A Brush With Death

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘I think I know who you mean,’ the barman said, a young man, a couple of years older than Ignacio, no more, with studs in his ears that Skinner suspected were gemstones pretending to be rubies. ‘He was in here last Wednesday night with a young fella. I don’t know what that was about. The Italian was an obvious three-pound note – this place isn’t called Regina’s for nothing, by the way – and the lad looked young. They sat in the far booth, over there,’ he pointed, ‘talking, and at one point the kid got quite agitated. I take it you’re a cop. Is that why you’re after him?’

  ‘Wrong, but I am after him, if only for wasting my fucking time. What are the nearest hotels to this place? I know he’s in one, but I don’t know which.’

  ‘My guess would be the Stadium. It’s only about a hundred yards away, down the hill then round the corner in West Campbell Street. Not big, but posh and pricey; it belongs to a footballer. If it’s not that, try the place up in Blythswood Square.’

  Skinner nodded his thanks and left the cellar bar. He flinched as he reached pavement level, regretting that he had no overcoat. Getting old, he thought. The day had never been warm, and the evening was decidedly cold as he walked down St Vincent Street, passing his parked car before reaching West Campbell Street. The naming of Glasgow city centre always baffled him, even after the short period in his working life when he had been based there; he had never been able to work out why so many streets were prefixed ‘West’. The one into which he turned appeared to be aligned from north to south, adding to his confusion.

  The hotel was as close to Regina’s as the barman had said, taking up half the block between St Vincent Street and West Campbell Street. Where Beedham’s had spoken quietly of post-Victorian wealth and confidence, the Stadium yelled modernity, with stainless-steel embellishing – or desecrating, depending on the viewer’s tastes – a yellow stone building, emphasised by plush synthetic carpeting and hard plastic fittings inside and a blue neon strip over the reception desk.

  ‘I’m looking for one of your guests,’ Skinner told the young woman who was positioned behind it, dressed in the manner of cabin crew on a Middle Eastern airline. Her badge named her as Raquel, and she was in the same age bracket as the barman in Regina’s, but her ear studs were definitely diamond. ‘A man by the name of Aldorino Moscardinetto. Is he in?’

  She frowned at him, her dark, shaped eyebrows coming close together, then peered at something on a level below the desk. She looked up again, meeting his gaze. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she replied, in an accent imported from the south, ‘Signor Moscardinetto gave us strict instructions that he only receives visitors by prior appointment, and there are no names on his list this evening.’

  ‘Do you have a pen there, Raquel?’

  The frown returned. ‘Of course, sir.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, smiling gently to put her at her ease. ‘So many young people these days just make notes on their mobiles. In a couple of generations they’ll have forgotten how to write, and they’ll have long pointy thumbs. Take your pen please, Raquel, and your empty list, and write on it “Robert M Skinner, KBE, QPM”, then call your guest and tell him that I’m here.’

  The knighthood had been bestowed at the turn of the year, at the insistence of a grateful prime minister. It had been offered twice before and declined, until, mindful of the fate of Julius Caesar after three refusals, he had accepted, on the condition that it was not gazetted, or featured in any honours list. Within his circle only two people knew of its existence, Sarah and Alex. He was fairly sure that the secret was safe with Raquel, as she stared back at him, bewildered.

  ‘Save some time,’ he suggested. ‘Forget his list, just call him.’

  She capitulated, picked up a phone and pushed three buttons. He watched her waiting for the call to connect, but nothing happened. She listened for what seemed like an age but was little more than half a minute before shaking her head and declaring, ‘I’m sorry, sir, He’s not in.’

  ‘No,’ he corrected her. ‘You mean there was no reply. You called him, so you must have believed he was in the hotel.’

  ‘I did,’ Raquel agreed. ‘I’ve been on duty since four. Signor Moscardinetto came back in five minutes after I started. I’ve been here ever since then, apart from a couple of minutes just after six, when I . . . you know . . . and he hasn’t gone out.’

  ‘Could he be in any other part of the hotel? Dining room? Bar?’

  ‘He’d have had to go past me to get there.’ She pointed to her left, at an elevator door. ‘That’s the only lift.’

  ‘Therefore the presumption is that he’s in his room, but not answering the phone. He was alone when he came back, yes? He didn’t bring a little friend with him?’

  She nodded, then shook her head, in quick succession.

  ‘In that case, you’d better take me up there,’ Skinner said.

  ‘Maybe he’s asleep,’ she suggested.

  ‘If he is, we’ll wake him, and he’ll be able to tell me why he didn’t turn up for our meeting in a bar up the road. Look,’ he offered, ‘maybe you’d prefer to call the manager if you’re not comfortable with that.’

  ‘I am the duty manager,’ she replied. ‘Hold on a sec.’ She turned, opened a door behind her and called out, ‘Jan, man the desk for a few minutes, please. Jan’s our doorman and porter,’ she explained as she lifted a flap and stepped out from behind the desk. ‘He’s on his break. This way.’ She stepped up to the lift, pressed the ‘ascend’ button and the doors opened immediately.

  Aldorino Moscardinetto’s room was on the top floor of the hotel, the third. The corridor was as tasteless as the reception area had been, but better lit; the cheap garishness of the thick purple synthetic carpet was even more evident. Glancing down, he saw at least an inch of Raquel’s heels sink into it.

  She stopped at room three zero six. ‘This is it,’ she murmured, then knocked on the door and called out, ‘Signore, it’s hotel management. Can I speak with you, please?’

  The veneered door was as cheap as the rest of the decor; Skinner knew that if there had been movement behind it, he would have heard. A feeling of inevitability settled upon him, one that he had experienced all too often.

  ‘Open it,’ he ordered.

  She looked at him, her eyes showing doubt, and something else: fear. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ He held out his right hand. ‘Give me the pass key, kid, then back off a little. Just in case,’ he added.

  She did as he instructed, retreating all the way back to the lift. He slid the plastic key card into its slot, saw a green flash, then withdrew it.

  The door was as light as he had suspected. As he opened it, using a handkerchief for want of a glove, and stepped into the room, the smell that greeted him confirmed that it was occupied.

  A golden face stared back at him from the dressing table. A full head of hair fell across its forehead, but its right eye socket was empty. The left was there but saw nothing.

  Fuck me, Skinner thought, he takes his BAFTA everywhere with him.

  He realised that his tense was wrong as he advanced into the room, past the wardrobes, past the en suite bathroom. The room had a double bed and Aldorino Moscardinetto lay beyond it, on the floor, on his side, with a small pool of vomit beside him. A thick restraining cord from one of the curtains was wrapped loosely around his neck, on which a vivid purple circle was evident. His black cotton jacket had been discarded, thrown across the bed, leaving him clad in a white shirt, its high collar open, and pale blue trousers, which he had fouled in death.

  He moved further forward into the narrow space where the body lay, between the bed and the wall. He leaned across it and placed two fingers against the carotid artery. It was a pointless gesture, for he had known he would feel no pulse. He rested the backs of the same two fingers for a few seconds against the dead man’s forehead, trying not to look at his purple face, or into
his eyes, knowing that if he did, the memory would stay with him for even longer.

  By gauging the temperature against his own, he judged that the body was cooling but not cold. The room itself was not warm, indicating that the heating system was on a money-saving timer. He tried to guess what Sarah would deduce with her pathologist’s skills, and concluded that she would suggest Moscardinetto had been dead for more than an hour.

  Then he stood, and walked away, walked out of yet another crime scene, added to the hundreds he had viewed in his time.

  As he closed the door behind him, Skinner saw Raquel standing by the lift, her hands covering her mouth and her eyes wide as she read his expression.

  ‘Do you have any other guests on this floor?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Four,’ she replied, her voice a little tremulous but under control.

  ‘Check their rooms, please, now, and ask any who are in to go downstairs. Can you move them all to a lower floor?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got space.’

  ‘Good. You need to do that sooner rather than later.’

  She looked at him. ‘We had a guest die on us last year,’ she said, ‘and we didn’t have to do that.’

  ‘This time you do. This floor will be very busy very soon.’

  ‘You are police, then,’ she murmured making the same erroneous assumption as had the barman in Regina’s, a long twenty minutes before.

  ‘Not any more,’ he told her, ‘but I know people who still are. You do what you have to do, and I’ll call them.’

  With his back to the door of room three zero six, he took out his phone, found Dan Provan’s number among the hundreds he had gathered through the years, and called him.

  ‘Aye?’ The detective sergeant’s gruff voice sounded in his ear. He assumed he had come up as ‘Number unknown’.

  ‘It’s Bob Skinner, Dan. I’m calling you rather than Lottie because I’m guessing that by now she might be back home with her wee boy.’

  ‘That’s right, she is.’

  ‘Then I’m not going to fuck that up for her, because I know how important it is. This is an executive decision that I no longer have the power to make, but I’m doing it anyway. I’m on the third floor of the Stadium Hotel in West Campbell Street, outside the room of Aldorino Moscardinetto. He’s been strangled, probably shortly after five past four, when he was last seen. I need uniforms here right now, people who know or have been told who I am, I need a full crime-scene team as soon as possible, and I need you, DS Provan, because this links directly to the Leo Speight investigation. Don’t worry about phoning your high heid yins; I’ll do that. You call the rest and then get your arse along here. Until you arrive, I’m taking charge of the scene, so make sure that everyone you call knows that.’

  He left Provan to his task, then took a deep breath. When he had gathered himself, he made another call. ‘Love of my life,’ he began as Sarah answered, ‘let me ask you something. If a human body is four or five degrees below normal temperature in cool indoor surroundings, how long has it been dead?’

  Twenty-Three

  ‘Why are you no’ wearing a sterile suit?’ Dan Provan asked as he hopped from the lift into the third-floor corridor while trying to fit on a paper overshoe.

  ‘I wasn’t wearing one when I found the deceased,’ Skinner replied, ‘so there isn’t a hell of a lot of point now. They’ll find me in there, but I’m in the database so it won’t be a problem.’

  The DS wrinkled his nose. ‘I don’t need tae ask if he’s still there,’ he said. ‘You should have telt them to close the door.’

  ‘It is closed now, but it was open for long enough. I asked them to open the window, but they won’t until it’s been printed. That’ll be a waste of time, of course, given that it’s a hotel room. It’ll yield dozens of untraceable prints that will have nothing to do with the investigation.’

  ‘Aye. This corridor will be a forensic disaster too, wi’ all the folk that have walked along it since it was last hoovered. How many rooms are there on this floor?’

  ‘Twelve, but that’s not important. In fact it’s irrelevant. We know the perpetrator had to come this way, not through anyone’s window. It’s what’s in the victim’s room that counts.’

  ‘I suppose Ah’d better take a look,’ Provan sighed.

  Skinner followed him along the corridor and into the murder scene but did not advance beyond the door of the bathroom. Instead he waited as the DS approached Moscardinetto’s body. As he was studying it, Skinner took the opportunity to appraise the scene more carefully than he had before.

  ‘Has the pathologist been yet?’ Provan asked from across the room.

  ‘No, but I’ve got an informed guesstimate from my wife of the time of death, based on what I could tell her about body temperature. She puts it between five past four, when he got back to the hotel, and five o’clock.’

  ‘How are we for CCTV coverage?’

  ‘It’s piss-poor, unfortunately,’ Skinner conceded. ‘This place was a cheap conversion from an office building, and they skimped on cameras. The entrance, the bar and the dining room are covered, and that’s about it.’

  ‘I see. Got any theories, big man?’

  ‘Yes, but you’re the SIO here, wee man, so let’s hear yours first.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the DS said. ‘I’m thinking this might be a professional hit, dressed up to look like a random robbery gone wrong. The deceased walks in on the thief, he has a go, and the thief strangles him. That’s what we’re meant to think, except I don’t buy it. Of all the rooms in this hotel, why pick this one? Okay, the drawers are half open, looking as if they’ve been gone through, but so what? Has anything actually been taken? The guy’s wallet’s still in his jacket with a mix of twenties and tenners in it. A real thief would have emptied that. Likely he’d have taken this thing too.’

  With his gloved right hand Provan picked up the BAFTA statuette, then replaced it quickly. ‘Fuck me, those buggers are heavier than they look!’ he exclaimed. ‘That would have made a good murder weapon.’ He paused. ‘That’s how I see it anyway,’ he concluded. ‘You?’

  ‘We’re not a million miles apart,’ Skinner replied. ‘I agree with you that it’s unlikely just to have been an unfortunate coincidence for Moscardinetto. However, I disagree on a few points. I believe it was a robbery, and I don’t believe that the perpetrator came here to kill. Dan, I’ve visited the aftermath of quite a few professional hits, as opposed to premeditated murders; more than you have, I’m sure. But I have never seen one where the assassin came along unequipped for the job. Most of the victims I’ve seen were shot, a minority were stabbed. I can only recall one where the target was strangled, and that was done with a wire garrotte, almost to the point of decapitation. That weapon wasn’t left at the scene, nor were any of the others; professional killers don’t do that. This was spontaneous, bet on it.’

  ‘I’m no’ a betting man,’ the DS retorted defensively.

  ‘That’s just as well for you, mate, and tough luck on the bookies. Any professional looks after the tools of his trade. This bloke came here for another purpose; he was disturbed and he improvised. He grabbed the nearest thing to hand, he overpowered Moscardinetto and he throttled him.’ He paused, then added, ‘Afterwards, I believe he took what he came for and he left.’

  Provan frowned, his eyes narrowing. ‘Okay with the rest, but how do you work the last part out?’

  Skinner beckoned him with an upraised finger. ‘Come here,’ he said, ‘and look at this.’

  He led the DS to a platform beside the wardrobe, where a small four-wheeled suitcase stood, unzipped and lying ajar, displaying a pair of trousers folded over a hanger. ‘What else do you see in there?’ he asked.

  Provan bent slightly from the waist and looked inside the case. ‘It’s got a compartment,’ he murmured as his former commander’s meaning dawned on hi
m, ‘a laptop compartment.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s empty, and trust me, there is no laptop or tablet, or any other form of computer, in this room. Nor is the victim’s phone here; that’s gone too. But there are chargers, for both, on the dressing table.’

  ‘What about the safe?’ the DS challenged. ‘There’s bound to be a safe.’

  ‘There is,’ Skinner conceded. ‘In the wardrobe. It was closed, but I got the override code from Raquel, the duty manager, and opened it. I found an Italian passport, a Business Plus boarding card for Ryanair’s flight from Prestwick to Rome Ciampino tomorrow, a small phial of what I believe to be amyl nitrite – although God knows how he’d have got that past an airport scanner – and three hundred and eighty-four euros in notes and change.’

  ‘What’s amyl nitrite?’

  ‘Dan,’ Skinner replied, ‘I really don’t think you’d want to know. Apart from those items, there was nothing else. Signor Moscardinetto’s killer came for a specific purpose, and he found what he was looking for.’

  Twenty-Four

  ‘That was a pretty big call you made yesterday,’ Lottie Mann murmured to Dan Provan as she stood in the doorway of room three zero six on Tuesday morning.

  They would have been alone on the third floor of the Stadium had it not been for a single uniformed constable standing beside the lift to redirect any unauthorised arrivals, media or hotel guests. The crime-scene technicians had finished their work, and the remains of Aldorino Moscardinetto had been transferred to the mortuary to await the slicing and probing of Professor Graeme Bell, although a faint reminder of his former presence still lingered in the air, despite the fact that a window had been opened.

  ‘I didn’t make it,’ he pointed out. ‘Big Skinner slipped into full command mode, and he’s no’ a man you’d want to try to override. Besides, he was right. Your Auntie Ann’s still on virtual lockdown at her hospital, and Jamie and Vanessa went out for a Mexican after you picked wee Jakey up. What would you have done with him if I had called you in? Ye’d have had to take him back to those two malevolent fuckers of grandparents. It would have been more ammunition for Moss bloody Lee but there would have been no other option.’