Cold Granite (6 page)

'Business before pleasure, eh?' Mil er dug a fancy dictaphone out of his pocket and pointed it at them. 'You've got another missing kid. Are you--'

Logan frowned. 'How did you know another child's gone missing?'

Mil er pointed out at the rain-soaked road. 'You've got patrol cars out broadcastin' the kid's description! How do you think I found out?'

Logan tried not to look as embarrassed as he felt.

Mil er winked. 'Ah, don't worry about it. I make an arse of myself al the time, but.' He held the dictaphone up again. 'Now, is this disappearance connected to the recent discovery of--

'

'We have no comment to make at this time.'

'Oh, come on!'

Behind Mil er another car had pulled up, this one with the BBC Scotland logo emblazoned down the side. The media were going to have a field day. Yesterday a little boy turned up dead, today another one had gone missing. They'd al be jumping to the same conclusion as Mil er. He could see the headlines now: 'HAS P AEDOPHILE K ILLERS TRUCK A GAIN?' The Chief Constable would have a fit.

Mil er turned to see what Logan was staring at and froze. 'How about if--'

'I'm sorry, Mr Mil er. I can't give you any further details at this time. You'l just have to wait for the official statement.'

He didn't have to wait long. Five minutes later DI Insch's mud-splattered Range Rover pul ed up. By then a little cordon of newspaper and television people had appeared, forming a wall of microphones and lenses at the foot of the steps, huddling beneath large black umbrel as.

Just like a funeral.

Insch didn't bother getting out of his car, just wound down his window and waved Logan over. The cameras turned to watch Logan cross the road and stand in the rain beneath his borrowed umbrel a by DI Insch's window, trying not to wince at the smel of wet spaniel that oozed out of the car's interior.

'Aye, aye,' said the inspector, nodding towards the ring of cameras. 'Looks like we're going to be on the tel y tonight.' He ran a hand over his bald head. 'Good job I remembered to wash my hair.'

Logan forced a smile. The scars crisscrossing his stomach were starting to bother him as last night's punch in the guts made its presence felt.

'Right,' said Insch. 'I've been authorized to release a statement to the media. Before I do, is there anything I need to know that's going to make me look like an arse here?'

Logan shrugged. 'Far as we can tel the mother's being straight with us.'

'But?'

'Don't know. The mother treats the kid like he's made of glass. Doesn't get out on his own. Al his toys are for a kid two years younger than he is. I get the feeling she's smothering the life out of him.'

Insch raised an eyebrow, causing the pink, hairless skin of his head to wrinkle. He didn't speak.

'I'm not saying he hasn't been snatched.' Logan shrugged. 'But stil ...'

'Point taken,' said Insch, smoothing himself down. Unlike the filthy, smel y Range Rover he was immaculately turned out in his best suit and tie. 'But if we play this down, and he turns up al strangled with his wil y cut off, we'l be up to our ears in shite.'

Logan's phone went off in an explosion of beeps and whistles. It was the Queen Street station. They'd picked up Duncan Nicholson.

'What...? No.' Logan smiled, the phone clamped to his ear. 'No, stick him in a detention room. Leave him there to sweat til I get there.'

By the time Logan and WPC Watson got back to Force Headquarters a ful -blown search was underway. DI Insch had more than trebled the six uniforms Logan had drafted in to help and now more than forty police men and women, four dog-handlers and their alsatians, were out in the freezing rain, searching every garden, public building, shed, bush and ditch between Richard Erskine's home and the shops on Victoria Road.

The desk sergeant told them that Duncan Nicholson had been stuck in the mankiest detention room in the place. He'd been there for nearly an hour.

Just to be on the safe side, Logan and WPC Watson stopped off at the canteen for a cup of tea and a bowl of soup. Lingering over the pea and ham while Nicholson sat in a room, al alone, and worried.

'Right,' said Logan, when they'd finished. 'How'd you like to drag Mr Nicholson into an interview room? Give him the silent glower routine? I'l check up on the search and pop along in about, fifteen, twenty minutes. He should be bricking it by then.'

Watson stood, cast one last longing look at the thick slices of sponge pudding and steaming yel ow custard, and headed off to make Duncan Nicholson's life even more miserable.

Logan got an update from the admin officer in the incident room: the search teams hadn't turned up anything and neither had the door-to-door interviews. So Logan grabbed a cup of tea from the machine in the hal way and drank it slowly, fil ing in the time. Then took another painkil er. When twenty minutes had elapsed he headed down to interview room two.

It was smal and utilitarian, done up in a nasty shade of beige. Duncan Nicholson sat at the table, opposite a silent, scowling, WPC Watson. He was looking very uncomfortable.

The room was no smoking and Nicholson obviously had a problem with that. There was a pile of shredded paper on the table in front of him and as Logan entered Nicholson jumped, sending little scraps of white fluttering to the scuffed blue carpet.

'Mr Nicholson,' said Logan, sinking down into the brown plastic chair next to Watson.

'Sorry to keep you waiting.'

Nicholson shifted in his chair, little beads of sweat sparkling on his upper lip. He wasn't a day over thirty-two, but looked closer to forty-five. The hair on top of his head was shaved down to the bone, blue-grey stubble showing between shiny patches of pink scalp. Each of his ears had been pierced in at least three places. The rest of him looked as if it had been thrown together on a Monday morning before the factory was properly awake.

'I've been here for hours!' he said, mustering up as much indignity as he could. 'Hours!

There was nae bog! I wis burstin'!'

Logan frowned. 'Dear, dear, dear. There's obviously been some mistake, Mr Nicholson.

You came forward of your own free wil , didn't you? No toilet? I'l have a word with the duty sergeant. Make sure it doesn't happen again.' He smiled a disarming, friendly smile. 'But we're al here now, so shal we get started?'

Nicholson nodded, smiling a little, feeling reassured. Feeling better.

'Constable, would you do the honours?' Logan passed Watson two brand new audiotapes and she unwrapped them, sticking one in each side of the recorder bolted to the wall before doing the same with a pair of videotapes. The machine clicked and bleeped as she pressed 'Record'.

'Interview with Mr Duncan Nicholson,' she said, going through the standard names, date and time.

Logan smiled again. 'Now then, Mr Nicholson, or can I cal you Duncan?'

The man on the other side of the table cast a nervous glance at the camera in the corner of the room, over Logan's shoulder. At last he nodded his shaved head.

'So, Duncan, you found the body of David Reid last night?'

Nicholson nodded again.

'You have to say something, Duncan,' said Logan, his smile getting wider by the minute.

'The tape can't hear you if you nod.'

Nicholson's eyes darted back to the staring glass eye of the video camera. 'Er...Oh, sorry.

Yeah. Yeah, I did. I found him last night.'

'What were you doing down there in the middle of the night, Duncan?'

He shrugged. 'I wis...takin' a walk. You know, had a row with the wife and went for a walk.'

'Down the riverbank? In the dead of night?'

The smile started to fade. 'Er, yeah. I go down there sometimes to, you know, think an'

stuff.'

Logan crossed his arms, mirroring the PC sitting next to him. 'So you went down there to think. And just happened to fal over the murdered body of a three-year-old boy?'

'Er, yeah...I just...Look, I...'

'Just happened to fal over the murdered body of a three-year-old boy. In a waterlogged ditch. Hidden beneath a sheet of chipboard. In the dark. In the pouring rain.'

Nicholson opened his mouth once or twice, but nothing came out.

Logan left him sitting in silence for almost two minutes. The man was getting more and more fidgety by the second, his shaved head now as sweaty as his upper lip, the smel of second-hand garlic oozing out of him in nervous waves.

'I'd been...drinking, OK? I fel down, nearly kil ed myself goin' down that bloody bank.'

'You fel down the bank, in the pouring rain, and yet when the police arrived there wasn't a speck of mud on you! You were clean as a whistle, Duncan. That doesn't sound like someone who's just fal en down a muddy bank and into a ditch, now does it?'

Nicholson ran a hand over the top of his head, the stubble making a faint scritching noise in the oppressive interview room. Dark blue stains marked his armpits.

'I...I went home to cal you. I got changed.'

'I see.' Logan switched the smile back on again. 'Where were you on the thirteenth of August this year, between half past two and three in the afternoon?'

'I...I don't know.'

'Then where were you between the hours of ten and eleven this morning?'

Nicholson's eyes snapped open wide. 'This mornin'? What's goin' on? I didnae kil anyone!'

'Who said you did?' Logan turned in his seat. 'Constable Watson, did you hear me accuse Mr Nicholson of murder?'

'No, sir.'

Nicholson squirmed.

Logan produced a list of al the children registered missing in the last three years and placed it on the table between them.

'Where were you this morning, Duncan?'

'I was watching the tel y.'

'And where were you on,' Logan leant forward and read off the list, 'the fifteenth of March between six and seven? No? How about the twenty-seventh of May, half-four to eight?'

They went through every date on the list, Nicholson sweating and murmuring his answers. He wasn't anywhere he said. He was at home. He was watching television. The only people who could vouch for his whereabouts were Jerry Springer and Oprah Winfrey. And they were mostly repeats.

'Wel , Duncan,' said Logan when they'd got to the end of the list, 'doesn't look too good, does it?'

'I didn't touch those kids!'

Logan sat back and tried DI Insch's silent treatment again.

'I didn't! I fuckin' came to you lot when I found that kid, didn't I? Why the hel would I do that if I kil ed him? I wouldn't kil a kid: I love kids!'

WPC Watson raised an eyebrow and Nicholson scowled.

'Not like that! I've got nephews and nieces, OK? I wouldn't fuckin' do something like that.'

'Then let's go back to the start.' Logan shoogled his chair in closer to the table. 'What were you doing wandering about on the banks of the Don in the middle of the night in the pouring rain?'

'I told you I was pissed...'

'Why don't I believe you, Duncan? Why do I get the feeling that when the report comes back from Forensics there's going to be evidence linking you to the dead boy?'

'I didn't do anything!' Nicholson slammed his hand down on the tabletop, making the little pile of shredded paper scatter and fal like snow.

'We've got you, Mr Nicholson. You're only kidding yourself if you think you're going to talk your way out of it. I think a little time in the cel s is going to do you the world of good. We'l talk again when you're ready to start tel ing the truth. Interview terminated at thirteen twenty-six.'

He got WPC Watson to escort Nicholson down to the cel block, hanging on in the interview room until she returned.

'What do you think?' he asked.

'I don't think he did it. He's not the right type. Not smart enough to lie convincingly.'

'True.' Logan nodded. 'But he's lying al the same. No way he was down there having a bit of a late night stagger. You get plastered, you don't go stomping about down the riverbank in the pissing rain for a laugh. He was down there for a reason, we just don't know what it is yet.'

Aberdeen harbour slid by the car window, grey and miserable. A handful of offshore supply vessels were tied up along the docks, their cheery yel ow-and-orange paintwork dul ed by the pouring rain. Lights glinted in the semi-darkness of the afternoon as containers were winched off lorries and onto the waiting boats.

Logan and WPC Watson were heading back to Richard Erskine's house in Torry.

Someone had actual y remembered seeing the missing boy. A Mrs Brady had seen a smal blond boy wearing a red anorak and blue jeans crossing the waste ground behind her house. It was the only break they'd had.

The half past two news was about to come on and Logan turned the car radio on, catching the end of an old Beatles track. Not surprisingly Richard Erskine's disappearance was given top bil ing. DI Insch's voice boomed out of the speakers asking members of the public to come forward with information about the child's whereabouts. He had a natural flair for the dramatic, as everyone who'd seen him in the annual Christmas panto knew, but he managed to keep it in check as the newsreader asked the obvious question:

'Do you think Richard has been taken by the same paedophile who kil ed David Reid?'

'At this moment we're just looking to find Richard safe and sound. If anyone has any information please cal our hotline on oh eight hundred, five, five, five, nine, nine, nine.'

'Thank you, Inspector. In other news: the trial of Gerald Cleaver, the fifty-six-year-old former male nurse from Manchester, continues today under tight security fol owing death threats made to the accused's solicitor, Sandy Moir-Farquharson. Mr Moir-Farquharson spoke to Northsound News...'

'Here's hoping it's not just an idle threat.' Logan reached out and snapped the radio off before the lawyer's voice could come through the speakers. Sandy Moir-Farquharson deserved to get death threats. He was the weasel y little shite who'd argued leniency for Angus Robertson. Who'd tried to claim that the Mastrick Monster wasn't entirely to blame. That he'd only kil ed those women because they'd reacted violently against his advances. That they'd dressed provocatively. That they'd been, basical y, asking for it.