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

  ‘Absolutely, gaffer.’ Jackson raised an eyebrow at Haddock’s use of the term. ‘Carrie McDaniels’ door was either opened with a key, which he didn’t have, or it was expertly picked. Barclay Potter couldn’t pick his own nose unassisted. He heard them, and this is where it gets really worrying. It happened just before three o’clock, half an hour before you were attacked, Alex, and Inspector Montell was wounded.’ Jackson raised another eyebrow. ‘That’s easily enough time to get from her place to yours.’

  ‘Worrying on several levels,’ Skinner observed. ‘We know these guys were capable of getting into Alex’s place without a key, but I doubt they needed one at Carrie’s. What was taken, Sauce, that you know of?’

  ‘Her computer and her iPad. Also her files were trashed; if they were looking for something there, it’ll have gone too.’

  ‘Agreed. Thing is, they went there specifically for those items. They knew where Carrie lived, and like I said, you can bet they had a key . . . that they got from her. Next thing they did was go down the hill possibly with the intention of silencing Alex.’ He looked at Haddock. ‘Carrie’s been missing for twenty-four hours. She’s either being held captive somewhere . . . or she’s not.’ He turned to his daughter. ‘Kid, your brief from David Brass has become extremely fucking toxic.’

  ‘David Brass?’ Haddock repeated.

  ‘We’ll get to that,’ his ‘Gaffer’ told him, ‘but there’s something else that you don’t know, not you, Alex, something I wasn’t planning to tell you just yet. Marcia Brown, the woman at the centre of the investigation Carrie was working on: she didn’t kill herself; she was murdered.’ He explained how Graham Scott’s review of the autopsy file had uncovered basic errors and crucial findings that would have ruled out suicide had the negligent pathologist spotted them at the time. ‘I’ve reported it to Mario McGuire; DCI Lottie Mann will open a full-scale murder investigation tomorrow, once I’ve briefed her.’

  The DI grinned. ‘Let me guess. You’ll be along as an adviser.’

  Skinner peered at him. ‘The word is mentor, Sauce, but you get the picture.’

  ‘Fine, but doesn’t the Carrie McDaniels situation overlap with that, if she was investigating the Brown woman’s death?’

  ‘She wasn’t,’ Alex said. ‘She was looking into an accusation of shoplifting that had been made against Ms Brown just before she killed herself . . . or didn’t, as it now appears.’

  ‘Investigating on your behalf?’

  ‘Yes, I was instructed by Mr Brass. He’s obsessed by it, as was his son.’

  ‘Had she reported back to you before she went off the radar?’

  ‘She was going to. She wanted a short-notice meeting at my office, five thirty on Saturday, but I didn’t get her voice message until well after that, so I didn’t turn up.’

  ‘Do you know if she did?’ Haddock asked.

  She frowned. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘It’s important that we find out. What time did she leave her message? Do you know?’

  ‘Two something, as I recall. I can check; I didn’t delete it.’

  The DI looked across at a woman who had been standing silently against Dominic Jackson’s living room wall. ‘Noele, we need to check with security at the Saltire building where Ms Skinner has her office to determine whether Ms McDaniels arrived for the meeting she’d requested. If she did, the search for her begins in Edinburgh. If not, we know that she disappeared sometime after leaving her voicemail.’

  ‘On it, boss,’ Detective Sergeant Noele McClair replied, her ice-blue eyes flashing as she nodded. They had won her the nickname ‘the Night Queen’ among her Serious Crimes colleagues. ‘Should we issue an appeal for sightings?’

  ‘Soonest,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll need a photograph; you can get that from her father, and while you’re at it, ask him if he has any idea of his daughter’s movements over the last week. Her laptop’s gone, her iPad’s gone, and she’s gone. We need to know where she’s been and who she’s been speaking to. Somewhere she’s tripped a wire.’

  ‘Those names should all be in the file,’ Skinner said, looking at his daughter.

  ‘What file?’ Haddock’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘The file David Brass gave me,’ Alex explained.

  ‘And where’s that?’

  ‘In my office.’

  ‘When were you there last?’

  ‘Friday. I see where you’re going,’ she said, ‘but the building’s secure, and it’s a newspaper office so there are always people around. They couldn’t have got in there.’

  He sighed. ‘Alex, these guys broke into your penthouse apartment in a secure building with multiple occupants, and you never heard a thing until it was nearly too late. They could have got anywhere they bloody well liked. At the very least, it has to be checked.’ He turned back to the DS. ‘Noele, make that your first priority, before you call on Mr McDaniels. Gaffer,’ he said to Skinner, ‘this has to be a single investigation, hasn’t it? Carrie’s disappearance, the break-in at her flat, the attack on Alex, and Marcia Brown’s death.’

  ‘That’ll be the DCC’s decision, Sauce,’ he replied, ‘but I’ll be advising him to keep them separate until they come together. Apart from the geography, one crime in Ayrshire and the others in Edinburgh, Marcia Brown died nine years ago. The likelihood is we’re looking for different perpetrators, and the motivation might be completely unrelated. One thing’s for sure, though: while Noele sets about her tasks, we need to interrupt big Mario’s weekend, again.’

  Haddock threw him a questioning look. ‘We?’ He sighed. ‘Aye, okay.’

  Thirty

  ‘This is serious, Sergeant, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is, Mr McDaniels,’ Noele McClair affirmed. ‘We’ve established that your daughter didn’t show up at Saltire House for the meeting she herself had requested only three hours earlier. When DI Haddock and I saw you earlier at her flat, you told us that she was going to Newcastle on Saturday night for a concert. We’ve checked with the Sage, the venue; they’ve established that the seat she bought was never occupied. They’d have the ticket stub, and they don’t.’

  ‘How do they know which seat was hers?’ As reality began to bite, Peter McDaniels seemed to be ageing before her eyes.

  ‘They have a record of credit card purchases. More than that, though, we checked with the Malmaison. She didn’t take up her booking.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘something really is wrong. Our Carrie’s careful with her money; she wouldn’t miss something that was bought and paid for without a bloody good reason.’ He frowned. ‘Or a bloody bad one. Is there anything you can tell me?’

  ‘Nothing positive. We’re fairly certain that the intruders Barclay heard in your daughter’s apartment were the same two men who broke into Alex Skinner’s duplex a wee while later.’

  ‘Eh? Was anything stolen from there?’

  ‘No.’ McClair decided to economise with the truth of what had happened. ‘They were disturbed, but they were able to escape.’

  ‘You’re saying the same two guys ransacked Carrie’s and Alex Skinner’s place. How did they know to go there? Is there a source inside her office?’

  ‘No, there isn’t. The thing is . . .’ She faltered, but McDaniels could see where she was headed.

  ‘The two guys knew,’ he continued, ‘because they got it out of Carrie; her keys, the Skinner woman’s address, and they went looking for everything that recorded her investigation.’

  ‘That’s what we believe.’ McClair sighed. ‘They even got into Saltire House and stole a file from Alex’s office. She has CCTV and they were caught on camera, but they weren’t bothered; they wore balaclavas, and they knew exactly what they were looking for and where to find it.’

  ‘Does she not have an alarm system?’

  ‘She does, and they were able to disable it. These men have considerable skill, or one of them has.’

  ‘What have they done with Carrie?’ McDaniels was on the edge of panic
.

  ‘We don’t know. Our hope is that once they’d got everything they needed from her, they tied her up and left her somewhere she wouldn’t be found for a while.’

  ‘You’d better get out and look for her then!’

  ‘That’s partly why I’m here, Mr McDaniels. We want to make a public appeal for sightings, and for that we need a photo. Can you help?’

  ‘Sure,’ he replied, ‘I’ve got loads on my phone. Give me your number and I’ll send you one.’

  She did as he asked. Within a matter of seconds, an image of a smiling, forceful woman appeared on her screen. At once she forwarded it to Haddock with a covering message.

  ‘Do you want me to go on TV to make an appeal?’ McDaniels asked. ‘I’m up for it if you do. I won’t be breaking down like most of those poor folk do. I won’t be begging these bastards to let her go, I’ll tell you. I’ll be warning them what’ll happen if they don’t. I’m still in touch with a few of Carrie’s friends from her days in the Territorial Army. A couple of them are regular soldiers now. They’d weigh in right away.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re there yet, sir,’ McClair murmured. ‘Let’s just start with an appeal for sightings, of Carrie or her car. Chances are she’ll be found within the first twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Could you not find her through her phone? Get a fix on that?’

  ‘First thing we tried,’ the DS replied. ‘It doesn’t exist any more. The SIM card’s been destroyed, and the phone itself too most likely. The intruders were after all her IT equipment, anywhere she could have stored interview notes and other material about the investigation. We’re hoping that anything there is will be backed up to the Cloud and we’ll be able to access it.’

  ‘You won’t get much,’ he said gloomily. ‘Carrie’s got a thing about Cloud storage. She doesn’t trust its security; she backs up all of her work stuff on an external hard drive. Any chance they left that at her flat?’

  ‘I’ll check, but given their general efficiency, I doubt it.’

  ‘What about her notebook?’ he asked. ‘She writes things down, then transcribes them afterwards. Everybody thinks IT these days, mini recorders and the like. Carrie reckons that if you go to interview someone and put a recorder in front of them, you might as well not bother. She thinks it’s rude and counter-productive, so every meeting she has, she takes notes. These men wouldn’t know that. I’m telling you, find her notebook.’

  ‘They’ve got everything else, Mr McDaniels,’ McClair pointed out.

  ‘She might have locked it in the glove box of her car,’ he persisted.

  ‘We’ll look when we find it,’ she promised. ‘First, can I ask you, has she said anything to you about what she was doing over the last few days?’

  ‘Carrie doesn’t break client confidentiality with anyone, not even me. I understand that; I didn’t in my job either.’ He frowned. ‘The closest she’s come . . .’ He hesitated, searching his memory. ‘Last time we spoke, she said that the job she was on was letting her see new parts of Scotland, places she’d never been to.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Motherwell, that was one. Ayrshire, another. And Millport; she’d always wanted to go to Millport but never got round to it. She’d to go and see somebody there.’

  ‘She didn’t say who?’

  ‘Oh no, she’d never do that.’

  ‘Never mind, it’s not a big place; my ex and I used to go there often. Anywhere else?’

  ‘Mmm . . . yes, there was Dundee, that she mentioned. She’s going there tomorrow.’

  ‘She’s never been to Dundee?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ McDaniels chuckled, ‘often enough. But she told me she’s never been to a radio station, so that’d be a first.’

  Thirty-One

  ‘What did Mario say?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Not just Mario,’ her husband replied. ‘He consulted with the chief constable, and Maggie agreed that the two investigations should be conducted separately, with him as co-ordinator. Also, she approved my involvement in the inquiry into the death of Marcia Brown. She was a bit miffed that she hadn’t been asked before, but she thought it was advisable to have outside oversight, given all the possibilities.’

  ‘What did she mean by that?’

  ‘Corruption, mainly. Was it negligence by Banks the pathologist, pure and simple, or was he bribed or otherwise induced to submit his shoddy report? Was there involvement by the police officers at the scene? According to the police report in the file Graham and I reviewed, there was no proper forensic examination carried out there; the woman was zipped straight into a body bag and sent to the mortuary, to be opened up the next day.’

  ‘You won’t get anything out of Banks, I can tell you that.’

  ‘I don’t expect to; my assumption is that he’ll have a complete memory lapse.’

  ‘He suffered that two years ago. He spent most of his time in a place he had in Dubrovnik; he had a cerebral haemorrhage while he was out there. I saw his obituary in a professional journal.’

  ‘Damn the man!’ Bob growled. ‘Useless then, and just as useless now. Do you know a pathologist called Marguerite Swanson?’

  ‘I know of her, but we’ve never met. She spent some time with my predecessor, Joe Hutchinson, in Edinburgh as an assistant. I was away in the US at the time. When I came back, she had moved on, to Birmingham, I believe. I can track her down if you need her, no problem.’

  ‘Graham’s already found her. He spoke to her about her role in the autopsy, which was minimal, as the examination itself seems to have been. She may need to be interviewed formally for the police investigation. If she’s in Birmingham, maybe we can do it by video link.’

  ‘We?’ Sarah queried.

  He laughed. ‘Funny, Sauce said the same thing, in the same tone of voice.’

  ‘They’re dragging you back in, you know, Maggie and Mario, as they’ve always wanted to. She can call it . . . what was it? . . . “outside oversight”, but you’ll put just as much into it as you do with every investigation. And you’ll be running the operation.’

  ‘They won’t drag me any further than I want to be dragged,’ Bob promised. ‘As for running the show, I will make damn sure that Lottie Mann thinks she is.’

  ‘And that Sauce thinks the same with the Edinburgh investigation?’ she challenged.

  ‘He is,’ Bob protested.

  ‘Sure he is. An investigation into an attack on your daughter and you’re going to keep your hands off it. Play me another tune, big boy.’

  He sniffed. ‘I admit that some co-ordination between the two investigations may be necessary, beyond that of the DCC. Because,’ he added, ‘I want to be within reach of these guys when they catch them.’

  ‘It’s more than just Alex, though, isn’t it? You know Carrie McDaniels. That appeal we’ve just seen on the news: is there a realistic chance of finding her?’

  He looked her in the eye. ‘Since I first heard about Alex’s break-in, I’ve been trying to make myself believe that they went there to throw a scare into her, no more than that. She’s high profile as an advocate, and those blokes would possibly be aware that she’s my daughter; any physical harm done to her would have drawn all sorts of heat. Yes, I put her with Dominic for her safety, but I don’t think they’ll go near her again. Carrie? She’s an unknown, one of life’s foot soldiers, literally in her case, even if she was only part-time. Safer to kill her than leave her alive.’

  Sarah shuddered.

  ‘Either way, love, you ask will we find her? Not if these guys are as thorough at their job as they’ve shown until now.’

  Thirty-Two

  After the visit from Skinner and the police, Alex and her host were left with no inclination to eat out. Instead she examined the contents of the fridge, and announced that she could ‘throw something together’.

  ‘Please do,’ Jackson said. ‘I can’t remember the last time someone cooked for me in my own home. Come to think of it, I’m not sure anyone ever did. The late M
rs Plenderleith, poor lass, didn’t know a soufflé from a suffragette. We never ate anything that didn’t come out of a box.’

  ‘Don’t build your hopes up,’ she warned. ‘I didn’t have a mother to teach me, and I’ve never done a cookery course. Everything I know in the kitchen came from my old man. And you know what they say about blokes’ cooking: they call it goulash, they call it stroganoff, they call it Sloppy Joe, but at the end of the day it’s all bloody stew.’

  Alex’s ‘stew’ was in fact a crisp salad of Chinese leaves, endives, tomato, sliced yellow pepper and chopped chives, crowned by smoked salmon and tiger prawns. In her perusal of the fridge she had seen no wine, only soft drinks and two cans of the spritzer he had given her earlier. ‘You don’t drink?’ she asked as she worked in the kitchen with him looking on.

  ‘No, I don’t. I went for nearly fifteen years without, no choice, but Lennie never did drink much, so it was easy for Dominic to become a teetotaller.’ He smiled. ‘That’s a damn silly word. Do you ever wonder where it came from?’

  ‘Not for one second,’ she replied cheerfully, ‘but I have a feeling I’m about to learn.’

  ‘One version anyway; it’s attributed to a man named Turner, a crusader against the demon drink who was forever going on about total abstinence. Unfortunately, he had a speech defect and it came out as “tee-tee-tee-total”. That’s what Google says. I assume you’re not one of those; I can go pick up a bottle of something if you like.’

  ‘No, I’m fine. Our family aren’t big drinkers either; I can live without. Our family,’ she repeated, smiling. ‘Half of it are too young to drink. Do you know, I am over thirty years older than my youngest sister? She was a surprise, they said. At their age you’d think they’d know what caused it. Mind you, my dad has previous; as witness my half-brother Ignacio.’

  ‘I remember his mother,’ Dominic said as he took the laden plate she handed him and carried it through to the dining table. ‘She was the big name on Edinburgh local radio at the time. Tony Manson knew her, sort of, but I never met her. She was under the protection of a man called Perry Holmes, who had a particularly crazy brother. I’d have liked to have had a couple of counselling sessions with him, but Mia’s uncle, Billy Spreckley, denied me the chance.’