STEEL:
Hope you’re happy with yourself, McRae. We had to spend the night watching kids’ TV instead of dinner and a shag! I WILL HAVE MY REVENGE!!!
He thumbed out a quick reply on his way up the stairs:
Tough. I was busy.
His footsteps echoed back at him – still no sign of anyone – through the doors at the top and into another empty corridor. Ten to eight on a rainy Saturday morning and the place was like the Mary Celeste… At least that meant he might actually get some work done for a change, free from the distraction, whingeing, and general all-round pain-in-the-backside-ishness of his fellow officers.
Logan punched in the door-code and let himself into the Professional Standards office. Stopped. Suppressed a little groan.
So much for the Mary Celeste.
Rennie was slouched in his chair, surrounded by his file-box battlements, staring at the ceiling tiles as he swivelled left and right.
Logan stripped off his fleece and hung it on the coatrack. ‘Thought you were taking Donna swimming?’
‘Guv.’ Rennie snapped upright.
‘You’re an idiot; it’s Saturday morning. Go home.’
A frown. ‘You didn’t hear?’
Logan sank into his own chair and powered up his computer. ‘Get the kettle on. And there better be some of those Penguins left.’
‘Yeah, but…’ Rennie grabbed a sheet of paper from his in-tray and hurried over. Held it out. ‘It’s DS Chalmers.’
He didn’t bother suppressing this groan. ‘What’s she done now?’
Sobbing howled out of the living room in jagged painful stabs. He was just visible, through the open door, hunched up on the floor in the corner of the room slumped against a set of DVD racks. A slightly chubby man, going bald at the back, arms wrapped around himself. Face buried in his knees, shoulders shaking.
Logan eased the door shut.
A uniformed PC stood at the other end of the hall, talking into the Airwave handset attached to her shoulder. ‘…no, Sarge, no sign of forced entry I can see, but the SE haven’t finished with the back garden yet.’
Past her, a patrol car sat at the kerb, its lights flickering blue and white in the rain.
Logan stepped through the plain door and into the garage again.
It probably hadn’t been big enough to park an actual car in to start with – ‘Executive Family Homes’ being developer-speak for ‘Tiny Rabbit-Hutch Houses You Can’t Swing A Cat In’ – but it definitely wasn’t big enough now. Lorna Chalmers and her husband had filled the garage with metal shelving, leaving a four-foot-wide path down the middle. Tins of beans, soup, tomatoes, fruit, and sweetcorn. Semi-transparent boxes of crockery, others of spices, towels, clothes, cleaning products, and unidentifiable things. Various items of kitchen gadgetry, still in the original boxes. Cartons of washing powder, rice, macaroni-and-cheese mix, cereal… As if they’d tried to pack their lives away out here.
And Lorna Chalmers had finally succeeded.
She was halfway down the space between the shelving units, the toes of her socks grazing the concrete floor. Scuffing the fabric as her body turned in the draught that slipped in beneath the garage door. A thick electrical cord made a makeshift noose around her neck, the other end tied to the exposed rafters above. Arms slack by her sides. Eyes open. Mouth too. Face covered in scrapes and the faded remains of bruising on waxy yellow flesh.
The hard clack of a camera’s flash caught a bluebottle as it landed on her bottom lip. Then wandered inside.
Definitely dead.
Logan leaned against the open doorway as a couple of scene examiners got Lorna Chalmers down. One hugged her around the middle while the other clambered up onto a chair, holding a pair of snips. Their white SOC suits rustled and crumpled.
Snips took hold of the electrical lead in her other hand. ‘You ready?’
Hugs kept his head as far away from Chalmers’ remains as possible without letting go. ‘Gawd… Soon as you like, Shirley. She reeks of booze!’
A click and the body dropped, but didn’t sag.
So still in the throes of rigor mortis, then.
Snips – Shirley – jumped down from the chair and helped her colleague wrestle Chalmers into a body bag. She zipped it up and backed off, waving a hand in front of her face. ‘Pfff… You weren’t kidding.’
Logan shook his head and turned away.
Shirley shouted after him. ‘Hoy! You SIO then?’
‘Nope.’
‘You’re Senior, you’re an Officer, and you’re Investigating. Sounds like SIO to me.’
Logan kept going. ‘Yeah, nice try. But the answer’s still no.’
Logan leaned his forehead against the bedroom window, breath making a foggy crescent on the glass.
Outside, the duty undertakers wheeled their shiny grey coffin down the driveway, then lifted it into the back of their shiny grey van. The name of the firm was picked out in discreet white letters, ‘CORMACK & CALMAN ~ FUNERAL DIRECTORS’ above the words ‘PRIVATE AMBULANCE’, but other than that there was nothing to indicate that Lorna Chalmers’ remains were on the way to the mortuary.
What a bloody waste…
‘Guv?’
‘Mmm?’ Logan turned, and there was Rennie waving at him from the bedroom doorway.
‘I know you don’t want to be SIO, but do you think … maybe…?’ He raised his eyebrows and mugged it up a bit.
‘You want to be SIO?’
‘Come on, Guv, got to be good practice, right?’ Rennie shrugged. ‘For the old CV? Even if it’s only a suicide.’
‘You know it’s mostly paperwork, right?’
‘And maybe people would say, “You remember that police officer who hanged herself? DS Rennie was the SIO on that. Did a bang-up job. Let’s give him something exciting to be in charge of next time!”’
Logan puffed out a breath. ‘I suppose I can ask. But no promises.’
Swear to God, the little sod did a wee jig. ‘Cool biscuits!’ Then stopped and pointed over his shoulder. ‘Oh, and you might want to come see this.’ He led the way across the hall and into a bathroom barely big enough for the bath, sink, and toilet that had been squeezed into it. Nearly
