Cold Granite by Stuart MacBride

Author:Stuart MacBride
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Police Procedural, Mystery & Detective, Hard-Boiled, Fiction
ISBN: 9780312940591
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2006-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

That night Logan’s dreams were full of rotting children. They ran through the flat, wanting to play. One sat on the living room floor, little chunks of skin falling onto the polished floorboards, bashing away at a xylophone Logan had been given for his fourth birthday. Clank and clink and boing, a cacophony that was more like a phone ringing than music.

And that’s when he woke up.

Logan staggered through to the lounge and grabbed the ringing phone from its cradle. ‘What?’ he demanded.

‘An’ a merry Christmas to you too.’ Colin Miller.

‘Oh God…’ Logan tried to rub some life into his face. ‘It’s half-six! What is it with you and mornings?’

‘You found another body.’

Logan shuffled to the window and looked for Miller’s expensive automobile in the darkened street. There was no sign of it. At least that meant he was to be spared a visit from the cheerful fairy this morning.

‘And?’

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. ‘And you arrested Bernard Philips. Roadkill.’

Stunned, Logan let the curtain fall back. ‘How the hell did you know that?’ There was nothing in the press pack to identify who’d been arrested, just the normal: ‘a suspect has been taken into custody and a report sent to the Procurator Fiscal’.

‘You know how: it’s ma job. Poor wee thing, rottin’ away in that pile of crap… I want the inside track, Laz. I’ve still got stuff on Geordie Stephenson you don’t know. Everybody wins.’

Logan couldn’t believe his ears. ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek after what you did to DI Insch yesterday!’

‘Laz, that’s just business. He screwed you over and I took him down a couple of pegs. Did I write one bad word about you? Did I?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Ah, loyalty. Like it. Good quality in an officer of the law.’

‘You made him look like an idiot.’

‘Tell you what: I lay off the pantomime dame and you and me has a chat over breakfast?’

‘I can’t do that. I need to get Insch to clear anything I say, OK?’

There was another pause.

‘You gotta be careful what you do with your loyalty, Laz. Sometimes it can do you more harm than good.’

‘What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘Take a look at the morning’s paper, Laz. See whether or not you need a friend in the press.’

Logan settled the phone back in its cradle and stood in the darkness of the lounge, shivering. There was no way he could just go back to bed now. Not until he knew what Miller had done. What the morning paper contained.

Half past six. His own copy wouldn’t be delivered for another hour and a bit. So he dressed quickly and slid his way through the ankle-deep snow up to the Castlegate and the nearest newsagent.

It was a small shop, the kind that tried anything once. The walls were festooned with shelves: books, pots, pans, light bulbs, tins of kidney beans… Logan found what he was looking for on the floor by the counter – a thick

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