‘You sound as if you knew her,’ Alex suggested.
‘I met her,’ he admitted, ‘a long time ago. She had a connection with somebody I knew.’ He glanced through the window, towards North Berwick. ‘Yes, a long time ago. So Sauce Haddock is Grandpa McCullough’s son-in-law,’ he mused.
‘In a manner of speaking. And Cheeky’s his heir.’ She grinned. ‘Which means, now that I think about it, that my half-brother Ignacio is Cheeky’s step-uncle, his mum being married to Grandpa. I wonder if she and Sauce have figured that out. It’s weird that our family should be intertwined with his.
‘What do you think?’ she asked suddenly. ‘If you met Goldie, do you think Grandpa was really in charge of everything? The police did. My ex was deputy chief on Tayside and he spent a lot of time trying to nail him.’
‘Mmm. The man who used to be Andy Martin,’ Jackson remarked quietly. ‘I think he was probably wasting his time. Cameron McCullough is a very successful businessman. He’s also a very clever man, so why put everything at risk by getting involved in organised crime when he was making just as much money legitimately? Did he know about his sister? Undoubtedly, for everyone in Dundee did. Did he protect her? Probably. Did he restrain her from time to time? Possibly. Did he ever allow her to launder money through his businesses? Absolutely not.’ He paused. ‘Come on, let’s go upstairs, out on the deck. It’s too nice a day to be stuck in the house.’
Alex let him lead the way; the deck, as he described it, was slatted wood over the roof of the building, L-shaped, facing south and west, looking up towards the city of Edinburgh and its great landmark, the castle. She waited as he produced a second patio chair from a storeroom. ‘You seem to know a hell of a lot about the activities of the McCullough family,’ she ventured as he handed her a spritzer, taking a soft drink for himself. ‘Is that your day job? Are you a journalist? Do you write investigative stuff for the Saltire? Is that how my father knows you?’
‘No to all four questions. My day job? I’m a psychologist; that’s what my doctorate’s in. I teach at Heriot-Watt. My speciality is criminal behaviour.’
‘You’re a profiler?’
He smiled, faintly, almost shyly. ‘I have been used as such.’
‘By the police?’
‘Not yet, but I’m working on it.’
‘MI5?’
‘No, they’re more involved in prevention than detention, I think.’
‘And the last question? How do you know my father so well?’
‘We’re former business associates, you might say.’
‘You were a cop?’ Alex exclaimed.
‘No, I was a criminal. Bob put me away, for my own good as much as society’s, he told me.’
She stared at him. ‘He did? He never mentioned you, not to me, and yet he talked about his cases a lot. There was no point in him being discreet; most of them wound up in the papers, with his name attached. What did he lock you up for?’
‘Murder. Three of them . . . although there was one I didn’t do,’ he added, watching as surprise and uncertainty registered on her face. ‘I wasn’t called Dominic Jackson then; that was the name on the fake passport I was using to escape when he caught up with me. I liked it, so I used it to register at the Open University and kept it when I was released. My birth name is Lennie Plenderleith.’
Alex gasped. ‘You’re Lennie Plenderleith? The Lennie Plenderleith? Of all my father’s customers, as he calls them sometimes, you’re the only one he speaks of with anything other than contempt.’ She paused for a few seconds. ‘In fact you’re the only one he speaks of much at all. He’s never mentioned Dominic Jackson, though.’
‘I’m impressed by that; I assumed he told you and Sarah everything. I really am Dominic now. Lennie was a misguided twin brother who did things out of loyalty rather than pure malice . . . although he did have plenty of that. Did Bob ever tell you about someone named Tony Manson?’
‘Yes, a while back; nowadays, very rarely. The man he never caught, he says.’
‘Tony was the man Lennie worked for. He rescued him from a terrible family background – alcoholic parents, brutal older siblings – and took him under his wing. Tony wasn’t a marginal case like Grandpa McCullough; he was organised crime, and Edinburgh was his. Bob left plenty of bruises on him, but he never put him away. Even so, he didn’t lose too much sleep about it. Nothing was ever said, but there were lines drawn and Tony was smart enough to know not to cross them.’
Alex gazed at him. ‘Are you saying that my father let a criminal go free?’
‘No, I’m saying that Tony was very careful never to give him grounds to arrest him.’
‘But Lennie gave him grounds, didn’t he? More than once, from what he told me.’
Dominic gazed back. ‘Yes, he did. Bob Skinner put Lennie Plenderleith away twice, the first time for assault. And you know who was behind that?’
‘Tony Manson,’ she replied. ‘He told me that much, that he had an anonymous tip-off about potential trouble, though the voice wasn’t very well disguised. But he didn’t explain why Manson would do that.’
‘He did it to protect me. Tony had an anonymous tip-off himself, that he was in someone’s bad books. Lennie was a problem, though. By that time everyone was afraid of him, and so they should have been where Tony was concerned, because Tony was like a father to him. Therefore, before they came for him, Lennie would need to be removed.’
She whistled. ‘You’re saying that Tony Manson got you . . . sorry, Lennie locked up for his own good?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And he died because of it?’
‘Oh no, he took care of that threat by himself, through some hired help from London. Tony died because he became careless. He got in tow with a couple of con men, just before Lennie was due for release. One of them stabbed him to death; unfortunately for them, they didn’t know about Lennie. It didn’t work out too well for either of them, or for anyone else involved in that business.’
‘Did that include Lennie’s wife?’ Alex asked tentatively. ‘Dad said he pleaded guilty to her murder as well.’
‘That’s right, he did, but he didn’t kill her.’
‘So why the hell did his counsel let him admit to it?’
‘Those were his instructions. There was some forensic evidence, enough to lay the charge. Lennie was already going away for two murders; a third wasn’t going to make any difference. He pleaded to it because he was pretty certain that Tony Manson had done it, to stop Lennie finding out that he had been servicing her while Lennie was away.’
‘Would Lennie have minded?’
Dominic sighed. ‘That’s the irony of it. That short spell in HMP Saughton was the great turning point in his life. In fact, it was the beginning of the end for him, and the birth of Dominic Jackson. It was the first opportunity he had ever been given to explore his own mind and to contemplate the reality of his sad existence. He came to see many things, and he realised that Tony Manson had stuck him in there for his own development as much as for protection, probably even more so. Tony could actually have told Lennie to go and kill his rival, and he would have, but I believe he knew that if he’d done that, he’d have been locking him into that life for ever. Would the newly evolved Dominic Jackson have gone Old Testament if he’d discovered that Tony had been having it off with Mrs Plenderleith? No, because he was leaving her behind too; that was his plan. He wouldn’t have married her in the first place. Would Lennie have gone off on one if someone hadn’t done for Tony already? I doubt it. He suspected it and he might have been disappointed in him, but a shouting match is as far as it would have gone.’
‘I see,’ she murmured. ‘I’m still getting my head round the fact that my father knows all this, yet never mentioned a word about you to me, not until today, and that even then, he’s left me to find it out for myself.’
‘I must admit, I’m pretty impressed by that too, but here’s how I see it. When your father caught up with me after Lennie killed those pe
ople – I’m making a distinction, because it was Dominic Jackson that he caught – Lennie had done everything he had to do; he’d ceased to exist. If Bob had been one minute later, I’d have been away, off to the other side of the world with my inheritance from Tony, and nobody would ever have found me. But he did turn up, on his own, ahead of the backup he’d called for, and he stopped me. He stopped me physically, something I thought nobody could ever do, not even that big bear McGuire. That earned my respect, and I believe that in the same way, I earned his; I was his biggest challenge and he came through it. What I didn’t realise for a few years was that in stopping me, he gave me a chance at a proper life, one I wouldn’t have had as an exile.
‘The way I look at it now, Bob Skinner didn’t just send me to prison, he sent me to university. It was a long course – twelve years – but I completed it, with his encouragement every step of the way, for he visited me at least every six months, and latterly more often. He asked me about my progress, but after a while he began to share stuff, too. His difficulties with Sarah, for example, he opened up about that. His thing with Aileen de Marco too; I told him, as a psychologist, that if he married her, he’d be back to me for counselling in a year, tops, and that’s how it worked out. It cut both ways: once he asked me where I would live when I was released. I said I’d like to go back to Leith, but I never could, because that was where Lennie lived. He said that was bollocks, because as far as this place was concerned, he really was dead. He told me that after Tony died, he had cleaned up the entire city, and that anyone who might have cared about Lennie Plenderleith and what he might have done in the past was dead, in prison, or just plain gone. He even said that he knew of a place coming on the market that would be ideal for me.’
Alex laughed out loud. ‘I might have known. Did he tell Mario and Paula who their buyer was?’
‘Yes, he did, because he could see that he might be worried about a potential embarrassment, a red-top story about a senior police officer selling to a murderer. McGuire was okay with it, for his name never appeared on the title deeds. The property belonged to the Viareggio family trust, and now it belongs to mine, not to me. So here I am, back in Lennie’s home town, a new man, an academic who just happens to be two metres tall but otherwise doesn’t look or act at all like the man he used to be. And it’s all down to your father, my friend.’
‘Who trusts you enough to let you shelter his daughter,’ she said. ‘And I never knew. I thought that man had no secrets from me.’
‘Everyone has secrets, Alex. Even you, I’ll bet.’
She frowned. Yes, she had; a few things she had never told her father or anyone else, and never would. She was looking at the latest of them: she realised that she found Dominic Jackson intensely attractive, but knew in the same moment that she must say or do nothing about it, for the consequences could be explosive.
‘How about Dominic?’ she asked. ‘Does he have any?’
‘Not yet, it’s too soon. But he will have, I’m sure.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Are you hungry? I can knock something up.’
‘Let me take you out, as a thank you. I’m not going to hide away from these bastards. I intend to go to work tomorrow, as usual. I have a full court diary this week.’
‘Understood. I promised Bob I would take you there and pick you up. I don’t know how he’ll feel about us being seen in a restaurant, though.’
‘I don’t care how he’ll feel. I won’t be a prisoner; you of all people should understand that.’
‘Yes, I do. Okay, if you want to cross the bridge, we can go to—’
He was interrupted by the opening bars of ‘Baba O’Riley’, Alex’s chosen ringtone. She looked at her screen. ‘It’s my PA,’ she said. ‘I must take this. She may have found my elusive investigator at last.’ She put the phone to her ear. ‘Clarice, have you run her to ground?’
Twenty-Eight
‘You’re telling me,’ Sarah said, ‘that for all these years, you’ve made the redemption of Lennie Plenderleith your personal project? The man nearly killed you.’
‘Actually it was the other way round. I broke his arm and kicked him hard enough in the head to give him a severe concussion.’
‘Then you charged him with three murders.’
‘For which he has paid the debt to society that the court required and emerged a different man. He’ll never be completely free, love. He’s changed his name legally to Dominic Jackson but he’s only released on licence, and he always will be. He’ll have to comply with the conditions like anyone else. He has to meet regularly with his supervising person, for the first few years at least. He can apply for a passport, but its granting is discretionary. As it happens, he chooses not to, for now.’
‘Who’s his supervising person?’
‘Who d’you think? Me.’
She laughed. ‘Different class, man. But why? Of all those people, why this one?’
Their garden chairs faced each other; Bob looked across at her. ‘Because I saw myself in him; still do, always will. Lennie Plenderleith’s background and mine were very similar: alcoholic mother, disinterested father, brutal older sibling, three of them in Lennie’s case. The difference between us was our social circumstances. If they’d been reversed, I could have gone to work for Tony Manson and Lennie could have been chief fucking constable. If that had happened, I like to think someone would have looked out for me, and so when he needed it, I looked out for him. I reached out to the prison service and let them know he was under my protection. I made sure that his applications for educational courses were processed quickly, and that he was given facilities to study. After a couple of years, the senior staff realised they were dealing with a very bright guy, and got with the project, so to speak.’
‘What about the junior staff? Teacher’s pet and all that. Didn’t any of them give him a hard time?’
Bob smiled and shook his head. ‘No, nor any other prisoners either. Let’s just say that he had a certain magisterial authority, and nobody ever tested it. He was left alone, and he repaid his privileges by gaining an honours degree in psychology, and a doctorate, both from the OU, and finally a masters from Glasgow University, on day release. The governor of his last nick, Kilmarnock, actually used him professionally to help with a couple of problem prisoners.’
‘You’re proud of yourself, aren’t you?’ his wife said.
‘I’m proud of him. And if any credit is due to me, yes, I’m proud of that.’
‘Will I meet him?’
‘I have no idea. There was a time when you were likely to have met him as a customer, but that’s past. Socially we’ll—’
He was interrupted by Sarah’s mobile. ‘Bugger,’ she muttered as she accepted the incoming call. ‘Looks like work. Sauce, what can I do for you? I take it you’re not looking for a four for bridge.’
‘Sorry, Sarah, no,’ Detective Inspector Harold Haddock replied. ‘Are you available? I’ve got a situation in the city centre that needs the top pathologist.’
‘Suspicious death?’
‘Good question, one it’ll take you to answer.’
‘I’ve had one beer, so I won’t drive, but my dear husband has been on the fizzy water; he can drive me.’
‘Actually, I need to speak to him too. There’s been a development on the situation with Alex. I might need to see her, and only he knows where she is.’
Twenty-Nine
‘The lad’s name is Barclay Potter, aged twenty-seven. He says that the body in the second bedroom is that of his grandmother, Mrs Alice McNeilly, aged eighty-seven, or whatever she was when she snuffed it. She was wrapped up tight in bedsheets, like Tutankhamun . . . a grandmummy, you might say. Barclay’s not sure when she died. He swears that it was natural, that he didn’t give her any help, but we’ll need Sarah to confirm that, and to give us her best estimate of time of death. Whenever it was, he’s been operating her bank account since then and using her pension to pay his bills. We’ll do him for concealing a death, social security fraud,
and murder if Sarah finds that the old lady didn’t go naturally. He’s a silly bastard; we’ve established already that he’s her only living relative. The flat was the old lady’s, unmortgaged, and even in its present state, that address is worth a tidy sum. He’s her heir, whether she left a will or not.’
‘Grandmummy,’ Skinner growled. ‘Who writes your scripts, Sauce? What else has the boy told you? And do you believe a word of it?’
‘That’s the thing, we do,’ the DI replied. ‘He’s sticking to his story of hearing people moving around in the flat below – that’s another thing: he really does lean out the window when he smokes, because his granny won’t allow it in the house.’
‘The boy’s in denial,’ Dominic Jackson volunteered. ‘He’s made himself believe that she’s simply asleep. He’s going to need careful handling when reality bites; he’ll be fragile. You should put him on suicide watch.’
‘Thanks, we’ll bear that in mind, Dr Jackson,’ Haddock said. ‘Would you like to be present when we interview him? I will need my arse well upholstered on this one. He hasn’t got a lawyer yet, but a half-decent one will want assurances that he’s mentally fit to be interviewed.’
‘He has, Sauce,’ Alex said. ‘Got a lawyer, that is. Our Clarice is quick on her feet. I won’t take it on, but he’s agreed that Johanna DaCosta, my associate, will represent him. Clarice briefed her before the uniforms arrived. Where are you taking him? St Leonards?’
Haddock nodded. ‘He’s there now.’
‘Don’t interview him before she gets there. And yes, I agree that it would be wise to have Dominic present.’ She turned to him. ‘Are you up for that, Dr Jackson?’
The huge man smiled expansively; she felt a flutter run through her. ‘My day gets better and better. Yes, I’ll do it.’
‘Thanks,’ the young detective said. ‘Your fee note will come to me, of course.’
‘It should go to the city council social work department,’ Skinner barked. ‘An eighty-seven-year-old woman completely off the radar! Bloody ridiculous. But back to the intruders; you are certain it wasn’t Potter himself.’
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 Page 15
