79
The pool car pootled along a winding back road in the middle of nowhere, where gorse burned hot-yellow along the sagging drystane dykes and miserable sheep hobbled over sun-baked fields. Definitely the sort of road that you suddenly met tractors coming the other way on. Big ones. That wouldn’t even notice if they drove straight over a manky old Vauxhall, squashing it flat.
Which probably explained why Tufty wasn’t pelting it, with the blues-and-twos going.
Steel lounged in the back seat, making rancid-fish faces and long-suffering sighs. Still wearing that sodding hat. ‘I’mbored.’
Logan gave her a Paddingtoning in the rear-view mirror. ‘No one asked you to come.’
‘Yeah, but Beardy Beattie was being a pain in the patoot, and I’m too Zen to deal with his...plop.’ Putting on a terrible Beattie impersonation for: ‘“Oh, they’re all someanto me!”, “That Logan McRae’s gotideasabove hisstation!”, “Constable Quirrelis a useless, impertinent, syntax-mangling, dollop of shite!”’
Tufty joined the Rear-Mirror Frowning Club. ‘Hey!’ Eyes back on the twisting road. ‘Also: pound in the swear jar.’
‘Doesn’t count if it’s a direct quote.’
Actually, once you got past the heat-stroke sheep andparched fields it was really pretty out here, with plenty of trees and the bracken unfurling in the sunshine.
A teeny clot of seventies bungalows drifted by, complete with sagging sheds and an elderly woman in dungarees grimly chopping firewood for the winter.
Logan went back to his printed-out front page. ‘Pfff...Listen to this: “The sign on the door says, ‘Wendy’s Happy Wishes, Because Every Child Deserves Joy’ but twisted charity boss, Keith Braithwaite,” brackets, forty-one, “had wishes far darker than any child dying of leukaemia could ever imagine.” Talk about melodramatic, sensationalist,wankywriting. “The unassuming businessman led a double life – raising money to grant the wishes of suffering children by day, and prowling Glasgow’s seedier streets for prostitutes and drug addicts to abuse by night...” Who wrote this?’
He had a wee squint at the byline: ‘LEROYMCGUIRE’.
Bet the Pulitzer committee kepthisnumber on speed dial.
Tufty turned a corner and the trees faded back from the road, replaced by fields awash with clumps of hard green reeds. The buckled remains of a ring feeder lay off to the right, like the ribcage of some huge parasite that had died crawling out of the docken and brambles.
Back to the printout:
‘“Braithwaite forged a warrant card for himself, with the fictional name, ‘Detective Sergeant Alexander Nairn’, which he used to lure women into his battered Ford Focus, where he forced them to performlewdsex acts in exchange for not ‘arresting’ them.”’
‘Saaaa-arge?’ Tufty scrunched up one side of his face. ‘If he was foundnot guilty, how come he didn’t sue them?’
Steel sniffed from the back. ‘Wee spud’s got a point. Some scummer talks poop aboutme, like that? I’m going home withevery penny they’ve got. And their house. And having a big hairy mate of mine break both their frudging legs.’
True.
Off in the middle distance, the grubby fields were punctuated by a series of tumbledown cottages with missing roofs and vacant windows.
Mind you...‘Maybe he did? We’ve only got the one article, could’ve taken them formillions.’
‘Here we is.’ Tufty turned left, off the tarmacked road, onto a rough track peppered with potholes. A Mohican of grass ran down the middle and as the car rocked and rolled through the hollows its undercarriage scraped along the raised tufts. Making horrible grinding noises whenever it hit a patch of gravel.
Steel sat forward. ‘What if your man decides he’s no’ wanting to cooperate?Violently.’
‘Really?’ Logan raised an eyebrow. ‘Not like you to be all timid. Frightened of messing-up our new hairdo, are we? Can stay in the car, if you like?’
‘You looking for a smack? I’m no’ “timid”, I’m nine weeks from retirement. That’s when people in action films get shot, or blown up. Thrown off a train or a building.’
The road hooked around to the left, dropping down a short, steep hill. Gorse rose on either side of the car, tinder-box yellow and ready to ignite in the blazing sun – getting taller as the track dipped, till it towered far above the car’s roof.
Tufty peered up at the jagged-green canyon walls. ‘She does got a point, Sarge. People with X-weeks left till retirement isalwaysdropping like flies.’
At the bottom of the hill the land opened up, revealing a higgledy-piggledy graveyard of rusty old farm equipment. Going by the grass and weeds growing around and up through it, this stuff hadn’t moved in months. Maybe years.
Just past the mechanical cemetery, a five-bar metal gate blocked the track ahead.
The wee lad hopped out and scampered over to open it.