'No?' Doug laughed, the sound turning into a thick, rattling cough and a stream of black-and-red spit. 'What,' he asked when he finally got his breath back, 'what have I got to lose? Eh? I've got the cancer, Mr Pig. Nice wee man at the hospital says I've got me one, maybe two years, tops. And they're gonnae be shitty years. And you bastards are after me, aren't ye?'

Logan gritted his teeth and pushed against the ground, getting as far as his knees before Doug put a foot in the centre of his back and pushed. The ground slammed against Logan's chest. 'Aaaaaaaaaaaa…'

'See, youse bastards are gonnae lock me up again. I'm no comin' out alive. No with the cancer eatin' ma lungs and bones. So what can they do to me if I slice you up? I'm dead before my sentence is up anyway. What's one more dead body, eh?'

Logan groaned and rolled onto his back, feeling the snow falling cold against his face. Keep him talking. Keep him talking and someone might come. One of the uniform. WPC Watson. Anyone. God, please let someone come! 'Is that…is that why you killed Geordie Stephenson?'

Doug laughed. 'What's this? You think we're gonnae have us a nice wee chat and I'm gonnae 'fess up tae everything? Keep the old fart talking and he'll spill his guts?' He shook his head. 'You watch too much television, Mr Pig. Only guts I'm gonnae spill are yours.' He waggled the Stanley knife and grinned.

Logan kicked him in the knee. Hard. There was a loud pop and Doug collapsed, dropping the knife, clutching at his ruined kneecap. 'Ahyafucker!'

Hissing through his teeth, Logan rolled onto his side and lashed out with his foot again, catching the old man on the side of the head, opening up a three-inch gash.

Doug grunted, his hands covering his bleeding scalp as Logan aimed another blow at the old man's head. Two of his fingers snapped beneath Logan's boot. 'Fuckinbastard!'

He might have been old and riddled with cancer, but Doug MacDuff had earned his reputation as a hard man in the toughest prisons Scotland had to offer. Earned it the hard way. Snarling, he scrabbled backwards, getting out of range. And then he lunged, wrapped his nicotine-stained hands around Logan's throat and squeezed, his face creased and brutal as he strangled himself a detective sergeant.

Logan grabbed at the hands encircling his neck, trying to pull them away, but the man's grip was like iron. Already the world had started to take on a red tinge, his ears ringing with the pressure in his head. He let one hand go, curled it into a fist and smashed it off the side of Doug's face. The old man grunted, but didn't let go. Screwing his face up, Logan did it again and again, blood from Doug's wounds dripping down all around him, turning the snow pink. Fighting for his life, he slammed his fist into Doug's head, cracking the jaw, closing the milky, unseeing eye. Punching for all he was worth as the world started to go dark. Again and again and again…until at last the hands around Logan's throat went slack and the old man went limp, slumping over sideways to lie, bleeding in the falling snow.

29

They rushed Douglas MacDuff straight through Accident and Emergency and into a treatment room. He looked like death. His lined and wrinkled face was covered with a growing network of dark red bruises. His breathing was shallow and rattling. He hadn't regained consciousness in the ambulance on the way to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, just lay there, oozing blood from his battered face.

The ambulance men hadn't spoken a word to Logan all the way over here. Not once they learned he was the one who'd beaten up the old age pensioner.

Standing in silence, shivering, Logan watched as a nurse wired Desperate Doug up to a bank of monitors, bleeps and pings marking time with the old man's heart.

She looked up to see Logan standing at the foot of the gurney. 'You're going to have to go,' she told him, unbuttoning the old man's shirt. 'He's been beaten up pretty badly.'

'I know,' Logan left off the fact that he was the one who'd done it. His voice was rough, painful.

'Are you a relative?' Her face was concerned and professional as she carefully peeled Doug's shirt open.

'No. A police officer: DS McRae.'

She stopped, her expression becoming cold. 'I hope you catch the bastard who did this and lock him away for life! Beating up an old man!'

And then the doctor arrived: a short, balding man with a clipboard and a stressed expression. He didn't care that Logan was an officer of the law. Everyone was to leave so that the patient could be diagnosed and treated.

'His name is Douglas MacDuff,' said Logan, trying to keep his gravelly voice level. 'He's the chief suspect in a murder investigation. He is to be considered extremely dangerous.'

The nurse backed away from the gurney, wiping her hands down the front of her blue smock, the latex of her surgical gloves making a dull, squeaking sound beneath the regular ping and beep.

Logan rubbed tenderly at his throat. 'I'll post a PC to watch him,' he said, swallowing painfully.

The nurse gave him an uncertain smile, but the doctor was already poking and prodding Dougie's battered body. With a deep breath she squared her shoulders and went to work.

Logan arranged for someone to stay by Desperate Doug's bedside and left them to it. Out in the hall he almost fell over a nurse pushing a trolley covered with bottles of pills. He turned to apologize and found himself looking into a familiar face. Only this time Lorna Henderson's mother was sporting a huge black eye. She'd tried to cover it up with six inches of make-up, but the bruising still shone through. 'Are you OK?' he asked.

A nervous hand fluttered up to the puffy eye and she forced a smile onto her face. 'Fine,' she said, her voice brittle round the edges. 'Never better. How are you?'

'Did someone hit you, Mrs Henderson?'

She smoothed down her blue nurse's uniform and said no. She had walked into a door. It was an accident. That was all.

Logan gave her one of DI Insch's patented silences.

Slowly the fake smile slid away, leaving her pale and jowly again. 'Kevin came round. He'd been drinking.' She picked at the name badge pinned to her chest, not looking Logan in the eye. 'I thought he'd come back to me. You know, dumped that flat-chested tart. But he said it was all my fault that Lorna was dead. That I should have never made her get out of the car. That I killed her…' She looked up, tears making her eyes sparkle in the fluorescent lighting. 'I tried to make him understand we could get through it together. Be there for each other. That I still loved him. That I knew he still loved me.' A single fat tear spilled over the edge and down her cheek. She wiped it away on the back of her hand. 'He got upset and shouted even louder. Then he…I deserved it! It was all my fault! He's never coming back…' Tears spilling down her face, she abandoned her trolley and ran.

Logan watched her disappear through a set of double doors and sighed.

WPC Watson was sitting in the waiting area, with her head back and a scrunched-up handful of toilet paper jammed against her face. It was bright red.

'How's the nose?' asked Logan, plonking himself down on the next plastic chair along. Trying to keep himself from trembling.

'Sore,' she said, peering at him from the corner of her eye, not moving her head. 'Ad leasd I don'd thing id's broken. How's the prisoner?'

Logan shrugged and instantly regretted it. 'How's everyone else?' he asked, his voice coming out as a painful croak.

WPC Watson pointed off down the corridor to the treatment rooms. 'One of the dog-handlers is gedding his ribs checked out. Everyone else is OK.' She smiled and winced. 'Oww…Someone from the bookies god their front teeth knocked out.' She peered at him again, watching as Logan rubbed a hand around his throat for the umpteenth time since sitting down. 'You OK?'