Thursday legends - Skinner 10

by Quintin Jardine

  Andy gazed at her. 'Singular, Sarah?'

  'As far as I know. I've seen the video and the still photos taken at the scene. Now that we know how it was done, there is absolutely no evidence to indicate that there was more than one person involved. This was carefully planned and brutally executed; it didn't even require a great deal of strength: pure physics tells you that it would have been easy to haul Smith up on that hook, the way it was done.'

  She stepped out of the centre of the group and sat once more on the edge of the desk.

  'Thank you, Sarah,' said Maggie Rose. 'Are there any more questions for the doctor? If not, she has to leave us now.'

  No-one spoke; Sarah waved a brief farewell, and stepped out of the van. Martin followed her outside. 'Before you go,' he said. 'About this afternoon's job; I know facial reconstruction's a science in itself, but if you could give me some idea of what this bloke might have looked like it might help us.'

  She grinned at him. 'I'm not a complete ignoramus in that science. I did some studying while I was pregnant with Seonaid, and I've talked to Joe Hutchison about it. I couldn't build you a new head yet, but I'll give you some thoughts that are a little more than guesses ... if only a little.'

  As he turned to go back into the van, she laid a hand on his arm. 'Andy.' She was suddenly, untypically, tentative. 'Can I say something?'

  'Always.'

  'It's about you and Karen.'

  He smiled gently. 'Bob's been filling you in on the office gossip. Or was it Alex?'

  'No. You know Bob wouldn't do that. And what would Alex know? He mentioned something, that's all. I just wanted to say ... and this is where it gets difficult ... that if you like her ... and I can tell you do ... you shouldn't hold back from getting involved because of anything that's happened in the past... to Bob and me.'

  He took her point at once. 'Listen, Sarah, one thing I like about Karen is that she doesn't want to get involved. We're good friends away from the office, and -1 only say this because it's you - we've danced the occasional dance together, but it is a friendship rather than a relationship. Happily, that suits us both. It's a bit like Alex and I are now.'

  She surprised him by frowning. 'As her step-mother, I have to tell you I'd be worried about you and her sleeping together just for old time's sake. Unless you were getting back together unconditionally, that wouldn't be good for either of you.'

  He laid his big hands on her shoulders and looked her in the eye. 'We couldn't do that; we want different things from life and we both know it. As for the other, I hear what you're saying and I'll make sure that doesn't happen. Promise.' He laughed, suddenly. 'Christ, my love-life's chaotic enough as it is.'

  'Then maybe Karen is what you need. Friendship should always come first, you know.'

  'Ah, there's a slight impediment in the way of that at the moment.'

  'Not Ruth McConnell, by any chance?'

  He stared at her amazed, confused and guilty all at once. He had forgotten, completely, his date for the following Saturday night. 'No,' he said, 'not Ruth.' He paused. 'Well...'

  She stood up on her toes and kissed him, gently, on the lips.

  'Andy Martin, you are a one-off. Take a tip from Auntie Sarah. Find a nice girl, one you like and respect, settle down, have lots of babies, and get on with becoming a Chief Constable.'

  'That's all wonderful theory, Auntie, but when you find three at the same time it becomes completely buggered up.'

  She shook her head, smiling, and pushed him back towards the mobile headquarters. 'I give up. Go on, get back in there.'

  She was almost gone when he remembered. 'Hey, Sarah,' he called after her. She turned. 'The floater p.m. this afternoon: would it be all right if a girl I know sat in on it? Her name's Rhian, she lives next door and she's a final-year medical student.'

  'If you're vouching for her and you tell her to keep her voice off the tape, that'll be okay.'

  'Great. Thanks. I'll tell her to ask for you at the Royal.'

  Maggie Rose had continued the briefing in his absence. 'I've just been summarising the door-to-door results, sir. Nothing, I'm afraid.'

  '... but you're not surprised.'

  'No. Not really. It fits the man.'

  'What do you mean?' he asked

  'I mean that no-one knew who he was. Alec Smith is the most private man I've ever encountered. It's as if he was born to do the SB job.

  'Everything we've been able to find out about him bears that out. We've interviewed all his neighbours in North Berwick; not one of them, not even the man who saw the dog and found the body could tell us anything about him. The woman two doors along didn't even know what he looked like.

  'I've spoken to former colleagues of his. They all said the same thing. "Oh aye, Alec." But they couldn't recall any stories about his career, or even any anecdotes. You know what I mean; Dan Pringle got pissed at a CID dance a few years back and folk still talk about it. But Alec Smith never even went to the CID dance ... not ever.

  'The Chief's even been to see his ex-wife ... his widow, I should say. They were never divorced. She told him that he was courteous, a good provider, not mean in any way; but she said that he was a remote man, quiet to the point of coldness, and that no-one - not even she, not even his children - ever really got to know him. Eventually she decided that she didn't like living alone, so she found someone else.'

  'Someone knew him, though,' Martin countered. 'Someone got to know him well enough to want to burn his eyes out and spill his guts out on to his living-room carpet. We're going to have to find the real Alec for ourselves. I'm pretty sure that's the only way we're going to find out who killed him.'

  'I agree with you. That'll have to be Mario's job. There are places he can go and things he can look at that are closed to us ordinary coppers. He's asked for Stevie as back-up.

  'As for the rest of us; we'll follow up the only lead we've had so far; Sarah's post-mortem report. The DCs, Faxon, Morrow and Braid, have been told to get round all the vets in East Lothian.'

  'We should check out Edinburgh too,' said the Head of CID. 'I'll have Sergeant Neville and DC Pye from my staff get that done and report back to you.'

  He called across the room. 'You hear that, Karen? You and Sammy do the Herriot round in the city. See if you can find out what sort of weapon might have been used to shoot Smith.'

  13

  'Calling Andy! Calling Andy! Where are you?'

  He blinked and looked up, across the dinner table. 'I'm sorry, Rhian,' he said, sincerely. 'You're right, I was off somewhere ... although I couldn't say for sure where it was. This has been an absolutely surreal weekend, in all sorts of ways. What a mixture; I've seen pure bloody horror ... yet in the midst of it all there's been you. An island of beauty in a sea of ugliness, you might say.'

  She grinned, dispersing the gloom which had begun to gather around him. 'I might indeed,' she murmured, 'but I prefer it when you say it.' She angled her head looking through the glass wall of Daniel's Bistro at the big modern Scottish Office building.

  'My mum works in there,' she said, idly. 'She's quite important; a Grade-something-or-other ... Damn! I always forget the number ... they used to call it Assistant Secretary. Her division has something to do with Home Affairs ... a family speciality, you might say.'

  A smile flicked his mouth in acknowledgement of her small joke. 'Everyone's important, Rhian. From the foot-soldiers through to the field officers like me to the generals on horseback like Big Bob and Proud Jimmy, we've all got our part to play in the service we give the public. If one link breaks the chain's goosed, and it doesn't matter where it happens.

  'That's true of every organisation ... including the Health Service. You'll be a better doctor if you remember it.'

  'I'll be a better doctor for watching Sarah do that postmortem this afternoon. She's terrific. Thanks for fixing it for me. Talking to her afterwards, listening to her talk about the way her career developed, has given me a different perspective on medicine.'

&nb
sp; 'Think long and carefully before making any decisions,' he warned her. 'There aren't many Sarahs about. You have to play to your own strengths, not those you see in others.'

  'Andy: about that chain of yours. What do you do if you find a weak link?'

  'You mean me? Personally?'

  'Yes.'

  'I cut it out.'

  'Isn't that a bit brutal?'

  His vivid green eyes fixed on her. 'It's necessary. I'll do anything that's necessary. I learned that from Bob.'

  'What's he like, that man Skinner?' she asked him.

  'Different. Inspiring, intimidating when he has to be. He has a tremendous analytical mind. Sum it all up, he's a great detective and a great leader.'

  'But wasn't he all over the Sundays a while back?'

  'I don't like to talk about that. It's true, but that's all behind him now, behind both him and Sarah. He's got over his obsessive period, now he's focused equally on his job and his family, as he should be. There's nothing he likes more than taking his kids for a walk of a Sunday afternoon; that's his greatest pleasure in life these days.'

  A silence hung over the table as Rhian sipped her coffee. 'So what about this talk that we were going to have tonight?' she murmured, eventually.

  'Let's make it tomorrow, honey. My head's wasted right now. How about if we just went home to bed?'

  'I'll settle for that.' She smiled again, a big gloom-brightening grin which lifted his spirits in an instant. 'As long as it doesn't become a habit. I'm a lively young thing, you know.'

  Two hours later, they lay entwined in each other's arms, in the dying light from the open bedroom window. The duvet was on the floor and they were slicked with sweat.

  'Hey,' she whispered in his ear. 'Remember what I said earlier about not making a habit of this?'

  'Mmhh.' His tongue flicked out, licking her neck gently, making her shudder.

  'In case you were in any doubt, I was joking.'

  'That's good. Handling rejection's never been my strong suit.'

  'What do you mean?' 'I mean I don't like being chucked.' 'What happened with your fiancee? Who really chucked whom?'

  'Let's say that we agreed it wouldn't work.'

  'Sure you did. And that's why you have her photograph on the sideboard downstairs. All these girlfriends of yours, yet she's the only person on display, other than your mother. Something big happened. What was it?'

  'Don't push it.'

  'Ah, you did catch her, then.'

  Sharp, way too sharp. 'Actually, she got pregnant, then had our child aborted without telling me about it.' 'So you broke off the engagement?' 'Yes. Immature, eh?'

  'No. Principled, I'd say. I can tell how much it hurt you to finish with her, yet you had to.'

  'Oh yeah? And why did I have to? Why couldn't I have gone along with it?'

  'Because if you had, you'd never have been your own man again, not completely. And someone like you has to be, doesn't he?'

  He looked at her, so close that it was an effort to focus his eyes on her. She was right; he had searched for months for an answer to the riddle of himself. Now Rhian had come up with it, on "their second night together. And of course, Alex, her father's daughter, was exactly the same; she had his no compromise gene. That was why it could never work again, because neither of them was physically capable of doing the thing that would make it so; yielding to the other's will.

  'So what about you?' he asked. 'What would you do in Alex's shoes?'

  'I'd have the baby ... but I'm not Alex. I mean, I'm not knocking her or condemning what she did. It was her right. But families are a two-way commitment, aren't they? Could you handle a family, properly, and your job at the same time?'

  He rolled on to his back and stared at the ceiling. 'You were at that post-mortem this afternoon. Did it affect you?'

  'I'm a doctor, or I'm going to be. I'm being trained not to form emotional attachments with live patients. Dead ones on a slab should be no problem for me.'

  'Don't give me theory, give me fact.'

  She thought about it for a few seconds. 'It wasn't the dissection,' she said finally. 'It was the commentary; the way Sarah described, for the tape, the things that had been done to that man. Did you know that he actually drowned in his own blood?'

  'No, but it doesn't surprise me. I looked into the guy's face, or where his face should have been, as soon as we took him out of the water. I saw his hands and feet, his legs, his chest, everything that was done to him.

  'I saw worse on Friday night; yes, worse than that. And you know what? Afterwards, I went home with Karen, my sergeant; she was there, she saw it too. We've got a history together, and right then we needed to help each other get over that hellish thing. We spent the night together because neither of us could face going home alone. I'm sorry if that hurts you, but it's the truth.' He looked into her eyes, and saw her flinch.

  'Now, to bring it all back to your original question, could I handle family life? The fact is, Rhian, I don't know for how much longer I can live as I do, and carry on doing my job. I'm really envious of Bob, in that respect. I need stability, I need the normal home life that Alex and I had for a while. I suppose I've been looking for it since we split.

  'Otherwise, things like Alec Smith's murder, or like looking at that bloke last night and realising that there's a fair chance we'll never even find out who he was ... I have this fear that the job will either break me, or take me over to the point that there will be no room in me' - he tapped his chest - 'here, inside me, for anything else. When I can look at an ex-colleague with his-' He stopped himself. 'When I can look at that then go home as if it's just another day at the office, as a man, I'll be done.'

  She gripped his fingers in hers, squeezed them and held them between her breasts. 'Then let's just make sure, that there's always someone there for you.'

  She rubbed her forehead on his shoulder. 'Maybe I've been looking for something too,' she whispered. 'And maybe, just maybe, the first time I saw you, I knew I'd found it.'

  14

  Detective Inspector Mario McGuire wore a broad grin. 'Welcome to the shadowy, glamorous world of Special Branch, Sergeant,' he boomed. 'Welcome to the centre of this spider's web of intrigue. Exciting, isn't it?'

  Stevie Steele leaned back in his hard chair and looked around the drab room, with its bare, magnolia-painted walls, and its single small window. 'Wow,' he said.

  'This is the reality of the job, Steve. We're the true crime-prevention department; we keep an eye on potential trouble and even more important, on potential trouble-makers. That's the way it's always been. Back in the fifties and sixties, we used to keep an eye on the local communists and fellow-travellers: trade-union guys, left-wing Labour Party guys and acknowledged CP members. Now terrorism, more than anything else, is the perceived enemy.

  'Back in the old days we had help, of course - local journalists who'd go along to meetings and report back to us for a few quid. We could trust the local newspaper hacks, they were poorly paid and always needed the money. But there were journos on the other side too. The NUJ had a communist as its president back in the sixties: wherever he travelled, all over the country, he had a Special Branch escort.

  'The boys in Glasgow, they had a permanent bug in the offices of the Daily Worker, but of course the hacks there knew it, so there was never anyone in their bloody office.

  They used to do all their business in pubs and send their copy to London from phone boxes. Everything we did, of course, was to ensure that guys like them couldn't deliver this great democracy of ours into the slavering Soviet maw.'

  'It worked, then,' said Steele, dryly.

  'Not really. Like I said, SB priorities changed in the early seventies when Ireland blew up. We had to stop playing with the wild-eyed Left to a great extent and concentrate on the real danger. It's been a different game since then, with a constant IRA and Loyalist threat for thirty years and, at the same time, the growth of international terrorism. We haven't always been successful in prev
enting attacks, but for every one that's succeeded there have been a right few others that we've headed off.'

  'Isn't it quieter now than it was?'

  'No it ain't. Sergeant. There will always be fanatics with a mission to destroy, quote, unquote, our decadent Judea/ Christian Western society, and there will be idiots among us who admire and support them. The Special Branch task has never really altered; the enemy just changes every so often, that's all.'

  'Have you always liked politics, Inspector?'

  'It's Mario in here and in the pub - and I've never liked politics. That's why I'm in the job. In fact I hate politics. It doesn't matter whether they are the politics of state, religion, race, gender, or just wealth, they are inherently fucking dangerous and they can get you killed. There used to be a famous copper in the West of Scotland who argued that all crime was related to the theft of non-ferrous metals. I disagree; I believe that all crime is related to politics of one sort or another. They got me shot, for a start.

  'I tell you, Stevie, politics can be hazardous to your health. Most of the people who practise them are well meaning, well-educated fools, but a minority of them, usually those who make it to the very top, are bloody dangerous.

  'That's why we're the key players in the Alec Smith investigation. Alec moved in this world and he was good at it - the best, I'm told. He was an apolitical guy, just like me, like Brian Mackie, like Andy Martin, tasked with keeping an eye on politicians of all sorts.'

  'Tasked by whom?'

  McGuire's laugh was a bellow. 'By politicians, of course; to keep an eye on their enemies. But from the start, SB has taken the view that there can always be an enemy within.'

  'So what are we looking for here?' Steele asked.

  'We're looking for all the enemies Alec might have made in his time. We'll do it by sifting through the files for the period in which he was in my job, and through the private papers which I've brought here from his house.'