Cold Granite (44 page)

'Then you had to find a bin-bag to put her in.' Cameron nodded and a sparkling drop fel from his nose, splashing onto the tabletop between his trembling hands.

'And then you threw her out with the trash.'

'Yes...I'm sorry. I'm so sorry...'

After his statement, after Cameron Anderson had admitted sexual y abusing a four-year-old girl, they put him back into his cel and arranged for him to appear in the Sheriff Court the next day. There wasn't any celebration. Somehow, after Cameron's confession, no one was in the mood.

Back in the incident room Logan sighed and unpinned the little girl's photo from the wall, feeling hol ow inside. Catching the man who had abused her and disposed of her body as if it was nothing more than household rubbish, had left him feeling dirty by association. Ashamed to be human.

Insch settled himself down on the edge of the table and helped Logan stack up the statements. 'Wonder if we'l ever know who she was?'

Logan scrubbed at his face with his hands, feeling the first rasp of stubble under his fingers. 'I doubt it,' he said.

'Anyway,' Insch dumped the statements into the case file and gave an expansive yawn,

'we've stil got enough on our plate to worry about.'

Roadkil .

This time they took one of the pool cars to the hospital, WPC Watson driving.

Aberdeen Royal Infirmary was a lot busier than it had been the night before. They arrived just in time to see lunch getting served: something boiled with boiled potatoes and boiled cabbage.

'Remind me to go private,' said Insch as they passed a housekeeper trundling a steaming trol ey that reeked of cabbage.

They gathered al the PCs who'd been questioning the patients and staff together in an empty day room to get their updates. There wasn't much worth listening to, but they went through them al anyway, thanking the uniformed officers for their work. No one had seen, or heard anything. They'd even been through the security tapes: no blood-soaked figures running off into the night.

The inspector gave something like a rousing speech, and sent them al back to work.

That left only Logan and Watson. 'You two better go make yourselves useful too,' said Insch, beginning the familiar hunt through his suit. 'I'm off to speak to that doctor we saw last night.'

He ambled off, stil hunting for the elusive confectionery.

'So,' said WPC Watson, trying to sound efficient. 'Where do you want to start?'

Logan thought about her legs, poking out from beneath his T-shirt in the kitchen. 'Er...'

he said, deciding that now was neither the time nor the place. 'How about we go take a look at those security tapes. See if there's anything that's been missed.'

'You're the boss,' she said and threw in a jaunty little salute.

Logan tried to keep his mind on work as they walked through the hospital, making for the security guard's station. But it wasn't working. 'You know,' he final y mustered the courage to say as they reached the lift. 'I stil owe you a pint from last night.'

Watson nodded. 'I hadn't forgotten, sir.'

'Good.' He punched the lift button and tried to look casual, resting against the railing that ran round the inside of the elevator. 'How about tonight?'

'Tonight?'

Logan felt the colour starting to rise into his cheeks. 'If you're busy it's OK. You know, some other night...' Idiot.

The lift shuddered to a halt and WPC Watson smiled at him. 'Tonight would be good.'

Logan was too happy to say anything else until they got to the security room. It was compact: a long black desk with a wal of little television screens above it. A bank of video recorders whirled away, taping everything that went on. And in the middle of al this sat a youngish man with bleached-blond hair and spots dressed in standard security-guard brown with yel ow trimmings and a peaked cap. Looking like a jobbie in a hat.

He explained that there were no security cameras watching the room where the murder took place, but they did have them in al the main corridors, A&-E, and al the exits. Some of the wards had them too, but there were 'issues' with videoing sick people getting medical attention.

Privacy and stuff.

There was a pile of tapes from the previous night. The search team had already been through them, but if Logan wanted to have another pass it was OK by him.

That was when Logan's mobile phone went off, the sound loud and intrusive in the smal room.

'You know,' said the guard sternly, 'mobile phones have to be switched off!'

Logan apologized, but this would only take a minute.

It was Mil er again. 'Laz! Beginning to think you'd fal en off the arse of the earth, man.'

'I'm kind of busy right now,' said Logan, turning his back on the spotty youth with the turd-brown uniform. 'Is it urgent?'

'Kinda depends on what your point of view is. You anywhere near a tel y?'

'What?'

'Television. Moving pictures--'

'I know what television is.'

'Aye, wel , if you're near one: turn it on. Grampian.'

'Can you get regular television on any of these things?' Logan asked the security jobbie.

The spotted youth said no, but Logan could try one of the rooms down the corridor.

Three minutes later they stood in front of a flickering television screen with an American soap opera dribbling away on it. Behind them, on the bed, an old woman with purple-rinsed hair was snoring it up, her teeth floating in a glass.

'Gee, Adelaide,' said a suntanned blond with perfect teeth and a washboard stomach.

'Are you saying that baby's mine?'

Dramatic music, close-up of over-made-up brunette with pneumatic breasts; cut to commercial. Stair-lifts. Crisps. Washing powder. And then the face of Gerald Cleaver fil ed the screen. He was sitting in a wingback leather chair, wearing a cardigan, looking al avuncular and wholesome. 'They tried to make me look like a monster!' he said and the camera cut to a shot of him walking a jol y labrador. 'They accused me of terrible crimes I didn't commit!' Another camera jump, this time to Cleaver sitting on a low drystone dyke, looking earnest and pained.

'Read about my year of hel , only in this week's News of the World!'

'Oh God,' said Logan as the paper's logo spun on the screen. 'That's al we need.'

34

Logan and Watson grumbled their way back to the security office. Berating the paper and its decision to give Gerald Cleaver money for his story. The spotty youth in the shitty-brown uniform was in the process of charging into action, straightening his peaked cap as he went.

'Trouble?' asked WPC Watson.

'Someone's stealing Mars Bars from the gift shop!' And off he ran.

They watched him disappear round the corner, feet and elbows flying in his haste to reach the scene of the crime. Watson gave a wry smile. 'How the other half live...'

A second security guard - a heavy-set man in his early fifties, with a comb-over and eyebrows like a terrier - was now manning the console. He was swigging from a bottle of Lucozade, his head buried in a copy of the morning's paper. 'Kiddie-Kil er Suspect Stabbed To Death!' was splashed across the front page. When Logan told him why they were there, he grunted and waved at a pile of label ed video tapes.

Settling down at a console with a tape player, Logan and Watson started to wade their way through the videos. The search team that had been here before had made things a lot easier, winding the tapes forward to when Roadkil was murdered. Slowly, Logan and Watson worked their way through them al , the security guard slugging away at his Lucozade and sucking his teeth in the background.

Figures jumped and jerked across the screen, the camera only taking one frame every three or four seconds, making everything look like experimental Canadian animation. The faces were pretty blurred, but it was stil possible to make people out when they got closer to the camera. Half an hour later Logan had recognized a handful of the hundreds of faces that had drifted through various parts of the hospital: the doctor who'd treated Desperate Doug; the nurse who thought he was a monster for beating up an old man; the PC who was supposed to be guarding the geriatric hitman; the doctor who'd declared death on Roadkil last night; the surgeon who'd spent seven hours stitching Logan's insides back together; and Nurse Henderson, her black eye clearly visible on the tape as she stomped along, dressed in her street clothes -

rugby shirt, trainers and jeans, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder.

'How many more tapes have we got to go?' asked Logan as Watson gave a huge yawn and stretch.

'Sorry, sir,' she said, composing herself. 'Two more exit tapes and that's the lot.'

Logan slipped the next one into the machine. A side entrance to the hospital. Faces flashed by, talking and laughing, or people with their heads down as they stepped into the biting wind. Nothing suspicious. The last one was the main A&-E reception area. The tape here ran at normal speed, ready to capture the al too common flare-ups of antisocial behaviour that came with a hard night's drinking. Logan recognized more faces here: he'd arrested a lot of them.

Peeing in doorways, petty larceny, vandalism. One bloke had been done for 'giving himself a treat' in Union Terrace gardens with a wine bottle. But again, there was nothing out of the ordinary here. Not if you didn't count the sudden explosion as two staggering drunks launched themselves at a huge bouncer who had his arm in a makeshift sling. Screams, overturned chairs, more blood. Nurses trying to pry them apart. And then, at last, a blurry police constable charged into the crowded room and put an end to the whole thing with three liberal doses of CS spray.

After that it was mostly rol ing about on the ground, screaming. But no sign of Roadkil 's murderer.

Logan sat back in his seat and rubbed at his eyes. The time stamp on the video said ten-twenty. The PC with the CS spray stayed to make sure everyone was stil alive. Ten twenty-five: PC hero accepts a cup of tea before returning to his vigil outside Roadkil 's door. Ten-thirty...Logan was getting bored with this. They weren't going to find anything on the tapes.

And that was when Nurse Henderson came back into view, the black eye a lot more noticeable. Logan frowned and paused the tape.

'What?' Watson squinted at the tableau.

'Notice something?'

WPC Watson confessed that she didn't, so Logan tapped the screen, right on top of Nurse Henderson, stil carrying the overnight bag. 'She's wearing her uniform.'

'So?'

'She was wearing her civilian clothes in the other tape.'

Watson shrugged. 'So she got changed.'

'She's stil carrying the bag. If she got changed, why didn't she leave her bag in the lockers?'

'Maybe they don't have lockers?'

Logan asked the older security guard if the nurses' changing room had lockers in it.

'Aye,' he said. 'But if you think I'm showin' you a video tape of nurses gettin' changed: you've got another bloody think comin'!'

'This is a murder investigation!'

'I don't care. You're no seein' any tape of naked nurses.'

Logan bristled. 'Listen, sunshine--'

'We've no got cameras in there.' He grinned, showing a perfect set of dentures. 'We tried, but the governors were havin' none of it. Didn't trust us to keep our minds on the job.

Shame. I coulda made a fortune floggin' those tapes...'

The administration centre of the hospital was nicer than the bit sick people occupied.

Here the smel of antiseptic on squeaky linoleum was exchanged for carpet and fresh air. Logan found himself a helpful young woman with bleached-blonde hair and an Irish accent and sweet-talked her into going through last night's shift records.

'Here you go,' she said, pointing to a screenful of numbers and dates on her computer.

'Nurse Michel e Henderson...Did a double shift last night. Got off at about half-nine.'

'Half-nine? Thanks: thanks a lot. You've been very helpful.'

She smiled back at him, pleased to have been of assistance. If there was anything else she could do for him, just give her a cal . Anytime. She even gave him a business card. Luckily Logan didn't see the look on WPC Watson's face as he accepted it.

'Wel ?' she demanded as they rode the lift back to the ground floor.

'Henderson gets off shift at nine-thirty. Nine-fifty she's on camera, changed and ready to go home. Ten-thirty she's back in her uniform again, leaving the building.' Watson opened her mouth, but Logan carried on, grim triumph in his voice. 'We were looking for someone covered in blood. Mrs Henderson just got changed and walked right out of there as if nothing ever happened.'

They grabbed a pair of uniformed officers from the search party and cal ed back to base.

DI Insch was not in the best of moods when the cal was put through: he sounded as if someone had been massaging his backside with red-hot pokers. 'Where the hel have you been?'he demanded, before Logan could get a word in. 'I've been trying to cal you for the last hour!'

'Stil at the hospital, sir. Al mobile phones have to be switched off...' But mostly he'd switched it off so Colin Mil er couldn't cal him back.

'Never mind that! Another kid's gone missing!'

Logan felt his heart sink. 'Oh no...'

'Aye. I want you to get your arse over here to Duthie Park: the Winter Gardens. I'm pul ing in al the search teams. Bloody weather's getting worse, snow's going to make any evidence we've got disappear. This is now our number one priority!'

'Sir, I'm just on my way to arrest Nurse Michel e Henderson--'

'Who?'

'Lorna Henderson's mother. The kid we found in Roadkil 's steading. She was at the hospital last night. She blames Roadkil for her daughter's death and the break-up of her marriage. Motive and opportunity. The Fiscal agrees: apprehension and search warrants.'

There was a moment's silence on the other end of the phone, then a muffled conversation as Insch gave someone else a hard time. And then the inspector was back. 'OK,' he said, sounding as if he was about to clobber someone. 'Pick her up, chuck her in a cel and get your backside over here. Roadkil 's not getting any more dead. This kid might stil be alive.'