He clunked the door shut behind him, and got the hell out of there...
The pool car skirled along Market Street, siren wailing, blue lights flashing, as Detective Sergeant Simon Rennie drove like a coked-up squirrel.
His peroxide-hedgehog hair stood to attention at the front, but was deserting its post at the back. He’d put on a bit of weight since the third kid, but had tried to compensate for the extra chin with a little bleached Vandyke beard. Which was a bit...mid-life-crisis-ish. As if Spike fromBuffy the Vampire Slayerhad awoken one morning to discover he’d somehow turned into Guy Fieri.
Tufty sat in the back, munching away on the rescued bourbon biscuit as a reward for rescuing Logan from the MAPPA Meeting Of Doom.
Which left Logan in the passenger seat, one hand wrapped around his Airwave handset, the other around the grab handle above the door as Rennie threw them around the four-way junction at the end of the road – narrowly missing a massive articulated lorry hauling offshore containers away from the harbour – and roared off down North Esplanade West.
‘Will you slow down! Already got one corpse on the go today, don’t need another three.’ Logan pressed the Airwave’s button again, voice raised above the siren. ‘I don’t care if they found the body or not, they don’t get to film the bloody thing: keep them back. We need that scene secured!’
Offices and industrial units flashed by on the right, a line oftrees and the shining ribbon of the River Dee on the left – with the granite-grey mass of Torry lurking behind it.
Steel’s voice grated through the Airwave.‘Oh, aye, thanks for pointing that out. Here was me selling tickets and letting everyone take selfies with the remains. What a silly-billy I am!’
‘We got an ETA on the Procurator Fiscal, or the Pathologist yet?’
‘How the buggerlumping hell would I know?’
Tufty sooked air through his biscuity teeth. ‘That’s a quid in the jar.’
The pool car flashed through the lights outside the big Jewsons in a blare of angry horns.
A bunch of fish workers were out lounging on the riverbank, still dressed in their overalls, blood-and-guts aprons, hairnets, and wellies. Enjoying a tea break in the sunshine. They sat up to watch the car go by.
Tufty gave them a cheery wave.
‘No’ my job to do the managerial stuff, remember? I’m just a lowlySergeant.’
‘Can you grow up and do your job?’
The car wheeched on, past a bunch of glass-and-concrete office blocks with their glittering modern facades, trying to kid on there weren’t fish-processing units hidden in the little side streets behind them. With big plastic bins full of fish guts, heads, and bones for the seagulls to feast upon.
Mind you, suppose they were a dying breed, these days. Back when Logan was a humble probationer, patrolling the streets with Big Annie Dunbar to stop him doing anything stupid.
Wonder what happened to her...
The traffic thickened up ahead – anticipating the approaching roundabout – cars and trucks and lorries creeping down the left lane, while the right was clogged by some tit in a blackBMW. The driver more interested in dawdling along, contemplating his bumhole, than getting the hell out of the way of a patrol car with its lights and siren blaring.
And still nothing back from Steel.
Logan pressed the button again. ‘Hello?’
‘You made Doreen and bloody Biohazard acting DIs, and not me!’
‘It was their turn.’
Rennie leaned on the horn. ‘COME ON: MOVE IT!’
‘I’m the only bastard here with the experience! I’ve been aDetective Chief Inspector,for pricking cock’s sake! And—’
‘And look what happened last time!’
Either the BMW driver had finally woken up, or realised he wasn’t the centre of the sodding universe, but his indicators flashed left, then right, then left again. No one was letting him in, though, so in the end – still indicating the wrong way – he bumped up onto the central reservation.
Rennie accelerated into the gap.
The pool car roared past warehouses and the BP garage, then out onto the roundabout, cutting across the nose of a skip lorry, and onto Riverside Drive.