Authors: Stuart MacBride
‘Hello, Sarge.’ She stomped her feet, and rubbed her hands. ‘Any chance of a cuppa?’
Nora filled the kettle from the tap over the tiny sink, and its steamy rumble soon had Butler standing over it, warming her hands over the spout. ‘Been up and down the street: no witnesses.’
Logan nodded. ‘Right, Guthrie you stay here: watch the shop till someone comes and boards up that window. Get them to do the door too. Ladies, you’ll need to come down to the station. We’ll get you to do an e-fit of the robber, make a formal statement, that kind of thing. Nothing to worry about.’
Peggy stood, her expansive bosom straining the stitches of all that tweed. ‘Oh I’m not worried. You give me five minutes alone with the animal who did this and I’ll give
him
something to worry about!’
She probably would too.
Logan told Butler to drive the ladies back to the station, then dug out his new phone and dialled the CCTV room at FHQ.
‘Fit like’ i day?’
‘Inspector Pearce about, Chris?’
‘Hud oan…’
And then the woman in charge of every closed circuit television camera in Aberdeen was on the line, her voice all muffled.
‘Who’s this?’
‘DS McRae, ma’am. How are you getting on with the footage for the Mackenzie and Kerr jewellery heist?’
‘Mmmmph, mmfff mnpmmph nmppph.’
Logan frowned at the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘Sorry, coconut cake. Hang on…’
Pause.
‘You want the good news, or the bad news?’
‘Surprise me.’
‘We’ve got a man fighting a pushchair into a red Fiat Panda on Summer Street, three minutes after the silent alarm was tripped. Got a perfect shot of the registration.’
‘That’s great! Can we run a PNC—’
‘Bad news is the car was registered stolen at half nine this morning.’
Logan put his hand over the mouthpiece and swore.
‘You still there?’
‘Yeah, just having a think.’
‘While you’re thinking.’
Her voice went all cake-muffled again,
‘a little word to the wise: DI Beattie’s been combing the station for you. I’ve had him down here twice in the last hour asking if we’ve seen you on any of the monitors.’
‘Bugger.’ Logan chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment. ‘Who was the car registered to? I mean, someone’s going to have to tell him his car’s been used in an armed robbery, aren’t they?’
‘I’ll get Control to send a couple of Uniform, soon as anyone’s free.’
‘Er…no. I think as SIO I should really speak to him myself. Get an…erm…you know, details.’ Cough. ‘Or something.’
Alan Gardner’s living room was uncomfortably warm, a wall-mounted flame-effect fire blazing away beneath a mantelpiece laden with photo frames. More pictures hung on the wall: a happy family sharing holidays and birthdays.
Alan shifted in his creaky armchair and stared at the fire. ‘Might as well have it up full blast, bloody electric’s getting disconnected tomorrow…’ What little hair he had left was white and tufty, most of it concentrated in two feral eyebrows, the rest holding on for dear life behind his ears. He sighed, looking out at the spartan living room, reflected in the black mirror of the bay window. No television. No sofa. No bookcases.
There wasn’t anywhere for Logan to sit.
He reached for his notebook, top lip curling as his fingers touched the evidence bag he’d stuck it in – locking in all that vomity goodness. It was all cold…‘Can you remember where you parked your car, Mr Gardner?’
The man shrugged, then worried at a hole in his threadbare green jumper. ‘My wife died last year. March. Kidney failure. We were on holiday in Kenya…’
Logan looked above the mantelpiece, finding a happy blonde lady with her balding husband, the pair of them
grinning like idiots in the basket of a balloon, pale yellow grass far below. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘At least it was quick.’ He shifted again, making the chair creak. ‘Quick and painful. Doctors said there was nothing they could do. Hit Stacy really hard, losing her mum like that, never getting to say goodbye…’
Silence.
‘About the car, Mr Gardner?’
‘What? Oh…yes. It was parked round the corner. Couldn’t get it out front because that idiot next door always leaves his sodding car outside my house. Rubbing it in, because he’s got a brand-new Audi estate, and I’m driving a third-hand Fiat Panda.’ Gardner tugged at a bushy eyebrow. ‘Surprised he doesn’t park his wife out there too.’
Logan scribbled the details down on the sheet of paper he’d liberated from Douglas Walker’s bedroom.
Have to pick up a new notebook when he got back to the station, one that didn’t reek of art student vomit.
He checked his watch. Nearly quarter past six. Beattie would be long gone – back home to put curlers in his beard, or whatever the hell it was he did when he wasn’t making Logan’s life miserable at work.
‘Right, well, I suppose I should be heading…’
Gardner hauled himself out of his chair and walked Logan to the front door. ‘Are you a family man, Sergeant?’
Logan pursed his lips. ‘It’s kind of complicated.’
Gardener nodded, his eyes watery, rimmed with pink. Bit his bottom lip. ‘Never gets any easier, does it?’ He rubbed his hand across his face. ‘I’m sorry, it’s…It’s been a tough couple of months.’
Logan laid a hand on his arm. ‘If we find your car I’ll let you know.’
‘Can I get a crime number for the insurance?’
‘I’ll get someone to phone it through…’ Logan trailed off.
The hallway had a set of stairs leading up to the first floor. ‘Did you hear—’
There it was again: a soft gurgling noise.
Logan looked back at Gardner, then took a step towards the stairs.
‘Well…’ Gardner unsnibbed the front door. ‘Anyway, thanks for coming – I know you must be very busy.’
Upstairs, the gurgling stopped and the crying started, quickly building to anguished howls.
Gardner smiled, a single bead of sweat trickling down his pink neck. ‘I…must have left the TV on in the bedroom.’
Logan put his hand on the balustrade. The old man flinched.
‘If I search this place am I going to find a pushchair, a sawn-off sledgehammer, and a bag full of stolen jewellery?’
‘I don’t…Erm…’
‘Your car wasn’t stolen, was it?’
Gardner just sagged.
The upstairs bedroom seemed to be the only place in the whole house with any furniture. It had bright yellow walls, a pile of soft toys, a sparkly mobile, and a big wooden cot. A little girl, dressed in a tiny princess/fairy costume, was imprisoned inside, holding onto the bars.
Alan Gardner sat on the floor, clutching a floppy-eared toy bunny identical to the one on the security camera footage. ‘It’s under the crib.’
Logan squatted down and dragged out a black-and-red Adidas holdall. He dumped it on the pink carpet – it was full of watches, chains, rings, brooches, and bracelets, gleaming in the light of a Bob the Builder bedside lamp. A big wodge of cash stuffed in the side pocket.
‘What happened to the first lot, from Henderson’s?’
‘Sent it off to one of those cash-for-gold places you see on the telly. Haven’t even got the cheque back yet.’
‘Alan Gardner, I’m arresting you on suspicion of—’
‘I didn’t have any choice.’ He kept his eyes fixed on the bunny rabbit.
‘Where’s the sledgehammer?’
‘She’s my daughter, what was I supposed to do? Let him hurt her?’
Logan turned and looked at the fairy princess in the cot. ‘Who’d want to hurt a little girl?’
‘Not Nicole, her mum: Stacy, my daughter.’ Gardner creaked himself upright and handed the rabbit into Nicole’s sticky little fingers. ‘When Laura died, Stacy…Stacy got involved with the wrong kind of people. Started taking drugs, drunk all the time, she just couldn’t cope.’
Gardner reached down and ruffled his granddaughter’s hair. ‘So now I look after Nicole. She’s my little tattieheid, aren’t you?’ The girl grinned, still chewing on the bunny’s floppy ear.
And now Logan was supposed to feel all sorry for him? ‘You robbed two jewellery shops, threatened the assistants with a sledgehammer.’
Gardner looked up, eyes pink and damp. ‘What was I supposed to do? Stacy ran up a lot of debts: drugs. There’s a man who’s going to…cut her if she doesn’t pay it all back. Break her legs. Worse…The interest is crippling.’ He reached down and picked the fairy princess from her cot, holding her tight. ‘I sold everything, cashed in my life insurance, pension, sold my car, put the house on the market…She’s my little girl, what was I supposed to do?’
Damn.
‘How about call the police?’
‘He said if I went to the police they’d never find her body.’
Logan closed his eyes, ran a hand across his forehead. Swore.
‘What’s his name?’
‘I…I don’t know. I never spoke to him.’
‘But you said—’
‘He always made Stacy phone.’
They stood there in the gaily coloured bedroom, Logan swearing, Gardner crying, Nicole making nonsensical gibberysing-song noises.
Custody was busy – shouts and threats coming from the lower corridor of cells, where the female prisoners were normally kept. Logan hefted the sawn-off sledgehammer onto the desk, along with the Adidas holdall, both stuffed into oversize evidence bags.
‘Two exhibits to sign in, and one prisoner.’
The custody sergeant nodded, reached below the level of the desk, pulled out a clipboard, and clacked it down next to Logan’s evidence bags. Sergeant Downie’s skin was so pale it fluoresced slightly in the overhead light, his hooded eyes moving restlessly across his twilight domain. The poster boy for generations of exuberant inbreeding.
He raised an eyebrow, giving Logan’s prisoner the long, hard stare.
Gardner was standing on the bare concrete with his head down, fairy princess granddaughter clutched to his chest, her podgy legs and little pink shoes dangling against his belly.
‘So,’ Sergeant Downie pulled the cap off a chewed blue biro and smiled with tombstone teeth, ‘which one am I checking in: the bald bloke, or the wee girl with the fairy wings?’
‘Very funny.’ Logan signed the custody form at the bottom. ‘Mr Gardner’s going to be helping us with those jewellery heists.’
‘I see.’ The sergeant took the clipboard back and started ticking boxes. ‘And would Mr Gardner like a wake-up call, newspaper, breakfast in bed?’
‘Don’t be a dick, Jeff.’
Twitch. ‘Fair enough.’
‘You got any PCSOs knocking about? I need someone to look after the kid till social services get here.’
Sergeant Downie laughed. ‘You’re kidding, right? I’ve got half a female rugby team downstairs screaming blue bloody murder. Must be that time of the month. Speaking of which.’ He leant forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Think Steel’s on the blob too. Been stomping about like someone’s smeared her tampons with Deep Heat. Beware of the lesbian!’
Logan’s phone was ringing again.
The Wee Hoose had been relatively quiet – unlike the main CID office – giving him a chance to type up Alan Gardner’s confession before heading off home.
He peered at the phone’s display, making sure it wasn’t that idiot Beattie, before picking up. ‘McRae.’
DSI Danby’s huge bass voice boomed out of the earpiece.
‘Any news on Knox?’
Logan snatched the phone away from his ear. ‘Bloody hell…’ He trailed off. DS Doreen Taylor was staring at him, her eyes bugged out, mouth an angry line. She pointed at the little fairy princess sitting on her desk, legs dangling over the edge. Nicole’s wings were getting crumpled, and the chocolate biscuit they’d used as a bribe to stop her crying was slowly making its way all over her face.
Doreen jabbed her finger at him, her voice a sharp whisper, ‘Language!’
Logan grimaced. ‘Sorry.’ He swivelled his chair around until he had his back to them both, then turned the volume down on the phone. ‘Sorry, sir, had to close the door. They’re still swamped with sightings of Knox.’ The last part was true at least, the phones hadn’t stopped ringing in CID all day.
‘How many worth chasing up?’
‘Backshift are still checking, but you know what it’s like. A big case like this brings out all the loonies.’ Logan clicked on his email and skimmed through till he got to the message
from the hospital. ‘Harry Weaver from Sacro woke up an hour ago – DS MacDonald interviewed him, but he can’t remember anything. Tox report says he was full of Rohypnol.’
‘The woman?’
‘Too early to tell.’
There was a pause.
‘Been on to my team. No one in Tyneside’s heard from Knox since he left, but there’s a lot of folk wanting their hands on Mental Mikey’s nest egg. Better tell your people to keep their eyes open for Newcastle gangsters, know what I’m saying?’
Logan groaned. ‘Christ, that’s all we—’
A pad of pink Post-it notes clattered off his monitor.
Doreen had her finger out again. ‘Language!’
‘Oops…’ Logan went back to the phone, thanked Danby, and hung up. Newcastle gangsters: as if things weren’t complicated enough.
The handset had barely touched the cradle before it was ringing again. ‘Oh for fff…’ He shut his mouth before Doreen could throw anything else. ‘McRae?’
Samantha:
‘I was…Are you doing another late night? I mean it’s OK if you are, I just wanted to…you know.’
Logan checked the time on the computer – 19:40 – nearly three hours after the end of his shift. ‘Drowning in paperwork: caught the guy doing over the jewellery shops.’
‘Oh…Well, never mind.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Actually, I’m just about done. How about I pick up a Chinese on the way home and…
Sod
it, I can’t. I’ve got an unattended minor here. Have to keep an eye on her till social services turn up.’ Logan closed his eyes and banged his head softly against his keyboard.
‘It’s not important.’
Of course it was, he could hear it in Samantha’s voice.
Doreen cleared her throat. ‘I can look after her.’
Logan raised his head. There was a long line of gibberish stretching across his screen.
Doreen ran a hand through the little girl’s pale-yellow hair.
‘Nicole can help me prepare case papers for the golf club murder, can’t you Nicole?’
The fairy princess stuck her thumb in her chocolaty mouth and sooked. To be honest, she’d probably be more help than most of CID.
‘Hello? You still there?’
Logan made more keyboard gibberish. ‘I’m on my way.’