Page 121 of Better the Devil

‘Eh, no. No.’ Fleck’s finger fell away from his ear. ‘I’m afraid he isn’t.’

‘You still here?’Logan asked, when he almost collided with DCI Reeve on his way out the door.

‘Ha! Yeah, just been saying my goodbyes to Mitchell and the panel.’

Logan looked past him in the direction of Mitchell’s office. ‘What, you spoke to them? On purpose? Of your own free will?’

‘They’re actually kinda nice,’ Reeve replied. ‘You know, beneath all the dead-eyed stares and near-complete lack of personality.’

He said it with such sincerity that it somehow came across as a compliment, despite the entire latter half of the sentence.

Logan considered him for a moment, like he was seeing something he hadn’t noticed before, but then he shook his head, shrugged, and went marching towards the lift.

‘Each to their own, I suppose.’

Reeve glanced into the Incident Room to see the team hurrying from their seats and pulling on jackets.

‘Something happen?’ he asked, following Logan.

Logan stepped into the lift and thumbed the button for the ground floor. ‘Aye.’

‘Something interesting?’

‘Not sure yet.’

Logan pressed the button again, letting it know he was already growing impatient.

‘Hey, come on. You promised we’d share!’ Reeve protested.

The lift doors started to slide shut. He jammed a hand between them, and they sprung back open again.

‘Can I come?’ he asked.

Logan sighed. Slowly. Heavily.

Without a word, he stepped to the side, making room for the other man to enter.

‘Alright!’ Reeve cried, joining Jack in the lift. He held his hand up for a high-five. ‘Let’s go, partner!’

Logan regarded the hand hanging there in mid-air.

He shifted his gaze down until he met Reeve’s eye.

‘Please, for your own sake,’ he intoned, as the doors began to close again. ‘Never do that again.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The majorityof Joe Robertson lay on the wet grass just off the A9, a few miles from his house. He had been discovered in a position that would’ve been described as “face up” were his face not almost entirely missing.

His shotgun—an old, long-barrelled thing—lay in the undergrowth beside him, his thumb still hooked over the trigger, beads of blood dotting the cooling metal.

The Uniform who’d called it in to Sergeant Fleck looked far too young to be dealing with something like this. Her eyes appeared as if they’d been magnified, made larger in their sockets by a horror and shock that would continue to haunt her until some other grisly discovery inevitably made it pale in comparison, months or years from now.

‘The, um, a lorry driver spotted the body and called it in,’ she said, struggling to read from a pad that was shaking too badly for her to focus on it. ‘I was, eh, I was closest, so I… I checked it out, and…’

‘Hey. Hey.’ Reeve put a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. ‘Uh…?’

It took the constable a second to work out what the DCI was getting at.