'Oh.'
'Tell you what though…' She snapped off her blue nitrile gloves. 'Long as you're here, you can give us a hand in the store room.'
Not exactly the way Logan had planned on spending his evening, but it was probably better than going home to paint the lounge ceiling. Ten minutes later someone shouted, the store room door flew open, and DI Steel appeared. 'Where the hell is every…' She stood there, staring as Logan and Sam straightened their clothes. 'No wonder the labs are backed up! Bloody IB spends all its time shagging CID.'
'We weren't shagging.' Sam's face went bright red. She grabbed a random bit of equipment from the shelves that lined the walls, 'I was looking for this and got something in my eye-'
'Got something in your pants, more like.'
'It's not-'
'Oh, like I care. Just give us the results of that DNA test I sent up yesterday and you can go back to your bonking.'
'We weren't bonking!' Sam pushed past Steel back into the lab, marched over to the filing cabinet, and yanked out a drawer.
'And while you're there,' said Steel, 'see if there's anything on that fire at the Turf 'n Track.'
'We've not had time. We're up to our ears fingerprinting this lot.' She pointed at the piles of weapons.
'Too busy bumping uglies with Detective Sergeants, more like.'
Samantha glared at Logan. He cleared his throat. 'Erm… Why don't I chase these up and bring the results down to your office, ma'am?'
The inspector stood there for a moment, shrugged, then wandered out of the lab with her hands in her pockets, whistling the tune to Lydia the Tattooed Lady.
As soon as the door closed, Samantha slumped back against the wall and buried her head in her hands. 'Oh God… it's going to be all over the station by morning…'
Logan tried for a reassuring smile. 'Could be worse?'
'She's a nightmare. She's a card-carrying, cold-sweat-in-the-wee-small-hours, bed-wetting nightmare.'
'Don't let her get to you.' He stroked the back of Samantha's neck, feeling the soft downy hairs goosebump beneath his fingers. 'Anyway, so what if everyone knows about us?'
'Easy for you to say, you're not going to be 'the tattooed slut who shags Detective Sergeants in the bloody store room', are you?'
'I'll have a word with her. She's not really as bad as everyone thinks. Besides…' he looked back at the door and suppressed a shudder. 'She wants me to do her a favour.' They found the remains of the Turf 'n Track petrol bomb buried under a stack of evidence bags. It only took five minutes to bring up three good clear prints from the broken bottle.
Samantha took reference shots with the lab's digital camera, then transferred the prints off with lifting tape to an acetate sheet and handed them to Logan.
'Just promise me,' she said, filling in the paperwork, 'you won't tell anyone I rushed that through for you, OK? If it gets out I do favours for sex there'll be a line right round the bloody building…'
24
The sign on the door said, 'ABERDEEN BUREAU ~ SCOTTISH FINGERPRINT SERVICE', which was pretty grandiose, given it was just a couple of rooms at the end of the third-floor corridor. One wall was dominated by a huge rack of pine drawers, each one stuffed with hundreds of old-fashioned fingerprint files, the rest of the space taken up with cubicles and light-boxes.
Logan found someone in the computer room — little more than an alcove with a scanner, a desktop machine, and a laser printer. The fingerprint technician sagged in his typist's chair, groaned, rubbed at his eyes, then pulled a sheet of acetate from the scanner, replacing it with another one from the pile.
He clicked the mouse a couple of times then glanced at Logan. 'Whatever you want, the answer's no. I'm swamped.'
'Who says I want anything? Maybe I just popped up to say hello.'
'Yeah? Then how come you're holding a fingerprint sheet?'
Logan slipped it onto the top of the pile. 'Oh, come on, Bill. I only need-'
'No! I've got three million prints to run for Finnie as it is. Supposed to be home having a romantic dinner with my wife…' All the time he was talking, the mouse was moving on the screen, clicking and dragging things.
Logan perched on the edge of the desk. 'Can't believe they left you here on your own to do all this. It's just not fair, is it?'
'Don't even try with the fake sympathy.' He clicked the button again, sending the print off to be evaluated against the database.
'Not even if I say 'pretty please'?'
Bill gave an elaborate sigh, emptied the scanner, then started again with a new set of fingerprints. 'When I finish this one I'm going for a cup of coffee. While I'm away you can play on the machine to your heart's content. As long as you don't break anything.'
'But-'
'Final offer.'
'Done.'
How hard could it be? It turned out to be a lot harder than it looked. Scanning the print in had been easy enough, but getting the contrast up without losing detail on the whorls, loops and deltas wasn't. After five minutes of fiddling, Logan finally had something that looked like it would do. Then he tried to follow the hastily-scrawled instructions Bill had left him: rotating the fingerprint so it was the right way up, then taking the mouse and marking up the distinguishing features. Find the end of a ridge, mark the tail with a pointer, then drag the mouse back along the line, then do it again, and again, and again.
Finally, when the screen was covered in little red circles and blue lines, Logan tried to get the machine to search for a match. Then did a lot of swearing when it wouldn't. He was poking away at random buttons when Bill reappeared with a huge wax-paper cup of coffee from the canteen.
'You not finished yet?'
Logan jabbed with the mouse again. 'Bloody thing doesn't work…'
'You didn't follow the instructions, did you?' Bill shouldered him out of the way, clicked twice, punched a couple of numbers into the keyboard, then hit 'PROCESS RESULTS'. 'See, piece of cake.'
'How long?'
'Depends. The machine doesn't actually compare prints, it compares the relative distance between points and the direction of the tails. Hundreds of different permutations analysed against every fingerprint we have in the database.' He pulled Logan's sheet out of the scanner and swapped it for the next one in line. 'Anything up to an hour.'
'I'll come back in the morning.' Logan stopped past the lab to say a final good night to Samantha — no tongues — and then wandered down to DI Steel's office.
She was sitting in one of the visitor's chairs, squinting her way through a stack of crime reports, scribbling indecipherable notes on them in red biro.
Logan dumped the DNA file Samantha had given him on the inspector's desk. 'You got a DNA match.'
'Eh?' She looked up from her forms. 'Oh… who is it?'
He flipped through the pages till he got to the conclusions at the back. 'Someone called Derek Allan?'
'Oh bloody hell, that's all I need.' Then she went rummaging in her trouser pocket and pulled out a fifty-pence piece. 'Here, stick that in the swear box. Bottom desk drawer.'
Logan popped the inspector's money into the Quality Street tin. 'Thought you said you were giving up on the whole 'new you' thing?'
'Aye, well…' She sniffed, and buried her head in the reports again. 'You thought any more about… what we talked about?'
