Kidney failure. We were on holiday in Kenya…’
Logan looked above the mantelpiece, finding a happy blonde lady with her balding husband, the pair of them grinning like idiots in the basket of a balloon, pale yellow grass far below. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘At least it was quick.’ He shifted again, making the chair creak. ‘Quick and painful. Doctors said there was nothing they could do. Hit Stacy really hard, losing her mum like that, never getting to say goodbye…’
Silence.
‘About the car, Mr Gardner?’
‘What? Oh…yes. It was parked round the corner. Couldn’t get it out front because that idiot next door always leaves his sodding car outside my house. Rubbing it in, because he’s got a brand-new Audi estate, and I’m driving a third-hand Fiat Panda.’ Gardner tugged at a bushy eyebrow. ‘Surprised he doesn’t park his wife out there too.’
Logan scribbled the details down on the sheet of paper he’d liberated from Douglas Walker’s bedroom.
Have to pick up a new notebook when he got back to the station, one that didn’t reek of art student vomit.
He checked his watch. Nearly quarter past six. Beattie would be long gone — back home to put curlers in his beard, or whatever the hell it was he did when he wasn’t making Logan’s life miserable at work.
‘Right, well, I suppose I should be heading…’
Gardner hauled himself out of his chair and walked Logan to the front door. ‘Are you a family man, Sergeant?’
Logan pursed his lips. ‘It’s kind of complicated.’
Gardener nodded, his eyes watery, rimmed with pink. Bit his bottom lip. ‘Never gets any easier, does it?’ He rubbed his hand across his face. ‘I’m sorry, it’s…It’s been a tough couple of months.’
Logan laid a hand on his arm. ‘If we find your car I’ll let you know.’
‘Can I get a crime number for the insurance?’
‘I’ll get someone to phone it through…’ Logan trailed off. The hallway had a set of stairs leading up to the first floor. ‘Did you hear-’
There it was again: a soft gurgling noise.
Logan looked back at Gardner, then took a step towards the stairs.
‘Well…’ Gardner unsnibbed the front door. ‘Anyway, thanks for coming — I know you must be very busy.’
Upstairs, the gurgling stopped and the crying started, quickly building to anguished howls.
Gardner smiled, a single bead of sweat trickling down his pink neck. ‘I…must have left the TV on in the bedroom.’
Logan put his hand on the balustrade. The old man flinched.
‘If I search this place am I going to find a pushchair, a sawn-off sledgehammer, and a bag full of stolen jewellery?’
‘I don’t…Erm…’
‘Your car wasn’t stolen, was it?’
Gardner just sagged.
The upstairs bedroom seemed to be the only place in the whole house with any furniture. It had bright yellow walls, a pile of soft toys, a sparkly mobile, and a big wooden cot. A little girl, dressed in a tiny princess/fairy costume, was imprisoned inside, holding onto the bars.
Alan Gardner sat on the floor, clutching a floppy-eared toy bunny identical to the one on the security camera footage. ‘It’s under the crib.’
Logan squatted down and dragged out a black-and-red Adidas holdall. He dumped it on the pink carpet — it was full of watches, chains, rings, brooches, and bracelets, gleaming in the light of a Bob the Builder bedside lamp. A big wodge of cash stuffed in the side pocket.
‘What happened to the first lot, from Henderson’s?’
‘Sent it off to one of those cash-for-gold places you see on the telly. Haven’t even got the cheque back yet.’
‘Alan Gardner, I’m arresting you on suspicion of-’
‘I didn’t have any choice.’ He kept his eyes fixed on the bunny rabbit.
‘Where’s the sledgehammer?’
‘She’s my daughter, what was I supposed to do? Let him hurt her?’
Logan turned and looked at the fairy princess in the cot. ‘Who’d want to hurt a little girl?’
‘Not Nicole, her mum: Stacy, my daughter.’ Gardner creaked himself upright and handed the rabbit into Nicole’s sticky little fingers. ‘When Laura died, Stacy…Stacy got involved with the wrong kind of people. Started taking drugs, drunk all the time, she just couldn’t cope.’
Gardner reached down and ruffled his granddaughter’s hair. ‘So now I look after Nicole. She’s my little tattieheid, aren’t you?’ The girl grinned, still chewing on the bunny’s floppy ear.
And now Logan was supposed to feel all sorry for him? ‘You robbed two jewellery shops, threatened the assistants with a sledgehammer.’
Gardner looked up, eyes pink and damp. ‘What was I supposed to do? Stacy ran up a lot of debts: drugs. There’s a man who’s going to…cut her if she doesn’t pay it all back. Break her legs. Worse…The interest is crippling.’ He reached down and picked the fairy princess from her cot, holding her tight. ‘I sold everything, cashed in my life insurance, pension, sold my car, put the house on the market…She’s my little girl, what was I supposed to do?’
Damn.
‘How about call the police?’
‘He said if I went to the police they’d never find her body.’
Logan closed his eyes, ran a hand across his forehead. Swore.
‘What’s his name?’
‘I…I don’t know. I never spoke to him.’
‘But you said-’
‘He always made Stacy phone.’
They stood there in the gaily coloured bedroom, Logan swearing, Gardner crying, Nicole making nonsensical gibberysing-song noises.
Custody was busy — shouts and threats coming from the lower corridor of cells, where the female prisoners were normally kept. Logan hefted the sawn-off sledgehammer onto the desk, along with the Adidas holdall, both stuffed into oversize evidence bags.
‘Two exhibits to sign in, and one prisoner.’
The custody sergeant nodded, reached below the level of the desk, pulled out a clipboard, and clacked it down next to Logan’s evidence bags. Sergeant Downie’s skin was so pale it fluoresced slightly in the overhead light, his hooded eyes moving restlessly across his twilight domain. The poster boy for generations of exuberant inbreeding.
He raised an eyebrow, giving Logan’s prisoner the long, hard stare.
Gardner was standing on the bare concrete with his head down, fairy princess granddaughter clutched to his chest, her podgy legs and little pink shoes dangling against his belly.
‘So,’ Sergeant Downie pulled the cap off a chewed blue biro and smiled with tombstone teeth, ‘which one am I checking in: the bald bloke, or the wee girl with the fairy wings?’
‘Very funny.’ Logan signed the custody form at the bottom. ‘Mr Gardner’s going to be helping us with those jewellery heists.’
‘I see.’ The sergeant took the clipboard back and started ticking boxes. ‘And would Mr Gardner like a wake-up call, newspaper, breakfast in bed?’
‘Don’t be a dick, Jeff.’
Twitch. ‘Fair enough.’
‘You got any PCSOs knocking about? I need someone to look after the kid till social services get here.’
Sergeant Downie laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’ve got half a female rugby team downstairs screaming blue bloody murder. Must be that time of the month. Speaking of which.’ He leant forward and lowered his voice to a
