shop had been a baker’s back in the sixties when the neighbourhood was a bit more upmarket. Not that much more upmarket, but back in the days when you could walk the streets after dark. The shop was part of a block of four equally tatty and run-down establishments. All were covered in graffiti, all had heavy metal grilles on the window, and all had been broken into and robbed at gunpoint many times. Except the Turf ’n Track, which had been robbed only once in living memory. And that’s because the McLeod brothers hunted down the bloke who burst into their father’s shop waving a sawn-off shotgun and tortured him to death with a gas lighter and a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Allegedly.
Council-owned housing surrounded the shops – three- and four-storey concrete tenement buildings thrown up in a hurry and left to rot. If you needed a home fast, had no money and weren’t fussy, this was where you ended up.
A poster outside the grocer’s next door declared: ‘MISSING: PETER LUMLEY’ beneath a colour picture of the five-year-old’s smiling, freckled face. Some wit had drawn on a pair of glasses, a moustache and ‘RAZ TAKES IT UP THE ARSE’.
There were no community notices pinned up outside the Turf ’n Track: it offered only blacked-out windows and a green-and-yellow plastic sign. Logan pushed through the door into the gloomy interior where the air was thick with the smell of hand-rolled tobacco and wet dog. The inside was even shabbier than the outside: dirty plastic seats in grimy orange, sticky linoleum with cigarette burns and holes worn all the way through to the concrete floor. Woodwork so thickly impregnated by generations of cigarette smoke that it oozed sticky black. There was a chest-high counter running across the room, keeping the punters away from the paperwork, the tills, and the door to the back room. An old man sat in the corner, a grey-muzzled Alsatian at his feet, a tin of Export in his hand. His attention was fixed on a TV screen with dogs screeching round a track. Logan was surprised to see a pensioner in here. He thought they were all too scared to come out on their own. And then the man took his eyes off the television to examine the newcomers.
There were tattoos all the way up his neck: flames and skulls; his right eye cloudy-white and slack.
Logan felt a tug at his sleeve and WPC Watson hissed in his ear, ‘Isn’t that—’
But the old man got there first, shouting, ‘Mr McLeod! There’s some fuckin’ police bastards here tae see you!’
‘Now, now Dougie, that’s not nice,’ said Logan, taking a step towards the old man. The Alsatian was on its feet in an instant, teeth bared, its low growl making the hair on Logan’s neck stand on end. A string of saliva spiralled down between the animal’s broken teeth. It was an old dog, but it was vicious enough to frighten the crap out of him.
Nobody moved. The dog kept on snarling, the old man kept on glowering, and Logan kept on hoping he wasn’t going to have to run for his life. Eventually a round face stuck itself out of the back room.
‘Dougie, what have I told you about that fuckin’ dog?’
The old man cracked a smile, exposing green-and-brown dentures. ‘You said if the pigs come in, let ’im tear their fuckin’ throats out.’
The newcomer frowned, then a smile broke his face in two. ‘Aye, you’re right. So I did.’ He was a good thirty years younger than Dougie, but the old man still called him ‘Mr’ McLeod.
Simon McLeod had inherited his father’s coarse features. His left ear was missing a chunk, courtesy of a Rottweiler called Killer whose head now adorned the back office.
‘What do you bastards want then?’ he asked, settling his massive arms on the counter.
Logan pulled out a colour picture of Geordie and held it out in front of him. ‘You recognize this man?’
‘Fuck you.’ He hadn’t even looked at the picture.
‘Nice offer, but I’ll pass this time.’ Logan slapped the photo down on the grimy counter. ‘Now: do you recognize him?’
‘Never seen him before.’
‘He was a loudmouthed git from Edinburgh. Came up here to do a job for Malk the Knife. Made some big bets and didn’t settle them.’
Simon McLeod’s face closed up. ‘We don’t have a lot of people who don’t settle. It’s against management policy.’
‘Take another look, Mr McLeod. Sure you don’t recognize him? Ended up floating face down in the harbour with his kneecaps missing.’
Simon’s eyes opened wide and he slapped a hand over his mouth. ‘Oh, him! God, now you mention it, I do remember something about hacking his kneecaps off and throwing him in the harbour! Christ, why’d you no’ say so sooner? Aye: I kilt him and I’m no’ fuckin’ bright enough to lie about it if the police come in here askin’ stupid fuckin’ questions.’
Logan bit his tongue and counted to five. ‘Do you recognize him?’
‘Get to fuck and take your bitch with you. The smell’s upsettin’ Winchester.’ He pointed at the snarling Alsatian. ‘And even if I did recognize him, I’d sooner eat shite out a whore’s arse than tell you.’
‘Where’s your brother Colin?’
‘None of your fuckin’ business: that’s where he is. Now you goin’ to fuck off, or what?’
Logan had to admit that there wasn’t a lot more they could do here. He was all the way to the door before a thought struck him and he turned. ‘Hacked off,’ he said, frowning. ‘How did you know the man’s kneecaps had been hacked off? I never said anything about that. I just said they were missing!’
McLeod just laughed. ‘Aye, well done, Miss Marple. When someone ends up in the harbour with no knees like that it’s a message. It’s no’ a very good message if everyone doesnae get it. Every fucker in the city knows you don’t do what he did. Now fuck off.’
They stood outside on the top step of the Turf ’n Track, watching clouds scud across the sky. There was just enough fading sunshine to cut through the seasonal chill and Logan watched a pair of plastic bags playing chase around the concrete in front of the boarded-up shops.
WPC Watson leaned on the steel rail that ran along the front of the fortified buildings. ‘What now?’
Logan shrugged. ‘We were never going to get anything out of the McLeods. We might have pulled in a couple of their punters, but can you see Dougie breaking down and spilling his guts?’
‘Not his own guts, no.’
‘So now we stick the photo under the noses of the other shopkeepers here. You never know. If we don’t mention the McLeods they might actually tell us something.’
The Liverpudlian owner of the Chinese takeaway didn’t recognize Geordie’s face and neither did either of his Aberdonian staff. The video store had shut down years ago though the windows were still full of posters for forgotten blockbusters and ‘straight to video’ releases just visible through the aerosol scrawl. Last on the row was a combined newsagents, greengrocer and off-licence. The owner took one look at WPC Watson’s uniform and got a sudden attack of laryngitis. But he did sell Logan a packet of extra strong mints.
Back outside again, the clouds had darkened the sky, the dying daylight giving up as the first fat drops of rain began to fall. They struck the concrete
