Chapter 2
Roberta sat on her throne, queen of all she surveyed – a barren cubicle of Formica-covered chipboard, with some fairly uninspired graffiti: ‘INSPECTOR MENZIES SMELLS OF CHEESE!’, ‘I STINK THEREFORE I AM’, and for some reason ‘I WANTED TO BE AN ALLIGATOR . . .’
Because police officers were weird.
Not being weird, and having no desire to be any sort of semi-aquatic reptile, Roberta poked away at her phone.
Playing Hedgehog Hodgepodge, with her trousers and pants around her ankles.
Not doing too badly, either. When the sodding thing rang, vibrating in her hands during a tricky bit.
Making her squeal and flinch and drop the phone.
Scrabbling to catch the handset before it disappeared to a horrible, unflushed, watery grave.
‘Snudging heck . . .’ She took a deep breath before answering. ‘Are you insane? What kinda time is this to call someone?’
A man’s voice. ‘Hi, it’s me again. Davey McLeod? I was just wondering—’
‘Oh for . . .’ Scowling at the cubicle walls. ‘I’m in a very important meeting, here!’
‘Only, I’m on a bit of a deadline and it would really, really help me if you could just run those plates and I can get out of your hair?’
She ripped off a streamer of toilet paper, because Davey had officially ruined her special alone time. ‘Were you always this big a pain in the hoop?’
A wee whine of desperation entered his voice. ‘Look, could we at least talk about it? You know, face to face?’
‘We’re talking now! And I’ve—’
‘I’m just outside. I’m waving; can you see me?’
Oh no . . .
Roberta blinked at the graffiti, then leaned sideways, far enough to peer beneath the cubicle door and out into the ladies’ loo.
No sign of any legs or shoes. Thank Christ.
She straightened up again. ‘Outside where?’
‘Inverurie station. Look: I bought doughnuts. Custard ones. Your favourite, right?’
Eh?
‘How did you know I was—’
‘Saw you’d got the body-in-the-bin case. Thought you’d probably set up an incident room at the nearest station: run the Op out of there.’ A wee, smug, aren’t-I-clever pause. ‘Used to be a detective sergeant, remember? Before I retired.’
Urgh . . .
So he did. And a right menace when he got his teeth into something too – it was all flooding back.
What to do about it, though? Wasn’t as if doing ‘little favours’ for civilians ever went well. If you got caught, Professional Standards were the least of your worries: gross misconduct, dismissal, prosecution, fines, maybe even jail time . . .
Course the question was: why did ex-DS Davey McLeod want to know? The people these number plates belonged to, what had they done? And what would she find if she did the search then went poking about?
Hmmm . . .
Knowledge was power, after all. And if she did find something, there was no reason to share it with Davey. Take the credit, do a victory lap, then head off into the retirement-flavoured sunset.
She kept the evil smile from her voice. ‘If I help you, will you sod off and leave me alone?’
‘Cross my heart and hope to die,
Stick a truncheon in my eye.’
‘OK.’
‘That’s great! Thanks, Robbie! I appreciate it, it’s really—’
She hung up.
Grinned.
Then finished her meeting.
The incident room had improved slightly since she’d been away. A few of the more disreputable office chairs had gone – swapped out for ones that didn’t look like drunken toadstools – and a scarred duplex laser printer now sat in the corner. A proper monster. About the size of a photocopier.
Tufty was foostering about with it, lying on the floor, plugging yellow cables into floor ports.
He’d also managed to scare up a cardboard box full of old desk phones, in various shades of smoker’s-teeth beige.
But no support staff, no extra officers.
Just him.
‘Hoy!’ Roberta kicked his foot. ‘Where’s the sodding team I was promised?’
Which is when the door opened.
But it wasn’t a phalanx of constables who marched in, ready to obey her every whim, it was Disco.
And he didn’t march, he ambled – carrying a small box, about the size of a hardback book.
‘Hi, Guv.’ He held it up for Tufty to see.
‘Sorry, these are all I could get.’ Then tipped the contents out onto the nearest desk.
A handful of manky whiteboard markers and a dry eraser clattered onto the dusty desktop.
Be still her beating heart.
Roberta curled her top lip. ‘Is this it?’
Disco shrugged. ‘Blame the plague. We’re skeleton-staffed, same as everyone else.’ Perching his bum on the bepenned desk. ‘Good job all the scroats and stots and fiddlers are laid up with it too, or we’d be buggered.’ Looking around the incident room. ‘So . . .?’
Tufty emerged from his labours, dusting off his hands as he wandered over to the Big Desk in the corner – a double-sized cubicle with a fancy executive chair that had definitely been stolen from a DCI or superintendent’s office.
A couple of manilla folders sat on the desk, next to an antique laptop.
The wee loon pointed at the left file. ‘Operation Troglodyte. PNC searches on everyone we arrested in Kintore, plus all the major players.’ Then the right one.
‘Operation Demogorgon. Got you every missing person reported in the last six months. And I went a-hunting while you were . . . indisposed.’ Pulling out his phone and poking at the screen, before holding it up so she could see.
Aye, but he wasn’t running the show. She was.
Roberta snatched one of Disco’s pens, produced her own mobile, and squinted at Davey’s text. Printed those three number plates on the whiteboard by the door in squeaky red letters. Then snapped her fingers at Disco. ‘PNC check. And see what you can dig up on any registered drivers too.’
‘Wow . . .’ He gazed at the three lines. ‘We’ve got leads already? Cool.’ Then he scurried off to a vacant, dusty desk to do what he was told.
About time someone did.
Tufty shuffled closer. ‘Did you find a witness? Did someone come forward with info? Ooh . . . or was it dashcam footage of suspicious vehicles at the scene of the crime?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Oh.’ Drooping a little, before remembering the phone in his hand. ‘Anyway, speaking of footage: we does has stuff.’
He set a video playing and held his mobile out again.
A lumpy young woman appeared, who’d applied so many ‘beauty’ filters when she’d filmed it that she looked shrink-wrapped.
It was a head-and-shoulders shot, eyes wide and mouth open in a shocked ‘O’.
Like a bullet hole. ‘Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod; you won’t believe what happened on my way into work this morning! ’
Her image shrank down into one corner of the screen, still cropped so the top of her head was missing and most of her shoulders too.
There was clearly some sort of half-arsed in-camera green-screen wank going on, because the background was a streaky fuzz of out-of-focus grey that kept cutting in and out around her hair.
Then the fuzzy grey swayed as a faint blue-and-white glow rippled on the right-hand side.
A clunk and what might’ve been the bevelled edge of a train window appeared in the bottom left, then darker streaks wheeched past like a huge barcode, and those blue-and-whites turned into the flickering glare of a patrol car’s lights – filtered through heavy fog.
And then the lay-by swept into view.
Must’ve been before Roberta and her convoy turned up, because there was no sign of the Scenes Transit, or the police van, or her MX-5, but the video zoomed right in on the wheelie bin. Tipped over. Its contents sprawled across the tarmac: long bones and ribs and that toothless skull . . .
And then the train was past, and grey descended once more.
The picture swung around, showing more of the carriage and the back of a dozen people’s heads as they strained to get more footage of the crime scene.
Then the background froze and Little Miss Lumpy raised a pair of eyebrows that she must’ve drawn on with a toilet brush. ‘I know, right? That was completely a dead guy! Just lying right there, where anyone could see it! It’s totally disgusting!’
Behind her, the footage looped back to the start.
‘Swear to God, it’s like something off a horror movie. Utterly traumatising! I mean, so, how could the police just leave it like that, utterly uncovered and bones and that? Are they trying to damage us? On, you know, purpose?’
This time, when the video got to the lay-by, it froze. Then the picture went in for an extreme close-up on the remains. Pixelly and blurred, but clearly a human skull – lying there in the sludge of its decomposed owner.
Miss Lumpy shuddered. ‘It’s just horrible. I might need therapy to get over the shock; for my mental health? No one should ever have to see stuff like that . . .’
As the remains loomed behind her.
Tufty peered over the top of the screen and swiped up.
There was no Little Miss Lumpy this time. The fogginess outside was the same, but a quick pan around the carriage showed a load of commuters on their feet with their phones out filming. Eager little faces waiting for the horror show. Which meant this had to be a later train.
Just to make things extra annoying, the footage came with a pounding drum-and-bass beat.
The patrol car’s lights shimmered in the fog, the trees strobed past – going left-to-right this time, so a northbound train – and then Roberta and Tufty appeared.
The wee loon had his head down, hiding his face, but she was on full view: arms and legs spread wide, trying to hide as much of the remains as possible.
And as if all that wasn’t bad enough, a man’s voice broke through the terrible music, rapping, machine-gun fast:
‘Sittin’ on a train, feeling ma pain,
Can’t explain all the ways that this life is insane,
And then Death’s standin’ there, in the fog and his stare,
Says that life doesn’t care, for the—’
Thankfully, Tufty swiped again and the awful racket stopped. ‘You get the drift.’
Another grey screen with a ripple of trees through the fog—