The Roots of Evil (Bob Skinner)

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘That depends how much heat you want to risk. If it was leaked and the Courier in Dundee picked it up, the Saltire would have to follow. That fucker Jack Darke would be on it like a flash. If he found out there’s a connection between Cameron and me through Ignacio and Mia . . . that’s if he doesn’t know already . . . he’d be all over it. If I tried to shut him down, I wouldn’t put it past him to leak that to the rest. It’s been a little over two days since Grandpa left the reservation, he’s a middle-aged man and with his minder Tremacoldi being gone too there’s no reason to fear for his safety. Hold off, I’d say, and let’s see how it falls.’ He took a mouthful from his own mug. ‘How’s the investigation going?’ he asked.

  ‘In a direction I never expected,’ Haddock admitted. ‘It’s clear that Griff was seriously up to something. He told Chief Inspector McGlashan, and he told Noele, that he was going to South Africa last Saturday, and he even checked in for his evening flight and dropped his bag, but he never got on board. We’ve got him on camera in the airport, landside, three and a half hours before flight time, then we lose him . . . until about half twelve on New Year’s Day, when he and Coats turned up dead.’ He sighed. ‘The stuff we found in the safe, that really threw me, and now I know about his involvement in the robbery . . .’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  The young detective updated his mentor on his discovery, from Spring Montell and later from Major Pollock, of the dead man’s part in the drama of the unsolved bullion hijacking. ‘I’ve read the report. There was only one thing in it that I wasn’t told by Pollock. The route they took from the gold refinery to the depository was decided on the day by the officer in charge of the escort vehicle. That was Griff, as he had seniority. There were six options; the one he chose went over a stretch that was off highway. You can see the entrance and exit on Google Earth street view, but not the track itself. That runs for maybe a mile until it re-joins the roadway. That’s where the robbery happened. I’ve logged the file and attachments on to the investigation database, but I can email it to you if you want.’

  ‘A bit fucking late for that, since this is the first I’m hearing about it,’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘Why was it left off his application when he came to Edinburgh? Be sure it was, Sauce; I would not have seen that and forgotten about it. Why did Pollock not tell me in the covering letter that came with it? Why was there no mention of it in his service record?’

  ‘Pollock told me that he didn’t think it would affect the transfer,’ Haddock explained. ‘He said it was such a traumatic experience for Griff that he wanted to help him to put it behind him, to leave it in South Africa. He was shot twice and left for dead.’

  ‘But he wasn’t fucking dead, was he? And if you’re right and he did want to forget it all, why would he tell Terry Coats about it? That’s where we first heard about it, from Terry when he was caught shagging the air hostess. Have you found her yet?’ he asked, suddenly.

  ‘She’s still on our to-do list. I’ve asked Jackie to trace her, through the airline.’ He grimaced. ‘The DCC’s been good, giving me extra manpower, but I could sure do with having Noele back. Fuck me, I could do with Sammy Pye getting over his bug, and taking the load off me.’

  ‘Neither of those things will ever happen, Sauce,’ Skinner said, quietly. ‘It’ll take a real effort to keep Noele in the job at all, and as for Sammy,’ his face darkened, ‘it’s no bug, I’m afraid. Don’t press me about it, but you can take my word for it, he’s not coming back.’

  The DI stared at him. ‘Seriously?’ he whispered.

  He nodded.

  ‘The place is falling apart, gaffer.’

  ‘Then it’s up to the likes of you to hold it together. Who’s handling the Howgate murder?’ he asked. ‘I saw a Saltire news feed just before you arrived, but of course I knew about it from Sarah. Who took the media briefing? All it said was that it was a police spokesperson.’

  ‘The new press officer, on the DCC’s orders. Pending the autopsy, we’re still calling it a suspicious death, but only for the media. Two shots in the forehead.’

  ‘The second one usually rules out suicide,’ Skinner observed, grimly. ‘Do you think it links to Griff and Coats?’

  ‘I’m not thinking anything. I don’t have the luxury of speculation. I can only deal with what I can prove.’ He glanced at his mentor. ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘Given the time-frame, I’d be assuming it does until I knew different. Have they identified the victim?’

  ‘Not yet. From what I’ve heard from Lottie and Jack McGurk, someone wanted to make it hard for us. But we’ll . . .’ He broke off as his mobile sounded. ‘Jackie,’ he said as he took the call, then fell silent, listening. ‘Thanks,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t know where that takes us, forward or back.’ He turned back to Skinner. ‘The count rises. Jackie’s just off the phone to the Wister Air HR department. Coats’ bird, Aisha Karman, went missing last November. She flew into John Lennon Airport in Liverpool, coming from Amsterdam. She was supposed to join a flight from Manchester to Cape Town next day but never showed up. She was booked into a hotel called the Grange, at Manchester Airport, but didn’t turn up there. The airline waited for three days and then reported her missing to the police in Liverpool and they’ve heard nothing since.’

  ‘When did we catch her with Terry Coats?’

  ‘A few months before that.’

  ‘I reckon you should get in touch with your Scouser colleagues,’ Skinner suggested, but in a way that made it sound like an order, ‘and request that they get the finger out.’

  Twenty-Six

  ‘There you are, Mr Douglas,’ Sarah Grace said, as she handed two small containers to the technicians. ‘Two bullets retrieved from the brain of Drawer Three. They’re the same calibre as the one I took from Drawer Five yesterday. It’s up to you to determine whether they were fired from the same gun.’

  ‘Thanks, Prof,’ he replied. ‘Do you have anything else for me? I’ve taken fibre samples from all of his clothing, and the shoes are off to London. If that’s all there is, I’ll head off to the lab.’

  She turned to Mann and Cotter. The DCI was paler than she had been an hour before, but her colleague seemed unperturbed. ‘Drawer Three was a healthy male, aged somewhere between fifty and sixty, or possibly a year or two older. He was physically fit, a non-smoker and his liver shows no sign of excessive alcohol consumption. His last meal was battered haggis and chips, consumed very shortly before death, with Irn Bru on the side. His bladder evacuated itself when he died, as did his bowels, but Scotland’s national drink hadn’t made it that far. Wherever he died, I’d say it wasn’t far from a fish and chip shop.’

  ‘Vinegar or sauce?’ Mann asked.

  The pathologist smiled at Cotter’s puzzled expression. ‘She’s asking me, Sergeant, whether he was from Edinburgh, and liked brown sauce on his supper, or from the west of Scotland and took vinegar. Tribal customs that you obviously haven’t caught up with. The answer, DCI Mann, is vinegar, but don’t read too much into that. Now what may be good news,’ she continued. ‘I had the body X-rayed and that revealed that the man had a plate in his right femur, put there to repair a bad fracture, around five years ago. I’ve removed it; it was made in England, but that’s not definitive, for these things are exported all around the world. However, it had a serial number, and I’m hopeful that the manufacturer will be able to tell me where it was implanted, and into whom. His killer tried to remove all identification; he was careless when he left the shoes behind, but there’s no way he could have known about the plate.’

  ‘Killers,’ Mann said, quietly. ‘We saw the victim in situ. There’s no way that he was put there by one person alone unless he was the size of Drew McIntyre.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ Cotter enquired. ‘One of your Glasgow villains?’

  ‘National hero, more like,’ his boss replied scornfully. ‘He’s a wrestler. How about time of death, Professor,’ she continued. ‘We know he was there for a while, b
ut how specific can you be?’

  Sarah frowned. ‘Looking at the physical and other factors, rate of decomposition, and the beginnings of saponification in the area of the body that was resting on a very wet surface, my estimate is that he died some time on Saturday. Looking at insect invasion, and animal depredation, I believe that the body was dumped not long after he was killed. On the assumption that it wasn’t done in the daylight hours, you’re looking at Saturday night or Sunday morning.’ She paused, looking Mann in the eye. ‘There’s one thing about the body that I haven’t mentioned, and it could be important. Three fingers on the left hand were broken, fresh fractures, untreated. That suggests there was a struggle before he died; either that, or the man was tortured.’

  Twenty-Seven

  ‘I don’t know why they reported it to us, mate.’ Haddock was sure he could hear the officer on the other end of the line stifle a yawn. ‘If she was booked into a hotel in Manchester, like you say, they should have reported it to the Mancs, shouldn’t they?’

  ‘That’s a debate for another day, Constable,’ the Scot said, failing to keep his irritation from his voice. ‘What I’m asking is if she’s still on your books as a missing person.’

  ‘Let me look, then. Kaufman, F, no, that’s a bloke. Yeah, here she is; Karman, A, female. The file’s still open, so she’s still missin’, as far as we know. Happens from time to time, mate, especially with cabin crew on the smaller airlines. The pay’s crap, they line up a better job in one of the countries on their routes and next time they’re there, like, they just bail out. Where’s this girl from? South Africa? Yeah, I could see that havin’ happened.’

  ‘Maybe you could, Constable Lynch, and maybe you’re even right, but has your force actually done anything to locate this woman? Even something as basic as circulating her photo?’

  ‘We don’t have one, mate.’

  ‘Fuck me!’ Haddock gasped. ‘Even I’ve got one and I’ve only started looking for her today. I’ll email it to you. I need this woman; she’s a potential witness in a double-murder investigation.’

  ‘Then you better talk to my boss, mate.’

  ‘That would be Detective Chief Inspector Mate, and yes, that would be an idea.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ the Liverpudlian said stiffly. ‘If you’ll hold on for a minute, I’ll see if she’s available.’

  The minute stretched into a second, and then a third. He was on the point of hanging up when a female voice came on the line. ‘DCI Haddock? I’m Inspector Jamie Ellis. You need our co-operation, I’m told.’

  ‘Acting DCI; DI really. I only used it to light a fire under your doorkeeper.’

  ‘Bert Lynch?’ she chuckled. ‘Sorry about that. He’s a year and a half off retirement and he doesn’t give one.’

  ‘If you think about having a whip round to send him off early, let me know. I might contribute.’

  ‘He gave me the bones of the story, would you care to flesh them out?’

  ‘Sure. I’m the SIO on a double murder in Edinburgh; one of the victims was a serving police officer, the other an ex-cop. I’m trying to trace a South African woman, Aisha Karman, age twenty-eight, last seen in Liverpool in July. She worked for an airline called Wister Air, but dropped out of sight somewhere between John Lennon Airport and the Grange Hotel, Manchester. Her employer reported her missing, and from the little that PC Lynch could tell me, she still is.’

  ‘She’s a potential witness in a cop murder, you say.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay,’ Inspector Ellis said, decisively. ‘I’ll dig out the file and put a team on it. Don’t worry, PC Lynch will not be on it. If she’s anywhere in the North West we’ll find her. Is she likely to co-operate?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ Haddock admitted. ‘She’s suspected of smuggling stolen gold into Scotland, so she might not be too keen to talk to us.’

  ‘Can you give me grounds to hold her?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure I can find a sheriff who’ll give me a warrant that lets me bring her back to Scotland, but that’ll hold for as long as it takes her to brief a half-decent solicitor. The source of my information was one of our murder victims, so he won’t make a very reliable witness.’

  Twenty-Eight

  ‘How much progress have they made, Mario?’ the chief constable asked, as her deputy came into the room. Outside, the street lights lit the evening, as she finished tidying her desk, and readying herself to go home.

  ‘On tracing the perpetrators?’ he replied. ‘Frankly, none. On uncovering stuff that we never knew or suspected about Inspector Montell, remarkably well.’ He briefed her on the discoveries made in his apartment, on the security that had been installed, and on the facts about his South African service that Haddock had uncovered.

  ‘Jeez,’ she sighed. ‘You think you know people. Although,’ she continued, ‘I can’t say that I ever really knew Montell. He was a fixture, always there with a smile when one was needed and a word, and yet, now I think back, it was all superficial. He was like a mirror; when you looked at him you never really saw anything of him, just a reflection of yourself.’ She shuddered. ‘How many people do I really know, I wonder?’

  ‘How many can you know, Maggie? You have going on for eighteen thousand officers under your command, and on top of that about five thousand civilian staff. If you knew any more than three or four per cent of them on a personal level it would be a miracle. Even remembering that many names would be an achievement.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about my officers,’ she retorted. ‘I meant people in general. Mario, you know me better than any man alive; we were married, but I never let you get close. In the end, I drove you away and you were happy to go. That’s how I am. I have a barrier built into my personality and it’s impenetrable. Yes, Stevie got inside my wall. Stevie made me happy, Stevie gave me a child. And then Stevie opened that booby-trapped fucking door in that fucking house and Stevie died.’ Her face contorted with the pain of the memory. ‘I know now I should have had counselling after it happened, but instead I had cancer, then I had Stephanie and I rebuilt my wall around us both. Since my sister went back to Australia to pick up her career again, and I put Steph into day care, we’ve been completely alone. When you called me to the crime scene in Torphichen Place, I could only go because you sent an officer to stay with her. How many friends do you think I have? People to call up for a chat, people to meet for a drink. None. I’m not kidding, none. I am completely absorbed in myself and my daughter, and that’s how I feel most comfortable. At work, I’m exactly the same, introspective, and I can feel myself shrinking. When I took over this job, I hoped I would expand into it. Before, when I was climbing the ladder, it was okay, because I had my little box of things to do and that was manageable. When I became Andy Martin’s deputy, it still was, because Andy never delegated anything to me. Then I became chief, and overnight the box was enormous. I’ve managed for a while, but gradually it’s begun to eat me. I’ve been pushing more and more in your direction and Brian Mackie’s and Doreen Irons’. You’re running the fucking force now, Mario; I know it, you know it and so does anyone who operates at our level. Yes, occasionally I will try to assert myself; for example on Wednesday morning, when I summoned DS McClair . . . fuck, I’m sitting here trying to remember her first name . . . to the crime scene to identify we had the body of the father of her child. That was an awful thing to do but something inside me said, “It happened to me, so you can face up to it too.” Inevitably, I’m taking it home. When I got back on Wednesday morning I shouted at Steph. I don’t remember ever doing that, ever. She cried, and so did I and that’s when I knew, Mario, that I can’t do this anymore. I’m resigning. I’m all my kid’s got and she deserves far more of me. Fuck it, so do I!’ She looked up at him from her chair, as the tears began to stream down her face.

  He stepped across, sat on the edge of her desk, and took her hand. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ he said, gently. ‘I should have realised how bad it was and helped you before now. You do have
friends, you know; you’ve got Paula and me for a start, and big Bob and Sarah, and Brian, and Sauce, and everybody who’s been alongside you all these years.’ He frowned. ‘This is my fault, Mags. You talk about driving me away, and maybe you did, but I didn’t go that far. When Stevie died, I should have been there for you far more than I was, but just like you, I was too wrapped up in myself.’ He pulled a tissue from a box on the desk and handed it to her. ‘Dry them, go on, and tidy yourself up, while I tell you what’s going to happen. You’re not resigning, you are going on sick leave. You’ve got mental-health issues and, like any other officer, you’ll be assessed by a police-service doctor, and we’ll go by the findings. Agreed?’

  She nodded and gave him a watery smile. ‘If you say so, big guy.’

  Twenty-Nine

  ‘Aw no,’ Cheeky Davis moaned, as her partner’s phone sounded by the side of their bed. ‘With this thing going on I wasn’t expecting you to have a Saturday morning off, but it’s ten past eight.’

  ‘Not for this guy,’ Sauce replied, drowsily. ‘He’s in Pretoria, and they’re an hour ahead of us.’ He accepted the call. ‘Good morning, Major Pollock.’

  ‘I’m calling from home, Inspector,’ the South African said. ‘I thought you’d want to know this right away. We’ve found Griffin’s cousin. He was stopped late last night by a patrol car about fifty kilometres from the Namibian border. He said he was going on holiday, but the officers didn’t believe him, since he had virtually no luggage beyond an overnight bag. He’s being brought straight to Pretoria by car but it’s a long way, well over a thousand kilometres. As soon as I have him here, I’ll arrange for you to talk to him, maybe tomorrow morning if that suits.’