“I’m not way better. You’re really good. Anyway, I’ve got bigger feet. And you know what they say about guys with big feet?” Chris said.
Constable Tanaka smirked. “I do.”
“Dead good at swimming,” Chris concluded. He pointed to Logan’s feet. “Are you any good at swimming, sir?”
Logan looked from one constable to the other, then glanced around to see if any hidden cameras were watching on. There was a real danger, he thought, that this whole conversation was another of Herbert Gibson’s internet pranks. Otherwise, the Police Scotland recruitment crisis was much worse than he thought.
“I’m going back in,” he said.
“To the caravan?” asked Suzi.
“Aye, to the… Where else would I be talking about?”
“Aye. No. Just…” Chris shrugged. “You were talking about going swimming, an’ that. We weren’t clear on what… But, aye. The caravan. Good call. Want us to come with you?”
“Be a bit of a squeeze,” Constable Tanaka said. She smirked at the younger officer. “But I’m game if you are.”
“No. Just wait here,” Logan said, then he pointed to Chris. “In fact, better still, you wait somewhere else. Go back to the scene. Ask for DC Tyler Neish. Tell him you’ve been given direct orders to assist him.”
If the constable answered, Logan didn’t hear it, preferring to take his chances with whatever waited in the caravan than listen to that pair of cretins for a moment longer. PC Tanaka had struck him as promising when he’d first met her, but something about the other constable’s presence appeared to have pruned her IQ.
The smell in the caravan wasn’t as bad, now that he was prepared for it, and it had a bit of time to waft out through the open door. It was still a long way from pleasant—it was still a considerable distance from neutral, in fact—but it would be tolerable enough in short bursts to let him have a poke around.
It was not a big living space, but then if what he’d been told was correct, Bernie only used it for what could, if you were feeling generous, be described as ‘work purposes.’ And, if you were feeling less generous, ‘his demented ramblings.’
The walls were covered in old newspaper cuttings, Polaroids, and handwritten notes in fastidiously neat block capitals. There were hundreds of separate pieces of paper, pinned up with no clearly discernible pattern, then joined up with sagging lengths of string.
An article about sewerage in a local river had a string connecting it to a printout of an internet page about the possibility of water on the planet Mars, which in turn was linked to a list of the months of the year, with all the months ending in the letter ‘Y’ heavily circled and underlined with a red pen.
One whole wall and a boarded-up window were decorated with adverts for something called ‘The Westerly Wellness Retreat’。 The name rang a bell somewhere at the back of Logan’s brain, but he couldn’t quite place where he’d seen or heard the name before.
Bernie seemed to hold some deep fascination for the place, though, and had torn out or printed off thirty or more advertisements for the place, before haphazardly pinning them up. Judging by the colour of some of the paper, and the way its edges curled, some of the cuttings were a year or more old.
Another wall held mostly Polaroids. The subject of many of them was a grey-haired man who never seemed to be aware that someone was taking his picture. Strings ran from several of the images, linking them to everything from a medical negligence case in Yorkshire to mass bird deaths in Arizona.
The man, too, was familiar, but the smell of the rotting pheasant carcass was starting to take its toll, and Logan couldn’t face standing around while he rifled through his memory banks. Instead, he plucked one of the photographs free, lumbered down the caravan’s fold-out metal steps, and blew the stench of decay out through his nostrils with what little air was left in his lungs.
“That’s ripe in there,” he remarked, then he held up the photograph. “Who’s this?”
“That? He’s a local politician. Well, a politician who lives locally, anyway. MSP. Forget his name, but I can look it up. Bernie had a bit of an axe to grind with him.”
“Oh? How come?”
The PC blew out her cheeks. “I think he was doing the bidding of a race of lizard men or something. That was the gist of it.”
“Aye, well, I suppose that’s as good a reason to hold a grudge as any,” Logan conceded.