Logan McRae Crime Series Books 7 and 8: Shatter the Bones, Close to the Bone. Stuart MacBride
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chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. As if anyone was going to break in and make off with a two tonne chunk of drilling pipe. They lay stacked up around the building, held in place with wooden chucks and ratchet straps.
Green marched towards the door marked, ‘ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION!’
‘Punctuality is the sign of an effective police officer, Sergeant.’
Tosser. How could Logan be late for an unscheduled meeting?
‘Really, sir? I always thought it was catching criminals and preventing crimes.’
Green paused for a moment, then pushed through into a small room that smelled of industrial grease and coffee. A large woman with a bowl haircut looked up from a stack of forms and stared at them over the top of her glasses. No, ‘Hello?’ No, ‘Can I help you?’
The superintendent glanced around the room – Health and Safety posters, framed photo of an oil rig, calendar with kittens on it, shelves groaning with lever-arch files. ‘I want to speak to Frank Baker.’
She puckered her lips. ‘He’s working.’
Green thrust his warrant card under her nose. ‘Now.’
Inside, the warehouse was vast: filled with machinery, forklift trucks, and more pipes. A radio boomed out something poppy, competing with the bangs, clangs, and thrum of heavy equipment. The machine-gun pops of welding.
Frank Baker didn’t look the same without his nice clean suit. Instead he was wearing a pair of grubby orange overalls with a padded green jacket on top, the chest and shoulders covered with pinhole burns. Big leather gloves, steel toecap boots. A thick red line across his forehead from the welding mask he’d just thumped down on a length of rust-flecked pipe. ‘I don’t appreciate you bastards coming here every day.’
‘Then answer the bloody question!’ Green crossed his arms, legs shoulder-width apart, chin up.
Baker scowled at Logan. ‘I’ve been through all this: with you, with the wrinkly old woman, so—’
‘It’s just a couple of follow-up—’
‘And you’re going to go through it all again for us.’ Green stepped closer and Baker flinched.
‘I have to work here.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ The superintendent winked. ‘They don’t know you’re a pervert. That you like to interfere with little boys—’
‘Keep your voice down!’
‘A filthy kiddie-fiddling paedophile, who—’
‘SHUT UP! SHUT YOUR DIRTY MOUTH!’ Baker grabbed the handle of his arc welder.
Green leaned in close. ‘Or what, Frank?’
Tears sparked in the corner of Baker’s eyes.
A huge man in filthy overalls wandered over, a baseball cap turned the wrong way around on his massive head, face creased with dirt around a clear patch where his safety goggles must have sat. ‘Everything OK, Frankie?’
Baker bit his lip. ‘Yeah … Thanks, Spike.’
Spike stared at them for a bit. ‘Any trouble, give us a shout.’ Then he turned and lumbered away.
Baker waited till he was well out of earshot. ‘I told them: I volunteer at a vet’s in town every Saturday. It’s not illegal, OK? It’s not against my SOPPO. I’ve not done anything wrong. So go away and leave me alone!’
‘No, no, no, Frank – that’s not how it works.’ Green smiled. ‘You tell me everything I want to know, or I’ll make sure every sweaty-arsed bastard in this place knows your grubby little secret.’
‘Sir?’ Logan cleared his throat. ‘That’s not really—’
‘You want that, Frank? You want them all to find out what you do to little boys?’
‘This isn’t fair!’
‘You think what’s happening to Alison and Jenny is fair?’
Baker closed his eyes and sagged. ‘Please, I just want to be left alone …’
Green leaned on the roof of Rennie’s pool car. Staring off into the middle distance, chin up. Posing. Again. ‘Well, that was … interesting.’
Logan hauled open the door and threw his notebook onto the driver’s seat. ‘That is not the way we do things.’
It had stopped raining, though from the look of the deep-grey layer of cloud blanketing the city that probably wouldn’t last. Still freezing as well.
Superintendent Green curled his top lip. ‘Really? What a shock: something else Grampian Police doesn’t do. Tell me, Sergeant, what do you do?’
‘Frank Baker is a registered sex offender – do you have any idea what’ll happen to him if his workmates find out?’
‘That’s hardly my—’
‘They’ll beat the shit out of him; he’ll get fired; and he’ll disappear! How are we supposed to manage him if we don’t know where he is?’
Green’s eyes narrowed. ‘Sergeant McRae, are you always this resistant to the chain of command?’
‘You had no business storming in there like something off the bloody Sweeney!’
The superintendent drummed his fingers on the roof. ‘When Chief Inspector Finnie told me you were “wilful” I wasn’t expecting full-on insubordination.’
Logan gritted his teeth. ‘I thought we were meant to be on the same side.’
‘Did you now?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Logan glanced towards the huge warehouse. Spike, Baker’s huge friend was standing in the doorway, staring back at him. Then he turned and melted away into the shadows. ‘Anything else?’
There was a pause. A cold smile. ‘Well, I’d better get back and check on the team. We need a strategy for Thursday – hostage exchange tends to be where you end up with dead bodies.’ Green stepped back from the car. ‘I’ll be seeing you.’
Logan clambered into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut. ‘Not if I fucking see you first.’
Rennie looked up from his book. ‘Sarge?’
‘Nothing.’ He hauled on his seatbelt. ‘I want that GPS fix on Charlie Delta Seven now.’
‘Already doing it.’ He stuck the book on the dashboard and dug out his Airwave handset.
Logan tilted his head sideways, frowning at the title. ‘The Accidental Sodomist?’
‘It’s literature: shortlisted for the Booker this year. Emma says I need to broaden my horizons, and – Hold on. Aye, Jimmy, how you getting on finding Charlie Delta Seven for me? … Uh-huh … No. Still no sign of him … Yeah, if you can …’ Rennie put a hand over the mouthpiece and nodded at the book in Logan’s hands. ‘You can borrow it when I’m finished. It’s about this concert pianist from Orkney who moves to Edinburgh ’cos he’s in love with his cousin, and ends up shagging a bunch of mental … Yeah? It is? Cheers, thanks Jimmy.’
‘Well?’
Rennie cranked the key in the ignition. ‘We have a winner.’
‘There … over by the trees.’
Logan squinted through the rain-flecked windscreen. ‘Where? It’s all bloody trees.’
Gairnhill Woods lay three-and-a-bit miles west of the city, part of a little conjoined network of Forestry Commission