He’d asked me if I thought she might be able to plead to a reduced charge. I mumbled my way round that one, but it must have been as clear to him as it was to me that her flight, and the things she’d done in the aftermath to conceal her crime, had to mean, inevitably, that she’d be done for nothing less than murder.
I wanted out of there and so I got out of there, heading back to Sarah and my lovely, normal, well-adjusted family unit, that I’d determined was going to be the centre of my life from that moment on.
But I didn’t get halfway home before I had another call from Alex that kicked the ball right up on the slates once again.
Sixty-Three
It made Alexis Skinner very sad that she had no memory of her mother, only a vision in her mind put together on the basis of photographs, stories her father had told her, and the shockingly self-revealing diaries that had been discovered after her early death in a car accident that she would probably have survived in a modern vehicle.
Alex was under no illusion that Myra Graham Skinner had been an angel, but her dad had loved her. More than that, he had liked her; he had told her when she was old enough for mature discussion that when she had died, it was as if he had lost three people, his wife, his lover and his best friend.
It was only as an adult that she had come to appreciate what a sad and lonely man her father had been through her childhood. He hadn’t been monastic, not at all; there had been women, for sure, and even a semi-domestic relationship with another detective called Alison that had lasted for a couple of years, until it dwindled to nothing.
The Mia Sparkles thing . . . she always thought of her by her radio name . . . had been very short-lived . . . if it had ever lived at all, for maybe she’d been wrong about a strange phone conversation she’d had with her father after he’d been away overnight . . . but it had made an impression on her.
He had met Mia in the course of an investigation, and somehow, after he’d told her she had a big fan in Gullane, he had wound up bringing her home. While Alex had been impressed as any thirteen-year-old would have been by a star figure twice her age, and had taken to her, she had known instinctively that she was not stepmother material, and so she had not been heartbroken when she had gone, as surprisingly as she had arrived.
She thought of the years between her mother’s death and the arrival of Sarah as her father’s Dark Ages. She believed firmly that they should stay unlit, and so, when Andy had brought up Mia’s name, she had been unusually uncommunicative.
She and he had been a couple on, off and then on again for a decade, and they had a ‘no secrets’ policy. However, if Mia was a secret, she was her father’s, not hers, and not one to be shared with anyone. He hadn’t pressed her on it; indeed, he hadn’t discussed it further, and that was good.
As she watched Andy’s daughter running through the first few fallen leaves of autumn in the Royal Botanic Gardens, with her younger brother staggering after her, she wondered what her mother would have thought about her lack of desire for children of her own.
She and Andy had broken off their engagement over his discovery that she had terminated a pregnancy without his knowledge. She had done so because she had believed that having a child at that point would have disrupted the formative years of her legal career.
She stood by her decision; it had worked out for her. She had become a partner in her firm, Curle Anthony and Jarvis, in almost record time, and was one of its key earners. She had reached a position where if she chose, she could take a couple of years out to start a family, then step back in exactly where she had been before.
But she felt no urge to make that move, and with no pressure from Andy, she was beginning to doubt that she ever would. They might marry, they might not. Either way they would be happy . . . just like her father and Sarah, who seemed more content and confident the second time around than they had ever been before.
She was smiling at the thought, as she ran to retrieve a ball that Danielle had kicked down a sloping path, smiling as her mobile rang.
She reached the ball, stood on it to stop its progress, and checked the phone. She saw her own number on screen; her position in her firm meant weekend calls and because of that she put her landline on divert every time she went out.
‘This is Alex,’ she said, cheerily.
‘I think I would have known that,’ a woman replied. ‘You had a mature voice for a thirteen-year-old. This is Mia, Mia Watson, Mia Sparkles, if you remember that name.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes I do. What do you want?’
‘I need to speak to your father. I’m sorry to be calling you, but his number is ex-directory and probably monitored, so this is the only way I could think of to contact him.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ she snapped. ‘I won’t forward this call, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’ll be his choice whether he speaks to you or not.’
‘Understood.’ Alex was struck by the change in her voice. There was none of the old vivacity; instead there was a coolness, and an underlying tension. ‘I’d like you to ask him to call this number. It’s a Spanish mobile.’ She recited nine digits, then repeated them. ‘Have you got that?’
‘Yes; I’ve noted it. Okay, I’ll do it, but I warn you, he may not want to know you. It’s been a long time, and his life’s a lot different now.’
‘So’s mine,’ the woman said, ‘believe me. Tell him it’s very much in his interests to call me . . . to call me, and nobody else, that is. It has to be between us, and us alone.’
The line went dead. She found herself staring at the phone.
‘Who was that?’ Andy asked, approaching, with Robert riding on his shoulders. ‘The ghost of Christmas yet to come, by the look on your face.’
‘Business,’ she answered, sharply. She kicked Danielle’s ball back towards him. ‘I’ll catch you up,’ she said. ‘I have to make a call.’
Sixty-Four
‘I can’t get my head round this,’ Sammy Pye said.
‘I have trouble myself,’ Karen Neville admitted, ‘but it’s true nonetheless. I called Jack McGurk and asked him if he knew about it. He didn’t but he rang me back half an hour later, after he’d spoken to DI Stallings . . . I don’t know her, she came in after I’d gone to Perth with Andy, but I’m told she’s Ray Wilding’s other half . . . and managed to get something out of her, on a colleague-to-colleague basis.’
‘These are heavy grapes, even for the force vine.’
‘Tasty metaphor, Sam,’ she acknowledged. ‘It seems that Ray’s been coordinating a national search for the Mackenzies since Monday, after they both disappeared. The fear was that he’d done her in, not the other way around, but from what Ray said, she turned up safe and sound this morning, claiming no knowledge of where her husband was.
‘He was called in by the chief to talk to her, but not at home, in his nick. Even then, no alarm bells were ringing with him. But when he got to Gayfield, Bob Skinner turned up and more or less took over the interview. Next thing Ray knew, he was being told to arrest her on suspicion of murder, and turn the thing over to Mary Chambers and the ACC.’
‘But only suspicion of murder?’
‘At that point yes, but Stallings . . . what’s her first name?’
‘Rebecca . . . Becky.’
‘Right. She told Jack that Ray had just been sent by Maggie Steele to an address in Lanarkshire, where a second, related, arrest had been made by Strathclyde.’
‘Does Becky know who it is?’
‘No, Ray wasn’t told. But he did say that the chief sounded very tense indeed.’
‘Jeez,’ the DI whistled. ‘You were right. This is going to be top of the news cycle when it breaks; we’ll get blown out of sight.’
‘Don’t get too down about it. If the Spanish can’t trace this Mia woman, that might be a good thing.’
‘Yes, but even if they do, Karen, it’s her mother’s death that we’re investigating. I know, if what Alafair told you is true, there’s no lov
e lost between them, but even so, her mother . . .’
‘Is that so different from Cheryl Mackenzie murdering her husband?’ She frowned. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time, so I can say this to you. I’d say it to Andy as well, for it’s true of him too . . . of all of you really. You guys, in your heart of hearts, you want to be Bob Skinner, but he is what he is because there’s no evil beyond his comprehension, nothing so dark that he can’t see its detail.’
‘I don’t know if I fancy that,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe I’ll settle for being Sammy Pye.’
‘That would be a good choice,’ she told him. ‘When you go to the other place, there’s no way back.’
‘Hey,’ Sammy exclaimed, ‘that has the sound of personal experience about it.’
‘Probably, but I don’t want to talk about it. All I’m saying is that when it comes to homicide, nothing’s off limits.’
‘Okay but there’s this too. Everything has to be proved in court, however obvious it may be to the likes of us.’
‘That’s true,’ she agreed, ‘and it’s what I really meant about Mia not being traced being a good thing. We can put her van in Caledonian Crescent at the time of Bella’s death, but we can’t put her in it. Who knows, we might find her DNA in the flat, eventually, but as we’ve just discovered with Hastie McGrew, and as you said yourself a few minutes ago, that won’t prove anything, other than that she went to see her mother.’
Pye yawned. ‘And with that discouraging word,’ he pushed himself to his feet, ‘I’m out of here.’
The DS checked her watch. ‘Me too, in half an hour,’ she said, ‘but I might just go and investigate a break-in in Costa Coffee that I thought had been reported.’
‘Got big plans for tonight?’
She shot him a raised eyebrow glance. ‘Big plans and I don’t go together. I’ve forsworn them, for ever.’
‘Oh dear,’ he chuckled, ‘sorry I asked.’
‘Not your fault. Just when I thought it was time to go back in the water, I found it was too salty for my taste.’
‘I won’t even try to understand that. There are always dating sites you could try.’
‘Online poker, maybe. Online dating, never.’
Pye turned towards the door of his office, to find that it was open and that Jackie Wright was standing there.
‘I’ve just had a call from the Fife police,’ she began. ‘Remember we put out an appeal for any sightings of a wooden blanket chest along the coast? There was one found a few days ago, washed up on the beach at Kinghorn.
‘It’s in the local nick; they weren’t sure what to do with it. They were going to give it to a local antique dealer. They said if we want it, it’s ours, but we’ll have to collect it.’
The DI looked at the DS, and smiled. ‘That could be your evening taken care of,’ he said.
Sixty-Five
Trepidation is one of those words that has never really figured in my vocabulary, nor even in my adult life.
If I’m honest, it was a big part of my childhood, although I couldn’t have put that name to it at the time. It was what I felt whenever my bedroom door opened at home. If my mother came into the room, or less frequently, my dad, that was all right. If it was my brother, Michael, that agitation turned into fear, or even terror, depending simply on the expression on his face.
It has occurred to me on occasion that maybe I should have sought him out while I had the chance, not to give him some more of his own back, but to thank him. Reason being, having survived him, I’ve never really been afraid of anything else that might happen to me.
More than that, he left me with an acceptance of some of the things I’ve encountered as a police officer that few other cops have. The notion, ‘surely he couldn’t have done that to another human being’, has never held me back. Thanks, brother.
Yet I might have gone the other way. It was clear to me that David Mackenzie hadn’t survived his abuse. I understood the boy who had thrown that superhot oil over his uncle. Part of me even admired him. He did something about his awful treatment; I didn’t.
My revenge could have been a lot simpler than his. I could have told my father, but I was too scared by Michael’s promise of the consequences, specifically, the amputation of my thumbs with garden shears, ever to do that. Instead I bore it and waited for my growth, turning myself gradually into someone far more formidable than he had ever been, making myself the one to be feared.
I went on to become, I reckon, a properly functioning adult. I learned how to love, rather than despise. I don’t believe that David Mackenzie ever did the same. He’s been accused by many of being in love with himself, but when I talked to Lennie about him, afterwards, he was convinced that the opposite was true, and that ultimately the man had been consumed by self-loathing.
But I wasn’t thinking of David as I dialled Mia’s number, from a lay-by on the outskirts of Edinburgh. As those bedroom door butterflies returned to my stomach, I was thinking of Michael.
‘Hello, Bob,’ she said, before I had a chance to utter a word.
‘Hello, Mia,’ I replied. ‘How did you know it was me?’
‘Nobody else has this number. It’s a throwaway, bought with cash and a false identity.’
I surprised myself by laughing. ‘How many have you got, for fuck’s sake?’
‘Three. I still have the paper version of my Mia Watson UK driving licence, and a Tunisian passport in another name, the one I showed when I bought the phone. The Spanish need an ID for all phones these days. Officially, though, I’m known as Maria Centelleos. But I suspect you know that by now.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I told her truthfully. ‘I haven’t been part of the investigation into your mother’s murder. I know none of the details, none at all, but I knew your name had come up. You should contact the police in Edinburgh, not me. I’m not part of that force now.’
‘I know you’re not,’ she told me. ‘I know most of what there is to know about you, Bob. You have a very high profile on the internet; key in “Robert Morgan Skinner” and all sorts of stuff comes out.
‘For a start, your wives, including the most recent one dropping her knickers for that actor Joey Morroco. Then there’s Alex’s progress . . . I thought that kid would go far; she could play you like a Stradivarius. Stories about your big cases, your rise to the top, to the very top.’ She paused, for breath I thought, but no, for effect. ‘Which I could have halted with one phone call, at any time.’
Trepidation? Yes, it was back well and truly, but I cuffed it round the ear and sent it scurrying.
‘You reckon? How would that work out?’ I asked.
‘It would work out because the only thing that you can’t Google is you and me, and what happened between us when you were investigating my brother’s killing.’
‘One night, lady, that was all. One night of admittedly pretty good sex, and then you brushed me off in the morning.’
‘I didn’t brush you off,’ she claimed indignantly. ‘You went psycho on me when you woke up.’
‘I had a bad dream, Mia,’ I protested, suddenly aware that we were having an argument that had been postponed from one century into the next. ‘I’d been at a crime scene in Newcastle the night before,’ I went on, agitated by the memory. ‘Christ, I’d seen a guy with his tripes out on his own kitchen table! Of course I was fucking jumpy!’
‘It wasn’t just that,’ she said. ‘All your dreams weren’t bad. You kept calling me “Alison” when you were talking in your sleep.’
If I’d been standing, that might have cut the feet from under me, but she wasn’t to know that.
‘Are you sure it wasn’t “Myra”?’ I snapped. ‘Or maybe “Madonna”. I fancied her at one point. Either way, this is not “career ending with one phone call” kind of stuff.’
‘Maybe not, but tipping me off that I’d become a suspect in my brother’s murder and warning me to get out of town, that might cut some ice.’ She had a point there, I must concede . . . but it wasn’t con
clusive.
‘The way I read the press,’ she continued, ‘that First Minister guy doesn’t like you much.’
‘Then read again. Clive Graham and I get on okay.’
‘If you do, it’s out of necessity on his part. This new single force he’s setting up: with you in the top job you’d be as powerful as him. No politician wants that. Yes, he’d be very interested in what I have to say.’
‘Then go ahead,’ I challenged.
‘No, because there’s more than that, something that you could not possibly survive professionally. You help me and it will stay a secret. I’ll tell you what it is, but it has to be face to face.’
Her intensity got to me. What the hell, there would be no harm done, and maybe even a little good.
‘Suppose I agree to meet you. Where? Starbuck’s in George Street. The Sheraton Hotel lobby, where we met once? Your old place in Davidson’s Mains, so we can go over old times?’
‘Nowhere as convenient for you, but not completely inconvenient. Your favourite family restaurant, you called it, so you’ll know the place I mean. I’ll meet you there.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow. Eight thirty, dinner. You’re paying; I got the lunch in the Sheraton, remember.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ I gasped. ‘It’s in another country.’
‘I’m not kidding in the slightest. I’ve checked, and you can do it. Hell, you’re Bob Skinner, you can do anything.’ She gave a small laugh and then her voice seemed to be younger, that of the Mia I’d known. ‘Apart from remembering the name of the woman you’re sleeping with, that is.’
Sixty-Six
Hour Of Darkness Page 33
