What did they…’
He reached inside and pulled out a crumpled ball of white paper, stained red in the centre. He eased the bundle open.
A little pale tube of flesh lay in the middle – a pink-varnished nail at one end, a bloody stump at the other. A little girl’s toe.
The wrapping paper was covered in congealed blood, but Logan could still make out the laser-printed message: ‘MAYBE NEXT TIME YOU WON’T BE LATE’.
2
‘Did your mother find you under the idiot bush?’ DCI Finnie jabbed his finger toward the graffitied phone box, where a lone Investigation Bureau technician in full SOC get-up was dusting for prints. ‘Is that why you thought it’d be a good idea to compromise every tenet of evidentiary procedure by opening the envelope, when any halfwit—’
‘What if it was instructions? Where to go next?’ Logan jerked his chin forward. ‘Would you have left it?’
Finnie closed his eyes, sighed, then ran a hand through his floppy brown hair. With his wide rubbery lips and sagging face, the head of CID was looking more like a disappointed frog with every passing year. ‘If you’d been here on time instead of—’
‘There was no way in hell we were ever going to make it all the way here from Altens in six minutes!’
‘You were supposed to be—’
‘We were two minutes late. Two minutes. And in that time they manage to print off a note, hack off a little girl’s toe, stick it all in an envelope, address it to “The Cops”, and bugger off without a trace?’
‘But—’
‘If they did the amputation here there’d be blood everywhere.’
Finnie puffed out his cheeks, then blew out a long, wet breath. ‘Bloody hell.’
‘We weren’t meant to get here in time; it was a set-up.’
A shout echoed out from somewhere behind them. ‘Detective Superintendent? Hello? Is it true you’ve found Jenny’s body?’
Finnie sagged for a second, then narrowed his beady little eyes. ‘Are these bastards psychic?’
It was a baggy woman, wearing jeans and a pale blue shirt that was stained navy under the arms and between the breast pockets. She lumbered up the dusty road, her greying hair tied in a puffball behind her sweaty face. A spotty man trotted along beside her, fiddling with a huge camera.
The head of CID squared his shoulders, voice a hard whisper. ‘Get that envelope back to the lab: I want it run through every bloody test they’ve got. Not tomorrow, or next week, or when Peterhead stop clogging up the system with their bloody gangland execution: today. ASAP. Understand?’
Logan nodded. ‘Yes, Guv.’ He turned away, making for the phone box just as Spotty the Cameraman took his first picture.
‘Is it her? Is it Jenny?’
Finnie’s voice boomed out into the warm afternoon, ‘DS TAYLOR, GET THIS BLOODY CRIME SCENE CORDONED OFF!’
The IB tech was busy lifting a print from the cracked Perspex wall of the phone box, just beneath a set of pornographic stick men done in black marker pen.
Logan knocked on the metal frame. ‘Any joy?’
She peered up at him, a thin band of skin the only thing visible between her steamed-up safety goggles and white facemask. ‘Depends on your definition of “joy”. This thing’s clarted with prints and I’ll bet you a tenner none of them belong to our guy. But on the plus side: I’ve found three used condoms, a pile of fossilized dog turds, two empty Coke cans, it’s like a microwave oven in here, and I’m kneeling in dried-up pish. Who could ask for more?’
‘Condoms?’ Logan wrinkled his nose. In a phone box that smelled like a urinal? And they said romance was dead. ‘You got the envelope?’
She pointed at the case beside her. ‘If you sign for it, you can have the lot.’
‘You left it out in the sun? Why isn’t it packed in ice?’
The tech wiped the arm of her SOC suit across her glistening forehead. ‘Where the hell am I going to get ice from? Anyway, not like they’re going to sew the bloody thing back on, is it?’
‘No wonder Finnie does his nut…’ Logan opened the battered metal case. A black Grampian Police fleece was folded up inside it, the padded envelope in its clear plastic evidence pouch resting in the middle. At least she’d had the common sense to keep it insulated. He filled in the chain of evidence form and stood. ‘Right, if you see any—’
‘MCRAE!’ Finnie’s voice was loud enough to make them both flinch. ‘I SAID ASAP, NOT WHEN YOU BLOODY FEEL LIKE IT!’
Logan turned the rattling Vauxhall into Queen Street. They’d stuck the battered exhaust in the boot and now the pool car roared and bellowed like a teenager’s first hatchback, the choking smell of exhaust fumes filling the interior.
Sitting in the passenger seat, DC Rennie tutted. ‘Thought they’d all be out at Hazlehead by now…’
Grampian Police Force Headquarters loomed at the end of the road – an ugly seventies-style black-and-white building, blocky and threatening, the roof festooned with communications antennae and early warning sirens. The Sheriff and JP Court building next door wasn’t much better, but even that was welcoming compared with the crowd gathered on FHQ’s Front Podium car park.
TV crews, reporters, photographers, and the obligatory crowd of outraged citizens clutching banners and placards: ‘DON’T HURT OUR JENNY!’, ‘THE WIND BENEATH OUR WINGS!!!’, ‘WERE PREYING 4 U ALISON AND JENNY!’, ‘LET THEM GO!!!!!’ Tears for the cameras. Grim faces. What’s the world coming to, and hanging’s too good for them.
A few protesters turned to watch the Vauxhall grumble past.
Rennie sniffed. ‘How come it’s the ugly ones that always want to get on the telly? I mean, don’t get me wrong: it’s tragic and all that, but none of this lot ever even met the McGregors. So how come they’re out here bawling their eyes out like their mum just died? Not natural, is it?’
Logan parked around the back, abandoning the battered car next to the police vans. ‘Get everything up to the third floor.’
Rennie rummaged the evidence bags out from the back seat. ‘I mean public displays of grief for someone you’ve never met are just creepy, they … Is this dog shite?’ He held one of the bags up, peering at the grey-brown lumps inside. ‘It is! It’s dog—’
‘Just get it up to the bloody lab.’ Logan turned and made for the back doors.
‘So how long’s it going to take?’
‘Urgh…’ The man in the white Tyvek suit shuddered, then lifted the toe from the bloodstained note and slipped it into an evidence bag. His voice came out muffled from behind the facemask. ‘A wee girl, for God’s sake.’
The lab at FHQ was a fraction
