Shatter the Bones

Finnie closed his eyes, sighed, then ran a hand through his floppy brown hair. With his wide rubbery lips and sagging face, the head of CID was looking more like a disappointed frog with every passing year. ‘If you’d been here on time instead of-’

‘There was no way in hell we were ever going to make it all the way here from Altens in six minutes!’

‘You were supposed to be-’

‘We were two minutes late. Two minutes. And in that time they manage to print off a note, hack off a little girl’s toe, stick it all in an envelope, address it to the “The Cops”, and bugger off without a trace?’

‘But-’

‘If they did the amputation here there’d be blood everywhere.’

Finnie puffed out his cheeks, then blew out a long, wet breath. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘We weren’t meant to get here in time; it was a set-up.’

A shout echoed out from somewhere behind them. ‘Detective Superintendent? Hello? Is it true you’ve found Jenny’s body?’

Finnie sagged for a second, then narrowed his beady little eyes. ‘Are these bastards psychic?’

It was a baggy woman, wearing jeans and a pale blue shirt that was stained navy under the arms and between the breast pockets. She lumbered up the dusty road, her greying hair tied in a puffball behind her sweaty face. A spotty man trotted along beside her, fiddling with a huge camera.

The head of CID squared his shoulders, voice a hard whisper. ‘Get that envelope back to the lab: I want it run through every bloody test they’ve got. Not tomorrow, or next week, or when Peterhead stop clogging up the system with their bloody gangland execution: today. ASAP. Understand?’

Logan nodded. ‘Yes, Guv.’ He turned away, making for the phone box just as Spotty the Cameraman took his first picture.

‘Is it her? Is it Jenny?’

Finnie’s voice boomed out into the warm afternoon, ‘DS TAYLOR, GET THIS BLOODY CRIME SCENE CORDONED OFF!’

The IB tech was busy lifting a print from the cracked Perspex wall of the phone box, just beneath a set of pornographic stick men done in black marker pen.

Logan knocked on the metal frame. ‘Any joy?’

She peered up at him, a thin band of skin the only thing visible between her steamed-up safety goggles and white facemask. ‘Depends on your definition of “joy”. This thing’s clarted with prints and I’ll bet you a tenner none of them belong to our guy. But on the plus side: I’ve found three used condoms, a pile of fossilized dog turds, two empty Coke cans, it’s like a microwave oven in here, and I’m kneeling in dried-up pish. Who could ask for more?’

‘Condoms?’ Logan wrinkled his nose. In a phone box that smelled like a urinal? And they said romance was dead. ‘You got the envelope?’

She pointed at the case beside her. ‘If you sign for it, you can have the lot.’

‘You left it out in the sun? Why isn’t it packed in ice?’

The tech wiped the arm of her SOC suit across her glisten ing forehead. ‘Where the hell am I going to get ice from? Anyway, not like they’re going to sew the bloody thing back on, is it?’

‘No wonder Finnie does his nut…’ Logan opened the battered metal case. A black Grampian Police fleece was folded up inside it, the padded envelope in its clear plastic evidence pouch resting in the middle. At least she’d had the common sense to keep it insulated. He filled in the chain of evidence form and stood. ‘Right, if you see any-’

‘MCRAE!’ Finnie’s voice was loud enough to make them both flinch. ‘I said asap, not when you bloody feel like it!’

Logan turned the rattling Vauxhall into Queen Street. They’d stuck the battered exhaust in the boot and now the pool car roared and bellowed like a teenager’s first hatchback, the choking smell of exhaust fumes filling the interior.

Sitting in the passenger seat, DC Rennie tutted. ‘Thought they’d all be out at Hazlehead by now…’

Grampian Police Force Headquarters loomed at the end of the road — an ugly seventies-style black-and-white building, blocky and threatening, the roof festooned with communications antennae and early warning sirens. The Sheriff and JP Court building next door wasn’t much better, but even that was welcoming compared with the crowd gathered on FHQ’s Front Podium car park.

TV crews, reporters, photographers, and the obligatory crowd of outraged citizens clutching banners and placards: ‘DON’T HURT OUR JENNY!’, ‘THE WIND BENEATH OUR WINGS!!!’, ‘WERE PREYING 4 U ALISON AND JENNY!’, ‘LET THEM GO!!!!!’ Tears for the cameras. Grim faces. What’s the world coming to, and hanging’s too good for them.

A few protesters turned to watch the Vauxhall grumble past.

Rennie sniffed. ‘How come it’s the ugly ones that always want to get on the telly? I mean, don’t get me wrong: it’s tragic and all that, but none of this lot ever even met the McGregors. So how come they’re out here bawling their eyes out like their mum just died? Not natural, is it?’

Logan parked around the back, abandoning the battered car next to the police vans. ‘Get everything up to the third floor.’

Rennie rummaged the evidence bags out from the back seat. ‘I mean public displays of grief for someone you’ve never met are just creepy, they… Is this dog shite?’ He held one of the bags up, peering at the grey-brown lumps inside. ‘It is! It’s dog-’

‘Just get it up to the bloody lab.’ Logan turned and made for the back doors.

‘So how long’s it going to take?’

‘Urgh…’ The man in the white Tyvek suit shuddered, then lifted the toe from the bloodstained note and slipped it into an evidence bag. His voice came out muffled from behind the facemask. ‘A wee girl, for God’s sake.’

The lab at FHQ was a fraction of the size of the main facility on Nelson Street and it looked more like a messy kitchen than a state-of-the-art forensic facility. It even had a fridge-freezer, gurgling away to itself by the door, covered in novelty shaped magnets. A little digital radio played Northsound One just loud enough to be heard over the whine of the vacuum table as someone dusted a length of metal pipe for prints.

Logan hauled at the crotch of his oversuit. Some funny bugger must’ve changed the label, because there was no way in hell this was a Large. ‘So, how long?’

‘Give us a break, we’ve only had the stuff fifteen minutes.’

‘Finnie wants everything tested ASAP.’

‘There’s a shock.’ The technician bent over the crumpled note again, taking a swab of sticky dark-red blood and slipping it into a little plastic vial. ‘If I put a rush on the DNA you’ll get it back in an hour-’

‘There’s a media briefing at six!’

‘-hour and a half tops. Best I can do.’

‘Can’t you-’

‘This isn’t the telly, I can’t just magic up a DNA profile in time for the adverts. Can probably do you a blood-type, though.’ He took another swab, then wandered over to the work surface beside the fridge. ‘As for the rest of it…’ He sighed, adjusted his safety goggles, then looked across the room. ‘Sam? How long for fingerprints?’

Nothing.

Logan peered at the shape huddled over the vacuum table. The baggy white SOC suit made her completely anonymous, even to him. ‘Samantha?’

The tech tried again. ‘Sam?’

Still nothing. ‘SAM: HOW LONG FOR FINGERPRINTS?’

She looked up from her length of iron pipe. One end was wrapped in a clear plastic evidence bag, the metal inside dark and stained. She hauled at the elastic on her suit’s hood — exposing a shock of bright scarlet hair — and pulled a tiny black headphone out of her ear. ‘What?’