Logan banged his palms on the roof.
She snorted and spluttered, sat bolt upright. ‘It wasn’t me! I never touched her boobs, it was...’ Then blinked, wiping drool from the corner of her mouth. ‘What? Where? Eh...?’
‘Start the car: we’re going hill walking.’
Fields swished past the windows in shades of grey and brown and yellowing green as they hammered up the dual carriageway. Water pooled along the drystane dykes, miserable sheep lumbering through the mud.
Logan tried not to flinch as Steel overtook an oil tanker on the inside. Focused on his phone call instead. ‘...I’d been looking at it all wrong — Chalmers wasn’t trying to crack the Ellie Morton case on her own. She was after DI Bell.’
Hardie groaned. ‘Oh in the name of... Because that was more important than a missing three-year-old girl?’
‘You know what she was like.’
‘Not really, but I’m beginning to get the idea.’
‘I need a dog unit: something cadaver trained.’
‘I’ll see what I can do, but they’re all tied up looking for Ellie Morton and Rebecca Oliver.’
‘And a POLSA.’
‘Same answer.’
‘Well... can we draft some bodies in from N or D Division?’
‘What exactly do you think I’ve been trying to do all weekend, painting my toenails?’
Bennachie appeared through the rain, its sides dark and brooding beneath that heavy lid of low grey cloud.
‘All I’ve got is two thirds of a Scene Examination team and a DS who drives like a drunken rally driver on acid.’
Steel grinned across the car at him. ‘Vroom, vroom! Beep, beep!’
‘Logan, every spare officer in the country’s been requisitioned for that stupid anti-capitalist thing in Edinburgh. We’re on our own till Tuesday.’
‘I’m trying to investigate a murder here!’
‘And there’s literally nothing I can do about that: you’re going to have to manage till I can get something sorted, OK? I’m sorry, but this is what it is right now.’
Of course it was.
‘Guv.’ He hung up. Sighed. ‘It never gets any better, does it?’
Steel put on what was probably supposed to be a sympathetic face, but it made her look more like a lecherous uncle. ‘You know what might help? Lunch.’
‘No. No lunch. We don’t have time.’
‘Aye, good luck with that. It’s gone half three and if we don’t stop for lunch soon I’m going to pull over in a layby, murder, and eat you.’
They’d grabbed a table by the big wall of glass that ran along the front of the café, overlooking a rain-drenched patio area and the rain-drenched car park, across the rain-drenched A96 and off to the rain-drenched trees and hills opposite.
Not exactly picturesque.
A fork clattered against the flagstone floor and Shirley bent down to retrieve it. It was... weird seeing her out of the usual SOC get-up. Like catching your granny in a gimp suit. She’d pulled her hair back with an Alice band, her green polo shirt and its funky oniony smell constrained by a pink cardigan.
The rest of the Scene Examination team were equally unfamiliar in civvies: Bouncer, in cords and a replica Peterhead FC shirt, with his long nose buried in the menu again — even though they’d already ordered — one hand smoothing down the thinning hair combed across his bald patch. Charlie had a compact mirror out, fixing his make-up, the top three buttons on his lumberjack shirt open to expose a gold chain nestling amongst thick wiry black hair. Polly’s chair was empty, because the silly sod was outside, wrapped up in a high-viz jacket, sheltering in the lee of the Transit van so she could smoke a cigarette and shout at someone on her mobile phone.
Logan checked his watch. Again. Ten to four. If they didn’t get a shift on it’d be dark before they’d found anything. So they’d have wasted the whole—
‘Will you stop fidgeting?’ Steel didn’t look up from her phone, thumbs poking away at the screen. ‘People got to eat.’
A voice sounded behind Logan’s head: ‘OK, so I’ve got a fish pie, a stroganoff, and a cauliflower cheese?’ Their waitress couldn’t have been much more than thirteen, her teeth all constrained behind the train-track wires of a set of braces.
‘Cauliflower cheese?’ Logan stuck his hand up. ‘That’s—’
‘Mine!’ Steel put her phone down. ‘With extra chips?’
A railroad smile. ‘With extra chips.’
‘Gimme, gimme, gimme...’
The plate clunked down. Shirley took the fish pie, and Bouncer got the stroganoff.
‘Ooh, ta.’
The waitress wandered off and everyone tucked in.
Steel grinned at him, mouth full. ‘You snoozed so you loozed.’
Child.
Logan pulled out his phone, scrolling through his text messages to the one from Dr Frampton:
If you follow this link it will give you the rough area to search!
He tapped the link and waited for the screenshot to download. It was another swirly bruised pattern of blue, yellow, red, purple, and grey overlaid on an OS map of Glen Rinnes.
Frampton had added a couple of big white circles with arrows pointing at them and, ‘TRY LOOKING HERE!’ Both circles sat over red bits on the slopes of Ben Rinnes, what looked like a track running through each.
Shirley leaned over and had a squint at the phone’s screen, a prawn skewered on the end of her fork. ‘Those our search areas? What are they, about two, maybe three hundred feet across? Lot of ground to cover.’
Bouncer grimaced. ‘Tenner says it’s all gorse and heather. Be an absolute nightmare to find anything in that.’
‘Aye, in the rain too.’ Steel shovelled in another mouthful of cheesy cauliflower. ‘I’ll stay in the car. Make sure no one steals it.’
Oh no she sodding wouldn’t.
Logan put his phone in the middle of the table, where everyone could see. ‘DI Bell won’t have buried it under a gorse bush. He’d want somewhere secluded but easy to dig.’
The waitress appeared again, with three more plates. ‘Got a meatloaf, chicken Provençal, and another cauliflower cheese?’
Charlie pointed at Polly’s empty chair. ‘Meatloaf.’ Then at himself. ‘Chicken.’
Logan put his hand up again. ‘I’m the cauliflower cheese.’
She winked at him. ‘I got you extra chips too, so you wouldn’t feel left out.’
‘Thanks.’ It was about time something went right. He stabbed a chip with his fork, using it as a pointer. ‘No one carries a body more than fifty metres from their car, so that’ll cut it down a bit. We start with whichever area’s more difficult to see from the road, then we—’
His phone buzzed, then launched into ‘Space Oddity’ as the word ‘TUFTY’ replaced the map.
So much for that.
‘Why me?’ Logan lowered his chip, picked up his phone and answered it. ‘Tufty? Can it wait? I’m in the middle of something important.’
‘Do you want the bad news, or the worse news?’
‘Let me guess: Norman Clifton’s solicitor hasn’t turned up?’
‘Forensic IT say they can’t even look at Chalmers’ phone for about a fortnight.’
He sagged back in his chair. ‘Oh for God’s sake!’
‘Said they’ve got about two dozen laptops from that hacking farm in Ellon to do first. You know, the ones who leaked all the SNP’s emails, when—’
‘And the worse news?’