A Litter of Bones Read online

“It’s fine,” Logan told him. He beckoned the young DC closer. “Come here.”

  Tyler hesitated.

  “Hurry up. Come here,” Logan said.

  All eyes watched as Tyler approached the DCI. He stopped a couple of feet away, eyeing the bigger man warily.

  “You want to hit me?” Logan asked.

  Tyler said nothing.

  “Do you? Because you can. I’ll give you one free shot. One-time offer. No consequences, no repercussions. One free smack in the mouth, punch in the guts, or whatever you prefer,” Logan said. “Ideally, not the balls, but whatever you think’ll help.”

  Tyler’s gaze flicked to DI Forde. Ben offered him nothing in response.

  “Come on, son. Get it over with,” Logan told him. “The sooner you get it out of your system, the sooner we can get back to work.”

  He jutted his jaw out, offering it as a target. “So, hurry up. Hit me.”

  “I don’t want to hit you,” Tyler said.

  “No? Last chance.”

  Tyler shook his head. One of Logan’s meat slab hands fell on his shoulder.

  “I made the wrong call, son. That’s on me,” the DCI told him. “We can talk about it later. But for now, how about we stop with the squabbling and catch this prick?”

  There was a nod from Tyler, a straightening of his back, a firming-up of the lines of his face.

  “Yes, boss,” he said. “I’m all for that.”

  “Alright, then,” Logan said. “Go grab a fresh shirt, take a minute to get yourself cleaned up, then get back here.”

  Tyler didn’t argue. As he headed for the door, Logan called over to the DS Boyle and DC Innes from CID. “Get anywhere with Mr Bamber?”

  “Not really,” said Boyle. “The most he’s been able to tell us about the person who gave him the teddy was that it was, ‘some guy,’ which doesn’t really narrow it down.”

  “Narrows it to half the population,” DS McQuarrie pointed out.

  “Well, aye, there’s that,” agreed Boyle. “We’re bringing in a sketch artist to see if we can get some sort of picture.”

  “How long will that take? Do they have to come down the road from Inverness, too?”

  “Normally, sir, aye. But, we’ve asked one of the art teachers from the high school to come in and have a bash while we wait. He used to be Bamber’s teacher for a while. Reckons he might be able to get something out of him.”

  “Good. OK. Keep on that, give me a shout when you have something more,” Logan told them. “Can you also coordinate with the Scene of Crime team up at the house? Anything that comes in, no matter what it is, I want to see it. Even if it’s their lunch order, I want to see it.”

  “Got it, sir,” said Boyle. He and DC Innes got to their feet. “We’ll be in the office next door. We’re already set up, no sense moving.”

  “Aye. Time is against us, lads,” Logan reminded them. “Best case scenario, Connor has maybe twelve hours left. Worst case…? Well, let’s not dwell on the worst case. Twelve hours. Keep that in mind. And, let’s not forget, that this is no longer just about Connor Reid. We’re also investigating the attempted murder of one of our colleagues. One of us.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re on it, sir.”

  Even before the CID boys had reached the door, Logan had wheeled around to address DI Forde and DS McQuarrie. “Right. What else? Anything on HOLMES yet?”

  “Shit. Forgot to check, sir,” said Caitlyn. “Sorry, just… with Hamza, and everything.”

  “Don’t apologise, Detective Sergeant, just look,” Logan instructed. “Constable Bell, get onto the local paper, will you? They’re running a story about a woman who keeps losing her cats. Try to find out where she lives, then get a description of the cats, see if any of them match ours?”

  “You think the cat’s connected, sir?” Sinead asked.

  “Maybe. Petrie had a habit of torturing them. Dogs, too. Can’t hurt to look into it.”

  “Right,” said Sinead, just happy to finally have a purpose. She reached for her mobile, but Logan stopped her.

  “Take a desk. Get set-up.”

  Sinead looked from the DCI to the vacant desks, then back again. “Uh, right. OK, sir. Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me, just get it done,” Logan told her.

  As she hurried off, Logan turned on his heels to face DI Forde.

  “Why was Connor there, Ben?” he said, voicing his thoughts aloud. “We didn’t even know about the Petrie connection to the place until today. How did someone else? And why use there to hide him?”

  “It’s out of the way. No-one to see you coming and going,” said Ben.

  “But there are loads of places like that,” Logan said, gesturing to the map on the Big Board. “Why that house? It has to be the Petrie connection, but… I don’t get it. The bear, the envelope, and now the house. It has to be someone close to the case. Someone who’s been involved from early on.”

  “And someone savvy enough to be able to figure out the house thing before we did,” Ben added.

  “No answer at the paper, sir,” Sinead called over from the desk she had installed herself at.

  “Damn. There’s a journalist.” Logan clicked his fingers a few times, searching for the name. “Fisher. Tom Fisher. He might be out front. See if you can dredge him up.”

  “Aw, shite,” Ben said, jumping to his feet.

  “What now?”

  “He’s not out front. None of them are. They’re at the hotel for the press conference. The Gozer wants you sitting in.”

  “Bollocks. What time?” Logan asked, checking his watch.

  “Twelve.”

  “Twenty minutes. How far away is it?”

  “Maybe five,” said Ben. He looked the DCI up and down. “You going to smarten yourself up a bit?”

  “For the press? What do you think?”

  Ben managed a grim smile. “Good man.”

  “Right, fifteen minutes,” Logan boomed. He nodded an acknowledgement at Tyler as he returned to the room, fastening the top button of a fresh shirt. “How far can we get in the next quarter of an hour? What else have we got?”

  “Something I forgot to mention, boss,” Tyler began, pulling his tie over his head. “There were bones in the house. In a cupboard at the top of the stairs.”

  Logan stopped, turned on his heels. “Bones?”

  “Yeah. And not like a cat or a dog, or whatever. Bigger. Bloodstains on the floor, too. Old. Way back.”

  Logan felt the room undulate around him. He leaned on the desk, steadying himself for a moment.

  Dylan Muir.

  Finally.

  “We’ll let the crime scene lot worry about that for now,” Logan said, dragging his thoughts back to the present. “Let’s concern ourselves with the living for the moment.”

  “Update in, sir,” said Caitlyn, looking up from her screen. “DNA results back from the teddy bear. As suspected, nothing connecting it with Ed Walker. They’ve got a match for Forbes Bamber, but we already knew he made the delivery.”

  “Anyone else?” Logan asked.

  Caitlyn’s gaze returned to the screen. She stared at it for a while, her mouth moving silently, like she was trying to figure out how to describe what she was seeing.

  “Detective Sergeant?” Logan prompted.

  “Aye, sir. Sorry. Three other samples. One of them hasn’t yet been identified.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Owen Petrie, sir,” Caitlyn replied. “And Matthew Dennison.”

  She raised her gaze until it met Logan’s. He stared back at her, too stunned to speak.

  “Petrie’s third victim.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  He could hear them. Moving. Talking. Laughing. Out there, beyond the door, beyond his little cube of darkness and fear.

  Beyond his prison.

  He was hungry and thirsty, his stomach cramping, his lips cracked and dry. They felt raw against the rough material of the gag, like it was sandpap
ering them down, whittling them out of existence.

  The boy had put the cat in with him a few hours ago, set it on his lap, watched and laughed as he’d sobbed into the mouth covering.

  When the door had closed, he’d tried to shake the cat off him, but the ropes were too tight, and his legs were asleep. There was nothing he could do but sit there with it on him, feeling what was left of its life soak into his trouser-legs, whimpering whenever it twitched and spasmed.

  Once, it had mewed angrily, its front claws scratching at his legs. He’d screamed and screamed and screamed, but nobody had come. Nobody had heard.

  Or nobody had cared.

  After a while, the cat stopped fighting. It stopped breathing shortly after. He’d heard the life leave it in a throaty gasp, and had cried for a while. Tears of relief, and of helplessness, and of hot, burning shame.

  And of fear, of course. The ever-growing sense of dread that told him no one was coming. No one was going to save him.

  He would die here, alone and afraid, like the cat on his lap.

  The voices became louder. Closer. His breath wheezed through his nose, adrenaline flooding him, preparing him for what might come next. For what they might do.

  There was a knock on the cupboard door. Sharp, but jolly.

  “Everything alright in there?”

  The man’s voice. That hoarse, scratchy rasp.

  “You decent?”

  The door opened. Two faces looked in at him. Both were smiling. Happy. Excited.

  Eager.

  Tears came then. He thought he’d run out of them hours ago, but they flowed freely, caressing the lines of his cheeks before soaking into the gag.

  “Look who I found,” said the boy. He held up a threadbare grey teddy bear, then moved its head as if making it speak.

  “Hello, Matthew,” the boy said in a high-pitched baby-voice. “Haven’t you been naughty, naughty?”

  And there, with the man and the boy leering in him, Matthew Dennison knew that the end was near.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Thank you for coming. We’re going to keep this brief. I have a short update to provide you with, then I’ll take one or two questions alongside DCI Logan, who is heading up the investigation.”

  Logan nodded, just briefly, at the sound of his name. Instinct, nothing more.

  Physically, he was present. Physically, he was sitting beside the Gozer at a long table in a hotel not far from where he’d nabbed Ed Walker, gazing out at a sea of faces, microphones, and cameras.

  Physically, he was right there in the room.

  Mentally, though, Logan was elsewhere. His mind had been a whirlwind since Caitlyn had dropped the DNA bombshell, thoughts crashing together as he struggled to come up with an explanation.

  It didn’t make sense. None of it made sense.

  The teddy bear that had been left at the Reids’ house carried the DNA of Owen Petrie, a man who had been in near solitary confinement for the best past of a decade.

  Worse, it carried the DNA of Matthew Dennison, a boy who had been murdered all the way back in 2005, and whose remains had been buried four years later in a small private ceremony that Logan had been invited to but had the good grace not to attend.

  DS McQuarrie was getting in touch with Matthew’s parents to see if the teddy bear looked familiar. Logan suspected that it would turn out to have belonged to the boy.

  Which meant… what? How had someone come into possession of it? Why here? Why now?

  What did any of it mean?

  He kept an ear open, listening as the Gozer rattled off the usual stuff. Family devastated. Support of the community. A number of promising leads.

  Logan sat up straighter at the mention of DC Khaled’s name, watched the vultures scrambling to write down all the lurid details.

  He recognized a few of the faces, but most were new. The old print guard had been getting gradually pushed out for a while now, their ranks thinning year-on-year. Logan had no sympathy for them, but if there was one thing he hated more than old school print journalists was new school digital ones. At least a handful of the journos in the room were from online-only outlets.

  Fucking bloggers.

  “And now, we’ll take a few questions,” said the Gozer. “Although, you’ll appreciate we don’t have a lot of time.”

  A dozen or more hands raised. Detective Superintendent Mackenzie looked around for a friendly face, then settled on a woman near the front. “Yes.”

  “Can you confirm if the abduction is related to the Owen Petrie ‘Mister Whisper’ investigation from a decade ago?” she asked. “And, if so, what’s the connection?”

  Logan waited for the Gozer to respond, then realised that the Detective Superintendent was looking to him for answers.

  “Oh.” Logan sat forward. “We don’t believe there’s a direct connection at the moment, as such.”

  “But there are similarities?” the female journalist pressed.

  Logan nodded. “We think we’re looking at a copycat situation. It’s ten years since Petrie’s arrest. Twenty since he abducted his first victim. Fourteen since he killed Matthew Dennison, his last victim. Or the last one that we know of. We think someone is trying to capitalize on Petrie’s—and I hesitate to use this word—‘fame.’”

  “Why would they do that?”

  Logan scratched his chin. “Why do any of them do any of it? Notoriety? To get their kicks?”

  “We wouldn’t like to speculate at this time,” said the Gozer, shooting Logan a warning look. “Next question.”

  The hands went back up again. The Gozer considered the alternatives, but it was Logan who singled one out. Tom Fisher, the local boy. Might as well give him a second chance to shine.

  “Yes?”

  Fisher looked taken aback at having been picked. “Um…”

  His eyes went to his notes.

  “Did you have a question?” Logan pressed, sensing the impatience and growing resentment from the other journalists.

  “Uh, yes. Yes. I did. I just… Yes.”

  Fisher cleared his throat. His cheeks were reddening before Logan’s eyes, like someone had just slapped him on both sides of his face.

  “It was… I was just going to ask, is it possible that you got the wrong man? Owen Petrie, I mean? Is it possible that he wasn’t guilty of what he was guilty of?” Fisher shook his head, annoyed at himself. “At what he was accused of, I mean? Could it have been someone else?”

  “No,” said Logan, dismissing the question with a shake of the head and a scowl.

  “Right. It’s just… With the…” Fisher swallowed, wilting under Logan’s gaze. “How can you be sure?”

  “Because the court found him guilty,” said the Gozer, spotting the warning signs in Logan’s body language and interrupting before the situation could escalate. “Because he confessed to all three murders, and because we were able to gather overwhelming evidence that proved his guilt beyond any measure of reasonable doubt.”

  “Right. Right. Cool,” said Fisher. His blush deepened. “I mean, not ‘cool,’ but… Thank you. Thanks. That was my only question. Thanks.”

  More hands shot up. Logan watched Tom Fisher scribbling down the answer the Gozer had given in his notepad. Or, attempting to, anyway. He was having problems getting his pen to write by the looks of things, and kept shaking it every few seconds to get the ink flowing.

  Fair play to the kid, though. The question had taken Logan by surprise. He’d have expected that sort of thing from Ken Henderson, but not from a snottery-nosed wee…

  Logan’s eyes flicked across the faces of the reporters, searching for Henderson but failing to find him. He wasn’t there. Henderson wasn’t at the conference.

  Arguably the one man on Earth who had invested as much of his career into the Petrie case as Logan had, wasn’t there.

  “DCI Logan?”

  Logan became aware of everyone in the room watching him, waiting for an answer to a question he hadn’t heard.
r />   “Huh?”

  “Do you want to field that one?” the Gozer pressed.

  Logan blinked. The legs of his chair scraped across the vinyl flooring as he pushed it back. He stood up, leaned on the table, and glowered out at the media.

  “Henderson,” he said. “Has anyone seen Ken Henderson?”

  Chapter Forty

  Logan rapped his knuckles against the Big Board.

  “Where’s my picture of Henderson? Come on, come on, people.”

  “Coming, sir,” said DS McQuarrie, grabbing a sheet of A4 from the printer the moment the machine spat it out. “It’s a blow-up from the web, so not great but—”

  “It’ll do,” said Logan, glancing at it then motioning for her to put it on the board. He shot looks at Ben, Tyler, and Sinead, making sure they were paying attention.

  “Kenneth Henderson, fifty-eight, freelance journalist and all-round pain in the arse. Made his name reporting on the Petrie case, and dined out on it for years after. Knows almost as much about the investigation as I do. I’ve now been told that he’s even interviewed Petrie a couple of times in the past few years for follow-up stories, although they never saw the light of day.”

  “Petrie could’ve told him about the house,” suggested Ben.

  “And the envelopes,” added Tyler from his desk.

  “Aye, it’s a theory,” Logan agreed. “We said it had to be someone involved in the original investigation. Someone close. They didn’t get much closer than Henderson. Our priority now is finding him. Tyler, find out what car he’s driving, get everyone on the look-out for it. Circulate a digital copy of his picture, too. And get word down the road to Glasgow. Check out his old haunts. I want the bastard sweating in an interview room within the hour.”

  “On it, boss.”

  Ben ran a hand through his thinning hair, teasing what was left of it around his fingers. “You really think he’d do something like this? Henderson?” the DI asked. “I mean, he’s an arsehole, no doubt about that, but this… And with Hamza…? That’s way beyond arsehole territory.”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t,” Logan admitted. “By all accounts, he’s had it rough, lately. Job’s not as safe as it once was. He needs a scoop, and what better than the Ghost of Mister Whisper? He’s built a career on Petrie’s story. Maybe he thought another chapter would help put him back on top.”