went through to the kitchen to fix himself some tea and toast.
On the way out of the flat he paused for just long enough to delete Miller's message without listening to it. He doubted it would be the last call he'd get from the reporter today.
The morning briefing was a subdued affair, with DI Insch doing a lot of yawning as he took everyone through the events of last night, both at the hospital and in interview room number three. The order of the day was going to be door-to-door. Again.
Logan hung back at the end of the briefing, sharing a smile with WPC Watson as she filed out to start questioning doctors, nurses and patients. He still owed her a pint.
Insch was parked in his usual spot, on the edge of the desk, one haunch up on the wood while he rummaged through his suit pockets for something sweet. 'Sure I had some fruit pastilles…' he muttered as Logan came up and asked him what the plan was for the morning. Coming up empty on the confectionery front, he asked Logan to get Cameron Anderson into an interview room on his own. 'You know the drill,' he said. 'Nice burly PC standing in the corner glowering at him for a bit. That'll make his sphincter clench.'
By the time nine o'clock came around Cameron Anderson had been sitting in a baking-hot interview room, with a hostile-looking PC for nearly an hour and, as Inch had predicted, he was squirming.
'Mr Anderson,' said Insch with zero warmth as they finally sat down to begin the interview. 'How nice of you to take time out of your busy, busy schedule!' Cameron looked terrified and exhausted, as if he'd been up all night crying.
'I take it,' said Insch, helping himself to a fruit sherbet, 'that you've concocted some other miraculous interpretation for the evening's events? Perhaps aliens did it?'
Cameron's hands trembled on the tabletop. His voice was thin and quiet, shaking like his hands. 'Geordie and me never met until I was ten. His mum went down with breast cancer, so he came to live with us. He was bigger than me…' Cameron's voice dropped so low that Logan had to ask him to speak up for the tape. 'He did things. He…' A single tear ran down his cheek. Cameron bit his lip and told them about his brother.
Geordie had come up from Edinburgh three weeks earlier. He was doing some business for his boss. Something to do with getting planning permission. He was spending money like it was going out of fashion. Gambling mostly. Only he wasn't winning. Then the thing with the planner didn't work. He'd spent all the bribe money by then anyway. So he tried threats. And then he had to get out of town quick.
'He pushed the planner under a bus,' said Insch. 'He's in Aberdeen Royal Infirmary with a shattered skull and pelvis. He's going to die.'
Cameron didn't look up, just went on with his story. 'A week later Geordie comes back. Said his employer wanted to know what had happened to all the money. He didn't have it and there were people from the bookies coming round to my flat. They took Geordie away. When he came back the next day he was peeing blood.' He shuddered, his eyes glistening. 'But Geordie had a plan. He said someone was looking for something special. Something he could get his hands on.'
Logan scooted forward in his chair. That was what Miller had said. That someone was after 'livestock'.
'I didn't see him again for a couple of days. He had this big suitcase with him and there was this girl inside. She was drugged. He…he said she was the answer to all our troubles. He was going to sell her to this man and get enough to pay off the bookies and give his boss the bribe money back. No one was going to miss her.'
'What was her name?' asked Logan, his voice cold in the oppressive heat of the room.
Cameron shrugged, the tears beginning to well up over his bottom lid, a small sparkling drip forming at the end of his nose. 'I…I don't know. She was foreign. From somewhere Russian I think. Her mother was a tart in Edinburgh, brought over special. Only she died of an overdose. So the kid was, you know, going spare…' He sniffed. 'Geordie bagged her up before anyone else came to claim her.'
'So you and your brother were going to sell a four-year-old girl to some sick bastard?' The menace in Insch's voice wasn't very well concealed. Colour had risen up the fat man's cheeks and his eyes sparked like black diamonds.
'I had nothing to do with it! It was him! It was always him…'
Insch glowered, but said nothing more.
'She couldn't speak any English, so he taught her to say things. You know,' he buried his head in his trembling hands, 'dirty things. She didn't know what they meant.'
'And so you abused her. You taught her to say: 'fuck me in the ass' and then you made her do it.'
'No! No! We couldn't…' A blush raced over his face. 'Geordie said she had to be, you know, still a virgin.'
Logan's face creased up in disgust. 'So you made her suck your dick?'
'It was Geordie's idea! He made me do it!' The tears spilled down Cameron's face. 'Only once. I only did it once. When the old man came round. He was beating up Geordie and I tried to stop him. Then the girl came in and she's saying these things Geordie taught her. And she grabs the old man and he pushes her away and she falls and hits her head and she's dead.' He looked imploringly into Insch's cold eyes. 'He told me he was going to kill Geordie, then he was coming back for me!' Cameron rubbed the back of his sleeve over his eyes, wiping away the tears. But more sprang up in their place. 'I had to get rid of her! She was lying on the fireplace and she was naked and dead. I tried to cut her up, but I couldn't. It was…it was…' he shuddered and wiped at his eyes again. 'So I wrapped her up in tape. I…poured bleach in her mouth to…you know…make it clean again.'
'Then you had to find a bin-bag to put her in.' Cameron nodded and a sparkling drop fell from his nose, splashing onto the tabletop between his trembling hands.
'And then you threw her out with the trash.'
'Yes…I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…' After his statement, after Cameron Anderson had admitted sexually abusing a four-year-old girl, they put him back into his cell and arranged for him to appear in the Sheriff Court the next day. There wasn't any celebration. Somehow, after Cameron's confession, no one was in the mood.
Back in the incident room Logan sighed and unpinned the little girl's photo from the wall, feeling hollow inside. Catching the man who had abused her and disposed of her body as if it was nothing more than household rubbish, had left him feeling dirty by association. Ashamed to be human.
Insch settled himself down on the edge of the table and helped Logan stack up the statements. 'Wonder if we'll ever know who she was?'
Logan scrubbed at his face with his hands, feeling the first rasp of stubble under his fingers. 'I doubt it,' he said.
'Anyway,' Insch dumped the statements into the case file and gave an expansive yawn, 'we've still got enough on our plate to worry about.'
Roadkill.
This time they took one of the pool cars to the hospital, WPC Watson driving.
Aberdeen Royal Infirmary was a lot busier than it had been the night before. They arrived just in time to see lunch getting served: something boiled with boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage.
'Remind me to go private,' said Insch as they passed a housekeeper trundling a steaming trolley that reeked of cabbage.
They gathered all the PCs who'd been questioning the patients and staff together in an empty day room to get their updates. There wasn't much worth listening to, but they went through them all anyway, thanking the uniformed officers for their work. No one had seen, or heard anything. They'd even been through the security tapes: no blood-soaked figures running off into the night.
The inspector gave something like a rousing speech, and sent them all back to work. That left only Logan and Watson. 'You two better go make yourselves useful too,' said Insch, beginning the familiar hunt through his suit. 'I'm off to speak to that doctor we saw last night.' He ambled off, still hunting for the elusive confectionery.
'So,' said WPC Watson, trying to sound efficient. 'Where do you want to start?'
Logan thought about her legs, poking out from beneath his T-shirt in the kitchen. 'Er…' he said, deciding that now was neither the time nor the place. 'How about we go take a look at those security tapes. See if there's anything that's been missed.'
'You're the boss,' she said and threw in a jaunty little salute.
Logan tried to keep his mind on work as they walked through the hospital, making for the security guard's station. But it wasn't working. 'You know,' he finally mustered the courage to say as they reached the lift. 'I still owe you a pint from last night.'
Watson nodded. 'I hadn't forgotten, sir.'
