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.
Even now, when Logan and Shona’s relationship was public knowledge, the cheeky bastard still chanced his arm.
Sure enough, as Logan and Shona picked their way through the heather, bogs, and bracken, they heard a cry of greeting from over by the tent, and an arm clad in a white paper suit raised to wave at them.
“Shona!” Geoff called, completely ignoring the DCI. “There you are. Glad you could make it. Watch yourself down here, it’s slippy.”
He wheezed halfway up the incline and held a hand out to guide her down. Logan took it firmly, used it as an anchor point to descend the slope, then gave the Scene of Crime man a nod.
“Cheers for that, Geoffrey,” he said, holding a hand out for Shona. She took it and he all-but lifted her down to stand between them.
“Eh, aye. No bother,” Palmer said, wiping his sleeve like it had been contaminated in some way.
“What’ve we got today, then?” asked Shona.
“Body. Male, we think, though there’s not a lot of him left to identify.”
“Burned, I hear,” Logan said.
“And the rest. Think animals have been at him,” Palmer said. “He’s not fresh. Probably been here for weeks.”
“And they have to find him today of all bloody days,” Logan muttered.
Palmer frowned up at him. As usual, he had his full SOC paper suit on, complete with elasticated hood. The way the elastic formed a near-perfect circle made Palmer’s whole face look like a giant zit crying out to be popped.
“What? Why, what’s today?”
“Our day off,” Shona said. “We were away.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry to hear that had to be cancelled,” Palmer said, though his face said something entirely different. “There’s a tent, by the way.”
Logan and Shona both looked at the large tarpaulin construction beside them.
“Well spotted,” Logan said, which drew a tut from the SOCO.
“Not that one. Inside. The body. It was in a tent. That got burned, too.” Palmer waggled his eyebrows—you could tell by the way the hood moved—and grinned. “So, you could say that this one is going to be intense.”
He clapped his gloved hands together and then held them apart like he was bracing himself for their applause.
He’d have a long bloody wait.
“Intense, in tents. Because he’s in… There’s two tents. Plural.”
“No explanation necessary, Geoff,” Logan said, stony-faced. “We got it. I mean, I got it. Did you get it?”
“I got it,” Shona confirmed, remaining equally as impassive as the DCI.
“The comedy thing still not going well, then?” Logan asked.
Palmer puffed up with outrage. “It’s going brilliantly,” he said, though his insistence didn’t last long. “I mean, it’s early days. I’m still finding my feet, but it’s building momentum. And you know what I always say—‘Even Tommy Cooper didn’t become Tommy Cooper overnight.’”
“Aye, you do always say that, right enough,” Logan agreed, despite the fact he’d never once heard the SOCO utter those words before today.
“I’m up for Scottish Comedian of the Year,” Palmer crowed. “It’s a big national award.”
“What?” Shona spluttered. “How?”
“Did everyone else pull out?” Logan asked.
The lower half of Palmer’s face smiled, but the top half just looked a bit confused. “What? No. You just… you put yourself forward for it.”
“Aah,” Logan and Shona both said in unison.
That made sense. Only Geoff Palmer, after a single—and by all accounts disastrous—five-minute spot at a local open mic night, would nominate himself as the best comedian in the country.
“I do this great bit now—really funny stuff—about squirrels,” Palmer said.
“Squirrels?” Shona asked, but Logan was already a step ahead.
“Nuts,” he said, clicking his fingers and pointing at the Scene of Crime man. “It’s something about nuts. It is, isn’t it? Like… you both like fiddling with your nuts. It’s something like that.”
“What? No!” Palmer scowled, folding his arms. This made his whole suit ride up, so for a moment, it looked like he was shrinking down out of the hood. “It’s nothing that obvious.”
“What is it, then?” Shona asked.
Palmer sniffed, shook his head, then indicated the tent behind him. “Can we just crack on and declare him dead, do we think? Some of us have lives, you know? We can’t all stand around here gossiping all day.”
It took Shona no time and zero medical training to conclude that the person under the tarpaulin was dead. He was as dead as anyone she had ever seen, in fact, and possibly even deader.
The fire had consumed all of his skin and most of his flesh. What little it had left behind, the heat had scorched into leathery knots that clung like tumours to his charred and blackened bones.
There were teeth marks here and there. Small and sharp. Pine Martens, maybe. They’d had a go at what was left of him, but it must’ve been slim pickings.
There was no smell to him. Not the stench of death that generally hung around bodies, anyway. Instead, the tent was thick with the smell of ash. It hung in the air, sharp and bitter, and with a note of an accelerant to it. Petrol, maybe, or something alcoholic.
She made her assessment, noted the time, then backed out of the tent and breathed in the fresh air.
“Yep, he’s dead alright,” she confirmed. “Usually I jab them with a pencil and see if they react, but I didn’t even need to bother this time.”