Logan closed the door and tried again: another cupboard, full of boxed crap this time.
Number four led out onto the balcony, where a knackered bicycle slowly decomposed, along with a couple of clothes horses and some tins of paint. But then they’d squeezed past those when they’d come through the door at the far end, from the stairwell. So that was no use.
Fifth: a bathroom, with an ancient, stained, salmon-pink suite and peeling lino floor.
Which left two to try.
Eenie, meenie...
Logan tried the one furthest away: an old-fashioned bedroom with floral pillows-and-bedspread that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in a while, and a view out over the rear green.
Which left door number eight.
Logan stepped into a small bedroom, that clearly belonged to amuchyounger person.
Like Charles MacGarioch and Andrew Shaw, Spencer Findlater had papered his walls with posters, but instead of films, soft-porn popstars, and computer games, he’d gone with oiled-up bodybuilders – men flexing away in their swimming trunks, showing off their veiny muscles and leathery tans.
A collection of free weights were neatly stacked beneath the window. The single bed wore an oldTransformersduvet cover.
But what wasmoststriking about the place were the heaps and heaps and heaps of dirty-big tubs of whey protein. Each one large enough to hold a child’s severed head.
There had to be at least two hundred of them in here. Lots of different brands, most still in their shrink-wrapped pack-of-six cases – complete with delivery notes.
Logan snapped on a pair of gloves, hefted a multi-pack off the nearest stack, and turned it over to read the delivery address.
It was the sports shop on Thistle Street – the one getting its windows replaced this afternoon.
Hmmm...
Bet every delivery note in here would turn out to be from a sports shop that’d been broken into.
Which at least solved that one...
Logan opened the built-in wardrobe and searched through the clothes. Other than yet more tubs of whey protein, stashed under piles of athletic leisure wear – most of which still had the security tags attached – there was nothing exciting.
So he tried the mattress instead.
Levering it up from the bed frame exposed a bunch of magazines with titles likeMuscle MagandFlexandUK Beef. Whichsoundedlike gay porn, but a quick rifle through provedthat although theywerefull of oiled-up men in their pants, it was all about bodybuilding.
And yeah, teenaged boys were known to have a one-track mind, but this was ridiculous.
Just to be safe, Logan knelt on Optimus Prime’s face and peeled back the posters above the bed. But there were no hidden photos, or anything else. Just a couple of startled spiders.
He checked under the bed instead.
Ooh, a holdall.
That looked a bit more promising.
Logan pulled the thing out and unzipped it.
A black tracksuit sat on the top. And when Logan lifted it out, there was a hammer, a pair of black trainers with little sparkling cubes of broken glass embedded in their treads, and a pair of black leather gloves. All carrying a faint...unleaded smell.
Sod.
OK.
He put everything back where he’d found it, zipped the holdall up again, and slid it under the bed.
