‘Probably a wheel brace in the boot.’
‘OK, so that’s—’ His phone launched into something upbeat. He pulled it out and answered it. ‘Heather! Talk to me, H, what’s—’ A wince. ‘Oh for God’s sake.’ He turned to Logan. ‘Firearms team are stuck at the Bridge of Don — eighteen-wheeler from Peterhead hit a builder’s truck. Smoked haddock and scaffolding pipe all over the bridge. Fire Brigade and Air Ambulance on the way. Our Guns are backtracking round to Gordon Brae.’
‘What about our Operational Support Unit?’
‘H: what about our Thugs?’ He sagged a good three inches. ‘Couldn’t get any. Or Dogs. They’re all busy dunting in a dealer’s door outside Stonehaven.’
Of course they were.
‘Remember that risk assessment we should’ve done?’
‘Well it’s too late now, isn’t it?’ King turned away and focussed on his phone. ‘Where are the rest of you?... Uh-huh... Uh-huh...’ A sigh. ‘Well, do your best, OK?’ He hung up and slumped in his seat. ‘You want the bad news, or the worse?’
‘Gah...’
‘The only ones that made it across the bridge before the crash were Steel and Tufty. And they’re about as much use as a Plasticine bicycle.’
The traffic thinned out a bit and the speedometer needle crept up to ninety again.
Right, no way they could do this without backup. They’d have to find bodies from somewhere else and hope they’d be enough.
Logan poked at the dashboard’s console — bringing up the address book from his phone. ‘Scroll through that lot till you get to “Stubby”.’
King did, then poked the call button.
Ringing belted out through the speakers, competing with the siren’s din.
Until, finally: ‘Whatever it is, I didn’t do it.’
‘Stubby? It’s Logan.’
‘I know who it is: the name “Sinister Bastard” came up on my—’
‘I need backup, ASAP. My firearms team is stuck in Bridge of Don behind twenty tons of smoked haddock and a mangled builder’s truck.’
‘Firearms? Can’t give you Guns, but I can give you Thugs. Where and when?’
Logan hauled the brakes on, slithering to a halt at a junction marked ‘BRIDGEND ¼ ~ CRUDEN BAY 2’. More morons on the other side of the road, heading south, completely ignorant of the fact that flashing lights and a bloody siren meant GET OUT OF THE WAY.
He looked at King. ‘How do you pronounce the cottage?’
‘“Kee-ow-nn-tri-ey.” Ceann is “head” in Gaelic, and tràigh is “sand”, or “beach”. So Beachhead, give or take.’ King checked his phone. ‘GPS is showing three point one miles.’
‘You get that, Stubby? Ceanntràigh Cottage, south end of Cruden Bay. ASAFBCWP!’
Finally, a minibus coming the other way slammed on its brakes and flashed its lights. Logan held up a hand in thanks and roared across the junction, picking up speed.
‘FB and CW? Wow. OK, we’re on our way.’
‘Thanks, Stubby!’
‘Glen: grab Ted and the wee loon, we’re—’ She hung up.
The Audi shot past not so much a village as a tiny collection of houses, then out through the limits into open countryside. Yellowy grass in parched fields, miserable sheep lolling about in the morning sun. All very flat and open.
Logan overtook a fat man on a scooter. ‘Peterhead station’s about... fifteen minutes north? Ten if they really go for it.’
King looked up from his phone and pointed. ‘Right, there!’
He wrenched the car into the turn, the rear end skittering out on the dusty tarmac, and onto a single-track road. The sign said ‘WEAK BRIDGE’, the narrow road hemmed in on both sides by waist-high stone walls. The Audi got some air in the middle... bumping down on the other side.
King bounced in his seat. ‘You want to wait for this “Stubby” person to show up?’
A hard ninety-degree left, between what looked like a school and a farmyard.
‘We’d be insane to go charging in without backup. Haiden’s built like a pit bull, only without the winning personality. And they’re armed.’
A graveyard, its serried ranks of granite headstones glittering in the sunshine.
King shrugged. ‘Just knives.’
‘Trust me: knives are bad enough. I should know.’
‘Fair enough. Left, here.’
Another ninety-degree turn, swiftly followed by a hard right.
King checked his phone again. ‘Not far now.’
They flashed across a junction, and onto another single-track road. Golden swathes of wheat pressed in on the tarmac. A sliver of North Sea visible on the left where the land dropped away.
Logan accelerated up the hill. ‘So, it’s agreed: we get there, we block the road and we wait for Stubby.’
‘OK.’ A nod. Then King’s eyes bugged, free hand grabbing at the dashboard. ‘Sheep! Sheep!’
Logan stamped on the brakes, wheeching around the big fat ewe wandering down the side of the road.
‘Jesus, that was close.’
The words, ‘NELSON ST. LAB’ appeared on the dashboard screen a second before the Audi’s hands-free kit rang.
King let go of the dashboard to press the green button. ‘Hello?’
‘Inspector McRae?’ Jeffers, their three-quarters-useless DNA analyst.
‘He’s driving.’
Logan shook his head. ‘We’re a bit busy, Jeffers!’
The car crested the brow of a small hill, and the jagged boundary between land and sea was laid out before them. Sunlight sparkling on the bright blue water.
‘I lifted a perfect thumb and forefinger off that coffee cup, but there’s no corresponding prints in the system.’
‘Literally right in the middle of something.’
King pointed through the windscreen at a tiny bungalow perched on the headland near the cliffs, down a dead-end dirt track. ‘Ceanntràigh Cottage. That’s us!’ It sat near the end of Cruden Bay beach, well away from anything else. Isolated. The perfect location for laying low and hiding the people you’d abducted and mutilated. A rusty Mini was parked out front.
Logan slowed to a crawl. ‘You sure?’
‘Look, there’s a car.’ King licked his lips. ‘Do you think it’s them? I think it’s them.’ A grin. ‘We’ve got them!’
The dirt track petered out in front of the cottage, with its grey slate roof and dirty harling walls. A whirly washing line with no clothes on it. What probably used to be a garden, but had turned into a wobbly rectangle of parched grass and dandelions. No other way in or out.
‘Anyway,’ Jeffers’s voice crackled out of the speakers again, ‘so I had a word with Dr McEvoy about the DNA, and she showed me how to expand the search parameters against the national database.’
Blah, blah, blah.
Logan pulled on the handbrake. ‘Can this wait?’
‘Well, it could, I suppose, but thing is: now we know who Mhari Powell really is. Well, we do and we don’t, but it’s a result, isn’t it?’
Logan raised an eyebrow. ‘Come on, then: who is she?
There was a pause. Then, ‘You’re probably not going to like this...’
38
Oh man...
Haiden rolls off Mhari and lies there, breathing hard, sweat cooling in the air.
Jesus. Yes. Hoo...
Wow.
He grins at the ceiling.