Skinner frowned. ‘But he can’t prove it.’
‘No chance. It’s his version against my client’s; reasonable doubt wins every time.’
‘So what’s your problem?’ her father asked.
‘I believe Jack’s theory too. I’ve spent enough time with my client to know that he’s a fucking psychopath; also, I have seen the previous convictions that the jury couldn’t be shown, including one for an assault that was serious enough for him to do eighteen months in a Young Offenders Institution. Despite all that, we have a woman in a chronic vegetative state, and the guy who put her there will be discharged.’
He shrugged. ‘As an ex-cop, kid, I agree with you. But it isn’t your fault. It’s Jack’s, for being too soft on the guy and failing to secure a confession. It’s the examining medic’s, for not being able to tell a self-inflicted wound from a real one. Either that, or you’re both wrong and it happened exactly as your client described. Either way, you have done your job to the best of your ability and should be as proud of yourself as I am.’
Alex winced. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Pops, but professional satisfaction is as much as I can muster. I have too much sympathy for the woman, whatever the truth of it. Her brain isn’t dead, but it’s massively damaged. Even if it did happen as Reilly – my client – says it did, it’s a hell of a price to pay.’
‘You’re not having second thoughts about your career switch, are you?’ Skinner frowned.
‘No, I’m not,’ she insisted. ‘When I went down this road, I knew that moral questions might arise. This is the first of them, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘Does it make you reconsider the offer that was made to you, to spend some time in the Crown Office as a prosecutor?’
‘No,’ she replied firmly. ‘I’m not ready for that yet. But it might make me think about representing victims of crime.’
‘I know plenty of those,’ Skinner murmured. He paused. ‘Is that why you wanted to see me, to get this off your chest?’
‘Partly, but there are a couple of other things. Firstly, there’s Uncle Jimmy’s memorial service on Thursday. Is Sarah going with you?’
‘Unless a last-minute job comes up that can’t be delayed, yes, she is.’
‘Can I tag along with you?’ she asked.
‘Of course. It won’t just be Sarah alongside me. June Crampsey’s going too, and her father, Tommy Partridge. I’ll have a row reserved for us; there’ll be a place for you.’
‘How about Andy?’ she murmured. ‘If he shows up, will he be welcome?’
He frowned. ‘Last I heard, Sir Andrew Martin was in America, lecturing and licking his wounds after his monumental fuck-up as the first chief constable of the national police service, or Holyrood’s Folly, as I like to call it. I doubt that the death of Sir James Proud got too much coverage in the US media, so he may not even know about it. He’s not on the guest list, that I can tell you. I know because his successor asked me to approve it on Chrissie Proud’s behalf.’
‘How is Lady Proud?’
‘She has vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s,’ Skinner said. ‘It hasn’t registered completely with her that Jimmy’s dead. Maybe I should give her his fucking dog back, as a substitute.’
Alex laughed. ‘Come on, you and Bowser are getting along fine, and the kids love him.’
‘The kids don’t have to clean up after him when we walk him.’
‘You could trust them to do that, surely.’
‘Like hell I could. And our village being what it is, the first time James Andrew neglected to bag a turd, the family would be named and shamed on the Facebook news group.’
She smiled at the thought. ‘I assume that you’ll be speaking at the service.’
Skinner shook his head. ‘No. I was asked, but I declined.’
‘You what?’ she gasped.
‘I said no. I’m history. Maggie Rose is the chief constable, and she served under Jimmy. It’s her place, not mine.’
‘But she didn’t know him,’ she leaned on the verb, ‘not like you did. You were his friend as well as his deputy. You spoke at Alf Stein’s funeral, but you weren’t nearly as close to him,’ she added.
‘I was a serving officer when Alf died. Love, near as dammit everybody who’ll be in St Giles’ Cathedral was Jimmy’s friend. It’s best that Maggie does it; she should have her place.’
‘I flat out don’t believe you. There’s another reason for you refusing. And don’t try to tell me you don’t like public speaking, or you don’t believe in God.’
‘I’m not going to try and tell you anything. Subject closed. You can tag along with Sarah and me, and if Andy Martin does show up, I will shield you from him.’
‘I don’t need shielding!’ Alex protested.
He winked at her. ‘Maybe not, but I’ll do it anyway. Now, what’s the other thing you wanted to ask me?’
‘It’s about my next visitor,’ she said.
‘What’s he supposed to have done?’
‘Nothing, as far as I know. He called and asked for an appointment, but he refused to tell Clarice what it was about. Normally she’d have insisted he tell her, but there was something about him, she said, that stopped her from doing that. She just slotted him in for five o’clock today.’
Skinner shrugged. ‘So why are you quizzing me?’
‘Because his name is David Brass: the same as that blogger who was murdered in Haddington a few weeks ago – Austin Brass, the guy who was a thorn in the flesh of the police with that website of his. Brass Rubbings, wasn’t it called? You were involved in that investigation. Is there a connection between them? Big coincidence if there isn’t.’
He nodded. ‘Yes: David is Austin’s father. I met him a couple of times during the investigation. As a matter of fact, you can blame me for the contact. I gave him your card and suggested that he give you a call.’
‘My turn to ask you. What’s he supposed to have done?’
‘Nothing at all. You were talking earlier about representing victims of crime. This could be your chance.’
‘Are you suggesting that I help him raise an action against his son’s killer?’
‘Not at all,’ Skinner said. ‘It’s not related to that . . . well, I suppose it is eventually. I don’t want to get into it. It’s best that you hear the whole story from him than second-hand from me.’ He grinned. ‘I should warn you, though. There won’t be a hell of a lot of money in it.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Thanks a bundle, Pops. I don’t just have my own mouth to feed. There’s Clarice, my PA, and Johanna, my associate.’
Her father raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t give me that; you’re doing all right. Not like CAJ, but okay. Johanna, she feeds herself by handling the sheriff court work that you don’t fancy.’
‘Will you sit in on the consultation?’ she asked.
‘Hell, no. You don’t need me. It’s best that you hear him out, then make your own judgement on whether you can help him. Besides, I don’t plan to spend the whole day here; the weather’s too good for that. I’m going to the beach, kid – with Bowser, of course.’
Two
‘If I didn’t live in an apartment, I might get a bloody dog myself,’ Alex grumbled as she gazed through the glass at the sun-bathed city. ‘If I did, I might spend less time in here.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if it was chucking it down outside,’ Clarice, her assistant, countered. ‘Besides, time is money, isn’t it?’
‘Not necessarily. I do a lot of productive thinking when I’m on the move. I’m like my father in that respect.’
‘As far as I can see you’re like your father in most respects. I’d only met him the once before this morning, but looking at the two of you, you’re definitely from the same pod. Okay, you’re prettier than he is, and you don’t have that thousand-yard stare he shows from time to time, but in attitude, you’re identical.’ She paused. ‘He’s pretty fit too, for a middle-aged gentleman,’ the matronly brunette mused, ‘in those
shorts and that T-shirt. Something of a FILF, as my daughter-in-law might say.’
‘Stop right there, woman,’ Alex laughed. ‘My stepmother’s a pathologist. She works with dead people, but if she heard that, she might make an exception for your kid.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind. Still, it’s been worth your while to stay in the office today. You got a result for your attempted murder, and two new clients. A corporate fraud trial; that’ll go on for weeks, won’t it?’
‘If it gets that far,’ she conceded. ‘I haven’t seen the prosecution case yet, only the complaint that’s been made by the alleged victim’s solicitor.’
‘Your old firm? Curle Anthony Jarvis?’
‘Yes, and that’s an added complication. If the indictment goes so far back that the complaint covers the period when I was in the corporate department there, I might have to declare a conflict of interest.’
‘Is that likely?’
‘I don’t think so. The client was given my name by Jocky Scott, the senior litigation partner at CAJ: not directly, but through his wife when she rang Jocky to raise merry hell about him reporting her husband to the police. He wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t been sure I could take the case.’
‘So, you see, it hasn’t been such a bad day. Your man Reilly is out from under an attempted murder charge, but you’ll still collect a fee, and this one will be potentially ten times that – and not from legal aid either.’
‘Neither was Reilly. He’s a dentist, remember?’
Her prediction that the Crown would drop the case had been proved correct just after two p.m., when Serena Colley, the advocate depute who had been leading for the prosecution had called to throw in the towel. ‘You’ve been lucky in this one, Alex,’ she had said. ‘You took a chance turning down the serious assault plea. If my boss had listened to me and let it go to the jury, there was a fair chance we’d have got a conviction.’
‘Outside chance, at best,’ Alex had countered. ‘But no chance at all that the appeal court would have let an attempted murder verdict stand. The evidence wasn’t there.’
‘Maybe not, but it would still have left a mark on the bastard, professionally. I don’t hear any triumph in your voice, by the way.’
‘No comment.’
There had been an ironic chuckle on the other end of the call. ‘Reilly won’t be doing your next implant, then.’
‘Fuck off, Serena. Take it like a woman.’
DI Jack McGurk had called her an hour later. They were friends, but for a year and more their only contact had been professional. ‘Congratulations are in order, I hear, Alex.’
‘Or commiserations, depending on which side you’re on.’
‘Mmm.’ His disappointment had been almost palpable. Strangely, she felt pleased that he had been able to make the call in a civilised way. A month before, a ‘not guilty’ verdict in a drugs trial in the high court in Glasgow had been followed by an email from Brendan Yeats, the DCI in charge, so vicious that she had considered forwarding it to Police Standards. ‘Alex, do you ever regret a verdict?’ McGurk had asked, in sorrow, not anger.
‘Honestly, no, but I don’t celebrate either. My first duty is to the court, not the client. If I had felt that Reilly’d had no other option but to plead guilty to attempted murder, that’s how I’d have advised him. If he’d refused, I’d have told him to find another advocate, because I won’t present a defence I can’t believe in. But your case wasn’t rock solid, Jack. The Crown Office let you down. They should have gone with serious assault and countered my self-defence claim with an excessive force argument.’
‘Hey, maybe I can get them to continue on that basis?’
‘Not now. They’ve told the judge they’re withdrawing. Move on, mate; that’s what I’m doing. In fact, by coincidence, I have another dentist coming to see me at five. This one’s retired.’
‘What’s his problem?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘As long as it doesn’t involve what’s on his laptop.’
A shiver of dread at that prospect ran through her. She had decided privately that if she was ever asked to take a paedophilia case, she would find herself otherwise engaged.
She checked the time on her phone, her ear registering the sounds of Clarice shutting down her computer for the night, and of Johanna, her associate having an argument on the phone in her small office. It was ten past five; Mr Brass was late. She decided that she would wait until five thirty, then change into the gear in which she had walked to work that morning, and run home, across the Meadows and then through Holyrood Park. It was five minutes short of that when she heard a soft ‘ping’ as her outer office door opened.
She greeted him in the reception area: a stocky man, carrying a briefcase, mid to late sixties, she estimated, no taller than she was, with rounded shoulders, long arms and big hands. He was unsmiling and there was a sadness in his eyes.
‘My apologies, Ms Skinner. It’s so long since I’ve come up from Kelso. I thought the traffic would have been lighter at this time of day, but it took me by surprise when I had to join the city bypass.’
‘That takes everyone by surprise. Its peaks are unpredictable; I’m fortunate in that I rarely have to use it. Come through to my office, Mr Brass, and tell me what my father thinks I can do for you.’
Surprise registered in his eyes. ‘Sir Robert told you?’ he exclaimed.
‘No, he didn’t. When I mentioned your name as my five o’clock appointment, he admitted that he’d given you my card, but he refused to tell me what it’s about.’ She ushered him into her office and to a seat at her conference table. ‘I know your son was murdered a few weeks ago. Are you considering an action against the man who’s been accused? It’ll be months until he’s dealt with, even if he pleads guilty, as I hear is likely.’
‘No,’ David Brass replied. ‘That idea never entered my mind. My son isn’t the only member of my family to have died an unnatural death. I’m here to talk to you about Marcia, his mother, my former wife.’
‘What happened to her?’ Alex asked, settling into her chair.
‘She took her own life, nine years ago. She was accused of shoplifting clothes from a supermarket called LuxuMarket, in Kilmarnock. She denied it, vehemently, but she was prosecuted, and the media gave her a hard time. She was a target, you see, a local councillor, and a vociferous one. She made more enemies than friends on the council, but her constituents loved her. She was a constant irritant to the powers that be, which means Labour, on the West Coast Council.’
‘I notice you called her your former wife, not your late wife,’ she observed.
‘Your father really has told you nothing. Marcia and I were divorced. It was how we celebrated the Millennium, she used to joke, although it was a little after that. It was my fault more than hers. I wasn’t the most faithful husband, but none of my flings ever came to anything and we remained on good terms, held together by our son to an extent.’ A less likely Lothario Alex had never seen; she did her best to banish the thought from her expression.
‘What were her politics?’ she asked. ‘What party did she represent on the council?’
‘She was an independent.’
‘How did she die?’
‘She took an overdose. She was a hospital manager; the investigating officers determined that she stole a lethal dose of morphine from the pharmacy.’
‘This all happened nine years ago, you say. What brings you here now?’
‘Marcia maintained that the shoplifting charge was a frame-up, from start to finish, and so did Austin.’
‘Your son ran a blog that focused on police misconduct. Did he ever use it to advance that theory?’
Brass shook his head; for the first time she realised that it was disproportionately large. There was something simian about the man. ‘No, he was more discreet than that. Not least because he was warned off by the supermarket’s very aggressive owner. We made a fuss after Marcia’s suicide, of course we did. But the media
were, well, frankly disgraceful; they played a part in her death, no doubt about it. The local paper ran a front-page lead under the headline “Shamed councillor facing theft charge”. It assumed Marcia’s guilt and told the whole story, leaked to them no doubt by the police.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Alex pointed out. ‘It could just as easily have been the supermarket.’
‘Given its attitude, that wouldn’t surprise me,’ Brass conceded. ‘We fought back, of course; I wrote to several newspapers but none of them published my letters. Austin went to one of the tabloids and suggested in a comment to a journalist that the supermarket was responsible for her suicide by its intransigence. That got some coverage, but LuxuMarket’s owner replied by threatening to sue him to within an inch of his life, or words to that effect.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘That’s when he decided to set up the blog,’ he continued.
‘My son didn’t have a bitter bone in his body until his mother died. The change in him was instant; he blamed the police as much as LuxuMarket. They had made him cautious, but he saw the police as open targets. He abandoned a very successful career as a child psychologist and began to pursue and investigate complaints against them, always intervening on the side of the aggrieved. He found cases easy to come by; they were all over the media. He went to the people involved and set himself up as an advocate on their behalf. Where a complaint was spurious, he realised that early on and gave it up. But where there was something in it, he did a little investigating and then went straight for the jugular. In the early days of the blog, he copied his posts to all the Scottish news desks. After a couple of spectacular successes, well covered by the red-tops, his fame spread and people with grievances began to approach him, rather than the other way around. He was even approached by the police on occasion, by serving officers who knew of something that wasn’t right but couldn’t do anything about it internally, for a variety of reasons.’
The Roots of Evil (Bob Skinner) Page 32