A Brush With Death

by Quintin Jardine

  He took the steps two at a time, pleased that he was able to do it at his age, and swung round the corner and into his bustling open-plan office . . . to see Bob Skinner seated beside his desk as three detective constables busied themselves around the room.

  He hid his surprise as he walked towards him. ‘Hello again,’ he said casually. ‘I thought you didnae like Glasgow.’

  ‘That was then and this is now,’ the visitor replied. ‘I’ve got an interest in this investigation, remember.’

  ‘With respect, Bob, your insurance company has got fuck-all interest in Moscardinetto.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but my other client might have.’ He laid his plastic badge on the DS’s desk.

  ‘Robert M Skinner, QPM, Consultant Director, the Security Service,’ he read. ‘You’re finally comin’ clean. Come on then, what’s your real interest?’

  ‘Let’s just say I’ve got an eye on the people who weren’t invited to Speight’s going-away party.’

  ‘Specifically?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet, but once I know what the deceased Italian was up to, I might have a better idea.’

  ‘It wouldnae have anything to do wi’ yon man McCullough, would it? My young DC, Willie Gowans, went up to Perthshire to see him yesterday afternoon, him and his wife. We’ve got people talking to everybody on the guest list,’ Provan explained. ‘The laddie said he’s never been told fuck-all before in so many different ways.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t,’ Skinner replied firmly. ‘I wish I’d known, I could have saved you a trip. I saw them myself yesterday morning. I have a personal connection with Mrs McCullough.’

  The DS stared at him. ‘What? Are you related, like?’

  He raised both eyebrows dramatically. ‘Define “related”, Dan. Mia McCullough is the mother of my oldest son.’

  ‘The boy that went to . . .’

  ‘That’s right, Ignacio did time. Basically for protecting his mother. Her husband isn’t the sort to volunteer information; if I’d known, I’d have advised you against sending a young officer to see him.’

  ‘Ah had nobody else. Oh, I’ve heard of McCullough all right; is he no’ the biggest fucking hoodlum on Tayside?’

  ‘That’s what they used to say. I believed it for a while, but now I’m not so sure he did everything they thought he did. His sister Goldie, now she was very illegal, but she died a wee while back.’

  ‘Are you saying he’s legit?’

  ‘Now, definitely he is. He has reason to be; apart from his link to me, his granddaughter . . .’ He stopped in mid sentence. ‘You know young Sauce Haddock, through in Edinburgh?’

  ‘Aye, bright laddie. A future ACC, they say.’

  ‘I’d say higher than that, but whatever, the granddaughter, also named Cameron, is his other half. So, Dan, if you had Grandpa McCullough’s name in your long list of suspects, I would take it off if I were you.’

  ‘Why did you visit him if he’s that innocent?’

  ‘Because he’s been involved peripherally in the boxing business and because he has interests in Russia. He knows people. One of the entities he knows is called Zirka. It’s a fight promotion company, owned by Yevgeny Brezinski, Leo’s old rival, and it stood to lose if his new venture had come to fruition.’

  ‘Are you saying this Brezinski might have done Leo in to stop it?’

  ‘It’s doubtful that he knew about it in advance of the party, but if he did, it might provide a motive. The time frame makes it unlikely, though. Bryce Stoddart has been bunging Zirka for years as part of a deal over Leo’s big fight with Brezinski in Russia. His retirement meant that would stop, but killing Leo wouldn’t start it up again.’

  ‘You’re still interested, though,’ Provan declared. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘Yes,’ Skinner admitted, ‘I am, but I’m more interested in the Italian at the moment. What have you dug up on him since I saw you last?’

  ‘I’ve found out who he was with in that bar: Gordon Pollock, no less, Leo Speight’s grown-up son.’

  ‘Your source being the barman, I assume?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He told me the boy was agitated.’

  ‘Me too, but I’m not sure he was necessarily upset at Moscardinetto himself. Briggs, the bartender, thought the Italian was videoing the kid on his phone.’

  ‘The same phone that vanished from his hotel room along with his laptop,’ Skinner moaned. ‘That’s a bit of a bugger. I’d love to see that recording.’

  ‘The guy was a film-maker,’ Provan reminded him. ‘He may have videoed all his meetings as a matter of course. We’re only the polis and we film quite a few of ours.’

  ‘For evidential purposes. Was that what he was doing, and if so, why?’

  ‘When we find the guy that killed him, we might know.’ He clicked on his mouse to waken his computer. ‘The lassie in the CCTV monitoring centre said she’d send me a link to the footage I’m after. Wi’ a bit of luck, it’ll be here. I’m sure I know how he got in and out, through the lane then up and over the roof.’

  ‘Is there footage from the lane?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘No, worse luck. There’s a couple of private cameras, and I got another DC to check them out. The focus on one of them was too tight to pick up passers-by, and the other one didnae work.’ He checked his mailbox, and nodded with satisfaction. ‘That’s fine, the link’s there. I asked for the footage from the street cameras near West Campbell Street and Blythswood Street between three p.m. and seven thirty.’

  ‘What do you mean by “near”?’

  ‘The cameras arenae actually in those two streets,’ the DS explained. ‘They’re in West George Street and St Vincent Street, but they’ll show us everybody that turned intae our target area off those streets. So if we find somebody that goes out of shot in one camera but doesnae reappear in the other, well, we want to know who they are.’

  ‘I get that,’ Skinner said. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  ‘I wanted to wait for Lottie before doin’ that.’ He checked his watch. ‘She went to see Speight’s lawyer, but she’s takin’ her time.’

  ‘We can run it again for her when she gets here. Get on with it, Dan.’

  Provan held up a restraining hand. ‘Wait a minute. Daisy’s email asks me to call her before we access the links. Daisy Millar; she’s the manager in the CCTV operations centre that I spoke to last night.’

  He picked up the phone on his desk and dialled a number. ‘Daisy,’ he began, ‘what did you want to tell me?’

  As he listened, a smile formed on his face, and grew progressively wider. ‘Ms Millar,’ he exclaimed when the message had been delivered, ‘you and that centre of yours are the best thing that’s happened to the Glasgow polis since they invented truncheons. Thanks.’

  He replaced his phone and turned to his companion. ‘She’s worked her socks off for me,’ he said. ‘She’s had her staff look at the footage and analyse it. In our time frame she’s only identified seven people that fit the criteria we gave her, either going into West Campbell Street and Blythswood Street and not reappearing at all, or coming back into shot a while after their original appearance. One of them was you. She knows you by sight, you bein’ famous an’ all, so she left you out.’

  ‘She shouldn’t have,’ Skinner observed.

  ‘I told her you found the body, so that’s okay. Of the other six, four were middle-aged women, a group of three that turned into West Campbell Street from St Vincent Street and a woman on her own that turned off West George Street five minutes later. They arrived at quarter to four, twenty-five minutes before Moscardinetto, and they all left, heading in the opposite directions, at ten past five. Daisy says that they were all wearing their finery, and she has them down as a group of friends meeting up in the hotel for afternoon tea. She’s right; they couldnae have been going anywhere else.’


  ‘Yes, agreed. Go on.’

  ‘The fifth person was Raquel, the hotel duty manager, who started her shift at four. I warned Daisy that she’d be on it and gave her a description, so she excluded her as well. That leaves only one person.’

  He stopped, and clicked on the link that showed on screen. As Skinner watched, a new window appeared, a still frame of a thoroughfare that he recognised as West Campbell Street. There was a single man in shot, his back to the camera. Provan hit an arrow at the foot of the screen; traffic began to flow, and the figure began to move, walking with a strange bouncing gait, then turning into West Campbell Street, appearing momentarily in profile then disappearing from view.

  ‘Daisy says he never reappears at all. There isnae another building you can access in that stretch of the street, other than the hotel. So either he’s staff, which he’s no’ because they’re all accounted for, or he’s a guest, which he’s no’ because they’ve all been interviewed, or he went intae the hotel bar or the restaurant and stayed there.’ He winked. ‘But he didnae do that either, because Daisy had her folk run the cameras right up till quarter past eight, when I cleared the hotel of everybody but staff and guests. When you exclude all those alternatives, chances are he’s our man. The only question I’m asking myself is where did he go after he killed the Itie and left the hotel.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ Skinner said. ‘He’s a clever bugger, and he realised that he’d been clocked by CCTV on the way in, so he left the area using the lane, having checked that it had no public space coverage.’

  Provan beamed. ‘It’s you that’s the clever bugger, Bob. Ah suppose that now you’re goin’ tae tell me you know who he is?’

  ‘Correct on both counts, Detective Sergeant,’ he replied, without the faintest flicker of a smile.

  Twenty-Eight

  Mario McGuire had a problem. Boredom.

  Those who had known him all his life would have agreed, had it been put to them, that he had never been driven by personal ambition. Instead he had defied consistently the hopes and expectations of others by doing things his way with such determination that his wife’s private nickname for him was ‘Sinatra’.

  He had grown up with a range of business opportunities within his family, but had ignored them all and confounded his mother by joining the police service. ‘Because I want to work for people, Ma, to make their lives better, not to have people working for me to give me even more of what I’ve got already.’

  For the first few years of his service he had been a happy and contented beat cop, alongside his lifelong friend Neil McIlhenney. For a while Neil had borne the wrath of Mrs McGuire for ‘leading my son astray’, until she realised that she had never seen two such contented young men and resigned herself to the truth: that whatever else life held in store for Mario, it would not be lived out as a director of her recruitment consultancy, or as a builder like his late father, or even as a player in his grandfather’s delicatessen, importing and property businesses.

  If Mario had never stepped above the lowest run in the ladder of policing, he would have felt fulfilled, but after a few years in the force, he came to the attention of the newly appointed head of major crimes in Edinburgh, Detective Superintendent Bob Skinner, and was swept into his circle, once again with McIlhenney at his side.

  Guided by his hard and ruthless boss, he had never looked back from that day on. Nor had he looked forward, very often. The job pitched him into a series of situations that left him few opportunities to focus on career planning, even if he had been interested in plotting his future course.

  He had loved almost every day of his time as a front-line CID officer, the exception being an incident that ended for him with a gunshot wound to the chest that would probably have killed a man less robustly built than he was. That had made him take a longer view of life, and had probably contributed to his drifting into marriage with his girlfriend of the moment, his colleague Margaret Rose. Their short-lived union had fallen apart in stressful circumstances and under the weight of a secret that both of them, and McIlhenney, would take with them as they passed into the great white light.

  And yet, in spite of himself, in spite of his indifference to his own position in the service, Mario McGuire had risen through the ranks, always a step behind his ex-wife, and usually a step ahead of McIlhenney, until the two were separated by the latter’s move to London and a command post in the Met.

  He had shared Bob Skinner’s antipathy to the Scottish national police service from the moment of its inception, but unlike his mentor he had never been able to resist opening whatever closed door lay in his path – a tendency that had proved fatal to Maggie’s second husband, Stevie Steele – and when it had come into being he had been one of its first assistant chief constables, under the command of Andy Martin, another graduate of the Skinner academy of take-no-prisoners crime-fighting.

  ‘It’s ironic,’ he had said to Neil McIlhenney, on one of the rare evenings when they and their wives met for dinner, ‘that out of all of us – you, me, Maggie, Brian Mackie, Stevie, even big Bob himself – the only one with a desperate, driving ambition to wear a chief constable’s magic hat was Andy Martin, and out of all of us, he was the one that turned out to be fucking awful at the job.’

  Sir Andrew’s tenure had been cut short. He was gone, first to a short-term lecturing contract at an American university, then, it seemed, to obscurity, out of touch with all his former colleagues and friends. They assumed that Karen, his former wife and the mother of his two children, who had rejoined the police service after their break-up, knew where he was, but nobody cared to ask her.

  In his place, Maggie, the widow Steele, had been appointed chief constable, with Mario McGuire as her designated deputy in the command team, increasingly confined to an office in central Scotland, shuffling paper, reviewing CID performance statistics from Shetland to Stranraer and yearning for the company and camaraderie of active service in a bustling major crimes unit.

  Whenever he could, he seized the chance to go to a crime scene, following the example that Bob Skinner had set on reaching command rank. On occasion, he had to fight off the urge to take operational command; the Leo Speight investigation had been one of those times, as had the Moscardinetto murder that Dan Provan had reported to him just before nine on the evening gone by.

  He smiled as he recalled the conversation.

  ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘You’re no’ going to believe this, sir. It was Bob Skinner.’

  ‘Fuck me!’ Paula, nursing Eamon, their teething infant, had thrown him a frown. ‘Why shouldn’t I believe it, Sergeant?’ he countered. ‘Does this mean there’s a link to the Speight homicide?’

  ‘Ah think that’s why he rang me. Because he thinks there is.’

  ‘With respect, why you? Why not DI Mann?’

  ‘Because I’m no’ a single parent who’s been working for forty-eight hours non-stop. But you really mean why no’ you, sir, don’t you? That’s between you and big Bob, but I guess it was because he knew we needed bodies on the ground right away and the crime scene established and protected.’

  ‘Do you need me there?’ He had struggled to keep a pleading tone out of his voice.

  There had been a silence, which he realised in the light of the following day had actually been the sound of Dan Provan trying to remember what tact might be.

  ‘Well, sir,’ the reply had come at last, ‘this is a fairly enclosed space, and you would probably fill more of it than we can spare. So with respect, ye’re probably better where you are.’

  And so, instead of jumping into his Range Rover, he had phoned Skinner. ‘Why the hell were you there?’ he asked, going straight to the point – and being met halfway.

  ‘Word for word,’ he had replied, ‘that’s what I was intending to ask Moscardinetto, had he not frustrated me by being fucking dead.’

  ‘Fine, but
your brief from Mrs Dennis and MI5 is to look for links to international organised crime. This guy was a film director, not a criminal.’

  ‘The guy was an anomaly, Mario, the only person on Leo Speight’s guest list with no obvious reason for being there. As for him being a film director, yes, that’s true, but it’s all I know about him. I’m going to ask Amanda tomorrow if she can find out what else he might have been.’

  ‘Let me know what she comes up with. It could be convenient if he turned out to have been in someone else’s gunsights, someone with nothing to do with Speight. I take it there’s no chance of this being a bungled robbery?’

  ‘None. Got to go now; I’m losing signal.’

  McGuire sat at his desk, frowning as he replayed the conversations in his head, and even more frustrated that he was so far away from the action. Indeed, he had risen from his chair and was reaching for his jacket, his out-tray full and ready for removal, when his phone rang.

  He snatched it up. ‘Yes?’ he snapped testily.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ his assistant said. ‘I’ve got Mr Dorward on the line from the Crime Campus. He says he needs to speak to the chief or you, and she’s got the Police Authority meeting all morning.’

  ‘Really? It’s that important?’

  ‘He says it is. I asked him what it was about, but he said it was confidential, chief officers only.’

  ‘Ah, bugger it,’ McGuire growled. Whatever else he might have been – and he had earned a few choice suggestions in his time – he knew that Arthur Dorward was not a drama queen. If he had gone directly to the top of the tree, and he had done so before, there would be a compelling reason for it. ‘Put him through, Jane.’

  He slumped back into his chair once more. ‘Where’s the national emergency?’ he sighed as the senior SOCO came on the line.

  ‘Right where you live,’ his caller retorted. ‘National emergency might be a bit strong, but it is fucking sensitive. It’s to do with the Speight investigation.’