Dark Blood

Oh no.

Logan swallowed. ‘She all right?’

‘Course she’s not, she’s having bloody stomach cramps!’ Silence. ‘What if she loses the baby?’

More silence.

‘I’m sure she’ll be fine. It’ll all be fine.’ That was what you were meant to say, wasn’t it?

Steel coughed. Sniffed. Cleared her throat. ‘Sod it, I’m taking her to A amp;E. You’re in charge: give the search another couple hours then wind it down. Make it look like we tried.’

‘Do you want…’

But Steel was gone. He was talking to a dead phone.

‘Sod it.’ Logan jabbed the car’s cigarette lighter with his thumb, and when it popped up he pulled a cigarette from the packet and sooked it into life.

Butler immediately started making pantomime coughing noises.

‘Fine…’ Logan ground it out in the overflowing ashtray. ‘Happy?’

‘Bad enough I’ve got to drive this rattletrap without catching your second-hand smoke.’

‘Just drive, OK?’

The gritters were out in force — two of them taking up both lanes of the dual carriageway, huge rusty yellow things topped with flashing orange lights, strafing the road with salt and sand. All the cars hanging back to avoid having the paint battered off their bonnets.

Butler took the second exit at the next roundabout, heading into Cove, weaving through the suburban streets for the south-east corner.

Jimmy Evans’s house sat on its own at the end of a long, rutted driveway, potholes and ice making Logan’s tatty little Fiat slither and jerk as Butler got them as close to the brightly lit house as possible.

A series of patrol cars and police vans snaked back from a snow-covered driveway, blocking the lane.

‘We’ll have to walk from here.’

Sunlight speared down from a crystal blue sky, making the fields glitter, the snow crunchy underfoot, the sound of dogs and police chatter ringing in the crisp air.

The Police Search Advisor met them at the front door, scratching an armpit. With thinning, scraggy blonde hair and a pointy nose, he looked a bit like a meerkat with mange. ‘So.’ He squinted at Logan. ‘It true you’re in charge now?’

‘That a problem?’

‘Hey, long as you sign off on the overtime, I’m happy.’ He held out a stack of reports and Logan flicked through them.

‘You want to summarize this for me?’

More scratching. ‘No sign of Knox anywhere.’

There was a shock. ‘IB?’

The POLSA took his hand out of his armpit for long enough to point at a familiar filthy Transit van. ‘Still doing the guest bedroom. Family’s cleared out, so we’ve got the run of the place.’

‘Door-to-doors?’

He blinked, then did a slow three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, staring out at the snow-covered fields. ‘Erm…There’s no one living anywhere near, if you don’t count the sheep, so-’

‘Back there, where the lane joins the main road. There’s houses overlooking the entrance — they might’ve seen a car coming or going.’

The rest of Constable Meerkat’s face turned as pink as his nose and ears. ‘Ah, OK. I’ll get that organized…’

The Airwave handset clipped to Butler’s shoulder started bleeping and she moved away a couple of paces to answer it, then came back and handed the thing to Logan. ‘Control.’

‘McRae.’

‘Aye, hud oan, puttin’ you through…’

Click.

‘Sergeant, it’s Dr Frampton, we met at the-’

‘Steve Polmont crime scene, yes, I remember.’

‘I tried getting in touch with DI Steel, but it seems she’s unavailable?’

‘Yeah…’ According to the paperwork, there wasn’t so much as a footprint beyond the back garden.

‘We’ve got a result from the soil sample we took yesterday, from the flat where Knox escaped. A footprint just inside the hallway?’

‘Uh-huh?’ Logan handed the search reports back to the POLSA. Steel was right — the search was a waste of time, but at least it looked as if they were doing something. Knox was long gone.

‘We ran it against the national soil database, and there’s about a dozen places it could have come from in Aberdeenshire, I’ve emailed the results to you.’

‘Hold on…’ He pulled out the scrap of paper he was using as a surrogate notebook, and pinned it to the roof of the nearest patrol car with the side of his hand, pen poised. ‘Want to give me the edited highlights?’

Pause. ‘The sample has a pH of five-point-five and carbon’s sitting around three-point-six percent. Add in silt at eleven percent and that makes it Cairnrobin. You see, the general SSKIB values for soils like these-’

‘Place names. Honestly, it’ll be quicker if you just give me place names.’

‘Oh. I see.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Yes, well Cairnrobin is a pretty small series — there’s only three hundred and ninty-five hectares in the whole of Scotland — in isolated pockets around Cove, Menie House, and near the mouth of the Ythan at Sleek of Tarty.’

Logan crabbed them out on the paper, then put his hand over the mouthpiece, leant over to the POLSA. ‘Any signs of a break in?’

‘Back door — the lock’s been gouged with a screwdriver.’

He went back to the call.

‘…time. You see, a soil sample is like a fingerprint-’

‘Thanks Doctor. That’s great. I’ll be in touch.’ He hung up before she could launch into anything else.

Logan stood there, tapping the handset against his chin.

Butler raised an eyebrow. ‘Something?’

He turned to the POLSA, and slapped his hand on the roof of the patrol car. ‘You got keys for this?’

Turned out it wasn’t even locked. Logan slipped into the passenger seat and fired up the little grey laptop mounted on the dashboard, using it to log into his Grampian Police email address.

Half a dozen messages from Beattie — which he ignored — and right after them the one from Dr Frampton. He opened it, then clicked on the.jpg attachment, shifting in his seat as the picture file downloaded.

It was a high-resolution map that looked as if it was made from stitched together screenshots. The areas where the soil matched the print in the flat highlighted in red. One cluster of red blobs sat north of Balmedie, near Donald Trump’s golf resort; one was about halfway to Peterhead; but the biggest concentration lay along the coast just south of Cove.

Logan frowned at the screen.

Most were just fields, but two of the blobs had houses in them.

Logan zoomed in on the Cove section. ‘See this?’

Constable Itchy squinted. ‘No, that’s wrong.’ He stuck his finger on the laptop’s screen and drew a little greasy circle inside the red bit. ‘That’s the search area: Steel only wanted a hundred meters. Are we meant to search the rest of it? Only it’s bloody freezing out there, and it’ll be dark soon.’

Why was there mud from around the victim’s home on the carpet of Knox’s Sacro flat?

Maybe whoever helped him escape stopped off on the way up to check on potential targets…?

Logan looked up at the house. ‘I need to speak to the victim, Evans.’

The POLSA shook his head. ‘Like I said — the family’s cleared out. Son took the old man back to Sunderland,