Tufty looked up from his computer and stretched, mouth wide open in a huge yawn. He raised his eyebrows at the sight of Logan’s plate and smiled. ‘Why yes, I’d love a little smackerel of something.’
‘Get your own. This is my lunch.’ He plonked the plate and the cup on his desk, then dipped into his fleece pocket for the half dozen plastic sachets of tomato sauce and mayonnaise. ‘Where’s Stinky and Wrinkles?’
‘DS Rennie’s away picking up medical and dental records for Fred Marshall and Rod Lawson, while the esteemed DS Steel has an appointment with a search team and Naughty Norman Clifton’s mum’s house. And I...’ he did a small drumroll on the desk with his fingers, ‘have gone through and reverse look-up’d all the numbers in Chalmers’ call history. It’s in your in-tray, and are you sure none of that buttie’s for me?’
‘Positive.’ Logan opened it and slathered the fish fingers inside with red and white blobs. Took a big crunchy bite. Hot and fishy and delicious. Talking with his mouth full. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear that Hardie’s putting DI Vine in charge of you bunch of miscreants. As of tomorrow morning, you’re his problem.’
‘Not DI Vine!’ Tufty’s face sagged. ‘He’s the police equivalent of having your verrucas and eating them.’
Another bite of buttie, washed down with coffee. Logan held his hand out. ‘Give me your phone.’
‘My phone?’
‘You said you’d copied all of Chalmers’ photos onto it.’
‘Oh, my phone!’ Tufty dug it out. Looked at Logan’s sauce-smeared fingers. ‘Yeah. Maybe after you’re a bit less... sticky?’
Such a baby.
Logan polished off his buttie and scrubbed his hands clean on a wee individual moist towelette pilfered from last night’s takeaway. ‘Happy now?’
‘Cool.’ Tufty scooted his chair over, cradling his phone as if it were a tiny baby and he the proud father. ‘I fitted an extra-large SD card: two hundred and fifty-six gig. Utterly massive storage capacity.’ He laid it on the desk with careful reverence. ‘There’s rumours they’re working on a one terabyte micro SD card, how mind-blowing’s that? I know, right? A thousand gigabytes in something smaller than your—’
‘I’m waiting for the passcode, you idiot.’
‘Ah. Six, six, two, six. If you need an easy reminder it’s the first four digits of Planck’s Constant.’
Weirdos and freaks...
Logan punched the four digits into the smartphone’s screen, then poked the icon for its photo gallery. A folder right at the top was marked, ‘CHALMERS’ PHONE PICS!!!’
He selected it and the screen filled with thumbnails.
‘These in any sort of order?’
‘By date, oldest to newest.’
He scrolled through them with his finger. Flicking faster and faster. There were hundreds and hundreds of the bloody things. Who took that many photos on their mobile phone?
Finally, the screen wouldn’t scroll any more. He’d reached the end of the list.
‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’ He tapped the last thumbnail and a pig ark filled the screen. It was the one from Nairhillock Farm — the rectangle of stunted lime-green grass was clearly visible next to it.
Scrolling backwards produced another eight or nine photos of the same sty, and another dozen of various bits of the farm. The picture after that — or before it, chronologically — was a selfie of Chalmers, staring out across Aberdeen Beach towards the North Sea. Brooding and moody. Auburn hair tangled by the wind.
Next up: three pics of a chicken Caesar salad.
And after that... ‘Oh for God’s sake.’
It was DI Bell, sitting behind the wheel of his Trans-Buchan Automotive Rentals car, parked somewhere in the Bridge of Don, by the look of. The next one was the same. And the one after that.
Logan turned the screen to face Tufty. ‘She found DI Bell days ago! If she’d bothered her backside to tell someone, we could’ve brought him in and he’d still be alive!’
A sage nod. ‘Maybe she’d still be alive too?’
‘Gah...’
Some more photos of Bell coming out of the Netherley Arms, carrying his pickaxe and shovel.
‘This is what happens when you’re not a team player, Tufty.’
Two shots of a big bowl of mushroom tagliatelle.
Then another selfie.
‘You end up ostracised, fired, or...’
Hold on.
Logan zoomed in a bit. The selfie was Chalmers posing in a shiny black bomber jacket with ‘SECURITY’ embroidered on the left breast. Danielle Smith from AberRAD was mugging over her shoulder, sticking her chin out and one eyebrow up. She was wearing an identical jacket.
Tufty sat forward in his chair. ‘Or — dot, dot, dot — what?’
The next photo showed the pair of them again, at some sort of concert, both throwing air-guitar poses — the band an out-of-focus blur in the background. There were another five pictures at the same venue, each one showing Chalmers and Danielle. Chums. Besties. Muckers. Mates. BFFs.
Logan grabbed the desk phone and dialled.
‘Control?’
‘I need a home address for one ex-Detective-Constable Danielle Smith.’
Traffic crawled along the South Deeside Road, winding its way along the course of the River Dee, past the sprawling mass of new-build houses at Blairs. On through the trees, twisting and turning till the view opened out on the right, exposing the gargantuan earthworks where the new bridge reached across the dark and swollen river like a vast grey slab.
Ahead, tail-lights stretched into the distance, brought to a halt by temporary traffic lights and a coned-off section.
Tufty hauled on the handbrake, then slumped in dramatic-fainting-Victorian-lady mode. ‘Please can I stick the siren on?’
‘No. Anyway, it’s not going to make much difference, is it? You overtake something on a bend down here and we’ll end up in the mortuary. And I’m not keen on Isobel ever seeing me naked again.’
‘Ooooh. Is that gossip I sense?’
‘No. And shut up.’
‘Fair enough.’ He puffed out a couple of breaths, lips pursed like a duck’s bum. ‘Course, you know the trouble with this bypass, don’t you? Going to be a green light for development. Aberdeen’s going to spread and spread, till it gets stopped by the road. Like a moat of tarmac around a city state. Or a wall around a megacity from 2000 AD. Or the belt on a really, really fat man.’
Logan stared at him. ‘Honestly, feel free to shut up any time you like.’
‘We could talk about physics instead? Where do you stand on Bohmian mechanics? Cause if it’s right, it’s a totally valid mechanism for explaining wave-particle duality!’
He covered his face with his hands and muffled out a scream.
So this was what it felt like to be DCI Hardie...
A line of temporary metal fencing ran along the side of the road and down both sides of the building plot — the kind made of panels, held upright by concrete blocks, and peppered with ‘WARNING: BUILDING SITE’, ‘AUTHORISED ENTRY ONLY’, and ‘THESE PREMISES PATROLLED BY GUARD DOGS’. It sat on the edge of an older housing estate, the beginnings of a house slowly rising from the ground about thirty yards in at the end of a rough driveway. Nothing but the foundations and a few courses of breeze blocks to mark out the shape.
Stacks of more blocks sat off to one side, along with two pallets of bricks and a big pile of something covered by tarpaulins. Probably timber.
A small caravan was parked halfway down the site, partially surrounded by a wicker fence, its lights shining in the gloomy afternoon. A shadow moved across the drawn curtains. So someone was in.