Читать книгу Logan McRae Crime Series Books 4-6: Flesh House, Blind Eye, Dark Blood - Stuart MacBride - Страница 64

The Tuesday morning briefing was a pretty dismal affair – they now had two more victims: Sandra and Maureen Taylor from Dundee. Their flatmate had returned from a long weekend in Edinburgh to find the kitchen soaked with blood.

‘Tayside Police,’ said DCS Bain, ‘have identified the blood as Sandra Taylor’s; she was a type one diabetic. It looks like the attack happened some time on Sunday evening. They’ve emailed up all the details, make sure you read them!’

Two more victims and still no sodding clue.

There was a bit of discussion about whether this was another copycat or the Flesher hunting outside of Aberdeen, and then everyone was given their assignments and told to go catch the bastard.

Back in the history room, Logan sat at his desk, eating a breakfast muesli bar and wishing the Environmental Health hadn’t confiscated half the bacon in the city. There was nothing like a bacon buttie to set you up after a night in the pub. Except maybe a steak pie, and they were like hen’s teeth these days as well.

He pulled out the folder Colin Miller had given him in the Prince of Wales, and spread the contents across the desk – printouts and photocopies of articles from 1987 to 1990. A chunk were about the McLaughlins and their disappearance, but most were the missing person and food-poisoning stories he’d asked for. Which were about as much use as Rennie’s INTERPOL reports; it was impossible to tell what might be connected and what was just random stuff.

So Logan went back to the articles on Jamie McLaughlin and his missing parents. Why had they never found any sign of the third victim, Catherine Davidson? Directly after the attack, the papers were full of her photo, but as time went by she drifted into the background and the media concentrated on the tragedy of little Jamie McLaughlin. Eventually Catherine Davidson was simply forgotten.

Logan flicked through the sheets again. Colin had been thorough, there was even a piece from before the attack: an article dated the eighth of October 1987 about how Ian McLaughlin had joined the team at Lindsey Arrow and was going to help them become a driving force in the field of Liner Hangers and Well Completion. Whatever that meant. McLaughlin wasn’t exactly a pretty man, but then neither was the thin bloke with the Zapata moustache he was shaking hands with. Welcome to the oil industry.

Logan finished his tea and stuck all the printouts back in the folder. At least lan McLaughlin had got to enjoy his fifteen minutes of fame, all the other Flesher victims got theirs post mortem. Well, except for one of the Newcastle women.

He looked at the death wall, trying to remember who it was, then went for a rummage in the old file boxes by the radiator, till he found a small stack of yellowed newspaper clippings. ‘BAINBRIDGE’S BRIDGE IS A WINNER’ was the headline, above a photo of Emily Bainbridge, grinning away like mad as she showed off her big oil painting of the Tyne Bridge. She’d come first: a cheque for one hundred pounds and an exhibition planned for the Autumn. She was dead three weeks later.

Three weeks…

He went back to Colin Miller’s printouts and pulled out the article on lan McLaughlin again. Eighth of October 1987: a Thursday. Three and a bit weeks before Halloween and the McLaughlins’ death.

‘Oh you beauty …’ He fired up his computer and went onto the Aberdeen Examiner’s website, doing a search for all the current victims, looking for news stories published before their deaths. There weren’t any. So he tried the same thing with the P&J and Evening Express sites. Then sat back and swore. So much for that theory.

He stared at the screen … mind you, the papers didn’t post everything on-line, did they?

He picked up the phone and put it down again. After the Weight Watchers fiasco he didn’t want to stick his neck out without something more conclusive than two newspaper articles from twenty years ago. He tried the phone again, dialling Colin Miller’s mobile. Engaged, so he tried the Examiner’s News Desk instead.

There was some muffled conversation then the Glaswegian’s dulcet tones sounded in the background, ‘Can you no’ see I’m on the bloody phone?’

‘It’s your copper boyfriend.’

‘I’ll boyfriend your arse with my—No Mrs Wilson, I didn’t mean you… Aye, I agree, there’s no need for language like that, I’m sorry… Aye…’

‘You going to speak to him or not?’

Silence.

‘He’ll call you back.’

Steel dumped another stack of reports on Logan’s desk. ‘There you go – Tayside say if you want anything else give them a shout.’

Logan stared at the pile of SOC, IB, and door-to-door data. ‘I don’t even want this lot.’

‘Aye, well, we’ve all got our crosses to bear.’ She struck a pose. ‘You think it’s easy being this gorgeous?’

‘You said I was supposed to check up on those Polish police reports.’

‘And did you?’

‘Yes …’ Logan realized his mistake as soon he’d said it.

‘Perfect, then you’re free to do this now, aren’t you?’

‘But—’

‘Ah, ah, ah.’ She waggled a finger at him. ‘Remember the golden rule: you—’

Logan’s phone rang and he snatched at the excuse: ‘Hello?’

But it wasn’t Colin Miller, it was an annoyed chief constable with a Brummie accent: ‘Where are you? I’ve been waiting here for ages.’

‘Waiting?’

Steel asked, ‘Who is it?’

‘Faulds.’ Back to the phone. ‘I don’t understand, sir, where—’

‘Aberdeen airport. You were supposed to pick me up at eleven!’

‘I was?’

‘DI Steel assured me…’

Logan pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at the inspector. ‘Thanks a heap.’

She shrugged. ‘Oops?’

‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

Forty minutes later Logan was heading out the road to Turriff, with Faulds in the passenger seat and his luggage in the boot. Logan kept sneaking glances at the chief constable’s face – it looked as if someone had given him a going over. The bruise on his forehead was starting to fade around the edges – dark purple tinged with greeny-yellow, a scab on his cheek, another bruise blending into his goatee. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days either.

‘Didn’t think we’d be seeing you back again so soon, sir.’

‘I can’t believe she didn’t pass on my message.’

‘She’s been a bit … preoccupied with the investigation.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ He went back to staring at the scenery.

‘If you don’t mind me asking …’ Logan coughed. ‘You look a bit … er …’ Try again. ‘I called when we IDed Kowalczyk on the abattoir’s CCTV, but they said you had a couple of personal days …?’

‘You know,’ said Faulds, watching the sun-flecked fields go by, ‘I heard about your solution to the Leith case. Very impressive.’

‘It was a team effort.’

‘Of course it was. But every good team has to have a leader, otherwise it’s just a mob. I was surprised to see DI Steel giving you so much of the credit.’

Logan shrugged. ‘She’s not as bad as everyone says.’ Which wasn’t strictly true, but Faulds didn’t need to know that.

The chief constable’s phone went off just past Fyvie and he disappeared into a convoluted conversation about staffing levels and Home Office statistics. All very boring stuff. So Logan gave up on eavesdropping and let his mind wander instead: what was he going to have for his tea? Would he ever see Jackie naked again? Could he fake diarrhoea to get out of going to his brother’s wedding? Whatever happened to Catherine Davidson?

According to the background reports she worked as a dinner lady at her son’s school. She liked horses – went riding in Hazlehead Park whenever she could – wanted to go to Spain for her holidays, talked about running a bed and breakfast… And no one had seen or heard from her since the night Ian and Sharon McLaughlin died.

If you wanted to get rid of a lot of suspect meat there were worse places than a school canteen. Who’d ever know?

‘… himself with a pineapple. Some people, eh?’

Logan glanced across at his passenger. ‘Sorry, sir?’

‘Never mind, I probably shouldn’t be complaining about my officers anyway.’ Faulds stuck his phone back in its holster as Logan drove them through Turriff. ‘I’d forgotten how much I missed this: out on a case instead of stuck behind a desk, or shaking some slimy politician’s hand. Must’ve driven half my team mad when I got back from Aberdeen last time. Poking my nose in …’

He watched the market town with its collage of red sandstone and grey granite buildings go by. ‘You know,’ he said, touching the glass, ‘I grew up in a little place like this …’

Logan turned the pool car into the road with Alaba Farm Fresh Meats at the end of it.

Faulds peered through the windscreen at the large plastic sign with its grinning butcher pig. ‘This it?’

The massed armies of the national press had gone, but a couple of die-hard journalists were parked by the high, chain-link gates, scrambling out of their cars as Logan pulled up at the barrier.

‘Do you have any suspects?’ ‘Will Alaba Meats be torn down?’ ‘Do you think the Polish community is responsible for the killings?’ ‘How would you react to claims that this is just an attempt to pin the blame on ethnic migrants?’‘How many bodies have you identified from the remains?’

Logan kept his mouth shut and let Faulds do the talking as they waited for the security guard to open the gate, then drove round to the little office block bolted onto the side of the abattoir. ‘Hmm …’ said Faulds, stepping out into the sunny afternoon, ‘the smell’s … interesting. Sort of a greasy bleach …’

The receptionist made them sign in and offered them coffee. Mr Jenkins would be down in a minute.

Mr Jenkins turned out to be a grey-haired man in his fifties, with a paunch that made him look six months pregnant. He showed them upstairs to an office on the second floor, overlooking the car park, and sank behind a desk overflowing with paperwork. ‘Forty years I’ve been in this game. Forty years! And now the only buggers who’ll take my calls are the sodding supermarkets.’ He waved Logan and Faulds towards a pair of leather visitor chairs that squeaked and farted as they settled into them. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful they’ve not dumped us like everyone else, but they were screwing us on price before all this started. You imagine what they’re doing now? Barely worth opening again.’

He leant forward and poked the desk. ‘There’s been an abattoir on this spot since the year dot. And I’m not talking about the fifties or sixties, I mean since the sixteen hundreds. When I was a kid there was a slaughterhouse in every wee town in Scotland. We used to cut the carcasses in half, chuck them on a flat-bed truck, cover them with tarpaulin and stick them on the next train to London. Didn’t even have refrigerated carriages back then. And did everyone die of food-poisoning? Did they buggery. Now it’s all factory freezing and EU regulations and health inspectors.’

‘If it’s any consolation,’ said Faulds,’ ‘policing used to be the same.’

Logan couldn’t add to that. It’d been wall-to-wall forms and procedural guidelines ever since he’d joined. ‘At least they’re letting you open again.’

Jenkins scowled. ‘Tomorrow. You would not believe the hoops we’ve had to jump through. Sixty new security cameras, twice as many guards, and I’ve got to have some moron from the Environmental Health on staff full time. And guess who pays for it all: me, that’s who.’ He picked up a thick wad of paper from his desk and wiggled it at them. ‘Every single joint has to be tied back to a specific animal, not just a batch like every other place. Every knife has to be sterilized before you can use it on a new quarter. We used to do fifty, sixty carcasses a day. Be lucky to get through thirty now. You got any idea what that’s going to do to our cashflow? Bastards made us throw away every side of beef in the place, and all the stuff in the aging shed. Bloody criminal.’

‘Well,’ said Faulds, ‘to be fair, they did find a whole heap of human remains in there.’

‘There was nothing wrong with the rest of the meat!’And so it went. On and on and on … Until the receptionist buzzed up to say that someone from the Environmental Health had turned up for a spot inspection.

‘It’s OK,’ said Faulds, before Jenkins could go off on another rant. ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’

But first the Chief Constable wanted to see where the Flesher disposed of the bodies.

Logan led him round to the ageing shed. The place was spotless – the shelves and plastic bins emptied and cleaned, the concrete floor scrubbed to within an inch of its life. Everything reeked of bleach.

‘So …’ Faulds did a quick three-sixty, his breath fogging in the refrigerated air, ‘how did our boy get the meat in here?’

‘Far as we can tell, it was all dumped in small batches, probably when he was getting rid of the bones. When we searched the place we found bits of at least seven individuals, all vacuum packed and slipped in with the other meat. Still waiting on DNA-test results for most of them, but we’ve IDed joints from Tom and Hazel Stephen, and Duncan Inglis.’ He pointed back at the small side door. ‘CCTV coverage of this part of the plant’s a joke. It’s all focussed on the perimeter – if you were already inside you could go where you liked: no one would know. And once it’s packed away in here, who’s going to notice an extra couple of joints?’

Faulds nodded. ‘Show me the bone mill.’

The rendering plant had been down for four days, but the smell still permeated everything, overlaid with the chemical reek of trichloroethylene. ‘The question we have to ask ourselves,’ said Faulds, staring up at one of the new security cameras bolted to the bone mill wall, ‘is how the Flesher managed to get into a working abattoir without anyone seeing him.’

He started up the stairs, making for the hoppers. ‘He’s a big man. He stuffs the bones and offal in a bin bag – something heavy duty, thick plastic so it won’t split – throws it over his shoulder and humps it up here. Can’t see him doing that in the middle of the day, can you?’

Logan followed him up to the top of the stairs. ‘DCS Bain did a walkthrough.’

‘Did he now?’ Faulds leant on the railing, staring down into the trough at the toothed screw at the bottom. ‘And what conclusion did the great Chief Superintendent come to?’

‘The Flesher probably has ties to the cleaning company that does the offices.’

‘Clever. So he’s got an excuse to be on the premises in the middle of the night, get a vehicle close to the building, and nobody’s going to look twice if he’s seen carrying bin bags.’

‘We interviewed everyone who works for them: full-time, part-time, and casual. No joy. Bain’s widened the net to friends and family.’

‘Worth a try I suppose.’ Faulds pushed himself upright and headed down the stairs. ‘But it’s not a cleaner.’

‘How do you know?’

The Chief Constable stopped and turned to look at Logan. ‘I’ve been chasing the Flesher for over twenty years.’ He smiled. ‘Who knows him better than me?’