The Roots of Evil (Bob Skinner)

by Quintin Jardine

  He waited until he heard the sound of the lift doors opening before picking up the recorder. It was a Philips model, low-end with few special features; he guessed that it might have been bought with one purpose in mind. Having used similar models on which the sound quality on replay had not been reliable, he found a cable in a desk drawer and connected the small machine to his computer. He pressed the ‘play’ button.

  ‘Bob, my instruction to Deacon was to destroy this if I was arrested and charged. If you, or anyone else, is listening to it he’s either broken his word or Griff Montell’s decided I’m too much of a risk, and I’m dead.’

  Terry Coats’ voice had a metallic echo, but it was clear and loud, so audible that he turned down the computer volume to avoid it being heard through the wall by Paco.

  ‘My intention was that if I had been arrested I would take my chances with the court, and give evidence against Griff. He must have worked that out for himself, so this is my confession, made to you, because I know that you’ll use it in a way that will protect Harry as far as you can. Just don’t let Noele hear it, that’s all I ask. She hates me already and she’ll use it to poison my son against me.’

  Skinner paused the recording and whistled. ‘That’s a big ask, Terry,’ he murmured, as if he was in the room. ‘If I have to give this to the police it’ll be their call who hears it.’ He pushed ‘play’ once again.

  ‘I’m entrusting this to you because in a way what’s happened to me is your fault,’ the dead man’s voice continued. ‘When you and young Haddock caught me with Aisha, and I told you how it had come about, it was you who sent me to talk to Montell. You suggested that it might get me back into the police and that he might be interested in helping me as it would give him a way back into CID. Then, you cunt, you went and shopped me to Noele. You really do owe me one, Skinner. I thought I could talk to you bloke to bloke, but obviously not.’

  He paused the recording again. He had told Coats that it had been a police decision to let Coats’ wife in on his liaison; she was a serving officer in Serious Crimes and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to keep the story from her. ‘I owe you fuck all, Terry,’ he hissed at the ghost in the room. ‘If you hadn’t been dipping your wick in that woman none of this would have happened, and you might still be living quietly in Fenton Barns.’ He was still seething as he restarted the player.

  ‘Things got messy after that for a while. It was a few weeks before I took my story to Griff,’ the tinny narrative continued, ‘not in his office obviously, but in a quiet corner of Ryrie’s Bar in Haymarket. He heard me out, without saying anything. Finally, he said that he needed to get back to the office, that he’d think about it and that I should come to his place that night to talk tactics. I was seeing Aisha that afternoon, so I said it would have to be the next day, but he said no, to put her off, to tell her that a meeting had come up. I did that. I put her off until her next layover, and I went to Griff’s. He sat me down, he gave me a drink and he left the room. When he came back, he was carrying a metal box. He put it down on the coffee table and he told me to open it. When I picked it up it was fucking heavy. That’s because it was full of gold coins, fifty of them. He told me they were Krugerrands, that each one was worth over a grand. Then, Bob, he switched on the telly, turned up the sound and produced a fucking pistol from his pocket, and he told me that I was either going to walk out of there carrying those coins, or I wasn’t going to walk out at all. I caught on straight away. I said to him, “That robbery you told me about in South Africa, that was fucking you!” He didn’t deny it, he didn’t have to. He was as calm as you like. It was like he’d turned into Michael fucking Corleone. I said to him, “You realise I could take these straight to Bob Skinner.” He said, calm as you like, “Then I’d have to kill him too.” That’s when I knew for sure he was deadly fucking serious. I took the money, but not before he told me there were strings attached. He was interested in Wister Air and the fact that Aisha worked for it. He said she had made up the story about the money-laundering, and the bit about the airline owning the shop as well. He told me to find out the truth. I saw Aisha a couple of times after that, and I quizzed her gently. Finally, she admitted that she was being given the coins by another boyfriend, by her boss in fact, the Russian who owned the airline. I told Griff; he didn’t say anything, or ask me anything about the guy. I know now that was because he knew him already.’

  Skinner paused the recording for the third time, considering what he had heard and guessing ahead. He stepped across his office, fixed himself a coffee and then resumed.

  ‘When he had thought about it, Griff said he wanted to meet Aisha. He said there were a couple of things he wanted to ask her. The problem was, she and I were in a sort of a hiatus. Her routes had been changed, and she wasn’t flying into Edinburgh for a while. She did tell me, though, that she’d be coming into Liverpool in a week or so, then flying out of Manchester next day, and suggested that we meet up in her hotel when she was there. By that time it was the beginning of November. I drove down there, with Griff, but he said he didn’t want to be seen talking to her. He had a look at the map and found a remote spot. He said I should drop him here, pick Aisha up and bring her to him. I did that, but I didn’t tell her about him; all I said was I wanted to go for a drive first. She was fine with that. We drove there but when we arrived, there was no sign of Griff. We were on our own, and she was horny, so we had sex. We were barely done when he appeared, opened the rear door and put a bullet in her head, without a word. I screamed, man. I was going to go for him, Bob, I really was, but he put the gun against my head and said if I wanted it to look like a murder suicide that could be arranged. Bob, you have no idea what that man was really like. He even smiled and thanked me for having left my DNA in her. He told me I was tied in for good now and he was right. I hadn’t known, but I’d set her up to be killed. I was fucked, man, and I knew it. We left her body there, took her clothes and everything else with us and put them in a bin in a motorway service area south of Carlisle, apart from her airline ID, her passport and her jewellery. Griff gave me another twenty coins after that. Most of the first lot had gone, on the deposit on my house and to pay off bookies. The key I’ve left you is for my locker at Harcourt Golf Club, in West Lothian. You’ll find Aisha’s stuff there, with the coins that are left and with a letter for Harry. I want you to keep that for him, until he’s old enough to have it. Not that I’ve finished my story yet. At the beginning . . .’

  He paused the recorder as he heard a sound in the corridor. ‘Fuck me, Terry,’ he whispered, falling silent as his door opened and Alex stepped into the room.

  Sixty-One

  ‘He wouldn’t let me hear it, Dominic,’ she said. ‘All he said was that it was Terry Coats’ confession, to his involvement with Griff and his complicity in two murders. His complicity,’ she repeated. ‘I take that to mean that, according to Coats, Griff pulled the trigger on both of them. I’m still struggling to believe it, despite what’s emerged since he was killed. He couldn’t really have been that evil, could he?’

  ‘He could, Alex,’ Jackson replied, ‘and he was. I never met the man, but on the basis of what I’ve been told and read, I see him as a classic case of a predator without a conscience. As I told you, I knew someone like him when I was inside,’ he added. ‘He made me feel better about myself.’

  ‘How come? What do you mean?’

  ‘He helped me come to terms with what I had done in my youth. Meeting him and talking with him led me to look at myself and confront my own excruciating guilt. I realised that he was irredeemable, but that I wasn’t. I wasn’t rehabilitated in prison, Alex. I was purged.’

  ‘Can you purge me?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t need it.’

  ‘I feel as if I do. I let that man into my life, whenever I chose. Worse, I let him into me. I indulged myself with him, I used him as it suited me . . .’

  ‘Just as he did with you,’ Jackson pointed out.

  ‘
That makes us both the same,’ she countered.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, not in any way.’

  ‘It does in my eyes,’ she insisted. ‘I suppose I suspected there was something different about Griff, but it suited me not to explore it, to leave it under the surface. It suited me because I am a spoiled, self-indulgent cow. I always have been. When Andy Martin and I got together the first time, he was my dad’s right-hand man . . . and he was ten years older than me. In most walks of life, fucking the boss’s daughter can be seriously damaging to your career prospects, but I didn’t care about that. I wanted him and I took him. When he and I were engaged, I saw someone else and I had a piece of him too, only he got caught up in one of my dad’s investigations and I got found out. Then I got pregnant by Andy and I had a termination without ever telling him.’ She paused, her eyes glistening, then carried on, the words tumbling out. ‘I’ll never have a child, Dominic, I can sense that now, and I don’t deserve to. That split us up, Andy and me, but at the first opportunity I took him back. I took him away from his wife and two kids. He couldn’t stand the guilt in the end, but you know what? It never bothered me, at least it hasn’t until right now, because I have never really cared about anyone or anything other than myself. Tell me I’m wrong,’ she challenged him.

  ‘No,’ he said, quietly. ‘I won’t, because you make a very good case against yourself, and someone who’s more objective than I am might well agree with you. But as I said earlier, you don’t need me to purge you, because you’re in the process of doing that right now. The time you’ve spent with me has been all about that. You came here because you were lost and bewildered but you didn’t know why. I did; I could see that you were filled with self-loathing, but I couldn’t help. You had to work it out for yourself, like I did in prison.’

  ‘Is there any of it left in you?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Not anymore. I still hate what I was, but to tell you the truth, I quite like what I’ve become.’

  ‘And I need to start to earn my own respect,’ she murmured, ‘which is why, I think, it’s time for me to go back to my own place. I’ve got one more confession, Dominic. There was one night, one sleepless night, when I stood naked on the other side of your bedroom door, ready to open it and step through. But, thank Christ, I realised that if I did I’d be betraying your trust and my dad’s, and I’d be destroying my self-respect for ever.’

  He smiled. ‘Yes, thank Christ you did, for I might have closed the door behind you. Do you think I’m perfect?’

  Sixty-Two

  ‘At the beginning of last week, last Tuesday, Griff told me to meet him at his place, at lunchtime. While I was there, he used his laptop to access police missing-persons reports in the Manchester area. He found a photograph of Aisha, dead, and a “Do you know this woman?” post. He’d already accessed her email account on her phone . . . it had her date of birth as her password. How stupid was that? . . . and used it to send Anatoly Rogozin a message saying that she needed to see him in Scotland, urgently, because she believed that he had been compromised, over certain events twelve years ago. Those were the words he used. Rogozin replied right away, almost instantly. He said he would be on the Wister Air flight on Saturday afternoon, and that she should meet him. Then Griff booked himself a flight to South Africa, British Airways. I asked him why; all he said was that he owed his sister a visit, and his kids. On the Saturday, he told me to be at my place in the afternoon. He didn’t tell me why, just to be there. I was watching the racing on Sky, and watching myself lose on the second leg of a four-horse accumulator, when he arrived with a bloke in a Crombie overcoat. It was Rogozin. The guy looked slightly bewildered. Griff introduced me and said I was the cousin of Aisha who’d sent him, Griff, to pick him, Anatoly, up, and that she’d be there any minute. I went along with it; I even went to the chippy for three suppers when he told me to. When I got back, everything was still kosher. We ate the suppers in the kitchen. Rogozin liked his haggis, and he even had some Irn Bru, after Griff made a joke of it. Then in an instant, it all changed. Griff said, “Anatoly, bad news. Aisha’s not coming. She’s dead. Dead because you compromised us, yourself, everything, by handing out K-rands like chocolate money when you were pissed. Your slegte winste, for fuck’s sake! She could have been a SAPS undercover officer for all you knew! So here’s what’s going to happen,” he said, and he produced a piece of paper. “You’re going to sign over your share of the airline to Spring and me, right here, right now. Do it and you might just catch your flight home.” Rogozin tried to stand up but Griff knocked him back down. Then he turned on the radio loud, picked up a nutcracker, grabbed the guy’s left hand and broke his middle finger. Rogozin screamed like a bastard, but he wouldn’t sign, so Griff broke another finger. I wanted to stop him, but I knew he wouldn’t just be breaking my fingers, so I just stood and watched. He signed after the third one, on the dotted fucking line. I thought, okay, that it was over and we could all have a drink, that’s how panicky I was. But no, while Rogozin was nursing his hand, Griff picked up a cushion, pulled his gun from the back of his belt and shot him in the fucking head, twice. Poor bastard barely knew what hit him. Maybe that was as well. Rogozin had crapped himself while his fingers were being broken, and I nearly did too, because I thought it was me next, but he just said, “Sorry about that, Terry, but it had to be done. We need to get him out of here, then you need to take me to the airport. I’ve got a plane to catch.” There was a wee bit of blood. He mopped that up with a kitchen towel. He gave it to me and told me to burn it and the cushion in the dustbin later on, then we carried the body into the garage and put it in the boot of my car. I drove us out of the city, south past Straiton and Ikea, and through Auchendinny. It was quiet out there; no cars about. We were just short of a village when he told me to take a left turn and stop there a couple of hundred yards along. We waited for a minute just to be sure, and then we got Rogozin out and hid his body in a field behind a stand of trees. We’d removed anything we thought might identify him before we left the house. When we were back in the car I just drove straight on, but he told me to turn right around and head for the fucking airport, pronto. It had taken us longer than he’d thought. Then his grand plan really went tits up. We went back on to the by-pass at Straiton, right into a fucking tail-back from an accident. We could see blue light in the distance and we knew we were going nowhere until it was clear. I reckoned then that he’d blown his flight, but he stayed calm and eventually we got through. While we waited, he told me I had to put the gun back in his safe. He wrote down the combination, gave me his keys and said he could switch off the security from his phone. We got to the airport, into the drop-off, he gave me the gun, and he jumped out. I could have shot him then, and taken my chances, but I was too fucking scared to think straight. He missed the flight, of course. He turned up at my place back of midnight. I was drunk by then. He said he couldn’t be seen at home, so he’d have to stay there for all the time he was supposed to be in South Africa. On the Monday, he said he needed to use my computer to send the document Rogozin had signed to Cyprus. I said okay, and I persuaded him that I needed to do a food shop. While I was out, I bought this recorder. I used it to make this statement. I’m about to put it in the package that you’ll have received by now, Bob, and give it to John Deacon, my lawyer. I’m quite convinced that Griff will kill me, sooner or later, or that at least he’ll try. There’s always the possibility that the police will actually do their job and trace Rogozin’s murder to us, but I doubt that. We’re both pros and we haven’t made any mistakes.’ The voice stopped, as if the confession was over, until there was a long sigh, and Coats resumed.

  ‘So, Bob, that’s the story, and since you’ve heard it, I’m dead. I’m handing it all to you because I can’t think of anyone who’s better equipped to ensure that psycho Montell gets what’s coming to him, preferably heavy calibre in the back of the head. When you get a chance, tell Harry his dad will always love him,’ Terry Coats’ voice faltered; he had been on the ver
ge of tears, ‘but that he should always look up to his mum,’ he continued, ‘and do what she says.’

  Skinner switched off the recorder and laid it on Haddock’s desk, beside Aisha Karman’s possessions and a sealed envelope with ‘Harry’ scrawled across it in a shaky ballpoint script. ‘It’s all yours,’ he said, ‘apart from this.’ He picked up Coats’ letter to his son and put it in his pocket.

  ‘I should really look at that,’ the DI said.

  ‘Maybe, but you’re not going to. It’s going into my safe for the next ten years, or until I decide that the boy’s ready for it.’

  Sixty-Three

  ‘What will Sauce do with the recording?’ Sarah asked. Bob’s call had taken her by surprise; his excitement was obvious, but normally he would have contained it until they were both at home. She had listened, silently, as he had told her about the package that Terry Coats had sent him from the dark vale of death.

  ‘If he takes my advice,’ her husband said, ‘he’ll give it to Lowell Payne and let him deal with it. Obviously, a report on the death of Anatoly Rogozin will have to go to the Crown Office. In common parlance there is a thing known as the buck, and my guess is that the fiscal will pass it as fast as he can to his boss, the Crown Agent, and so on, until it winds up on the desk of our new Lord Advocate. On the face of it, there are two options. Will she hold the simple line that nobody else is being sought in connection with the death and close the case with no further action? That will lead the media to assume that it was a suicide; most of them won’t even report it, or they’ll give it page five treatment at best. Alternatively, will she order a full-scale Fatal Accident Inquiry with evidence led in public before a jury?’

  ‘Which do you think she’ll choose?’

  ‘I could argue that she doesn’t have a choice. The statute says that she has the discretion not to hold an FAI when, if I remember the wording right, the circumstances have been adequately established in criminal proceedings: repeat, proceedings, not just by an investigation. Obviously, she isn’t going to fancy a public hearing that reveals that the police service had within its ranks a ruthless, cold-blooded killer. She won’t want it, the Justice Secretary won’t want it and the First Minister sure as hell won’t want it with an election coming up in a year’s time. The shit will spray over everybody, me included, because I was the guy who recruited him, and advanced him within the service. I was taken in as completely as everyone else. If you can see yellowy stuff on my face, it’s egg.’