style="font-size:15px;"> Tarlair Outdoor Swimming Pool appeared in the distance. A collection of boxy art deco buildings – not much bigger than a handful of Portacabins – were surrounded on three sides by cliffs, the fourth open to the sea. Their whitewashed walls going grey with neglect, caught by the evening sun. The two outdoor pools empty and decaying in front of them.
‘Have we got an ID?’
Logan switched off the siren. ‘Not yet. We’ve no support staff in Banff after five. Can you spare someone?’
The road dipped steeply down to another hairpin – gorse bushes like a sheet of rolling flame on the right, the bay on the left. Dark rocks making broken submarines and stranded ships in the glittering water. White foam marked the outward edges as the waves tried to shoulder them up onto the grey stony beach.
‘Any idea if it’s accidental, or …?’
‘I hope so. We’ve got a missing paedophile on the books: Neil Wood. Disappeared three days ago. His father only reported it today.’
‘That’s all we need …’ The sound became muffled, as if she’d stuck her hand over the microphone, partially blocking her firing orders at someone in the background – telling someone to get the Scenes Examination Branch to hotfoot it over from the cashline job in Fraserburgh.
Smooth tarmac gave way to scabby potholes. Knee-high grass bordered the sides of the road, punctuated by the searching pink antennae of rosebay willowherb. The patrol car bumped across the pockmarked tarmac, then wallowed as Nicholson slowed. The sound of a mudflap grinding against the uneven surface.
The road gave up in a dead end, just before the entrance to the pool. One way in, one way out. Well, unless you wanted to work your way down the cliff path from the golf course.
Inspector McGregor’s voice went from muffled to full volume again. ‘Logan, I need to know if this was a suspicious death ASAP. Am I calling in an MIT or not? Then secure the scene. I’ll be right there, soon as I get someone to run admin tasks for you.’
Logan stuck his Airwave handset on its clip.
Deano and Tufty’s little police van was parked in the middle of the road, between two jagged lumps of rock, blocking off the entrance to the site. The thing needed a wash, its white paintwork nearly grey with grime, but the stripe of blue-and-yellow blocks along the side glowed in the pool car’s flashing lights.
No sign of either of them.
Nicholson hit the button, killing the blue-and-whites.
Silence.
Logan grabbed his hat. ‘Get the tape out and secure the road. I want it blocked.’ He turned in his seat, then pointed at the top of the hill, where the first hairpin was. ‘Better make it other side of the water-treatment plant. Don’t want some scumbag with a telephoto lens selling snaps to the tabloids.’
‘Sarge.’
As soon as he clunked the passenger door shut again, she was reversing through the potholes. Did a sharp three-pointer, then accelerated off.
He turned. Picked his way around the police van. Punched Deano’s badge number into the Airwave.
But before he could press send, Tufty appeared, scrambling across the pebbled beach, both arms held out as if he was walking the high wire. He paused. Slithered back a couple of steps. Waved. ‘Sarge? Over here.’
Logan followed him across the pebble beach, avoiding the road. Broken kelp roots clung to the high-tide mark, pale and weathered, like a thousand human tibias. Everything smelled of ozone and salt, underpinned by a thin smear of rotting fish. He looked over his shoulder. ‘Guy was down here taking photos for some urban-decay-project-thing. Young lad doing an HND in photography at Aberdeen College. Peed himself. Then battered it over to Macduff on his bike. Saw us at the harbour, and that was that.’
A nod. Pebbles crunched and shifted under Logan’s feet. ‘You confiscate the camera?’
‘Deano got the SD card.’ Tufty pointed off to the right, towards a crumbling concrete embankment. ‘This way.’
‘Why didn’t your student call nine-nine-nine? Thought everyone had a mobile phone now.’
Tufty flashed a wee smile and a shrug. ‘Panicked. Says he couldn’t remember the number. Bit of a climb, sorry …’ He clambered up the embankment, then up onto the grass. Then over an outcrop of lichen-covered rock.
‘You sure you know where you’re going?’
‘Deano said there’s no way anyone would come this way carrying a body. So, you know, common approach path.’ More clambering and scrambling, and they were up on a ridge above the swimming pools. Tufty nodded. ‘Down there.’
The site was split into two halves. In front of the main buildings were a set of wide amphitheatre steps in dark-grey stained concrete, the edges picked out in decaying whitewash. They enclosed a D-shaped shallow pool – dry as an abandoned riverbed – the wall between it and the main swimming area crumbling and partially collapsed. On the other side of the wall, water came halfway up. A stony beach at one side that couldn’t have been an original feature, speckled with broken pipes and other bits of rusting flotsam. Then the sea wall, and then the blue expanse of the North Sea.
A dark shape was hunched at the far side of the pool, a line of black-and-yellow tape trailing from one hand: ‘CRIME SCENE – DO NOT ENTER’. Deano. He stuck both arms up and waved them. ‘Sarge!’
It took a moment to pick out the body. Grey against grey.
Not a mistake then.
A couple of inches below the ridge they stood on lay the decaying flat roof of some sort of ancient pump house. No way in hell Logan was risking standing on that. ‘Where’s this common approach path go, then?’
Tufty pointed. ‘Far as we can tell, he’d take her in a straight line from the entrance over there, along the side, take the walkway between the two bits, and dump her in the pool.’ His shoulders drooped. ‘I wanted to do some searching, but Deano won’t let me go down. Says I’ve got to stay up here.’
Proper procedure. Wonders would never cease.
Logan eased himself down the rock face and onto the amphitheatre steps. No way to get to where Deano was without crossing the killer’s route. Well, except for picking his way along the sea wall, but it looked narrow and slippery with green slime. And according to the sign at the entrance, it was a two-metre drop from there to the rocks, so sod that.
Assuming there was a killer.
He pointed at Tufty. ‘As of now, you’re acting Crime Scene Manager. You record the time and the date and everyone who’s been near the body. Guard the entrance and make sure no one gets past you till I say so. No one. Don’t care if it’s the Chief Constable himself, he cools his heels in the car park till I say otherwise. Understand?’
‘Sarge.’
Good.
He went right, dropped into the D-shaped inshore pool and made his way through the rubble and rubbish to the other side.
Deano
