Yes, that’s right, it was fifteen years ago, for Alexis Skinner was at that unmercifully awkward stage, not quite a woman, I thought, but on the other hand definitely not Pops’ wee girl any more. The attitude that’s characterised her ever since was in its formative stage, with all of the sharp edges that time would smooth away, still, then, at their most abrasive.
We were having our evening meal, she and I, the two-person family unit that we’d been for almost a decade, since Myra had died in a tangle of metal. Daisy Mears had gone home for the night. She’d been a part of our lives for the previous eight of those years. More than a part: in truth, she’d been the saviour of mine, professionally.
Daisy lived in Gullane, in a cottage, as we did; hers was on the other side of the main street from Goose Green, in Templar Lane. She was five years older than me, just past forty, divorced, childless, and with no intention of ever getting involved with another man in any way, other than business. She was an artist, and a pretty good one at that; her landscapes, and stormy, brooding seascapes, sold for upwards of a grand a time through an Edinburgh gallery, and for not quite as much to collectors who approached her directly. She hadn’t always done that well, though. When she’d become Alex’s day-carer… my daughter did not care for the term ‘childminder’ and corrected anyone who was foolish enough to use it… the money had come in handy, in the wake of her acrimonious split from the heavy-handed skinflint she’d made the mistake of marrying.
She’d joined us after a succession of short-term failures. At first Myra’s mother insisted on helping me out, but after only a year she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and went back to Lanarkshire to die. After her came a series of women who’d promised that my unpredictable working hours would be no problem, only to discover that they were. At that time, I was still in my twenties, widowed, with a five-year-old kid who was the centre of my world. It might not always have been apparent… indeed, today I have an ex-wife who’d take issue with the assertion… but through my life my career has come second to my family.
With the resignation of the most recent ‘carer’, I had a problem, but I had an option open to me, one which I almost took up. When Daisy answered the ad that I’d placed, in desperation rather than hope, in the East Lothian Courier, I was probably within three months of leaving the police force and moving back to Motherwell, to add a law qualification to my arts degree and join my father’s firm.
She was made for us. Her creative hours were completely flexible, and could be shaped to meet our needs. She’d come in every morning, to get Alex ready and take her to school, then pick her up at the end of the day and bring her home, or if I was working late, take her to her place until I called for her. On the odd occasion when an investigation turned into a crisis, she’d look after her overnight, always at Templar Lane, for Daisy and I agreed early on that she would never sleep over at Goose Green. Villages are villages, even the nicest of them; we knew there would be talk as it was, without our feeding it.
I thought about letting the answer-machine handle the incoming call, but only for a fraction of a second. I’ve never been able to do that. If the phone rings more than three times, in my home or in my office, it means that I’m not there, unless I’m sound asleep or locked away taking care of private matters. Even then, I once ruined a perfectly good mobile by answering it while taking a piss and letting it slip from my grasp. I stood up from the table, and snatched the handset from its cradle on the sideboard.
‘Three two nine one,’ I answered. My phone number. That’s my way. I never give my name when taking a call at home. My life is about having an edge; I’ve always liked to know who’s calling before giving anything of myself away.
‘DCI Skinner?’ Male voice, deep, young, just on the confident side of arrogant.
‘Who’s this?’
‘PC McGuire, St Leonards.’
I frowned. The name meant nothing to me. ‘This is Skinner,’ I conceded. ‘It’s quarter past seven, and I finished a ten-hour working day just over an hour ago. So why are you interrupting my dinner, Constable?’
‘Because my boss told me to, sir.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘Detective Superintendent Jay.’
Greg Jay; arrogant prick. I didn’t like him, and I wasn’t alone. ‘I thought you said you were a PC,’ I snapped. ‘Why are you gophering for a CID officer?’
‘I was nearest the door; got seconded.’
‘And Jay gave you my ex-directory number, just like that?’
‘I didn’t know it was X-D, sir. He just told me to call it.’
‘And?’
‘And to ask you to meet him at Infirmary Street Baths, as soon as possible.’
‘That’s how he put it?’
The PC hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘Actually, sir, he said, “Tell him to get his arse along to Infirmary Street Baths, now.” Those were his exact words.’
I cut off my retort, just before it left my mouth. Alex was watching me, with a frown on her face. ‘In that case, Constable McGuire,’ I replied instead, ‘… what’s your first name?’
‘Mario, sir.’
‘Now there’s an odd mixture.’
‘Father Irish, mother Italian.’
‘Indeed? Well, Mario, please give Detective Superintendent Jay my compliments and tell him that my arse is going nowhere until he calls me himself and gives me a good reason why it should.’
‘Will do, sir.’ Something in the lad’s tone hinted that he would enjoy it too.
‘And one other thing,’ I added.
‘I know, sir. Forget the number I just called.’
My daughter looked at me, a little anxiously, as I came back to my seat. ‘Can you do that?’ she asked. ‘He’s a superintendent and you’re only a chief inspector.’
‘Nobody’s “only” a chief inspector, love,’ I told her. ‘Nobody’s “only” anything. “Only” isn’t a word I like to tag on to people.’ That said, I could have added that if you made chief inspector at thirty-three… I’d held the rank for three years by that time.. . then somebody who’d taken twelve years longer to make super would know that at some point down the road he’d be calling you ‘sir’, and thus wouldn’t be taking too many liberties.
I didn’t say it, though; instead I concentrated on finishing my lasagne before the phone rang again. I felt myself grin as I wondered whether that young constable had the stones to deliver my message verbatim, suspecting that he did.
It didn’t take Jay too long. I was in the kitchen when he called; Alex picked up in the dining room, before I could stop her. She answered in the same way I did, number only, as I’d taught her.
‘Yes, my father is at home,’ I heard her say. ‘Who’s calling, please?’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry,’ she continued, switching into young woman mode and sounding frighteningly like her mother. ‘Either you tell me who you are or I hang up. That’s what my father says I should do with anonymous callers.’ She waited, taking the phone away from her ear slightly, as if she was getting ready to put it down. ‘Thank you,’ she said, eventually, then turned to look at me. ‘Dad, it’s Detective Superintendent Jay.’
‘How soon can we start her on our switchboard?’ he drawled, as soon as I took the phone.
‘We’ll be minding hers before she’s done,’ I told him.
‘You finished your tea then, Bob?’ The sarcasm in Jay’s tone was only one of the reasons for my dislike of him.
‘And done the dishes.’
‘You ready to obey orders now?’
I didn’t want to upset Alex, so all I did was grin, when I really wanted to bite his ear off. ‘Since when were you my line manager?’ I asked him, quietly. ‘You’re at St Leonards, CID; I’m drugs squad commander. So please stop puffing out your chest and tell me exactly what the hell it is you want.’
‘Listen…’ he growled.
‘I’m listening.’
I heard a deep breath being drawn. ‘I’ve got a crime scene,’ h
e continued, eventually.
‘Infirmary Street Baths,’ I said. In the Victorian era Edinburgh’s civic leaders built several public swimming pools to combat the scourge of cholera. When I was young, my father took me to see his grandfather’s grave in a cemetery in Wishaw, Motherwell’s neighbouring town; as we approached it he pointed out a green area, without memorial stones, and told me that it was the site of a mass grave for victims of a cholera epidemic.
‘That’s right,’ Jay confirmed, brusquely.
‘I thought they were closed.’ A hundred years on, we weren’t so bothered about Biblical plagues.
‘They are. They were shut down about a year ago; they’ve been mothballed while the council tries to find a new use for the building, or for the site, if it comes to that. There are jannies going in every so often, to check the place out, make sure that everything’s all right.’
‘But today something wasn’t?’
‘That’s right. They found a guy in the pool.’
‘What stroke was he doing?’
‘Very funny. There’s no water supply to the building, but even if there had been, this one wasn’t swimming. He was at the deep end; right under the high diving board. His neck was broken.’
‘He took the plunge, eh?’
The superintendent allowed himself a grim chuckle. ‘That’s how it looks. But we don’t know for certain whether he dived off it or whether he was chucked off.’
‘What makes you think I can tell you?’ I asked.
‘If what Alf Stein says about you is right,’ I could see the sneer on his weasel face, ‘you probably could tell us just by looking at him.’ Detective Chief Superintendent Stein was our head of CID, Jay’s boss and mine. I’d heard myself described, with undisguised jealousy, by someone who didn’t know I was within earshot, as his protege, but Alf had never told me that I was. ‘But the reason I’d like you to look at him…’ he hesitated, ‘… this has got drugs overtones to it, Bob. There’s no ID on the body, but Alison Higgins reckons she’s seen this bloke before. She thinks that he’s one of Tony Manson’s crew.’
I could have said that I’d look at him next morning in the mortuary, but in truth, if Jay had done that to me I’d have been seriously upset. And there was something else: Alison wasn’t wrong too often. I told him to hold, and put my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘Do you know if Daisy has anything on tonight?’ I asked my daughter.
She nodded. ‘She’s taking some pictures to show to a private buyer in Haddington.’
‘Do you have much homework?’
‘I’ve done it.’
‘Fancy a quick trip into town?’
‘Aw, Dad! Top of the Pops is on in a minute or two.’
‘We can record it. I need to do this.’
‘New jeans?’
‘Are you trying extortion on a police officer?’
‘It’s always worked before.’
‘Okay.’ I put the phone back to my ear. ‘I’ll be about forty-five minutes, give or take a couple,’ I told Jay.
‘Our guest will wait for you,’ he replied.
I let Alex set the VCR; we had no empty tapes so she and I had a brief argument about which to use. She won in the end, because I wasn’t really interested in catching up on Juventus winning the Champions League on penalties. She didn’t get to choose the music in the car, though. I never could stand R Kelly, and Wyclef’s language on one of the Fugee tracks was… well… ‘Mista Mista’ had become the anthem of the Edinburgh drugs squad, but it wasn’t for my daughter’s ears. Instead I forced her to listen to ‘Aria’, a strange, contemplative blend of opera and chill-out music by the Cafe del Mar maestro, that a friend had given me in Spain a few weeks before, at Easter.
Although it was a Thursday, most of the late evening shoppers were heading for home by the time we came into the outskirts of the city. I was thinking about Infirmary Street Baths, and what was waiting for us there. Alexis was thinking about something else; we were on Milton Link when she turned the volume down.
‘Dad,’ she said, abruptly, reclaiming my attention. ‘Why don’t we have a dinner party?’
‘What?’ I spluttered. ‘Why the hell would we do that?’
‘Why shouldn’t we? You never invite friends to the house. It’s as if we’re hermits. You’re a good cook, and I’m not bad at some things. We could manage.’
‘Who would we invite?’ As I thought about it, I conceded the point; we did live a secluded existence. Alex wasn’t my life in its entirety, but I didn’t have a legion of friends, not outside the job. Yes, I was invited to parties thrown by people who’d been part of our circle when I was half of a couple, but nobody expected me to take a turn as host myself, not with a kid… but she wasn’t any more, was she?
‘You could invite the Lloyds,’ she suggested. Jack Lloyd was my usual foursomes partner in the golf club. He and his wife were more than ten years older than me. ‘And Aunt Jean could come.’
I smiled. I must have looked condescending, for she frowned. ‘When you’re a lawyer,’ I told her, ‘and you have an opposition witness on the stand, you’ll need to take your examination more slowly than that, or you’ll have no flexibility left, no wiggle room. It’s the biggest mistake defence counsel make when I’m in the box.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she snapped.
‘Yes you do. You’re matchmaking, and you’re not very good at it.’
Alex and her aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had always got on. So had Jean and I, for that matter. But neither my daughter nor I could stand her husband Cameron, one of the very few men that Myra had ever detested absolutely. Jean had joined our camp a couple of years earlier. She had celebrated her thirtieth birthday by chucking him out, and had called a week before to tell us that her divorce had been finalised.
‘Okay, so what if I am? Dad, it’s been a long time. You’ve got to …’
‘Move on?’
‘Yes.’
‘Alex, I have moved on.’
She looked across at me. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’
‘You know that I don’t.’
‘I know that you never bring any women home, but that’s all.’
‘Well I don’t.’
‘None at all?’
‘No.’
‘You mean you’ve been celibate since Mum died?’ She pronounced the bombshell word carefully, as if she’d just learned it.
‘Hey!’ I protested, laughing. ‘Jesus, kid, what sort of a question’s that for a thirteen-year-old to be asking her father?’
‘That means you haven’t. If the answer was “yes” you’d have said so. People prevaricate when they have something to hide; that’s what you told me.’
‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ I insisted.
I had, of course. Nine months before, I had left Alex in Daisy’s care and gone to Spain for a long weekend, to do some maintenance on the house that I’d bought with part of my father’s estate, and to commission an extension. I’d flown from Glasgow to Barcelona and Jean had come with me. Her suggestion, not mine; nothing had been said in advance about the sleeping arrangements, but I suppose we’d both known what was going to happen. It wasn’t a disaster, but it did feel a little weird. We had some laughs, the sex was good, and I didn’t imagine for a second that Myra would be turning in her grave, but when Jean made it clear at the end of the trip that it would be a oneoff, I felt relieved rather than slighted. She hadn’t been my only fling; there had been other women, a few over the years, but always away games, work as far as Alex was concerned, the truth and nothing but the truth with the understanding Daisy.
‘Tell you what,’ I offered her. ‘No dinner party, but we’ll have a barbie in the garden, one Sunday afternoon. We’ll invite friends from the village, you can ask some of yours from school, if their parents are okay with it, and I might ask some from work. You can invite our Jean if you like, but don’t you be surprised if she wants to bring a man.’
The notion that her aunt
was capable of independent thought and action sent her into silent contemplation. ‘You up for that?’ I asked, as I negotiated a troublesome roundabout.
‘We’ll see.’The idea of a joint adult-kids party left her underwhelmed, as I had guessed it would. Negotiations were suspended, and I drove on, letting the music fill the void.
Infirmary Street had been closed at either end as I turned into it off the Cowgate. The uniform on duty waved a ‘get on your way’ gesture at first, but he was looking at Alex rather than at me. He knew me well enough; his name was Charlie Johnston and he wasn’t going anywhere other than towards retirement and a PC’s pension, his objective from the start. He and I were contemporaries. The first thing he’d done on joining up was to learn, off by heart, the book and how to play everything by it without ever risking his head above the parapet. After a closer look, he stepped aside and moved a traffic cone.
Jay was waiting for me on the pavement outside the old building, sucking on a cigarette. Even now, it’s difficult for me to paint a word picture of the man. He came closer than anyone I’ve ever known to being a walking definition of ‘nondescript’. The only feature that stopped him from going all the way was the colour of his eyes, as grey as the stone of the bathhouse behind him.
They flickered as Alex stepped out of the car, and I didn’t like what I saw in them. She was tall for her age, and dressed as she saw fit. That evening her choice had been jeans, ripped at the knee, and a baggy, custom-made, white T-shirt that one of her friends had given her the Christmas before. It had ‘WARNING! CID brat!’ emblazoned on the front.
‘Bob,’ he said, his face twisting into what passed for a smile. ‘Glad you could come. It might help us get a head start.’
‘I know that.’ There was a cop standing in the doorway behind him, a PC in his mid-twenties, around my height, six two. Modern police tunics make some officers look fat, but not this guy; he just looked massive. He had to be McGuire, even if he did look a lot more Italian than Irish. His hair was darker than dark, the purest jet black, and his eyes, a complete contrast to Jay’s limpid puddles, were deep blue pools which twinkled with laughter and excitement. I’d seen him around but hadn’t put a name to him before. He was usually to be found in the company of another young plod, his equal in size if not in temperament.
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