Pray for the Dying

by Quintin Jardine

  He gave her a big wide-open smile, a rarity from him. ‘Yes, but I don’t need that incentive.’

  When the door slid open, they were both taken by surprise. ‘Tickets please.’

  The guard’s intervention ended the moment. They were passing through the first station on the route before Sarah broke the silence. ‘When did you eat last?’ she asked.

  ‘Good question; probably sometime between one and half past; sandwiches with Mann and Provan, my office. They were crap. The bread was turning up at the edges by the time we got round to them.’

  ‘That sort of a day, uh?’

  He nodded. ‘That sort. How about yours?’

  She scrunched up her face for a second or two. ‘Usual blood and guts, but pretty run-of-the-mill, as my job goes.’

  ‘No surprises? No complications?’

  ‘None, in either case. The two cadavers I’ll be looking at tomorrow . . . remind me of their names again? Not that it matters.’

  ‘Smit and Botha, also known as Mallett and Lightbody.’

  ‘Well, one thing I can tell you about them right now is that they were very good at their job, and humane too. Neither of their victims had any time to think about it. Mr Brown died on Friday evening. He may have seen the man who was killing him, but he died instantly. He still had a surprised expression on his face.’

  ‘I know,’ Bob reminded her. ‘I saw him in his second-to-last resting place. And,’ he added, ‘I’ve just seen a recording of him being shot.’

  ‘Why didn’t they kill the detective inspector’s husband?’

  ‘Because he never saw them, otherwise, you’re right, poor Lottie would be a widow.’

  ‘Then too bad for Mr Brown that he did, otherwise his life expectancy would have been pretty good. He was a fit guy.’

  ‘And how about Toni?’

  ‘Same with her, as you might expect, given her job. She was killed even more humanely than Brown, if I can use the term. She would not have had the faintest idea of what had happened to her. Well,’ she corrected herself, ‘maybe a few milliseconds, but no more than that. She’d have been brain-dead even before the force of the impact threw her out of her seat. If that’s some small comfort to her family, you might like to tell them.’

  ‘I have done already. I saw her mother and sister this morning.’

  ‘How were they?’

  ‘Very dignified, both of them. I’ve let the fiscal talk herself into releasing the body as soon as she gets your report.’

  ‘Then I’ll complete it and send it to her before I move on to Smit and Botha.’ She paused. ‘But how about her husband? How about the child?’ she asked. ‘Or is it too young to understand?’

  He stared at her, a slight, bewildered smile on his face. ‘Husband?’ he repeated. ‘Child? What child?’

  ‘Hers of course, Antonia Field’s. I assumed she was married or in a familial relationship.’

  ‘No, never,’ Bob said. ‘She was never married, and she lived with her sister. What makes you think she had a child?’

  ‘Hell,’ she exclaimed, ‘I might not be a professor of forensic pathology yet, but I do know a caesarean scar when I see one.’

  He sat up straight in his high-backed seat. ‘Well, honey, that is news to me, and neither her mother nor her sister . . . who wants to come back to work for me . . . gave me the slightest hint of its existence.’

  ‘Then tread carefully if you decide to tackle them about it. Yes, she has a scar, and there were other physical signs of child-bearing. However, there is no way I could guarantee that her baby was delivered alive.’

  ‘I accept that, but the odds are heavily in favour of that. If a kid goes full-term or almost there . . .’

  ‘That’s true, but Bob, where are you going with this? Suppose she did have a baby and kept quiet about it in case it harmed her career; that’s not a crime.’

  ‘In certain circumstances it might be. An application for the post of chief constable requires full disclosure.’

  ‘But honey, she’s dead. Does it really matter?’

  ‘Probably not at all.’ He grinned. ‘But it’s a mystery and you know how I feel about them. How old was this scar? Can you tell?’

  ‘I can take a guess. I’d say not less than one year old, and not more than three.’

  ‘Okay. One year ago she was chief constable of the West Midlands; if she had it then it would have been a bit noticeable. But hold on.’

  He raised himself from his seat and took his attaché case down from the luggage rack. He spun the combination wheels and opened it.

  ‘I’ve got Toni’s HR file in here. Let’s take a look and see what that tells us.’ He removed the thick green folder, then closed the case again, putting it on his knee to use as an impromptu table.

  ‘Let’s go back three years. Then she was a Met commander, on secondment to the Serious and Organised Crime Agency; she built her legend there knocking over foreign drugs cartels. If she’d taken time out to have a kid, that would have been noticed and recorded. It isn’t, so we can rule it out. So where does that take us?’

  As he read, a smile split his face. ‘It takes us to her becoming the chief constable of West Midlands, just over two years ago.’

  ‘She couldn’t have been there long,’ Sarah remarked.

  ‘She wasn’t. She barely had time to crease her uniform before the Strathclyde job came up. But, it says here that before she was appointed to Birmingham she took a six-month sabbatical, which ended a week before she was interviewed. That fits like a glove,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘It does,’ Sarah agreed. ‘But what do you do about it?’

  ‘I could simply ask her family, but you’re right; there could be sensitivities there. It’s even possible they don’t know about it. Marina gave me a pretty full rundown of her sister’s sex life and didn’t mention her being pregnant. She may have assumed that I knew from her record, but on the other hand, is there any reason why she should? If the child was safely delivered, it could have been put up for adoption. Toni was the sort of woman who wouldn’t have fancied any impediment to her career ambitions.

  ‘So no,’ he decided, ‘I won’t take it to Sofia or Marina. Instead I’ll do some digging of my own. I have a timeframe, her full name, Antonia Maureen Field, and her date of birth; they’ll be enough for the General Register Office to get me a hit. But I’m not counting on it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I have a feeling that there’s another possibility, one that might even be more likely.’

  ‘You love this, don’t you?’ Sarah chuckled. ‘The thrill of the chase, and all.’

  ‘It’s what I do, honey,’ he replied. ‘It’s the part of the job that I’ve always loved. These days, I don’t have too many chances to be hands on, so I take every one that’s going.’

  ‘Including interviewing the guy tomorrow morning? Surely you don’t really have to do that. An ACC alone’s pretty heavy duty, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh, I have to do it, make no mistake. Not only was he a police officer until a few years ago, his wife still is. I’ve come to rate her in the last couple of days, and to like her a lot too. This bastard’s gone and compromised her career and even put her in a situation where she had to be formally detained for a short while.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, he’s going to have me across the table, and if he thinks that his obligatory lawyer will prevent me from coming down on him like an avalanche, he’s kidding himself.’

  ‘It’s a new thing in Scotland, isn’t it, the prisoner’s right to a lawyer?’

  Bob nodded. ‘Indeed, but to be frank, I don’t know how we got away with the old system for so long. It doesn’t bother me anyway; I’m at my best when I don’t say a word.’

  Sarah grinned, as a gleam came into her eye. ‘You can say that again, buddy,’ she murmured.

  Thirty-Eight

  ‘Where is ma daddy, Uncle Dan?’ Jake Mann asked, not for the first time. His godfather realised that there was no ducking the question.r />
  ‘I told ye before, Jakey, it’s all hush-hush, but maybe this’ll explain it. Ye know your daddy used to be a policeman.’

  The child nodded, with vigour. ‘M-hm.’

  ‘Well, it’s like this. They’ve asked him to go back and help them again. Yer mum and I, we’ve been asked no’ tae talk about it, not even tae you.’

  ‘Wow! Secret squirrels?’

  ‘That’s right, secret squirrels; undercover.’ He ruffled Jake’s hair. ‘Now away ye go to your bed, like yer mum asked ye to a while back.’

  ‘Okay.’ He hugged his honorary uncle and ran into the hall, heading for the stairs, as if he was fuelled by excitement.

  ‘You’re a lovely wee man, Danny Provan,’ Lottie said, from the kitchen doorway. ‘I’d never have thought of that.’ She was carrying two plates, each loaded with fish and chips still in the wrapper. She handed him one and settled into her armchair. ‘It won’t hold up for long, though,’ she sighed. ‘Eventually, this is going to hit the press.’

  ‘Eventually,’ he conceded, ‘but these are special circumstances. The husband of the SIO bein’ lifted? Okay, it’s bound to leak within a day or two, but Ah’d expect the fiscal tae go to the High Court and get an interdict against publishing Scott’s name, at least until the trial begins, maybe even till he’s convicted.’

  ‘There’s no doubt he will be, is there?’

  ‘Ah’d love tae say he’s got a chance, but Ah can’t. We found the wrapping from the parcel in the car. You know as well as I do that the forensic people will find fibres on it and match them to a police uniform.’

  ‘It’s as well for him he is done,’ she barked. ‘I could bloody kill him, for what he’s done to Jakey; it’ll be hellish for him at school. Ye know what kids are like. I tell you this, even if by some miracle he does get out of this, he and I are done. He’s never coming back here. Never!’

  ‘Come on, Lottie, Scott wouldnae harm his laddie for a’ the tea in China.’

  ‘And what about me? Do you think he hasn’t harmed me?’

  ‘No, Ah don’t,’ the sergeant admitted. ‘I concede that. Ah want you to know, hen,’ he added, ‘that this has been the worst day of my police career. What I had to do this afternoon . . .’ His voice trailed away, as if he had run out of words.

  ‘But you had to do it, Dan,’ she countered. ‘As you say, you had to do it. If you hadn’t, I’d have thought the worse of you, and so would you and all, for the rest of your life. You’ve always been a hero to me, since I was the rawest DC in the team, but never more so than this afternoon.’

  Thirty-Nine

  ‘You’ll be DCS McIlhenney, then,’ Lowell Payne said as he approached the hulking, dark-suited stranger who stood at the entrance to the platform at Victoria Station where the Gatwick Express arrived.

  ‘How do you work that out?’ the other countered.

  ‘The boss’s description was enough. That and the fact that you’ve got his warrant card hung around your neck.’

  ‘Ah. I deduce that you are a detective. DCI Payne?’

  They shook hands. ‘That’s me. It’s a pleasure to meet the other half of the Glimmer Twins.’

  ‘You know my Latino compatriot?’ he asked, surprised. ‘Bob never mentioned that.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I was involved in the investigation in Edinburgh that led up to the shit that happened at the weekend. That’s how I met Mario. He and I got to the Glasgow concert hall not long after the shooting. Now I find myself right in the middle of the follow-up.’

  ‘You were there?’ McIlhenney’s eyes flashed. ‘How’s Paula? McGuire says she’s all right, but I couldn’t be quite sure that he wasn’t spinning the truth to keep me off the first plane.’

  ‘Trust me, he wasn’t,’ Payne assured him. ‘She’s a tough lady. Everything happened so fast that I don’t think she had time to be scared. She was fine when we got there, shaken, but well in control of herself. From what the boss said when he called me last night she still is. Mind you, you can think about booking a flight this weekend, from what I hear. The baby’s expected by the end of the week.’

  ‘Is that right? That’s terrific.’ He laughed. ‘Mario has no idea how much his life is going to change. He reckoned nothing could ever slow him down, but this will. Who knows? I might even get to overtake him.’

  He read the question written on Payne’s face. ‘He’s always been first to every promotion,’ he explained. ‘Then when I get one, he lands another. It’s the same again this time. I come all the way to London to make chief super, he stays in bloody Edinburgh, and gets the ACC post.’ He beamed. ‘There’s a longer ladder here, though; he’ll be struggling from now on. He’s got one more rung left in him, max, while I could have two in the Met.’

  ‘Good for you guys,’ Payne said. ‘I’m not on a ladder any more. I won’t see fifty again, I’ve reached my level, and I’m happy with it.’

  ‘Don’t write yourself off,’ McIlhenney murmured, ‘not if you’re working for Bob Skinner.’ He frowned, rubbing his hands together. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘enough career planning. You and I have got a grieving widow to interview.’

  ‘Does she know she’s a widow yet?’

  The chief superintendent checked his watch, as they walked towards the station exit. ‘She should by now. We ran some checks on her and found that she’s not in employment, so we guess that she’s a full-time mum. The family support people were going to call on her at nine thirty, and I’ve had no message to say that she wasn’t in. It’s going on ten now, so hopefully by the time we get there, she’ll have had time to absorb what’s happened.’

  ‘Or not, as the case may be,’ the visitor countered. ‘It’s the worst possible news they’ll have given her. She might not be capable of talking to anyone.’

  ‘In that case, we get a doctor, we sedate her and while she’s in the land of nod we search the place, quietly but carefully.’

  ‘Can we do that?’ Payne wondered. ‘Legally, I mean?’

  McIlhenney opened his jacket, displaying an envelope in an inside pocket. ‘I’ve got warrants,’ he said. ‘Everything the Met does these days has to be watertight. We are all book operators now. I hate to think how Bob Skinner would get on down here. He’d do his own thing, because that’s all he knows, and wind up on page one . . . just like his bloody wife! That was a shocker; it blew me right out of my seat when I saw those pictures. Some of my brother officers think it’s funny, fools that they are, to see the big man embarrassed like that. How’s it going down in Pitt Street?’

  ‘Very quietly. The new chief’s reputation travels before him. One of our ACCs might be found chortling in a stall in the gents, but he’s got his own secret to protect, so he’s poker-faced in public.’

  ‘Sensible man.’ McIlhenney slowed his pace as they approached a waiting police car. ‘I can’t get over Aileen getting herself compromised like that. She always struck me as super-cautious, given her political position. What doesn’t surprise me, though, is that the marriage was up shit creek even without the Morocco complication.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Those are two of the most powerful people, personality-wise, that I’ve ever met. I never thought it would last. Just as I never thought he and Sarah would actually split, even though she can be volatile and though Bob doesn’t have quite the same control over his dick that he has over everything else. McGuire tells me that Sarah’s back in Edinburgh. Is that right?’

  ‘So I believe. I have met her, you know. For example, a few years back, at my niece’s twenty-first . . . well, she’s my wife’s niece, really. Sarah and Bob weren’t long married at the time. She was well pregnant at the time.’ McIlhenney was staring at him, puzzled. ‘Alex,’ he explained. ‘Alexis, Bob’s daughter. I’m married to her mother’s sister, although Myra had died well before I came on the scene.’

  The chief superintendent beamed, then laughed. ‘Jeez,’ he exclaimed, ‘the man’s like a fucking octopus; his tentacles are everywhere. He’s had a family i
nsider in Strathclyde CID all this time and he’s never let on.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Payne protested, ‘you’re making it sound like I was his snitch. I rarely saw him, other than a few times when he came with Alex to visit our wee lass, or family events, like weddings and such, and before now our paths only ever crossed the once professionally, way back when I was a uniform sergeant and he’d just made detective super.’

  ‘Maybe so, but I’ll bet when you did see him, you spent a hell of a lot more time talking about policing than about Auntie Effie’s bunions.’

  ‘Mmm,’ the DCI murmured. ‘We don’t have an Auntie Effie, but yes, I suppose you’re right. It was mostly shop talk. Mind you, I’m not a golfer, and I don’t follow football, so there wasn’t much else on the agenda.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have made any difference,’ McIlhenney assured him. ‘Come on, let’s get on our way.’ They slid into the back of the waiting police car. ‘You know where we’re going?’ he asked the constable at the wheel.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the driver replied. ‘There was a message for you while you were away,’ he added. ‘The family support gels say it’s okay for you to go in. The lady’s been advised, and she’s okay to speak to you.’

  ‘I hope she’s still okay after we’ve finished,’ the chief superintendent grunted.

  The car pulled out of the station concourse and into the traffic. ‘Tourist route, sir?’ the constable asked.

  ‘Not this trip. We can show DCI Payne the sights later.’

  The visiting detective had no more than a tourist’s knowledge of London, and so he sat bewildered as they cut past New Scotland Yard and along a series of thoroughfares that might have been in any developed city in the world, had it not been for the omnipresence of the Union flag and the Olympic rings, and for the Queen’s image beaming from shop windows displayed on a range of souvenir products from clothing to crockery. The sun told him that they were heading roughly north, and occasionally a sign would advise him that Madame Tussaud’s lay a mile from where they were at that moment, or that they were passing an underground station called Angel, or that the Mayor of London wished him an enjoyable stay in his city.