"Brookmyre, Christopher - Quite Ugly One Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brookmyre Christopher)

He was not going to lose his temper. He felt that on a morning like this, it was only a short distance between snapping at Skinner and waking up in a soft room in Gogarbum, wearing
2 a jumper with sleeves that fitted twice round the waist. He breathed in and out, closing his eyes for a short, beautiful second.
'Gavin, you're on spew-guarding duty,' he said calmly. 'Stay there. Guard the spew.
'Do you want me to take down its details, sir?' Skinner asked loudly in his inimitable jiggle-headed way. 'Read it its rights maybe?'
'Yes, Gavin,' McGregor said wearily. 'All these things.'
Dear Lord, he thought, don't make me kill him today when I won't enjoy it.
McGregor ventured down the rest of the short hall to the doorless doorway at the end, which gave on to the living room. The room was at ninety degrees to the hail, a long, open area that ran the depth of the building, a partition wail having long since been consigned to a skip. Consequently, there were windows at either end. One of them was close-curtained, but through a gap McGregor could spy the crisp, cloudless blue sky and the lightly snow-dusted grass in the Square below. Through the other he could see the hazy, white-topped hifis of Fife in the distance, the austere, dark blue calm of the Forth, and the snow-specked slate rooftops of Leith. In between there was a corpse in blood-drenched pyjama trousers, with most of its nose bitten off, two severed fingers stuffed up what remained of its nostrils, the rest of its face a swollen mass of bruising, and a wide gash around half the circumference of its neck. It was lying on the missing door, which sat at thirty degrees to the horizontal, propped up by the twisted metal frame of what had recently been a cheesy smoked-glass coffee table. The blood had run off the door and collected on the polished wood below, and might have lapped its way gently down to meet the postman's spew if much of it had not drained through a gap in the floorboards, from where it ran along an electrical flex into the main-door flat underneath, dripping off the end of the living room light-fiffing. The police would find the unconscious Mrs Angus a few hours later amidst the damp fragments of a broken tea-set, and once revived she would swear never to let her clairvoyant sisterin4aw bring the ouija board round again, before phoning a Catholic priest to come out and exorcise the place. And so what if she was C of S, when it came to this sort of thing, nothing less than a Tim would do.
3 Around the room's grotesque star attraction was a supporting cast of debris. Much of the floor was carpeted in scattered clothes, books and copies of the blue-covered British Medical Journal. There were huge, dark stains on the wails and floor around the kitchen door, shards of broken green glass and jagged bottle necks lying amidst the wine-soaked clothes and magazines. And there was a hatstand sticking out of the television screen, like a moderately impressive 3D effect.
McGregor looked on blankly and shook his head.
'So are we treating the death as suspicious, sir?' chimed Skinner cheerily from behind.
'Keep guarding the spew, Gavin.'
McGregor edged around some of the blood and leapt clear of the puddie, skidding slightly on a BMJ but managing to stay upright.
Splash.
'Aw, fuck's sake,' whined Skinner's indefatigably loud voice.
McGregor turned his head to see DC Dalziel step gingerly thr6ugh the rest of the postman's puddle as Skinner picked at his bespeckled trousem, and enjoyed a brief smile.
Splash.
Aw, Jesus, watch where you ....
Callaghan.
'Naw, wait a wee... [splash] Aw, in the name of .
Gow.
The three of them hopped over the blood one by one and spent a few moments taking in the sheer scope of the carnage and disruption.
'Hey, try not to make a mess you lot, eh?' said Skinner, with slightly less enthusiastic joviality than before.
The four cops stood staring at the corpse, then at each other, then back at the corpse, and eventually out of the windows. Between them they were never, ever lost for words, but this one had run them pretty close.
'It's .... .' started Callaghan strainedly, pulling at his chin. McGregor slowly put a finger to his lips, and Callaghan nodded.
'The first one to say anything stupid gets fuil charge of this
* investigation, understood?'
'Yes, sir,' said Callaghan. Gow looked too rn to say much anyway. Daiziel just bit her lip and nodded.
4 McGregor looked again at the mutilated pyjama man.
'This,' he said, indicating the room in general, 'is what we experienced officers refer to officially as a fuckin' stoater. Observe and take notes, and consider yourselves highly privileged to be part of it.'
Cailaghan lost his footing slightly as he tried not to step on any of the items scattered around the floor, and put his hand out to steady himself, grabbing a radiator behind an upturned armchair. Then his hand slid along it, causing him to fall backwards over the chair and rattle his head off the underside of a windowsill.
'Fuck's sake. . . look at this,' he mourned.
There was dried and drying sick all over the hot radiator and down the wall behind it, which went some way towards explaining the overpowering stench that filled the room. But as pyjama man was only a few hours cold, his decay couldn't be responsible for the other eye-watering odour that permeated the atmosphere.
McGregor gripped the mantelpiece and was leaning over to offer Callaghan a hand up over the upturned chair when he saw it, just edging the outskirts of his peripheral vision. He turned his head very slowly until he found himself three inches away from it at eye level, and hoped his discovery was demonstrative enough to prevent anyone from remarking on it.
Too late.
'Heh, there' a big keech on the mantelpiece, sir,' announced Skinner joyfully, having wandered up to the doorway.
For Gow it was just one human waste-product too many. As the chaotic room swam dizzily before him, he fleetingly considered that he wouldn't complain about policing the Huns' next visit if this particular chalice could be taken from his hands. McGregor caught his appealing and slightly scared look and glanced irritably at the door by way of excusing him, the Inspector reckoning that an alimentary contribution from the constabulary was pretty far down the list of things this situation needed right now.
They watched their white-faced colleague make an unsteady but fleet-footed exit and returned their gazes to the fireplace.
The turd was enormous. An unhealthy, evil black colQur like a huge rum truffle with too much cocoa powder in the mixture. It sat proudly in the middle of the mantelpiece like
5 a favourite ornament, an appropriate monarch of what it surveyed. Now that they had seen it, it seemed incredible that they could all have missed it at first, but in mitigahon there were a few distractions about the place.
'Jesus, it's some size of loaf right enough,' remarked Callaghan, in tones that DaIziel found just the wrong side of admiring.
'Aye, it must have been a wrench for the proud father to leave it behind,' she said acidly.
'I suppose we'll need a sample,' Cailaghan observed. 'There's a lab up at the RVI that can teil all sorts of stuff from just a wee lump of shite.'
'Maybe we should send Skinner there then,' muttered Daiziel. 'See what they can tell from him.'
'I heard that.'
'Naw, seriously,' Cailaghan went on. 'They could even tell you what he had to eat.'
'We can tell what he had to eat from your sleeve,' Skinner observed.
'But we don't know which one's sick this is,' Callaghan retorted.
'We don't know which one's keech it is either.'
'Well I'd hardly imagine the deid bloke was in the habit of shiting on his own mantelpiece.'
'That's enough,' said McGregor, holding a hand up. 'We will need to get it exarnined. And the sick.'