Duncan Philips, AKA Roadkill, comes along with his shovel and his wheelie-cart and does what he always does.’
Insch looked at him as if he’d just plucked the dead child’s rotting corpse from its refrigerated drawer and proceeded to do the Dashing White Sergeant round the room with it. ‘It’s a dead girl! Not a bloody rabbit!’
‘It’s all the same to him.’ Logan looked down at the contents of the drawer, feeling a heavy weight pressing down between his ribs. ‘Just another dead thing scraped off the road. She was in steading number two. He’d already filled one building.’
Insch opened his mouth. Looked at Logan. Looked at Isobel. And back to the X-rays lying on the floor. ‘Bastard,’ he said at last.
Isobel stood in silence, her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her bright orange fleece, an unhappy expression on her face.
‘Well?’ Logan asked.
She drew herself up to her full height and, with a voice like frozen bleach, agreed that the injuries were consistent with the scenario described. That it was impossible to tell what order the injuries occurred in, because of the state of decay. That the injuries had looked consistent with a severe beating. That she’d made the best call she could, based on the state of the body. That she couldn’t be expected to be clairvoyant.
‘Bastard,’ said Insch again.
‘He didn’t kill her.’ Logan slid the refrigerated door shut, the dull clang echoing off the cold, white tiles. ‘We’re back to square one.’
Bernard Duncan Philips’ ‘appropriate adult’ turned up after an hour and a half of frantic telephone calls, looking like something the cat dragged in. It was the ex-schoolteacher, Lloyd Turner, again, smelling strongly of mint, as if he’d been drinking alone and didn’t want anyone to know about it. Ten o’clock shadow blurring the edges of his thin moustache. He fussed with his papers as Logan went through the standard details for the tape.
‘We want you,’ said DI Insch, now dressed in his spare suit, ‘to tell us about the dead girl, Bernard.’
Roadkill’s eyes darted round the room and the ex-teacher gave a long-suffering sigh.
‘We have been over this already, Inspector.’ His voice was old and tired. ‘Bernard’s not well. He needs help, not incarceration.’
Insch screwed his face up. ‘Bernard,’ said Insch with careful deliberation, ‘you found her, didn’t you?’
Lloyd Turner’s eyebrows shot up his head. ‘Found her?’ he asked, looking at the stinking, tatty figure sitting next to him with barely concealed surprise. ‘Did you find her, Bernard?’
Roadkill shifted in his seat and stared down at his hands. Small, burgundy clots covered his fingers like parasites. The skin was raw around the fingernails where he’d been picking and chewing his hands into submission. He didn’t even look up, and his voice was small and broken. ‘Road. Found her on the road. Three hedgehogs, two crows, one seagull, one tabby cat, two long-haired cats, black-and-white, one girl, nine rabbits, one roe deer. . .’ His eyes misted up, his voice becoming rough, ‘My beautiful dead things. . .’ A sparkling tear escaped his eye, clearing the long eyelashes, to run down the weathered skin of his cheek and into his beard.
Insch folded his arms and settled back in his seat. ‘So you took the little girl back to your “collection”.’
‘Always take them home. Always.’ Sniff. ‘Can’t just throw them out like garbage. Not dead things. Not things that used to be alive inside.’
And with that Logan was forced to remember a single leg sticking out of a bin-bag in the middle of the council tip. ‘Did you see anything else?’ he asked. ‘When you picked her up. Did you see anything: a car, or a lorry or anything like that?’
Roadkill shook his head. ‘Nothing. Just the dead girl, lying at the side of the road. All broken and bleeding and still warm.’
The hairs went up on the back of Logan’s neck. ‘Was she alive? Bernard, was she still alive when you found her?’
The ratty figure sank down against the table, resting his head in his arms on the chipped Formica top. ‘Sometimes the things get hit and they don’t die right away. Sometimes they wait for me to come and watch over them.’
‘Oh Christ.’
They put Roadkill back in his cell and reconvened in the interview room: Logan, Insch and Roadkill’s appropriate adult.
‘You do know you’re going to have to release him, don’t you?’ said Mr Turner.
Logan raised an eyebrow, but Insch said: ‘Your arse I will.’
The ex-schoolteacher sighed and settled back into one of the uncomfortable plastic seats. ‘The most you have on him is failing to report an accident and the illegal disposal of a body.’ He rubbed at his face. ‘And we all know the Crown Prosecution Service isn’t going to take this for criminal trial. One good psychiatric report and the whole thing goes nowhere. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Not by his reckoning anyway. The girl was just another dead thing found at the side of the road. He was doing his job.’
Logan tried not to nod his head in agreement. Insch wouldn’t have appreciated it.
The inspector ground his teeth and stared at Mr Turner, who shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, but he’s not guilty. If you don’t release him I’m going to go to the press. There are still enough cameras out there to get this all over the morning news.’
‘We can’t let him go,’ said Insch. ‘Someone will rip his head off if we do.’
‘So you admit that he’s done nothing wrong then?’ There was something distinctly patronizing about the way Turner said it, as if he was back in the classroom again and DI Insch had just been caught behind the bike sheds.
The inspector scowled. ‘Listen, sunshine: I ask the leading questions in here, not you.’ He rummaged in his pockets for something sweet and came up empty-handed. ‘With Cleaver going free, the great, good and stupid of the community are on the lookout for anyone even slightly dodgy. Your boy had a dead girl in his shed. He’s going to be top of their list.’
‘Then you’ll have to provide him with protective custody. We’ll speak to the press: get them to understand that Bernard is innocent. That you’ve decided to drop all the charges.’
Logan cut in. ‘No we haven’t! He’s still guilty of hiding the body!’
‘Sergeant,’ said Mr Turner with condescending patience, ‘you have to understand how this works. If you try to take any of this to court, you’re going to end up losing. The Procurator Fiscal won’t stand for another cock-up. He’s got enough egg on his face with the Cleaver fiasco. Mr Philips will go free. Question is: how much tax payers’ money do you want to waste getting there?’
Logan and DI Insch stood in the empty incident room, looking down at the growing bustle of activity in the car park. Mr Turner had been as good as his word. He was standing in front of the cameras, enjoying his moment in the spotlight. Telling the world that Bernard Duncan Philips had been absolved of all charges, that the system worked.
The ex-teacher
