Broken Skin by Stuart MacBride

vibrate.
    FHQ was eerily silent in the wake of Insch's storming out. There was barely a whisper as Logan left DI Steel's office and wandered back to his little cubicle in the CID room. It took him nearly twenty minutes to check his email and make up an identification book for Laura Shand to look at when she came in - Iain Watt's face hidden amongst pictures of eleven others from the Scottish Criminal Records Office database. It was a formality more than anything else: with Watt's confession and the forensic evidence, he'd be on the first bus back to Peterhead Prison, whether she could identify him or not.
    And then Logan really couldn't put it off any longer: he called the front desk and asked Big Gary where Jackie was.
    ' No idea .' Was the reply. ' She went to Professional Standards first thing, but they can't have fired or suspended her, or they'd've had me in there as her Federation rep .' There was a faint slurping sound, as if Gary was in the middle of a mug of tea. 'Probably just a smack on the wrists .'
    'Yeah ... thanks Gary.' Logan hung up and tried her mobile: it rang and rang, then beeped over to voicemail. There was no point asking Professional Standards - they wouldn't tell him anything - so he went for a walk instead, wandering the corridors and asking if anyone had seen PC Watson.
    He found her in the basement records room, where the old files went to die, sorting through the ancient unsolved investigations and swearing under her breath - a constant, violent monologue about what would happen if she ever got her hands on that bastard from the Daily Mail . She dumped a dusty box onto the concrete floor and yanked the lid off, glaring at the contents.
    Logan closed the door behind him and wandered over. 'Hey you.' She looked up, still glaring and he backed off a couple of paces, hands up in surrender. 'Whoa, whatever it is, I'm sorry!'
    Jackie went back to scowling at the open box. 'Can you believe this shite?' She hauled out an ancient bundle of files held together by an elastic band so old it was beginning to flake away in brittle brown shards. 'Half these bloody things don't even match the sodding inventory. Lazy bastards ...'
    'You OK?'
    She shrugged and started scribbling down a list of the contents into a large notebook. 'I mean, look at it. Not like it's hard to keep track of what's in a bloody box, is it?'
    'Jackie?'
    'I mean, some of this stuff goes back thirty, forty years! Why the hell couldn't they do it properly in the first place?' Throwing the pile of files back in the box, the vitrified rubber band shattering into a thousand pieces. 'Fucking thing!'
    'Jackie. It's OK.'
    'Get the prehistoric bastards out of retirement and make them come down here and inventory their own bloody case files.' She dragged another bundle out and began scribbling in her notebook again. 'Should have solved them in the first place! Who cares about some daft sod getting beaten up twenty years ago - it's not like we're going to catch whoever did it any time soon, is it?' There were angry tears, glinting at the corners of her eyes.
    'Jackie!'
    'They talked to me like I was a fucking child! OK? Like I'd done it on purpose! Like I was just some stupid bloody woman who couldn't keep her big mouth shut!'
    'Come here.' Logan helped her to her feet, then wrapped her in his arms.

8
    The shit hit the fan, first thing Thursday morning - Logan could smell it as soon as his copy of the Press and Journal was delivered at ten past seven. TOLD YOU I DIDN ' T DO IT! was the headline, above a photo of Rob Macintyre's ugly, big-eared head. Logan read the article in the kitchen, his cup of coffee going cold beside him. There was a brief account of how DI Steel and local police 'hero' DS McRae had charged a known sex offender with one of the rapes Macintyre was supposed to have committed, leaving the footballer in the clear. According to the paper, Macintyre's legal team were going to the Sheriff Court to have the whole case abandoned. And