“Fifty-seven dicks, sir,” Sinead said.
“Fifty-seven?” Logan whistled through his teeth. “That is a significant number of dicks.” He tapped the bottom of the page, where two phrases had been written. “Hashtag Herby Goes Bananas, hashtag Big Dick Energy. Mind explaining this?”
“Hashtags,” Herbert said. “They’re like, on Twitter, you use them to make it easier to find—”
“I know what a hashtag is, son.” Logan waved a hand over the paper. “I meant all this. Explain all of it.”
Across the table, Herbert sniffed, wiped his eyes on his filthy sleeve, then swallowed. “Where do you want me to start?”
“Maybe start with the fifty-seven dicks and go from there,” Logan suggested.
Herbert shifted in his seat, glanced at all three detectives without meeting their eyes, then shrugged. “It was just… It was a prank.”
“I bloody knew it!” Logan barked, and the flat of his hand slammed down on the table like a thunderclap. “I knew from the moment I walked in you were a lying wee bastard!”
“N-no! Not the body, the body’s real! The paint. The dicks. That was the prank. It was going to be, I mean, then I found him.” He jumped in his chair. “It. The body, I mean.”
“Oh,” Logan said, relaxing back into the chair. “Right. I see. And what was this prank going to be?”
“It was just… It was… It seems stupid now.”
“I’m almost certain it does,” Logan said. “What was it?”
Herbert took a breath, held it, then let the words tumble out as he exhaled. “I was going to make the lighthouse into a big willy.”
Logan sat there. Mute. Motionless.
Several seconds passed before he said a word.
“Excuse me?”
“You know the lighthouse? Ardnamurchan Lighthouse? I was going to… I thought it’d be funny to paint it like… like…”
“A big willy,” Logan concluded.
“Exactly. Yeah.”
“And what would be the point in that?” Logan asked.
Herbert glanced furtively across the faces of the detectives. “Just, you know, it’d be funny.”
“Would that be funny, do we think?” Logan asked the others, and he was relieved that DC Neish wasn’t there.
“Not at all, sir.”
“Not to me.”
“No. Not to me, either,” Logan said. “And I’m sure not to the people responsible for managing the lighthouse, either. Or, you know, anyone over the age of eight.”
“No, but… I was going to make it look like a big dick. Like a big penis,” Herbert said, assuming the detectives had surely just failed to grasp the hilarity inherent in the idea.
“No, we got that. That came across loud and clear. We just didn’t find it funny,” Logan said.
“How?” Herbert asked, seemingly genuinely perplexed. “I was going to film it. It was going to go viral. I was going to be famous.”
“So that’s what this is about,” Logan said, the penny dropping. “Attention. You want to be noticed, Herbert. Is that it? You want your fifteen minutes of fame?”
“No, that’s not… I mean, yes. But that’s why I was going to the lighthouse. That’s why I was doing the big willy.”
“And you just happened to stumble upon a corpse on the way?” Logan asked, clearly not buying a word of it.
“Yes!”
“That your van out front?” the DCI demanded, throwing a thumb back over his shoulder.
Herbert followed the direction of the digit, but the sudden shift in the direction of questioning had thrown him off. “What?”
“The van. Out front,” Logan said, making a show of simplifying the sentence structure. “That yours?”
“Um, yes. Yes, that’s mine.”
“Then why not drive? To the lighthouse. There’s a road. Correct?”
“Well, yes. Yes, but… I didn’t want anyone to see me.”
Logan paused and sat back. He rolled his tongue around inside his mouth while he mulled over this answer. “You didn’t want anyone to see you,” he muttered, then he turned to the other detectives. “Hear that? He didn’t want anyone to see him.”
“Strange, sir,” Hamza said.
“Why’s…?” Herbert’s gaze flitted from face to face. “Why’s that strange?”
“Well, you can’t go viral if no bugger knows it was you,” Logan pointed out. “I mean, if it was fame you were after, I assume you were going to show your face in the video?”
“Well, yeah, but—”
“So, why not drive? If everyone was going to know you did it, why not just take your van and be done with it?”
Herbert sat in the chair with his mouth hanging open. “I mean… I mean… I suppose that would’ve made sense,” he admitted. “I didn’t really think about that.”
“Or—and here’s what I think, Herbert—this whole vandalism thing is a cover story. You weren’t going to do anything to the lighthouse. It was a cover to explain why you were out there. Weird choice, though. I mean, I’d have just said I was out for a walk.”
“I did say I was out for a walk!” Herbert protested. “You didn’t believe me.”
Logan leaned sharply forward, and the younger man instinctively drew back, his eyes widening once more in fear.
“Because I think you’re a liar, Herbert. I believe that you wanted your moment in the spotlight—that bit I buy—but I think that’s what all this is about. I think that’s why you’re wasting our time with this whole dead body nonsense.”
“It’s not nonsense! I saw it!”
“I don’t believe you, Herbert. I think you’re wasting our time in the hopes you might get on the telly. A wee bit of publicity on the STV evening news. That’s what this is about.”
“It isn’t!” Herbert cried. He fumbled a hand into a trouser pocket, fighting back tears.
Hamza and Sinead moved as if to tackle him to the ground, but Logan held out a hand to stop them. They all watched as Herbert produced his phone, hurriedly tapped in a sequence of digits, then brought up a photograph of something that had once been a person.
“See! I’m not lying! It was there, I saw it!”
He yelped when the phone was snatched from his hand by the Detective Chief Inspector. Logan studied the picture, swiped through a couple of others and a video showing the remains from a variety of angles, then passed the mobile back over his shoulder to Hamza.
“DS Khaled, see if you can get a GPS position off these pictures, will you? Fortunately for Mr Gibson, it seems he’s telling the truth about the body,” Logan said.
“Um, see?” Herbert said, his conviction rapidly fading as he watched his phone being handed over. “Like I said, I’m not—”
Logan cut him off. “Unfortunately for Mr Gibson,” he said, and the very air itself seemed to crackle around him. “I take a very dim view of people taking photographs of a potential murder scene.”
Before he could continue, the door behind him opened. Taggart burst into the room, ran laps around the table, then attempted to launch himself at Logan, Sinead, and Hamza all at the same time, with predictably mixed results.
“Sorry, I let him off the lead,” said Shona, leaning in through the open doorway. She smiled awkwardly and held out a thin plastic carrier bag weighted with bars of chocolate. “Twix?”
CHAPTER FIVE