Dark Blood (12 page)

‘I mean, I don’t wake up wanting to get blootered, do I? Just been under a lot of pressure recently.’

‘I think there’s a very real chance he’s going to offend again and sooner rather than later.’

‘It’s not like I’m an alcoholic or anything.’

‘Can you get me in to see him?’

‘What? Oh, erm…possibly. I’ll have to check.’

‘Good. Now you and I need to get a proper session organized. I’ve got a cancellation on Monday you can have.’

‘Do we have to?’

‘Yes, twelve noon. And don’t forget – I need to see Knox ASAP.’
Another pause.
‘And maybe it wouldn’t hurt to try laying off the booze for a bit, OK? Might make you a bit less edgy.’

Logan hung up and rammed the phone back in his pocket. Liverpudlian git. Why did
everyone
have to bang on about his drinking? OK, so he was only just crawling out from under a gargantuan hangover, but that wasn’t his fault, was it? Having to deal with Knox, Steel giving him a hard time, beating Reuben up, the bribe…Enough to turn anyone to drink.

God it was cold.

He stomped his feet, scanning the building site for PC Martin and Wardrobe the Wonder Dog. The pair of them had almost made it to the first part-built house – a bare timber frame reaching up into the cold grey sky.

Logan wandered over, hands twitching through his pockets, looking for a pack of cigarettes. Only the second one today. Which was a bit of a record, considering how crappy—

‘Excuse me, exactly
what
do you think you’re doing?’ It
was the man from the site office, not Big-and-Bald, but the other one: ridiculous trimmed beard, comb-over hidden beneath a bright orange hard hat.

Logan pulled out the sheet of paper they’d picked up at the Procurator Fiscal’s office on Guild Street on their way over and kept on walking. ‘Mr…?’

‘This is a private development. I’m going to have to ask you to—’

‘I have a warrant here to search—’

‘—leave, or do I have to call site security…?’ The man trailed off, staring at the handcuffs dangling from Logan’s index finger.

‘Police.’

He curled his top lip. ‘I thought you said you were a debt collector for some sort of local bookies.’

The man obviously thought Logan was an idiot. Mr Big-and-Bald had looked him straight in the eye and called him ‘Officer’. They knew fine what he was.

‘Speaking of “site security”, where is he? Your bald mate with the big dog?’

‘I don’t see what that has to do with—’

Logan thrust the warrant at him. ‘I think I’ll decide what’s relevant, don’t you, Mr…?’

‘Joseph Brett, project manager.’ He raised his chin. ‘And may I ask exactly
why
you feel it necessary to search a perfectly legitimate—’

‘Don’t mind me.’ PC Martin clumped past, dragged along behind a panting Wardrobe, then disappeared around the corner. Doing a lap of the perimeter.

‘And you say you haven’t seen Stephen Polmont since Monday?’

Pink rushed up the man’s cheeks, clashing with his orange hard hat. ‘I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said he was suspected of stealing electrical equipment and disappeared before we could contact the police.’

‘Right…’ Logan turned and watched the constable and the Labrador work their way across to the next house in line. The ground floor was already clad in a skin of pale-yellow brick, partially hidden behind a web of scaffolding. Two men in padded overalls and thick woolly hats were laying down the next course, their paint-spattered radio blaring out Radio 2. ‘Big development: four hundred houses. That’s a lot of money.’

‘It’s—’

‘Course, it’s nothing compared with how much your boss rakes in from drugs, loan sharks, and prostitutes, is it?’

The project manager stared out across the rutted mud. ‘Is this little search of yours going to take long? A development this size doesn’t run itself.’

‘Might want to tell Mr McLennan it’s not a good idea to go muscling in on someone else’s territory. Burning bridges with the local community.’ Logan jammed his hands deeper in his pockets. ‘Aberdeen doesn’t need any more scumbags, Mr Brett, we’ve got enough of our own.’

The project manager straightened his hard hat. ‘McLennan Homes is a law-abiding company. We build family homes, community centres, libraries. We do
not
deal drugs or start gang wars. And anyone who says we do is going to be looking at a lawsuit.’ He turned a cold smile on Logan. ‘Are we clear?’

PC Martin appeared around the other side of the house, no Wardrobe. She grinned at them. ‘He’s got something!’

Logan hurried over through the ruts of dirty brown earth. The Labrador was lying down beside the wall at the rear of the property.

PC Martin bent down and ruffled the dog’s ears again. ‘Who’s a clever boy? You are. Yes you are!’

Wardrobe’s tail thumped against the frozen earth.

‘Well, well.’ Logan turned and smiled at the project manager. ‘Looks like we might have found your missing sparky after all.’

‘There’s definitely something there.’ The IB technician pulled his white facemask off, revealing a big salt-and-pepper moustache and a face like a squeezed sponge.

They’d had to rip the chipboard floor up to get at the concrete underneath, piling the wooden sheets against the walls in jagged layers so he and his assistant could wheel the ground-penetrating radar kit slowly around the part-built house.

Logan peered at the GPR screen. It was a ripply mix of blacks, dark blues, and greens, with an orange and white blob in the middle. Squint your eyes and it could almost be a body, lying curled up on its side. Or a squid. Or a radioactive angry amoeba. ‘What if it’s not?’

Mr Moustache tapped the screen. ‘Head here, legs, and that’s an arm.’

DI Steel shoved Logan out of the way. ‘Let me see…You sure?’

The man shrugged. ‘Eighty percent.’

‘Dig it up.’ Steel hauled at the crotch of her SOC suit. ‘Don’t see why we’ve got to wear these bloody things, like huge great albino bloody Smurfs. Poor sod’s buried under three feet of concrete, what the hell are we going to contaminate?’

‘Because, Inspector,’ came a voice from the doorway, ‘we do not treat our crime scene as if it were the January sale at Primark.’

Dr Isobel McAllister stepped down from the front door onto the bare concrete, carrying a small stainless steel briefcase. She wore the same white paper oversuit as everyone else, but somehow she managed to make it look stylish. She nodded at the moustachioed IB man. ‘Where is it?’

He described a rough oval with his finger.

‘I see. And are we certain the remains are human?’

Mr Moustache shrugged again. ‘Cadaver dogs react to decaying meat, so it could be anything.’ He stomped a bootied foot on the grey floor. ‘Might be a pig, might be a deer, but there’s something dead under all this lot.’

Steel scowled at him. ‘You told me eighty percent!’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Peter,’ Isobel placed her metal case on the floor and popped it open, ‘I need you to help me mark out the body.’ She produced a measuring tape, a box of white chalk, and what looked like a bag full of ten pence pieces. Then she and Mr Moustache laid out a six-inch grid in pale-blue chalk over the rough area of the body, and marked each intersection with one of the shiny silver coins. When that was done they ran the GPR kit carefully across it, Isobel taking notes in a small pad.

‘The body is…’ She pulled a stick of white chalk from the box and, checking her notes, outlined a crouching figure at her feet. ‘Here.’ Isobel smiled down at it. ‘You know, in all the time I’ve been a pathologist, I’ve never seen a body chalked up at a crime scene. Like being on the television, isn’t it?’

Steel leant over and whispered in Logan’s ear. ‘Aye, only a hoor of a lot more boring.’

Isobel selected another stick of chalk. ‘So we need to cut…here.’ A perfect rectangle of red, never closer than twelve inches from any point on the body.

The inspector rocked back and forth on her heels. ‘Right, McRae, you nip out and grab a couple of jackhammers, and—’

‘You’ll do no such thing!’ Isobel clunked her case shut again. ‘I will not have my crime scene turned into a building site.’

Steel cast an eye around the ripped-up floor and exposed wooden frame of the part-built house. ‘Hate to break it to you…’

‘You know what I mean. I want this section of the floor cut away and brought back to the mortuary. We’ll create a secondary crime scene there to examine the remains.’

Logan looked down at the slab. ‘Don’t think that’s going to be possible.’

The pathologist narrowed her eyes. ‘We need a secure and
sterile
environment, Sergeant. Otherwise—’

‘It’s got to weigh, what, half a ton?’

Mr Moustache ran a hand across his bristly moustache. ‘Actually, that much concrete’s going to be closer to two and a bit.’

‘About three times as much as my car. Can you imagine trying to get it down the corridor and into the cutting room?’

Isobel cocked her head to one side for a moment. ‘Agreed. We’ll need a second location. Somewhere with forklift access. Running water. And refrigeration.’ She grabbed her metal case and stood. ‘In the meantime, I want this block
cut,
not hacked out of the foundations.’

A thin stream of misty rain fell through the gaping hole in the ceiling, sparkling in the harsh glare of the IB’s arc lights. Logan peered up through the severed joists at the heavy sky and the huge metal hook lowering down into the house.

Outside, the roar of the crane’s diesel engine had replaced the deafening judder of the jackhammers. So much for Isobel’s insistence that her crime scene wouldn’t become a building site. The foundations were too thick to cut through cleanly, so they’d had to excavate the rectangle she’d marked out on the concrete by hacking a foot-wide trench around it, the rubble all heaped up in the corner against a mound of pink Rockwool insulation.

Nearly a dozen IB technicians stood in little clumps around the outside of the room. A pair of them wandered the ground floor, one with a high-definition video kit, the other with a huge digital camera – its flash flickering in the confined space.

Two IB technicians threaded thick steel rope through four heavy eyelets bolted into Isobel’s concrete slab, then fiddled about with connectors and spanners, fitting a big metal ring to slip over the big metal hook.

DI Steel’s stale cigarette breath washed over Logan’s cheek. ‘Wish they’d get a shift on, I’m bursting for a slash.’

Logan shifted his feet, watching as the IB hooked the block up to the crane. ‘You think it’s him? Polmont?’

‘You’d better pray it is, amount of man-hours we’re wasting on this.’

‘Just seems a bit quick, doesn’t it? They kill him Monday, bury his body in the foundations…what, Monday night? Leave it to set. The soonest they can start building is Tuesday.’

He pointed at the house, the brick-clad ground floor, the gaping hole in the roof where the IB team had to cut away the joists. ‘How did they get all this built in four days?’

‘Kit houses, aren’t they – all prefabricated units. They’re no’ building the thing from scratch, just sticking it together like a big fuck-off Lego kit. Good team of builders, and you’d be moving in before the end of the week.’

‘Right, before we begin,’ Isobel took her place at the headend of the hooked-up slab, ‘I want you all to remember that any evidence we have here will be clinging to the underside of the concrete.
Everything
is to be collected and analysed.’

She nodded at one of the albino Smurfs, who unfurled a long sheet of the ubiquitous SOC blue plastic. Another Smurf grabbed the other end, then they both held up a thumb.

‘Norman?’

The tech with the HDTV camera squatted down, focussing on the jagged edge. ‘Rolling.’

‘You may begin.’

One of the IB team mumbled something into a bulky radio handset and the rumble of diesel got louder – the hook slowly pulled upwards, hauling the steel ropes tight. There was a loud
crack,
then the slab of chalked-up concrete juddered out of the foundations. It had to be at least three feet deep.

Smurf Number One shouted, ‘Hold it!’ and the crane’s engine eased off, the slab hanging two feet above the rest of the foundations. Then Smurfs One and Two slid the blue plastic sheet under the rectangle, pulling it tight. ‘OK…’

The engine roared again, and the block rose jerkily into
the air, clumps of black-brown earth falling in stinking clumps.

The two cameras swarmed in, taking shots of the block’s underside. Clack, flash, whine…

A large chunk of sticky earth gave way, thumping down on the stretched plastic sheet, exposing a leg, dangling out of the concrete from the knee down. Blue jeans stained almost black. A battered Nike trainer, the filthy white plastic stained with dark brown blotches. A flash of ankle, porcelain white on one side, a tidemark of reddish-purple on the other with a smear of waxy-yellow – pressure pallor where the skin had been in contact with the ground, the cells and capillaries too compressed for blood to pool.

Definitely a body.

Thank Christ.

Isobel waved, and the slab jounced to a halt, swinging gently back and forth. She put a hand out and steadied it, then peered up at the underside. ‘Hmm…’

Steel hunched over, hands on her knees, looking at whatever Isobel was looking at. After a beat, Logan joined them.

Between the clumps of mud and concrete was the partial outline of a man, lying twisted, three-quarters hidden by the grey mass, that one leg dangling free. A thin trickle of yellow-green liquid spattered onto the blue plastic below. It smelled like meat left too long in the fridge.

‘So…’ Steel’s voice was muffled behind her mask. ‘You fancy declaring death so we can get this circus on the road?’

Isobel didn’t even look around. ‘We will proceed at the pace required for the proper preservation of evidence, Inspector. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d—’

‘You think it’s our bloke?’ Steel scooted forward, probably trying to get a better look, getting a face full of tumbling dirt instead. ‘Sodding monkey bollocks…’

One of the IB laughed – the sound quickly dying as Steel
glowered around the room. Much shuffling of feet and looking at something else.

That last fall of dirt had exposed a hand, the fingers nearly white, the knuckles stained purple with hypostasis.

Logan stepped in close, staring at the grubby hand. A pair of small ragged holes punctured the palm, surrounded by dark purple bruising. Black earth and grey concrete were wedged in under the fingernails.

‘Sergeant.’ Isobel pushed him firmly to one side.
‘Please
try to stay out of the way.’

‘He tried to claw his way out.’ Logan turned his back on the body. ‘He was still alive when they buried him.’