Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘It’s Grandpa, isn’t it?’ she said, and all I could do was nod. I made to hug her, but she turned away and walked into the living room. I followed her, watching her, ready for her to break down. But she didn’t. She turned and looked at me, frowning and waiting for me to find the words I was after. That was the moment when I knew, beyond doubt, that I didn’t have a child any longer.

  ‘He died this afternoon, love,’ I told her, feeling my chin wobble. ‘Very suddenly, at home.’

  ‘He was ill, though,’ she murmured, ‘wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, my darling, he was. It was only a matter of time, but I never imagined it would be so soon.’

  ‘He told you yesterday, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘He didn’t want me to. In fact he insisted that I didn’t. But I was going to anyway; this evening, in fact. I’m sorry, love.’

  She took my hand. ‘It’s all right, Pops,’ she whispered. ‘You didn’t have to tell me anything. I could see that he was ill. And I knew as soon as he said he hadn’t brought his golf clubs that it must be serious. I didn’t believe any of that stuff about the mystery tour.’

  ‘Maybe not, Alex, but that’s where he’s gone, on the greatest mystery tour of them all.’

  She smiled, and her expression said that if I wanted to believe that, it was all right with her.

  ‘You can cry, you know, kid,’ I whispered.

  ‘I might,’ she replied, ‘but not just now. I’ve been crying since I was five, Pops. I’m only just learning not to. Besides, Grandpa wouldn’t want me to, and if I did, it would only upset you more.’

  I let myself slump on to the couch and she joined me there, nestling against me as she always had done. ‘Are you sure you’re only thirteen?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Alison says I’m going on twenty-five. And speaking of Alison,’ she added, ‘what did you mean about us going sailing?’

  I told her about our invitation for the weekend.

  ‘Can we go?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you want to, given what’s happened?’

  She pushed herself upright and stared at me. ‘Are you kidding? What would Grandpa tell us to do?’

  I couldn’t argue with that thinking. ‘Okay,’ I promised, ‘unless his funeral is on Saturday, we will join Alison’s brother’s crew.’

  ‘Where will we be going?’

  ‘That’ll be up to the captain.’ I nudged her side. ‘See, kid? Mystery tour.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll meet Grandpa at the end.’

  ‘In this world, love, who knows? Hey,’ I went on, ‘fancy going out to eat? That’s all there is on offer unless you’re cooking, for frankly, after the day I’ve had, I cannot be arsed.’

  Twelve

  Neither could she, but the options on a Monday weren’t that great so we settled for fish suppers from Aberlady. A bad move on my part; the batter was heavy and I ate too many chips, a recipe for indigestion and a restless night. Not that I’d have slept much anyway; my mind was in danger of overload, a whirlpool of thoughts, each of them a crisis of sorts: the two murder investigations that I was heading up, and the two women with whom my life had become entangled. As I struggled with the intricacies and implications of them all, I kept coming back to Thornton. Myra’s death had been as great a bereavement for him as for me, yet he’d been my rock in the aftermath, my wise counsellor in the dark hours when I thought I wouldn’t be able to cope . . .

  Jesus, I hate that word now. Cope. All those well-meaning people, who looked at me anxiously and asked, ‘Are you coping?’ I found myself hating them for their pity. I hoped they would choke on their own kindness. I wanted to rage at them, to shout, ‘What fucking choice do I have?’

  It was Thornie who got me through, for all that his own heart must have been breaking. I might not have made it without him. My own father was no help to me at all; I didn’t know it then, but he was in the last couple of years of his life. He was working too hard, and the diabetes that he hadn’t bothered to tell me about, and was neglecting, was about to lead to irreversible heart difficulty. My dad had always been a remote figure to me. Now I’m inclined to blame him for a lot of things, but in those days he was someone I barely saw, and as I found out after he died, and I learned just a little of the truth about his war, someone I barely knew.

  How I wish now that I hadn’t been so self-obsessed in my youth, and so angry over Michael, that I let him maintain that distance between us. If I had known of the war service that had earned him one of his nation’s highest honours, and had taken the time to ask him about it, to ask him what it was he had done or seen that, I realise now, haunted him forever afterwards, then today I might feel a lot differently about him.

  I never loved my father; yes, that’s the sad truth, and I doubt that he ever loved me either. There’s nothing I can do to change history, but maybe I can find out a bit more about it. I’ve made myself a private promise, that one day, when I’m a man of leisure, I will seek out his past, and find out what it was that he did on his country’s behalf that marked him so badly. He left Alex and me comfortably off when he died, but that meant little to me, for he had left me nothing of himself, nor given me anything when he was alive.

  Thornie was my real dad, and it was him I cried for in the small hours of that night, something that I never did for William Skinner, GC. But no, it wasn’t just for Thornie, but for everything that he had given me as well, for she who had been taken away. My daughter was learning not to cry; I still had a way to go.

  I felt grim in the morning, and in a state of turmoil so deep that I did what I had decided against the afternoon before. I told Alex that I’d be very late that night, and I fixed it for her to sleep over with Daisy. Before I left, I packed an overnight bag and slung it in the car. I was flying on autopilot, but the damn thing was faulty and I was heading for a mountaintop.

  I didn’t go straight to my desk; it wouldn’t have been fair to my team. Instead I told Fred that I’d had a family bereavement and wanted some space. I went to the gym and lifted some weights, then put on my running shoes and spent an hour and more taking out my anger on the streets. I must have covered about ten miles around the city centre. By the time I’d cooled out and showered, I felt more human, and more able to face my colleagues without the near certainty of turning into Mark McManus.

  I did a quick catch-up. There was no news from Newcastle; Milburn and Shackleton were off the radar completely. Our Northumbrian colleagues had run out of ideas, and places to look for them. However there was a message from Alison, asking me to call her when I could.

  I did, there and then. I took care to keep my tone professional. I reckoned that if I did I wouldn’t be overcome with guilt about where I was headed that evening. And anyway, Skinner, why should you feel guilty? No strings, no commitment, careers first and foremost, remember.

  ‘What have you got?’ I asked her, briskly.

  ‘A name for McCann’s mate: Charles Redpath. Steele managed to have a chat with him over the phone, but all he could do was confirm the barman’s story.’

  ‘Description?’

  ‘The clothes match what the man from the mews house told us, but we’ve got nothing more to go on. Redpath isn’t a fighting man from the sound of things. Stevie reckons he didn’t look too closely at the guy, just in case he took an interest in him as well as McCann.’

  ‘Any other leads?’

  ‘No,’ she said, candidly. ‘We’ve got names for a few of the other people who were in the bar, some from Redpath and some from the bar staff. Steele and Mackie are going round talking to them all, in the hope that somebody might have seen the killer and known him.’

  ‘Aye, maybe,’ I murmured sceptically.

  She read my mind. ‘I know, anybody who could might think twice about it.’

  ‘So where do you go now?’

  ‘Back to Wyllie, as you suggested,’ she replied. ‘I’ve read his statement aga
in. It’s one of the vaguest things I’ve ever seen. I do not believe that it’s a straightforward account of what happened, so I am going to give him another chance to get it right.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I told her, ‘but don’t you go to him. Have the bugger lifted; have him brought to Torphichen and tell the uniforms who pick him up to have their serious faces on. Let’s get him as jumpy as we can.’

  ‘That was what I was planning. But I thought we should give him the full treatment. So, how are you placed?’

  I frowned. ‘Ali, I told you this was your gig.’

  ‘I know, but I want your help.’

  She didn’t sound desperate, or indeed anxious in any way. What she was asking was logical: the more weight we could put on Wyllie, the more we would squeeze out. ‘Yeah, fine,’ I agreed. ‘Tell you what. Let’s bring him here. Do you know where he works?’

  ‘Same place as Weir did. B&Q at the Jewel.’

  ‘Right, I’ll send my boys Andy and Mario to lift him there. Those two would scare cheese. Speaking of which, come for lunch at one, and we’ll see him at two, two thirty, once he’s had a wee sweat in our smelliest interview room.’

  ‘When you say lunch, do you mean senior officers’ dining room?’ she asked, with the smile in her voice that always managed to put one on my face, even then.

  My promotion had opened its door to me, although I hadn’t had time to take advantage of the privilege. ‘If that’s what you’d like,’ I replied. ‘But if you’d prefer it, I could get a takeaway from Pizza Hut.’

  ‘You’d be wearing it as a hat, my dear.’

  I’d done it again. I’d begun my conversation with Alison fighting off guilt about my date with Mia, and ended it by inviting her to lunch. But the fact was, she’d lifted my spirits in those few minutes; she’d taken the last of my anger away. Instead of replacing the receiver, I pressed the button in the cradle to get the dial tone. I tried to dial Mia’s mobile number from memory so that I could call her to cancel, but I lost my way after half a dozen digits, so finally I did hang up and reached for my mobile, where it was in the memory. I was scrolling through my directory when the thing sounded; ‘Jean’, it told me.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I asked, before she could speak.

  ‘How did you know . . . oh, these bloody clever mobiles. I’m doing all right, thanks, Bob. I stop for a cry every now and again, but there are things to be done after a death. You just have to get on with them. The undertaker’s been to see me. The funeral’s arranged for Friday afternoon, two o’clock at Daldowie Crematorium.’

  That’s good, I thought, instantly. We’ll still be able to go sailing. My face flushed as quickly as my reaction, at its selfishness.

  ‘You know how to get there?’ she continued.

  ‘My God, Jean, I haven’t lived in the east for that long,’ I reminded her. ‘My parents were sent off from there, remember, and your mother.’

  ‘Of course, I’m sorry, Bob. Will you be bringing Alexis?’ My sister-in-law never shortened her niece’s forename.

  ‘Of course, to that question as well.’

  ‘It won’t be too much for her?’

  ‘You’ve got some catching up to do, Auntie. She would drive cocktail sticks under your fingernails if you asked her that question. At her age, a day’s a week in maturity terms.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she sighed. ‘I keep forgetting. You’re right, I should see more of her, Bob, I know.’

  ‘I hope you will now that she’s your closest blood relative.’

  ‘God, you’re right there too,’ she exclaimed. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘Come and visit us,’ I said, ‘when we’re past all this. Bring the new man too.’

  ‘I’m not sure if he’s ready to meet you,’ she replied, cagily.

  ‘Why shouldn’t he be?’

  ‘Because he’s a policeman too; a sergeant, uniform, stationed in Hamilton. He’s heard of you.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Lowell Payne.’

  ‘What’s he heard?’

  ‘That you’re a hard bastard. His words, not mine. I told him you’re very gentle, really.’

  ‘I’ll look out for him if I’m ever through in that direction and he can make his own mind up. But he’ll meet me on Friday, remember, whether he’s ready or not.’

  ‘True,’ she conceded. ‘Will you be bringing anyone, other than Alexis?’

  The idea hadn’t occurred to me, but given the timing and the geography, we’d be heading for Inverkip Marina after the funeral so . . . ‘It’s possible,’ I told her. ‘But if I do,’ I warned, ‘don’t read anything into it.’

  ‘I’ll reserve judgement on that. You can read anything you want into Lowell. I like him. You will too.’

  ‘It won’t make any difference if I don’t; it didn’t the last time, when you married that arsehole.’

  ‘True,’ she admitted. ‘But Dad liked Lowell, and that’s enough for me. On second thoughts, Bob, you should come to Dad’s house on Friday; the cortège will be leaving from there at one twenty.’

  I promised that I would. As soon as we had said our farewells, I rang a guy I knew in Strathclyde Special Branch and asked him if he’d do me one of those favours that he owed me, by checking up discreetly on Sergeant Lowell Payne, and his reputation within the force. Thornie had started off by liking Cameron, I recalled; he’d always given people the benefit of the doubt, until there was none. If there was anything on Payne’s file that I didn’t like, I didn’t want Jean to find out about it the hard way.

  I went outside into the main office . . . yes, I’d forgotten about the call I’d been about to make when Jean had phoned. McGuire and Martin were both at their desks, making their way through files of continuing investigations that Fred Leggat had given them. I tasked them with picking up Wyllie. ‘Don’t smile,’ I warned. ‘DI Higgins has a feeling about this man, so I don’t want him brought in here full of confidence. If he wants to speak while he’s waiting for us, don’t let him. If he asks for tea or coffee, give him water. If he wants to pee, go with him.’

  ‘What if he wants to take a dump, boss?’ McGuire asked, cheerily.

  ‘Wait outside the cubicle door.’

  ‘Can I go back to St Leonards?’

  I patted him on the back. ‘And to that nice tailored uniform?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he mused. ‘What’s a wee bit of methane against that? Maybe not.’

  They’d been gone for around twenty minutes when Alison arrived. I hung her light raincoat . . . it had been drizzling slightly while I ran . . . in my room, and we headed for the Command Corridor, where the dining room is located.

  ‘On Friday,’ I said as we walked. ‘I’d been thinking that we’d all go in my car.’

  ‘Me too,’ she agreed, readily.

  ‘In that case . . .’ I told her about Thornton’s death.

  She was shocked. ‘Bob, that’s awful. So sudden. How did Alex take it?’

  ‘Better than I did. I won’t go into detail just now, in case it makes me cry. That wouldn’t look good in here.’

  She squeezed my arm. ‘I don’t know about that. It’s a new man thing, and new men are all the rage.’

  ‘I’ll stick to being an old one,’ I said, ‘or middle-aged . . . young middle-aged . . . approaching middle-age. Anyway, the funeral’s on Friday afternoon, in Lanarkshire. Will you come with Alex and me? We can head for the boat afterwards.’

  She stopped walking, and whistled. ‘Are you sure about that, Bob? This is a family funeral after all.’

  ‘A very small family now.’

  ‘Still, I’m not part of it. What would Alex think?’

  ‘What should she think?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, that we were . . . more than we are.’

  ‘She knows how we are, and she’s happy with it. Ali, I’d like you to come.’ I realised that it was true; I wasn’t just saying it because her presence would have been convenient. I hadn’t gone to anything with a partner since Myr
a died. Indeed, I’d never gone to anything with a partner other than Myra.

  ‘If that’s what you want, I’ll come, depending of course on . . .’

  ‘I know, I know, I know: the fucking job. That goes for us both. If there’s a crisis, everything comes second.’

  ‘What would you be if you weren’t a cop, Bob?’

  That was a question I’d put to myself, often. As I’ve said, a few years before I’d been close to becoming a lawyer, although I would have been miserable as the sort of general solicitor that my father was. Probably I’d have made my way to the Bar, with a criminal practice as my objective, or I’d have joined the Crown Office, to concentrate on prosecution. But that was then; my thinking had changed over the years, and journalism had become more attractive to me. I’d a journo friend called Xavi Aislado, a big, serious man, widely regarded as the best reporter in the country. I admired him and could have seen myself trying to fill his enormous shoes. But in truth each of those options would have been a bad second best. If I was snatched away from the job I loved, I’d have been . . .