Logan blew a stream of smoke at the sky. 'Your arse.'
Silence.
'So… you coming to the briefing then?'
'Are you deaf?' He ground his cigarette out against the wall and turned towards the back door. Then stopped. 'And don't worry about that DS's job, there's going to be another one free by lunchtime.' 'You look like shite.' DI Steel collapsed into the uncomfortable chair next to Logan's, outside Superintendent Napier's lair. 07:00 precisely.
Logan raised an eyebrow. 'You can talk.' She was wearing a dark grey trouser suit that wouldn't have looked out of place on Worzel Gummidge. Neither would her hair. Scarecrow chic, if you were feeling generous. The bags under her eyes belonged on an airport carousel.
She punched him in the leg. 'Didn't get any sodding sleep, did I? Susan won't come home, says I'm an 'insensitive cow'. Says, first I won't give her a baby, and now I'm turning the house into a B &B for perverts.' The inspector pulled out a packet of nicotine gum and popped a couple out of their foil packaging. Stuck them in her mouth and chewed as if they were live wasps. Then offered the pack to Logan.
He shrugged, took two, and discovered why she made that face. 'Urgh! What's this stuff made of?'
'My house is a bombsite, I can't get my wife pregnant, and my career's fucked.'
Logan slumped back in his seat. 'I'm sorry, OK? I am. None of this was… I'm just sorry.'
'So what's the problem?' She stared straight ahead. 'You don't think I'd make a good parent for your sprog? That it?'
'No… I…' He scrubbed his face with his hands, wincing as he touched the fresh bruise where Kravchenko's henchman, Grigor, had punched him. 'I don't know.'
'Yeah, well, what does it matter to you, eh? No' like your relationship's going down the toilet, is it? No' like your life's screwed up beyond all sodding recognition!'
Logan looked at her. Then burst out laughing.
'What the hell is so funny?'
But now he'd started he couldn't stop.
Steel scowled at him. 'What the hell's wrong with you? I'm asking for your help! They won't let us adopt, we can't get IVF on the NHS, and we can't afford to go private. She's going to leave me, I bloody know it.'
There were tears running down Logan's cheeks.
'You are such a cock!' Steel hit him again. 'It's no' some sort of joke, OK? This is my life we're talking about!'
He had to fight to squeeze the words out, bent almost double in the chair: 'I've been blown up; shot at; I can't sleep; I have nightmares, even when I'm awake; all I want to do is drink until I can't… fucking… feel anything; I've started smoking again; I got Rory blinded, and Wiktorja's going to be next; I think I killed someone in Poland; I ruin everything I touch; and I'm about to get fired.' He looked up at her. 'And you think my life's not fucked up?' Logan stood in front of the machine on the third floor, trying to decide if he felt like a coffee, a tea, or a chicken noodle soup. Not that it mattered, they all tasted the same. He punched the buttons and reconstituted brown slurry gurgled into a thin plastic cup.
He picked it up by the rim, trying not to burn his fingers, then wandered upstairs to the CID office. Rennie was there, boring PC Karim with his 'how I caught the Sperminator story'.
'… and I'm piecing together, like, a million hours of CCTV footage, trying to track the guy back from the shopping centre and all the way down Union Street…'
Logan's desk was a disaster area of forms and files. Again. Half of them weren't even his. He stuck his cup of plastic coffee on top of a memo from DI Beattie, and gathered up an armful of witness statements. Then dumped them on the next desk over.
He sat in his creaky swivel chair and stared at the dead computer. Thinking about booting it up and writing his letter of resignation. Dear Bastards,
I quit.
Screw you all. Detective Sergeant Logan McRae
Karim kept glancing at his watch and shuffling towards the exit, but Rennie wouldn't stop droning on, and on, and on. 'Worked in a shoe shop…' Blah, blah. 'Confessed right away…' Blah, blah. 'Wife waited till he was handcuffed, then kneed him in the balls…'
'Yeah, great,' said Karim, when he could finally get a word in. 'Got to go: post mortem in ten minutes.'
'Ooh,' Rennie grabbed his notebook. 'Someone dead?'
'Dirty Bob. They found him yesterday evening in the St Nicholas graveyard, round the back near the shopping centre?' Karim sighed. 'He was pretty broken up about his mate Richard dying… Doc Fraser says sometimes they're like married couples: first one goes, then the other. I suppose it's kind of sweet. Poor sod probably drank himself to death — stank of white spirit.'
Logan's stomach curdled. 'White spirit?'
'His tipple of choice.'
And Logan had given him twenty pounds to go buy booze with. Great, something else for him to feel guilty about. He didn't listen as Karim said his goodbyes and left the office.
Rennie waited for the door to close before rummaging through his desk drawers, then scooted his chair across the CID office floor, until he was sitting next to Logan. 'Got something for you.' He handed over a carrier bag.
There was something heavy in it, a rectangular box — about a foot long and three inches on either side — wrapped in brown paper. Instantly recognizable to every Scotsman over the age of twelve.
The constable nodded. 'Came for you yesterday — didn't want to leave it lying on your desk, you know what a thieving bunch of bastards they are in here.'
Logan tore the paper off, levered opened the cardboard box's top flap, and pulled out the bottle of whisky inside. Thirty-year-old Knockdhu. There was a hand-written note Sellotaped to the bottle: 'DEAR DS MCRAE,
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR SORTING OUT THAT WEE MIS UNDERSTANDING WITH COLIN MCLEOD AND HARRY JORDAN. WE ALL APPRECIATE IT.
B EST WISHES,
H.M.'
'H.M.' Hamish Mowat. Brilliant. That was just what Logan needed. A gift from Aberdeen's top crime lord, thanking him for getting Creepy Colin off with attempted murder. Professional Standards were going to love that.
Rennie took one look at the bottle and said, 'Cool! Not your birthday is it?'
Logan slid the bottle back into its box, then locked it in his bottom desk drawer. It could stay there until he figured out what he was going to do with it. 'Don't you have work to be getting on with? People to impress, arses to kiss?'
'Jesus, you're a happy little pixie since you got back from Poland, you know that?' He stuck his feet flat on the floor and pushed, squeaking his chair back to his own desk. 'Anyway, thought you were in with the rubber-heelers this morning.'
'Steel went first: privilege of rank. I get to wait for my bollocking.'
'Oh…'
'Now sod off and leave me alone.' Logan poked away at paperwork for a while, but couldn't work up any enthusiasm. What was the point? They were probably going to suspend him anyway. So he gave up and borrowed an Aberdeen Examiner from the media office, flipping through to the Jobs pages at the back.
Everyone wanted years of experience. No one wanted a failed ex-Detective Sergeant with a crappy track- record and talent for disaster.
He checked his watch. Steel had been in with Superintendent Napier for nearly three hours.
Logan let his head sink forward until it was resting on a pile of uncompleted burglary reports. Sod this. He wasn't just going to sit here and wait for Napier to summon him.
He went to the IB lab instead, hoping to grab a couple of minutes with Samantha, but she was off at a crime scene in Blackburn.
What now? Back to the CID office to sulk some more? Scrounge a cup of tea and some cake from the CCTV room? Or just walk out and never come back. Or he could do what he should have done last night: march into DCS
