Sodding hell … this was what he got for not paying more attention during Polish lessons back at the station.
‘Proszę…’ She slid further down the wall, leaving a thick streak of red on the wallpaper, saying ‘please’ over and over: ‘Proszę, proszę…’
Logan could hear footsteps clattering up the stairs, then someone reached the landing and swore. ‘Control, this is zero-three-one-one: we have a man down; repeat, we have a man down! I need an ambulance here, now!’
‘Proszę…’ The stapler fell from her fingers.
A firearms officer burst into the room, gun pointing everywhere at once. He froze as soon as he saw the woman slumped against the wall, legs akimbo and covered in blood.
‘Jesus, Sarge, what did you do to her?’
‘I didn’t do anything: it was Guthrie. And it was an accident.’
‘Bloody hell.’ The newcomer grabbed his Airwave handset and called in again, demanding an update on that ambulance while Logan tried to calm the woman down with pidgin Polish and lots of hand gestures.
It wasn’t working.
The other half of Team Two stuck his head round the doorframe and said, ‘We’ve got another one.’
Logan looked up from the woman’s bloodshot eyes. ‘Another one what?’
‘You’d better come see.’
It was a slightly bigger office, the roof sloping off into the building’s eaves. A dusty Velux window let in the golden glow of a dying sun. The only item of furniture was a battered desk, with a missing leg. The air was thick with the smell of burning meat, and human waste.
The reason was lying on the floor behind the broken desk: a man, curled up in the foetal position, not moving.
‘Oh Jesus…’ Logan looked at the PC. ‘Is he…?’
‘Yup. Just like all the others.’
Logan squatted down and felt for a pulse, double checking.
Still alive.
He placed a hand on the man’s shoulder and rolled him over onto his back.
The man groaned. And Logan’s stomach tried to evict the macaroni cheese he’d had for lunch.
Someone had beaten the living hell out of the guy – broken his nose, knocked out a few teeth, but that was nothing. That barely merited a band-aid compared with what had happened to his eyes.
Just like all the others.
‘All right, that’s enough.’ Detective Chief Inspector Finnie slammed his hand down on the table at the front of the little briefing room, then glared at the assembled officers, waiting for quiet. With his floppy hair, jowls, and wide rubbery lips he looked like a frog caught in the act of turning into a not particularly attractive prince.
‘Thanks to last night’s sterling work by Team Three,’ he said, ‘the press have somehow got the idea that we’re all a bunch of bloody idiots.’ He held up a copy of that morning’s Aberdeen Examiner, the headline ‘POLICE SHOOT UNARMED WOMAN IN BUNGLED RAID’ was stretched across the front page.
Sitting at the back of the room, Logan shifted uneasily in his chair. The first operation he’d been involved in for six months and it was ‘Bungled’. A cock-up. Fiasco. Complete and utter sodding disaster. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his fault – he wasn’t even the Lead Firearms Officer.
He let his eyes drift to the clock on the wall behind DCI Finnie. Twenty to eight. He’d spent half the night up at the hospital, and the other half filling in paperwork: trying to explain how they’d accidentally managed to shoot a civilian. Right now he was operating on two hours’ sleep and three cups of coffee.
Finnie slapped the newspaper down on the desk. ‘I had the Chief Constable on the phone for two hours this morning, wanting to know why my oh-so-professional officers are incapable of carrying out a simple forced entry without casualties.’ He paused for an unpleasant smile. ‘Was I too vague at the briefing? Did I have a senior moment and say you could shoot anyone you felt like? Did I? Because the only other alternative I can think of is that you’re all a bunch of useless morons, and that can’t be right, can it?’
No one answered.
Finnie nodded. ‘Thought so. Well, you’ll all be delighted to know that we’ll be getting an internal enquiry from Professional Standards. Starting soon as we’ve finished here.’
That got a collective groan from the whole team, all twelve of them.
‘Oh shut up. You think you’ve got it bad? What about the poor woman lying in intensive care with a bullet in her?’ He glanced in Logan’s direction. ‘DS McRae: Superintendent Napier wants you first. Please, do us all a favour and make-believe you’re a policeman for once. OK? Can you do that for me? Pretty please?’
There was a moment’s silence as everyone looked the other way. Logan could feel his face going pink. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘And when you’re finished there, you’re on chauffeur duty. Maybe that’ll keep you out of trouble for a while. Next slide.’ Finnie nodded at his sidekick – a stick-thin detective sergeant with ginger hair like rusty wire wool – and the image on screen changed. An unremarkable man’s face: mid-twenties, grinning at the camera in a pub somewhere. ‘This is victim number five: Lubomir Podwojski.’
Another nod and the photo changed. Nearly everyone in the room swore. The happy face was gone, replaced by the battered nightmare Logan had seen last night. The eyes just two tattered holes ringed with scorched tissue.
Someone said, ‘Jesus…’
Finnie tapped the screen. ‘Take a good, long look, ladies and gentlemen – because this is going to happen again, and again, until we catch the bastard doing it.’ He left the man’s ruined face up there for a whole minute. ‘Next slide.’
Podwojski disappeared, replaced by a letter with lots of different fonts in lots of different colours. ‘It arrived this morning.’
You let them in!!! YOU let them in and they RUN WILD LIKE DOGS. These Polish animals take our jobs. They take our women. They have even taken our God! And you do nothing.
Someone must fight for what is right.
I will do what I have to. I will BLIND them all, like I BLINDED the last one! And YOU will WADE in the burning blood of wild dogs!!!
Finnie held up a collection of clear plastic evidence bags, each one containing its own little laser-printed message of hate. ‘Five victims; five phone calls; eight notes. I want you all to read the profile again. I’ve got Doctor Goulding coming in at three to update it with
