There was a crackle from the intercom, then silence.

Logan hesitated, waiting for the person on the other end to speak. When they didn’t, he took the lead. “Uh, hello?”

Nothing.

“Can you hear—?”

A buzzer sounded and the door’s locking mechanism gave a clunk. Logan pushed it open before it secured itself again, and led Tyler into the close. Like the rest of Dennistoun, the close was an improvement on those of even a few years previously.

There was nobody lying dead with a needle in their arm, for one thing. Although, this had probably been quite rare a thing to come across back then, too, for anyone not involved in the frontline emergency services.

Still, the place was far better than Logan had been expecting. It had been freshly painted within the last few months, he’d guess, including the metal handrail of the steps that led up to the flats above.

The door on their left looked reasonably new, too. The fact that the owner had gone for style over security said as much about the changes to the Dennistoun area as anything else the detectives had seen that day.

It opened as they approached it, but just far enough for a chain to catch and the same eye that had peered out at them through the blinds to appear in the gap.

“Phone thing’s not working,” rasped a voice from inside.

It was a smoker’s voice, and a sixty-a-day one at that. The accent had been rough once, but the edges had been smoothed down over the years. They were all still there, though, if you knew where to look and how to listen.

The eye studied them. “You’re with the police?”

“What makes you say that?” Logan asked.

“Because of your faces, and the way you dress. And everything else about you. It’s, like, could you be any more obvious?”

“Aye, well, you got us,” Logan conceded.

As he stepped closer, the head of a small, yappy dog emerged near the bottom of the door and began barking furiously. It was one of those wee boggle-eyed bastards, little more than a rat with big ideas, but its sudden appearance made Tyler jump back and hiss out a, “Jesus!”

“Mulan! Will you cut that shit out?” the voice on the other side of the door cried. There was a hint of an American twang to it, too, Logan noted. Nowhere specific, and very likely an affectation rather than anything that had actually been picked up overseas. As accents went, it was as much of a mongrel as the dog was, and equally as pleasing on the ears.