constable sat up straight in his seat. ‘No: Jimmy, don’t you bloody dare put him—’ A cough. ‘Chief Inspector Finnie, yeah, I was just … DS McRae? Er …’ Rennie stared at Logan, eyes bugging, mouth making a squiggly line across his face.
Logan mouthed, ‘No!’ waved both hands, palm out, shaking his head.
‘Hold on …’ Rennie held the handset out. ‘It’s for you.’
Bastard.
Logan took the Airwave. ‘Sir?’
‘Tell me, Detective Sergeant, did I accidentally give you the day off and forget all about it?’
‘Well, no, but—’
‘Then perhaps you’d like to explain why you’re not currently interviewing Frank Baker like I told you?’
Logan peered out through the hail-flecked windscreen. How the hell did Finnie know he wasn’t—
‘Superintendent Green tells me he’s been waiting for you to appear for the last fifteen minutes.’
‘He’s what? Look it’s bad enough we’ve—’
‘It would be nice, Sergeant, if for once I thought I could actually depend on a member of my team to act like a professional. I don’t care if you think it’s a waste of time or not – get round there, interview Baker, and try not to behave like a petulant bloody child!’
And then there was silence.
Logan held out the handset and read the little grey-and-black LCD screen: ‘CALL TERMINATED’
Perfect.
Just. Bloody. Perfect.
Logan rapped his knuckles on the car’s passenger window.
Superintendent Green looked up from the laptop he was poking away at, and stared at Logan for a moment, then a smile crawled across the lower half of his face, going nowhere near his eyes. Bzzzzzz – the window slid down a couple of inches. ‘Been on our holidays, have we, Sergeant?’
Warm air curled out into the cold morning. The hail had died off, replaced by a frigid drizzle.
Logan forced a smile of his own. ‘Pursuing other avenues of enquiry, sir.’
‘Yes …’ Green turned to the uniformed constable sitting in the driver’s seat. ‘Wait for me.’ He snapped the laptop closed and slipped it into an oversized leather satchel. Stepped out into the horrible morning. Looked Logan up and down. Raised an eyebrow. ‘Is your suit meant to look like that?’
Logan glanced at his left trouser leg. The fabric was torn and tattered, stained dark-grey with blood, rain, and dirt. Muddy paw prints on his chest. ‘I thought you were in a hurry?’
‘After you.’
The fabrication yard where Frank Baker worked was a small industrial unit bolted onto a large warehouse, cut off from the road by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. As if anyone was going to break in and make off with a two tonne chunk of drilling pipe. They lay stacked up around the building, held in place with wooden chucks and ratchet straps.
Green marched towards the door marked, ‘ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION!’
‘Punctuality is the sign of an effective police officer, Sergeant.’
Tosser. How could Logan be late for an unscheduled meeting?
‘Really, sir? I always thought it was catching criminals and preventing crimes.’
Green paused for a moment, then pushed through into a small room that smelled of industrial grease and coffee. A large woman with a bowl haircut looked up from a stack of forms and stared at them over the top of her glasses. No, ‘Hello?’ No, ‘Can I help you?’
The superintendent glanced around the room – Health and Safety posters, framed photo of an oil rig, calendar with kittens on it, shelves groaning with lever-arch files. ‘I want to speak to Frank Baker.’
She puckered her lips. ‘He’s working.’
Green thrust his warrant card under her nose. ‘Now.’
Inside, the warehouse was vast: filled with machinery, forklift trucks, and more pipes. A radio boomed out something poppy, competing with the bangs, clangs, and thrum of heavy equipment. The machine-gun pops of welding.
Frank Baker didn’t look the same without his nice clean suit. Instead he was wearing a pair of grubby orange overalls with a padded green jacket on top, the chest and shoulders covered with pinhole burns. Big leather gloves, steel toecap boots. A thick red line across his forehead from the welding mask he’d just thumped down on a length of rust-flecked pipe. ‘I don’t appreciate you bastards coming here every day.’
‘Then answer the bloody question!’ Green crossed his arms, legs shoulder-width apart, chin up.
Baker scowled at Logan. ‘I’ve been through all this: with you, with the wrinkly old woman, so—’
‘It’s just a couple of follow-up—’
‘And you’re going to go through it all again for us.’ Green stepped closer and Baker flinched.
‘I have to work here.’
‘Oh. Oh, I see.’ The superintendent winked. ‘They don’t know you’re a pervert. That you like to interfere with little boys—’
‘Keep your voice down!’
‘A filthy kiddie-fiddling paedophile, who—’
‘SHUT UP! SHUT YOUR DIRTY MOUTH!’ Baker grabbed the handle of his arc welder.
Green leaned in close. ‘Or what, Frank?’
Tears sparked in the corner of Baker’s eyes.
A huge man in filthy overalls wandered over, a baseball cap turned the wrong way around on his massive head, face creased with dirt around a clear patch where his safety goggles must have sat. ‘Everything OK, Frankie?’
Baker bit his lip. ‘Yeah … Thanks, Spike.’
Spike stared at them for a bit. ‘Any trouble, give us a shout.’ Then he turned and lumbered away.
Baker waited till he was well out of earshot. ‘I told them: I volunteer at a vet’s in town every Saturday. It’s not illegal, OK? It’s not against my SOPPO. I’ve not done anything wrong. So go away and leave me alone!’
‘No, no, no, Frank – that’s not how it works.’ Green smiled. ‘You tell me everything I want to know, or I’ll make sure every sweaty-arsed bastard in this place knows your grubby little secret.’
‘Sir?’ Logan cleared his throat. ‘That’s not really—’
‘You
