Read Bred in the Bone for Free Online

order to give a fuck.
    Nothing. Empathy failed her. She knew too much about him, knew that a quick death with no warning, no time to know fear, was a kinder fate than Stevie Fullerton had doled out to his victims.
    As she proceeded through the forecourt she observed that there was one other car on the premises, a silver Ford Focus. Catherine guessed its driver was the woman she didn’t recognise, standing next to DC Zoe Vernon and two paramedics inside the kiosk that served as both office and supply room. The front was glass from floor to ceiling, affording an unobstructed view of the Spartan arrangements inside. A cash register and a desk were all that survived from the premises’ previous incarnation. Instead of newspaper racks and rows of confectionary, there were barrels of cleaning products and a small fridge on top of which was perched a filthy and aged kettle. DI Laura Geddes was talking to two guys who looked like car-wash staff: a lank-haired and ashen-looking teen and a burly older bloke sporting a lot of tattoos.
    Glancing up, Laura gave Catherine a nod of acknowledgement but then went back to her conversation, taking notes. One of the two males she took to be Traffic also clocked the new arrivals and strode across the forecourt to greet them, checking his stride at one point, as though avoiding an invisible pillar.
    A breath of wind blew through the place, suddenly filling Catherine’s nose with sharp chemical scents. There was something nastier in there too.
    ‘Kevin McCallister,’ the uniform introduced himself. ‘I was first on scene.’
    He was straight-backed, with a determined seriousness in hisexpression that nonetheless betrayed unease. He looked like he was worried he was about to be told he’d screwed up, but was coaching himself to remain stoic in the face of it. Catherine felt for him. Her jokes with Beano had just been banter, but there was a certain truth in this being out of the guy’s comfort zone.
    It wasn’t the body that would have unsettled him. The gory sights McCallister must have seen would doubtless top anything Catherine had ever confronted, and probably have Beano in therapy. But finding himself Johnny-on-the-spot when one of the city’s most notorious crime figures had just been gunned down was not covered in the Traffic Division’s playbook.
    Catherine recalled a story Cal O’Shea told, about a crash team finishing up following a prolonged resuscitation and wondering what had happened to the (very) junior doctor who had been carrying the cardiac arrest bleep. As they were leaving the ward they saw him climbing out of a cleaning cupboard. Poor bugger had been walking right past when the thing went off and knew he would be the first on the scene.
    ‘Detective Superintendent McLeod. And this is DC Thompson. When did you get here?’
    ‘Eleven fifty-two. Got the call at eleven forty-nine. We were running a speed trap down the Gallowhaugh end of the dual carriageway. Victim was already dead when I got here. I know how to feel a pulse,’ he added, the grim certainty of his tone heading off any question over this.
    Catherine nodded. She had little doubt that Constable McCallister had often been there to witness the moment when somebody died, rather than merely surveying the aftermath like she was used to. Nonetheless, he’d only been three minutes away. It wasn’t like the body had had time to go cold.
    ‘He can’t have been dead long,’ she suggested.
    ‘There was a delay in us getting the call,’ he replied, a look of irritation on his face, and not at her. ‘The woman in the Focus, a Mrs Chalmers, said the older of the car-wash workers went inside to the office and got on the phone, so she assumed he was calling emergency services. After about ten minutes had gone by and therewere no sirens she made her own call, just in case, and that turned out to be the first.’
    ‘Mr Hairy Biker knew it was an emergency but the number he dialled wasn’t