Page 11 of Better the Devil

Hamza swallowed. ‘Sir?’

‘Jack’s fine,’ Logan told him.

Panic flared behind Hamza’s eyes. ‘Oh, no, sir. No, that’s… I don’t think I could do that.’

‘Ach, it’s easy,’ Shona said. She put a hand on Jack’s arm and winked at the freshly minted DI. ‘You should hear some of the names I call him.’

‘Next steps, son,’ Logan said. ‘What are they?’

Hamza’s face went rigid. Went pale.

‘Next steps?’

Logan nodded. ‘You’ve a lot of people standing around here waiting for orders, and I’m about to run Shona home, so… Next steps?’

Hamza’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. He looked around, as if searching for inspiration, sweeping past Logan,past the car, past Tyler and Palmer, until finally alighting on Dave Davidson further back towards the cordon.

Dave nodded to him, and raised a hand in a thumbs-up.

‘Hamza?’ Logan pressed.

‘Check the cordon’s secure, make sure only necessary personnel are within it, prioritise SOCO access so they can get the tent up and protect the scene.’

‘Right. All underway,’ Logan confirmed. ‘So, what else?’

‘Uh, it’s not quite underway, sir, because you need to shift,’ Hamza said, his eyes darting to the guys in the paper suits struggling to construct the tent around him. ‘After that, we run the car’s plate, see if we can get a name. And then…’

What else?

What else?

‘Witnesses!’ he blurted. ‘Send Uniform door-to-door around the nearby houses to see if anyone saw anything. Get one of the team to talk to the person who found the body.’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ Logan confirmed. He looked very deliberately at all the other officers scattered around them. ‘But what are you telling me for?’

It took Hamza a moment to realise what the DCI was getting at, but then he nodded, drew himself up to his full height, and summoned DC Neish with a shout.

‘Tyler.’

‘Oh, thank Christ,’ Tyler whispered, turning his back on Geoff and hurrying over to join the others. ‘Nice one. Thanks for that, Ham. I thought he was never…’

Tyler stopped mid-sentence, his mouth hanging open as an expression of pure, unbridled joy spread across his face.

‘Don’t,’ Hamza said, already predicting what was coming.

‘Did I say “Thanks for that, Ham”?’ Tyler asked.

‘Please, don’t,’ Hamza reiterated.

Logan had also figured out what was coming, and laid a supportive hand on the new DI’s shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. You stop hearing it after a while.’

‘What I meant to say,’ Tyler continued, beaming like a kid on Christmas morning, ‘wascheers, boss!’

Hamza groaned and rolled his eyes. ‘You enjoyed that, didn’t you?’

‘Very much so, aye,’ Tyler confirmed. ‘What were you wanting, anyway?’

‘I, eh, I need you to run the plate on the car, see what that tells us,’ Hamza said. It took all his willpower not to look to DCI Logan for confirmation. ‘See who it’s registered to, see if there are any ANPR cameras that picked it up in the last few hours.’