06 - Skinner's Mission

by Quintin Jardine

  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.

  Looking over his shoulder to make sure that there were no eavesdroppers, he laid the envelope on the table. ‘Sorry I was so long,’ he said, ‘but I had to wait for these to dry.

  ‘I’ve done you eight by six, ten by eight and fourteen by eleven, and I’ve focused in on the pipe as tight as I can without losing quality. The fourteen by eleven’s a bit fuzzy, but I think the ten by eight gives you what you’re after.’

  Peering into the envelope, he withdrew an enlarged photograph and laid it on the table in front of Skinner and Masters. The damaged brake pipe leapt out at them, everything else distorted and out of focus by comparison. The print was so sharp that the camera’s flash could be seen reflected in the strands of severed wire braiding.

  The cut had been made laterally, clean and straight across the top, not quite halfway through the diameter of the pipe, to a depth at which the fluid would have escaped under braking pressure gradually, rather than all at once.

  Staring at the enlargement, Skinner realised that he was holding his breath. He blew it out in a great sigh, his shoulders sagging and his head dropping like a cross-country runner at the end of a race. ‘You’ve found it, boss,’ said Pamela. She grasped his hand in her excitement. Unconsciously, he squeezed hers, and held it tight.

  As he stared at the image again, a flat, empty, feeling gripped the pit of his stomach, overwhelming him. With a final quick squeeze, he released Pamela’s hand, stood up from the table and walked quickly outside. She made to follow him, but Whatling put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Give him a minute, lass. There’s nothing you can say to him just now.’

  He was back in five minutes. ‘Sorry,’ he said quietly, as he slipped into the bar and rejoined them at the table. ‘I just needed some air.’ He smiled at Masters, but she frowned at him, at the pallor of his face.

  ‘Tom,’ he said, as briskly as he could. ‘I can’t thank you enough, but what I can do is pay you for your time and materials.’ Whatling shook his head and held up the wrist on which his gold watch shone in the pub’s even light.

  ‘You did already, sir. Anything I can do, ever, to help a former colleague, I do with pleasure.’ He paused. ‘Listen, that’s the best I could manage with my equipment, but if you ask the boys at the lab, they have computer-aided gear that can get it a lot finer than that.’ He replaced the enlargement in the envelope and pushed it across the table. ‘The negative’s inside.’

  Skinner took it and stood up. ‘Thanks again, then, Tom. I’m not sure where this will lead me, but without you I couldn’t have taken a step further.’ With a final wave, he ushered Pamela Masters out of the Travellers’ Inn, and into the Lower Largo evening.

  The gloaming was giving way to darkness. They stood on the pavement listening to the lapping of the waves against the harbour wall, Masters gasping slightly at the sudden chill which had swept down from the north-west. Skinner nodded across the road, to the brightly-lit Crusoe Hotel.

  ‘I need food, Pam,’ he said, softly. ‘What would you say to supper before we head back?’

  She smiled up at him in the darkness. ‘I’d say it was getting to be a habit, sir.’

  The Crusoe’s dining room was empty, the weekend residents having gone back to Glasgow and to Edinburgh, but they were welcomed nonetheless. They followed the waiter’s recommendation of crab soup and roast beef salad, and chose a bottle of Findlay’s mineral water to wash it down.

  Sipping the clear bubbling liquid, Skinner smiled across the table at his assistant. ‘You know, Pam . . . Sorry, Pamela . . . we’ve come this far in two days yet I haven’t told you the story behind this mission of mine.’

  She grinned back at him, her big eyes smiling too. ‘Pam’s fine. It’s just Polly that I couldn’t stand. Made me sound like a bloody parrot. Yes, I like being a Pam.’ The smile vanished, as quickly as it had appeared, and was replaced not by a frown but by a look of concern. ‘So what is the whole story, sir? Why have you suddenly launched this investigation after eighteen years?’

  He paused, as the waiter served the crab soup, adding a little crème fraiche, and left.

  ‘A few months back,’ he began, ‘I was stabbed.’

  ‘I remember. Everyone on the force was worried about you.’

  ‘I would have been too,’ he said quietly, ‘if I’d been conscious. The fact was, I nearly died. After my surgery, I experienced a reaction under sedation which made my consultant, and my wife, decide that I needed investigative hypnotherapy. So they called in a guy named Kevin O’Malley; the best in the business, so they say.

  ‘Kevin put me under and led me back to incidents in my past life, leading up to Myra’s death. He discovered . . . we discovered . . . that the experience of turning up at the scene of her death, and of what I saw there, had caused a traumatic amnesia.

  ‘Kevin took me back to the scene and, under hypnosis, I saw everything I’d seen before - including, I believed, that cut brake pipe.

  ‘Yet there was always a chance that I was wrong. Kevin admitted later that while the experience was real, he couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain that I didn’t add in that detail because of my own guilt . . . guilt because, as I told you, Myra was driving my car.

  ‘Now I know I wasn’t wrong, that I didn’t imagine any of the details.’ He looked, gloomily, down at his soup, stirring in the crème fraiche.

  She looked up at him. ‘Then why are you so down?’ she asked quietly.

  He sighed, long and deep, and tapped his chest. ‘I suppose it’s because, in here, I hoped that I was mistaken. What we got there wasn’t the answer I wanted, not in my heart of hearts. Until now, it’s been a theoretical exercise. Most of me wanted it to stay that way, for it to be stopped at the first hurdle, so that I could get on with my life, duty done.

  ‘Now I have my evidenc
e and I have to carry on. The trouble is, the process is having side effects.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘My marriage, for starters. This thing has changed Sarah, just as it’s changed me. It’s made us different people. I can’t explain it any better than that. It has driven us apart.

  ‘It’s affecting Alex too. She’s now finding out things that I’ve held back from her since she was a child. That part’s a bonus, though. It’s time she found out for herself what a terrific woman her mother was.’

  ‘So what do you, we, do next?’ asked Pam.

  ‘I go to Shotts Prison tomorrow, to see that man I told you about. A remarkable man: a multiple murderer, but a remarkable man nonetheless. Our paths have crossed before. In fact he tried to kill me, once. His name’s . . .’

  In the pocket of his jacket, slung over the back of his chair, Skinner’s mobile phone rang. He took it out and switched it on. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Boss, it’s Andy. I’ve been trying to get you for hours.’

  ‘Sorry, I was busy. The phone was off. What’s the panic?’

  ‘I’m in Alnwick,’ said Martin. ‘The police here pulled in Ricky McCartney for failing to stop and for speeding on the A1. Big Neil and I came down with a team to collect him. When we got here we found we had a bonus: our two kidnapped tourists from Birmingham, dead in the boot of McCartney’s car.

  ‘Now I find myself in a tug-of-war over him and his partner, Willie Kirkbride. The Northumbrian police are being difficult. They’ve found a caravan up on the Haggerston Castle site, and they’re assuming that the Brummies were killed there.

  ‘I’ve done my best to persuade them to let me have McCartney and the other fellow, but they’re digging their heels in. I’ve been right up to the Chief Constable himself, but he’s playing it by the book.’

  ‘Whose book?’

  ‘His own,’ said Martin, wearily. ‘Yet I have to get these two back home. As soon as I can take statements from them I can arrest Dougie Terry on a lifetime’s worth of charges, including, I’m sure, setting up these three murders.’

  ‘Bugger that,’ said Skinner. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll ask Proud Jimmy to speak to their Chief Constable first thing tomorrow morning. These guys are ours and we’re having them, even if I have to come down to collect them myself. For now, you and McIlhenney get yourselves home.

  ‘Meantime, Andy, keep a veil over this. I don’t want anyone outside the team to know what’s happening, until the moment that our hands feel Dougie Terry’s collar. After that, it’ll be next stop Jackie Charles!’

  57

  Sir James Proud’s great grey head nodded slowly and sagely as he stared at the loudspeaker phone on his desk.

  Skinner, Martin and Pamela Masters were seated in armchairs well away from the instrument’s sensitive microphone.

  ‘I quite understand, Chief Constable Clark, your view of the situation,’ he said. ‘These bodies were found in your area. Where a murder is committed on your patch your duty is to investigate and report to the CPS.’

  ‘That’s right,’ a tinny voice boomed in reply from the speaker.

  ‘In that case, Hugh, please try to understand my view. The chain of events in this crime began in Edinburgh, when these men were abducted from a car in which a third man was shot dead. The men you are holding are prime suspects in that and other crimes.

  ‘My duty is to pursue investigation of these men with all vigour, wherever it leads me. As I understand it, you have found no proof as yet that the two men found dead in the Rover car were actually killed in England. Is that correct?’

  The loudspeaker coughed. ‘Yes it is. However we have found a caravan belonging to McCartney on the Haggerston site. I’ve got specialists at work there now.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said Proud Jimmy, ingenuously. ‘When did you first make that discovery?’

  ‘At around six last night,’ the Geordie voice replied.

  ‘Ah. So you’ve been looking for over fifteen hours and you still can’t say that the crime was committed on your territory.’

  ‘No, but . . . Come on, Jimmy, these things take time.’

  ‘Yes, but not forever. Which brings me back to my duty. The way things stand, I’ve got no choice but to go to our Supreme Criminal Court and ask the Lord Justice General for an order requiring the return to my jurisdiction at once, of McCartney and Kirkbride, plus the bodies of the two victims.’

  A spluttering sound came from the speakerphone. ‘This is England, Jimmy, not Scotland. Your court order wouldn’t work here.’

  ‘I disagree. It would be effective unless you could produce a counter from your highest criminal court. Even then, it’s possible that our Lord Justice General would issue a warrant for your arrest on grounds of contempt, to be effected by any Scottish force when next you set foot in Scotland.’

  He shook his silver mane, a dolorous expression on his face. A few feet away Skinner and Martin struggled to keep their laughter in check, while Pam Masters stared open-mouthed, astonished by the goings-on in her new professional circle.

  ‘Very embarrassing, Hugh, very embarrassing,’ said Proud. ‘I think that before it got to that stage, I’d have to ask my deputy, Bob Skinner, who’s an adviser to our Secretary of State, to contact his opposite number in the Home Office, to get a ruling from the Home Secretary himself.’

  He smiled, easily, as if he were addressing someone across the desk, rather than a box upon it. ‘I can do that right now, in fact, without even going to the court.’

  The conference telephone sat silent.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Sir James at last. ‘Let’s do a deal. You keep the stiffs, for as long as it takes you to establish where they were actually killed . . . if you can. I’ve got more than enough bodies to be going on with up here at the moment.

  ‘In the meantime, though, you hand over McCartney and Kirkbride to me, so that my investigations can proceed. My people need to take statements from them today. Once that’s done, if you want to charge them with murder in Northumberland, you can have them back, and we’ll let the Crown Office and the CPS argue about who tries them first. I don’t care where these chaps serve their life sentences. It’s the people above them in the chain that we’re after.

  ‘How about it?’ He looked across at Skinner, Martin, and Masters, with a wide smile of victory.

  ‘All right,’ said Chief Constable Clark, at last, wearily. ‘You send people down to Alnwick for four o’clock and we’ll hand them over . . . unless we do find something at Haggerston and have to charge them and hold them for court.’

  ‘Mmm,’ the Chief Constable muttered. ‘I don’t know about sending people to Alnwick. We’ve done that once already. Best that you hand them over at the border . . . for appearances’ sake. Shall we say three o’clock? That’ll give you another four hours to work at Haggerston.’

  ‘Okay, Jimmy, okay. I’ll have them there.’

  ‘Good, good,’ beamed Proud. ‘Pleased about that. Now is there anything that you have discovered that might be of help to our investigation?’

  ‘We found two handguns in the Rover’s glove-box,’ Clark replied. ‘One had been fired recently, so we ran tests on McCartney and Kirkbride. We found residue on McCartney’s clothing which indicates that he had discharged a firearm within the last forty-eight hours.

  ‘I’ll give you the guns, when we hand over the men. They’re not linked to anything in England. We’ve run a ballistics check though the PNC.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Proud. ‘We’ll run our own ballistics tests, but I’ll bet we can establish a link with our murder on Saturday night. We’ve identified the victim as Eddie Chang; half Chinese, half Brummie.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Clark. ‘The other two were Irish gentlemen, named Maloney and O’Flynn, both with Birmingham addresses. The PNC gave us their details from fingerprints this morning. Maloney did twelve years for attempted murder in Belfast.’

  ‘He didn’t succeed this time either,’ said Proud, with an irony that w
as unusual for him. ‘The sentence was a lot tougher, though.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Englishman chuckled grimly. ‘I don’t think he’ll attempt any more. See you, Jimmy. An ordeal doing business with you, as usual.’ A loud buzz filled the room as the line went dead. Sir James pressed a button to switch off the speaker box.

  ‘There you are, lady and gentlemen.’ He beamed, hugely pleased with himself. ‘Tact and diplomacy. Amazing what it can secure.’

  ‘That’s right,’ laughed Skinner. ‘But it’s nothing compared to what you can secure through naked threat. Christ, did you hear the intake of breath when you mentioned arrest.

  ‘Thanks, Chief, objective achieved.’ He stood up and led Martin and Masters from the room by the side door.

  ‘Wonderful,’ said Martin, outside in the corridor. ‘I’ll send McIlhenney down there with a team to take possession. Two transport vehicles, though: I want those guys kept apart from now on.’

  As she looked at the Head of CID, Pamela Masters could sense that he was buzzing with excitement. ‘Do you want to be in on the examination of McCartney and Kirkbride?’ he asked Skinner.

  The DCC shook his head. ‘No, I’ve got other fish in the fryer. You do it, with Donaldson and with Maggie Rose. Let Sammy Pye sit in on it too. He and Mags have done some bloody good work, so he deserves to be in at the kill.

  ‘But listen, the way the weather’s looking, that won’t be until six tonight, at the earliest. We’re still no further along in the Carole Charles investigation, with which, after all, we started out. McCartney and Kirkbride won’t be ready for interview until six at the earliest. While you’re waiting for them, give that another push. We don’t want it to stall.’

  Martin grunted as he followed Skinner and Masters into the DCC’s office. ‘Yes, boss. I’ll do that. I did hear before I came up that there’s a taxi driver who wants to see us about a pick-up he made last Wednesday. Mind you, we’ve had a few of those so far, all of them a waste of time.’

  He paused. ‘These other fish of yours. Anything to do with . . . ?’