The Bad Fire (Bob Skinner series, Book 31): A shocking murder case brings danger too close to home for ex-cop Bob Skinner in this gripping Scottish crime thriller

by Quintin Jardine

  Eleven

  ‘Morning, Roy.’ Skinner greeted the newcomer as he stepped into the coffee shop, beckoning him towards the corner table that he had commandeered. ‘I’m pleased you could join me. In fact, I’m pleased you’re still here. You must be due for retirement pretty soon.’

  ‘That’s being negotiated.’ The Crown Agent scowled. ‘I was due to go last year, until we had a new Solicitor General, a political appointee who didn’t know her bottom from her elbow, and the Lord Advocate asked me to stay on for a while to keep the train on the tracks. The word is she’s giving up. If the rumours about her successor are true, I can see the same thing happening again. I feel like a hamster on a treadmill, Bob.’ As he took his seat, he called out his order to the barista: a latte and a Danish. The venue, on King George IV Bridge and close to his office, had been Roy Pettigrew’s choice. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about retirement, though. I’ve just reviewed the file on that murder out in Haddington. Your fucking spoor was all over it. You and big Mario McGuire: which of you can’t live without the other?’

  ‘I get along without him very well,’ Skinner sang softly in reply. ‘I may take an interest on occasion,’ he continued, ‘but only when I’m asked.’

  ‘I’ve heard you also take an occasional interest in the security service.’

  Skinner glanced across at the counter, where Pettigrew’s latte was being prepared. ‘Amanda Dennis has consulted me on occasion,’ he admitted, ‘and I do have an informal connection. I haven’t heard from her in a while, though.’

  ‘Probably because you’re too busy being a media typhoon.’

  ‘That would be tycoon, would it not?’

  Pettigrew looked at him over the rim of his spectacles. ‘I choose my words carefully, Big Bob. You and the Saltire are a big wind blowing through the Scottish media, they’re saying.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Skinner conceded, ‘but not always kindly. The Saltire was the best newspaper in Scotland long before I got involved with its owners.’

  ‘Maybe, but now it’s the most influential. Which makes me ask: this unexpected invitation to morning coffee, is it off the record?’

  ‘Strictly off. It has nothing to do with the newspaper. I’m not editorial.’

  The Crown Agent peered at him anew. ‘I never thought, my friend, that I’d accuse you of being naïve, but that day has come. You might not be a member of the reporting staff, but you’re a main board director of the owners, and your office, I’m told, is next door to the managing editor, who reports to you. Anyone who sits down with you informally has to ask how confidential the chat might be. I know cops are more secretive than most, but even they talk to other cops.’

  Skinner nodded. ‘I hear that, and I repeat. This is strictly off the record. It’s not a hot topic, not at all; it flows from the Austin Brass murder that you mentioned a minute ago, but it’s nothing to do with it. Austin’s father, David, has asked me if I’ll take a look at a shoplifting case involving his former wife. It happened in Kilmarnock, nine years ago, but it never got to court—’

  ‘Because she killed herself. Yes, it crossed my desk briefly, because the woman was a local councillor and when she died the fiscal shat himself. I told him to man up, view the death as the post-mortem report said it was, a straightforward suicide with no added extras, and decide whether to have a formal inquiry, or classify it and close the file; that’s the norm in such cases, as you’re aware.’

  ‘I know that,’ Skinner agreed. ‘But in this case, the local newspaper ignored sub judice rules and really went to town on her, blackened her name to the extent that it might have been a factor in her death. The Brasses, son and father, never forgot it, and never gave up on uncovering what they saw as the truth. With Austin’s death, the dad’s picked it up again.’

  ‘How deep are you digging?’ Pettigrew asked, after a pause as his coffee and pastry were delivered.

  ‘I’m not . . . well, not really. I’ve referred him to my daughter, and she’s looking into it. She’s looking at David Brass’s conspiracy obsession, but there’s another side of it that I thought I’d cast an eye over. Given that it happened a decade ago, where would the fiscal’s report on the suicide lie right now?’

  ‘Almost certainly it’d be in an archive . . . such as it was.’

  ‘What about the witness statements?’

  ‘Same place, not that there would be likely to be many with a suicide. The person who found the body, and the attending police officer.’

  ‘And the post-mortem report?’

  ‘The paper report might not exist any more; it won’t be in the Crown Office files, of that I’m sure.’

  ‘Where else could it be?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘I suppose it’s possible that the pathologist kept a copy, although unless the circumstances were exceptional, I’d say it’s unlikely.’

  ‘If they did, who would have it?’

  The Crown Agent sipped his latte and nodded satisfaction. ‘Let’s see . . . The death was in Ayrshire, so I’d be looking at Glasgow. You might have a word with Professor Scott, in the new super hospital through there. Mind you,’ he added, ‘it’ll cost you more than a coffee and a bun with him.’

  Twelve

  McDaniels had expected that Zaqib Butt would be a hard man to find. His employer of the time, LuxuMarket, no longer existed as a trading entity, and according to the Crown Office file he had been a short-term employee, hired on an initial six-month contract to cover the maternity leave of another staff member. She had entered the name into the Facebook search bar with no expectation of success, but to her surprise, one name had popped up. His location was Motherwell, and his page carried a full CV which listed all his employers, including ‘LuxuMarket, Kilmarnock’. She had contacted him through Messenger asking for a meeting on a confidential matter, and he had agreed without question.

  Mr Butt had come up in the world in the nine years since his brief foray into on-site security. He was now the managing director of a steel stockholding company on the outskirts of what had been one of the largest burghs in Scotland. The ever-reliable Apple Maps plotted her course, but it could do nothing about the traffic. Glasgow and Edinburgh were linked by a motorway, but it was at least a lane too narrow for the throng of Friday-afternoon commuters. There was nothing for it but to crawl patiently with the rest, grateful yet again for her air con, listening to the melodious Mark Knopfler and contemplating what she had learned in her brief investigation into the sad and lonely death of Marcia Brown.

  Her lawyer thought she had been guilty, it was clear, but her elusive sister was, it seemed, convinced of a conspiracy, up to and including murder. Carrie had no expectation that Butt would add much clarity to the picture, but he was another box that had to be ticked, and she was pleased that she would be able to do it so quickly. Butt was in the diary, then Terry Coats. She disliked working weekends; they were for her father and for quality time spent with one of a small list of men. She was not a woman for commitment, not for a while at any rate, a trait she had sensed that she shared with Alex Skinner. Coats, however, had insisted on a Saturday-morning meeting, in his office at the airport.

  Following Coats on her list was Hazel Delaney, the former LuxuMarket boss, scheduled for the following Monday morning. Social media had become a great boon to the detecting business, she acknowledged. LinkedIn had led her straight to the woman, who had crossed the country after the sale of the business to become general manager of a radio station in Dundee. She was looking forward to that visit, after a quick look at its website; its star presenter was Mia Sparkles, a name she recognised from her primary school days when she had been the top disc jockey in Edinburgh until her sudden disappearance from the airwaves, leaving thousands of disappointed kids behind her. Carrie liked to believe that her feet were squarely on the ground, but even she could be star-struck on occasion.

  Mark Knopfler had given way to Corinne Bailey Rae when Apple Maps, to her relief, instructed her to leave the motorway. She followed its
guidance through a place called Holytown, which looked to be anything but, past a sign for a crematorium – for some reason those always gave her the creeps – then on for a mile or so until she turned into an industrial estate. A signboard stood at the entrance, listing half a dozen companies. WZB Stockholders was third on the list.

  The unit that the business occupied was much larger than she had expected; steel stockholding was a business of which she had heard and about which she knew nothing, but it had no bearing on the purpose of her visit. A single-storey black-walled office building sat in front of the massive shed, with a parking area alongside in which one car stood out from half a dozen others: a silver Mercedes S Class with a personalised number plate that bore the company’s three initials. Advertising on wheels, she thought.

  She checked her Rolex as she walked towards the office. Four forty-seven, and Butt had made it clear he would be leaving at five on the dot. ‘Sorry,’ she exclaimed to the young clean-shaven Asian man who greeted her. ‘Can you explain to Mr Butt that the motorway was a real nightmare? I left in plenty of time, but it was like there was a pilgrimage of sorts out there.’

  ‘No need to explain to him,’ he replied. ‘I know the M8. I’m Zaqib. A pilgrimage of sorts,’ he repeated. ‘That would be a good title for a book. Come on through.’

  He led her into a spacious, well-furnished office, dominated by a glass wall that looked out on to the shed, which was piled high with slabs of steel and girders, beneath overhead cranes. She counted five men and three women on the stock floor, each wearing overalls and a yellow hard hat, as they operated cutting machines. In each of the four corners of the roof, fans were located; even through the thick glass wall she could hear that they were going full blast, against the heat, she assumed.

  ‘Is this all yours?’ she asked. ‘You’re very young, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘I don’t mind a bit,’ Butt replied. ‘I’m twenty-nine years old and it bigs me up. But it’s one reason why you didn’t see any personal photos on Facebook. This is a very competitive business, and if my rivals could use my age against me, they would.’

  ‘Still, you’ve come a long way in a relatively short time. Nine years ago you had a short-term contract at LuxuMarket.’

  Zaqib Butt smiled. Involuntarily she checked his left hand for a wedding ring and saw none. ‘That wasn’t what it seemed,’ he said. ‘It was a vacation job. My dad was a minority shareholder in the holding company. He fixed it up. When the business was sold a few years later, he set me up here.’

  ‘Is he involved in running this business?’

  ‘Only if I ask him for advice, but I don’t do that very often. He knows nothing about the steel industry; always was a retailer. Mind you, he offers me advice whether I ask him or not. He’s back in Pakistan just now, for good, I like to hope, but no such luck.’ He glanced at a wall clock; it showed six minutes to five. ‘I’m sorry to rush you, but I really do have to be out of here sharpish. I have a golf tie at Lanark at six. What is it that you want to ask me?’

  ‘It’s about your time in Kilmarnock, and a shoplifting case in which you were cited as a police witness. I’m looking into the incident on behalf of a client.’

  Butt frowned; the openness in his expression was replaced by concern. ‘I remember it,’ he admitted, ‘but only because the lady who was accused took her own life rather than face the court. That was a great pity, I thought. If she stole something, it was hardly worth dying for. The goods in her basket that she had bought and paid for already were worth almost a hundred pounds – groceries, drink, household goods. The clothing in her bag, it was shit, a suit off the sale rail that had been discounted down to twenty-five quid or something around that.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ McDaniels asked. ‘The charge against her said it was worth over a hundred and fifty.’

  ‘That was the regular price. I saw the red discount tag sticking out of the bag when I stopped her. Now that you force me to think about it, I remember wondering why the police were involved. I had only been there for a couple of weeks, but I had caught a couple of thieves already. All that happened to them was that they were photographed and barred from the store, because the stuff they had nicked was worth less than thirty pounds. That was store policy; they threatened to prosecute everyone caught stealing, but they only did it if it was more than that.’

  ‘Did you query it with anyone?’

  ‘I told my father after she had died. He said he asked the store manager, Mrs Delaney, if there was really a need to prosecute, but she said that her hands were tied by established policy, and that was that decisions were based on the price of the stolen goods. She didn’t think they had been discounted.’

  Carrie felt her excitement rise. ‘Did you tell any of this to Ms Brown’s solicitor?’

  ‘I was never asked,’ Butt replied, ‘by him or anyone else other than the cop who interviewed me. I was told I might be a witness if it went to trial, but it never did, did it?’ He checked the wall clock again.

  ‘Sorry,’ she promised, ‘I’ll be quick.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he insisted. ‘Let’s deal with this. You’ve got me worried now.’

  ‘Thanks. Part of Ms Brown’s defence would have been that she was distracted on her way out of the store by a man called Adrian, who claimed to be a constituent of hers. Can you confirm that?’

  ‘No, not as such, but she mentioned it as Geoff, the other security guard, and I were taking her back to the office. I did remember seeing her trolley near the exit, though, before it all happened.’

  ‘Did you tell the police?’

  ‘I can’t remember. It was a while ago; I can’t remember much of the detail.’

  ‘The other security guard: I’ve never heard of him. There’s no mention of him in the file.’

  ‘There wouldn’t have been. He saw nothing. I called for backup after I’d stopped her.’

  ‘So you were the only person who was there when the security alarm was triggered?’

  ‘Yes.’ Butt paused for a moment. ‘The alarm was never triggered, though. It was broken.’

  ‘Eh?’ McDaniels exclaimed. ‘Then how did you know to stop her?’

  ‘I was told to, by another staff member.’

  ‘Ah, I’d forgotten that. The corroborating witness’s statement was on file: Alicia Malcolm.’

  Butt looked at her. ‘I really can’t remember who called out to me. Alicia was a checkout girl, that I do recall. It could have been her, I suppose, who told me to stop Ms Brown . . . Whoever it was, I remember clearly that she called out to me, “Boy, stop that one, she’s nicked a suit.”’

  ‘Do you remember a woman called Stephens on the staff?’

  He grinned. ‘Her, yes. Geoff called her Zeppy because she had ti—’ He stopped himself, but Carrie had heard the one about racing airships half a dozen times in her part-time army career. ‘Not much older than me, but full of herself and a nasty little racist as well. Vera, she was called, Vera Stephens.’

  ‘Could it have been her, not Alicia?’

  ‘Nine years ago? I can’t say. For all I know, it could have been you.’ He looked at the clock for a third time. ‘Is that us?’ he asked, ‘Because really . . .’

  ‘Yes, that’s great, thanks,’ McDaniels said. ‘Mr Butt, Zaqib, would you be prepared to speak to the police about this again?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ he declared. ‘That woman died because I stopped her. I don’t want that on my conscience.’

  Thirteen

  Skinner became aware mid afternoon, from a news flash on the Saltire’s in-house information system, that there had been a multiple fatality on the westbound M8 motorway just before its link with the M73. His regret over the four reported deaths was accompanied by pity for any commuting motorists heading for Glasgow, and by the realisation that Professor Graham Scott would have his hands full and was unlikely to be responding to his voicemail any time soon.

  In fact he was just leaving Aberlady, with Gull
ane Hill in sight, when his ringtone sang out over his car’s Bluetooth system, and the information screen showed a Glasgow number. He pushed the receive button. ‘Graham,’ he said, ‘I didn’t expect to be hearing from you today.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not finished, Bob,’ the pathologist replied. ‘It’s taken longer than anyone anticipated to cut the last two bodies out of their vehicle. They’re on their way here now; that’ll be me and the team tied up until midnight. I’ve just taken a break from the second one: a girl in her early twenties. I’m told the boyfriend was driving, clocked at a hundred and twenty-eight by the police. Fucking thing went airborne and took out a couple of innocent Belgian tourists in a car in front. The police haven’t released any names yet, but the boyfriend was an English Premier League footballer. Your news desk and all the others will go crazy when they find out. My God, the whole world’s gone crazy; the boy was driving a Lamborghini, and it was less than a week’s wages to him. What are they going to do about it?’

  ‘Not a fucking thing, chum,’ Skinner assured him as he pulled into the nature reserve car park to continue the call. The road was busy and he had no wish to wind up on his wife’s mortuary table. ‘Supply and demand; you’ve got agents falling over themselves to supply players to the top clubs, and able to demand ridiculous money because the global television market is apparently insatiable.’

  ‘But that’s not why you called me earlier,’ Professor Scott said wearily.

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s a fit of curiosity on my part, actually.’

  ‘It was ever thus,’ Scott chuckled.

  ‘Maybe,’ Skinner admitted. ‘My daughter’s been asked to look into a nine-year-old shoplifting involving a local councillor from Ayrshire. The accusation led to the woman’s suicide.’ He paused. ‘That’s what the fiscal decided it was, at any rate.’

  ‘You have doubts, I take it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far. It was an unexplained sudden death, maybe not suspicious at first sight, but if I’d been investigating it there would have been certain questions I’d have wanted answered, the main one being was there any likelihood, possibility even, that the drugs that killed her might not have been self-administered. Is that routine for your guys?’