The Bad Fire (Bob Skinner series, Book 31): A shocking murder case brings danger too close to home for ex-cop Bob Skinner in this gripping Scottish crime thriller

by Quintin Jardine

  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’r
e 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.’

  ‘Going back to the accusation,’ Alex murmured, ‘you said that Marcia denied it vehemently.’

  ‘Absolutely, from the beginning. She protested her innocence from the outset. When she was charged, she said that was how she intended to plead – and then the procurator fiscal had a private word with her solicitor. He told him that there was more than enough evidence to convict, and that if she went to trial, the sheriff would be likely to impose a custodial sentence, precisely because she was a public figure. On the other hand, if she pleaded guilty, there would be a modest fine and that would be it.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘It didn’t get that far. The day before the pleading diet, she was found dead.’

  ‘Did she leave a note?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Was there any hint that she was about to take her own life?’

  ‘None. On the contrary, she told Austin the night before she died that she intended to go to trial.’

  Alex frowned. ‘Did the police treat her death in any way other than suicide?’

  ‘Not that I could see. The investigating officer was the man in charge of the shoplifting case.’

  She gasped. ‘You’re joking. That’s . . . it’s irregular at the very least.’

  ‘It was nine years ago,’ Brass pointed out, ‘in a different policing environment.’

  ‘I don’t care if it was in the reign of Queen Victoria,’ she retorted. ‘Given the possibility that the death was linked to the prosecution he was driving, that should never have been allowed. Do you know the officer’s name?’

  ‘Terry Coats; he was a detective sergeant at the time, later detective inspector. Mind you, Austin did have a measure of revenge. He did an exposé on the man in Brass Rubbings a year or so back, and Coats was held to account. He resigned from the force shor
tly afterwards. I believe he was briefly a suspect in Austin’s murder.’

  ‘That much I do know,’ Alex said. ‘My father had a run-in with him. You’re correct, he was a suspect, but he was eliminated very quickly.’ She paused. ‘How did the Terry Coats piece come about? Was Austin watching everything he did, looking for evidence of any wrongdoing?’

  ‘No, he was very careful about Coats. The fact is, he was tipped off by a very senior officer that it was worth taking a look at him.’

  ‘Was that a coincidence, or did that officer share his doubts about the accusation against Marcia?’

  ‘I can’t honestly say, although I suspect that if it was the case, Austin would have told me.’ He paused, but only for a second. ‘No, it’s not possible,’ he decided. ‘Before he ran the exposé on Coats, he cleared it with me. I noted that it didn’t refer back to his mother, and he said no, that he didn’t want to be seen as less than objective, not until he had one hundred per cent proof of a conspiracy. Then he would act.’

  ‘This person who spilled the beans on Coats. Do you know who it was?’

  ‘I believe so. If I’m right, she’s dead.’

  Alex nodded; she sat silent for a while, considering everything that he had told her. ‘Mr Brass,’ she continued, ‘this is a very sad story and I sympathise with you for the losses you’ve suffered. But what do you want me to do? Why are you here?’

  He gazed at her across the width of the table; his eyes were kind, but as sad as any she had ever seen. ‘I would like to see justice done, for Marcia and for Austin. Her death triggered the circumstances that led to his murder. If she hadn’t died, he would never have started that blog of his, never have been working on the story that got him killed. He’d have had a quiet and fulfilling career and the world would never have heard of him. But he didn’t. To my shame, I encouraged him to start Brass Rubbings and backed him financially until it started to generate revenue. It was very popular. It didn’t take long until its readership was large enough to attract advertisers.’ He wrung his massive hands and winced. ‘I should have seen the danger in what he was doing, though. I should have realised that he might attract the attention of dangerous people, both within the police force and beyond.’