Logan blinked. “Hmm? Sorry, did you say something?”
Shona laughed, punching him playfully on the arm. “Well, guess who’s just blown their chance of getting a Twix. I’ll bring Twixes for everyone, but not you. I’ll be dishing them out like the Milkybar Kid. Except, you know, with Twixes.” She stopped talking, blinked slowly, and frowned. “I’ve said ‘Twixes’ so often I’m no longer convinced it’s a real word.”
Logan regarded her in silence for several seconds, then patted her leg. “Aye, well,” he said, opening the door. “Good luck with all that.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Logan would have thought it impossible, but the inside of the station was even less grandiose than the outside. It was made up of four rooms, one of which was a bathroom, and another a small kitchen.
The remaining two rooms, while larger than the others, seemed to have been put there with no real purpose in mind.
They each contained a table or two, some chairs, a filing cabinet, and various posters on the walls proclaiming the perils of drinking and driving, and other traffic-related offences.
One of the rooms also contained DS Hamza Khaled, DC Sinead Bell, and a manic-looking young man who wasn’t so much in need of a shower as a high-powered jet wash. He was caked in mud, black with ash, and had what appeared to be dried vomit down his front.
The red rings around his eyes suggested that either he’d been crying, or he suffered badly from hay fever. Given the look on his face, Logan was going to go with the former.
“Detective Sergeant. Detective Constable,” Logan said, nodding to the officers in turn.
“Sir,” they both replied, Hamza in his dulcet Aberdonian tones, and Sinead with her local Lochaber twang.
She insisted she didn’t have an accent, and while it was nowhere near as strong as Hamza’s, or even his own guttural Glasgow growl, it was there if you knew how to listen.
Logan laser-targeted his gaze on the man sitting at the scuffed and mug-ringed table. “And who do we have here?”
“This is Mr Herbert Gibson,” Sinead said.
“Herbert? There’s a name you don’t hear very often,” Logan said. “Fortunately for all involved.”
“Mr Gibson is the one who phoned in the report about the body,” Hamza explained.
“Is he? Is he, indeed?” Logan said. He adjusted his mouth into something almost smile-shaped. “So you’re the reason I got called in on my day off.”
Herbert blinked, frowned, and swallowed all at the same time. He was not a tall man, so even standing he’d have been dwarfed by Logan. Sitting, he could only tilt his head all the way back so he could look up at the towering detective.
“We haven’t found the body yet, I understand,” Logan continued. “You definitely saw it, though, Herbert? You’re not pulling our leg, are you?”
Herbert shook his head. “N-no, no. I saw it. I definitely saw it. It was there. He was dead.”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “He?”
“What?”
“I understood from one of my colleagues that you said the body was burned beyond all recognition.”
Herbert pressed his blackened hands together, like he was getting ready to pray or beg for mercy. If the bastard was lying, though, neither one would do him any good.
“It. I mean… it was dead.”
“But you don’t know where.”
“Not… not exactly. But roughly. I told them roughly where to find it.”
“And yet, they have not,” Logan said.
He pulled out the chair directly across from Herbert and lowered himself onto it. It lost him some of his height advantage, but made it much easier to eyeball the man sitting opposite.
“It’s there. It’s definitely there. I saw it. I’m not lying,” Herbert insisted.
“Who said you were lying?” Logan asked. He turned and looked back at Hamza and Sinead. “Did you say he was lying?”
“No, sir.”
“Not us, sir.”
“Nobody’s said you’re lying, son,” Logan said, fixing Herbert with that glare again. “Because you look like you’re brighter than that. You look like you’re smart enough not to waste police time like that. I mean, clever-looking lad like you, you’d know just what an absolute shitshow that would be for you, were you to have made something like that up. On my day off, of all days.”
He let that sink in for a moment, then leaned forward a little and lowered his voice, like he was sharing a secret. “But now would be the time to say, if you were lying. Before any more damage was done, and taxpayers’ money spent. Now would be the time to tell us if you were making it all up.”
Herbert shook his head. “I wasn’t. I’m not. Honest. It was there. I saw it.”
Logan sucked in his bottom lip, scraped his teeth across the stubble, then nodded. “Fine. Good. So, mind telling us what you were doing out there in the arse end of nowhere then, Herbert?”
“I was just… I was hillwalking.”
“In them shoes?” Logan asked, rocking himself onto the back legs of his chair so he could look under the table at Herbert’s mud-slicked footwear. “Who goes hiking in a pair of Converse trainers?”
“Mr Gibson was happy to let us look in his bag, sir,” Hamza said.
Herbert’s head snapped up, his eyes widening. “I didn’t know I had a choice!”
“We expressly asked for your permission,” Sinead reminded him.
“Well, yeah, but I thought you were just being polite! I didn’t realise I could say no.”
“Why would you say no?” Logan asked. “Unless you’ve got something to hide.”
Herbert’s eyes somehow found it in them to widen further. “What? No. No, I just…”
“Did we get a look at Mr Gibson’s phone?” Logan asked.
“No, sir,” Sinead replied. “He claims he’s forgotten the PIN to access it.”
“It’s… it’s the stress,” Herbert said, shrinking a couple of inches under Logan’s withering gaze. “It’ll come back to me.”
“We did find some interesting items inside the bag though, sir,” Hamza said.
“Did we now?” Logan rubbed his hands together as the bag was placed on the table before him. “This is exciting,” he said, lifting the flap. “I wonder what I’ll find.”
First out of the bag were two cans of red spray paint. Logan turned the canisters over in his hands, gave them a shake until they rattled, then set them down, lined up, between himself and Herbert.
“Interesting hillwalking equipment you’ve got there, Herbert.”
“That’s not all, sir,” Sinead said. She indicated the bag with a nod. “It gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it.”
Logan lifted the flap again, and peered into the bag. He frowned for a moment as he tried to figure out what he was looking at, then he raised his gaze to meet Herbert’s.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he said, pulling a crumpled sheet of A4 paper from the backpack. He regarded it for several seconds, before voicing his thoughts. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Herbert, but this appears to be a lot of drawings of dicks.”