. Good luck with your miscarriage of justice.’ He thumped the handset down.

One, one-thousand.

Two, one-thousand.

Three, one-thousand.

Right on cue, the desk phone rang. He picked it up. ‘Banff station.’

‘What do you mean, “miscarriage of justice”?’