‘Hi,’ I said, quietly, ready to signal a truce.
‘How are you?’ she asked; something in her voice told me that she wasn’t.
‘Busy,’ I replied.
‘Me too. Listen, Bob, I’ve been thinking. I have some constituency stuff to take care of in Glasgow tomorrow. Rather than have you glowering at me across the table before you disappear off to the pub for your Friday swill, I’ll go through there tonight and stay in the flat. Okay?’
Enough of being conciliatory. ‘Would it matter a toss if I said it wasn’t?’ I snapped. ‘You suit yourself, dear: as usual.’ I hit the red button to end the conversation.
I sat there for a couple of minutes, wondering how something could go so wrong so quickly. I could have made it right with one phone call. All it would have taken was for me to hit the return button and say, ‘Aileen, you’re right and I’m wrong. Your crowd are the policy makers and I’m the public servant. I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on and let you get on with your job.’
Why not? Why didn’t I do that? After all, and you can trust me on this, I knew that I had no chance of winning the war I’d declared. I have power, sure, but not Clive Graham’s kind, not Aileen’s kind. Yes, I could have faced the facts, accepted the inevitable and tried to live with it.
And lived with myself at the same time? Not a chance, because I believed then, as I believe now, that what they were planning to do was not in the best interests of the people that I was appointed to serve. Not a chance, because a man can’t preach about values and principles to his children when he’s abandoned his own.
‘Bugger!’ I growled, then turned to my computer, opened a new document and started to type, to draft the letter of resignation that I would submit on the day that the unification legislation was passed.
I was still considering whether to begin ‘It is with great regret. .’ when my personal mobile trilled again, on my desk beside the keyboard. I assumed it was the bell for round two. I’d have stayed in my corner had I not glanced at the readout. Wrong wife.
‘Hello, Sarah,’ I answered.
‘You sound beat,’ she said.
‘Do I? I’m sorry. Tough twenty-four hours, and I’m still in the office. I shouldn’t let it get under my skin.’
‘Trouble in Harmony Row? Or am I not allowed to ask?’
‘You are very definitely not,’ I warned her. ‘What’s up anyway?’
‘Nothing specific. I was worried about you, that’s all.’
‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’ I exclaimed.
‘I dunno. Last night at the crime scene, you didn’t seem yourself.’
‘How do you know what my self is any more?’
‘Hey,’ she protested, ‘how many years were we married?’
‘More than enough,’ I chuckled.
She sniggered too. ‘Probably, but in the time we were you don’t think I got to know you? I can tell when you’re not focused and last night you weren’t. You’re okay, aren’t you, physically? Your pacemaker hasn’t been playing up, has it?’
‘What pacemaker? I barely remember that it’s there. I have my annual check-up and each year they tell me that the battery’s going to last a little longer than they expected.’
‘That’s a good sign,’ she said. ‘It means your heartbeat needs very little regulation.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you’d heard it. .’ I stopped, but by then I’d said too much.
‘I see. I won’t pry, honest. Actually there was a work reason for me calling you. I wondered if you had any feedback from the autopsy on our client from last night.’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m completely up to speed. I don’t just know what he had for dinner, I know where he had it. I know also that he was with two other men, and I’m assuming that when he died they were the ones who buried him and called us.’
‘Hey,’ Sarah exclaimed, ‘young Sauce is on the ball, isn’t he?’
‘More than you know,’ I told her. ‘Things happen to Sauce. He’s a magnet for them.’
‘You should be careful. You sound paternal when you talk about him; if you let other people in the force hear that tone they’ll get to resent him pretty quickly.’
She had a point. That woman always could read me like a Kindle.
‘I’m aware of it,’ I said. ‘But the people he works with rate him just as highly as I do. He’s about to be promoted, on his DI’s recommendation, but he doesn’t know yet.’
‘Thank God you’ll be retired,’ she murmured, ‘by the time our kids are old enough to join the force.’
‘As they will over my ancient body!’ I retorted. ‘Speaking of our kids, Mark’s just asked me if he can have a mobile. I didn’t think he was interested in one, but it’s okay with me if you’re onside.’
I heard a gasp. ‘The cunning little. .’ she exclaimed. ‘Mark isn’t interested, not really; he’s been played by his brother. Jazz nagged me about that very thing this afternoon. I told him no way was he having one before Mark, and that I would talk to you about it.’
I had to laugh at that one. ‘What a player! Hey, maybe I should encourage him to be a cop after all. If he’s as manipulative as that now. . I may have to head him off from being a politician.’
Fortunately, Sarah didn’t latch on to that one. Instead, after a few seconds’ silence, she asked, ‘Are you really still at work?’
‘Yup, ’fraid so. I’m waiting for a couple of things, then I have to make a call. No rush, though. Aileen’s going to Glasgow and Trish is looking after the kids.’
‘In that case,’ she hesitated, then. . I could almost hear the splash as she took the plunge, ‘would you like to eat with me?’
‘Are you kidding?’ I exclaimed.
‘No, I’m not. We have matters of common interest, three of them. Surely it’s not unreasonable for us to meet to talk about their future.’
‘When you put it that way, no it isn’t.’ I stretched in my chair, feeling, all of a sudden, as tired as Sarah had claimed I sounded. ‘Ah, what the hell! Where? Nowhere too crowded.’
‘Everywhere’s crowded on a Friday night, Bob. Come to my place. I’ll burn you a steak. .’
I smiled, and finished the quote for her. ‘. . and smother it in onions.’
She’d taken that line from an old Paul Newman movie she’d seen as a kid, and made it real many times when we were together. Sarah can burn a steak to perfection, and as for the onions. .
‘Okay, I’m sold,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring a bottle of something decent, but you’ll have to drink it.’
‘Not me, hon. I don’t partake these days.’
‘Eh?’ How many surprises in one day? Sarah loved fine wine.
‘It’s too easy for a single woman to sit at home and sink a bottle a night,’ she explained. ‘I’ve looked at too many diseased livers to want anyone looking at mine one day and wincing. But I do like Vichy Catalan, that mineral we used to drink in Spain, if you can find any of that.’
‘Okay, I’ll try to be with you by eight,’ I promised. ‘But don’t cook anything till I call to tell you I’m on the way.’
‘As if I would!’
She hung up and I turned back to my computer. I aborted my draft letter to be resumed at a later date, then opened my intranet mail box. Young Sauce had moved fast. The images and the report he had attached told me that the banknotes had been dusted and had yielded only eight prints in total, but four of them were common to each note. There was a thumb in the corner, index finger in the centre, same side, where someone might leave them when peeling them from a roll, and two others, fainter, one on the front of the fifties and the other on the back. Sauce guessed that these might have been Solomon’s as he took the money from his customer.
The lad had been smart enough to have the notes scanned, and sent four images, with the serial numbers showing clearly. ‘Good boy,’ I murmured, then reached for the phone, not a mobile, but a secure line on my desk.
It’s good to have friends, but it’s
great when they have influence. I’ve known Amanda Dennis professionally for years, and whenever I’m in London I try to meet her socially as well. She’s one of those people who keep a low profile. Indeed there was a time not so long ago when she didn’t even exist, officially. Her business is national security, and on occasion it overlaps with mine. She’s the deputy director of MI5, although there was a period when she ran the whole damn show, on an acting basis.
‘Bob,’ she said, ‘this is a surprise. Does it mean you’re coming to the capital?’
‘Hey,’ I laughed. ‘I’m in the capital.’
‘Oh, you bloody Scots. You know what I mean.’
‘Yes, but I don’t have a trip south in my diary at the moment. There’s something I want to run past you, to see if you can help. I’ve got an odd situation in Edinburgh and it’s getting odder by the minute.’ I ran through the story from the beginning, from the anonymous call and the discovery of the body, though to Haddock’s trip to Glasgow and what he had found there.
‘You can’t help it, can you?’ she murmured, when I was finished. ‘You’re a chief constable, supposed to be a pen-pusher, yet here you are on a Friday evening, up to your elbows in an investigation when you should be in your club with your cronies. Does the phrase “get a life” mean anything to you?’
‘You can talk, woman,’ I grunted. ‘Do you actually have a home, or do you have a room in that building?’
‘I have a very nice flat,’ she replied, but I’d known that all along.
‘Sure, in Dolphin Square. You could throw a tennis ball from your office window and it would hit it without a bounce.’
She sighed. ‘Maybe, but you know how it is. The bastards who are trying to get us don’t work office hours; for example, there’s live intelligence about a plot to assassinate a leading British political figure. Whitehall’s on a virtual lockdown because of it. Even without that, the threat level’s constantly high these days. From both sides,’ she added, ‘theirs and our own. Ever since we became a more open book, as it were, we’ve been under more political scrutiny. You know what those chaps are like; Commons committees are stacked with ambitious people looking for a cause that’s going to generate headlines for them, and bashing the security service has become very popular.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I murmured.
‘Oh, do you have problems too?’
‘Do I ever.’ I paused. ‘Amanda, between you and me, what do you know of Toni Field?’
‘Enough to know that I never want to work for her,’ she said, firmly.
‘You’re career Five, chum, going nowhere else; there’s no chance of that.’
‘To the first, yes, I agree. To the second, don’t be so confident. That woman’s ambitions know no boundaries. She cultivates the powerful everywhere she goes. Doesn’t matter who or what they are. She’s the poster girl in the Met at the moment. . the Mayor of London thinks she’s wonderful. . plus she has contacts deep into the Home Office and Justice Ministry, at political and civil servant level. She sees herself running this place one day; the way she operates makes me certain of that. The present Home Secretary hates her, thank God, but nobody stays in that office for long. When I heard she’d got the Strathclyde job, I knew there would be trouble between you two, I just knew it.’
She was so insistent that I had to chuckle. ‘Fact is,’ I said, ‘I have bigger problems than her, but to hell with it, I’ve had enough of them for today. Amanda, I’ve got some fingerprints, and an image of the dead man. We’re running them through conventional databases, naturally, but I wondered if you’d be prepared to do some wider checks for me, within your community. The fact that these guys seem to be foreign. .’
‘I agree. They could just be a trio of tourists, but. . To dispose of a body like that? Worth a check.’
‘And it might be worth checking with your Glasgow office, too,’ I suggested, ‘to see if there have been any undercurrents there. The three men ate in Glasgow; the guy died very soon afterwards, and yet his friends buried his body in Edinburgh and then pointed us at it. Why would they do that? They must have known we’d be chasing our tails in the aftermath, so was that deliberate? Create a mystery in Edinburgh, focus attention there. Smokescreen?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I’m not aware of anything specific in Scotland but I’ll ask. Send me the image and the prints and I’ll have people work on them, straight away.’
Lowell Payne
I hadn’t really fancied a trip to Andorra. I went there on a skiing holiday with Jean in the first year of our marriage, before our daughter was born: I didn’t like it. The country looks as if God landscaped the Pyrenees with an axe when he was making the world. It’s a drab, claustrophobic canyon of a place. Our travel agent fed us a line about how cheap the shops were. Crap! When we got there we found that for most things they were cheaper than Harrods, but nowhere else. An ex-pat resident told me there were bargains to be had in diving equipment. . in a ski resort: work that one out. . and in firearms, but we were in the market for neither.
As it turned out, one phone call was all Mackenzie and I needed to make progress with our investigation. A quick online check told us that while there’s an honorary consul in the mountain state, he operates under the supervision of the British consulate in Barcelona. I called there, and was put through to the Andorran expert, a lady called Betty Ireland.
‘How can I help the police?’ she asked, sounding as if she was genuinely pleased to have a chance to do so.
‘I want to find out all there is to know about a company called Holyhead SA,’ I told her. ‘It’s come up in an investigation. Can you give me some pointers?’
‘A criminal investigation?’
‘Potentially,’ I conceded. ‘We’re interested in some payments that have been made and Holyhead’s the source.’
‘I can make enquiries. Do you know anything about it at all?’
‘We believe it may be owned by a man called Welsh.’
‘Is he a resident of Andorra?’
‘No, he’s Scottish. Lives in Edinburgh. Does that make a difference?’
‘Not necessarily, but you may find that the gentleman isn’t the owner of record. In the past that would have had to be a citizen, but the law is changing, to encourage foreign investment and to encourage the setting up of holding companies there.’ She paused, then switched into full lecture mode. ‘Andorra isn’t your classic offshore tax haven, you understand. It doesn’t have the sort of regime that attracts financial institutions, nor is it the sort of place where you’d set up an offshore trust.’
‘So what’s the attraction?’
‘Income tax: there isn’t any. The taxation is all indirect.’
‘I see.’ Wouldn’t be enough for me, I thought. They’d have to pay me to live there. ‘Can you give me any pointers,’ I asked, ‘on how to investigate this company?’
‘How urgent is it?’
I grinned. ‘We’re the police, Ms Ireland. Everything’s urgent.’
‘In that case I’ll speak to my contacts and get back to you as soon as I can. I’m sure you won’t mind giving me your main switchboard number, so that I know you really are the police.’
‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ I said. ‘Time frame?’
‘With luck, tomorrow morning; I’m assuming that you’re on weekend duty.’
‘We are on this one. Thanks.’
‘Sauce’ Haddock
Cheeky and I don’t live together, you understand. We each have our own place, and don’t plan on moving in together until we’re sure that the time is right. . and yes, I’ll admit it, when I feel one hundred per cent sure of her. At the moment we tend to get together at weekends rather than during the working week. We’re pretty conservative in what we do, given that we’re both still only twenty-something: we’ll go out for a meal at least once, do a movie at one of the multiplexes. If the weather’s nice we might go for a drive on a Saturday or Sunday, usually as far away from Edinburgh as we can get, and if we
’re feeling flush, stay over in a hotel.
We’d been talking about going to Loch Lomond on the Saturday in question, and maybe beyond, up towards Oban. There are all sorts of wee bed and breakfast places up that way, and we thought we might try one of them. The chief had buggered that plan up, well and truly.
He’d put me in something of an awkward position as well. As I’ve said, I’ve built Chinese walls into our relationship, to keep Cheeky and my work well apart. Her having given me her grandpa’s tip was one thing; it didn’t break any of my self-drafted rules. But me, involving her in my work, that did.
But what was I going to do when the boss asked me? Refuse? Tell him politely to go and fuck himself? Bob Skinner? Are you kidding? I might be self-confident, but I’m not suicidal. No, I’d said, ‘Yes, sir, how many bags would you like me to fill, sir?’ and a few hours later I was sitting in Petit Paris in the Grassmarket. . we’d decided to stay at my flat that night. . feeling decidedly shifty, and I am certain looking it as well.
Some nights, I’ll look at Cheeky and I’ll say to myself, ‘You know, Sauce, you’re crazy.’ My favourite band is Del Amitri, and of all their songs, my all-time number one is called ‘Be my downfall’. Every time I hear it I think it could have been written about me, and often I find myself singing it in my head, sounding remarkably like Justin Currie in the process.
She could have been my downfall, and no mistake. Her grandfather is from the Dark Side, so dark that when the local villains in Dundee mention Darth Vader, they ain’t talking about the black sheep of the Skywalker family, or Sammy Pye’s secret father as a CID in-joke has it. She and I got together for all the wrong reasons, lust on my part, the fact that I’m a cop on hers. She kept her background from me and when she walked out the door one time, she might have been carrying the corpse of my career on her shield.
But she came back, remorseful, and when she did, I found that I couldn’t slam that door in her face. I’ve told her that if she ever lies to me again, that’ll be it, we’ll be finished. I was so firm about that, I almost believed it myself. The truth is that she has a hold over me. I love her. She says she feels the same about me, and I do believe that. We don’t discuss the future, we don’t think about it. We have what we have and that’s cool.
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