earth.
No caravans, no Portakabins, not so much as a three-man tent.
Steel took a step forwards, but Logan grabbed her arm.
‘Maybe we should call for a search team. IB. Pathologist. If Polmont’s—’
‘Don’t be so wet.’ She shook herself free and stomped off into the mud.
Logan swore, then followed her.
The going was tough, thick clogs of brown-black earth sucking at his shoes, dirty water oozing in through the lace holes, soaking into his socks. And then his foot disappeared into a puddle, right up to the shin. ‘Fuck…’ Cold and wet, the trouser leg sticking to his skin. He limped after Steel, cursing all the way.
She came to a halt about two hundred yards from the high chainlink fence that surrounded the site, then turned around a few times. The earth here was firmer – still covered in weeds and grass, the vegetation looking pale and unhealthy.
Logan squelched up beside her. ‘Hope you’re bloody happy, my feet are—’
‘Where the hell is he?’ She turned around again, then peered at the sat-nav.
‘—socks are sodden and my trousers are all covered in—’
‘Will you shut up moaning about your bloody feet! He’s supposed to be here.’
Logan snatched the sat-nav from her – the display read, ‘YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION’.
Welcome to the middle of nowhere.
‘Well, at least we know he’s not stuck in some shallow grave.’
Steel grabbed the sat-nav back. ‘Oh yeah, tell me Sherlock, how—’
‘Look at the ground. It’s not been disturbed.’ He pointed at the little black rectangle in Steel’s hands. ‘What are those accurate to, ten, fifteen feet? And the GSM’s about a hundred…’
Logan looked out across the tufts of yellowy grass and dark-green weeds. ‘Give him a ring.’
‘What?’
‘Call him on his mobile.’
She did, standing there with her phone clamped to her ear. ‘It’s ringing…’
Logan stood as still as he could, ears straining. A faint metallic warble was coming from somewhere over to his left. He turned and marched towards it, but the sound of his squelching through the waterlogged grass was loud enough to block it out. And then the warbling stopped.
Steel pointed at the mobile in her hand. ‘Voicemail.’
‘Call him again.’
This time Logan crept across the uneven ground, the ringing getting louder with every careful step.
‘Voicemail again.’
He found it on the third go: a scuffed and battered Nokia lying in a patch of greasy nettles at the edge of a burn. He snapped on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and picked the phone up, just as it stopped ringing. The casing had been broken at one point, then stuck back together with black electrical tape.
Steel appeared at his shoulder. ‘Is it his?’
Logan stared at her. ‘It rang when you called it, what do you think?’
Scowl. ‘I’ll do the sarcasm, thank you very much.’ She stuck out a hand. ‘Gimmie.’
‘Gloves.’
‘I’ll bloody “gloves” you in a minute. Give me the damn phone.’
She went stabbing through the phone’s menu with her thumbs. ‘See what he’s got listed as home… It’s an Aberdeen number.’ She pressed another button, and stuck the phone to her ear. Listened for a bit. ‘No answer. So he’s no’ here, and he’s no’ at home.’
‘Probably still pissed.’ Logan offered her an evidence bag, but she just stuck the phone in her pocket and marched back towards the building site.
Logan shook his soggy foot and squelched after her.
The rain was beginning to pick up, the thin, leeching drizzle giving way to pattering globs of ice-cold water that kicked ripples across the dirty puddles.
Logan followed Steel down an embryonic street: bare foundations on one side, part-built homes on the other. Wooden skeletons, with blue plastic sheeting stretched between the uprights. A couple of the frames were being skinned with pale orange brick, a radio blaring out Northsound One as two teams of brickies built up the next layer.
Further down, half a dozen looked nearly finished – some even had doors and windows. The one at the far end had a big ‘SHOW HOME’ sign out front, a garage twice the size of the others, and a slightly surreal-looking bright green lawn. No way that could be natural. Probably Astroturf or something like that. A pair of gardeners were planting shrubs and trees around it, hacking out holes in the rubble with a pickaxe.
Bugger that for a job.
Logan stopped in the middle of the muddy street. ‘Where do you want to start?’
Steel dug her hands deeper into her jacket pockets. Her nose had gone a fetching shade of pink. With a not so fetching drip on the end. ‘Where do sparkies work?’
‘Well … you wouldn’t want to run electrical cables till you’d got the roof on and the place was watertight, would you?’
She shrugged and stomped through the rain towards the little clot of completed houses.
A battered, red Berlingo van was parked outside one of them. It had a crap illustration of Robert Burns on the side, and the words, ‘MCRABBIE’S FAMILY ELECTRICALS, “YOUR LOCAL BRIGHT SPARKS”’. The address and phone number were for Stirling. So much for being ‘local’.
Someone had keyed the paintwork, permanently engraving ‘SCABBY’ in front of the company name.
The front garden was a mess of rubble and debris, the concrete path littered with clumps of mud. Steel bumped the front door open with her shoulder, hands at her sides, not touching anything. Inside, the house was an exposed framework of raw pine, the outer walls stuffed with pink Rockwool insulation waiting for their skin of plasterboard. The entryway was carpeted in a layer of flattened cardboard boxes, the brown surface rippled with dirty water and muddy boot prints.
Someone was singing upstairs: a surprisingly tuneful rendition of ‘Let Me Entertain You’, complete with ‘Wakka waaaaa, weeeeeeee-wahhh…’ guitar solos. Steel nodded and Logan took the lead, up the bare wooden stairs and onto the chipboard landing.
The singer was hunched on top of a folding ladder in what was probably going to be a bedroom, wearing a padded orange boilersuit with that same crappy Robert Burns illustration on the back, tightening the chuck-less bit on a cordless drill. A brief pause for the chorus, then he stuck the huge drill bit against the nearest upright and screeched through it.
Out on the landing,
