'Good, then it's settled. You get someone to bring him up from the cells and I'll sort us out a nice cup of tea.' Five minutes later Logan had held up his end of the bargain, which was more than Faulds had done. Whatever was in the three Styrofoam cups he'd turned up with could only be described as 'nice' if you were a lying bastard. It was barely tea - just a watery brown substance with suspicious-looking froth round the edges. But it wasn't the least attractive thing in the room: that honour went to Andrew McFarlane. The butcher was like one of the damned. Sweat beaded on his balding forehead, his baggy face swollen in places, bruises beginning to spread across his pale skin. His big, bloodshot nose had developed a list to the left, a sticking plaster crossing the bridge from one blackened eye to the other. And he stank. BO and desperation mingling with the sour tang of TCP. Twitching. 'You have to get me out of here!' Faulds passed him one of the polystyrene cups. 'It's all right, Mr McFarlane. No one's going to hurt you here.' 'No one's going to ... WHAT ABOUT THIS?' He pointed a trembling finger at his battered face. 'They put my photo in the papers! Everyone thinks I killed those people ...' 'I'm sure it's not--' 'He wouldn't stop hitting me! Said I'd killed his mother! I never touched her! It wasn't me!' McFarlane started to cry. 'All I wanted was to run a little butcher's shop, somewhere nice and local, where people would come and buy their meat ...' 'Then why were you selling bits of dead body?' McFarlane wiped his nose on his sleeve. 'I told you: I don't know how that stuff got into my shop.' 'So you're saying it was all Wiseman--' 'No. He didn't kill anyone, he--' 'When he was in Peterhead Prison, he beat a man to death in the showers.' 'Because you bastards put him there! It wasn't his fault.' 'I can't believe you gave him a job when he got out. Wiseman in a butcher's shop? Like giving Gary Glitter the keys to a children's home.' 'He's my brother-in-law, what was I suppose to do: abandon him? He didn't kill those people!' 'Come off it, Andrew.' Faulds sat back in his chair and tried his friendly Chief Constable smile again - the one that hadn't worked on Richard Davidson. 'When he was arrested they found a lot of blood in the boot of his car, it--' 'It - was - his! He cut himself. We went through all this at the appeal. You fitted him up.' 'He confessed.' 'You beat that out of him!'
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