Flesh House

middle of the far wall, the hearth full of twigs and bones. An abandoned green parka sprawled on the bare floorboards. A pile of crumpled Special Brew tins in the corner. An old sleeping bag with a hole in the side - white kapok stuffing sticking out. The smell of mould. Alec scurried round filming everything, looking pleased with himself. 'Aye, very clever,' Steel told him,'we'd no' have found it without you. What with us going through all the rooms one at a time and all.' There was a newspaper lying by the prolapsed sleeping bag: a copy of the Daily Mail with the headline 'CANNIBAL CHAOS HITS NORTH EAST HOSPITALS!' Logan snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves and picked the thing up. 'It's yesterday's paper.' The Aberdeen Examiner might have got the drop on everyone with Colin Miller's story, but it was all over the place by the Saturday morning editions. Steel stared out of the window at the overgrown back garden and its stinking sheep. 'We're screwed. This place's been under observation since what? Yesterday lunchtime? Wiseman went out in the morning, got himself a paper, couple of rowies, came back, had breakfast, and sodded off out again. If he'd been back we'd've seen him ...' She screwed up her face. 'How the hell could we miss him?' 'Maybe he's--' Steel threw a finger in Logan's direction. 'Don't! OK? Don't even start. He must have spotted one of the cars on the way back here!' For a moment it looked as if she was going to kick the mound of empty beer cans all over the room. 'Bastard! We could have had him!'

18

Sunday afternoon and the phones were going non-stop: people calling in from all over the North East to say that they'd seen Wiseman, or had eaten something that was supposed to be pork or veal but was probably person. Would they get Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease? Logan listened for a minute to a PC trying to calm someone down on the other end of the phone. 'No,' she was saying,'you're not going to get mad cow disease ... No, sir, variant CJD is ... There are only seven people in the whole of the UK with the disease at the moment, sir, so it's highly unlikely ... Yes, sir, it is impossible to say for sure.' She slumped forward till her head was nearly resting on the desk. 'Yes, sir ... Environmental Health have set up a special hotline for ... Yes ...' She gave him the number, hung up, and then her phone started ringing again. 'Oh, bugger off.' Click. 'Hello, Grampian Police, can I help you?' Logan left her to it and headed back to the history room. Rennie was already there, contemplating a copy of the Daily Mail and mining his nostrils for little savoury nuggets. He stopped, snapping upright and wiping his finger on the underside of the desk as soon as he realized he had company. 'Sir.' He grinned. 'Sorry. Miles away.' 'Your brain'll fall out your nose if you don't stop picking it.' 'Ahem. Yes ... well ...' Rennie grabbed a pile of forms. 'I've been going over those INTERPOL results Insch wanted.' 'Anything?' The constable shrugged. 'Depends. Kinda ... difficult to tell, you know?' He handed over a small pile of printouts. 'Trouble is there's no real MO.' Logan skimmed the forms. 'I would have thought abduction and butchery were pretty damn distinctive.' 'No. I mean ... sometimes there's heaps of blood, but mostly it's just signs of a struggle and someone's missing. That could be anything, couldn't it? Doesn't have to be Wiseman. And there's hundreds more where these came from. Belgium, Israel, Romania, Kazakhstan you name it - half this crap's probably just missing persons.' 'Well,' said Logan,'look on the bright side. Insch isn't back till Tuesday. You've still got a day and a half to finish