The door to steading number one had been clarted in cheap green paint. There was paint on the wood, up the walls on either side, on the grass beneath their feet. . . Logan gestured to the shivering constable, but PC Steve just stared back at him in mute horror. The smell here was even worse than before.
‘Open the door, Constable,’ said Logan, determined not to do it himself. Not when he had some poor sod to do it for him.
It took a while, but in the end PC Steve said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and took a good hold of the handle. It was a heavy sliding door, the runners buckled and flaky with rust. The constable gritted his teeth and yanked. It creaked open, letting out the most godawful smell Logan had ever encountered in his life.
Everyone staggered back.
A small avalanche of dead bluebottles tumbled out of the open door to lie in the misty drizzle.
Constable Steve hurried off to be sick again.
The building had been a cattle shed at some point: a long, low, traditionally-built farm steading, with bare granite walls and a slate roof. An elevated walkway ran down the centre of the building, bordered by knee-high wooden rails. It was the only empty area in the place. Everything else was filled with the rotting carcases of small animals.
The stiff and twisted bodies were covered with a carpet of wriggling white.
Logan took three steps back and bolted for a corner to be sick in. It was like being punched in the guts all over again, each heave sending ripples of pain through his scarred stomach.
Steadings number one, two and three were full of dead animals. Number three wasn’t quite packed yet: there was still a good ten or twelve feet of exposed concrete, free of corpses, but covered with a thick yellow ooze. The bodies of flies were crispy under foot.
Somewhere around steading number two Logan had changed his mind: DI Insch wasn’t someone who punished drunken PCs properly. He was an utter bastard.
They opened and checked each of the buildings, and Logan’s stomach lurched every time PC Steve dragged open a door. After what seemed like a week of retching and swearing they sat outside on a crumbling wall. Upwind. Clutching their knees and breathing through their mouths.
The farm buildings were full of dead cats and dogs and hedgehogs and seagulls and even a couple of red deer. If it had ever walked, flown or crawled it was here. It was like some sort of necromancer’s ark. Only there was a hell of a lot more than two of every animal.
‘What are you going to do with them all?’ asked Logan, still tasting the bile after half a packet of PC Steve’s extra strong mints.
The council man looked up at him, his eyes bright pink from repeated vomiting. ‘We’ll have to remove them all and incinerate the lot,’ he said, running a hand over his wet face. He shuddered. ‘It’ll take days.’
‘Rather you than. . .’ Logan stopped: something was moving at the end of the long drive.
It was a man in faded jeans and a bright orange anorak. He tramped along the tarmacked portion of the road with his head down, seeing nothing more than his feet beneath him.
‘Shhhhhhhhh!’ hissed Logan, grabbing the council man and the bilious PC. ‘You go round the back there,’ he whispered, pointing PC Steve at the building with the number two scrawled on the front.
He watched the PC scurry off through the sodden undergrowth. When he was in place Logan grabbed a handful of the council man’s jacket. ‘Time to serve your papers,’ he said, and stepped out onto the flattened grass.
The man in the orange anorak was less than six foot away when he finally looked up.
Logan hadn’t recognized the name, but he knew the face: it was Roadkill.
They sat on a makeshift bench just inside steading number five. Mr Bernard Duncan Philips, AKA Roadkill, had made something like a home in here. A large bundle of blankets, old coats and plastic sacks were piled in the corner, obviously serving as a bed. There was a rough crucifix on the wall above the nest, a half-naked Action Man taking the place of Christ on the home-made cross.
A mound of empty tin cans and egg cartons sat next to the bed, along with a small Calor Gas cooker. It was one of the little ones Logan’s father had taken with them on every summer caravan holiday to Lossiemouth. Right now it was hissing away to itself, boiling a kettle of water for tea.
Roadkill – it was hard to think of him as Bernard – sat on a rickety wooden chair, poking away at a small fire. It was a two bar electric job, as dead as the animals in buildings one through three. But it seemed to give him pleasure. He jabbed at it with an elaborate iron poker, humming a tune to himself that Logan couldn’t quite make out.
The man from the council was surprisingly calm now that Roadkill was here. He laid out the situation in small, easy-to-understand words: the mounds of dead animals had to go.
‘I’m sure you understand, Bernard,’ he said, poking at his clipboard with a finger, ‘that you can’t keep dead animals here. There’s a considerable risk to human health. How would you feel if people started getting sick because of your dead animals?’
Roadkill just shrugged and poked at the fire again. ‘Mother got sick,’ he said and Logan was struck by the lack of an accent. He’d always assumed that someone employed by the council to scrape dead animals off the road would sound a lot more ‘local’. Some of the people round here were almost unintelligible. But not Roadkill. It was clear that the man sitting on a creaking dining chair, jabbing away at a dead electric fire, had suffered some sort of classical education. ‘She got sick and she went away,’ Roadkill went on, looking up for the first time. ‘Now she’s with God.’ He was a good-looking man, under all the dirt and grime and beard. Proud nose, intelligent slate-grey eyes, weather-reddened cheeks. Give him a bath and a visit to the barber’s and he wouldn’t look out of place at the Royal Northern Club, where the city’s elite held court over expensive five-course lunches.
‘I know, Bernard, I know.’ The man from the council smiled reassuringly. ‘We’re going to send a crew in tomorrow to start clearing out the buildings. OK?’
Roadkill dropped the poker. It hit the concrete floor with a clatter that reverberated off the bare stone walls. ‘They’re my things,’ he said, his face working itself up to tears. ‘You can’t take away my things! They’re mine.’
‘They have to be disposed of, Bernard. We have to make sure you’re safe, don’t we?’
‘But they’re mine. . .’
The man from the council stood, motioning for Logan and Constable Steve to do the same. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard, I really am. The team will be here at half past eight on the dot. You can help them if you like.’
‘My things.’
‘Bernard? Would you like to help them?’
‘My special dead things. . .’
They drove back into town with the windows down, trying to get rid of the smell of Bernard Duncan Philips’s farm. It clung to their clothes and their hair, rancid and foul. It didn’t matter that the drizzle had given way to heavier rain, seeping in through the open windows: getting wet was a small price to pay.
‘You
