Copyright © 2016 Portador Ltd
The right of Quintin Jardine to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in this Ebook edition in 2016 by
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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eISBN: 978 1 4722 0569 8
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Praise for Quintin Jardine
Also by Quintin Jardine
About the Book
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
About the Author
Quintin Jardine was born once upon a time in the West: of Scotland rather than America, but still he grew to manhood as a massive Sergio Leone fan. On the way there he was educated, against his will, in Glasgow, where he ditched a token attempt to study law for more interesting careers in journalism, government propaganda, and political spin-doctoring. After a close call with the Brighton Bomb, he moved into the riskier world of media relations consultancy, before realising that all along he had been training to become a crime writer.
Now, more than forty published novels later, he never looks back. Along the way he has created/acquired an extended family in Scotland and Spain. Everything he does is for them.
He can be tracked down through his website www.quintinjardine.com.
Praise for Quintin Jardine
‘A triumph. I am first in the queue for the next one’ Scotland on Sunday
‘Well constructed, fast-paced, Jardine’s narrative has many an ingenious twist and turn’ Observer
‘Very engaging as well as ingenious, and the unravelling of the mystery is excellently done’ Allan Massie, Scotsman
‘The perfect mix for a highly charged, fast-moving crime thriller’ Glasgow Herald
‘[Quintin Jardine] sells more crime fiction in Scotland than John Grisham and people queue around the block to buy his latest book’ The Australian
‘There is a whole world here, the tense narratives all come to the boil at the same time in a spectacular climax’ Shots magazine
‘Engrossing, believable characters . . . captures Edinburgh beautifully . . . It all adds up to a very good read’ Edinburgh Evening News
By Quintin Jardine and available from Headline
Bob Skinner series:
Skinner’s Rules
Skinner’s Festival
Skinner’s Trail
Skinner’s Round
Skinner’s Ordeal
Skinner’s Mission
Skinner’s Ghosts
Murmuring the Judges
Gallery Whispers
Thursday Legends
Autographs in the Rain
Head Shot
Fallen Gods
Stay of Execution
Lethal Intent
Dead and Buried
Death’s Door
Aftershock
Fatal Last Words
A Rush of Blood
Grievous Angel
Funeral Note
Pray for the Dying
Hour of Darkness
Last Resort
Private Investigations
Primavera Blackstone series:
Inhuman Remains
Blood Red
As Easy As Murder
Deadly Business
As Serious as Death
Oz Blackstone series:
Blackstone’s Pursuits
A Coffin for Two
Wearing Purple
Screen Savers
On Honeymoon with Death
Poisoned Cherries
Unnatural Justice
Alarm Call
For the Death of Me
The Loner
Mathew’s Tale
About the Book
Former Chief Constable Bob Skinner has uncovered his fair share of shocking crime scenes over his thirty-year police career. But few have affected him quite as much as the horrifying sight he finds stowed in the back of a stolen car that collides with his own on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
As his former colleagues investigate the mystery, Skinner is left to take on the unusual challenge of tracing a multimillion-pound yacht, vanished from its mooring.
From the outsi
de, the two events couldn’t seem less connected. And yet, as the body count rises, a link surfaces that could provide the key to both.
And as discord spreads within the newly unified Police Scotland, it will soon become clear whether Skinner is on the side of the angels . . . or working against them.
This book is dedicated to Mr David Lewis, consultant vascular surgeon, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and his dedicated team. He’ll know why.
One
I’ve never felt more positive than I did when I left home that day for the start of my working week; I was the new Bob Skinner, new career, new attitude, new life; I’d turned a corner.
A couple of months before, I’d been in a proper mess, in such a confused state of mind that I’d taken myself off to Spain to sort myself out, and to try to shape a new life plan.
One exciting road trip with a friend was all it had taken. A different environment, a new challenge, and a satisfactory solution to a seemingly insoluble problem, and I felt that I was back in shape. When our journey was over, I had made a clear decision to walk away from the police service, for good. I even had a new job, part-time, one that was ideally suited to a man of my talents and experience.
Best of all, for the first time in years I had a secure and happy home life. I was reunited with my ex-wife Sarah, the mother of two of my five kids. Although she still had her own house in Edinburgh, we were spending more and more time en famille in Gullane.
Okay, my oldest son was a few months into a prison sentence, and his mother was about to marry a gangster, but isn’t it true that perfection can lead too easily to complacency?
I had set out that morning to spend some time in my office. The new employment? I am a director of a Spanish company, InterMedia, of which my friend Xavi Aislado is chief executive. It owns the Saltire newspaper in Edinburgh, but that’s only a small piece of its portfolio of online and printed newspaper titles, plus radio and TV stations, across Spain and Italy. It’s a real job; I have independent oversight of all group investigative activity, and I instruct young journalists on developing relationships with police that do not rely on brown envelopes changing hands.
Contractually it’s on a one day a week basis, but in practice I contribute more than that. I have a base in the Saltire building in Fountainbridge, and I share a secretary with June Crampsey, the managing editor.
That’s where I was headed on the Monday it all kicked off. I planned to spend the morning finalising a training manual I’d written, preparing it for translation into Spanish, Catalan and Italian, before moving on to a working lunch with an old acquaintance.
He had contacted me a couple of weeks earlier, asking for my help with what he had described only as ‘a certain situation’. It had taken that long for him to find time to meet me, so I assumed that whatever it was, it couldn’t be too pressing.
Before she left for work that morning, Sarah asked me to do her a favour. ‘Honey, I have a sudden, uncontrollable craving,’ she confessed, ‘for Marks and Spencer lemon drizzle cake. I woke up with it this morning; it must be the effect of reading Mary Clark’s book. I don’t have time to pick one up on the way in, and I’m not sure when I’ll be finished, so . . . would you be a love and call in there on the way to the office?’
What Sarah wants Sarah gets . . . it wasn’t always that way, I confess . . . although I was still wondering about ‘uncontrollable cravings’ as I cruised into the Fort Kinnaird shopping mall, and parked as close as I could to M&S.
Its food store is always busy, even at nine fifteen on a Monday morning: when I reached in and grabbed the last lemon drizzle cake from the rack, I beat a blue-rinse matron to the punch by less than a second. She glared at me, as if she expected me to hand it over. I smiled and shook my head.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but my future happiness may depend on this.’
She sniffed, and gave me another long look. It told me wordlessly that if I died in utter misery she wouldn’t give a damn, and allowed me to go to the quick checkout without a single fragment of guilt.
I paid and went back to my car, laying the precious confection, in its five-penny bag, on the front passenger seat. Before starting the engine, I called Sarah via Bluetooth.
‘Got it,’ I told her, ‘although I had to fight for it.’
‘I’ll bet,’ she chuckled. ‘Those cakes go like crazy.’
‘So, this craving of yours . . .’ I ventured. ‘Should I read anything into that?’
‘No, you should not,’ she replied, still with a smile in her voice. ‘As if . . .’
‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We have an extra room in Gullane.’
‘Which we could need this year,’ she countered, ‘when Ignacio comes out of the young offenders place.’
She had a point. Ignacio is the teenage son I never knew about until we met last year in Spain, by which time his reckless mother, Mia, had allowed his life to become seriously fucked up; he was going to need a secure roof over his head, and I did not want it to be hers. She was about to marry a man named Cameron ‘Grandpa’ McCullough, a millionaire Dundee businessman, whose legitimate enterprises had been built with cash laundered from serious organised crime. Better coppers than I had tried to put Grandpa in jail, but none had ever succeeded.
Initially, I had decided not to visit Ignacio in prison; my reasoning was that he’d be endangered if he was revealed as the offspring of a very senior cop. However, a few months into his sentence, I realised that we could waste no more time bonding, and a cooperative governor had allowed us private meetings, away from the open hall where routine visits took place.
‘He and I will discuss that next week,’ I told Sarah, ‘but you have a point. See you tonight.’
I ended the call, and turned on the engine, letting it warm up for a few seconds. With my foot on the brake, I slipped the lever from P for Park, into R for Reverse, then checked my mirrors, all three of them, and the screen that shows the view from my car’s reversing camera.
Satisfied that all was clear I began to reverse out of my space, slowly. I had travelled no more than a yard when, on the edge of my vision, I saw it coming, a red car travelling towards me at a speed that was way too high for a shopping mall park.
I braked, instantly, but it was too late; the idiot, a man in a hoodie, I registered, caught the nearside corner of my rear bumper, bounced off it sideways, into the middle of the narrow carriageway and stopped, just in time to avoid hitting a Grand Cherokee that was coming in the other direction.
The law is imperfect; whatever the constitution may declare, there are occasions where there is indeed an assumption of guilt, and that situation was one of them. I’d driven with due care and attention, yet I was well aware that insurance companies, and all too often the courts, take the view that the reversing driver is in the wrong, automatically. When I was a chief constable, I instructed my traffic officers that every incident should be approached with an open mind, but those damn insurers paid no attention.
My car, a nice silver Mercedes, was less than six weeks old, yet there it was with damage to its rear end, thanks to some clown who didn’t know the difference between a shopping centre car park and Brands fucking Hatch . . . and chances were, the bloody insurers were going to pin the blame on me!
Worst of all, the bag on the passenger seat had hit the gear lever, bursting it open and smashing Sarah’s precious lemon drizzle cake. That lit my fuse; I’d been a happy family man, joking with the love of my life, only to become, in the space of a few seconds, an explosion waiting to happen.
I popped my seat belt and stepped out, ready to do battle with the stock car driver in the red car; it was a BMW, I noticed, with a few years on the clock. I was ready for whatever story the bloke came up with, ready for a confrontation, ready to blow him out.
I waited for him to climb out and face me. To my surprise, he didn’t; instead he began to
move forward, blasting his horn at the Grand Cherokee that was blocking the roadway, as if the sound could push it backwards. The big jeep didn’t move. Its lady owner sat behind her steering wheel, looking bewildered and a little frightened.
Giving her a wave and a sign that I hoped she would read as ‘Stay where you are’, I moved towards the Beamer. Its driver, seeing no way forward, started to reverse, but got no further than a couple of yards before slamming hard into a Mini that had come to a halt behind him. He was trapped; no escape route.
We made eye contact as I advanced on him. I saw a thin, sharp, youngish Caucasian face within the hood, eyes narrowed. I guess he saw a tall, angry, grey-haired bloke in a dark suit, white shirt and blue tie.
My view of him lasted for only a couple of seconds, for as long as it took a cloud that had obscured the low winter sun to pass by, and for a ray of light to hit the red car’s windscreen, reflecting into my eyes and blinding me momentarily.
I took a couple of steps to my left to escape it; by the time my vision had cleared the man was out of his car and legging it across the park. I gave a moment’s thought to chasing him, but abandoned the idea, for he was moving like a bat out of hell. I still go out running along the coastline in front of my house, but I never was a sprinter. I knew that he had too big a start, plus he had at least twenty-five years on me.
Instead I walked round to the Mini. Its bonnet had been crunched, and its engine had stopped, probably stalled on impact. The driver was also a lady, but older than the Grand Cherokee’s pilot. She was white haired and in her seventies, I guessed.
She was shocked. She stared straight ahead, heavily veined hands grasping her wheel, so tightly that her knuckles showed bony white.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ a voice demanded. Grand Cherokee woman, a striking redhead in her thirties who could have been modelling her M&S clothes, had overcome her initial scare and stood behind me.
‘You know as much as I do,’ I replied. ‘This thing,’ I nodded towards the BMW, ‘hit me, and the driver legged it.’
‘Why would he do that?’ she asked.
‘My best guess,’ I told her, ‘is that this is stolen, probably from this car park. Look, do me a favour,’ I added. ‘Will you take care of the old lady? She’s had a hell of a fright and might need medical assistance. If you do that I’ll call for help and alert site security.’
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