Chapter 49 #2
Of course, maybe they weren’t fighting? Maybe it was a mating dance? Couldn’t be any more ridiculous than snogging a subsea engineer in a nightclub and pretending it was just a ‘joke’.
‘You still there, Guv?’
‘Look: go through the ANPR again – see if anything pops out at you. This bastard’s out there somewhere.
’ Logan flicked back a couple of pages in his notebook, to the scribbles about Andrew Shaw’s gym membership.
‘And get someone to check out Wellheads Fitness Studio. Our victim was a frequent flyer, might have met his killer and-or kidnapping-accomplice there.’
‘Urgh . . .’ As if Logan had just plopped a ‘Mars Bar’ on Biohazard’s desk. ‘Guv.’
Logan hung up. Frowned out the window at the quarrelling/amorous seagulls.
Time to go check on his team.
He buzzed up all the windows, then climbed into the gritty afternoon heat. Jogging across the road between a taxi and a gaily painted florist’s van.
Ding-buzz.
Safe on the other pavement, he checked his texts under the baleful eye of Landfill and Mixed-Recycling.
Four messages, waiting and unread. Lined up most recent to last.
BEARDY BEATTIE:
Dear Acting DCI MacRae, I am in Incident Room B2 for our review meeting about Operation Red Dragon. Will you be much longer?
Oh, bloody hell. When did Tufty say that was meant to start – two o’clock or something?
Bugger.
Didn’t change the fact that Beattie was a dick, though . . .
TARA:
Talk about peer pressure – The Monitor Lizzard wants to go shopping for ALL BLACK GOTH CLOTHES!?!?!!
She’s joined a cult!
THE ICE QUEEN:
Thank you for inviting Colin to your barbecue.
Post-mortem suggests TOD range between 0000 and 0400.
Cranial trauma most likely COD.
Extensive tissue damage + dislocated fingers confirms possible torture.
Will bring burgers and napkins.
And last, but not least:
DS ROBERTSON:
Hi Guv
We still on for this review meeting?
Operation Hedgehog FTW!
Cheers
Henry
As that was the oldest message of the four, it meant Logan was very, very late for the meeting indeed.
And unlike Beardy Beattie, Robertson wasn’t a dick.
He drifted to a halt outside Brenda’s Hair & Beauty Palace and thumbed out a quick reply:
Sorry, Henry!
Got caught up on this body-in-the-river thing.
I owe you a bacon butty.
Tufty will reschedule, OK?
SEND.
And while he was at it, might as well get back to Tara as well:
It’ll do her good to have some friends at school.
Tell her no painting her face white, though – she’ll scare Cthulhu!
SEND.
The reply dinged back before he’d even put his phone away, so clearly, Tara wasn’t having a busy day at Trading Standards:
You know how obsessive she gets.
We’ll be listening to MISERABLE MUSIC and hoovering BLACK GLITTER out of the carpet for years!
Probably. But that was kids for you.
His thumbs tick-tick-tick-tickticktick-ticked across the screen:
Let her find her tribe.
Sometimes children need this stuff.
It’s how they learn friendship and responsibility and loyalty.
And that shit was important in life.
SEND.
He looked up from his phone, and there was that advert for the ‘RUMPLINGTON brOTHERS’ CIRCUS OF DELIGHTS!
’, in Westburn Park. The poster was a cluttered mélange of puppet animals and real clowns and acrobats, with a big top in the background and a red-clad ringmaster in the middle, posing as if he were the most important man in the world.
And tonight was the last night . . .
‘. . . you’ll never find anyone more loyal . . .’
‘Charlie never misses an Orphan Outing.’
‘. . . depends which performance you want to see. I booked ours weeks ago for the eight o’clock.’
Worth a go, wasn’t it?
Logan scrolled through his contacts and called Chief Superintendent Pine.
She answered with a sigh. ‘If this is more bad news: don’t, OK? Just heard McCulloch, Porter, and Pearce are down with the bloody plague. There’ll be no one left at this rate!’
‘I’ve been thinking about—’
‘And the sodding press are all over us like a sticky sneeze. Did you hear the drubbing we got on the lunchtime news? You’d think someone had kidnapped the Dalai Lama, way they’re going on about it.’
‘Boss, there’s a possibility—’
‘And do you know what happened when I got on to head office for more backup? To help us find Natasha Agapova?’ A bitter laugh.
‘Aye, right. Remember all those officers I’ve been promised from other divisions?
Not any more. They can’t spare anyone – most of them are off on the sick anyway.
’ Pine puffed out another long unhappy breath.
‘If you’ve got your heart set on a nationwide crime spree, now’s the perfect time. ’
Well, there was one easy win:
‘So, cancel the protest march.’
A groan. ‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘We didn’t have enough staff to start with, but now? It’s a public-order disaster waiting to happen. Imagine the headlines if something kicks off and we’ve got rioting on Union Street.’
‘Instead we’ll have “Fascist Cops Crush Right To Protest!” Any other civil liberties you’d like to abolish while we’re at it?’
Landfill and Mixed-Recycling scrawked into the air, a squabbling tornado of feathers and malevolence.
‘No, but I would like to run an undercover op this evening. I know it’s short notice for all the oversight, managerial, and risk-assessment stuff, but I think half a dozen plainclothes officers should do it. Eight would be better, but six would do.’
The seagulls battered away at each other, then Mixed-Recycling wheeled off to divebomb a woman eating a Cornish pasty outside the dry cleaner’s.
Chief Superintendent Pine’s voice went all thin and suspicious. ‘An undercover operation to achieve what?’
The woman flailed her arms, but Landfill swooped in to attack from the other side, and that was her pastyless, left with nothing to do but shake her fists and swear at the avian larcenists.
Logan looked back at the poster. ‘I was thinking a fun night out at the circus . . .’