Flesh House (12 page)

RRRRRRRRRRingggggggggggggg

'OK, OK, I'm coming.' Logan hurried down the communal stairs and opened the building's front door.

It was Alec, standing on the top step. 'Sorry I'm late,' he said, sticking his hands in his pockets,'you ready to go?'

'Where?'

Alec looked puzzled. 'We're going for a pint with ex-DSI Brooks, remember? You and me; Oldmeldrum? Meeting Insch and Brooks? Remember?'

'Oh for God's ... You still want to go, after everything--'

'I'm a professional: the Ob Doc comes first.' He frowned at Logan. 'Don't tell me you're bailing!'

'Well--'

'You can't! You promised!'

'No I didn't. And in case you didn't notice, I got clobbered in the face today.'

'I got pushed in pish. Twice!'

'That's not my fault--'

'You bloody did it the second time.'

'Saving your arse.'

The cameraman frowned, obviously trying to think up his comeback. 'Yeah? Well ... I lied for you.'

'No, you lied for Insch.'

'Fuck ...' He tried on a winsome smile. 'I promise I won't let them make a tit out of you when we do the voiceover for the series.'

There was a stunned silence. 'What?'

'When they do the voiceover, they usually want someone to come across ... well ... you know what can happen when people start editing stuff. Amazing how you can make one thing look like another.'

'This blackmail?'

Alec grinned. 'Coercion. Maybe. At a push ... please?'

Logan closed his eyes, swore, then went inside and fetched his coat.

16

Ken Wiseman was not a happy man. Hadn't been for many, many years. It wasn't his fault: life conspired to fuck him over at every available opportunity. Good things would happen to other people, but nothing good ever happened to him. Because life was a bastard and it hated him.

Some days it was all he could do to fuck it right back.

Everything had been OK for a while. Calm. Back to normal ... and then it all started to unravel again. Just like it had last time. Taking a human being apart ... the chunks of meat ... the spiral into darkness.

He tightened his grip on the holdall. It was a lot heavier than it looked, knives and saws were funny like that. They looked so pretty, and sparkly, but the legacy of blood weighed them down. Made them deceptive. Made them lie ...

Wiseman paused for a moment, looking up and down the quiet forecourt, making sure no one was watching, then opened the door and stepped inside.

It was time to fuck with life again.

The rain started to peter out somewhere after Newmacher, and by the time Alec was parking outside the Redgarth Inn it had stopped altogether. The view from the pub car park would have been perfect for Halloween: looking out across Oldmeldrum's ever-expanding waistline, lights glittering yellow, orange and white; past fields as dark as coal; the faint glow of Inverurie eight miles away; and beyond that the asymmetric anvil of Bennachie reaching up into the night sky. There was even a gibbous moon, casting a waxy grey light that made greasy shadows between the muck-encrusted four-by-fours. Logan almost expected to see a witch on a broomstick, cackling her way across the moon's pitted face. But his mother was probably miles away.

Inside it was fairly busy, the happy murmur of Saturdaynight conversation competing with vintage Rolling Stones on the stereo. Logan squeezed through to the bar and waved down a gangly man with white hair and a smile that made him look as if he was eating a coat hanger sideways. Logan smiled back. 'You haven't seen ...' it felt weird using the inspector's first name:'David Insch around, have you? About six-three, this wide, bald--'

The man pointed at an empty barstool and an unattended pint of Guinness. 'Aye, he's sitting there. You gentlemen wanting something to eat? Or is it just a drink this evening?'

Logan thought about the Marks and Spencer ready meal sitting at home in the fridge, and asked to see the menu. They'd ordered by the time Insch appeared, stomping in from the cold night, wrapped up in a huge padded overcoat, muttering under his breath.

'No luck?' asked the barman.

Insch unbuttoned his coat. 'No answer, no lights on, no car in the drive.' He stopped when he saw Logan and Alec standing drinking at the bar. 'You're late.'

Logan was tempted to tell the grumpy fat sod he was lucky they were there at all. Punching someone in the face, or shoving them into a urinal, wasn't exactly motivational.

Insch levered himself up on his stool, his massive buttocks enveloping the seat, and took a big bite out of his Guinness.

'Well,' the barman poured a couple of pints for a hovering waitress,'maybe he forgot. You know what he's like these days. Grandson's over from Canada, isn't he?'

Insch grumbled and threw back the last of his stout. 'That was last week.' He held up the empty glass. 'Same again, Stuart.' Then he looked at Logan and Alec. 'And whatever they're having.' Which was probably about as close as they were going to get to an apology.

They took a table in one of the large bay windows, overlooking the post-witching night. Alec collapsed into his seat. 'I can't believe he didn't show! It was going to be a great piece too ...'

The hovering waitress arrived with placemats and cutlery. Insch waited till she'd gone before asking,'Who've they put in charge of--'

'DI Steel.' Logan sipped at his pint. 'Just till you're back.'

'Wonderful
. So when Wiseman turns up she'll take all the credit.'

'Maybe Wiseman will lie low till you're back on duty? It's not as if he's in any hurry, is it?'

'Yes, and maybe he'll kill a couple more people while he waits. Wouldn't that be nice?'

Logan blushed. 'I was only saying.'

Alec pulled a brand-new HDV camera from its carry case and set it on the table so he could hook up the receivers for a pair of radio mikes. 'Just because Brooks hasn't turned up, doesn't mean the night's a washout.' He unpacked two small clip-on microphones and handed one each to Logan and Insch. 'Noise levels aren't bad in here: the pair of you can go over developments in the case.' He switched the camera on, fiddled with the settings, then pointed it at them. 'And, action!'

There was an uncomfortable silence.

'That means you have to start doing something.'

Logan groaned. 'Bugger off, Alec, eh?'

The cameraman stared at them. 'After all that shite this afternoon, you two owe me.'

'It wasn't shite,' said Insch with the faintest trace of a smile,'it was pish.' Then he cleared his throat and asked Logan what was happening at the address they'd got from Angus Robertson.

'Nothing.'

Alec made 'more detail' hand gestures until Logan, reluctantly, started talking again. 'The building's pretty much derelict. Used to be a halfway house in the seventies, but there was a scandal ... look we already know all this.'

'Yes,' said Alec, never taking the camera off them,'but the viewers don't.'

Sigh. 'There was a scandal: two of the "guests" took turns raping their social worker. The investigation turned up some questionable practices, financial irregularities, unsanitary conditions and dodgy wiring. So they shut it down ... Aren't people going to notice I've been bashed in the face?'

Alec gritted his teeth. 'This is going to be difficult enough to edit as it is!'

'Anyway, I've seen the photos - the place is a tip. Half the windows are gone, weeds growing in the lounge, cold, damp. He'd have to be bloody desperate to go back there.'

'He's desperate. Question is: what's he up to? He's got to know we'll pick him up soon as he arranges his fifteen minutes of fame with the BBC ...' Insch polished off his second pint. 'What would you do? You've only got a few days of freedom left, then you're going back to prison for the rest of your life.'

But Logan had already answered that one, back when Faulds asked the same question at the Leith house. 'What would I do?' He stood: it was time for more beer. 'Revenge.'

The answering machine was lying in wait for Logan when he finally got back to the flat, its little red light winking away, malevolent and devious. He hit the button, still feeling all bunged up and sore, even after two pints of Stella and a nip of Glen Garioch.
'YOU HAVE THREE MESSAGES. M
ESSAGE ONE
: Laz? You awake? C'moan man, pick up ...' Pause. 'You're no' in. OK, tomorrow - down the beach, fireworks, half five outside the Inversnecky.' There was a noise in the background and Colin said,'I'm no' tellin' him to wear a jumper, I'm no' his bloody mother ...' Beeeeeeep

'MESSAGE TWO: Logan, it's your mother--'

He peeled off his coat, only half listening as she rabbited on about his little brother's upcoming wedding.

'--so make sure you remember. And would it kill you to wear a kilt this time? Honestly, Barbara's son--'

Logan hit delete.

Beeeeeeep

'MESSAGE THREE: Hey you
... it's me ...' Jackie, sounding drunk again. He settled onto the end of the settee and stared at the dead fireplace.
'You miss me? I'm ... I'm probably a bit thingied ... with the vodka ... but I miss you, OK? Turnip Head? I miss you. I'm got a ... a
...' What sounded like a burp crackled out of the answering machine's speaker. 'Oops.
I'm got some time off. You wanna ... you know ... with sex and stuff
...' A garbled voice in the background said something about another round. 'Gotta go, OK? I--' Beeeeeeep 'E
ND
OF M
ESSAGES
.'

Logan erased the lot, did his teeth and went to bed.

17

DI Steel sat in the passenger seat, eating a bacon buttie and slurping noisily at a wax-paper cup of tea from the bakers in Newmachar, while Logan got himself outside a hot steak pie. Steel didn't bother swallowing before pointing at the dilapidated house two hundred yards away and saying,'Mmmmghmmmf, mmmn nnn?'

'No idea. Half two, I think.'

She shrugged, and went back to chewing.

They'd parked on the outskirts of Hatton of Fintray, a tiny village on the back road from Dyce to Blackburn, so far off the beaten track it was practically invisible. Logan had manoeuvred the pool car down a wee side road - little more than a farm track - with a view through a thin stand of trees and gorse bushes to the dilapidated granite building.

One of the downstairs windows had been boarded over, but the other was an empty black hole. The roof looked as if it had eczema, shedding dark grey slates into the overgrown garden. What an estate agent would call 'a fixerupper'.

'How the hell did he find this place?' Steel mumbled through another mouthful of buttie.

'Wiseman's sister worked for the Council, property management, probably had keys to half the abandoned buildings in Aberdeenshire.'

Logan polished off the last of his breakfast pie and started in on his coffee as Alec climbed into the back of the car.

'Morning all.' Alec pulled out his camera and fiddled with electronic things. 'Ready for a happy day of sitting about in the cold playing eye spy?'

Steel sooked tomato sauce from her fingers. 'Anyone been in there yet?'

'Not since yesterday afternoon.' Logan, pointed at the isolated halfway house. 'Insch didn't want to risk spooking Wiseman, remember?'

'So we've no idea he's even set foot in the place.' She scrunched up the paper bag her buttie had come in and tossed it over her shoulder into the back. 'Remind me again just how many man-hours we're pissing away here?'

'Three cars, two CID per car. Eight-hour shifts.'

Steel did the maths. 'A hundred and forty four man hours, every day! Jesus, no wonder Baldy Brian whinges about the overtime bill. And we've not even checked there's anyone home!' She took a swig of her tea, then stuck the steaming carton on the dashboard, fogging the windscreen. 'Come on then, get your arse in gear, we're going over there.'

'But what if Wiseman--'

'If he's here, we'll catch him. Medals and dancing girls for everyone. If not, what's the worst that can happen?'

'He comes back, spots us, does a runner, and we never see him again.'

She shrugged and picked up the car radio, putting a call out to the three unmarked cars watching the rundown building, telling them to call her on her mobile if they saw Wiseman coming.

There was a stunned pause from the other end, then:
'But we've got strict instructions from DI Insch--'

'Aye, well now you've got strict instructions from me.' She clambered out of the car and into the blustery morning. The sky was three shades of grey, each one moving in a different direction, the trees and bushes whipping back and forth. Steel pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit up as she marched down the lane, leaving Logan to lock up and hurry after her. Alec jogged along at the rear, filming them both.

'Are you sure we should be doing this?'

She stopped at a big, metal gate and hauled on the spring catch. 'There's more to being a police officer than sitting on your arse eating pies.' The field on the other side was stubble and mud - the crop long gone - but Steel stuck to the edge, picking her way around the soggier looking bits.

'And how come everyone thinks that cock-weasel Robertson was telling the truth when he told you about this place, eh?' she said,'Murdering wee bastard's no' exactly-- Aw shite!' She froze, standing on one leg. 'I've trod in something.' They walked the rest of the way to the small woods with Steel dragging her foot through the barley stubble like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

They had to clamber over a barbed-wire fence to get into the stand of trees, then fight their way through the rustling mass of spiny gorse bushes to get out the other side, with Steel swearing quietly the whole way. 'Who's stupid bloody idea was this?'

'Yours.'

She scowled at him. 'You've got a lot to learn about being a sidekick, you know that, don't you?'

From here the building looked even more dilapidated than it had from the car. Plus there was the smell. As if something had died, and been left to rot.

'Jesus ...' Steel whispered,'you thinking what I'm thinking?' She scrambled over a low stone wall and made for the front door. It was secured by a heavy padlock, the brass pitted with age and streaked with rust. Locked. A weed-infested gravel path ran around the house, greybrown spears of docken poking up through the tangled grass.

'Er ...' Alec fidgeted with his camera,'I'm not supposed to ... you know ... go into dangerous situations without backup.'

The inspector stared up at the vacant windows. 'What are we, haggis rissoles?'

'It's the insurance: I have to have another BBC employee to watch my back in case--'

'Fine. You can sod off back to the car. No skin off my nose if you miss us catching Wiseman, is it?'

The cameraman cursed, fiddled with his focus, then gave a determined nod.

'Aye, thought as much.'

They tried round the back. The stench of decay was even stronger: definitely rotting meat. Logan froze. 'Might be a good idea to get the IB down here. If it's a body--'

'Wimp.' Steel picked her way into the undergrowth. Following her nose. This had been a proper country garden at one point: a small orchard sat in front of a crumbling brick wall, leaves the colour of cider, fruit blackened and rotting on the yellowy grass. A greenhouse with no glass. A shed on the brink of collapse, the wood disintegrating, the contents long surrendered to mould and decay.

The stench was coming from the other side of a clump of brambles: a sheep, lying on its side, bloated and covered with flies and maggots. Logan gagged. So did Steel and Alec.

'Jesus,' she said, when they'd backed off upwind, out of the reek,'wish I'd no' had that bacon buttie now.' She shuddered, then lit another cigarette, holding the smoke deep in her lungs, as if trying to fumigate them. 'Well, don't just stand there,' she pointed at the carcass,'off you go and get it shifted.'

'Are you out of your--'

'You never read books, Laz? Reginald Hill? Dalziel and Pascoe? No?' She shook her head, obviously disappointed.'Suppose you've got a deid body to get rid of - where better to stick it than under a rotting sheep? Who'd go looking underneath that?'

'Oh, come off it! That's not--'

'Sooner you do it, the sooner it's done.' She smiled at him. 'Chop, chop.'

It became something of a mantra:'Fucking Steel and her fucking, rotting, bastarding son of a bitching fuck ... fuck ...' mumbled over and over under his breath as Logan took one look at the mouldering sheep, decided there was no way in hell he was going to touch it with his bare hands and snapped on a pair of latex gloves. He looked up at Alec, filming away, face wrinkled in disgust.

'You want to put that down and give me a hand here?'

Alec shook his head. 'Fly on the wall. Remember? Not supposed to interfere. Besides ...' He shifted from one foot to the other, peering into the long grass and thickets of weeds. 'What if there's rats?'

Swearing, Logan grabbed the animal's hind legs and pulled. There was a moment's resistance ... and then both back legs came off with a sickening wet noise and a roiling carpet of maggots. Logan's stomach lurched.

The inspector shouted at him from a safe distance:'Stop sodding about! It's not going to bite you.'

Logan's mantra started up again. He fought his way through the weeds to the mouldering shed and raked through the rusting contents until he found a garden fork. It only had two of its four tines left, but it was better than nothing. He dragged it back to the sheep, took a deep breath, held it, jammed the fork under the sheep and heaved the thing over onto its back. Where it promptly burst.

He said goodbye to his pie.

'Well?' Steel shouted, when he'd finished vomiting,'Anything?'

He scowled at her. 'No.'

'You didn't dig about where the sheep was, could be a shallow grave in there.'

Logan said 'Fuck' a lot, then poked his new-found fork in the ground. Trying to ignore the filthy yellow-brown liquid that crawled with wriggling white flecks. 'There's nothing here!'

'Ah, well. Worth a try.' Steel stuck her hands in her pockets and sauntered over to the back door. 'You coming then?'

The place was a mess: peeling wallpaper, holes in the ceiling, lath visible through crumbling plaster. The kitchen was blanketed with spiders' webs and dust, all the appliances torn out, the window boarded-up, the room shrouded in darkness. The bathroom was even worse. Everything downstairs stank of mildew and neglect.

Upstairs wasn't much better. It must have been a large farmhouse at some point, but when the council turned it into a halfway house for the mentally disturbed they'd subdivided the first floor into tiny bedrooms. Just big enough for a single bed, a bedside cabinet and a wardrobe. Most of the furniture was gone, but a couple of pieces - too nasty, cheap and knackered to be worth anything - had been left behind to rot like the sheep.

There were
some signs
of occupancy: discarded takeaway containers; empty lager tins and cider bottles; used condoms ... but none of it looked recent, the debris dusty and speckled with fly shit.

Alec stuck his head into the tiny room Steel and Logan were searching. 'Through here!'

There was a room at the very back of the building, twice as big as the others. An open fireplace sat in the middle of the far wall, the hearth full of twigs and bones. An abandoned green parka sprawled on the bare floorboards. A pile of crumpled Special Brew tins in the corner. An old sleeping bag with a hole in the side - white kapok stuffing sticking out. The smell of mould.

Alec scurried round filming everything, looking pleased with himself.

'Aye, very clever,' Steel told him,'we'd no' have found it without you. What with us going through all the rooms one at a time and all.'

There was a newspaper lying by the prolapsed sleeping bag: a copy of the
Daily Mail
with the headline 'C
ANNIBAL
C
HAOS
H
ITS
N
ORTH
E
AST
H
OSPITALS
!' Logan snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and picked the thing up. 'It's yesterday's paper.' The
Aberdeen Examiner
might have got the drop on everyone with Colin Miller's story, but it was all over the place by the Saturday morning editions.

Steel stared out of the window at the overgrown back garden and its stinking sheep. 'We're screwed. This place's been under observation since what? Yesterday lunchtime? Wiseman went out in the morning, got himself a paper, couple of rowies, came back, had breakfast, and sodded off out again. If he'd been back we'd've seen him ...' She screwed up her face. 'How the hell could we miss him?'

'Maybe he's--'

Steel threw a finger in Logan's direction. 'Don't! OK? Don't even start. He must have spotted one of the cars on the way back here!' For a moment it looked as if she was going to kick the mound of empty beer cans all over the room. 'Bastard! We could have had him!'