Skinner's Mission bs-6

by Quintin Jardine

  She spotted her target at once. Even seated she could tell how big he was from the size of his shoes and the length of his legs crossed in front of him. His reddish-blond hair was cropped tight and the yellow-tanned pallor of his skin marked him out as an American. She had sensed him watching her as she had swung, long-legged, into the hotel.

  Slowly and deliberately, she turned her eyes around to look at him. She held his gaze for a few seconds, smiled briefly, then looked away. She picked up her drink, took a sip and looked over her shoulder, around the rest of the big area. When she turned back to replace her gin and tonic on its mat on the table, he was standing over her.

  ‘Good evening, ma’am,’ he said, in a light Texan drawl. ‘Mind if I join you?’

  She glanced towards the door. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was late arriving. So I’ve either been stood up, or my date’s given up on me. Sure, go ahead, sit down.’

  She watched as he lowered himself into the seat opposite her. He was around thirty, at least six feet six and running slightly, but not unacceptably, to fat. ‘What a well filled lunchbox,’ she thought to herself, as he sat down.

  ‘Been in Glasgow long?’ she asked, almost casually.

  ‘Two days,’ said the American. ‘My name’s Randall. Randall Garland, a lonely man from Austin, Texas.’ He held out a hand.

  She shook it, looking him full in the eyes, and holding it for just a second longer than necessary. ‘Myra,’ she said. She grinned, with a lift of that right eyebrow. ‘Myra Graham, a friendly lady from Glasgow, Scotland.’

  54

  Tom Whatling’s warning had been well placed. Many of his salvaged negatives bore an FA heading, and even in negative form, many of them were harrowing to see.

  There was a two-car pile-up outside the Cramond Brig Hotel, in which Skinner and Masters counted eight bodies, before the DCC ripped the negative from the viewer. There were shots of pedestrian accidents, most of them involving children, but one of a man, his head and upper body protruding from beneath the double front wheels of a heavy vehicle. Not all the deaths had been road casualties. There were scenes of a family of three burned to death in a house fire, bodies shining white in the negative image. There was film from another incident on a railway line, in which they could make out a woman’s severed torso beside the track.

  Three times, Skinner asked Pamela to leave him to the grim task, and three times she refused, saying that if he wanted her to leave he would have to order her. Each time, smiling at her tenacity, he had pulled out another rack of negatives.

  They had been surveying the grim scenes for almost three hours when they found the negatives which they were beginning to fear had been lost after all. There were four strips each bearing file number FA 4782. As soon as Skinner fed the first image into the viewer and switched on the back-lit screen, he knew. They had learned to read colours in negative, and when the DCC saw the light-brown shape of a tree, he stiffened and recoiled slightly.

  It was a long shot, taken from the other side of the road, but the shapes of the car against the tree, and of the figure inside were clearly visible. All of the photographs on the strip had been taken from a distance, recording the crash from all around the vehicle, most of them showing the direction in which the Cooper S had been travelling.

  Skinner withdrew the strip and fed in the next. The first frame, the second, the third and the fourth showed, from different distances and angles, deep tyre tracks in a patch of mud on the road. He pulled the strip through to the fifth photograph.

  Pamela Masters cried out in horror as it appeared. It had been taken through the shattered windscreen and showed a close-up of Myra’s body in the car, the steering column through her chest, her eyes staring wide at the sheer surprise of her last second of life.

  Bob Skinner sucked in his breath and looked away. Suddenly he was back in his dream, thrust back into the depths of his recovered memory, seeing everything, hearing everything, smelling everything.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, thickly, to Pamela. ‘This is what we came for.’ He forced himself to look back at the screen, ripping images through quickly, one by one, looking for the right angle, hoping against hope that it was there.

  It was the eighth shot on the fourth strip. The attending officer had taken the photograph from the exact point at which Skinner had looked into the car. The field of vision of the lens seemed to replicate his memory exactly.

  He picked up a small magnifying glass which he had found in the studio, and held it close to the bottom right-hand corner of the negative image, searching, millimetre by millimetre. Suddenly, he stopped. His left hand shot out and grabbed Pamela’s arm. ‘There, Pam, there. Look.’ He leaned back, holding the glass steady to allow her to see the spot upon which it was trained.

  ‘I can’t make out detail from this, but I’ll swear that’s the brake fluid pipe. You can see, it’s been broken.

  ‘When Tam gets back, I’ll have him make me a print of this section, big as he can. Then, pray God, I . . . we’ll . . . have what we need.’

  55

  The drive down to Alnwick took just over two hours: because Martin, driving his swift silver Mondeo with McIlhenney in the passenger seat, did not wish to suffer the embarrassment of tripping one of the many speed cameras on the A1; because behind them came a dark blue Ford Transit with black barred windows, and six burly uniformed policemen inside; and because, for the first time in several days, there was, simply, no need to rush.

  Martin had never been to the old Northumbrian town before, but street signs took him, without difficulty, to its police station, past its castle and its prison.

  Leaving the escort officers outside in the Transit they announced themselves to the Sergeant in reception, and were greeted within seconds by a uniformed Chief Inspector. ‘Howay, gentlemen,’ the forty-something man said, cheerily, ‘I’m Frank Berry. Hope we didn’t spoil your Sunday, but my lads were very pleased at catching your fugitive for you. They couldn’t wait for me to tell you about it, in fact.’

  ‘You didn’t spoil our Sunday, Chief Inspector,’ said Martin, with a grin. ‘In fact you made it. We’ve had a parade of cock-ups in our investigations this weekend, so we were needing a break like this.

  ‘Where are you keeping McCartney and Kirkbride?’

  ‘We’ve got them banged up in separate cells. McCartney’s already been charged with failing to stop for a police signal, and with doing almost a hundred and thirty trying to get away from my guys. We’ll want him back for our magistrates on both those counts.’

  Chief Inspector Berry shook his head in wonderment. ‘You wouldn’t have thought one of those big old round-bodied Rovers could go that fast, but it did. We only just got the roadblock in position in time. Just for a second, my lads thought they were going to try to crash through it.’

  He looked at Martin as he led the two Scots through to a room behind the reception desk. Its window overlooked the station’s secure car park. ‘That’s the flying machine across there,’ said Berry, pointing to a big white Rover 3500s, reversed into the far corner of the yard. Its registration bore an A prefix, and in another era it might have been a police vehicle.

  ‘What do you want to do with these two?’ the Chief Inspector went on. ‘You’ll want to caution McCartney formally and arrest him on the attempted extortion charge. You can interview him here if you like, or you can just lift him straight away. I assume we’ll just let his mate go. We’ve nothing to hold him on.’

  Martin smiled and shook his head. ‘Oh no, Frank, we want Willie Kirkbride too. We’ve got another matter to discuss with him and McCartney, one that’s far more important than a wee bit of half-hearted intimidation for a loanshark. Let’s have a word with them both now, if we may.’

  ‘Okay, sir.’ Berry opened the door and barked an order to the Sergeant on reception. One minute later, the door opened once again and two men were bustled into the room, each in the grasp of two Constables.

  Ricky McCartney was just under six feet tall,
and built like a barrel, with black greasy hair and heavy brows, over dark, brooding, threatening eyes. His jutting jaw was black with a day-old stubble. Beneath his crumpled grey jacket he looked to be massively built, with long arms, which lent a simian look to his overall appearance. His companion, Kirkbride, was an inch or two taller. His pinched face was unshaven like McCartney’s, with a greying beard which looked as long as the remaining hair on his bald head. He had mean, nasty eyes which darted all around the room, save at Martin and McIlhenney.

  The escort officers shoved both men down, roughly, into seats at the interview table. McCartney, a heavy hand on each of his shoulders, looked up at Martin, briefly, then across at McIlhenney. ‘You!’ he said, with a snarl. ‘I might have known you’d show up.’

  The big Sergeant nodded. ‘Bet on it, Ricky. I’ve never forgotten that time I broke your nose, see. I’d go anywhere for another shot. You’re all right, guys like you and Tommy Heenan, with someone you’ve got outnumbered, or you know you can lean on. But you never fight in your own weight division, because you haven’t got the fucking bottle.’

  ‘Heenan?’ said McCartney, ‘What about Heenan?’

  ‘Come off it, Ricky,’ said Martin. ‘You know damn well. As soon as you heard that we had lifted Heenan for Carl Medina’s murder, you did a runner. Because you were with him last weekend at Medina’s house when you went to give him an eighteen hundred-pound message, and because you knew that we’d be after you too.’

  The thug looked at him. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, shiftily.

  Martin smiled, as he and the Sergeant eased themselves into seats facing the two men. ‘Of course you do, but it doesn’t matter. Heenan is no longer a suspect in the Medina case. You would be, only you don’t come anywhere near fitting our eye-witness description of the killer.’

  McCartney sat in silence, staring down at the desk. Kirkbride continued to gaze shiftily around the room.

  ‘Well, Ricky?’ asked the Chief Superintendent. ‘Aren’t you going to ask us what it’s all about.’

  McCartney’s vicious eyes looked up at him. ‘Aye, okay. What is it then?’

  ‘It’s about some work you two did for Dougie Terry.’ Across the table, both men flinched, taking Martin momentarily by surprise. ‘A few years back,’ he went on. ‘You and Barney Cogan, now deceased, Willie Easson, and Willie Macintosh, with Evan Mulgrew as lookout, beat up and crippled a young footballer named Jimmy Lee. You did so on the orders of Douglas Terry.’

  McCartney’s eyes seemed to go completely blank. Beside him, Kirkbride slumped back in his chair, breathing heavily. Martin stared at them both, his confusion gathering. He had expected the usual denial and bluster, not this.

  ‘Dougie Terry’s a great singer,’ said Neil McIlhenney. ‘Now we want to hear what sort of a voice you’ve got. You’re going to sing for us, Ricky.’

  McCartney nodded, without looking up. ‘Aye okay then,’ he muttered. ‘Get us up the road then, and we’ll tell you about it.’

  Andy Martin leaned back in his chair and had a vision: through night-glasses, of a suddenly-appearing Jaguar, a Ford Scorpio and, behind it, a big, light-coloured, indistinct shape.

  He sat bolt upright, a huge, triumphant, exultant smile spreading across his face. ‘You’re in a tearing hurry to get out of here, aren’t you?

  ‘Chief Inspector Berry,’ he asked, his eyes not leaving McCartney and Kirkbride for a second, ‘have you searched that Rover out there?’

  ‘Well, no sir, not yet. In fact, we were waiting for you.’

  Martin cut him off. ‘Get the keys, then, and come with us. And bring these two.’ He jumped up from his seat, and led McIlhenney and the rest out of the room. He looked around until he spotted the exit to the yard, then marched outside, across to the Rover, and round its long nose, to the boot.

  He stood there, staring at it, waiting, as Berry ran towards him waving two big car keys, and as McCartney and Kirkbride, ashen-faced, were dragged outside by the four Constables across the car park.

  Martin was smiling still as he bent over the tailgate of the big hatchback car, unlocked it and swung it open.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ gasped Chief Inspector Berry, as he looked inside. Involuntarily, he took two paces backwards.

  The two bodies were crammed into the boot space, their knees forced up to their chest, and their hands tied behind them. Their eyes bulged like organ-stops and their tongues protruded from their mouths.

  Andy Martin leaned over the cadavers. ‘Strangled,’ he said in a calm, even, almost friendly voice. ‘Garrotted with wire. Very effective, very colourful.’ He looked around.

  ‘On our way to Birmingham, were we, gentlemen? To make a special delivery?’

  McCartney struggled briefly in the hands of his escorts, then gave up. Kirkbride slumped in a half-faint, staring transfixed into the boot.

  ‘I think we should have that discussion about Dougie Terry, don’t you?’ said Martin. ‘Only now we’ll widen the agenda. Come on, Neil, let’s take them back north.’

  Chief Inspector Frank Berry gulped. He was faced with one of those rare decisions on which a career could hang.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘I can’t let you take these men anywhere. There have been two murders committed on my patch, and I have to hold McCartney and Kirkbride for questioning.’

  Martin frowned at him. ‘But man, these two stiffs were abducted from a car in Edinburgh last night, in which a third man was shot dead. We know where they’re from and why they were killed, and I’ll bet the PNC will tell us who they were as soon as we feed their prints into it.

  ‘It’s our active investigation, not yours.’ But he was playing poker with no cards in his hands, and he knew it. So did Frank Berry.

  ‘No, sir, I’m sorry,’ said the Northumbrian, ‘but you can’t take the prisoners anywhere unless you can prove to me that those men were actually killed in Scotland, or unless my Chief Constable says otherwise. In fact, you can’t even speak to them. It’d be more than my job’s worth.’ It was the traditional and unmistakable sound of a pension being protected. Martin and McIlhenney knew they had lost.

  Berry turned to the four Constables, his arms flapping and pointing all around. ‘Take McCartney and Kirkbride back to their cells. Get the duty CID people out here, pronto. Have this area roped off. Call the Medical Examiner.

  ‘And call the photographers. We must have photographs! ’

  56

  They were waiting in the Travellers’ Inn when Tom Whatling returned from Upper Largo Kirk, and from his christening engagement. Skinner had spent almost half an hour studying the same small section of the image in the viewer, until Pamela had persuaded him to take some time out from the agonising task.

  ‘Any luck?’ asked Whatling.

  Skinner nodded. ‘I’ve found the negative I was after. Sergeant Haig and PC Orr did a good job. They took three identical shots from most angles just to be on the safe side. Let’s hope that at least one of them was in focus.

  ‘Tom, can you do me a print?’ The ex-policeman nodded. ‘Can you isolate a single section of an image, and blow it up?’

  ‘Yes. I can’t guarantee what the resolution will be like - the cameras were often too complicated for the police photographers in those days - but we can only try it and see. Come on.’

  He led them out of the pub and back to his shop. In the studio he switched on several pieces of equipment before turning back to Skinner. ‘Let’s see what you’ve found, then,’ he said quietly, switching on the viewer, in which the negative strip still lay. He winced as he looked at the shot.

  The DCC handed him the magnifying glass. Pointing at the screen he traced a line with his finger around the lower right quarter of the rectangular image. ‘There, Tom, that section is what I need. In the middle of it, you’ll see a thin pipe, part of the hydraulics that were forced into the car by the impact. See it?’

  Whatling peered through the glass. ‘I see it,’ he
said. ‘It’s been burst open in the crash.’

  Skinner shook his head. ‘No, not burst open. Cut half through, before the crash. That’s a wire braided, hydraulic brake fluid hose; good for 100,000 miles and virtually unbreakable in any impact. It might be ripped loose from its connection in a crash, but it would never go in the middle like that.’

  He waved a hand towards the next room. ‘You’ve got hundreds of accident shots through there. You look through them all and I guarantee you that you won’t find another pipe that’s fractured in that way.’

  ‘Tell you what, sir,’ said Whatling. ‘I’ll do that. I’ll look through a selection, and I’ll make prints. If your theory’s right, that might help you prove it to a jury one day. Meantime, though, let’s print up this section and see how sharp we can get it. I’ll start with an eight by six. Highest I can go is about fourteen by eleven, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep the resolution at that size, on my equipment.’

  He withdrew the negative strip. ‘Look, before I can isolate your section, I’ll have to study the whole image in positive form. You don’t need to see that, so why don’t you and Miss Masters go back to the pub and finish your drinks, if my wife hasn’t cleared them up.’

  Skinner smiled, sadly. ‘You’re a kind man, Tom. The truth is that for the last four months, I’ve seen that image every time I’ve closed my eyes. And you’re right, the last thing I need is to see it while I’m awake.’

  He led Pamela back into the Travellers’ Inn, where the Sunday evening crowd had gathered, many of them specifically to watch Manchester United tackle Liverpool in the day’s televised football match. Collecting their drinks from the table, the two police officers stood and watched with the rest, groaning or roaring with every passage of play, swaying as if they were back on the terraces of Fir Park, the ground where each had watched football as a youngster, ten years or so apart.

  The match had been over for almost an hour before Whatling returned carrying a large flat envelope. Skinner and Masters were back at their fireside table, nursing a half-pint of shandy and a gin and tonic, as he crossed the room to sit down beside them.