A huge metal barn stood off to one side, the far corner collapsed — trapping big round bales of rotting hay beneath.
Logan turned.
Downhill, the fields were a mess. Thigh-high swathes of docken and reeds. Uphill, it wasn’t much better. Whin and broom hunched in jagged green herds, reaching along the fence line as if they planned on devouring the place.
Steel sent another stone on its clattering way. ‘Oh come on, Susan! Don’t blame me, it’s no’ my fault.’
Between the farmyard and the devouring gorse lay the decomposing hulks of about two hundred pig arks, their dull brown semi-circular roofs making a regular grid pattern across the hillside. And right at the top, diggers and bulldozers growled, prowling the ridge.
Posts and ropes and survey poles marked out a strip of land from there, straight down the hill, through the farmyard, the outbuildings, the farmhouse, and out the other side. Wide enough to fit two lanes, a central reservation, and the road verges either side.
Goodbye, Nairhillock Farm.
Logan wandered over to the farmhouse.
‘What?’ Steel raised her voice, no doubt making sure he could hear her. ‘Because, Buggerlugs McRae thinks it’s OK to drag me in on my day off to ferry him about the place... Aye, I told him that too.’
The door was wasp-stripped and swollen. The grey wood flecked with speckles of red paint. He gave it a couple of kicks. It juddered in an inch — so not locked — then wedged to a halt.
‘What? No! Did she?’ A throaty laugh. ‘Bet she did...’
Logan waded into the weeds and around the side. More weeds. And no sign that anyone else had tried to force their way through them.
He pushed between rattling spears of rosebay willowherb, sending puffs of white drifting off into the dank air. Peered in the windows.
A bedroom rotted on the other side of the broken glass, its lath and plaster swollen and distended, freckled with mould and mildew. What was left of a wooden bedframe and a sagging mattress.
The back door was swollen and jammed too.
Living room — peeling wallpaper, manky furniture, a swathe of bird droppings beneath a couple of house martin nests up in the corner.
Kitchen — crumbling units with the doors hanging off, a hole in the wall the size of a bulldog, an ancient range cooker puffed up with rust. The remains of a table and skeletal chairs. All the charm of a biopsy.
He stepped out in front of the building again.
Steel was still mooching about. ‘I don’t know, do I? Depends when Herr Oberleutnant Von Arseface decides to stop wasting everyone’s time with this jiggery piggery pokery.’
Logan crossed the yard, making for the metal farm gate — wide open on sagging hinges.
‘You liked that did you?... Yeah, thought you would.’
He leaned on it, frowning.
All those rusty pig arks, stretching up the hill. Regular as the squares on a chessboard.
The grass was tussocked and dark green, littered with thick-stalked docken — the colour of dried blood. Animal trails snaked away through the undergrowth.
‘So, come on then: what are you wearing?’
Logan climbed onto the gate.
‘Well, that’s no’ very erotic, is it? Joggy bottoms? Least you could do is make something sexy up!’
More dark grass. More docken...
There — a rectangle of lime-green grass, about a hundred feet into the field. From the ground, it’d been hidden behind one of the pig arks, but from up here on the gate it stood out like a neon sign. And now he’d seen it, it was obvious what else was wrong with the scene. The pig ark in front of that lime-green rectangle wasn’t in line with the others. Two-hundred-odd rusty metal semicircles and this was the only one out of place.
‘Ooh, that’s better!’
He clambered down from the gate and waded into the grass, keeping clear of the animal trails. No point disturbing potential evidence.
Steel gave a dirty chuckle. ‘You saucy minx...’
A perfect rectangle of pale green, peppered with the twisted, stunted stalks of docken. Like they’d been covered with something for a long time, sheltered from the light. The grass between it and the misplaced pig ark was flattened and torn, gouged with scrape marks that ended at the mini Anderson-shelter shape.
Logan peered inside.
The grass inside the pig ark was dark green, but rutted and mismatched, filthy with clods of soil. A brown seam marked the joint between the clumps and the rest of the field. Spade marks?
He squatted down, grabbed a handful of grass and pulled. A chunk, about the size of a placemat, lifted away like a grimy toupee revealing churned earth underneath.
Logan curled his top lip. Sniffed.
There was something lurking beneath the rich dark-brown scent of newly turned earth. Something... He leaned in and sniffed again.
Gah!
Rancid meat. Like a stack of suppurating roadkill, or those floorboards at the foot of his stairs.
He stood, wiped his hands on his trousers. Backed away from the ark.
Steel’s voice battered out behind him. ‘Hoy! You finished twatting about yet?’
Logan turned and pulled his phone out.
She tapped her watch. ‘Lunchtime!’
It took three rings for someone to pick up. ‘Control.’
‘Yes. This is Inspector McRae: I’m going to need an SE team.’ He peered into the sty again. ‘And tell them to bring their shovels.’
The sky darkened like a bruise.
The Scenes Examination Transit sat next to Logan’s pool car, its back doors open — exposing the cages of equipment and rows of seating inside. A scruffy blue Fiat Panda four-by-four was parked on the other side, with an immaculate Range Rover nearest the farmhouse.
Isobel checked her watch. ‘Is this going to take long? I have DNA results pending.’
Logan shrugged. ‘Don’t look at me: I told Control to let you know what was going on, not get you out here.’
A blue plastic marquee hid the pig ark from view. The lightning-flash of photography made the walls glow, casting the silhouettes inside as larger-than-life distorted monsters.
Someone in full SOC regalia exited the tent, carrying a blue plastic evidence crate, lugging it towards the farmyard.
The Procurator Fiscal clasped his hands behind his back, feet shoulder-width apart, as if he was at parade rest. Not the tallest of men, in a blue pinstripe suit and long red tie. Glasses, grey hair, and a military moustache. A voice about three times larger than he was: ‘There might not even be a body in there. Cadaverine does not a human cadaver make, it could be a dead dog, or chicken...’ He looked around him, one eyebrow raised. ‘Or pig.’
Oh for God’s sake.
Logan sighed. ‘Look, I called Control and asked for an SE team, OK? It’s not my fault they mobilised everyone and their Uncle Jim.’
‘So you say.’ Isobel folded her arms. ‘I managed to pull what looks like saliva from DS Chalmers’ cheek, two centimetres below her left eye.’
‘What, someone spat on her?’
‘Not spat, no. The saliva acted as an adhesive, fixing the hairs on that part of her cheek upwards: opposite to their direction of growth. So I’d say whoever it was licked her.’
The Procurator Fiscal’s moustache twitched. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope for that the saliva belongs to our killer and he’s in the database?’