'Jamie's missing?' Sharon clapped a hand to her mouth, stifling the shriek. Always overreacting, just like her bloody mother. 'I never said that! I didn't say he was lost, I just--' 'If we're late for this bloody party, I'm personally going to see to it that--' The doorbell: loud and insistent. '--your life is going to be--' The doorbell again. 'For God's sake, Sharon, answer the bloody door! I'm on the phone...' There was a clunk and a rattle as Sharon finally did what she was told, and then she shrieked again. 'Jamie! Oh Jamie, we were so worried!' Ian stopped mid-rant, staring at the soggy tableau on the top step: Jamie and his best friend Richard Davidson, holding hands with some idiot in a Halloween costume. 'About bloody time,' said Ian, slamming the phone down. 'I told you to be home by five!' The two small boys looked wide eyed and frightened. And so they bloody should be. 'Where the hell have you two been?' No reply. Typical. And look at the time ... 'Jamie!' Ian hooked his thumb in the direction of the stairs. 'Get your backside up there and get changed. If you're not a Viking in three minutes you're going to the party as a kid in his vest and pants.' Jamie cast a worried look at his partner in crime, then up at the stranger on the doorstep - the one wearing the bloodstained butcher's apron and Margaret Thatcher fright mask - before slinking up to his room, taking Richard with him. Great, now they'd have to drop the little brat off at his parents' house. Today was turning into a complete nightmare.
1
Detective Sergeant Logan McRae winced his way across the dark quayside trying not to scald his fingers, making for a scarred offshore container pinned in the harsh glow of police spotlights. The thing was about the size of a domestic bathroom - dented and battered from years of being shipped out to oilrigs in the middle of the North Sea and back again - its blue paint pockmarked with orange rust. A pool of dark red glittered in the Investigation Bureau's lights: blood mingling with oily puddles on the cold concrete, while figures in white oversuits buggered about with cameras and sticky tape and evidence bags. Four o'clock in the morning, what a great start to the day. The refrigerated container was little more than a metal box, lined with insulating material. Three wooden pallets took up most of the floor, piled high with boxes of frozen vegetables, fish, chicken bits and other assorted chunks of meat, the brown-grey cardboard sagging as the contents slowly defrosted. Logan ducked under the cordon of blue-and-white POLICE tape. It was impossible to miss Detective Inspector Insch: the man was huge, his SOC coveralls strained to nearly bursting. He had the suit's hood thrown back, exposing a big bald head that glinted in the spotlights. But even he was dwarfed by the looming bulk of the Brae Explorer, a massive orange offshore supply vessel parked alongside the quay, all its lights blazing in the purple-black night.
