Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel

by Quintin Jardine

  She smiled. ‘I know, it’s over for me too. All right. Night, Pops. Good night, Ciaran. Good night, Alison, and please don’t let them keep me awake.’

  ‘I won’t,’ my occasional bidey-in promised. ‘See you in the morning.’ She waited until the door had closed and for a few seconds after that, before continuing. ‘Now tell me what really happened.’ Earlier while I was changing, I had given her a quick rundown on Hastie McGrew, and about the raid on his father’s house. I had left out most of the detail but as soon as Ciaran had mentioned helicopters and battering rams, her police officer’s brain had drawn conclusions.

  McFaul’s expression changed; his head slumped a little and the humour left his face, as the last of the action juice wore off.

  ‘What happened,’ he repeated, ‘. . . was that after that bloody sergeant’s performance, when I got in there, where I was supposed to be, our man was waiting for me, and he was armed. He had the drop on me. Holmes was in his pool, being floated by his masseur or nurse, whatever he is. That caught my eye first and when I looked at his son he had a gun on me. I was looking right down the barrel, Alison, and I couldn’t move. He told me to drop mine, and I did. I saw his eyes narrow and I said the fastest Hail Mary! I’ve ever managed in my life, for I really did think he was going to fire. And that’s when Bob shot the gun clean right out of his hand from the patio door. Personally, I’d rather he’d hit him in the head.’

  ‘I could have,’ I told him, ‘but the hand was the safer target, for you, not for him. He could have pulled the trigger by reflex.’

  ‘You might have missed.’ He shuddered.

  ‘I don’t, from that far away.’

  He chuckled, grimly. ‘I didn’t know that. All I could think was that I didn’t have any spare underpants.’

  Alison was anxious. ‘He didn’t give you any more trouble, did he?’

  ‘No,’ I assured her. ‘He couldn’t. His left hand’s pretty much useless, as a result of a service injury. After a year of feeding his father, for a while he’s going to find out for himself how that feels.’

  ‘Where’s McGrew now?’ she asked.

  ‘I had him taken to the Royal A&E, under armed guard, to have his hand fixed. The bullet went through the base of his thumb and out the other side. As soon as they’re ready to discharge him, he’ll be moved to Fettes. He can have his sister’s old room; I released her as soon as we’d secured Hastie.’

  ‘And what about their father?’

  ‘Perry? He’s still at home. We’d no grounds to arrest him. Suppose we had, where would we have taken him? No, we left him with his nurse, and there are officers front and back of the house. It’s not that he’ll be going anywhere but I don’t want the press to get near him.’

  ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘Have you ever met Perry?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. He was raging after it had all happened. It was almost frightening to see, all that anger contained in a body that’s quite unable to move. He was naked in the pool, and that made him even more furious. Vanburn took him out of the water on a trolley thing that he uses, but he had to sedate him before he even started to dry and dress him. As soon as he was back in his chair and able, I tried to question him, but by then he was back to the old Perry. Same old line that he’s been using for years: “I’m a legitimate businessman, and I’m not responsible for the actions of those around me. Now go and prove otherwise, but while you’re doing that I’ll be calling my lawyers.” Nailing Perry Holmes was never an option, love. We’ve done the best we could. We’ve got Hastie, plus we found his car round the back. I left a search team going through everything. They won’t turn up anything incriminating in the house, but they did find a knife in a scabbard, taped under the passenger seat of the car. It’s a Gurkha kukri; an army souvenir, I guess, since that’s who he served with. He’s bound to have burned the clothes that he wore the night he took care of the guys on Tyneside, but there’s a stain on the face of the squab of the driver’s seat. The SOCOs were afraid to put luminol on it in case they compromised it, but they’re sure it’s blood, and the hope has to be that it can be matched to Winston Church.’

  Alison picked up the bottle, topped up our glasses and set it back down, empty. McFaul was well and truly down from his cloud. His eyes were starting to glaze over. I didn’t mind that; we were probably heading for an argument next morning over the custody of McGrew and it would do me no harm if he had a bad head.

  ‘Interesting stuff, blood,’ she murmured. ‘Would you like to hear my news now, while you still can?’

  I hadn’t given it a thought since we’d spoken in the afternoon; I’d been focused on Holmes and son, the family firm. ‘Of course, sorry.’

  ‘Well,’ she began, pouring herself some white, then leaning back, ‘I took your advice. I did some cherchezing. The last time I was in uniform I picked up a little inside knowledge. Do you know that we have a specialist rape unit in the force?’

  I nodded. ‘Of course; staffed by women officers only, naturally.’

  ‘Almost, but there are specialists they can call in on cases of male rape. However, I went to the women, or rather to one in particular, the team leader, Inspector Martina Chivers, and I asked her about reports on a specific date. Everything they do is very confidential, so much so that if there is doubt, or if the potential victim declines to make a complaint, no report is made, to anyone.’

  ‘Not even to Alf?’

  ‘Not even him; even when there is a complaint, the name’s withheld from circulation and only goes to Crown Office. However, Martina was prepared to tell me, girl to girl, that on the day after Weir, McCann and Telfer met up for their boys’ night out, a woman was brought into the office in Wester Hailes, in the early afternoon. She was seen by a patrol car, in the street, in a dazed and distressed state, with her clothing dirty and dishevelled. The rape unit was called in, she was medically examined and the doctor determined that there had been multiple rape, and that she’d been sodomised. Semen samples were taken, and in due course these determined that at least three men were involved, each with a different blood type; one was A positive, as are half the population, a second was type O positive, that’s one in every three people, roughly. Neither of those is much good as an identifier,’ she smiled, ‘but guess what? Albie McCann was AB positive . . . as are only three in every one hundred people.’

  The message penetrated my befuddled mind. ‘Well done you. And the victim was . . . ?’

  ‘The victim, once she got a hold of herself, refused to make a complaint.’

  ‘She what!’ I exclaimed, startling McFaul.

  ‘She said that she had been at a party that got out of hand.’

  ‘Yet she allowed herself to be brought in?’

  ‘Yes, but she was pretty much hysterical when she was found.’

  ‘And she submitted to examination?’

  ‘Yes again, but she said later that she’d been under the influence or she wouldn’t have. Then she demanded that they called her a taxi. She wouldn’t take a lift home in a police car, even though it was offered.’

  ‘Did the unit take blood samples?’ I asked.

  ‘With the rest, yes, of course. Tests showed neither drugs nor alcohol in her bloodstream.’

  ‘Did she give a name?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Alison rolled her eyes. ‘Martina shouldn’t have told me, but she did, in confidence. She called herself Mary Whitehouse.’

  ‘Tell me you’re ki . . .’ I broke off. ‘No, you’re not, are you?’ My mind was working again, and heading in a direction that I did not like at all. ‘In a case like this, complaint declined, wouldn’t all the evidence be disposed of?’

  ‘Normally yes, but Martina didn’t believe her party story, not for a second. She hoped she would change her mind and come back, so she carried on with the lab work, and got those results. The blood types were enough for me; three gentlemen songsters out on a spree on the evening before she was found, and thirty-three to one odd
s on that one of the sperm donors was McCann. I got an arrest warrant for Telfer; a couple of Grampian officers flew out to the platform this afternoon to lift him and bring him back onshore. He’ll be driven down to us tomorrow morning.’

  Her initiative made me smile. ‘Do we actually have grounds for arrest?’

  ‘Suspicion of rape? How’s that?’

  ‘But there’s no complaint,’ I pointed out.

  ‘There is now, I made one, on Mrs Whitehouse’s behalf. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if we believe that a crime’s been committed, don’t we have a duty to investigate?’

  ‘You could argue that,’ I conceded.

  She beamed. ‘Good, for I told the sheriff you’d asked me to apply for the warrant.’

  I drew her a long look. But what could I say? ‘You know what this does, don’t you?’ I murmured. McFaul was watching us, with the flickering eyelids of someone pretending to be sober and alert.

  ‘I think so,’ Alison replied. ‘But I want you to be the one to say it.’

  ‘Mary Whitehouse equals Mia Watson: same initials. That magazine article. Mia was the victim.’

  ‘A fair assumption, but that’s still all it is, a guess.’

  ‘Maybe, but . . .’ I stood. ‘Just a minute.’ I left the room and went upstairs. Alex was still awake, reading Thomas Wolfe . . . the original, not the Bonfire of the Vanities man. ‘Think back three weeks,’ I said. ‘Was Mia on air every day?’

  She frowned at me. ‘No,’ she answered instantly. ‘She was off air on Thursday and Friday. Period problems.’

  ‘What?’ I gasped.

  ‘That was what she said, more or less, when she came back next Monday; she said that she’d had an awkward visit from a persistent friend. Girl talk, Pops. Why are you asking?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Everything fitted, and there was one additional piece of evidence; only I knew about it, and I’d be keeping it to myself. With my new knowledge, Mia’s frightened and fierce reaction when I wakened from my nightmare made perfect sense to me if she’d been a rape victim a couple of weeks before. And yet, if she had . . .

  I went back downstairs, and repeated the story to Alison, and the bewildered McFaul, who was a few glasses beyond understanding what we were talking about. ‘Not such a big jump now,’ I said.

  ‘How do you want me to play it?’ she asked, suddenly tentative.

  I shrugged. ‘In whatever way you think best.’

  ‘What would you do?’ she persisted.

  ‘If it was me, I’d show Martina Chivers her photo, for confirmation, then I’d pull her in.’

  ‘For what reason, though?’

  ‘Jesus, how many do you need? Subject to Chivers’s confirmation we know she was a victim of a sexual attack by three men. We believe that one of them was Albie McCann, and we’re sure we know who his associates were. Further testing and comparison of the samples will prove it for sure. Two of them are dead, Ali, and the other one’s been out of reach since the attack. On the basis of that alone, you could bring her in for questioning. But if you go back to Wyllie and Redpath, ask them whether the person they saw could have been a woman, and if either one says that it’s possible, you could arrest her on suspicion of murder.’

  ‘Seriously?’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I said that you could do that. I wouldn’t go as far as that, not at first, but I’d certainly be inviting her in for a polite chat. If she refuses, then I’d go looking for a warrant.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you get involved if it comes to that?’ she asked.

  The ground under my feet grew very shaky all of a sudden. ‘What?’ I laughed; a little theatrically, but she didn’t seem to notice. ‘Lift my daughter’s heroine and alienate her affections forever?’ I said. ‘You’re not on.’

  No way could I have been involved in arresting Mia, but not because of Alex; in fact, my blood ran cold at the thought of being cross-examined by her QC in a criminal trial. Tell the court, Detective Superintendent Skinner, didn’t you have an intimate relationship with the defendant? Didn’t it end badly? Isn’t this whole thing your attempt at revenge?

  ‘And if I do it,’ Alison challenged, ‘how’s Alex going to feel about me?’

  And what would defence counsel feel if he knew about us? Detective Inspector Higgins, isn’t your attitude towards my client coloured by her affair with your partner, Detective Superintendent Skinner?

  ‘That, my dear, we will deal with if it happens.’

  Eighteen

  Beyond all the potential for career damage, I was worried about what Mia would say to Alison about me, if they did come face to face. For all that I was pretty sure I could talk my way out of it, even if she spilled the whole damn tin of beans, still I was unsettled, not by the potential embarrassment itself, but because I realised what a selfish bloody fool I’d been, and most of all because I cared about Ali more than I had realised, and about the comfort that I was finding in our relationship.

  That concern was set firmly on one side by a call on my mobile as I waited in a queue of traffic near the office, with a recuperating Ciaran McFaul in the passenger seat of the tank. (And there was I, led to believe that Geordies could hold their drink. That was a joke, by the way; a near-death experience can do that to you.) It was from David Pettigrew, in the Edinburgh procurator fiscal’s office. They’re the prosecutors in Scotland, and technically we investigate crime on their behalf.

  ‘Bob,’ he said, ‘I need you to come and see me, in my office now. It’s about the Hastie McGrew arrest.’

  ‘Has his dad’s lawyer been leaning on you?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you expect? He’s been shouting about wrongful arrest, attempted murder even.’

  ‘Fuck him. If I’d wanted to kill the guy, he’d be dead.’

  ‘I know that and I’ve told him as much.’

  ‘Who is his lawyer anyway?’

  ‘Ken Green.’

  ‘Wanker.’

  ‘Agreed, but he’s not the problem.’

  ‘So what is?’ I snapped, losing my patience.

  ‘I’ll explain when you get here.’

  ‘Fuck it, Davie, I haven’t begun to question the guy yet.’ I was giving him a hard time, principally because invitations to the fiscal’s office were never to discuss the time of day; they always signalled a crisis of some sort or another.

  ‘Bob,’ he sighed, ‘would I ask if I didn’t have to?’

  ‘No,’ I conceded, ‘I suppose not. But I tell you now, if that fucker Green’s in the room when I get there, I’m walking straight out.’

  ‘He won’t be, I promise; but it’s not just you I need. I’d like your English colleague to join us. Can you pick him up and bring him?’

  ‘I don’t have to. He’s with me. I’ll see you in however long it takes.’

  By the time I’d extricated myself from my traffic queue and found a parking space, it had taken twenty-five minutes. And I was annoyed. I strode into Pettigrew’s office, full of hell, with McFaul tagging along an my heels. ‘Okay, Davie,’ I began, when I was no more than halfway into the room, ‘what the fu—’ I stopped short. He wasn’t alone. He was sitting at his meeting table with a woman, around forty, slim, dark hair, dark suit, frowning and all business.

  He rose, she didn’t. ‘Bob, Detective Inspector,’ he greeted us, ‘thanks for coming. This is . . .’

  ‘I know who she is,’ McFaul said. ‘Morning, Paula. Bob, this is Mrs Paula Cherry, from the Crown Prosecution Service, Newcastle office.’

  She nodded, but still didn’t crack a smile.

  ‘Is this your back-up, Ciaran?’ I asked, not best pleased. ‘I thought we’d agreed that I’d question McGrew about the Watson murder then let you take him south.’

  ‘I didn’t send for her,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got no idea . . .’

  ‘Take a seat, gentlemen,’ the fiscal said, ‘and let me tell you why we’re here. We have a situation. Ken Green is demanding that we release Mr McGrew immediately. Apart from the usua
l bluster, he is also threatening a civil suit against the police. Bob, it would be helpful if you ran through the circumstances that led you to raid Perry Holmes’s house yesterday and to arrest his son.’

  I did, in detail, step by step from the finding of Marlon Watson’s body in the disused public baths, through McGrew’s sister’s fling with Tony Manson, to our discovery of his existence and of his true identity, finally tying him to the murders in Newcastle.

  ‘Okay?’ I concluded, annoyed more than ever by the woman’s silent frowning presence. ‘Where’s the problem with any of that? Now, can Ciaran and I go and hit the guy with rolled-up Yellow Pages or whatever it is you imagine we do to suspects?’