Broken Skin

bondage mafia. I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and there’ll be a horse’s head in a gimp mask lying on top of the duvet.’

‘Think you might have overreacted a bit there?’ asked Logan back in their grubby little incident room, sitting a fresh mug of tea down in front of Rickards and his protruding bottom lip.

The constable scowled up at him. ‘Did you tell them? I trusted you and-’

‘Of course I didn’t! Rennie was just pulling your leg. No one knew. Well, not till you shouted it all over the canteen …’

Rickards opened his mouth to say something and froze, realization dawning in his horrified eyes. ‘Oh fuck.’ He buried his head in his hands.

‘Congratulations.’ Logan patted him on the back. ‘You’ve just come out of the bondage closet.’

It was nearly lunchtime before they got to the bottom of Frank Garvie’s porn stash, and by then Rickards was beginning to come to terms with his outing. The DVDs were all what they claimed to be, the videos homemade — Garvie in his dark red rubber romper suit, sometimes with friends, but mostly alone. The only things Rickards hadn’t tried were the two canisters of old seventeen-millimetre film. Logan cracked open The Butler’s Revenge and examined the case. According to the Identification Bureau’s audiovisual team it was probably Victorian and there was nothing in the station that could handle film stock that old. Not that it mattered: anything illegal in there would be well past its sell-by-date. There was nothing here to tie Frank Garvie to the corpse of Jason Fettes.

Rickards picked up one of the ancient film canisters. ‘Er … sir,’ he said, turning it over and reading the title, Festive Frolics, ‘I think these are stolen …’ He dumped it on the desk, then went squirrelling in a stack of paperwork on the floor by the radiator, coming up with a handful of forms, mumbling to himself as he flicked through the pages. ‘Here: three canisters of vintage Victorian erotic films stolen from ClarkRig Training Systems. Knew I recognized them.’ He smiled, proud of himself. ‘Told you I’d been reading the reports.’

Logan checked the list of stolen property — Rickards was right. Zander Clark, Aberdeen’s premier pornographer, had reported the films missing in amongst a host of other antique sex toys and outfits, with a few computers, mobile phones and digital video cameras thrown in for good measure. A slow smile spread across Logan’s face.

He dialled DI Insch’s number, but it went straight through to voicemail, so he tried Steel instead. Voicemail again. One more go — the Control Room, where a woman with an almost impenetrable Banff accent told him that both inspectors were in the Terror Readiness Review and wouldn’t be gettin’ oot till aifter six. Logan hung up, tapping the phone against his chin. ‘I think,’ he said at last, ‘that you and I should go pay Mr Frank Garvie a visit. See if he can explain why he’s got stolen Victorian pornography hidden in his sock drawer.’

But first they were going to take a wee detour and test out a theory.

Zander with a Z was in the editing suite, a huge insulated mug of coffee sitting alongside a plate of stovies, dark disks of pickled beetroot leaching purple into the potato. People in hard hats lurched back and forwards on the screen in front of him as the director fiddled with the console. He didn’t even look up as Logan and Rickards entered. ‘With you in a minute … this is an important scene …’

‘When do the naked Viking women arrive?’

The large man punched a button and the people froze in place. ‘They don’t,’ he said, winding it back and pressing play, staring intently at the finished product. ‘Perfect!’ He rewarded himself with a massive forkful of stovies, chewing as he spoke. ‘This is Safety First! A guide to container management. Lot of people don’t bother with plot and narrative when they do this kind of stuff, it’s just one stupid scene after another. “Don’t do this, don’t do that” … My safety films have theme and subtext. That’s why they win awards.’

‘Yes …’ Logan pulled one of the ancient film canisters out of Rickards’ hands. ‘We were wondering if you recognized this.’

Zander’s eye went wide. ‘The Butler’s Revenge! You caught the bastard!’ He reached forward and grabbed the other one from the constable. ‘And Festive Frolics!’ he stopped, looking slightly puzzled. ‘What happened to Kitty-Cat Katy and all the other stuff?’

‘Kitty-Cat …?’

‘Katy. It’s a woman who comes on dressed as a cat and licks herself. One of those old Victorian circus acts. Contortionist pornography from eighteen ninety-eight. Very, very rare.’ He held the films against his chest, cuddling them. ‘You do have them, don’t you? The rest of the stuff that was stolen?’

‘We’re currently pursuing several lines of enquiry.’ Which usually meant, ‘we don’t have a sodding clue’ so it was nice to able to use it legitimately for a change. ‘We’ll need to hold on to them for a while as evidence,’ he said and Zander’s face fell. ‘But you’ll get them back.’

The director nodded. ‘At least you’ve found them … Tell you what,’ he bustled out into the reception, coming back with a couple of DVD cases, ‘I felt kinda guilty you didn’t get one last time. Here: best thing I ever did.’ He gave Rickards his own copy too: Crocodildo Dundee.

Logan turned the thing over in his hands, and there on the cover — hamming it up behind the heroine’s long, bronzed legs — was Jason Fettes, dressed like a gangster. Which was the real reason for their visit. ‘You never asked us what he’d done.’

‘Who?’ Zander’s smile slipped an inch.

‘Jason Fettes, AKA Dick Longlay, you never asked what he’d done.’

‘No?’

‘You knew, didn’t you?’ Logan stuck the DVD in the deep pocket of his overcoat and settled back against the mixing desk, arms crossed, giving him DI Insch’s patented silent technique.

‘I … well … it all depends what you mean by “knew” … I mean.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Look, I knew Jason was into other stuff. That’s all! I didn’t know he was dead or anything. I get a bit obsessive when I’m working on a film.’

‘Other stuff like BDSM?’

A blush rushed up Zander’s cheeks. ‘He was … renting himself. For sex.’

‘Was he now?’

Another jiggly nod. ‘He was so desperate to get out to Hollywood and try being a proper actor. Had this screenplay he was working on … You’d be surprised how many people want to sleep with a genuine porn star, even in Aberdeen.’ An uncomfortable pause. ‘We used to get emails through the Crocodildo website.’

Logan stayed silent, watching as Zander Clark, porn producer, started to sweat.

‘I … I wasn’t his pimp, if that’s what you’re thinking! I never had anything to do with that! We just treated everything as fan mail and forwarded it on. Really!’

‘And did you keep copies?’

‘No! Nothing. Deleted everything. It wasn’t anything to do with me, or the company. If Jason wanted to make a bit of money sleeping with deluded, middle-aged ladies that was his business …’ He started picking at the side of his thumb with the nail on his index finger. ‘Seriously, I don’t know anything else.’

‘I want the email address you forwarded them on to.’

‘Sure, sure, no problem, always happy to cooperate with the police.’ Going for jovial bonhomie and overshooting the mark by about a mile.

‘You see,’ said Logan as the fat man hurried off to get it for them, ‘sometimes even Miss Marple gets it right.’

25

Garvie wasn’t at work, where a frosty-faced man in jeans and a polo shirt told Logan in no uncertain terms what he thought of the police harassing innocent men until they had to be signed off for stress. So they tried the ex-porn star’s flat in Danestone. The sun was hidden behind the building, casting a long, blue shadow across the frost-bleached grass and glittering grey tarmac. Rickards leant on the bell again and again, until finally an upstairs