I did it. I did it and I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt her, but I did. Their was a lot of blood. Afterwards I did not know what to do, so I proceeded to dispose of the body by dismemboring cutting it up and getting rid of the parts. I do not remember ware I burried them. I had been drinking. There was another page and a half - a tortured mass of bad typing, poor spelling and twisted lies, and then, at the end, a shaky signature. As if the writer's hand had just been slammed in a drawer. There was a second version of the confession, all neatly typed by someone who could spell. Wiseman's signature wasn't any better on that one. Logan pushed the file away, wondering how the hell someone like Brooks had ever made it to the rank of Detective Superintendent; the bastard was little more than a criminal himself. And Insch had helped him. Mr Everything-Has-To-Be-Done-By-The-Book had beaten a suspect in custody and forced him to sign a confession. No wonder Wiseman went after him ...
Lunch was a baked potato in the canteen, eaten one-handed as he re-read the SOC report on the derelict butcher's shop where Ian and Sharon McLaughlin's remains had been found. He stuck the report back in the folder and pulled out Faulds' tatty copy of Smoak With Blood, flicking through till he got to the chapter on the same scene. When God makes man, he does so from the simplest of materials. Our bodies, our minds, the blood that courses through our veins, are no different from those of the animals we slaughter for food. A pig, a cow, a human being: after the butcher's tender ministrations it's all just meat. We are all just meat. It was an anonymous tip-off that led police to the disused butcher's shop on Palmerston Road, within spitting distance of the railway station; the rumble of passing freight trains making the ground shudder beneath their feet as they picked through the debris-strewn interior. Rats scuttled through the piles of broken plaster and crumbling furniture. The floor and walls spattered where pigeons had passed judgement on a shop closed for eighteen years and turned into a storage shed. Today, the sign outside says 'Property Management', but in January 1988 it was the final resting place for my parents. Or would have been, if not for that anonymous phone call in the dead of night. Logan flicked through the file - finding reference to a call made from a public phone box in Torry. The note said it was a woman's voice: drunk and scared. They thought it was probably a working girl, looking for somewhere to take a punter. Or maybe one of the city's growing homeless population, looking for a place to drink themselves to sleep. Brooks put out the usual appeals, but no one came forward. The fridges at the back of the shop had been cleared of their contents, the detritus piled up in the serving area. In here the walls were smeared with filth, mildew reaching out of the corners: a permanent shadow that not even the pathologist's spotlights could banish. My parents hung from hooks in the ceiling.
