Dark Blood

DS Bob Marshall just grinned. If God existed, He hadn’t been paying a lot of attention when He’d put Bob together. Big ears stuck out at right-angles from a square head with a bald patch at the back and a single, thick eyebrow at the front. Arms like hairy string. A monkey in a machine-washable suit.

‘Christ!’ Mark blinked, then hauled the door open. ‘What’ve you been eating?’

Bob patted the sides of his stomach. ‘Can’t beat cauliflower cheese and chips.’

‘Oh no it’s everywhere…’ Logan stood, backing away into the corner of the little walled-off section of the CID office, built to house the detective sergeants. Six desks — four for dayshift, two for night — all but one covered in drifts of paperwork and ring binders, monitor, keyboard, and overflowing in-tray. The walls were just about visible between the procedural flowcharts, a corkboard covered with mugshots and memos, a whiteboard with each DS’s name written above a list of active cases, another one with a schematic of some drug dealer’s house scrawled in blue marker pen. And a yellow-and-black biohazard triangle mounted above Bob’s desk.

Mark wafted the door open and closed, and open and closed…‘Never mind fucking Iraq, bloody United Nations should invade your arse. That’s a weapon of mass destruction, right there!’

‘I can’t help it if I’m talented.’

Gradually the smell faded, and people got back to work.

Logan finished a report on two indecent exposures in Trinity Cemetery — you’d have to be a brave man to wave your willy about in January in Aberdeen — then called up his internet browser and went looking for Billy Adams. 12,900,000 results in Google.

He refined the search criteria, narrowing it down to Newcastle. 358 results. Apparently there was a featherweight boxer called Billy Adams in the fifties, a guitarist with Dexys Midnight Runners in the eighties, a bunch of businessmen, some football fans…Then Logan included Knox’s name in the search.

An article from the Newcastle Evening Chronicle was top of the list: ‘MISSING OFFICER’S BODY FOUND.’

There were more links to the Newcastle Journal, News Post Leader, Sunday Sun, Morpeth Herald, and Whitley Bay News Guardian. Even a few of the national broadsheets had got in on the act. Logan clicked on the Chronicle link.

Under the headline was a photo of a blue SOC tent, the kind you put up to preserve a crime scene. It was surrounded by patchy bushes with some trees and the leg of a pylon in the background, an IB technician in protective gear walking towards the camera, carrying a black plastic box. Further down the article there was another photo: a smiling man with short blond hair, squint nose, blue eyes. According to the caption, it was ‘DETECTIVE INSPECTOR BILLY ADAMS (42)’

Apparently they’d found his body in the family Ford Mondeo on a patch of wasteland to the north of Newcastle. The story didn’t have a lot of detail on the cause of death — not surprisingly — concentrating instead on how police search teams had been looking for Adams since he’d gone missing from his home the Wednesday before. There was a quote from his wife. One from the detective inspector who’d headed up the search. Another from the young man who’d found the car. And a small potted history of DI Adams’s career. Drug seizures, three murder enquiries, one high-profile kidnapping that ended in disaster…

Logan dug the phone out from under a pile of partially completed crime reports and called Northumbria Police Headquarters.

‘Well?’ Detective Inspector Beardy Beattie’s office was crowded with box files — piled up on the carpet, the shelves, the windowsill, even the visitor’s chair. So Logan had to stand. The only place not covered in boxes was Beattie’s desk. That was covered in biscuit crumbs and paperwork.

Logan handed over the indecent exposure report. ‘He’s done it twice that we know of, probably more. Young mothers with pushchairs every time.’

Beattie sat forward, eyebrows raised. ‘Maybe he’s not flashing the mothers at all, you think of that? Maybe he’s flashing the kids!’ The DI smiled, obviously pleased with his deductive reasoning. Like a podgy Sherlock Holmes, who’d been dropped on his head as a child.

‘Don’t be daft George. He’s picking victims he knows aren’t going to chase after him. You going to abandon your baby in a graveyard to go running after some pervert who’s just shown you his dick?’

‘Oh.’ Beattie picked at a coffee stain on his new desk. ‘What about the counterfeit goods?’

‘Did you speak to Trading Standards, like I told you?’

‘I…erm…was hoping we could go over there together. You know, show a united front?’

‘Just call them, OK? We shouldn’t even be dealing with it: hookie goods is a job for the Shop Cops.’

‘Yes, but the sheer volume of-’

‘Still their job.’

‘Finnie wants us to do that Interagency Cooperation thing: us, Trading Standards and Customs.’ Beattie shuffled through some of the mess on his desk. ‘It shouldn’t take long, just a couple of hours and-’

‘You’ll have to take it up with Steel. I’ve got stuff to do for her all day.’

Beattie’s bottom lip protruded, his eyebrows pinching up in the middle. The ‘lost puppy’ look. ‘But Finnie wants to see progress.’

‘Then go get Biohazard Bob or Mark to help. Or Doreen. Eh? How about giving her some sodding work for a change instead of lumping it all on me?’

‘Fine.’ The inspector went back to his files, face turning pink. ‘I’ll call Trading Standards myself.’

Logan left him to it.

‘Bloody thing…’ DI Steel jabbed at the latch of her office window with a fork, digging the tines into the mechanism.

Logan closed the door and slumped in the visitor’s seat. ‘Tell me again why they promoted Beardy Beattie?’

‘It’s no’ safe making the windows so you can’t open the bastards more than an inch. What if there’s a fire?’

‘Useless tosser couldn’t investigate a septic tank for jobbies.’

She jabbed the fork into the catch again. ‘Give us a hand, eh?’

‘Thought you were supposed to be cutting down on the fags?’

‘This is an infringement of my human rights…Open you bastard!’

They struggled with the mechanism for a minute, before Steel managed to stab herself in the thumb with her fork. ‘Fffffffffffffffffff…’ She screwed her face up, then hurled the stainless steel thing in the bin. ‘FUCK!’ Steel slumped into her office chair and stuck her bleeding thumb in her mouth.

‘Why can’t you go outside for a cigarette, like a normal person?’

Steel just scowled at him.

‘Whatever.’ Logan pulled out his notebook. ‘Billy Adams. AKA: Detective Inspector Billy Adams, Northumbria Police. Did a lot of anti-gang stuff, and some undercover work on a big Newcastle mobster called Maitland. Killed himself about six weeks after Knox got sent down. And I mean seriously killed himself.’

She pulled her thumb out of her mouth. ‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’

‘According to the sergeant I spoke to, DI Adams swallowed enough antidepressants to cheer up a whole bouncy castle full of goths, a bottle of gin, and the barrel of a shotgun.’

‘No sodding about for our Billy, then.’

‘Blew a big hole in the roof of the family Mondeo, in the grounds of some disused factory. Been there four days in the sun before they found the body. The magpies had been at him.’

Steel went back to sucking her thumb, mumbling around the digit, ‘So why’s Danby being all touchy about it?’

‘No idea.’ Logan shifted forward in his seat. ‘I went for a dig in Knox’s file too, in case there was a connection there. He’s got big chunks marked “restricted”. No details.’

‘That’ll be those other rapes Danby was waffling about. Would’ve been before the Soham murders, back when we all thought we had to be so sodding sensitive about unsubstantiated accusations going on some dirty bastard’s permanent record. Bloody Data Protection Act bollocks.’