Logan grimaced and poured his plastic cup of hot brown liquid into the bin.

She frowned at him. 'If it's any consolation the damage was post mortem. The child was dead when it happened.'

'Any chance of DNA?'

'Unlikely. The internal damage isn't consistent with something flexible. I'd say it's more likely to be a foreign object than the attacker's penis. Maybe a broom handle?'

Logan closed his eyes and swore. Isobel just shrugged.

'Sorry,' she said. 'David's genitals were removed by what looks like a pair of secateurs, curved blade, some time after death. Long enough for the blood to have clotted. Probably long enough for rigor mortis to have set in.'

They stood in silence for a moment, not looking at each other.

Isobel twisted her empty plastic cup round in her hands. 'I…I'm sorry…' She stopped and twisted the cup back the other way.

Logan nodded. 'Me too,' he said and walked away.

4

WPC Watson was waiting for him at the front desk. She was muffled up to the ears in a heavy black police-issue jacket, the waterproof fabric slick and glistening with raindrops. Her hair was tucked into a tight bun under her peaked cap; her nose was Belisha-beacon red.

She smiled at him as he approached, hands in pockets, mind on the post mortem.

'Morning, sir. How's the stomach?'

Logan forced a smile, his nostrils still full of dead child. 'Not bad. You?'

She shrugged. 'Glad to be back on days again.' She looked around the empty reception area. 'So what's the plan?'

Logan checked his watch. It was going on for ten. An hour and a half to kill before Insch got out of his meeting.

'Fancy a trip?'

They signed for a CID pool car. WPC Watson drove the rusty blue Vauxhall while Logan sat in the passenger seat, looking out at the downpour. They had just enough time to nip across town to the Bridge of Don, where the search teams would be trudging through the rain and mud, looking for evidence that probably wasn't even there.

A bendy bus rumbled across the road in front of them, sending up a flurry of spray, adverts for Christmas shopping in the west end of town splattered all over it.

Watson had the wipers going full tilt, the wheek-whonk of rubber on the windscreen sounding over the roar of the blowers. Neither of them had said a word since they'd left Force HQ.

'I told the desk sergeant to let Charles Reid off with a warning,' Logan said at last.

WPC Watson nodded. 'Thought you would.' She slid the car out into the junction behind an expensive-looking four-by-four.

'It wasn't really his fault.'

Watson shrugged. 'Not my call, sir. You're the one he nearly killed.'

The four-wheel-drive, all-terrain vehicle – which probably never had to deal with anything more off road than the potholes in Holburn Street – suddenly decided to indicate right, stopping dead in the middle of the junction. Watson swore and tried to find a space in the stream of traffic flowing past on the inside.

'Bloody male drivers,' she muttered before remembering Logan was in the car. 'Sorry sir.'

'Don't worry about it…' He drifted back into silence, thinking about Charles Reid and the trip to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary last night. It hadn't really been Charles Reid's fault. Someone phones your daughter up and asks how she feels about her three-year-old son's murdered body turning up in a ditch. Not surprising he took a swing at the first target that presented itself. Whoever sold the story to the P amp;J: they were to blame.

'Change of plan,' he said. 'Let's see if we can't find ourselves a slimy journalist.' 'THE PRESS AND JOURNAL. LOCAL NEWS SINCE 1748'. That's what it said at the top of every edition. But the building the paper shared with its sister publication, the Evening Express, looked a lot less venerable. It was a low, two-storey concrete-and-glass monstrosity just off the Lang Stracht, squatting behind a high, chainlink fence like a sulking Rottweiler. There being no access from the main road, WPC Watson drove them in through a tatty-looking industrial estate consisting of crowded car showrooms and double parking. The security guard took one look at Watson's uniform and raised the barrier, smiling a gap-toothed smile as he waved them through.

'ABERDEEN JOURNALS LTD' was written in gold lettering on polished granite next to the reception's revolving door, right above a brass plaque proclaiming the paper's history. 'FOUNDED BY JAMES CHALMERS IN 1748…' blah blah blah. Logan didn't bother to read the rest.

The pale lilac walls of the reception area were bare. Only a carved wooden plaque, commemorating the paper's employees lost in World War Two, broke the monotony. Logan had been expecting something a bit more newspaper-ish: framed front pages, awards, photographs of the journalists. Instead it looked as if the paper had only just moved in and hadn't got around to decorating yet.

Weedy pot plants sat on the violently-coloured floor: big linoleum squares of bright blue fake marble, set in a gold-and-pink grid.

The receptionist didn't look much better: pink eyes, lank blonde hair. She reeked of mentholated cough sweets. Peering blearily up at them, she honked her nose on a scabby hanky.

'Welcome to Aberdeen Journals,' she said with zero enthusiasm. 'How can I be of assistance?'

Logan dragged out his warrant card and held it under her runny nose. 'Detective Sergeant McRae. I'd like to speak to whoever phoned the home of Alice Reid last night.'

The receptionist looked at his identification, looked at him, looked at WPC Watson and sighed. 'No idea.' She paused for a sniff. 'I'm only here Mondays and Wednesdays.'

'Well, who would know?'

The receptionist just shrugged and sniffed again.

WPC Watson dug a copy of the morning's paper out of a display rack and slapped it down on the reception desk. 'MURDERED TODDLER FOUND!' She stabbed her finger at the words: 'BY COLIN MILLER'.

'How about him?' she asked.

The receptionist took the paper and squinted her puffy eyes at the by-line. Her face suddenly turned down at the edges. 'Oh…him.'

Scowling, she jabbed at the switchboard. A woman's voice boomed out of her speakerphone: 'Aye?' and she grabbed the phone from its cradle. Her accent suddenly switched from bunged-up polite to bunged-up broad Aberdonian.

'Lesley? Aye, it's Sharon…Lesley, is God's Gift in?' Pause. 'Aye, it's the police…I dinna ken, hang oan.'

She stuck a hand over the mouthpiece and looked up, hopefully, at Logan. 'Are you going to arrest him?' she asked, all polite again.

Logan opened his mouth and shut it again. 'We just want to ask him a couple of questions,' he said at last.

'Oh.' Sharon looked crestfallen. 'No,' she said into the phone again. 'The wee shite's no gettin' banged up.' She nodded a couple of times then grinned broadly. 'I'll ask.' She fluttered her eyelashes and pouted at Logan, doing her best to look seductive. It was an uphill struggle with a flaky red nose, but she did her best. 'If you're not going to arrest him, any chance of a little police brutality?'

WPC Watson winked conspiratorially. 'See what we can do. Where is he?'

The receptionist pointed at a security door off to the left. 'Don't be afraid to cripple him.' She grinned and buzzed them through.

The newsroom was like a carpeted warehouse, all open plan and suspended ceiling tiles. There must have been a couple of hundred desks in here, all clumped together in little cliques: News Desk, Features, Editorial, Page Layout…The walls were the same pale lilac as reception and just as bare. There weren't any partitions and the desktops spilled into one another. Piles of paper, yellow Post-its and scribbled notes oozing from one desk to the next like a slow-motion avalanche.

Computer monitors flickered beneath the overhead lighting, their owners hunched over keyboards, turning out tomorrow's news. Apart from the ever-present hum of the computers and the whirr of the photocopier it was eerily quiet.