Just the sort of face to go demanding money with menaces with. He looked a lot more battered and pasty now he was dead, but it was definitely the same man they’d dragged out of the harbour with his knees hacked off. And to make matters certain, the fingerprints were an exact match.
Logan phoned Lothian and Borders back to give them the news. Geordie Stephenson was now collecting debts in the great beyond. They promised to send Logan up some cake.
Now that they had a positive ID, the next thing to do was find out who killed him. And Logan was willing to bet it had something to do with Geordie’s gambling habit. So that meant doing the rounds of the bookies in Aberdeen. Flash Geordie’s face and see who squirmed.
Logan popped into his little incident room on the way out, just to make sure everything was still going OK. On Insch’s instructions he’d commandeered an efficient-looking WPC with sandy-brown hair and thick eyebrows to woman the phones and co-ordinate the uniforms going door-to-door. She sat at the cluttered table with a phone headset on, taking down yet another possible identity for the dead girl. Then she brought him up to speed with the latest developments, which took all of three seconds – there weren’t any – and promised to call him on his mobile if anything came up.
That done, all he had to do now was pick up WPC Watson from the Sheriff Court and get cracking.
She was still sitting in the main courtroom, watching a huge youth with a pockmarked face giving evidence. WPC Watson looked up and smiled as Logan sat down next to her.
‘How’s it going?’ he whispered.
‘Getting there.’
The kid on the stand wasn’t much more than twenty-one, and sweat made his flushed, lumpy face shine in the courtroom lights. He was massive. Not fat, just big-boned. Big jaw, big hands, long, bony arms. The grey suit the CPS had lent him to make him look more credible as a witness, was far too small, straining at the seams every time he moved. His dirty-blond hair looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb for a long time and his big hands fluttered and fidgeted as he mumbled his way through his encounter with Gerald Cleaver.
An eleven-year-old boy, so badly beaten by his drunken father that he gets to spend three weeks in Aberdeen Children’s Hospital. And that’s where his luck goes from bad to worse. Gerald Cleaver, in charge of the wards at night, practises his own special ‘bedside manner’ while the kid’s strapped to the bed. Making him do things that would make a porn star blush.
The prosecutor gently drew the details from him, speaking softly and reassuringly even when the tears start to flow.
Logan split his attention between the jury and the accused as the boy spoke. The fifteen men and women looked appalled at what they were hearing. But Gerald Cleaver’s face remained as expressionless as a slab of butter.
The prosecutor thanked the witness for his courage and handed him over to counsel for the defence.
‘Here we go.’ WPC Watson’s voice dripped with contempt as Slippery Sandy the Snake stood, patted his client on the shoulder and wandered over to the jury. Casually, he leaned on the rail at the front of the box and smiled at the assembled men and women. ‘Martin,’ he said, not looking at the trembling young man but at the jury, ‘you’re not exactly a stranger to this court, are you?’
The prosecutor was on his feet as if someone had run a thousand volts up his bum.
‘I object. The witness’s past situation has nothing to do with the case being tried.’
‘Your honour, I am merely trying to establish the veracity of this witness.’
The judge looked down his nose, through his glasses and said, ‘You may proceed.’
‘Thank you, your honour,’ said the Snake. ‘Martin, you’ve been up before this court thirty-eight times, haven’t you? Breaking and entering, criminal assault, numerous charges of possession, one of possession with intent to supply, shoplifting, arson, indecent exposure. . .’ He paused. ‘When you were fourteen you tried to have sex with a minor and when she refused you beat her so severely she required forty-three stitches to put her face back together again. She can never have children. And just yesterday you were arrested for masturbating in a ladies’ changing room—’
‘Your honour, I strongly object!’
And that was how it went for the next twenty minutes. Sandy the Snake calmly ripped the witness to shreds and left him a swearing, sobbing, scarlet-faced wreck. Every humiliation Gerald Cleaver had submitted him to was explained away as the disturbed fantasy of a child in desperate need of attention. Until, in the end, Martin had lunged for the lawyer, screaming, ‘Fuckin’ kill you!’
He was restrained.
Sandy the Snake shook his head sadly, and excused the witness.
Watson swore all the way back to the cells, but she perked up when Logan told her about his new assignment.
‘DI Steel wants me to follow up on Geordie Stephenson: that body they dragged out the harbour,’ he said as they made their way down the long corridor that linked courtroom number one to the holding cells. ‘I said I’d need some help, and Insch volunteered you. Said you’d keep me right.’
Watson smiled, pleased at the compliment, not knowing Logan had made it up himself.
Martin Strichen had been escorted from the court straight to the holding cells. By the time Logan and Watson got down there he was sitting on a thin grey bunk with his head in his hands, moaning softly beneath the flickering overhead lights. The back of his borrowed suit jacket was groaning under the strain, the seam getting more and more visible with every shivering sob.
Looking down at him, Logan didn’t know what to think. It was terrible that any child should have to undergo the kind of abuse Cleaver subjected his victims to. Even so, Slippery Sandy’s words stayed with him. That list of crimes. Martin Strichen was a dirty wee toerag. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t suffered at the hands of Gerald Cleaver.
Watson signed for Martin Strichen and they led him, handcuffed and whimpering, up through the building and out the back entrance. It was only a short walk to the pool car Logan had appropriated. As Watson pushed her prisoner’s head down so it wouldn’t bang on the roof of the car, Strichen said, ‘She was fourteen.’
‘What?’ Watson peered into the car, into Martin Strichen’s puffy red eyes.
‘The girl. We was both fourteen. She wanted to, but I couldn’t. I didn’t force her. . . I couldn’t do it.’ A large, tear-shaped drop suspended from the tip of his nose and as she watched it slowly fell, sparkling in the early afternoon light.
‘Arms up.’ She buckled the seatbelt around him, making sure that Grampian Police didn’t end up in court defending a negligence claim if they crashed the car. As her hair brushed his face she heard him whisper, ‘She wouldn’t stop laughing. . .’
They dropped their passenger off at Craiginches Prison. Once the rigmarole of signing him back into custody was over and done with, they were ready to start on DI Steel’s investigation.
Logan and WPC Watson slogged their way around Aberdeen’s less salubrious bookmaking establishments, showing the staff Geordie Stephenson’s porn star picture but getting nothing but blank stares for their troubles. There was little point in visiting the majors – William Hill and Ladbrokes – they weren’t likely to hack Geordie’s
