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

  Sixty-Five

  ‘It’s great being a hived-off specialist service,’ Arthur Dorward told Tarvil Singh as he took his call. ‘I get to be called “sir” by all the plods and newbie detectives. That never happened back in the old days when I was a DS like you.’

  ‘That’s very good . . . sir,’ Singh replied. ‘Now what precisely the fuck can I do for you?’

  ‘You? Nothing, but is your gaffer in?’

  ‘Sauce? As it happens, he’s walking through the door right now; he’s smiling, so it must have gone well downstairs.’

  ‘I’d better speak to him then, not that it isn’t always a pleasure dealing with your good self. By the way, when’s the other half of the Menu due back?’

  ‘DCI Pye? His paternity leave’s up the week after next.’

  ‘Paternity leave,’ Dorward grunted. ‘There was enough fornication went on in the police service before you were rewarded for it. Now? Jesus. Let’s have Haddock.’

  Singh put a hand over the mouthpiece and called out to the DI. ‘Arthur Dorward. Like a dog with two cocks in a forest.’

  Haddock grinned, went into the small office and took the call. ‘Arthur,’ he said, ‘I’m told you’re giving away free sunshine this morning. Don’t you think we’ve got enough?’

  ‘Take it while it’s going, son,’ the veteran retorted. ‘Take the good news as well. My people have finished checking the database for matches to all the DNA samples we were able to recover from Carrie McDaniels’ car. One direct match showed up, for Mr Gerard Heaney, muscle for hire, but we know about him.’

  ‘Correct,’ Haddock agreed, ‘so why the jollity?’

  ‘That’s because I ran them all – personally, you understand – against a profile that was passed on to me for a man named Wasim Butt, who’s a witness, I gather. I didn’t get a direct match for him, but I did find one that’s very close. Wasim hasn’t been in contact with the victim’s vehicle, but his son has.’

  ‘Nice one, Ginger,’ the DI exclaimed, only for his elation to evaporate as quickly as it had arisen. ‘But . . .’

  ‘Are you going to let the air out of my balloon?’ Dorward asked.

  ‘Maybe. Do you have any way of determining when or how that sample got there?’

  ‘No,’ he admitted with a sigh. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Thing is, we know that Carrie met with Wasim’s son last Friday at his business premises.’

  ‘Bugger. It was nice while it lasted.’

  ‘I’ll get you another sample, and prints, just for elimination, but that’ll be him, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah well,’ Dorward said. ‘At least I can go back to being my usual miserable bastard self.’

  ‘That you can, Arthur, that you can.’

  Sixty-Six

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Cheeky Davis said. ‘I’ve known Hazel since she went to work at the radio station, and I like her. I saw the brother too, last time I was there, but I thought no more of him other than noticing his make-up. Poor guy.’

  ‘That was the second reason for him being called Spider-Man in the force,’ Sauce told her. ‘His less sympathetic colleagues ribbed him about needing to wear a mask.’

  ‘Bastards.’

  ‘Agreed. A strong station commander would have known about that and come down on it hard, but everything we’re hearing about the late Chief Inspector Mason suggests that she was the opposite. How do you think your grandpa will react when he finds out Hazel’s been hiding her brother in plain sight?’

  ‘That’s not the question. How will Mia react? That’s what you should be asking. The station’s her toy, really. She’s a director.’

  ‘And you’re not. Are you jealous?’ He was teasing, but she took him seriously.

  ‘I can’t be a director of anything that my accountancy firm audits. You know that, Sauce. I’m not jealous of Mia in any way; if anything, it’s the other way around. Before Grandpa married her, he took me out for dinner and promised me that it wouldn’t affect my inheritance in any significant way. He had a trust fund established to look after my mum when he’s gone. Under his new will, that passes to Mia.’

  ‘You never told me that before,’ Sauce said. ‘What about your mum?’

  ‘She becomes my responsibility. I’m good with that. As I’ve told you often enough, she’s an idiot, so it’ll be better all round that she’s under my control. Mia? It’s not jealousy. I don’t like the woman, plain and simple.’

  ‘Does she know what’s in the will?’

  ‘Yes. She’s never said anything to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she contests it after Grandpa dies.’

  ‘Given that he’s only in his sixties, and he’s one of the fittest guys of that age I know, she’ll have a long time to wait for that . . . as long as he’s careful to check the sugar bowl for ground glass.’ He winked at her. ‘Bob Skinner told me about her family background and it’s fucking horrifi—’

  The Z-Cars ringtone of his work phone stopped him in mid description. He looked at the screen; the number was unknown to him, but he answered, a simple ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is that Detective Chief Inspector Mann?’ a woman’s voice enquired. He read the accent as west of Scotland.

  ‘No, it isn’t. I’m Detective Inspector Haddock, a colleague of DCI Mann’s.’

  ‘My name’s Joan Brown,’ the caller said. ‘I’m in Spain and I’ve been asked by the police to call Chief Inspector Mann as a matter of urgency.’

  ‘Okay. DCI Mann’s busy tonight, but she briefed me about a potential call and put her phone on divert.’

  ‘She? Oh, sorry, I just assumed . . .’

  ‘Nobody makes that mistake twice,’ Haddock chuckled.

  ‘The Spanish police officer who approached me said she wanted to talk to me about the murder of my sister. That’s what I thought he said, but his English wasn’t at all good. He couldn’t have meant that, could he?’

  ‘He did, Ms Brown. Her post-mortem has been reviewed by a senior pathologist, and his conclusion is that she couldn’t have committed suicide. There had to be third-party involvement.’

  ‘Assisted suicide? Is that what he’s saying?’

  ‘He doesn’t believe so.’

  ‘Why has this come up now? Does it have to do with David Brass, my former brother-in-law?’

  ‘In a way,’ the DI admitted. ‘Mr Brass instructed a lawyer to re-examine your sister’s prosecution for theft. That led, indirectly, to the re-examination of what had been classified as her suicide. However, there’s been another death. The solicitor hired a private investigator to look into the case. She conducted a number of interviews, but on Saturday afternoon she vanished . . . until Monday morning, when her remains were found.’

  ‘Are you telling me that the two are connected?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, because we don’t know for sure. DCI Mann is looking into it; I’m leading the investigation into the death of Carrie McDaniels, the investigator. We’re not ruling out a connection, that’s all I’ll say.’

  ‘I knew it,’ Brown hissed. ‘I always knew she didn’t kill herself. She phoned me, you know, a couple of days before she died. She’d been drinking, something she did a bit too much. She told me she was looking forward to going to court, for she was planning to use it to expose corruption within the council.’

  ‘What kind of corruption?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me; the only hint she dropped was that it involved a planning application by a man who wanted to take over LuxuMarket and put loads of people out of work. She had information from a source, a boyfriend who’d worked for this man in his cash-and-carry business. I’ve got to confess, Mr Haddock, that I didn’t take her seriously. My sister saw conspiracy everywhere. If someone spent too long in the pub toilet, they were snorting cocaine, not . . . whatever they were really doing. No, I didn’t take her seriously, not until Cedric Black, her lawyer, called me and said the police needed me to identify her body. After that, oh yes, I believed her.’

  ‘You went to t
he autopsy, didn’t you? You made a fuss there?’

  ‘I did. I’d asked Black to tell me when it was happening. He didn’t, but I found out from the chief inspector at the station handling Marcia’s death. I turned up and I lost my temper, because I felt convinced that Black just wanted the whole business to go away, that he wanted everything covered up. I shouldn’t have, I know. There was a policeman present, the same man who was there when I identified Marcia; he was very understanding, but he made it clear that I couldn’t stay.’

  ‘The boyfriend,’ the DI asked, making notes, ‘did she give you a name?’

  ‘No, only that he was Asian, and younger than Marcia; they were always younger than her and they were usually Asian. They were always respectful, she said, and they never wanted to marry her.’

  ‘Afterwards, how closely were you involved with your nephew Austin in his protests, if I can call them that?’

  ‘I supported him, of course, encouraged him. He went as far as he could until he was threatened with legal action and went down another route with Brass Rubbings.’

  ‘Who threatened him?’

  ‘The man, of course; the man behind the planning application that got Marcia so excited and may have got her killed. He was Asian too, but not her type; too old. His name was Butt, Wasim Butt. She was convinced he had the council leader in his pocket, and that she was behind the shoplifting conspiracy, to shut her up . . . as if it would have!’ She paused. ‘There was a conspiracy, Detective Inspector,’ she asked, anxious for the first time, ‘wasn’t there?’

  Sixty-Seven

  Tarvil Singh smiled as he countersigned the statement. For him it had been the rarest of rare days, and he was a happy man. He saw it as a reward for his sterling desk work that Sauce Haddock had sent him to pick up Zaqib Butt from the morning Emirates flight at Glasgow Airport, and take him to the Crime Campus at Gartcosh. If he had known that it had only happened because there was nobody else available, Jackie Wright being on a day’s leave, he would have been only marginally less pleased.

  Arthur Dorward had taken Butt’s DNA sample and fingerprints, personally rather than sending a junior, then the detective sergeant had taken a full statement about his meeting with Carrie McDaniels.

  ‘When she left,’ he had asked, on Haddock’s instruction, ‘did you see her off? Did you go to the car park with her?’

  ‘Yes. I had to. I was really tight for time for my golf match; the guy I was playing, I know him and if I’d been one minute late on the tee, he’d have claimed the tie. It was the club championship too.’

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘Easy, six and five; I’m in the semi-final, a week on Sunday.’

  ‘You couldn’t have stayed much longer in Pakistan, in that case.’

  ‘No, but that was no worry to me. It was good to see that Uncle Imran’s on the mend, for all my father’s pessimism, but I really don’t like the place. How about you? You’re a Sikh, going by your name. Do you ever go back to the land of your birth?’

  ‘I pass by the old Simpson Maternity in Edinburgh every so often, but I don’t make pilgrimages. My grandfather was from the Punjab, but a package holiday in Turkey’s as close as I’ve got.’

  ‘I’m the same, almost. I’m a Weegie, born if not bred; I was brought up in Eastwood, went to Hutchie Grammar, and learned my golf at Williamwood. I was twelve the first time my dad took me to Rawalpindi. I caught a bug the first day there, spent a week sat on the toilet and have hated the place ever since.’

  ‘How about your father?’

  ‘Oh, he’s old school. He was born there, did some time in the army when he was young – he says he still has connections – then came over here and got into the cash-and-carry business.’

  ‘Has he ever been in any other business?’ Another Haddock question.

  ‘Hah! Fuck no! Other than the sectors he’s comfortable in, and that’s big sheds really, Dad is basically clueless. Funny, he never wanted me in the household supplies company; I thought he would, I assumed it almost, but he said he had bigger ambitions for me. WZB is my inheritance in advance, that’s what he told me; he’s on the board, but it’s mine, all of it.’

  ‘You’re not involved in his company at all, not even as a director?’

  ‘Not at all. Sergeant, my father feels a duty towards me because I’m his son, but I don’t believe he likes me too much. He’d like me to be a good Pakistani Muslim and marry my cousin Benny. He doesn’t acknowledge Krystle as my partner, and his grandchildren don’t even know him. If I had any siblings, I doubt I’d have had a penny off him.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Singh said, as he passed Butt a copy of the signed statement. ‘Is the jet lag starting to get to you?’

  ‘Not really; I wasn’t there long enough. My circadian clock was still struggling to readjust from UK time, so I don’t expect to miss too much sleep.’

  ‘Still, you’ll want to get home. I’ve got to hang around here for a while, so I’ve arranged for a car to take you; unmarked, by the way. You wouldn’t want to be dropped off by something with a blue light on top.’

  Butt smiled; his relief was mostly about being spared another car journey with a driver of Singh’s size, but he thanked him for his thoughtfulness.

  The DS watched him depart, then, feeling peckish, headed for the canteen. He was finishing his second tuna mayonnaise roll when Arthur Dorward dropped into a seat beside him, a mug of tea in his right hand.

  ‘I thought I’d find you here, Wimpey.’

  ‘You were right then, Ginger. Am I that good company, or do you have news for me?’

  ‘Both, and for that DI of yours. I do love rattling that boy’s cage, and this will, for sure.’

  Singh finished his roll and reached for a four-finger Kit Kat. ‘Do tell.’

  ‘I’ve done a quick analysis of Zaqib’s DNA sample. He’s his father’s son all right, no doubt about it. But . . .’ he paused to take a mouthful from his mug, and for effect, ‘his profile doesn’t match the one we found on Carrie’s Renault. Wasim Butt has another son.’

  ‘Eh,’ the DS gasped. ‘Zaqib’s just after telling me he’s an only child, and I believed him.’

  ‘He might believe it too. The sons have different mothers. Zaqib’s sample shows European influences on his maternal side. The other one is pure Indo-Pakistani.’ Dorward beamed. ‘Have a nice day, Detective Inspector Haddock.’

  ‘Fuck!’ Singh hissed. ‘I’d better tell him.’

  He reached for his phone, but Dorward put a hand on his arm to stop him. ‘Before you do, I have some more glory to bask in. It took a lot of effort, and I’ve probably broken some ground in forensic science, but . . . the second body in the crematory; I know whose it is.’

  Sixty-Eight

  ‘Gerry Heaney?’ Alex stared at Haddock, wide-eyed with shock and surprise. ‘The man I hit with the Le Creuset.’

  ‘That’s what we believe,’ he replied. ‘Arthur was able to extract viable matter from the thickest of the bone samples, sufficient for him to construct enough of a DNA profile to get a match with Heaney.’

  ‘Are you saying that I killed him?’ she asked. ‘If I did, that can’t be swept under the carpet. It’ll become public and there’ll be pressure on the Crown Office to consider a culpable homicide charge.’

  ‘No way,’ Griff Montell exclaimed as he lay on his hospital bed in a green and orange robe, tied at the waist. ‘That wouldn’t hold up for a minute. You didn’t hit him that hard. He was strong enough to get up and slice me open as I was restraining his mate.’

  ‘That’s why I asked if I could meet you both here,’ Haddock said. ‘The events are covered by your statements, yours and Alex’s, but we’ve moved on from there.’

  ‘You’re close to nailing them?’ Montell frowned. ‘Him, rather, since Heaney’s out of the picture.’

  ‘Closer, Griff, closer. But to ease your worries, Alex, you didn’t kill Heaney, not unless you shot him in the head as well as slugging him with your pan. What’s it made
of?’

  ‘Cast iron, enamelled.’

  ‘I can vouch for that,’ Montell volunteered. ‘My sister gave me one like it last Christmas. I use it all the time,’ he added.

  ‘Lucky you,’ the DI said. ‘We like our Tefal stuff. But neither of them contains copper or lead, melted traces of which were found in a skull fragment that it’s now been determined belonged to Heaney. They were from the bullet that killed him.’

  ‘What about Carrie?’ Alex asked quietly. ‘Was Sarah, or Arthur, able to determine how she died?’

  ‘No, and I doubt they ever will.’

  ‘There’s something that’s been concerning me,’ she said. ‘Carrie didn’t know where I live. She couldn’t have told them.’

  ‘They broke into your office, remember. Do you keep anything there with your address on it?’

  She winced. ‘Lots of stuff. I tend not to think of security within a secure building. Idiot.’

  ‘No you’re not, no more than any other person.’

  ‘Well I feel as if I am. Sauce, why was Heaney killed?’

  ‘Best guess,’ the DI replied, ‘with things going wrong at your place, and with Carrie dead in the boot of their car, his partner decided he was too big a risk. Alex, this is organised crime we’re dealing with. These people are ruthless.’

  ‘Then why did we survive?’ Montell asked. ‘If Heaney was shot, it meant his mate had a firearm, so why not just shoot the two of us?’

  ‘Two or more gunshots, seven floors up, with you two having yelled your heads off already? The neighbours would have been disturbed for certain. What would their chances have been of making it out of there?’

  ‘True. Then there’s the other possibility: that they knew who Alex’s father is and didn’t fancy the consequences.’

  ‘Maybe all of the above,’ Haddock conceded, ‘but once they were out of there, our mystery man made a decision, and it was goodbye, Heaney; he was a Crown witness waiting to happen, so he had to go. The other guy,’ he continued, ‘the one you took down, Griff. Did you have time to form any impressions?’