a golden sticker with the photographer’s name, address and telephone number and another, white paper, spelling out ‘DARREN CALDWELL: THIRD YEAR, FERRYHILL ACADEMY’.
‘He was a bastard!’ said the friend again, relishing every syllable.
‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘Last I heard he’d upped sticks and moved to Dundee of all places! Dundee!’ The friend stuck another fag in her mouth and lit it. She sucked air through it, making the tip glow fiery-red before hissing the smoke out of her nose. ‘Little bastard can’t wait to get away, can he? I mean here’s his kid, growing up without a father and he buggers off to Dundee first chance he gets!’ She took another deep drag. ‘Ought to be a bloody law.’
Logan didn’t point out that, since Darren Caldwell wasn’t allowed to see his son, it made no difference where he stayed. Instead he asked Miss Erskine if he could keep the photograph.
‘Burn it for all I care,’ was all she said.
Logan let himself out.
It was still chucking it down outside and the foosty-looking BMW was still parked where it had a good view of the front of the house. Keeping his head covered, Logan sprinted for the pool car. Cranking the heating up, he set the blowers on full and made his way back to Force Headquarters.
Outside the big concrete-and-glass building there was a knot of television cameras, most of them sporting a serious broadcast journalist looking seriously into the camera and making serious statements about the quality of Grampian Police. The WPC he’d spoken to hadn’t been kidding: Sandy the Snake had really whipped up a storm.
Logan tucked the CID car into the car park around the back, steering well clear of the reception area on his way to the incident room.
The room was a flurry of activity again. But this time the whirlwind was centred around a harassed-looking press officer who was standing, clutching a clipboard to her chest, trying to get details out of the four officers on duty while every phone in the place went off. As soon as she clapped eyes on Logan her face lit up. Here was someone to share the stress.
‘Sergeant—’ she started, but Logan held up a hand and grabbed one of the few silent phones.
‘Just a minute,’ he said, dialling the records office.
The phone was picked up almost immediately.
‘I need to get a vehicle check on one Darren Caldwell,’ he said, doing a quick bout of mental arithmetic. Darren had knocked up Miss Erskine when she was fifteen, plus nine months for gestation, plus five years for the kid’s age. Presuming they were in the same class when their ‘eternal love’ turned physical Darren had to be twenty-one – twenty-two by now. Give or take a few months. ‘He’s in his early twenties and allegedly living in Dundee. . .’ He nodded as the officer on the other end of the phone recited the details back to him. ‘Yeah, that’s right. How quick can you get that for me? OK, OK, I’ll hold.’
The press officer was standing in front of him, looking as if someone had dropped a live herring down her pants. ‘The press are all over us!’ she wailed while Logan held on for his vehicle check. ‘That bloody Hissing Sandy Lawyer Bastard is calling us every shade of shite under the sun!’ Her face was florid, the beetroot tinge extending from her blonde fringe all the way down her neck like sunburn. ‘Do we have anything to tell them? Anything at all? Anything that makes us look like we’re getting somewhere?’
Logan put one hand over the mouthpiece and told her they were pursuing several lines of enquiry.
‘Don’t give me that!’ She almost exploded. ‘That’s the shite I give them when we haven’t got a bloody clue! I can’t tell them that!’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t just conjure arrests out of thin. . . Hello?’
The voice on the phone was back: ‘Aye, I’ve got fifteen Darren Caldwells in the north-east. Mind, only one of them lives in Dundee and he’s in his late thirties.’
Logan swore.
‘But I’ve got one Darren Caldwell, twenty-one, livin’ in Portlethen.’
‘Portlethen?’ It was a little town about five miles south of Aberdeen.
‘Aye. Drives a dark red Renault Clio. You want the registration number?’
Logan said he did, closed his eyes and thanked God something was starting to go his way. A witness had seen a child matching Richard Erskine’s description getting into the back of a dark red hatchback. He copied down the registration number and address, thanked the man on the other end of the phone and beamed at the agitated press officer.
‘What? What? What have you got?’ she demanded.
‘We’re hoping an arrest will be imminent.’
‘What arrest? Who are you arresting?’
But Logan was already gone.
The PC he’d grabbed from the locker room sat behind the wheel of the CID pool car, breaking the speed limit, heading south. Logan sat in the passenger seat, watching the dark countryside whip past the window. Another PC and a WPC sat in the back. Traffic was light at this time of night and it wasn’t long before they were drifting slowly past the address Logan had been given for Darren Caldwell.
It was a new-looking bungalow on the south side of Portlethen, part of a winding development of identical, new-looking bungalows. The front garden was little more than a few square feet of grass, bordered with wilted roses. Some limp red petals still clung to the flower heads: the rain had battered off the rest. They lay in a soggy heap at the base of the bushes, turning a sickly shade of brown in the streetlights.
Sitting in the small lock-block drive was a dark red Renault Clio.
Logan got the driver to park around the corner. ‘OK,’ he told the PCs, unbuckling his seatbelt, ‘we’re going to take this nice and easy. You two work your way round the back. Let me know when you’re in place and we’ll ring the doorbell. If he runs: you grab him.’ He turned to the WPC in the back, wincing as the movement pulled at the scars on his stomach. ‘When we get to the house I need you to keep out of sight. If Caldwell sees police on his doorstep he’s going to freak. I don’t want this turning into a siege. OK?’
Everyone nodded.
It was freezing cold as Logan climbed out of the car. The rain had changed from thick, heavy drops back into a fine, icy drizzle that leached all the warmth out of his hands and face by the time they reached the front door. The two PCs had disappeared around the back.
A couple of lights were on in the house, the sound of a television seeping out from the lounge. A toilet flushed and Logan reached for the doorbell.
The phone blared in Logan’s pocket. He cursed quietly and punched the pickup. ‘Logan.’
‘What’s going on?’ It was Insch.
‘Can I call you back, sir?’ he whispered.
‘No
