He stuffed everything relating to Geordie Stephenson's death into the file, including his report on yesterday's shenanigans. There would be some paperwork to tidy the thing off, but other than that the case was as dead as Geordie.

With that all packed away, the only thing left in Logan's little incident room was the unknown girl. Her dead face looked down at him with blank eyes.

One down, one to go.

Logan sat down and waded through the statements once more: everyone living within easy access of the communal bins. One of them had killed the girl, stripped her, tried to hack her up, wrapped her body in brown packing tape and stuffed it into the bin. And if it wasn't Norman Chalmers, who was it?

31

Sunset painted the sky above Rosemount in violent orange and scarlet flames. From street level, hemmed in on all sides by long lines of grey three-storey tenements, it was only visible as ribbons of iridescent colour. Here and there sulphurous-yellow streetlights flickered and hummed in the crisp December air, giving the buildings a jaundiced pallor. It wasn't even five o'clock yet.

Against all the odds WPC Watson had managed to find them a parking spot in front of the building Norman Chalmers lived in. The communal bin stood directly in front of the front door. It was a large black barrel, chest height, flattened at the sides and chained to a post. That was where the girl must have been dumped. Where the scaffies collected her from, taking her body to the council tip along with all the other garbage.

Forensics had been all over the bin and come up with nothing except the fact that someone in the building was into leather-fetish pornography.

'How many buildings we going to do?' asked Watson, balancing a pile of statements against the steering wheel.

'Start from the middle and work out. Three buildings each side: that's seven buildings. Six flats in each…'

'Forty-two flats? God, it'll take us for ever!'

'Then there's the other side of the road.'

Watson looked up at the building next to her, then back at Logan. 'Can we not get some uniforms in to do it?'

Logan smiled. 'You are uniform, remember?'

'Yeah, but I'm doing something: driving you about and all that. This'll take ages!'

'Longer we sit here, longer it'll take.'

They started with the building Chalmers lived in.

Ground floor left: an old lady with shifty eyes, urine-yellow hair and breath that stank of sherry. She refused to open the door until Logan had shoved his warrant card through the letterbox and she'd phoned the police station just to make sure he wasn't one of these paedophiles she'd heard about. Logan didn't point out she was about ninety years safe from people like that.

Ground floor right: four students, two of whom were still asleep. No one had seen or heard anything. Too busy studying. 'My arse,' said Watson. 'Fascist,' said the student.

First floor left: timid single woman with big glasses and bigger teeth. No she hadn't seen anyone or heard anything and wasn't it all simply dreadful?

First floor right: no answer.

Top floor left: unmarried mother and three-year-old child. Another case of see, hear and speak no evil. Logan got the feeling you could commit regicide in her bathroom while she was taking a bath, and she'd still swear she'd seen nothing.

Top floor right: Norman Chalmers. His story hadn't changed. They had no right to harass him like this. He was going to call his lawyer.

And back out onto the street again.

'Well,' said Logan, stuffing his hands into his pockets to keep out the chill. 'Six down, seventy-eight to go.'

Watson groaned.

'Never mind.' Logan gave her a smile. 'If you're very, very good I'll buy you a pint when we've finished.'

That seemed to cheer her up a bit and Logan was on the verge of adding an invitation to dinner when he caught sight of his reflection in the car windscreen. It was too dark to make out much detail on the building behind him, but the windows shone like cats' eyes in the dark mirror of glass. All of them.

He turned and stared up at the building. Every single window on the front of the building was ablaze. Even the supposedly empty first floor right flat. As he watched a face appeared at the window, staring down at the street. For a heartbeat their eyes met and then the face was gone, wearing a terrified expression. A very familiar face.

'Well, well, well…' Logan patted WPC Watson on the shoulder. 'Looks like we have ourselves a contender.'

Back inside, Watson pounded on the door of the offending flat. 'Come on: we know you're in there. We saw you!'

Logan leaned back against the banister and watched her bash at the black-painted door. He'd brought the pile of statements in with him and was flicking through them, looking for the one that fitted the address. First floor right, number seventeen…A Mr Cameron Anderson. Who came from Edinburgh and made ROVs.

WPC Watson mashed her thumb on the doorbell again, still hammering away with her other hand. 'If you don't open this door I'm going to break the damn thing down!'

All this racket out in the hall and not a single face peeked out from the other flats to see what was going on. So much for a sense of community.

Two minutes and still the door remained resolutely shut. Logan was beginning to get a bad feeling about this. 'Kick it in.'

'What?' Watson turned and whispered loudly at him, the words hissing out. 'We don't have a warrant! We can't just break down the door! I was only bluffing-'

'Kick it in. Now.'

WPC Watson took a step back and slammed her foot into the door, just below the lock. With an explosive bang the door flew open, slamming into the flat's hall and bouncing back, rattling photographs in their frames. They rushed in, Watson into the lounge, Logan taking the bedroom. No one.

Like Chalmers's flat, upstairs, there wasn't a door on the kitchen but it was empty anyway. That only left the bathroom and it was locked.

Logan rattled the door, banging the flat of his hand on the wooden door. 'Mr Anderson?'

From inside came the sound of sobbing and running water.

'Damn.' He gave the door one last try before asking Watson for a repeat performance.

She nearly kicked it off its hinges.

Clouds of steam billowed out into the tiny hallway. Inside, the small bathroom was clad in wood, like a sauna, partially concealing a nasty avocado suite. The room was just big enough for the bath to fit along the far wall, on the other side of the toilet, a shower rigged up over it, the curtain drawn.

Logan yanked the curtain open to reveal a fully-dressed man on his knees in the rising water, hacking away at his wrists with a broken disposable razor. They took Mr Anderson directly to A amp;-E, without waiting for an ambulance. The hospital was less than five minutes away. They wrapped his wrists in layers of fluffy towels before stuffing them into discarded plastic carrier bags from the kitchen so he wouldn't bleed all over the car.

Cameron Anderson hadn't done a very good job of killing himself. The cuts weren't deep enough to fully open the veins, and he'd gone across, rather than down their length. A few stitches and a night's observation was all he needed. Logan smiled as he was told the news and promised the nurse that Mr Anderson would get all the observation he needed in a cell back at Force Headquarters. She looked at him as if he should be scraped off her shoe.

'What the hell is wrong with you?' she demanded. 'That poor man has just tried to kill himself!'

'He's a suspect in a murder enquiry-' was as far as Logan got before she scowled in recognition at him.

'I know you! You're that one was here yesterday! The one beat up that old man!'

'I don't have time for this. Where is he?'