‘I would say that it was preposterous, and wholly untrue.’
‘So defend your officers, Chief Superintendent. Name your informant.’
Skinner leaned forward in the witness box. He looked deep into Rachel Jameson’s eyes and held her gaze. ‘Counsel may be aware that I have come to this Court from a highly-publicised murder enquiry. Earlier this week I saw a person who had been brutally killed. If I do as you ask, I might well have to look at another. I don’t want that. Do you?’
Rachel Jameson paled. She nodded to the Bench and sat down. Lord Auchinleck thanked Skinner and excused him. He left the Court feeling a twinge of sympathy for the defence advocate, but only a twinge. Each of them had clients to protect.
6
The telephone, held in a cradle screwed to a post at the head of Skinner’s pine bed, rang at 6.00 a.m. He struggled out of sleep, cursing softly. The slim figure beside him rolled over, grumbling. His groping hand found the receiver. The caller was Andy Martin.
‘I’m sorry to wake you, boss, but there’s been another murder. Jackson’s Close this time. Some bastard’s set a wino on fire!’
‘Aw, come on, Andy. Those poor sods are always dropping matches on their meths.’
‘No’ this one. He had a gallon of petrol poured over him and was set alight by a piece of paper thrown on to a trail four feet away. Look, I wouldn’t have called you, but with the other one so close by, and so recent ... ’
‘That’s okay; you were right. I’m on my way in.’
Martin hesitated. ‘Eh, boss, you wouldn’t happen to know where the duty police doctor might be. I can’t raise her on the phone at home.’
‘Andy, don’t push your luck.’
With a soft smile, he replaced the telephone in its holder. ‘Come on, gal. It’s you and me for the early shift again.’
Sarah Grace sat up in bed and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. ‘Shit. Do you want to go first in the shower?’
‘Who says we have to take turns?’
Sarah stripped off Bob’s Rugby World Cup tee-shirt, which had been her night attire, and together they stepped into the shower cubicle in the en suite bathroom. He chose ‘champagne’ from the range of options, and turned the shower to full power.
Her eyes were squeezed tight shut as he soaped her breasts and belly. ‘Is it a bad one, Bob?’ she asked quietly.
‘Not now, sweetheart. Things like that don’t belong in here. I’ll tell you on the road.’
Sarah stepped first out of the shower. She looked back at Robert
Skinner, Detective Chief Superintendent, as he krieaded shampoo through his hair. Her professional eye told her that he had the body of a man younger than his forty-three years. One hundred and ninety pounds was spread evenly over his lean frame. Good muscular definition, there, she thought, clinically. His hands were slender. This, when he was clothed, tended to mask his strength, which was maintained by regular work-outs in the small, well-equipped gym alongside the shower room. Fresh from sleep, fitness shone from the man. Only those creased eyes offered a hint of the pressures of his job.
Twisting the valve to turn off the shower, Bob took the towel which Sarah held out to him. As she rubbed her auburn hair, he smiled at her slim brown body, its colour accentuated by the white bikini marks. Sarah’s parents lived in retirement in Florida. In October, she had visited them to break the news of the widowed policeman who had come bursting into her life seven months before.
Sarah had met Skinner in her first week as a part-time police surgeon, introductions effected over the body of a middle-aged man, stabbed to death by his only son in a squalid house in Newhaven. At first she had been in awe of the famous DCS Skinner. A hard man, she had heard from colleagues. Perform well and you were okay. Slip up, and you’d never forget it.
She had done well, and she knew it. Skinner had been polite, even complimentary. And, Sarah thought, to her great surprise, a bit tasty for a Detective Chief Superintendent.
When he had telephoned a week later to invite her to dinner, she had been astonished. But she had said yes, pausing only so that she did not sound too eager, yet answering, she thought afterwards, more quickly than she should have. ‘I didn’t even ask if he was single,’ she said to herself, but then she recalled the story. Skinner, widowed at twenty-seven by a road accident, was married to the job.
He had taken her to Skippers, ostensibly a dockside pub, but in reality, Edinburgh’s finest seafood restaurant. The meal was relaxed; Skinner was charming, suddenly younger than he appeared at work. Her preconceptions of the man had been obliterated from the moment she opened the door of her Stockbridge flat, as Skinner had arrived to collect her. The copper’s overcoat had been nowhere in sight. Instead, he had stood there, tall, lean and shining, flowers in hand, dressed in calf-skin moccasins, tan slacks and a soft brown leather jacket, with the collar of a blue and white striped Dior shirt, worn open-necked, spread wide on the shoulders. His only jewellery was an eighteen-carat gold rope neck chain.
Over their first meal together, Skinner, skilled and subtle interrogator that he was, had found out almost all there was to know about Sarah.
She had been born in Buffalo, New York, to a prosperous forty-year-old lawyer and his twenty-eight-year-old teacher wife. She had been brought up in a fine house with a pool and educated at the finest schools and colleges, where she had always achieved good grades and had been an enthusiastic member of the tennis squads. She had graduated from medical school six years earlier and had shocked her parents by turning down the local internship which her father had arranged for her, through what he called the ‘Buffalo Magic Circle’, in favour of a job in the wildest hospital in the Bronx.
Her first experience of what she soon learned to call the ‘real world’ had changed her life. She had remained on the staff of the hospital after her initial contract was over, and had undertaken post-graduate studies of scene of crime’work. She had given her time voluntarily to clinics offering free medical care to New York’s thousands of poor families, mostly black or Hispanic.
She explained that her move to Scotland had been prompted not by job dissatisfaction, but by the break-up of her three-year relationship with, and six month engagement to, a very earnest young Wall Street fund manager.
‘What happened?’ Skinner asked.
‘I just realised that having my pants bored off wasn’t necessarily the best way.’ She had answered him naturally, without thinking, then had realised what she had said. Her mouth had dropped open, she had gasped, flushed and then they both had laughed. To her surprise, she had noticed Skinner blush slightly.
Before the evening was over, Skinner had known the story of the twenty-nine years of Sarah Grace, all the way up to her decision to find out what the world outside New York State was like, beginning with Edinburgh. It was only after he had dropped her off at home, declining her offer of coffee, and unknown to him, maybe more, that Sarah had realised that she still knew little or nothing about him.
That had changed four days later, on a bright spring Saturday. As arranged, Bob had picked her up at 1.00 p.m. When he had made the date he had said something vague about a football match, Motherwell versus Rangers. Great! Sarah had thought; just what I want — a sports freak.
But instead of joining the flow of football traffic, he had headed east-wards out of Edinburgh towards the East Lothian coast. They had stopped in Gullane, pulling up outside a grey stone cottage, set in what looked like half an acre of ground. In recent years the house had been extended, to the rear and into the attic, to provide more living space. A big wooden hut stood in a comer of the garden.
On the drive out, he had talked about his life; his Glasgow up-bringing, his education at a modest fee-paying school, his decision to join the police force, taken out of a desire for an ordered life. Then his tale seemed to become one of growing loneliness, as he spoke of the illness and death of his father, a lawyer like Sarah’s, of the more recent death of his mother, and finally, painfully, of
the loss of his wife Myra sixteen years earlier in a car crash.
‘It was just here,’ he said. They were taking a long left-handed curve between the villages of Aberlady and Gullane. ‘We had just moved out here. I had just made Detective Sergeant, and Myra was teaching. We were comfortable and very happy. She had this Hillman Imp. It hit a patch of black ice, then a tree. Broke her neck.
‘So that was me left with two jobs in life — policeman and single parent.’
And when he had opened the door, there she had been. Alex, at nineteen. Bob Skinner’s secret, the daughter he had brought up alone, in the country, shielded from the reality of his work. Since his first days in the Edinburgh police, Skinner had kept a barrier between his work and his home life. He had always been seen by his colleagues as a private man, with an inner driving force. Very few colleagues knew what that force was; even fewer had met Alex.
The girl was stunning. She was taller than Sarah, and as slim. Long dark hair fell in ordered confusion on to broad shoulders, framing a perfectly oval face, which was lit by huge, soft blue eyes.
‘Hi,’ Alex had said with a sudden smile, putting her at her ease with an outstretched hand. They had shaken, formally, and then the jumble of words which was Alex’s trademark had come pouring out.
‘You’re really a doctor, then. And a New Yorker. That’s great. Pops thinks that Glasgow is on the other side of the universe. I’m at university there, doing Law, did he tell you? My greatest threat to him is that when I graduate I’m going to join the Strathclyde Force and set up in opposition.’
‘The hell you will!’ Skinner had snorted in a John Wayne drawl. Sarah had realised just then that she had never seen a man look so alive.
And so by that introduction to Bob’s other life, their relationship had been put on a formal footing. It had blossomed at once. Sarah had found out from Alex the things which Bob hadn’t said, and which she could not ask. She had found out that since his wife’s death he had never had a long-term relationship. ‘A few dates, that’s all. You’re the first girlfriend who’s ever been in this house.’
Alex had returned to Glasgow that evening in her silver Metro, pleading study. And Sarah had come into Bob’s bed without a word of it being said. He was big, but he was gentle, and when they made love for the first time, Sarah had felt him explode inside her with the force of a bursting dam as if the years of loneliness were flooding away. She had drifted out of her own mind for a time, on the crest of the deepest physical sensation she had ever known. And afterwards, when they had returned to the present, she had nibbled his ear and said: ‘Now, that’s the way I’ve always thought it should be.’
From that moment on, their relationship, new though it was, had fitted around them like a well-worn pair of good leather gloves, and soon it had seemed as if it had always been. As it had developed, they had discovered the bonuses. They both loved movies, and shared a secret enjoyment of TV soap operas. Their tastes in music were wide and complementary. They played squash well together, and Sarah’s golf was competent enough for them to reach the quarter-finals of the Golf Club mixed four-somes. But best of all the plusses for Sarah had been the friendship she had developed with Alex. There was nothing step-parental in tone about it. Alex was a mature lady for her years, and they had become solid, steadfast adult friends.
Marriage was not discussed. Sarah, having been engaged once, painfully, had no desire to rush back into that state. And in any event, it had hardly seemed necessary.
Their relationship, as they had agreed early on, was never discussed at work. But equally they had agreed that they would make no elaborate attempts to hide it. Her years in New York City had taught Sarah the value of privacy, but she realised that Edinburgh was a village by comparison, where secrets guarded too jealously rarely kept safe for long. And Andy Martin was too good a detective and too close to Bob not to have happened early upon the truth.
He had soon begun to notice his boss disappear more often at lunchtime than was natural for him, and had noticed too the new air of relaxation which he wore at work. However, when he had stumbled on the secret it had been by accident, calling in at Gullane one Sunday morning, with his wind-surfer strapped to the roof of his car. It was 11.00 a.m. The boss never, ever, slept late.
‘Hello, Andy,’ the big tousled figure in the blue silk dressing gown had said as he opened the door. ‘You’ll have had your breakfast, then?’
And he had called into the kitchen. ‘Come on out, love, it’s the polis!
So Andy had been admitted into the secret circle, and when the two had disappeared together in July heading for L’Escala on the Costa Brava, where Bob had a small apartment, he had said not one word to encourage the one or two who remarked on the coincidence of the Big Man and the Young Doctor being on holiday at the same time.
July was a fond memory, and on that dark November morning it was still summer for Skinner and Sarah Grace, even as they drove into Edinburgh on their grim business.
On the road, Skinner repeated Andy’s message, to prepare her for what she would see. He could sense her shudder in the passenger seat beside him. Nevertheless when they arrived at the scene of the murder, she was all professionalism. She approached the black thing huddled in the doorway, despite a combination of nauseating smells of squalor, abuse, decay and destruction.
She gave Skinner a running commentary as she worked. ‘Almost total immolation by fire of the front part of the body. It’s definitely male, but God knows what the age might be. It’s hard to tell, because of the reaction to fire, but the hands look as if they were heavily arthritic. If that’s the case, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for this poor lump to strike a match.’
Martin broke in, ‘In any event, look at this.’
Skinner followed his pointing finger and saw a five-litre Duckham’s oil can which stood against the damp wall of the close. It was still possible to see where the fire had been started and to follow its course to the corpse, across the scorched flagstones.
‘No doubt about it, is there? Who found it?’
‘Young couple in a passing car. She saw the flames. The bloke had a fire extinguisher in the car. He put it out, but the poor bugger was a cinder by then. No reported sightings, but there were fewer people about than usual on a Saturday morning. The punters must be saving up early for Christmas.’
Skinner nodded in agreement. ‘We’ve got no reason to believe that there’s a connection between this and the Mortimer affair, but two murders in two closes in the same week is a Hell of a big coincidence In any case I don’t want us to be accused of trying less hard for a wino than for an advocate, so let’s repeat everything we’ve done so far in the first one.
‘Let’s go up to the High Street office. Come on, Doctor, I’ll treat you to breakfast.’ He handed Martin a five-pound note. ‘Here, Andy, you’re a detective. See it you can detect some bacon rolls and coffee on a Saturday morning.’
7
The Edinburgh media were less equipped to handle a murder story on a weekend morning. Nevertheless, Skinner knew that the tip-off machine would make it necessary for him to issue a short-notice statement. The journalists who turned out to High Street at 9.30 a.m. were a mixture of freelances and evening and Sunday paper writers. There was no sign of television, but the diligent Radio Forth was present.
Roger Quick of the Evening News asked the only question after Skinner’s brief factual statement. It seemed that no one, certainly not the Scottish weekend public cared too much about an incinerated wino. ‘When do you expect an identification, Mr Skinner?’
‘Quite frankly, Roger, I don’t know. Some of these poor people can’t remember their own names, far less those of the people around them in the hostels.’
And that was how it turned out. The body was too badly burned to be identifiable, and without a photograph, or any distinguishing feature, it was impossible to conduct a productive enquiry among the city’s alcoholic drop-outs. The hostel wardens agreed to check on absentee
s from their usual list of guests, but none were hopeful.
Thousands of questions were asked, but no leads uncovered. The charred corpse remained stubbornly anonymous over the weekend.
On Monday morning, Skinner anticipated press requests and called a news conference to report no progress in either case, and to renew his request for assistance from the general public.
Douglas Jackson of Radio Forth asked for an interview. ‘Chief Superintendent, do you believe that there is any connection between last week’s two Royal Mile killings?’
‘There is no proof of that at all. But I’ve been a policeman for a long time, and I have learned to mistrust coincidences.’
A few minutes later, Skinner sat at his borrowed desk in the old High Street office, studying once more the papers in the two cases. Professor Hutchison had worked hard over the weekend to complete his examinations of both bodies. His notes were extensive. ‘Yes,’ they read, ‘it is possible that the bayonet found at the scene of the crime could have inflicted Mr Mortimer’s injuries, if wielded by someone of sufficient strength and expertise. However there is no physical evidence to confirm this, no blood, bone, or tissue adhering to the blade.
‘In the second case, this unfortunate man died from shock as a result of immolation. However his physical condition was so low that the least exertion might have killed him. Had the man been compos mentis at the time it is possible that he could have beaten out the flames. I should have thought it impossible to categorise the crime from the circumstances. One cannot rule out the possibility that this was a youthful prank which went terribly wrong.’
‘Bollocks!’ Skinner shouted to the empty room. ‘The poor bastard was doused in high performance lead-free and set alight. Not much bloody room for error there.’
He looked at the two files. Where to go from here? One man on the threshold of an outstanding professional career, the other in the poorest state to which it was possible to decline in society. Each killed, savagely, in the same week, not three hundred yards apart. That was a link, if nothing else, and experience was shouting at him that there had to be others.
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