Dying Light

33

Back in the morgue, Doc Fraser was slowly lumbering his way into a set of surgical greens while Brian washed the little bits of grit and fluff off Jamie McKinnon’s liver. ‘Any idea what that was about?’ asked Logan as Brian patted the slab of purple offal dry with green paper towels.

‘No idea,’ he said, laying the thing in a kidney dish. ‘It was the hospital and they said it was urgent, but other than that, nothing.’

‘OK, ladies,’ said Doc Fraser, snapping on his latex gloves. ‘If you don’t mind we’ll get through this one sharpish. I’ve still got all those bloody expense forms to fill in.’

The rest of the post mortem went by in a haze, Doc Fraser cutting, hefting, weighing and examining Jamie’s innards, taking tissue samples for Brian to preserve in tiny plastic tubes full of formalin. It wasn’t long before Brian was stuffing Jamie’s organs back where they’d come from, using a well-practised blanket stitch to sew the body back up again.

‘Well,’ said Doc Fraser, pinging his gloves into a pedal bin like elastic bands. ‘I’ll have to go through the Ice Maiden’s tape before I can give you the full monty, but it looks like your boy here didn’t actually die of an overdose. OK, the silly wee bastard shot himself so full of shite there was no way he was going to survive, but it was the diced carrots that killed him.’ Logan looked puzzled. ‘I’d guess,’ said Fraser as Jamie was wheeled past on a gurney, heading for cold storage, ‘that he’d been on the wagon for a bit, so the effects of the dose were magnified. Heroin, and lots of it. There’s a whole heap of diamorphine still in his bloodstream; your lad snuffed it before his system could absorb it all. Fell unconscious and choked on his own vomit. Classic rock star death.’

Logan nodded sadly. That explained why they’d found the body with the syringe still sticking out of it. Normally a heroin overdose would only kick in a couple of hours after the injection. Then Logan remembered the fresh bruises: the hand clamped over Jamie’s mouth, the marks around the wrists where he’d been held down and punched... Or maybe just held down, the hand preventing him from screaming for help while someone forced a syringe into his arm, saying, ‘No one rats on Malk the Knife!’ He shuddered. That kind of thing would be right up Chib Sutherland’s alley. ‘Any chance he didn’t do it to himself?’

The pathologist paused, halfway out of his scrubs. ‘Don’t remember Isobel saying anything about it...’ He looked thoughtful for a moment before telling Brian to get Jamie back out of the fridges: they had some more slicing and dicing to do.

It took Doc Fraser twelve and a half minutes to determine whether or not the overdose was self-inflicted. There was a cluster of old injection points in the crook of Jamie’s arm, the skin rough and pockmarked, and in the middle of them a little black dot ringed with a faint purple halo. Jamie had only been an occasional user, but he would have known better than to ram the needle right through the vein and muscle and into the bone. Doc Fraser dug around with a pair of tweezers, coming out with a sliver of metal that matched the tip of the syringe found with the body. There was only one needle mark, he explained, because the broken needle was only partially withdrawn from the hole, before being pushed into the vein properly. Doc Fraser was embarrassed at having missed it the first time round; he’d thought Isobel had already looked at the injection site, when she’d obviously been saving it for last.

Logan told him not to worry about it and spent the next hour and a half filling in the usual pile of paperwork and online forms that followed a suspicious death, before printing the whole lot out. He was going to sneak up to DI Steel’s office and dump it in her in-tray while no one was about. Avoid the inevitable confrontation. His conscience got the better of him by the time he’d climbed the stairs: Jamie McKinnon had been murdered and, like it or not, Logan owed it to him to set the wheels in motion properly. With a sigh, he stomped his way up to the inspector’s incident room. It was bedlam: piles of reports; a queue of uniformed officers waiting to present them; mobile whiteboards with maps of various forests stuck to them, clarted in red and blue pen; phones going; people all talking at once. And sitting at the centre of the tornado was DI Steel. Logan took a deep breath and marched up to the front of the queue, sticking his paperwork under the inspector’s nose. She snatched it and skimmed through the first couple of pages, swearing as she read. ‘What the hell do you mean suspected murder? I thought the wee shite was supposed to have killed himself.’

‘Looks like he might have had a little help.’

‘Fuck, that’s all I bloody need, another sodding murder enquiry.’ She screwed up her face, the wrinkles all aligning into a starburst centred on her nose. ‘And it’s Craiginches! Who the hell’s going to talk to us? Might as well interview the bloody pavement! Waste of bloody time...’ Steel chewed thoughtfully on the inside of her cheek for a bit, then shouted across the room. ‘Rennie! Get your arse over here.’

‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘I have decided to give you a chance to fuck something up all on your ownsome.’ She thrust Logan’s report into the constable’s hands. ‘Read that, then get up to Craiginches and find me whoever killed Jamie McKinnon. I want a written confession and a packet of Embassy Regals on my desk by this time tomorrow.’

A look of fear crawled over DC Rennie’s face. ‘Ma’am?’

Steel punched him on the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince. ‘I have every faith in you. Now bugger off — I’ve got work to do.’ Rennie did what he was told, shaking his head in bewilderment.

‘Er...’ said Logan, knowing this was probably going to get him even further into the inspector’s bad books. ‘Are you sure that’s wise? I mean, he’s only a constable and—’

‘And you are only a backstabbing arsehole, but I still let you play cops and robbers, don’t I?’ Logan shut his mouth. Steel hopped off the desk and dug her hands into her pockets, rummaging around until she found a wrinkled packet of fags. ‘What’s the worst he can do? No one’s going to come forward and admit to seeing anything; sure as hell no one’s going to confess. So Rennie gets a bit of experience under his belt. He can’t screw it up any more than it already is. And let’s face it: no one’s going to miss a little bastard like Jamie McKinnon anyway.’ She saw the disgusted expression on Logan’s face and snorted. ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that — he was a shitebag. Remember Rosie Williams? Maybe McKinnon didn’t kill her, but he still beat her up badly enough to make her throw his arse out. And do you really think that was the first time he’d had a few pints and laid into her? Check his record: McKinnon liked to get drunk and beat up women. Bastards like that deserve all they get.’ Her voice was flat and bitter. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, Sergeant, some of us have real police work to do.’

‘Backstabbing arsehole...’ Logan stomped back down the stairs, muttering all the way. DI Steel seemed to have conveniently forgotten that he was the one who’d spotted the car with the missing prostitute in it. That if it wasn’t for him, DI Steel wouldn’t even have a suspect in custody... Wasn’t his fault Insch was on the warpath; if Steel had got her finger out and acted like a proper bloody detective inspector in the first place and actually told Insch they had Chib and his mate in custody, this would never have happened. Bloody DI Steel and her personal crusade to grab any glory going.

He stared out of the back door, watching the clouds whip across the pale grey sky. Jackie wouldn’t be home until after midnight, so all he had to look forward to tonight was an empty flat, a carry-out and a bottle of wine. Maybe two bottles. It wasn’t as if he’d been sticking to the diet anyway. Could always start again next Monday, when things got a little better. But he’d been saying that for the last three months, and they never did... It was time to go home.

He got as far as the off-licence before his mobile phone started ringing. Oh Christ, now what?

A depressingly familiar gravelly voice on the other end: ‘Where the hell did you disappear off to?’

Logan groaned. Bloody DI Bloody Steel. ‘Shift’s over, I’m going home.’

‘Don’t be daft: more important things in life than beer and nipples. Search team three’s just called in, they’ve found something.’

‘Holly McEwan?’ They’d found the fourth victim’s body.

‘No. Suitcase: red, smells like a dead dog in a sauna.’ A pause then some muffled conversation. ‘Get your arse back to the station — we’ve got a dismembered corpse to go play with.’