Just the sort of thing a young man would liberally squirt himself with, because the adverts liked to pretend it attracted women like black trousers attract cat hair.
...
Bloody hell.
Logan grabbed Tufty, shoving him towards the front door. ‘Go! Back of the building: right now!’
The wee loon legged it, banging out into the stairwell as Logan grabbed the bedroom door handle.
Locked.
‘Keira?’ Rattling the thing. ‘I know he’s in there!’
Nothing but R&B.
Not today.
Logan took a step back and slammed his boot into the door, just beneath the lock.
BOOM.
The thing flew open, and he stumbled into a messy pit with clothes on the carpet, and a collection of hairy mugs mouldering away on a kid-sized desk. There was a zoo’s-worth of stuffed animals spilled across the floor, as if some sort of massacre had occurred.
A striped flag hung above the unmade bed – one band eachof red, yellow, and green, with a black star in the middle. The sheets were crumpled, the pillows in disarray.
And the whole place reeked of Lynx Africa, sex, cigarettes, and shampoo.
In normal times, the room’s only window would’ve looked out over the parking area at the back of the block, but the rear of the building was clad in scaffolding too, hiding the view behind metal poles, tarps, and scaff-boards.
The window lay wide open; no sign of Keira Longmore.
Bloody hell.
Logan lunged over there and clambered out onto the scaffolding boards.
They’d braced the whole structure against the wall with wooden batons in every other window opening, wedging it into place. One of those orange-plastic-chute things zig-zagged down to a rubble-filled skip. A ladder sat off to the right, going up to the top floor and down to the first.
And there was Keira: clambering down it to the next level, wearing a biker jacket and a ‘NUCLEARKILLSYNDROME’ T-shirt, a pair of jeans clutched in one hand, a pair of red trainers in the other.
‘HOY!’
Her head snapped up and she froze, top half poking up through the gap in the boards.
Logan strode over there. ‘There’s police officers at the bottom, waiting for you, so you can clamber down the ladder with your pants on show, if you like.’ Shrug. ‘Might be alittlemore dignified going down the stairs with your trousers on?’
Keira closed her eyes, pressed her forehead against the ladder’s rung, and swore and swore and swore and swore...
Logan marched Keira out through the stairwell door at the front of the building – now all glammed-up in trousers,trainers, and this season’s must-have accessory: handcuffs – to find Steel waiting for him. Glowering.
Bits of twig and leaves poked out of her nice new hairdo, and she looked even more rumpled than normal. ‘Blah!’
He steered Keira towards the pool car. ‘Where the hell were you?’
Steel spat out a sliver of greenery. ‘Waiting round back, just in case. Cos, unlike you, Irememberwhat happened at MacGarioch’s flat.’
‘Then where is he?’
‘Some bugger landed on me! Didn’t see anything but a naked hairy arse, andbang: I’m facedown in the bloody undergrowth.’ She pulled a twig from her curls. ‘Then that stupid wee spud’s sprinting past, going“Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo!”chasing after the bastard.’