Skinner's Ordeal

by Quintin Jardine

  `Did Stewart Morelli ask you to make a device for him?'

  `No.' The voice trembled slightly.

  `Did Ariadne?'

  `No'

  ‘ Did anyone?'

  `Where would I have got the explosives?'

  `That isn't an answer. Your regimental records are okay, but that doesn't mean anything.

  You could have pulled our Special Forces trick and taken the HE out of a heavy shell, for use in covert operations. The shell gets marked down as a dummy on the live firing range.'

  He paused. 'Now, did anyone else ask you to make a device?'

  `No, sir.'

  `Not Maurice?'

  'No, absolutely not.'

  Arrow nodded. He broke his gaze, as if allowing the young man a few moments rest then fixed it on him once more. `Let's talk about your brother. Did you get together often?'

  'As often as we could.'

  Did he ever talk about his job, since he moved into Private Office?'

  `No, he didn't like to. It depressed him.'

  `Did he ever talk about his wife?'

  `Yes. All the time. From the earliest days, he would go on about her affairs.'

  `That must have been very difficult for you, when you knew that it was true.'

  `Yes, it was. But I regarded it as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.'

  Ànd you lusted after her yourself, anyway.' Arrow gave a short laugh, with no humour in it.

  'Did Maurice ever ask you about your work, about the technical side?'

  Òccasionally.'

  `Did he ever ask you about assembling devices?'

  Richards's eyes narrowed, but he did not turn them away from Arrow's stare. 'Yes, he did.'

  Ànd what did you tell him?'

  Ìt was all conversational. I just told him the basics, that you take your HE, stick in detonators and set up a wiring circuit, to be completed either by a timer or a mechanical trigger.'

  `Was Maurice a technically-minded man?'

  'He wasn't an idiot; as I recall he had Physics A-level. But he always had people in to do jobs around the house.'

  What did Maurice think of Colin Davey?' Arrow asked suddenly.

  Richards blinked. 'He thought he was a shit. That's the thing about Maurice. He was never really cut out for MOD. Shits all over the place in the Services. Like Davey, like you —

  like me I suppose. But you can't be wholly nice and still be efficient in a business where the ultimate speciality is killing people.'

  With the speed of a striking snake, Arrow's right hand flashed across the table and slapped Richards, open-palmed, across the face. 'True, that is. You can't be,' he said coldly. 'And don't you ever call me a shit again.'

  The younger man's head snapped sideways with the force of the blow. He stared at Arrow, in surprise and fright, a red weal growing on his left cheek.

  Did Maurice think that Ariadne was having an affair with Davey?'

  `Maurice thought everyone was having an affair with her,' said the Lieutenant, his voice shaking. 'Except Morelli and me, that is.'

  Arrow's left hand flashed out. A second slap cracked around the small room. This time Richards howled.

  `That's very neat,' said the little man, with a smile that was not in the slightest amused.

  'You've really put your brother in the frame for it, haven't you? And you reckon I'll believe that because it's the easiest option. But Ariadne still had complete access to that box.

  `Now,' he said, still smiling, grabbing the younger man's right hand in his and beginning to squeeze his knuckles together. `Who asked you to make the device? Was it Morelli, or was it her?'

  EIGHTY-FIVE

  ‘What about this Sawyer fellow, Andrew? What do you make of him?' Sir James Proud looked odd on the monitor screen, his form made even squarer and his uniform even bulkier by the video link.

  Martin wondered for a moment about his Chief, dressing officially for a trip to London to interview two suspects, but realised that it was entirely in character. Proud Jimmy needed his uniform like a medieval knight needed his armour or a Judge his wig and red robe, to show who and what he was, and to help him impress his authority. Still, thought the detective, it doesn't make him any the less of a copper.

  Ì doubt, sir,' he replied, 'whether I've ever seen a stronger chain of circumstantial evidence pointing to a person's guilt. He has motive, expertise, materials, and we've established his presence at the scene. He hasn't wavered once in his belief that the world's a better place without Colin Davey. There's only one problem. He won't admit it.' He looked into the small camera above the screen. 'What about the people you have down there?'

  The Chief shook his silver head. 'That's the second problem, Chief Superintendent.

  Everything you've said about Sawyer, I can say about them. Morelli and Tucker are paramours. Morelli now admits that he promoted Noble into a job for which he wasn't competent to increase his access to his wife. Then there's Noble himself, a very depressed and unstable man. It's confused, Andy, very confused.'

  `What about the soldier?'

  Àrrow gave him a good going over. He didn't bash him about or anything . . . well, not too much . . . but he didn't incriminate anyone, other than by implication, his brother. I tell you man, we could go on all bloody night!'

  Martin nodded. 'So what will we do, sir?' he asked.

  The sensible thing,' replied the Chief. 'I'm bringing all three suspects—'

  `Morelli too?'

  Àye, Morelli too; I'm playing no favourites! . . . up to Edinburgh. I'm going to have them all interviewed, and Sawyer too, by the Procurator Fiscal. We'll give him a hatful of possibilities. It's his job to decide which one he's going to charge.'

  Ìf any,' muttered Martin.

  Àye, Andy lad. If any!'

  EIGHTY-SIX

  ‘One. Two. Three. Four. Five.' Skinner's eyes were closed on `Three'.

  `We're moving on, Bob,' said O'Malley in a voice not much above a whisper, 'from where we found the doll. There's Inspector McGuinness, Constable Pender, and you. Where are we headed?'

  `We're moving towards the nose section of the plane,' said the young man's voice.

  'Towards the cockpit, where it's crumpled into the mud. There's been no fire there, only wreckage. The smoke is all behind us now.'

  `How far is it to the cockpit?'

  Àbout a couple of hundred yards.'

  `What do you see between here and there?'

  `Bits of the aeroplane; wreckage; luggage and duty-free bags. There's a bottle of vodka over there, sticking in the mud, and it's not even broken. The people are, though. There are bodies, lots more bodies; some of them in bits. Oh look, there's a girl over there, one of the stewardesses. Aww, no, no, no, that shouldn't be.' His voice was high, almost whimpering.

  Àren't you stopping to help any of them, Bob?'

  `No. I don't think they can be helped. Anyway, McGuinness says no. He says other people will do that. He's leading us on towards the cockpit. I don't want to go, though.'

  `Why not, Bob, why not?'

  `Because I don't want to see what's inside. But he's making us go anyway.' On the bed, wrapped in his dressing gown this time Skinner's legs began to twitch, then writhe.

  Àre you there yet?' asked O'Malley.

  `Nearly.'

  `Describe the wreckage for us, please.'

  Ìt was white, but it's dirty now, as if it had rolled over. The part behind the cabin, where the plane ripped apart, is crushed into the ground, and the nose is sticking almost straight up into the air. There's a man's body caught underneath it where the fuselage goes into the ground. I can only see his head and shoulders. His face is all yellow.'

  His forehead creased. 'Who, sir? Me?'

  `Who are you talking to, Bob?'

  Ìnspector McGuinness. He's telling me to climb up there and look in the cockpit, just to make sure.'

  `To make sure of what?'

  'That everyone in there's dead!' he snapped back at the psychiatrist Ò
kay, Bob, okay. Just keep telling us about it.' The entranced body on the bed began to move once more, jerkily. 'What are you doing now?'

  Ì'm climbing, up towards the windows. There are torn bits in the outer casing. I'm using them as hand grips and footholds. It's not too difficult: I'm nearly there now. Bugger! That was sharp: I've cut myself.' His right hand jerked suddenly, but his legs continued to move.

  `Right, I've made it. I'm going to look in the window.'

  Skinner fell silent. O'Malley, sitting beside the bed, and Sarah, in her corner seat, watched his face intently. And as they did it changed. Where it had been that of someone in a deep, if troubled sleep, it took on the appearance, even with eyes closed, of a man confronting something dreadful, something too awful to be contemplated.

  The sound, when it came, was one of grief. Pure, deep, inconsolable grief.

  'No!' he keened, he wailed. 'No! No! No! Please, you bastard, don't let this be.'

  As they listened, the wife and the counsellor realised that, apart from its misery, there was something else that was different about his voice. It sounded rougher, and more mature, as if the last innocence of youth had been rubbed away.

  `Bob,' said O'Malley, very quietly. 'How old are you?' `Twenty-eight.' He was sobbing, tearlessly.

  `Where are you?'

  luffness Corner. Between Aberlady and Gullane.'

  Ànd what are you doing?'

  'I'm looking through the window.'

  `Which window?'

  Òf the Mini. The window of the Mini.'

  `What do you see inside? You must describe everything.' On the bed he shuddered, and shook his head.

  `Yes, Bob, you must. I'll keep you locked in there until you do. Tell me, and release yourself.'

  In his trance sleep, he began to whimper. Sarah was appalled by the sound, and terrified.

  `The car's against a tree,' he moaned, at last. 'The front end's smashed in. I see the engine, inside the body compartment. That's the thing about Minis. That's what happens to them if they hit something hard enough. I see wires and cables all over the place. There's one of them almost under my eyes. It's the brake-fluid pipe. It's got a nick in it. Not a tear. A cut.

  D'you see it?'

  `Yes, yes, I see it,' O'Malley responded urgently.

  `Do you understand me? It's been cut, by a blade. About a third of the way through. The fucking thing's been sabotaged.'

  I see it. I understand. Now, what else do you see?'

  He shook his head again. 'No, please. I can't look any further `We must finish it, Bob. You must finish it. Look through the window!'

  They waited, but not for long. His mouth opened in another long, howling cry.

  `Myra! I see Myra. The steering column is through her chest. There's glass in her hair.

  There's blood on her hands, and on her face. I can smell the blood, and the oil, but above it all, I can smell her perfume. It's Chanel No. 5. She always wears it. The bottle's in her handbag, on the passenger seat, and it's smashed.

  Ànd she's dead. Oh, God help us, my wife is dead!'

  Down to his right, in the corner, O'Malley was aware of Sarah, her face buried in her hands and her shoulders shaking,

  `Bob,' he said. `You will leave the dream now.' As he watched, Skinner's face relaxed.

  'But I'm not going to bring you up yet. I want you to sleep calmly, for fifteen minutes, to recover.'

  He stood up, lifted the weeping Sarah from her chair, and led her from the room. Outside in the corridor, it took some time for her to compose herself, but eventually, her sobbing subsided. A passing Sister saw her and looked at the door of Skinner's room in alarm, but O'Malley waved her away.

  `Has he ever mentioned that to you before?'

  `No,' she whispered. 'He told me that Myra had been killed when her Mini went off the road and hit a tree, but he never said that he'd been there, that he'd seen her. Why couldn't he share that with me?'

  `Sarah, my dear, if he couldn't acknowledge it to himself, how could he tell you? Come on, let's go back in. I'll give him a few minutes more rest, then I'll bring him back up. But I warn you, I wasn't expecting anything like this. I've no idea how he's going to react to the memory.'

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  ‘Five. Four. Three. Two. One.’

  Skinner's eyelids flashed open, wide. His eyes seemed to stand out slightly as he stared at the ceiling, but they did not seem to be focused on anything in the present.

  `Think your happy thought, Bob,' said O'Malley. `Concentrate on your present happiness, and let it drive everything else to one side. Concentrate, and talk me through it as you do.

  What are you thinking about right now?'

  `Sarah and Jazz,' he said at last. 'In Spain, by the side of the pool. The sun's going down, and I've got a beer in my hand . . . Alex, on the day when she came back from Europe and took us all by surprise. Sarah again, and me, on the day we got married.'

  `Good. That's your reality, remember. That's your life today. The memories that we've unlocked over the last three days might be terrible, but they are things in the past, and they can't hurt you any more than they have already.'

  Bob pulled himself up to a sitting position on the bed, drew Sarah to him, and hugged her, hard enough for him to wince from the pain of the healing wound in his ribs. 'I know that,'

  he said, looking over her shoulder at O'Malley. 'But it amazes me that I was able to keep them so deeply suppressed, and for so long. Imagine, for all those years, I didn't have the balls to face the truth of my own experiences.'

  `No,' said the psychiatrist. 'In my experience your reaction is a sign of exceptional strength of character, and of very strong mental control. You should never have been put in that position at that air crash all those years ago. You were still a very young man, you had been on the same plane a week before; then to find the body of your friend's child . . . To expose you to that was inexcusable behaviour by your commanders.'

  Skinner smiled at him. 'Give them a break, Kevin. They really weren't to know, and I didn't say anything. Mind you, it explains one thing. Eddie McGuinness went on to become Deputy Chief Constable, and latterly I worked quite closely with him. Yet I had this in-built dislike of the man that I could never explain to myself. I can now. The fact is that any half-fit man could have climbed up to look in that cockpit window. Eddie ordered me to do it because Pender was throwing up, and because he didn't have the bottle himself to face what might have been in there.'

  `What was in there, Bob?'

  `Nothing. The crew had run to the back of the plane before the impact. It was the Captain's body that was trapped under the fuselage.'

  `Yet when you looked through the window, in the dream’. O'Malley stared at Skinner.

  'That was quite remarkable,' the psychiatrist said. 'In fact, I've never encountered anything like it. First, as a very young adult you had an experience which would have left most people mentally scarred for life. You coped with it by taking all the detail of it, walling it up, entombing it in the depths of your mind.

  `But then, a few years later, you had an experience that was even worse. Infinitely worse, in fact. You dealt with that by taking it and hiding it, for extra security, actually inside your first terrible memory, behind the wall, in that tomb in your subconscious!

  Remarkable, quite remarkable. Bob, if you'll allow me, I'd like to publish a report of your case, on a Mr X basis, of course.' Ì'll need to think about that!'

  'Naturally, but I hope you'll agree. You know,' he went on, 'it's pretty obvious how those locked memories were disturbed.'

  `Sure, through me being called to a second air crash.'

  O'Malley shook his head. 'No. Not just that. I'm aware that you rehearse situations like these — but that hasn't been enough to trigger any memories. The crash itself might have knocked a couple of bricks out of the wall, but it would have repaired itself pretty quickly.

  It was the cockpit, and especially the moment when you had to break into it to rescue the chil
d. That's really what knocked down all the mental barriers. Not only were you smashing into that cabin, but also into your own subconscious!'

  `The man in the cottage,' said Skinner slowly. 'He appeared in the original dream, the one I had when I was under sedation. Why didn't he reappear under hypnosis?'

  'I think he was probably just a side-effect of your sedation. You obviously knew who he was, so I'd say that he relates to a separate experience, but one that you've come to terms with to an acceptable degree.'

  The two men looked at each other in silence until Sarah squeezed her husband's arm. 'Bob, how did you come to be at the scene of Myra's accident? Surely they didn't send for you?'

  'No, love. I was driving home after my shift. It was as simple as that. I got there a minute after the Fire Brigade and before the ambulance. The car was so smashed up that I didn't even realise it was her . . . until I looked inside, and caught the scent of Chanel No. 5.' His voice tailed off.

  `But . . . what you said about the brake-fluid pipe. Why would anyone want to do that to Myra?'

  He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and stood up, then took a few steps towards the window. She watched him as he turned back to face her.

  `That's the whole point, love,' he said quietly. 'Myra was driving my car that day. It was a souped-up Mini GT job, and it went like shit off a shovel. Hers was an elderly Triumph 2000, a big genteel thing that she took to work, and that the pair of us used to take Alex around in. One of the police mechanics did homers in his lunch-breaks, and he looked after it for me. So I had the Triumph in town that day, being serviced. Normally, I'd have been driving the Mini.'

  Was the cut pipe investigated?'

  Ì'm sure it wasn't. I have to assume now that it was only me who saw it, and I was in no state to talk to anyone about anything.'

  `No,' said the psychiatrist, 'nor to face up to the realisation. That's why your defence mechanism clicked in again.'

  Ì guess so,' said Skinner. 'Anyway, after the accident, our traffic guys found some mud on the road. They assumed that Myra had been travelling too fast . . . which she usually was when she drove the Mini . . . and that she'd hit it. The Fatal Accident Inquiry verdict was accidental death, end of story.'