Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘What’s tomorrow got to do with it?’ he snapped.

  ‘Tomorrow, Greg, I assume command of the Serious Crimes Unit, on promotion to detective superintendent. I’ll be working alongside the Scottish Crime Squad, and my remit will include organised crime. We’ll continue to have a dedicated drugs and vice unit, with Roy Old in charge, but it’ll work hand in hand with my team.’

  ‘Who defines serious crime?’ Jay was deflated; I’d let some of the air out of his balloon.

  ‘Within our force area, we do. The Scottish Crime Squad targets on a national basis, but its resources are limited. Our focus is within our own territory; we pass on intelligence when we have it, but we set our own local agenda. Tony Manson is very much part of that, and when we find his driver dead in these circumstances, that’s of interest to us.’

  He shrugged. ‘Good luck to you, then. I’ll be off home. Higgins, Martin, you can knock off too.’

  Christ, the man’s lifetime mission seemed to be to rile Bob Skinner. ‘Normally, I’d have no objection to any of that,’ I said, ‘but in this case I need a team on the ground, now. So I’m commandeering yours, or some of them, at least. Higgins, Martin, you’re with me, and I’ll have the lad on the door as well.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘Before you ask, yes, I have the power to do it. Call Alf, if you doubt me.’

  He could have called the chief constable too. I’d been called to a meeting in his office, that morning, without being given a clue to the subject in advance. It had been James Proud, Alf Stein and me, that was all. The chief had told me of my promotion, and of the reason for the strengthening of my unit. It had existed for a while, and I’d spent some time there as a detective sergeant, but it was being beefed up. ‘I don’t want my force to be marginalised,’ the chief had said, ‘or to see any of its investigative role being handed over to a central crime-fighting unit. One or two of my fellow chiefs would like to see that happen, but it won’t, not while I’m behind this desk.’ There was a school of thought within the force that Proud was more politician than policeman; I was pleased to learn that he was both. ‘For the moment, you’ll have the squad that Tom Partridge built up, but you can add to it, straight away or whenever it suits you.’

  I kept on staring up at Jay. ‘I’ll let you know how the investigation goes, Greg,’ I told him. ‘If I need anything else from your division, I’ll let you know.’ I didn’t feel any guilt about putting him down in front of his own officers; that’s what he’d have done to me, if he’d been able.

  He sloped off, without another word. Policing is no different from any other profession, or from humanity for that matter. It has those people with that little bit extra, or who exceed their natural ability by their effort and enthusiasm, and it has its great majority, those who do what’s expected of them competently, the people who, in the end, make it all work, life’s Poor Bloody Infantry. Then there are the others, those who want the ride for free, and whose weight is carried by the rest. Occasionally, one of those will climb the ladder through lack of proper scrutiny. Greg Jay wasn’t a typical example, he’d gone higher than most, but he’d been on my radar for a while, and with me having risen to the same rung as him, he knew that his card was marked.

  I climbed the ladder out of the pit, beckoning to Higgins and Martin to follow. They’d both stood silent while Jay and I had our gunfight. At the top, I called out to the lead crime scene officer. ‘DS Dorward,’ I said, ‘I know this place must be a fucking mess, with council staff walking all over it twice a week, but I need you to get as much as you can out of it. First off, I need to know how many people were in here with the dead man.’ The SOCO opened his mouth but I cut him off. ‘Yes, I know it’s possible that nobody else was here with him, that he was off his face on something and thought he was Greg Louganis, but I do not believe that. I want everything there is. Start with the door that was jemmied.’

  Red hair poking out angrily from under his tunic hood, the man stared at me as if I’d asked him whether he regularly had sex with pigs. ‘That’s the first place we went, sir,’ he retorted. ‘It’s covered in prints. If the victim’s are there, we’ll find them.’

  ‘Of course you will. Sorry. Give me everything you can, as soon as you can, but without compromising thoroughness.’

  ‘What does “compromising” mean, sir?’ he drawled. ‘Is that a CID term?’

  I laughed. Dorward’s path and mine hadn’t crossed too often, but every detective in the force knew of his prickliness.

  ‘Nah,’ I replied, ‘it’s a general term, as in “compromising your promotion chances”. Sarcasm can be good for that.’

  He smiled, calmly. ‘I’ll bear that in mind, sir. Now will the three of you please fuck off and let me get on with it.’ Dorward was untouchable and he knew it. He was a genius at what he did, and rank meant nothing to him.

  We peeled off our sterile gear and stepped back outside, where Alex was waiting with McGuire. ‘Where’s Mr Jay gone?’ she asked, frowning as if she knew.

  ‘Home. I’ve taken over the investigation.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a suspicious death.’ I was always matter-of-fact about my job when I discussed it with my daughter. I didn’t believe in euphemism . . . not that she’d let me get away with any since she was five, and she’d forced me to use the ‘D’ word when I tried to explain why her mother wouldn’t be coming back from the hospital. For almost a year after the accident, that’s where I’d said she was, but with kids such deceits don’t survive a week at a village primary school.

  ‘You mean a murder?’ she persisted.

  ‘We don’t know yet. Nothing’s ruled out till we can prove it couldn’t have happened.’

  ‘So what happens now?’ She seemed excited by the situation.

  Good question, kid. If I’d been any good at delegation, I could have given my three subordinates orders and taken Alex home; but I’m not, and never have been. I wanted to be the one who did what had to happen next; I wanted to see the expression on Bella Watson’s face when I told her that her second son had died a violent death.

  I took a few steps away, nodding to Alison to follow. ‘Would you do me a big favour,’ I whispered, ‘one that’s completely unfair of me to ask a colleague of your rank? And don’t fucking call me “sir” when you answer.’

  A faint grin touched the corners of her mouth. ‘Sure, Bob. I’ll do it.’

  ‘You know what it is?’

  ‘Of course. You want me to take your daughter home and wait till you get back there.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’ I said.

  ‘No, but so what if I did?’ The grin became a wide smile, reminding me of how attractive she could be. ‘You can hardly send her home with a uniformed cop, and I wouldn’t trust my mother’s cat with Andy Martin.’

  I didn’t expect Alex to make a fuss when I told her what was happening, but neither did I expect her to be quite as enthusiastic as she was. She’d met Alison once before, by accident, when we were on a clothes shopping expedition in the junior designer section of John Lewis, and for a while after that she’d looked at me curiously.

  The two of them headed off towards Alison’s car, which was parked at the top of the street, leaving me with Martin and McGuire. ‘You were in this at the start,’ I told the PC, ‘so you can stay for the ride. You and DC Martin are both seconded to Serious Crimes . . . temporarily, I stress . . . so you can lose that uniform for a while.’

  The Irish Italian beamed. ‘Yes, boss. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘What you’re told, and no more. You are not CID yet, so don’t let it go to your head.’ I checked my watch: twenty minutes to nine. ‘There’s a mugshot of Marlon Watson in the drugs squad office at headquarters. Have it faxed to St Leonards, then take it into all the pubs in the area, not just that one across the road. There’s the cellar bar in Chambers Street, the Irish pub along South Bridge, and a couple more; you’ll have time to check them all before last orders. Show it to the staff and any regulars
they point you at. Ask whether anyone saw him on Tuesday, or even Monday. We shouldn’t rule that out, he may have died earlier than we think.’

  ‘What if someone saw him on Wednesday?’ McGuire asked. (He was flippant from the start; it’s one of his strengths, funnily enough, for it encourages people to underestimate him.)

  ‘Then arrest him, because he fucking killed him! Report to me at headquarters tomorrow morning, in the SCU office. Andy, while Mario’s doing that, you and I are going to find the mother, to break the bad news.’

  Martin looked back at me. ‘What about the father?’

  ‘He hasn’t been around for donkeys. He was a seaman; worked the trawlers, they said. As far as I know he sailed away twenty years ago and never came back. I doubt if he even knows that Ryan’s dead. That’s if he isn’t himself.’

  ‘Wife?’

  ‘Marlon? Not that I’ve heard of; last time he was lifted he gave Bella’s address.’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, heavily. ‘When Billy shot the Holmeses, there was a whisper from an informant that it was Bella who bought the gun and told him to do it. DCS Stein, the head of CID, put it to her himself. I was there at the time. She told him to either prove it or fuck off. Perry made one of his rare mistakes there. He should have told his brother to kill all three Spreckleys, not just Gavin. If he’d ever met Bella, maybe he would have.’

  Two

  The Watson family home was in a crumbling council estate on the south side of the city. It was one of the urban sores that Scottish Homes had been set up to eradicate, and it should have been high on its agenda, but wasn’t. The police station that had been built there a few years earlier might have been the work of an architect who’d seen Assault on Precinct 13. Indeed that had probably been in the design brief.

  There were a few kids hanging out in the street as I parked in the gathering gloom, and I cursed myself for lack of foresight. I had two cars, a BMW 3 Series saloon that I used socially, and a battered, scratched six-year-old Land Rover Discovery that was my work car. Since Myra’s death I’d always gone for solid vehicles with good all-round protection. When I’d left home, because Alex was with me, I’d taken the Beamer, without thinking ahead. It was a nice car, gunmetal blue metallic, and it drew admiring glances, even in Gullane, where upmarket was the norm. Where we were, it was more likely to draw gunfire.

  We got out, and as I locked up I looked around; a few yards away a group of half a dozen boys and youths stood, some eyeing me up, a couple looking at the car and almost salivating as they did. ‘Just a minute,’ I said to Martin. I walked up to them. The oldest of them might have been sixteen, maybe a year or so younger, but he was a big lad. He was cocky with it, didn’t flinch as I approached, but looked at me as if he was thinking of having a go there and then.

  I held his gaze. ‘If you haven’t guessed,’ I began, ‘we are the polis. We’re going into that building, and we’ll probably be a while in there. You lads are appointed to watch my motor.’

  ‘What’s in it for us?’ the gang leader grunted. I felt a wee bit sorry for him. In his environment face was important and he was about to lose some, in front of his crew.

  ‘We’ll discuss that when the job’s done. But if, when we come out of there, I see one mark on my car, as much as one fingerprint on the windscreen, I will pick you out, yes you, son, personally, and I will knock seventeen different colours of shite out of you. There will be no point in doing it over then getting off your mark, because I will come back, and back, and back until I’ve found you. My name is Skinner, and I’m a man of my word.’

  I left them to consider my offer and rejoined Martin; he’d been watching from the other side of the road. ‘What was that about, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Personnel management. Come on.’

  The houses in the street were all in tenement blocks, but Bella Watson’s house was ground floor, with a main door that opened out on to a narrow, untended garden, with beer cans, cigarette packets and other garbage littering what might have been a lawn with a little interest, imagination and effort. I’d been there twice; after her brother had re-enacted the OK Corral gunfight, and a year or so later to take Marlon in for questioning that I’d known would be pointless but had to be done.

  The door was painted grey, with a quarter panel of dappled obscure glass. The DC stepped in front of me and pressed the buzzer. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I chuckled. ‘She’ll think you’re the rent man. Fat chance of her answering then.’ I leaned forward and pounded the woodwork, hard, with the side of my closed right fist, once, twice, a third time. ‘Now she knows. Count to thirty, slowly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To give her time to hide anything she doesn’t want us to see.’

  He had reached twenty-eight when we saw the handle turn.

  Bella Watson was better dressed than she had been on my previous visit. She’d never been scruffy, but the casual house-wear that I’d been expecting had been replaced by a short-sleeved blouse with vertical cream and brown stripes, a close-fitting brown skirt, and shiny high-heeled shoes; none of it looked as if it had come from Littlewoods catalogue. It was the first sign she’d ever given me that she had a body, and it took me by surprise. Her hair was different too; the grey streaks that I’d seen before had gone, it was a lustrous auburn and it had a Charlie Miller look about it. She was around fifty, I knew, but with the new style and a tan that was way out of place in her neighbourhood, she could have passed for at least five years younger.

  The mouth was still the same, though. ‘Aw fuck, it’s you,’ she moaned, as she looked up at me. ‘What do you want now? Ma boy’s no’ here.’

  ‘We know that,’ I told her. ‘He’s with us. Invite us in, Bella.’

  She knew it wasn’t a request; and she stood aside to let us past and into the hallway. The house had had a makeover too. There was a new fitted carpet in the living room, and a white three-seater settee and armchair that had a leather look to it. The telly in the corner was bigger than mine. I glanced at the sideboard, at the two framed photographs that stood upon it; Marlon and a boy who hadn’t grown much older than he’d been when it was taken. There wasn’t one of the daughter, I noticed. ‘Marlon’s earning good money, surely,’ I remarked.

  ‘This has got fuck all tae do wi’ him,’ she snapped.

  I stared at her. ‘You’re not telling me you’ve got a job, are you? There would have been a story in the Evening News about that.’

  ‘Smart bastard.’

  ‘So what is the story? Or is this all knock-off? Would you like to show us receipts for this lot?’

  Her eyes blazed at me. ‘Piss off, Skinner!’ she snarled. ‘If ye must know, it’s our Mia. She’s been lookin’ after me. She’s doing all right for herself.’

  I didn’t know Mia; I’d never met her. But as far as I knew she hadn’t broken the mould and gone straight to Oxford from Maxwell Academy. She wasn’t the business of the evening, though. ‘Does Marlon still live with you?’ I asked her.

  ‘Aye. Why? Did he tell you lot different?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, he hasn’t said a word to us. When did you see him last, Bella?’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘we’re not trying to do him for anything. I need to know, that’s all.’

  ‘Tuesday,’ she muttered, grudgingly. ‘Tuesday afternoon, before he went out.’

  ‘Had he been in all day?’

  ‘No, he’d been at his work.’

  ‘With Tony Manson?’

  She seemed to draw herself up to her full height, about five eight in the heels, and a look of pride shone in her eyes. ‘Yes, wi’ Mr Manson. He’s his prodigy.’

  ‘I think that might be protégé, Bella; who told you that?’

  ‘Mr Manson did.’

  ‘Manson came here?’

  ‘No. I’d to go to his place one day. Marlon had left his mobile at home, and he needed it.’

  A ques
tion suggested itself. ‘Are you working for Manson too, Bella?’

  ‘No.’

  I didn’t believe her. ‘Bella!’

  She folded. ‘Okay, occasionally.’

  ‘What sort of work?’

  ‘In one of his launderettes.’

  Tony Manson had a range of commercial interests; they included low-rent offices around the West End of Edinburgh and in Leith, two discos, one in Fountainbridge and another in Bellevue, a pub chain that was incorporated and traded as Bidey Inns, several saunas, a private hire taxi company, and a string of launderettes. It was believed that much of what was laundered there was money from Manson’s other business activities, drugs, prostitution, protection and loan-sharking. I knew all those places and I’d never seen anyone in a launderette dressed as the new-look Bella was.