Rush hour was getting to the point at which everyone who should have left for work half an hour ago suddenly realized they were going to be late. Here and there some daft soul sat behind the wheel, cigarette clenched between their teeth, with the window wound down. Letting the smoke out and the drizzle in. Logan watched them with envy.

He was beginning to get the feeling DI Insch had been telling him something with that whole 'Privilege of Rank' speech. Something unpleasant. He ran a slow hand over his forehead, feeling the swollen lump of his brain through the skin.

It was no surprise that Insch had read Steve the riot act. The drunken PC could have caused the whole force a lot of embarrassment. Logan could see the headlines now: 'Naked Copper Showed Me His Truncheon!' If he were Steve's superior officer he'd have given him a bollocking too.

And that was when the penny dropped. Insch had said it right to his face: 'That's one of the privileges of rank: you supervise those further down the tree.' He was a detective sergeant, Steve a constable. They'd all gone out and got pissed and Logan hadn't done a bloody thing to stop the PC getting blootered and bollock-naked.

Logan groaned.

This assignment was as much a punishment for him as it was for Steve.

Twenty-five minutes later they were climbing out of the Nervous Wee Shite's car in front of a dilapidated farm steading, the first outlying arm of a rambling croft on the outskirts of Cults. What little road there was disappeared into the undergrowth. A rundown farmhouse sulked at the end of the track, its grey stone weeping in the neverending rain. Derelict farm buildings sprawled around it, set in a wasteland of hip-deep grass and weeds. Ragwort and docken stuck up through the vegetation, their stems and leaves rust-brown beneath the winter sky. Two windows poked out of the building's slate roof like an empty, hostile stare. Below, a faded red door bore a big painted number six. Each of the rambling steadings had a number scrawled on them in white paint. Every surface was slick with the misty rain, reflecting back the flat, grey daylight.

'Homely,' said Logan, in an attempt to break the ice. And then he smelled it. 'Oh Jesus!' He slapped a hand over his mouth and nose.

It was the cloying, reeking stink of corruption. Of meat left for too long in the sun.

The smell of death.

11

PC Steve lurched once, twice, and charged into the bushes to be noisily and copiously sick.

'You see?' said the nervous man from the council. 'Didn't I tell you it was terrible? Didn't I?'

Logan nodded and agreed, even though he hadn't paid attention to a single word on the way out.

'The neighbours have been complaining about the smell since last Christmas. We've written letter after letter, but we never get anything back,' said the man, clutching his leather folder to his chest. 'The postman refuses to deliver here any more you know.'

'Really,' said Logan. That explained why they never got a bloody reply. Turning his back on the retching constable, he started wading his way through the jungle. 'Let's go see if there's anyone in.'

Not surprisingly, the man from the council let him go first.

The main farm building had once been well cared for. There were little flecks of white paint on the crumbling stone, twisted rusting brackets where hanging baskets would have been. But those days were long gone. Grass was growing in the gutters, blocking the downpipe, and water dripped over the edge. The door hadn't seen a fresh coat of paint for years. Weather and wasps had stripped the last coat away, leaving bare, bleached wood and a small iron number was screwed in the middle, rendered illegible by rust and dirt. The handle didn't look much better. And over the lot was that big, white, hand-painted number six.

Logan knocked. They stood back and waited. And waited. And waited. And…

'Oh for God's sake!' Logan abandoned the door and stomped off through the undergrowth, peering into every window on the way.

Inside, the house was shrouded in darkness. He could just make out mounds of furniture in the gloom: shapeless blobs obscured by the filthy glass.

He finally made it back to the front. A perfectly trampled path in the long grass marked the route he'd taken. Closing his eyes, Logan tried not to swear. 'There's no one here,' he said. 'There hasn't been for months.' If someone was still living here, the grass would have been tramped flat between the road and the door.

The council man looked at the house, then back at Logan, then at his watch and then fumbled his way into his leather folder and pulled out a clipboard.

'No,' he said, reading off the top sheet of paper, 'this property is the residence of one Mr Bernard Philips.' He stopped and fiddled with the buttons on his coat and checked his watch again. 'He, er…he works for the council.'

Logan opened his mouth to say something very, very rude, but shut it again.

'What do you mean "he works for the council"?' he asked, slowly and deliberately. 'If he works for the council, why didn't you just serve notice when he turned up for work this morning?'

The man examined his clipboard again. Doing his best not to meet Logan's eyes. Keeping his mouth shut.

'Oh for God's sake,' said Logan. In the end it didn't really matter. They were here now. They might as well get it over with. 'And is Mr Philips at work right now?' he asked, trying to sound calm.

The nervous man shook his head. 'He's got a day off.'

Logan tried to massage away the headache pulsing behind his eyes. At least that was something. 'OK. So if he does live here-'

'He does!'

'If he does live here, he's not staying in the farmhouse.' Logan turned his back on the dark, neglected building. The rest of the farm buildings were arranged with almost casual abandon, and all had numbers painted on the front.

'Let's try over there,' he said at last, pointing at the ramshackle structure with the number one painted on it. It was as good a place to start as any.

A shaking, white-faced Constable Steve joined them outside the steading, looking even worse than he had first thing this morning. You had to give it to DI Insch: when he punished someone he did it properly.

The door to steading number one had been clarted in cheap green paint. There was paint on the wood, up the walls on either side, on the grass beneath their feet…Logan gestured to the shivering constable, but PC Steve just stared back at him in mute horror. The smell here was even worse than before.

'Open the door, Constable,' said Logan, determined not to do it himself. Not when he had some poor sod to do it for him.

It took a while, but in the end PC Steve said, 'Yes, sir,' and took a good hold of the handle. It was a heavy sliding door, the runners buckled and flaky with rust. The constable gritted his teeth and yanked. It creaked open, letting out the most godawful smell Logan had ever encountered in his life.

Everyone staggered back.

A small avalanche of dead bluebottles tumbled out of the open door to lie in the misty drizzle.

Constable Steve hurried off to be sick again.

The building had been a cattle shed at some point: a long, low, traditionally-built farm steading, with bare granite walls and a slate roof. An elevated walkway ran down the centre of the building, bordered by knee-high wooden rails. It was the only empty area in the place. Everything else was filled with the rotting carcases of small animals.

The stiff and twisted bodies were covered with a carpet of wriggling white.

Logan took three steps back and bolted for a corner to be sick in. It was like being punched in the guts all over again, each heave sending ripples of pain through his scarred stomach. Steadings number one, two and three were full of dead animals. Number three wasn't quite packed yet: there was still a good ten or twelve feet of exposed concrete, free of corpses, but covered with a thick yellow ooze. The bodies of flies were crispy under foot.