‘What was the story the second time?’
‘There wasn’t one. I went to hers one night expecting her to give me the first thousand back, but all she said was, “Trevor, darling, I need ten grand.” Just like that. I asked her why; she told me I didn’t need to know. When I told her that I didn’t have ten thou just lying around, the sugar voice turned to acid. “Bloody well find it,” she said. She’d turned into someone I didn’t know, and didn’t like, not at all.’
‘But you did. You did give her the money.’
Christie’s right eye flickered slightly. ‘Yes,’ he whispered, with a sudden look of vulnerability. ‘I did. She scared me into it.’
‘How?’ the detective asked. ‘Was there a physical threat? Did the husband get involved?’
‘No, but he wouldn’t have worried me. I might look like a wimp, Harold, but I was on my university boxing team. I’ve always kept myself fit. In fact Josey and I work out together; we do kick-boxing. She can be quite aggressive sometimes, and I see that as a way for her to externalise it. No, I’m afraid that Tammy’s coercion was much more brutal than that. She said that if I didn’t pay up, then her sister was going to tell the truth about what happened at school.’
‘Her sister? Hazel?’
‘Yes. Nothing did happen, Harold, I promise you,’ he added, quickly and vehemently. ‘Even in those days, male teachers were never daft enough to be alone with female pupils. I told Tammy as much, but it didn’t deter her. She said that Hazel would go to the police and say that I had sex with her when she was fourteen and fifteen years old.
‘I didn’t believe her at first. I told her that I was leaving and that I wanted my thousand back or I’d set my solicitor on her. And then Hazel came into the room.’
‘Jesus!’
‘I said much the same at the time, if a little more forcefully. She’d been in the kitchen listening through the door. When she heard me shouting at Tammy, it was as if it had been her cue. She came in and she showed me a written statement that she had all ready, she said, to be handed in to the CID. It purported to give details of our so-called affair when she was at high school. Chapter and verse, date, time and place. She said she was infatuated with me, and that I had taken advantage of her.’
Haddock looked him in the eye. ‘Mr Christie, I have to ask what any cop will ask. Was it a total fabrication?’
‘Absolutely!’ the man protested.
‘Then it’s your word against hers.’
‘It’s not as simple as that.’
‘It has to be. She says you had relations with her and you deny it.’
‘Yes, but I have an … anatomical peculiarity,’ Christie said. ‘I have a large birthmark on my abdomen. Hazel’s statement described it in detail.’
‘Sure she did, as dictated by her sister.’
‘Obviously, Harold, but I can’t prove that. Tammy and I were very discreet. Other than that time in Wooler we never spent a full night together, and nobody ever saw us together. Just as what Hazel threatens to allege is her word against mine, so any relationship between me and Tammy is my word against hers.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Haddock conceded, ‘but even at that, if I was investigating this, officially, I wouldn’t be expecting to see you convicted.’
‘But I might be charged?’
‘It’s possible, post Yewtree, even though that was mainly English: but I doubt it very much. If you were, would it go to trial? I doubt that even more.’
‘It doesn’t matter; the allegation would be enough to compromise my career. They said they would “out” me on Hazel’s Twitter account if I didn’t pay up. Social media’s as big a threat as the court these days.’
‘What about the guidance teacher, Mrs Andries? You said that she gave Hazel counselling when she was at school. If this was never mentioned then …’
‘Mrs Andries died of breast cancer five years ago, and any case notes she might have made would have been destroyed after Hazel left the school. It doesn’t matter, Harold,’ Christie sighed. ‘I’ve given them the money, the nine thousand from the jewellery sale, and the other thousand I had left in cash. Now all I can do is hope that will be enough.’
‘I’d bet against that; you’ve been a mug. You’ve let yourself be intimidated. They’ll come after you again.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Two things. First you can tell Josey the truth. Second, you can leave it with me.’
‘The first I’ll do, but a formal police investigation will blow the whole thing up.’
‘I didn’t say it would be formal, did I? That would be a dead end, at best. No, these two sisters think you’re helpless, and probably you are. But they don’t know about me.’
‘After all these years, Sauce,’ Audrey Shields said, with a laugh in her voice, ‘you’re finally looking me up. I was real hurt, ken, when you never came back after our wee fling at the school.’
‘You were too much for a simple boy like me,’ Haddock replied. In fact their ‘fling’, their one-off encounter, had not taken place at school, but at a party one Saturday night, after Barry Paterson’s parents had been foolish enough to believe that their teenage son and his twin sister could be left to fend responsibly for themselves while they went off for a cheap weekend in Prague.
There had been cider, beer and vodka, the usual stuff at young people’s parties. Haddock had been nursing his third Strongbow, alone in the kitchen, thinking about going home while he still could, when Audrey Shields, Raleigh herself, had come in.
As he recalled, she had looked completely sober as she approached him, plucked the bottle from his hand and murmured, ‘I fancy you, Sauce. Come and I’ll show you something.’ She led him into the back garden; it was late September, late evening but there was enough moonlight for him to make out the shape of a garden shed. The key was in the lock; she turned it, on the inside.
‘I thought you were going with Barry,’ he remembered saying, as she unzipped her green satin dress.
‘He’s binned.’
‘Hold on a minute,’ he whispered, as she unzipped him. ‘I don’t have any Johnnies.’
‘Silly boy. I’m on the pill, ken.’
‘But you’re not sixteen yet.’
‘Bloody hell!’
Twelve years on, he smiled at his innocence. ‘That was your first time, wasn’t it?’ she said, reading his mind.
He nodded, feeling himself redden.
‘God,’ Audrey chuckled, ‘I must have seemed like a real slapper.’
He had traced her without difficulty, after leaving Christie; one phone call to Barry Paterson and he had learned that she worked for an insurance company in the Edinburgh Park complex; she had been surprised to hear from him, but more than happy to meet him for lunch at the Gyle shopping centre.
He smiled. ‘No, you were just friendly.’
‘Are you trying to find out if I still am? I’m still single, if you do want to know, but I’ve been in a steady relationship for four years.’
‘Me too. Not quite as long as that, but I’m settled.’
‘Mine’s a fireman. What’s yours?’
‘She’s an accountant.’ He held her gaze. ‘You know what I do?’
‘Of course I do, Sauce. At the school, you never stopped talking about joining the polis. You’re doing all right, I hear. I saw your name in the paper, no’ that long ago, to do with that murder, the body on Cramond Island.’
‘That’s ancient history now, all sorted.’
‘Do you ken that man Skinner, the chief constable, as was?’
‘Bob Skinner? Of course I do.’
‘Is he as hard as he looks from his picture in the papers?’
Haddock shook his head. ‘No. He’s much, much harder.’
Audrey gave a small shiver. ‘So,’ she exclaimed. ‘What has made you look me up after all this time?’
‘I want to pick your brains,’ he replied.
‘You never thought I had any.’
He
laughed. ‘That’s rubbish!’ he told her. ‘I never fell for your dumb blonde act, Audrey. You always did enough work to scrape through whatever exam was coming up. Did you not go to Napier, after the high school?’
‘Aye,’ she admitted, with a shy grin. ‘I scraped by there too; I got an honours degree in computer security.’ She picked up a slice of pizza from her plate. ‘So, Sergeant Sauce, now you’ve got me to confess to havin’ brains, what do you want to pick out of them?’
‘It’s not official,’ he replied, ‘just something I’m following up on the quiet. It goes back to our schooldays, and I’d welcome your recollection of that time.’
Audrey glanced at her watch. ‘Shoot. I’ve still got half an hour.’
‘It won’t take that long. What do you remember about Mr Christie, the Classics teacher?’
‘Old Trev? Him that was always on about the grandeur of Rome?’
‘That’s the man. By the way he was about thirty at the time, that’s all.’
‘Maybe, but he was one of those guys that seemed to have been born old. I don’t remember a hell of a lot about him, truth be told …’ her eyes widened, ‘… apart from one thing. There was a rumour that he was havin’ it away with Mrs Andries, the guidance teacher. Shirley McTaggart said she thought she saw them in a hotel out in Queensferry. Nobody really believed it, though. Andries must have been ten years older than him. Mind you,’ she conceded, ‘we might think different now. There’s an eighteen-year-old boy in my office, and given half a chance …’ She winked.
Haddock smiled. ‘What about Hazel McVie?’ he asked. ‘What did you think of her? She always struck me as a quiet, withdrawn wee lass, never one of us.’
‘She always struck me as a duplicitous little twat!’ Audrey retorted. ‘You guys were all taken in by her. She wanted you to feel sorry for her, since she never thought any of you’d ever fancy her. She was also a fucking grass.’
Haddock smiled at her vehemence. ‘Come on, that’s a bit extreme.’
‘You think? Remember that time when you were a prefect and full o’ yourself, and you belled me off for bullying McVie? If I hadn’t been so bloody hurt by you, I’d have told you at the time I wasn’t bloody bullying her. I was squaring her up for having fed Andries a story about me shagging Pete Collins, who just happened to be Andries’s nephew.
‘That cow of a teacher had me in her room over that, for a “woman to woman chat”, as she called it. I’d no idea what she was talking about. There was nothin’ between me and Pete, and I told her as much. When I got laid back into her, she let it slip that the story had come from wee Hazel. That made it all clear; I was going with Alan Grierson at the time and the wee bitch fancied him herself. She knew she’d no chance so she tried to make trouble for me.’
‘I see,’ Haddock murmured. ‘I had no idea about any of that stuff.’
‘Why should you? By that time you could see nothin’ but Mary McDougal’s admittedly impressive tits.’
‘Mmm. You’re not wrong there.’ He paused. ‘But hold on, how did I hurt you?’
‘Jesus Christ, Sauce,’ Audrey gasped. ‘Was my reputation really that bad? Did you really believe I was Raleigh the school bike? I didn’t take you into that shed at Barry’s party just to pass the time. I had a serious case of lurv, my boy.’ To his astonishment she blushed bright pink.
‘I might have been brassy and more than a wee bit flirty, but the truth was, I was as innocent as you were. But how would you have known that, eh?’
‘You said you were on the pill,’ he responded, lamely.
‘I was too, but that was down to my mother bein’ determined that lightning would not strike twice. She was sixteen when she had me, and no, she never did marry my dad. The fact was, Sauce, you broke my heart.
‘Of course, you, being a guy, would probably say it was my fault. A guy’s always got to have a woman to blame.’ She bit another large chunk off her pizza.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’d never say that. I felt the same way about you; I just couldn’t bring myself to say it, that was all. I couldn’t even pluck up the courage to ask you out, not even after we’d … because I still thought you’d knock me back.’
‘So,’ she said, when she had finished her mouthful, ‘we were both a pair of young fools?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Then it was probably just as well: I’d fallen in love with someone else six months later, and you had your head stuck between Mary McDougal’s racing Zeppelins. Still, I feel better for this wee chat. Let it be a lesson to you as well, Sauce,’ she added. ‘Picking brains can be risky if you don’t know what’s in there.’
‘Never go into an interview room with preconceptions about the interviewee. Leave your prejudices in the corridor outside.’
That CID mantra had been drummed into Sauce Haddock from his first day as a detective constable by some very formidable mentors. The foremost of those had been Bob Skinner, the first chief constable he had ever served under, and the scariest man he had ever met. Skinner had since taken himself off to Glasgow, but his influence still hung heavily around his old patch in the capital city.
Sauce had the dictum firmly in mind as he walked up the path to Tammy Jones’s front door. She must have done all right in her divorce, he thought. The house was a substantial detached villa in a new estate in Liberton, less than a mile from Drumdonald Academy.
It had taken him less than an hour and a couple of phone calls to trace her, and to build a profile. Mr Jones … whose forename was George, a coincidence that would have delighted Tammy’s country and western crazy dad … was a partner in a fund management firm. They had been married for eleven years, until he had traded her in for an investment analyst.
She had a career of her own, in the same Edinburgh business community as her husband, but in a different profession. Her national insurance record showed she had interrupted it for only a year after having young Crawford. She was a recruitment consultant, making good money, although nowhere near her ex-husband’s salary bracket.
He rang her bell with no certainty that she would answer, only the hope that a single mother would be at home with her son on the evening of a school day. In the event, it was the boy who opened the door, a tall kid, with suspicious eyes.
‘Is your mother in?’ he asked. ‘My name’s Haddock.’
‘Are you a client?’ he asked, with a hint of aggression.
‘No, I’m a cop; detective sergeant.’
As he spoke he heard the swish of a door opening over carpet, and a second later Tammy Jones stepped into the hall, behind her son. ‘I’ll deal with this, Crawford,’ she said. ‘You get up to your room and do your homework.’
With a final frown at the visitor, the boy obeyed. ‘I’m sorry,’ his mother said. ‘I only caught the detective sergeant bit.’
Haddock repeated his name and showed his warrant card.
‘You’d better come in.’ She stood aside. ‘First door on the left.’
Yes indeed you scored in the divorce, Haddock said to himself as he surveyed the furniture in her lounge. He had seen something almost identical when he and Cheeky had gone shopping for a new dining table, and remembered gasping at the price.
Tammy Jones swept her strawberry hair away from her face. ‘Am I in the shit?’ she asked quietly.
‘Not right now,’ he replied. ‘As for the future, that depends on the next ten minutes or so.’
‘This is about Trevor, isn’t it?’ she said, dropping into a soft leather chair, and watching him as he sat opposite her on a matching settee.
‘Yes,’ he conceded.
‘So the stupid bastard went to the police?’
‘Not exactly.’ He explained how he had become involved. ‘This isn’t formal yet,’ he told her. ‘Mr Christie isn’t too keen on all this going public, you’ll be glad to hear.’
‘I’ll bet he isn’t,’ she snorted. ‘Look, I know that what we did was wrong, but morally, I don’t feel that I have anything on my conscience
.’
‘You think that extortion is okay, do you, Mrs Jones?’
‘I don’t see it as extortion.’
‘You might not, but if Trevor Christie makes a formal complaint, you could find that the High Court sees it very differently.’
She threw her head back. ‘He’d be mad to do that.’
‘No, just angry: but he doesn’t have to do it himself. On the basis of what I’ve been told, I’m within my rights to caution you right now and take you down to Leith for questioning.’
‘Then do it,’ she declared. ‘I’ll get my coat. Crawford can stay with the boy next door for a couple of hours, for that’s as long as I’ll be.’
As Haddock looked at her, that old mantra, and Bob Skinner’s frown, came back into his mind. No preconceptions, Sauce.
‘Let’s keep it here for now,’ he said, ‘and start from the beginning. You met Mr Christie when you enrolled your son at Drumdonald, yes?’
‘True.’
‘After which you met several times, socially?’
‘We had dates, yes.’
‘You had a weekend away at a cottage in Wooler?’
‘Again, true. It was a big step, for both of us, I think.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, for a start, I hadn’t been with a man since my marriage ended, and Trevor said he had been alone since his wife passed away. I was very nervous and so was he. Look,’ she sighed, ‘do you need all the gory details?’
‘As many as you think are necessary.’
‘All right, if you must: Trevor had difficulty getting …’ she paused, clearly embarrassed. ‘He had difficulty sustaining an erection, but eventually he managed. It wasn’t the dream weekend I’d been hoping for, but I felt sorry for him, so we had a few repeat performances.’
‘Where?’
‘Here, in my house, while Crawford was with his father and his tart.’ Sudden anger flared in her eyes.
‘This house is pretty impressive, Mrs Jones,’ Haddock ventured. ‘You don’t look as if you’re stuck for a few quid. So why did you ask Mr Christie to lend you a thousand?’
A Hint of Death (A Bob Skinner Short Story) (Kindle Single) Page 2