Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel

by Quintin Jardine

  I left her to charge Wyllie and went back upstairs. I took Fred Leggat into my glass-walled closet and gave him a rundown on how the interview had gone, and on Alison’s investigation in general. I didn’t expect him to be involved, but he was my de facto deputy in the Serious Crimes Unit, so it was only right for me to keep him in the loop on all of its business, even that which had been slung our way for reasons of convenience, office politics and public relations. When I’d been offered the job by Alf and the chief, they’d given me fair warning that would happen.

  ‘What’s your thinking, Bob?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t have any yet. Same weapon, same killer, same approach, provoke and attack. Three possibilities: it could have been random, the man with the knife could have had a grudge against the victims, or someone else might have. I’m not going to make any guesses; Alison’s are as good as mine at this stage, and she’s running the inquiry.’ I paused. ‘How are we going on the other priority task?’ I asked, without much optimism. There were no grounds for any: we were seven days from the murder, five days into the investigation, no sign of any motive and our two major suspects were nowhere to be found.

  ‘Well,’ he began; something in his tone took my attention. ‘I don’t think we’re any further forward than we were, but this fax came in from Newcastle.’ He’d been holding a couple of sheets of paper, clipped together. He laid them on my desk and pushed them towards me. ‘It’s the full intelligence file on the man Winston Church; there’s something in there that jumped out at me.’

  I picked it up and began to read through it. Church was an archetypal local hoodlum of his era. He was sixty-nine years old, and had emerged in the post-war period as a black marketeer, diversifying, when rationing ended, into just about anything that was criminal and, typically, some things that were not. He had been the top man in his city through the sixties, seventies and through the eighties, by force of arms; the feudal lord of Tyneside. His file suggested that he was the man who had got the real Carter, in the real-life gangland episode that had been fictionalised for the screen. In a biopic of his life he might have been played by Ricky Tomlinson or Warren Clarke, or even by Michael Caine.

  But he was history, the file said; an old man with little power left to direct or restrain the new breed who had moved in on his patch. They tolerated him, in the same way that the outgoing chairman of a football club is made president for life, and they ignored him. Even his one-time loyal retainers, like Milburn and Shackleton, had gone freelance, their muscle and other services for hire.

  I was wondering why Fred had wanted me to read his tired story when a name jumped off the page at me, one of a list of ‘former associates’.

  ‘Alasdair Holmes?’ I exclaimed. ‘What the fuck was Al Holmes doing with this guy?’

  ‘Probably supplying him,’ Leggat volunteered. ‘If you look at the timeline in the file, Church’s decline began after the Holmes brothers were shot.’

  ‘That’s of some interest,’ I conceded. ‘We both know that Al never did anything on his own initiative. His brother was his keeper, in every respect. But as you say, they were indeed shot. Al’s dead, and even if Perry wasn’t a cripple with round-the-clock care needs . . . he never went within miles, personally, of the likes of Winston Church.’

  ‘So I understand,’ Fred agreed. ‘That’s why I don’t see it as relevant. Just a curiosity, really; that’s why I drew it to your attention.’

  I gazed at the report, and I smiled. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s no more than that, but given who’s involved . . . I think I might just go and visit the sick.’

  Thirteen

  I didn’t take grapes with me, or even a bunch of the petrol station flowers that were popular in those days (and may still be, for all I know) with guys who had wool to pull over their wives’ eyes. Perry Holmes might have been a basket case, but his past hadn’t been erased, not in my eyes, or in those of any cop who’d seen the aftermath of some of the things he’d ordered.

  My former colleague Tommy Partridge was among them. He devoted a large chunk of his career to putting Perry away but he never came close, and because of it he was a bitter man when he retired. Holmes was much, much too clever, for all of us. He never got near to the things that were his, and he was never near anything that was done in his name. When I was in my last year at secondary school, an old policeman came to speak to my debating group. In an off-the-record moment, he told us, ‘You are all bright young people, with working lives ahead of you. I shouldn’t give you this employment advice, but the fact is that should any of you choose to go into crime, then with your intelligence and backgrounds, you probably have a ninety per cent chance of being successful.’ Holmes was living proof of the truth he spoke; he was a brilliant, ruthless man. Tony Manson had learned a lot from him, but he wasn’t his equal.

  I’d only ever met him once, in the Western Infirmary, two years before, after Billy Spreckley had killed his brother and shot him four times. One of those bullets had lodged in his brain, and was still there. His consultant neurologists, all three of them, for Perry wasn’t a man to accept only a second opinion if he didn’t like it, said with unanimous certainty that he was going to die. He was conscious and responsive, though; I was sent by Alf Stein to interview him about the shooting, and about anything else he cared to discuss . . . to take a dying declaration, in effect.

  He didn’t care to say a word, not a cheep. He didn’t care to die either. After a few months it became obvious that he wasn’t going to, not any time soon at any rate, and so he was transferred to a nursing home while a new house was built for him on an estate that he owned just outside the city, all on one level and fitted out to meet the needs of a quadriplegic.

  He’d been kept under observation there, for a while, just in case his surviving old associates started to roll up to his door, but none of them had. No police time was spent on him any longer. Received wisdom, and the evidence of our own observation, was that his criminal enterprises died with his brother Al, and, shortly afterwards, with Johann Kraus. They had been his main conduits, the means by which his orders were delivered, and executed. Without them, and with no means of replacing them, the word was that he devoted himself from his wheelchair exclusively to the legitimate side of his business empire, the vast property portfolio that he had built up with very thoroughly laundered money, and a development wing which the banks and other institutions were always ready to fund, because he was very good at it, and always gave an excellent return on investment.

  The underworld vacuum that he had left behind him seemed to have been filled not by one person, but by several, of whom Tony Manson was one. He was dominant in Edinburgh, but in other areas of the country there had been a couple of turf wars, with fatalities, before the new order had established itself.

  I’d met Al Holmes often enough; he was pulled in quite regularly by the drugs squad, and given as hard a time for as long as the law would allow, but Perry’s system was foolproof. He swept his house and his office for bugs every day, and he never had discussions, only oneto-one meetings, with no third parties present. Al was a shit, and nowhere near as bright as Perry, but he was too scared of his brother ever to cross him.

  Kraus and I had crossed paths too. He was almost as big as Lennie Plenderleith, but not in his league when it came to tough, or for that matter in the same league as me, as he found out one time when he took a swing at me in an interview room. I’d hoped he would; that’s why there was no one else there. He had a fearsome reputation, but only with a gun or a chainsaw in his hand. When one of our marksmen took him down, the squad had a whip-round for the shooter.

  I was thinking of him as I pulled up outside Perry’s new house. Kraus had lived on a small farm that was part of the estate, and it was suspected that some of his victims, including most of Mia’s brother and uncle, had gone into an incinerator there. And that made me think of Mia for the first time in a few hours; it was just gone four o’clock and she was on air until half an hour before I w
as due at her place. Too late to cancel gracefully . . . if I’d really wanted to.

  I stepped out of the Discovery and walked up a long white marble pathway that led to the front door. It was opened before I reached it by a man in a blue nurse’s tunic, a large black man, with short frizzy hair; he wasn’t smiling. I glanced around looking for the camera that must have picked me up, but I couldn’t see it.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the doorkeeper asked as I approached; his accent could have been from anywhere other than Scotland, and I’d never seen him before.

  ‘I’d like to speak with Mr Holmes,’ I replied.

  ‘Then you’ll be disappointed, sir. Mr Holmes does not receive visitors.’

  ‘I’m a hard man to disappoint,’ I countered. ‘I apologise for not calling ahead to make an appointment, but the matter is important, and it’s only just come up.’

  ‘You’d have been wasting your time trying to call. The number here is ex-directory.’

  ‘Those don’t exist for me.’ I pulled my warrant card and showed it: I’d no reason to hassle the guy, and he had every right to refuse me entrance. ‘That says I’m a police officer, Detective Superintendent Skinner. You’re doing your job, sir, but so am I, and mine overrides yours. So please go and ask Mr Holmes if he has five minutes to assist me in a murder investigation in which he is not, I repeat not, a suspect.’

  He made his choice, and let me step into the hall. ‘Very well. Please wait here.’

  I did. He left through a door in the far left corner. While he was gone I scanned the place carefully for the next camera, the one that I was sure was trained on the door, but I couldn’t spot that either. The guy was gone for five minutes, but I kept my patience. If he was going to ask me to leave he’d have been back sooner.

  When he did return, he was brisk and to the point. I saw that he had a professional bearing, not that of hired muscle. ‘Mr Holmes will see you, Mr Skinner,’ he announced. ‘I’m sorry for the delay, but we’ve been moving him to his receiving room. If you’ll come with me . . .’

  I followed him into a broad corridor, more of a second hall, in fact, with several doors off, all double width. The set that faced us were of dappled glass, and he led me towards them. They opened out into a conservatory big enough to accommodate a tennis court and a few spectators into the bargain. It looked into a walled garden, and was expensively but not heavily furnished, a circular table and a couple of armchairs, that was all. Its main feature was a pale blue tiled swimming pool, with a ramp rather than steps leading into it.

  But no, the main feature was probably Perry Holmes himself. He was waiting for me, seated upright in a wheelchair with a high back, a head restraint, and padded arms. His right hand rested on a control pad. It moved very slightly, one finger, no more, but he started to roll towards me.

  ‘I won’t shake hands, Mr Skinner,’ he chuckled, hoarsely. ‘I probably wouldn’t even if I could. You can sit down, though. Would you like a wee refreshment, as they say?’

  ‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘Are you sure? I can’t join you since Hastie here has to feed me, and we don’t do that in public.’ I glanced across at another blueuniformed man who was standing close by, pale-skinned, slimmer and smaller than the other. ‘But don’t let that put you off.’

  ‘No, really.’

  ‘As you wish. You can leave us now, lads.’ The two men withdrew, without a word. ‘They’re my carers,’ Holmes said as the door closed. ‘Hastie’s a nurse, highly trained and very experienced; Vanburn’s my masseur. I need a lot of that, to keep me going. They’re good lads; they allow me a certain lifestyle, and they’re with me pretty much full-time. As you can see, I have very little movement; facial muscles, fingers and toes, but that’s it . . . apart from erections. Ironically, I still have those, but they have nothing to do with muscle movement. The doctors say it may have something to do with the bullet in my brain, but those people say I should be dead, so what the hell do they know?’

  ‘Are those two your only staff?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied. I noticed for the first time that his chair had high supporting pads on either side of his head. ‘I have a housekeeper, a chef, both Chinese, and a personal assistant.’

  ‘Assisting you with what?’

  ‘My business activities, of course. My property holdings, and my other investments, take a lot of management, and I’m becoming more involved in development again, after my involuntary hiatus. Miss Young . . . that’s my assistant, is a lawyer with an accountancy qualification. I recruited her from a merchant bank; I pay her a bloody fortune, but she earns it.’

  I settled into one of the soft white armchairs and studied him. The Perry Holmes I’d interviewed had been wired up to half the devices in the Western Infirmary, but he’d been a solid, formidable man. Two years on, he’d lost some weight, but his eyes were keen and bright, and his life force was strong. He was past sixty, but take him out of the chair and you wouldn’t have guessed; you’d have called him ten years younger.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asked. ‘What are you thinking? Do I look like that poor wee professor chap? Or the Father of the Daleks? Come on, tell me; I don’t have many visitors, it’s useful to know what people really think of me.’

  I told him exactly what I’d been thinking, and saw pleasure register on his face. ‘That’s good. You don’t feel sorry for me, then?’

  ‘Mr Holmes,’ I replied, ‘suppose you were sitting on hot coals with an imp of hell poking hot needles in your eyes, I wouldn’t feel sorry for you. That bullet in your brain doesn’t absolve you of all the crime you’ve committed, or rather that you had committed, through your brother. To tell you the truth, I had a wee bit of sympathy for him when I saw him lying dead in the mortuary, evil bastard that he was, since he was never really a man in his own right, just the instrument of your will, him and that big German pansy, Kraus. How do I feel about you? Like many people do: sorry that Billy Spreckley wasn’t a better shot, and didn’t put all four in your head.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he conceded. ‘I like a man who speaks his mind. If you’re that repulsed by me, then how about giving me a good thump on the head? The slightest blow could kill me, so my consultants all agree. Christ, if you hit one of these support pads hard enough, and I know you could, that would probably do it. Nobody would ever be the wiser either, because there wouldn’t be a mark on me.’

  I frowned; and then I smiled. ‘You’ve got a point there,’ I said. I started to rise from the armchair. Just for a moment, a tiny moment, I saw a flash of uncertainty in his eyes. It was enough. I sat back again.

  ‘Bastard,’ he murmured, and then he grinned too. ‘You didn’t do it, though. And do you know what that tells me? That you are what you say I am . . . or I was: someone who delegates to others the things that he’s too careful, or circumspect, to do himself. But that’s just what you do: you delegate the shitty end. You catch your thieves, your murderers, and although sometimes your instincts may be Old Testament, as they clearly were with the late Johann, judging by the contempt with which you spoke of him, you don’t act upon them. Instead you simply deliver the people up to justice; to the jailer, or half a century ago to the executioner.’

  ‘That’s my job,’ I pointed out. ‘If I let my own feelings get in the way, I wouldn’t be doing it properly. There’s this too: I work for society; you work against it.’

  ‘Me?’ he laughed. ‘I’m a property tycoon.’

  ‘Of course you are, Mr Holmes, of course you are. Now, can I ask you, as a property tycoon, or as anything else, does the name Winston Church mean anything to you?’

  I had a big advantage over Perry, in his situation. He couldn’t look away from me. Sure he could have turned his chair around, but I could have turned it right back. He could have closed his eyes, I suppose, but he didn’t. He surprised me by holding my gaze and replying. ‘Would that be Mr Church of Newcastle?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a name I
recall. I’ve never met the gentleman, but I believe my late brother may have . . . on what business,’ he added, ‘I know not. Why do you ask?’

  ‘He’s connected to a couple of people we’re interested in eliminating from a murder investigation. I appreciate that you’re a respectable property developer, but I’m wondering, did your late brother ever mention any other people in Edinburgh who might have been acquaintances of Church’s?’

  His face was expressionless. ‘I can’t think,’ he replied, slowly, ‘that any of my brother’s friends would have felt the need to move in his circles. Let me get this right,’ he continued. ‘Are you saying that Mr Church has business interests in Edinburgh, ambitions even?’

  ‘No, that’s not my view. He ran out of ambition a while back, from what I’ve been told. I’m trying to establish whether he might have provided services to someone who has.’

  Holmes blinked. ‘If that’s the case,’ he said, ‘you might want to find that person before Mr Tony Manson does.’