Thursday legends - Skinner 10

by Quintin Jardine

He hung up the phone, and turned to Pringle. 'Okay, Dan. I want you to get McGurk up to the Murrayfield to collect a sample of the Diddler's stored blood. Then I want you to find an address in Coltbridge occupied by one Graham Shearer.'

  The Superintendent picked up a copy of the electoral register from his desk and flicked through it. 'There's no Shearer listed anywhere about there,' he announced, after a few minutes.

  'The boy's only twenty, Dan. His vote's probably still in Gullane, but he'll be paying Council Tax in Edinburgh. Check it out with the City.' He turned towards the door.

  'Damn!' he shouted suddenly. 'Damn! Damn! Damn! Who the Hell would want to do that to the Diddler? And why, for God's sake? Alec Smith and him, on the same bloody night!'

  'But no connection between them, Boss.'

  'No, but...' He gasped. 'Wait a minute, of course there's a bloody connection. They both belonged to the Legends. They played together.'

  Pringle stared at him. 'My Thursday football group,' he explained, curtly. 'Alec was a member for a while, till his knee went; the Diddler's been a member almost from the start. And they're both murdered on the same night. One in North Berwick, one in Coltbridge. And what was the time gap between the two killings?' He thought for a moment. 'Four hours,' he snapped. 'It's possible; it could have been done.

  'Dan. Get that blood; find that house. I'm off to talk to Sarah.'

  40

  'No, Bob, no. Those two murders could not have been committed by the same person.'

  'Come on, can you say that for sure? The time-frame fits.'

  'Maybe it does, but that's all. There are major differences between the two. Look at poor Diddler; let's go with the sex-crime scenario, I accept that it's the likeliest explanation for the nature of the binding. He's tied, has sex, or at least there's enough contact for him to acquire that single strand of hair, then he's battered to death.

  'The Smith case was completely different. He was stripped and bound, yes, but that was for torture. There was nothing remotely sexual about it.'

  'What about the burning of the genitalia?'

  'That's an anti-sexual gesture, a classic'

  'This is only theory though.'

  'Okay, you want fact, here it is. The blows to Smith's head and the blows which Diddler sustained were certainly not inflicted by the same person. Now that is a hard, under-oath statement. I wouldn't call Smith's wounds superficial, but they were not the cause of death, nor did they contribute.

  'Howard Shearer, on the other hand was battered savagely to death, with great force. Different people, Bob, different people. I'm sorry to blow your theory, but look at it from this angle. How many people have played football with your crowd over the years?'

  'God knows,' he conceded. 'Dozens of regulars; if you count the guys, and one woman, who have played just once or twice, you could be into the hundreds.'

  'And Alec Smith really wasn't there for all that long, was he? Three years or so?'

  'True. Okay, I get your drift.'

  'Exactly. Two members of your squad of hundreds being killed violently in completely different circumstances is, I grant you, something of a coincidence, but it's not like winning the pools. Whereas, the possibility of their having been killed by the same person does not exist.'

  'Right, right, right, I'm beaten. I guess I got over-excited. Give my love to the kids; see you later.'

  Skinner replaced the phone and looked across his desk at Neil Mcllhenney. 'Sometimes it's just impossible to argue with my wife,' he said. 'Especially when she's right.' He paused. 'We don't have a sniff of a motive. The Diddler was a wealthy man, he could have been killed for money, or for his Rolex, even; that alone was worth a ton.

  'Nonetheless, as soon as we have a positive ID on the body, as we will, I want you to organise a meeting of the Legends, the other seven and us, or as many as are available, in the Golf in North Berwick, six o'clock this evening. I want to tell them all before they read it in the papers. If Grock or Stewart Rees or Andy John are golfing, tell them to cancel it. The poor wee bugger deserves a wake.'

  'I'll need to bring the kids,' said Mcllhenney.

  'Fine, Sarah will give them their dinner, and they can have a play on the beach with the lads.'

  He recalled the night before. 'Here, was Karen okay about you being late?'

  'Aye, she was fine,' his exec replied. 'She was a bit strange, I thought, but it was nowt to do with that, I'm sure. Lauren said this morning that she seemed sad, and she has her mother's eye for people's moods.'

  'She's a capable woman, is Sergeant Neville; she'll sort it, whatever it is.'

  The big Inspector stood and made to leave. 'Oh,' he said, as an afterthought. 'I tried to raise DCS Martin as you asked, but he isn't in yet. I left a message with Sammy for him to call you.'

  'Fine,' the DCC acknowledged, just as the telephone furthest from his right hand sang into life ... the phone which hardly ever rang. He picked it up, frowning, as the door closed behind Mcllhenney.

  'Skinner.'

  'Morning, Bob,' said a gruff voice, in a bluff Derbyshire accent. This is Adam. I'm about to get on to a plane at Farnborough and fly up to Scotland. I want you and McGuire to meet me at the General Aviation Terminal at Edinburgh.

  'There's something I've got to show you ... something fooking messy'

  41

  'What's the number?' Dan Pringle asked, gazing along Coltbridge Terrace.

  'It doesn't have one, sir,' Detective Sergeant Jack McGurk replied as they walked along, between linked bungalows on one side of the road and a small tenement on the other. 'Only a name; River Cottage. I think it might be along there, on the right. I can see a couple of houses on their own.'

  They strode on, their car parked at the entrance to the narrow cul-de-sac, past a modern building on their right to the first of the detached dwellings. McGurk read the name-plate. 'No, that's not it.' They moved on to the next. 'Not that either.'

  And then, a slight curve in the road, and a single-storey house which until then had not been in their line of vision; it was set back from the street, unlike the others, and had a small rose garden, with a path leading to the front door. It seemed to stand out into the flowing water behind, and as they approached they could see the structure below, built into the river bank.

  McGurk's keen eyes read the name-plate from yards away. 'This is it,' he announced. 'River Cottage.'

  'Aye,' said Pringle. 'Like Shearer's secretary said, it backs right on to the water. Come on then.' He led the way up the path.

  The house looked, even felt, deserted. There were drawn blinds on the two front windows; the frosted glass panels set into the green-painted front door gave no hint of light or life inside. There was no bell, only a big, black knocker. McGurk grabbed it and rapped it hard; once, twice, a third time.

  They waited for no more than thirty seconds, before Pringle said, 'Right that's enough. Let's get in there. Let's see what the back's like.' He disappeared round the side of the house, the big Sergeant on his heels, but saw at once that there was no back door. The building stood, quite literally, at the water's edge.

  They returned to the front door; it appeared to be secured only by a cylinder lock. McGurk glanced around until he saw a brick in a corner of the garden. He picked it up and, with a single quick blow, smashed a hole in one of the glass panels, reached in and opened it with a single twist.

  'Smells in here, sir,' he said, as he stepped into the house. They stood in a dusty hallway, not large, but wide enough to allow a narrow stairway, on the right, to run up into the attic.

  Pringle opened a door at the foot of the steps. 'Kitchen.' McGurk opened the door opposite. 'Living room. Looks tidy and undisturbed.' They moved through the hall and past the stairway to the back of the house, where they found a small neat bedroom, and a bathroom.

  'Look at this,' the Sergeant called out as he looked inside. 'There are towels lying all over the floor.' He stepped across to the bath; a shower curtain on a rail, hanging inside the tub had be
en pulled most of the way across. He yanked it back, and took a quick look around.

  A pink face-cloth had been thrown over the shower's mixer tap; the sergeant picked it up and saw quickly that it had not always been that colour. He handed it to Pringle. 'No prizes for guessing what that is.' He leaned over and picked up a cake of Dove cream soap; it bore faint red streaks.

  'Someone's been cleaning up in here,' he muttered, 'in a hurry, from the way those towels were chucked about.'

  'Upstairs,' Pringle barked. He led the way back to the hall, and up the narrow stairs to the attic, to a small landing from which three doors opened. He made for the nearest, the one in the middle: a cupboard. 'Bugger.'

  McGurk threw open the door to the left: and recoiled as the sudden stink wafted out. 'Jeez.' He switched on the light, and looked at a slaughterhouse.

  There was a bed; a big metal-framed bed, against the far wall. A duvet lay in a corner of the wide spacious room, made larger by the curtained dormer window which the detectives knew must overlook the river. A white sheet and pillows in the far corner. In another, a man's jacket, underpants and trousers, over a chair, socks and shoes on the floor.

  But the bed itself ... The remaining sheet told a horror story; it was soaked with blood, apart from a patch in the middle, which corresponded roughly to the shape of a man's body, and was stained a different, yellowish colour. Four lengths of white rope, blood-streaked again, were secured to the four corner posts of the frame; at some point the man they had restrained had been cut loose. A number of small objects lay near each of the strands; McGurk bent over them, peering. 'Don't touch,' Pringle whispered, unnecessarily. Severed thumb, severed little fingers at the far end, severed big toe, severed little toe at each of the nearer corners; discoloured but not yet black. Discarded, between where the feet had been secured, lay a heavy pair of garden secateurs.

  And laid against the frame, caked with thick, dark, dried blood, a full-sized, metal baseball bat. 'The murder weapon, d'you think?' asked Pringle heavily.

  He looked around the room, feeling queasy and regretting his last four whiskies of the evening before. There were blood spatters on the walls around the bed, on the curtains and even on the ceiling. A red trail led across the carpet from the frame to the door.

  'I noticed two bolts in the hallway floor,' said McGurk. 'I bet they're for securing a trap door, covering steps down to a boat-landing on the river. There's no rug in the hall, but I'll bet that there used to be, until it was used as this guy's shroud, before he was rolled down those steps and dumped in the river.'

  'I'm not taking either of those bets,' said Pringle. He stepped carefully across to a dressing table, in the window space. A black leather wallet lay on it. He picked it up, by a corner and held it up. It held no money, but there were six plastic cards in slots. He slid one out with a finger until he could read the holder's name; 'H. Shearer.'

  He set it back down on the dressing table, took out his mobile and dialled Skinner's number. Mcllhenney answered. 'The Boss there, Neil?'

  'No. He's had to go out.'

  'You got an ID on your pal from that blood yet?'

  'No, not yet.'

  'We have, at his son's cottage. Sorry, lad, but he was here all right. Some of him still is, in fact; all over the fucking place.

  'You'd better tell the Boss when he comes in that it's all right for him to call Mrs Shearer now'

  42

  'Karen, this is for you,' Jack McGurk shouted across the CID room at Torphichen Place. She frowned; who knew she was there? She picked up the call on another extension. 'Neville.'

  'Karen. Good, you're still there.' The voice of Sammy Pye.

  'Just. I've been stood down: I'm just tidying my desk, then I'll be on my way back to you, my dear. We seem to have put a name to the man at the centre of this investigation.'

  'Yes, I know.'

  'Who is it then? No-one's saying around here.'

  'Can't tell you; not over the phone. Neil Mcllhenney passed on an order from the Big Boss that if there's another leak to the press on this one before he's ready to make an announcement, then the leaker will be out of a job.'

  The Sergeant whistled. 'Heavy stuff. So what did you want me for?'

  'I was wondering if you knew where our boss is; the DCS. He hasn't turned up so far this morning; he hasn't called in and he isn't answering his home phone or his mobile.'

  'Why ask me?' she said, coldly.

  'Come on, Karen. Don't be naive; if Mr Martin's missing you're one of the first people anyone would talk to.'

  'Well, I don't know, okay? All that's over with.' She was angry now, but hurting as well; on top of all that she felt a twinge of fear. 'What about the DCC? Have you asked him?'

  'He's out of the office. DI Mcllhenney doesn't know anything; he asked me to have the DCS call Mr Skinner when he got in.'

  She thought of the red car in the driveway. 'Ahh, don't worry. He'll be across some new woman or other. Is Ruth McConnell in yet?'

  'Of course. There's nothing going on between them. They had a date for tomorrow night, but the DCS called it off.'

  'How do you know that?' she asked, surprised.

  'I know because I'm going out with her now; she told me what happened.'

  'Don't bother taking her to dinner; it would just be an appetiser. Ruth will eat you, Sam. Now, who else have you asked about Andy?'

  'SB. And that's what's worrying me. When he left last night, the DCS was doing something related to them. He was going to lift a guy that the Special Branch trawl turned up in connection with the Alec Smith investigation.'

  'On his own?'

  'Yes. He told me to stay here and finish what I was doing, that he'd have no bother. I called DI McGuire; he was out too, and that new girl in there Alice Cowan, she wouldn't say a thing. It hasn't taken her long to go native. A couple of days ago she was in uniform, now she's a bloody SB zealot.'

  Karen thought once more of the red MGF. 'Did he take his own car?'

  'No. He walked to Fettes yesterday. He was in a pool Mondeo, and it's missing too.'

  Her fear was more than a twinge now; it was chilling her, sending her pulse rate soaring. This is what you do, then. Don't make a fuss, but order every panda car, every patrol car and every biker we have to find that car. Tell operations that it's an order from the Head of CID.

  'I'm on my way back now.'

  43

  They beat the plane to the General Aviation terminal by ten minutes. They stood side by side outside the building which had once served all of Edinburgh's air traffic, looking at its impressive and ever-expanding replacement across the old north-south runway.

  Skinner had no idea what type of aircraft to expect, but even he was impressed when an RAF Tornado streaked in to land.

  'Every time Adam Arrow shows up,' he shouted to Mario McGuire over the noise of the engine roar as the pilot eased the plane back to taxiing speed, 'it means trouble. For him to arrive like this, it means BIG trouble.'

  'What is he, exactly?' the Inspector asked.

  'The fact that you're a Special Branch officer and yet are asking me that says a lot in itself.' Skinner could speak quietly again, as the plane approached.

  'Adam is everything. He was SAS, but now he's in charge of all MoD security and intelligence gathering, with the power to do things you would never want to tell your grandchildren about.'

  'Who's his boss?'

  'God, I think, but maybe he's under surveillance too.' 'What rank is he?'

  'At this moment? I'm not sure, but it doesn't matter. That little man climbing out of that aeroplane could, if necessary,

  make a Field Marshal, Air Marshal or an Admiral of the bloody Fleet disappear off the face the earth.' As he spoke, Arrow jumped down from the navigator's seat and came bustling across the runway towards them. He was small, but built like a spinning top; massive shoulders tapering down through a stocky waist to short legs with little feet. His hair was cropped close and he was wearing civilian clothes - dark tr
ousers, white shirt, an MCC tie and a check jacket.

  'Morning, Bob,' he said, with a cheeriness which made McGuire wonder how he could possibly be the figure Skinner had described.

  'Morning, Captain, Major, or whatever it is now...'

  'Major, it says on my door.'

  'What's with the tie?'

  'My one aspiration to fookin' toffhess.'

  'God, you've sold out.' Skinner looked back over his shoulder to the Inspector. 'You remember our Head of SB, Mario McGuire, don't you?'

  'Sure, from way back.' Arrow reached across and shook hands; an astonishingly strong grip for a man of his size.

  'What's the crisis then, Adam?'

  'I'll show you when we get there; there should be a chopper about here somewhere.' He looked around the terminal until he spotted a big grey-green helicopter around a hundred yards away, a pilot standing beside it. 'Come on.'

  The pilot saluted as they approached, speaking quietly to Arrow as he ushered them up the few built-in steps to the passenger space.

  'He says we're flying back south over the City by-pass, and up into the Pentland Hills. There's Army ground up there ...'

  He shouted suddenly as the helicopter's engine roared into life. '. .. as you probably know.'

  Something bit at the back of McGuire's mind; something ominous.

  There was no conversation as the chopper took off, or as they rose and flew over the Gyle Centre and the impressive, and growing, commercial township known as Edinburgh Park, towards the dominating hills to the south. Instead the three men wore big ear-protectors, against the noise.

  They had been flying for less than fifteen minutes when the helicopter began to circle. Arrow pointed downwards, and shouted something. Skinner could not make out a word, but he guessed that the pilot was looking for a safe landing area on the rising hillside. Then he saw a flare, burning on the ground on what appeared to be a flat area. Sure enough, they began to descend.