The logs seemed to be hugging. ‘What the hell?’ I murmured, to the person who had climbed into the wreck after me. ‘Could they have been screwing? Caught in the act by a jealous husband with a petrol bomb?’
‘That’s if they’re man and woman,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll tell you that in a couple of hours.’
‘Men get up to naughties as well,’ I pointed out.
‘But not face to face. . well, not in that position, if my understanding of these things is correct. Besides, if they were having sex, it was necrophilia on somebody’s part.’ She used a pen to point to a lumpy bit of the log nearer to us. ‘This one was dead before the fire was set. There’s a massive hole in the back of the head that, in my opinion, can only be an exit wound. And if he or she was, then the assumption must be that so was the other.’
‘Maybe jealous husband. .’ I persisted.
‘Or jealous wife,’ she interrupted.
‘If you insist. . or jealous wife. . caught them in the act and shot them, then torched the van. Or shot them somewhere else, put them in the van and brought them here?’
‘And drove two vehicles? Arthur’s certain there was another here.’
‘In which case,’ I offered, hopefully, ‘maybe jealous husband of one and jealous wife of another.’
She nodded and jumped out of the van. I followed her. ‘That I cannot rule out,’ she admitted, pulling off her face mask, ‘not until I’ve separated them from their grotesque dance of death, as at least one tabloid is bound to say when this comes to court.’
‘Okay,’ I told her, ‘you’d better do it. You can have ’em.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ she grinned. She seemed exceptionally full of life; or maybe it was simply the contrast with her surroundings. Whatever, I found myself smiling with her. She was like the old Sarah back again, the one we knew before everything between her and Bob got buggered up.
‘Roshan,’ she called to another paper suit, ‘the boss man says we can have ’em. Let’s go to work.’
‘What are you going to be able to give me?’ I asked.
‘Their genders, and cause of death, certainly. Time of death, no, not unless I’m wrong and the fire killed them. Place of death, the same applies. Identification? Given the material, I’ll probably have to do DNA comparisons with people reported missing. I’ll give you as much as I can as quickly as I can, Mario. That’s all I can offer.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
I stood back and watched as the mortuary crew began the task of removing the bodies. I didn’t know where Lowell Payne was while it was happening, but I was bloody sure he hadn’t gone for a takeaway. Sammy, though, he stood beside me, shoulder to shoulder, putting down yet another marker.
‘Where do I go with this one, sir?’ he asked, quietly, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear him sounding uncertain.
‘Not far,’ I suggested. ‘We’re stymied for identification until Sarah’s done her autopsy. But,’ I paused, ‘does anything strike you about this, Sam?’
He frowned, considering his answer, considering, as it turned out, whether to tell the head of CID to his Italian-Irish face that he was talking bollocks.
‘I heard what you said to Dr Grace,’ he ventured, once he’d decided. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see this being a crime of sexual jealousy. It’s not just that there were two vehicles involved, so at least two perpetrators. It’s the fact that they’ve gone out of their way to make it difficult to identify the bodies. The number plates are gone: not melted, gone. The passenger cabin, that’s clean. Arthur swears that there was nothing in it, no paperwork, no old crisp packets or drinks cans, none of the stuff you’d expect in a working van. Also there were two seats to the fire, not just in the back but in the cabin too. We’re not meant to know who these people are, or who this van belonged to: at least we’re not meant to find out in a hurry.’
He was earnest and he was right. I had to smile. ‘One thing they couldn’t have known, though,’ I countered. ‘We’ve got our brightest and best on the case. Plus we’ve got my remarkable record of being a lucky bastard. Fingers crossed for the autopsy, Inspector, and fingers crossed also that these people didn’t know where the chassis number is on Movano vans.’
Aileen de Marco
I didn’t have any constituency business in Glasgow that Saturday morning, but I told Bob that I had as an excuse for getting out from under his roof.
Marriage hadn’t been on my agenda at the time I met him. I was Deputy Justice Minister in Tommy Murtagh’s Holyrood administration, but my immediate boss was on the way out and I was expected to move up, and into the Cabinet. However, nobody ever imagined that I would replace Murtagh himself. . nobody but me, that is.
I wouldn’t join an orchestra with the sole ambition of playing second fiddle; it isn’t in my nature, any more than it’s in Bob Skinner’s. I am sure that’s what attracted me to him, that shared trait that we have, attracted me strongly enough for me to ignore any concerns over the fact that he was married. Not that I had many of those. I’ve always taken the view that when someone plays away, it’s because the game at home isn’t so hot, and so as far as I’m concerned Dr Sarah Grace’s problems were entirely self-inflicted.
Maybe I should have felt uncomfortable about it, and maybe what happened in the end is my punishment for my lack of scruples. Maybe, but the truth is I don’t give a bugger. I fancied the man, I sent out signals and he came homing in on them like a guided missile. Even then, I wasn’t bothered about marrying him, but by that time I was First Minister of Scotland, so when he asked me I agreed, on the grounds that it would be seemly, but more practically that the tabloids wouldn’t be hounding us if we were man and wife.
Bob would tell you now, I’m sure, that I saw it as a political alliance from the start. You know what? He’d be right. From the day I came into politics, my ambition has always been the same: to go as far as I can. That’s true of many of my fellow members of Scotland’s parliament, but I don’t know any who appreciate that there is a life beyond that building if you’re young enough to go for it.
I have never stood for Westminster, but that’s only because I haven’t tried. . yet. I will, soon. My party will resume power after the next election; of that I’m reasonably confident. I’ll become First Minister again, I will serve loyally and faithfully for a couple of years, and then I’ll use my influence in London to find myself a safe seat south of the border at the next Westminster election, expecting to move straight on to the front bench.
That’s been my scenario for a while, and when I married, it was in the assumption that I’d have the full support of my husband in making it happen. When I say full support, I mean that exactly. Robert Morgan Skinner is many things; some are pleasant, some are not, but he has one quality that sets him apart. He’s an achiever, and I figured that with him spearheading my back-room team, there was nowhere I couldn’t go.
My game plan was to take him out of the police force, where he was approaching burn-out anyway as I saw it, and make him my chief of staff. Who better for the job of managing my rise to the top than someone who loved me but loathes just about every other politician in existence? I thought I could bring him onside, I honestly did. I thought that his unquenchable ambition would transfer to me, making that easy.
Unfortunately, my grand design had a couple of flaws. One you know already, I’m sure; Bob’s infuriating and unbending resistance to the idea of a single, unified Scottish police force, to which I am committed irrevocably, as part of my plan for stuffing Clive Graham’s lot at the next election. I’d prepared the way a year or two earlier by asking Bob to do me a paper on the subject, on how it would work. He did that, without setting out any furious counter-argument, so his blowing up at me when I told him it was going to happen was completely unexpected.
I might have hung in there and gone to work on him. If I had done, I might have, could have, won his support or, if not, won his silence at worst. I’ve decided not to, because now I know that my ship is sunk,
holed below the waterline by the other thing I hadn’t anticipated.
When Bob and his second wife split, I assumed that she would take her kids with her wherever she went. Even after she decided to go back to the US, and the children stayed with Bob, I was sure that it would be a temporary arrangement and that once she was settled they would join her. I mean that’s what mothers do, isn’t it?
But no, not that one. She and Bob worked out their friendly, no-fault split with a shared custody arrangement that meant effectively that the kids were with us most of the time. Was I consulted? Was I hell! No, regardless of the fact that I’m a legislator and leader of the country’s largest political party, I found that I was expected to be a Goddamn mother figure as well!
Sorry, that is not me. It’s not that I hate kids. What it is, I don’t understand them, I can’t empathise with them, I have no interest in them. Thank God we had a nanny or I’d have blown a fuse a long time ago. As it was I let Trish get on with her job, and she enabled me to get on with mine.
I probably shouldn’t have phoned him that Saturday morning. He assumed I was checking up on him, and maybe I was. He likes having a shoulder to cry on, preferably female. I know that because he used mine for a while. We didn’t speak for long, but in the time that we did, things went from worse to irrevocable. At the end of it, we both knew our marriage was in pieces, and that all the counselling in the world couldn’t put it back together.
To tell you the truth, for all my blazing anger at his intransigence, I was relieved. No more sham, no more Mummy Aileen, no more Sex By Numbers with sighs afterwards. His, not mine. If he couldn’t make me come, that was his lookout. The only pressing problem I had left after our Saturday conversation was that I was saddled with Paula fucking Viareggio as my chum at Clive’s bloody concert.
No, that’s not fair. Of all the women in that circle, I like Paula most; she’s honest, up front, a truth-talker, and not affected by her business success. The rest?
There’s Alex, prodigiously talented they say, but endowed with all the same qualities that I’ve come to dislike so much in her father.
There’s that DI I met once, Stallings; ten minutes with her is like watching EastEnders for three hours.
There’s a hugely repressed lesbian superintendent called Mary Chambers.
There’s the widow Steele, with her miracle child, a police goddess with shards of shattered glass ceiling at her feet, yet with something very cold and rather scary at her centre.
And then there’s the newly returned Sarah; if you want him back, you can have him. . honey.
Yes, you can keep all of those ladies, as far as I’m concerned.
It was only Paula’s blooming maternity that made me regret having been manoeuvred into inviting her. But I had been, and I had to make the best of it. So I decided to let the government car service be her taxi, freeing me of the chore of driving her myself, since I no longer had plans to go on to Gullane after I’d dropped her off.
I called her to tell her about the arrangement, and also in the vain hope that she might pull out. She was up for it, though, excited, even. How was she to know that when she told me that she was wearing the same colour dress as me, I almost screamed at her, for putting the glace cherry on the icing on the pile of shit that my week had been?
Becky Stallings
The devil makes work for idle hands, and it’s been said that there’s something dark and Satanic about Mario McGuire. But given the alternative of hanging the flock wallpaper that I’d chosen and was already beginning to regret, I was happy to lend him my soul. There was a second reason why I didn’t mind. I was on the trail of a bent cop. I’m old school Met, and when I come across one of them, I feel that I’m defending my own reputation, not just my force’s. And yes, there was another: I welcomed a distraction from the reality of another chucked breakfast, and an excuse not to go to Boots for a pregnancy testing kit.
The DCS had given McGurk and me a stack of objectives. I did think about calling Sauce in, but Jack told me that he and his girlfriend were going far away for the weekend. Luckily the uniforms were having a quiet weekend, with no football at Tynecastle, so Mary Chambers, the station commander, was able to lend me three of them to back up the one rookie DC that I had at my disposal.
I set them all to work, looking for two needles called Varley in the twin haystacks that were Edinburgh Airport and Waverley Station, checking the taxi companies and one other possibility that Jack had thrown into the mix, car hire companies. I wasn’t optimistic, though, that any of them would turn up anything. Life’s never that easy.
While that was happening, Jack came up with a home address for Freddy Welsh. It was south of the city, out in West Linton, a nice rural village, he called it, that straddles the road that leads to a place called Biggar and on towards Carlisle. We headed on out there, taking Jack’s car because he’s too tall to fit comfortably into mine, and also because he knew where the hell we were going. Neither Ray nor I are country types; we don’t do greenery.
‘How are you and Lisanne getting along?’ I asked him as we drove across the Edinburgh bypass.
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Fine,’ he replied.
‘Wedding bells?’
He glanced at me and chuckled. ‘And you?’
‘Not at the top of our to-do list,’ I admitted. Not yet, but that seemed to be changing by the day.
‘Same with us. But unlike you and Ray, we’ve both been married before. Neither of us is too fond of the institution.’
‘What happened to your first marriage?’ I asked. ‘Or don’t you like to talk about it?’ He never had, not to me.
‘I don’t mind. It started to fall apart when I was posted down to Borders Division. Mary didn’t want to go but she was talked into giving it a try. Didn’t work.’ He paused. ‘You’ll never guess who did the talking.’ He was right, I never would have, but he didn’t give me a chance to try. ‘Karen Martin, Andy Martin’s wife. She left the force when she married him and got pregnant. She set up this thing that she called the police partners’ support group, that was supposed to help people like us with job-related problems. It did a bit of good, for a while, then Andy got the Tayside job, they moved to Perth and the group folded. Too bad; she could have done with some support herself.’
‘Would it have stopped him bonking Alex Skinner?’ I murmured.
He laughed. ‘Shhh. This car may be bugged; those Agency guys are everywhere now.’
‘What’s your ex doing now?’
‘She went back to her old job; she’s teaching art in a school in Aberdeen, married to a car salesman and I get to see Regan once every couple of months if I’m lucky.’
‘Regan?’
‘My wee girl. Old George thinks she was named after him. . as if we’d ever have done that. . but the truth is we called her after the John Thaw character in The Sweeney.’
‘Thank God for that,’ I exclaimed. ‘It would have been weird if it had been the other one.’
‘What other one?’
‘Have you never seen The Exorcist? That’s what the girl was called, the one possessed by the Devil.’ Or maybe Mario McGuire? I thought.
Jack gasped. ‘You’re joking. And no bugger ever told us? Fucking hell!’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s forgotten about The Exorcist by now.’
‘You haven’t.’
He drove on in silence, frowning. I looked at his grim profile and reckoned that my gaffe would cost me a right few drinks in the near future. ‘Where did you get that mark on your ear?’ I asked. I hadn’t noticed it before, but a small piece of it was missing.
‘I was shot,’ he replied, in the same tone he’d have used to tell me he’d nicked it while shaving.
‘Shot?’ I repeated.
He nodded. ‘An armed operation. The subject fired at me before I could incapacitate him. That’s how close it was.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘I was a better shot than he was.’
‘Jesus, Jack,’ I whispered.
‘It wasn’t just me. Another officer fired at the same time. We both hit, and the post-mortem called it a draw.’
‘Jesus,’ I repeated, but I was talking to myself, asking myself what sort of a boss I was. I’d worked with the guy for over a year, yet all the stuff he’d told me was news to me.
‘We’re here,’ he said, interrupting my guilt trip as a sign told us we’d arrived at West Linton. ‘According to the map, Welsh’s house should be up the first road on the right.’
He made the turn, into what was more of a leafy lane than a road. Just looking at the bloody place was enough to give me hay fever. Nothing had a number; all the gaffs looked too important for that. Jack drove slowly reading the names on the signs at the entrances to each of the big plots.
‘What’s it called?’ I asked.
‘Carmarthen. It had to be something Welsh. . and there it is.’
He turned into a wide driveway. There was a big double gate but it lay open. I’m not great with areas, but Welsh’s house must have stood on an acre of land, at least. It didn’t look like one he’d built himself; it was too old, too substantial, although there was a conservatory on the right gable that he might have added.
The blacktop road swung round in front of the house. As Jack stopped I saw that we were facing a massive garage, with two wide up and over doors. Both were raised, and two cars were parked beneath them, a red Vauxhall Astra and a silver Laguna estate. Each had a personalised registration, letters FJW in the three-number format that went out of date in the nineteen sixties.
As we stepped out, the front door opened, and a woman appeared. She had a battle face on, but it softened as soon as she realised we were strangers. ‘Can I help you?’ she said. ‘I imagine you’re lost. It happens a lot.’
I put her right. ‘No, Mrs Welsh, we’ve come to the right address. We’re police officers, CID; we’d like to speak to your husband, please.’
As I spoke a kid appeared in the doorway behind her, a lad, no more than eighteen, but heavyset. He wore jogging pants and a vest, and he was sweating. I guessed that the Welsh family had a home gym. ‘What’s up, Mum?’ he began, shaping up as truculent until he realised how big McGurk is, then thinking better of it.
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