finally delivered.
Desperate Doug had looked bad, but Roadkill looked worse. White bandages separated by bruises. They'd put both his arms and one of his legs in plaster since Logan had seen him last. As if he was in a Carry On film.
The oxygen mask was gone, replaced by a tube with a nosepiece in the middle, the clear plastic line looped over his ears and taped to his cheeks to stop it from falling out.
'Can I help you?'
It was a short woman, dressed in a nurse's uniform: sky-blue slacks and a short-sleeved top with an upside- down watch pinned over the left breast.
'How is he?'
The nurse examined Logan with a practised eye. 'You family?'
'No. Police.'
'You don't say.'
'How is he?'
She picked the chart off the end of Roadkill's bed, skimming it. 'Well, he's doing a lot better than we thought. Surgery went well. He actually came round for an hour this morning.' She smiled. 'Bit of a surprise that. I put money on 'coma'. Still: win some, lose some.'
It was the last time Logan saw Roadkill alive. DI Steel wasn't surprised he'd got nothing out of Desperate Doug. Instead she just sat back in her chair, feet up on the desk, and puffed smoke rings at the ceiling.
'If you don't mind me asking, ma'am,' said Logan, fidgeting in the seat on the opposite side of her desk, 'how come you didn't go and interview him yourself?'
She smiled languidly at him through a haze of smoke. 'Dougie and me go way back. When I was first in uniform and he was in his prime…' Her smile became wry. 'Let's just say that we had a bit of a falling out.'
'What are we going to do about him?'
She sighed, sending cigarette smoke drifting across her desk like a wall of fog. 'We go to the Procurator Fiscal and we give him the forensic evidence. He reads it and he says, it's enough to go to court on, and we say great. And then Dougie's lawyer says my client is going to snuff it in under a month. And the PF says well in that case bugger it. Why waste the money?' She worked a chipped nail in between her teeth, dug something out and stared at it for a moment before flicking it away. 'He'll be dead before this thing comes to court. Let sleeping Dougs die, I suppose.' She stopped, as if something had suddenly occurred to her. 'You did check with his doctor, didn't you? He is dying, isn't he? Not just pulling your dick?'
'I checked. He's really dying.'
She nodded, the glowing tip of her fag bobbing up and down in the semidarkness. 'Poor old Doug.'
Somehow Logan found it difficult to feel a great deal of sympathy for the man, but he kept his mouth shut.
Back in the incident room Logan took down Geordie Stephenson's photograph. Both the one from Lothian and Borders Police and the one from the morgue. Now that Desperate Doug MacDuff was dying no one would ever be found guilty of Geordie's murder. But the man had no wife, no kids, no brothers or sisters. No one to claim his body. No one was going to miss Malk the Knife's enforcer. No one except Malk the Knife. And what was he going to do to Dougie? The old man would be dead in a month anyway. And it'd be painful: the doctor said so. All Malkie could do was put him out of his misery and Doug knew it. Maybe that was why he'd laughed when Logan had talked of retribution. Either way it didn't matter.
He stuffed everything relating to Geordie Stephenson's death into the file, including his report on yesterday's shenanigans. There would be some paperwork to tidy the thing off, but other than that the case was as dead as Geordie.
With that all packed away, the only thing left in Logan's little incident room was the unknown girl. Her dead face looked down at him with blank eyes.
One down, one to go.
Logan sat down and waded through the statements once more: everyone living within easy access of the communal bins. One of them had killed the girl, stripped her, tried to hack her up, wrapped her body in brown packing tape and stuffed it into the bin. And if it wasn't Norman Chalmers, who was it?
31
Sunset painted the sky above Rosemount in violent orange and scarlet flames. From street level, hemmed in on all sides by long lines of grey three-storey tenements, it was only visible as ribbons of iridescent colour. Here and there sulphurous-yellow streetlights flickered and hummed in the crisp December air, giving the buildings a jaundiced pallor. It wasn't even five o'clock yet.
Against all the odds WPC Watson had managed to find them a parking spot in front of the building Norman Chalmers lived in. The communal bin stood directly in front of the front door. It was a large black barrel, chest height, flattened at the sides and chained to a post. That was where the girl must have been dumped. Where the scaffies collected her from, taking her body to the council tip along with all the other garbage.
Forensics had been all over the bin and come up with nothing except the fact that someone in the building was into leather-fetish pornography.
'How many buildings we going to do?' asked Watson, balancing a pile of statements against the steering wheel.
'Start from the middle and work out. Three buildings each side: that's seven buildings. Six flats in each…'
'Forty-two flats? God, it'll take us for ever!'
'Then there's the other side of the road.'
Watson looked up at the building next to her, then back at Logan. 'Can we not get some uniforms in to do it?'
Logan smiled. 'You are uniform, remember?'
'Yeah, but I'm doing something: driving you about and all that. This'll take ages!'
'Longer we sit here, longer it'll take.'
They started with the building Chalmers lived in.
Ground floor left: an old lady with shifty eyes, urine-yellow hair and breath that stank of sherry. She refused to open the door until Logan had shoved his warrant card through the letterbox and she'd phoned the police station just to make sure he wasn't one of these paedophiles she'd heard about. Logan didn't point out she was about ninety years safe from people like that.
Ground floor right: four students, two of whom were still asleep. No one had seen or heard anything. Too busy studying. 'My arse,' said Watson. 'Fascist,' said the student.
First floor left: timid single woman with big glasses and bigger teeth. No she hadn't seen anyone or heard anything and wasn't it all simply dreadful?
First floor right: no answer.
Top floor left: unmarried mother and three-year-old child. Another case of see, hear and speak no evil. Logan got the feeling you could commit regicide in her bathroom while she was taking a bath, and she'd still swear she'd seen nothing.
Top floor right: Norman Chalmers. His story hadn't changed. They had no right to harass him like this. He was going to call his lawyer.
And back out onto the street again.
'Well,' said Logan, stuffing his hands into his pockets to keep out the chill. 'Six down, seventy-eight to go.'
Watson groaned.
'Never mind.' Logan gave her a smile. 'If you're very, very good I'll buy you a pint when we've finished.'
That seemed to cheer her up a bit and Logan was on the verge of adding an invitation to dinner when he caught sight of his reflection in the car windscreen. It was too dark to make out much detail on the building behind him, but the windows shone like cats' eyes in the dark mirror of glass. All of them.
He turned and stared up at the building. Every single window on the front of the building was ablaze. Even the supposedly empty first floor right flat. As he watched a face appeared at the window, staring down at the street. For a heartbeat their eyes met and then the face was gone, wearing a terrified expression. A very familiar
