“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
The photographs on the phone, and the location geotags in particular, were the missing piece of the puzzle. Forty minutes after Logan had handed the mobile to Hamza, he was trudging across a rugged Highland landscape towards where the top of a white tent rose from a dip in the ground.
Throughout his career, he’d come to resent the sight of those tents, knowing full well what waited inside them. Although, it wasn’t the knowing bit that was the worst, it was the not knowing. Those tents, with their cordon tapes and their uniformed guards, were like the worst lucky dips in the world. You rarely knew what you were going to get, but could be reasonably confident that you were going to hate it.
These days, of course, he didn’t just resent the sight of those tents, he despised them. These days, those tents didn’t just contain something terrible, they drew something terrible to them, like a fly to shite.
Namely, Geoff Palmer, chief SOCO of the Scene of Crime team.
Logan and Palmer had never seen eye to eye. Partly, it was the height difference—Palmer was a stubby wee man with rounded shoulders, a potbelly, and a head like a partly deflated basketball. Despite his physical shortcomings, he considered himself quite the catch—which was a real testament to the power of the human imagination, Logan thought—and he had been angling for a date with Shona for as long as Logan had known him.