‘You poor love,’ I murmured. That might sound soppy, but I know Mario’s secret side. He’s more sensitive than he would ever let on, and when someone he’s trusted . . . and that means every cop in the force . . . lets him down, it makes him very sad, as well as very angry.
‘Bah!’ he grunted, for he won’t admit it to anyone, not even me. ‘Listen,’ he continued, ‘in the wake of that I might be a wee bit later than usual this evening. I’ve got a call to make.’
‘Where? Out of town? Can you tell me?’
‘Not very far. Saughton Prison, in fact. The chief wants Andy and me to have a serious conversation with the man who set this whole sorry Varley business in motion.’
Alexis Skinner
I must have raised my voice during my discussion with my dear stepmother. I may be a partner in the august firm that is Curle Anthony and Jarvis, but I’m still well down the pecking order and the office that I rate didn’t have too much spent on its sound-proofing. I had barely hung up before the door opened and my secretary’s frown came into view.
‘Is everything all right?’ she murmured. Clio Lomax and I are still new to each other: her predecessor Pippa finally pushed her flippancy far enough for it to earn her a rollicking from the chairman of the firm. When she came crying to me and I told her that it wasn’t before time, her lip became so petted that she called me a ‘fucking establishment lackey’ and walked out, never to return. Now she’s working in her father’s investment management business; God help the clients.
Clio was available as a result of one of our departments having been downsized during the recession, and she moved straight into the vacancy. Her inquiry wasn’t entirely solicitous. It was her way of suggesting that I turn down the volume.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘You weren’t meant to hear that. Just a small family disagreement. You don’t want to know about the serious ones. You know who my stepmother is?’
She nodded. ‘I take it you won’t be voting for her next year.’ I grinned, and she left.
I tore into the project I’d been assessing before Aileen’s call; her interruption had taken fifteen minutes out of my midday break, but since I hadn’t been scheduled to meet anyone, it wasn’t a big deal. The day was warm and sunny, so I cleared out of the office, walked down the steps that lead from Castle Terrace to Princes Street Gardens, and bought a sandwich lunch at the Fountain Cafe. I was eating it, on a bench, when my mobile sounded.
I looked at the screen, and felt instantly brighter. ‘Hiya,’ I said. ‘How’s the sex slave business?’
‘Getting worse by the day for the traffickers,’ Andy replied, cheerfully, ‘I’m glad to say. So is drug-dealing, and the Agency’s internet team just busted a rock singer for having some very bad stuff on his computer.’
‘Once upon a time, sex and drugs and rock and roll were reckoned to be very good indeed,’ I laughed, ‘until Director Martin became head of the serious crime-fighters. How’s the weather in Paisley? It’s lovely here in the Gardens.’
‘No idea,’ he replied. ‘I’m enjoying the sunshine on Leith. It’s an outside officer job that your father asked me to do; it’ll take up the rest of the day.’
‘Are you around this weekend?’
‘I am tomorrow, unless this goes pear-shaped. Sunday I’m going up to Perth to take the kids out. You?’
‘I’m clear. Fancy meeting up tonight, and taking it from there?’
‘Deal. I’ll call you when I’m done.’
That’s the way it is with Andy and me now. We have no ambitions for our relationship, but we enjoy it. I know what a lot of people think of me . . . yes, they think it of me, rather than him . . . but I did not set out to bring it about, and I’m sorry that his marriage didn’t work. I’ve had hate mail, the old-fashioned kind, addressed to me at the firm and always anonymous. There’s been shit posted about me on Facebook too . . . Faecesbook, as I’ve come to call it. I assume it’s all come from people who are, or consider themselves, friends of Karen, Andy’s wife. He hasn’t had any of that stuff, but you’d have to be seriously mental to send poison pen messages to a cop. If anything was too heavy, I’d ask him to deal with it, but I would never, ever mention it to my father.
It’s strange, that people can come back into your life when you believe that you’ve consigned them entirely to your past. When Andy and I split and he married Karen, I didn’t see him for a few years, even though he’s my old man’s closest pal, and I never expected to have anything to do with him, ever again. Same with Sarah and Dad; when they divorced and she went back to the US, I assumed that it was for good. Her latest comeback was as unlikely as Rocky Seven but it’s happened. Sarah says it was a career move. Yes, and next year I will be the fairy on top of the Christmas tree on the Mound.
I shouldn’t have said what I did to Aileen about her, in the midst of the only major row we ever had. I knew that Sarah detested her, but I was just as sure that Aileen had no thoughts about her at all, that she saw her as being as distant a figure in my dad’s past as my mother is. And there she’s wrong on two counts.
Sarah is in the present and she’s alive; so is my mother, in my father’s heart. Sarah found that out and stopped trying to compete. Aileen? She didn’t even know she was in a contest. She lived in a world that she’d created in which her husband is settled and content, domestically, and in the job about which he was always ambivalent, but which she manoeuvred him into accepting.
Great, until she tried to push him that one step too far and it all went up in smoke. She came to me in the hope that I could put out the fire, and I threw petrol on it by telling her that her predecessor still loved her husband. I’d told her she’d screwed things up, but what had I done myself?
I was by the bin, recycling my sandwich wrapper, when my phone rang again. ‘Yes, Dad,’ I said.
‘You had a call from Aileen?’
‘Yeah,’ I admitted. ‘I’m sorry. I lost it.’
‘You and me both,’ he sighed, ‘last night. We should be ashamed of ourselves, shouldn’t we?’
‘That depends. Were we right on the principle?’
‘Of being against police unification? I believe so, absolutely. Trouble is, Aileen believes the opposite.’
‘And she wants you to subordinate your view to hers, and me too, by implication?’ I put the question to him as if I was leading him, in court. ‘That’s what she expects, yes?’
‘Yes, that’s how it seems. But it works both ways; I recognise that. It’s an impasse.’
‘Will it happen, Pops?’ I asked. ‘The unified force.’
‘It’s shaping up that way,’ he admitted. ‘You only need to look at the numbers. If the Nationalists and Aileen’s crew both back it, then it’ll walk through the parliament. She and Clive Graham probably think I’ll keep quiet if ACPOS support it, but I won’t. Any journo who asks me a straight question will get a straight answer, and I’ll bloody well make sure that I am asked. It won’t make any difference, though, for all the friends I have in the media, and in the parliament itself, because when it comes to it, there won’t be a free vote.’
‘Will you really quit over it?’
‘That’s my intention, although Aileen imagined that I could be bought off with the top job. No chance of that,’ he said emphatically. ‘What would make me reconsider? If you asked me not to, I might not.’
‘If I asked you to betray your principles?’ I exclaimed. ‘Why would I ever do that?’
‘Look, kid, if I go balls out over this I could make myself pretty unpopular with some people with a lot of power. There could be backwash, you know.’
The waves would have to be high, I reckoned, to reach a fifth-floor office in the biggest commercial law firm in Scotland. But they could be as high as the castle that I could see through my window and they wouldn’t make any difference to me.
‘Remember that song,’ I said, ‘the one you used to sing to me when I was wee, in the years after Mum died, whenever I got sad and started to cry because
really she wasn’t coming back?’
I could see him smile, as if we were on Skype. ‘Yeah. The one by Paul Williams: wee guy, glasses, dodgy hair; “You and me against the world”. I’ve still got it, you know, that record. It was your mum’s favourite.’
‘Then dig it out and play it, because it was never more true.’
Nobody really understands about my dad and me; there’s a bond that ties us together, one that will never break, although she who formed it has been dead for twenty-five years.
‘Sauce’ Haddock
Satnav guided me all the way into the heart of an old-established residential area called Newton Mearns, to the south of Glasgow. What it didn’t tell me was that I’d been there before, not on police business, but for an away tie in a national foursomes competition against a pair from Whitecraigs Golf Club. I have very warm memories of that place; my partner and I handed the opposition a dog licence, in other words we beat them seven and six.
Solomon’s restaurant was situated only a few streets away from the clubhouse where we’d eaten after the match. That was a friendlier snack than it might have been, given what we’d just done to the locals. I’ve been to golf clubs where I haven’t even been offered a drink in those circumstances.
Solomon himself, a cheery, dark-haired wee guy . . . think of Ben Elton with a refined Glasgow accent . . . just short of forty, first name Jeffrey, ‘but call me Solly; everyone else does’, kept up the local standard of hospitality. He took me into his small office, and gave me sparkling mineral water, then produced a plate of buns that he called rugelach. I tried one, then another, then another. ‘Cream cheese cookies,’ he explained. ‘Kosher, of course. Go on, have another.’
I did; I hadn’t realised how hungry I was.
‘So,’ he said, once we had cleared the plate, ‘this guy you asked me about. What’s the story?’
‘I have a photograph,’ I told him, ‘but I have to warn you, it’s not the nicest.’
‘I have a strong stomach, Mr Haddock.’ He grinned. ‘Unsullied by pork, that’s why. You know the story about the rabbi and the priest?’
I did, but I let him tell it anyway, and I laughed when he was done. Then I took the mugshot from my pocket, slipped it from the evidence bag that held it and showed it to him.
It wiped the smile off his face, but it didn’t take the colour from his cheeks. He shrugged. ‘So he’s dead. I’ve seen worse: I did some kibbutz time when I was a kid, and we had trouble once. Rocket attack. What happened to him?’ He paused, and his eyes widened slightly. ‘You’re not going to tell me it was food poisoning, are you?’
‘No,’ I replied, smiling vaguely for a second or two, as I tried to work out whether his concern was real or just part of his shtick. ‘He had a brain haemorrhage, no warning. Pretty much instant cheerio. If it’s any consolation, he seems to have enjoyed his last meal. He ate plenty of it and he didn’t have time to digest it. That’s how we linked him to you.’
‘So what can I tell you about him?’
‘His name would be nice. Was he a regular?’
Solly shook his head. ‘Never seen him before. I have lots of regulars, and I know them all, but equally, because this is the only kosher restaurant in a long day’s march, I have a lot of occasional trade.’
‘How about his bill?’ I asked. ‘Can you identify that? I might be able to trace him through his credit card slip.’
‘I can find his bill, no problem,’ he told me, ‘but there ain’t no transaction slip, because he paid in cash. That’s why I remember him so clearly. You have any idea how few cash customers pass through here, or through any retail business these days? I love those guys. When someone offers me real money rather than plastic I knock the bill down to the nearest fiver, out of pure sentiment.’ He winked at me. ‘And when I do, the tip is always bigger. Works every time, and it did with him. I’ve still got the notes, by the way.’
‘You have?’
My tone must have rung a warning bell. ‘All above board,’ he insisted. ‘It all gets declared, honest. It’s just that I have so little currency that I don’t bank it very often; I tend to keep it as a float.’
‘Solly,’ I told him, ‘when I showed you my warrant card, it didn’t have HMRC on it. I don’t care about that. Anyway, I don’t imagine there’s any way you can tell which are the notes he gave you.’
‘Hell yes,’ he laughed. ‘I know exactly which ones they were. The only two Bank of England fifties I’ve taken in here since I opened.’ Just as I was thinking that his prices must be sky-high if it took two fifties to cover chicken broth with matzohs and stuffed fish, he added, ‘He didn’t give me them, though. It was one of his mates.’
‘He wasn’t alone?’
‘No. Party of three.’
That was news indeed. ‘Can you describe the other guys?’ I asked, trying to sound casual. Solly struck me as a man with an imagination and I didn’t want to get him so excited that it ran riot. ‘Age bracket, for example?’
‘Same ballpark as your mate, I’d say. Medium height, all of them. One of them was fair-haired, sort of ginger, with a crew cut, a real flat-top; reminded me of that American wrestler guy, Brock Lesnar, only smaller.’ I’d no idea who that was, but I made a mental note to Google him and find a likeness. ‘Otherwise,’ Solly continued ‘they were ordinary-looking guys. Nondescript,’ he declared. ‘I could do a photofit if you like,’ he added.
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ I said; a nondescript photofit, indeed. I reckoned that Brock Lesnar was as lucky as I was going to get, but I was wrong.
‘One thing, though,’ Solly chirped on. ‘The other two guys weren’t Jewish. They hadn’t a clue about the menu. Your dead guy had to explain what everything was, and in the end they let him order for them.’
A bit more, but it didn’t really take me beyond ‘nondescript’.
‘And they weren’t British.’
That was more like it. ‘Explain,’ I murmured.
‘They spoke English, to me and the staff, but with accents. The dead guy, the Jew; his was closest to normal, but it still wasn’t. The other two, I dunno; Australian? New Zealand?’
‘To you and the staff, you said. What about among themselves?’
He shook his head, firmly, sending a white shower of dandruff on to the empty plate. ‘No, they spoke something else then. But don’t ask me what it was. I don’t have a bloody clue, other than that it wasn’t Hebrew. I’m not fluent, but I’d have picked up some of it if it had been that.’
‘Okay, thanks,’ I said. ‘That’s something to go on. I wish you had a credit card slip, though.’
‘Sorry.’
But . . . wait a minute, Sauce. ‘You said one of the other guys paid the bill?’
More dandruff flew. ‘Yes, the other dark-haired one, not the wrestler lookalike; seventy-two quid and twenty pence, I knocked it down to seventy. He peeled two fifties off a roll and told me to give him back twenty and we’d be square.’
‘And you’ve still got them?’
‘Like I said.’
I picked up the evidence bag that had held the photo. ‘Solly,’ I began.
He rolled his eyes. ‘Ah, I know what you’re going to ask.’
‘I’ll give you a receipt.’
He laughed. ‘Now, I really will have no choice but to declare it to the tax man.’
He took a cash box from his desk and unlocked it, then pushed it across to me. I tipped the contents out, a few hundred quid, and saw the two fifties straight away, reddish things with the Queen’s head on the front and some bloke in a wig on the back. I wondered how much fifty pounds had bought in his day as I picked them up, each one by a corner, and slipped them into the protective case. They looked fresh, and hardly used; bound to yield decent prints and, with luck, not too many of them.
I wrote Solly the promised receipt, signed it and clipped one of my cards to it for added authenticity.
‘Will you let me know what happens?’ he asked. ‘Whether you get a r
esult or not?’
‘I don’t even know what the game is, sir,’ I admitted, ‘let alone how to work out the score.’
He offered me a sampler of the chicken broth, but I declined. Undeterred, he pressed a bag of rugelach on me, for the road, he said. I thanked him and headed for my car.
I didn’t rely on the satnav for the return journey, for that would have taken me through the centre of Glasgow at gridlock time. Instead I took a simpler route through East Kilbride. I had just cleared the place when my phone sounded. I hit the Bluetooth button on the steering wheel and said, ‘Sauce.’ That’s my standard greeting; on the rare occasion I have a wrong number it confuses the shit out of the caller.
I expected to have Becky Stallings in my ear, wondering why I hadn’t given her a progress report . . . as I’d neglected to do. Instead I heard someone I hadn’t expected, not at all.
‘Chief Constable here. Are you on the road?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ve been to Glasgow, in connection with Mortonhall Man.’
‘Oh yes? Any progress?’
‘Of sorts, sir. I don’t have a name for him, but I’ve got a couple of new lines of inquiry.’
‘What are they?’
I paused as I was overtaken by a clown in a Mercedes, braking as he pulled in too soon, to be overtaken himself by an even bigger idiot in a Golf GTI. ‘Fingerprints and a wrestler,’ I said, when I could.
He laughed. ‘Where the hell are you, son? It sounds like Brands Hatch. I couldn’t make out a word you said there. Tell me all about it when you get back.’
‘Sir?’
‘I want you to come straight to Fettes, to my office. I need to speak to you.’
Funeral Note Page 17