06 - Skinner's Mission

by Quintin Jardine

  Alarm at the snapped question showed in the young Detective Constable’s eyes, but for no more than a second. Then he nodded, and it vanished to be replaced by cool confidence.

  ‘John Jackson Charles, sir,’ he began, as if reading from a page in his mind. ‘Known to all his friends and associates as Jackie. Aged forty-eight, and born in Edinburgh. He was an only child and his parents were thoroughly respectable middle-class people. His father, Martin Charles, was sales manager with the main Ford dealer in the city until he retired twelve years ago. Mr Charles senior is seventy-seven years old. He and Mrs Charles senior, who is seventy-five and who has always been a full-time housewife, now live in a cottage in St Andrews owned by their son.

  ‘The Charles family lived in a small bungalow in Corstorphine, and Jackie was educated at the Royal High School. He left school at eighteen with a clutch of Higher passes, but didn’t choose to go to university. While he was at school his father had given him holiday work at the Ford dealership, and when he left, he insisted on starting there full-time.

  ‘He was there for three years, until there was a row. The directors of the business discovered that he’d been dealing privately in used cars, often selling to customers who had come into the Ford showroom. Jackie was sacked, and his father might have been too, only his bosses were persuaded by Jackie that his dad had known nothing about his illicit sales.

  ‘Not unnaturally, Charles moved out of the family home after that incident. He bought a semi-detached house out in Penicuik, and began to deal from there, selling to private customers, or locating and supplying specific cars to the trade.

  ‘He did that, apparently successfully, for three more years. Then all of a sudden he went up in the world. He opened up, in this very showroom, the first car dealership in Seafield, and at the same time he and his new wife moved from Penicuik to a villa on a new development, Muirfield Park, in Gullane.’

  Detective Constable Pye paused, and looked at Skinner. ‘I’m sorry, sir. That’s as far as I’ve got with the file so far.’

  ‘That’s fair enough,’ said the DCC. ‘I didn’t expect you to have memorised Jackie Charles’ complete life story, but you’ve done pretty well. Let me fill in the rest for you.’

  He paused, as Pye looked at him, in relief. ‘In those days,’ he began, ‘before computer storage and analysis, the business of criminal intelligence wasn’t anywhere near as sophisticated or as high-tech as it is now, but it existed nonetheless. Fair or unfair, secondhand car dealers were among its priority subjects, and so when Jackie Charles made his big move it stood out like a sore thumb. My team became even more interested when our routine investigation showed that Jackie wasn’t renting his new showroom. He had bought it for a hundred and twenty grand from a dealer in domestic heating oil, who had anticipated the collapse of his market.

  ‘The showroom had plenty of stock too, much of it bought for cash at auction in the month before the opening. My people did their sums. The showroom and the new house were mortgaged to an extent, but we worked out that Jackie must have laid out over a hundred thousand in cash.

  ‘We had a guess at the profit that he might have made in six years of trading, but it fell well short of that, and the Inland Revenue were happy with his tax returns. So we looked around, and we came up with a theory.

  ‘Around a year before Jackie Charles made his big move upmarket, there was a major robbery in Edinburgh. One of the biggest industrial employers, a company called Indico, had its payroll snatched in broad daylight from an armoured van on a back road out in Sighthill. Five men in two cars stopped it and blocked it in. They were dressed SAS-style and were armed with shotguns, handguns and sledgehammers.

  ‘They smashed their way into the cabin of the truck, hauled out the driver, put a gun to his head and forced him to unlock the back door. The security guard inside had a go as soon as it was open. One of the gang shot him in the legs with a sawn-off. Afterwards the man had to have a leg amputated.’

  Skinner paused, to make sure that Pye was following his narrative. ‘Indico had a big payroll,’ he went on, eventually. ‘The gang escaped with almost half a million pounds. None of it was ever recovered, and they were never caught. Six months after the event, an informant gave us the name of someone he said had driven one of the cars. The man named was Douglas Terry, the manager of one of Tony Manson’s saunas. He was picked up, but he denied any involvement and of course, a couple of girls from the sauna came forward and gave him an alibi.

  ‘My squad made the reasonable assumption that Tony Manson was behind the robbery, and that he had done his usual efficient cover-up. But then a few months later, Jackie Charles spent all that money, and the case was reopened. Us guys in the Serious Crimes squad took another look at the staff of Indico, the company which had been robbed. We had already investigated everyone in the accounts department who might have known about the movement of cash, but couldn’t find a thing.

  ‘This time we looked at former staff as well. We found that a young book-keeper had packed in her job three months before the hold-up, and we read her resignation letter. It explained that she was leaving to work in her boyfriend’s business. When she worked at Indico, her name was Carole Huish. By the time we read the letter, she had become Carole Charles.’

  Young Pye’s eyes widened, but Skinner held up a hand, seeing Inspector Dorward approach. ‘You can read the rest for yourself, Sammy.’ He turned towards the newcomer. ‘Yes, Arthur. Are you ready to draw that picture for us?’

  The man nodded. Like the others he had pulled up the hood of his tunic against the rain. ‘As ready as I’ll ever be, sir.

  ‘Like I said earlier, this was a low-tech job. The arsonist used petrol as his fuel, good old four-star. Some of it was in cans near the office door, some of it was in the tanks of the cars in the showroom.’

  ‘How was it triggered?’ asked Andy Martin.

  ‘The old-fashioned way, with petrol-soaked rope as fuses. We’ve found traces of what we think is hemp residue leading from the showroom doorway right up to the tanks of the Maserati, the Ferrari and the two biggest BMWs, and to a pile of what we reckon are melted oilcans, beside the empty office doorframe.

  ‘Whoever did this set up the fuses, stood in the showroom doorway, lit them all, closed the door behind him and buggered off.’

  ‘But wait a minute,’ said Martin. ‘All that couldn’t have been done silently. Surely the victim in the office must have heard?’

  ‘Not necessarily, sir. We found a melted radio in the office with the volume control turned up pretty high.

  ‘But even so, take a look at this.’ Dorward held up a bright brass object, with a darker piece of twisted metal protruding from it.

  ‘It’s the lock from the office door, as we found it among the ashes. It’s been turned, and the key is on the outside.’

  Martin stared hard at him. ‘So your evidence in the witness box would be that the victim was locked in, before or after the fire was set, yet could have been unaware of it until it was too late.’

  Dorward thought for a few seconds. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said at last. ‘That’s what I’d say under oath.’

  ‘Yet the arsonist knew that the poor sod was in there,’ said the Head of CID, ‘because he turned the bloody key!’

  ‘Which makes this,’ muttered Skinner slowly, ‘not an insurance job, or a fire-raising by someone with a grudge against Jackie Charles, but cold-blooded premeditated murder, possibly with the man himself as the victim.’

  He looked at Martin. ‘I think, Chief Superintendent,’ he said heavily and grimly, ‘that it’s time that you and I paid a call on Mr Charles. Unless, that is, we’ve seen him already this morning!’

  2

  Skinner had been brought to the scene by a patrol car, and so they set off for the Charles home in Martin’s Mondeo, with the Head of CID at the wheel.

  ‘I never knew you were on that Serious Crimes team, boss,’ said Martin.

  ‘What? The one that turned up the Carole Hu
ish connection? I thought I’d told you that.’ He smiled in the dark.

  ‘I was a young DC, twenty-three, younger even than Sammy Pye. Myra and I were just married, and living in a police flat in Clermiston. We were there for about a year and a half before we bought the cottage in Gullane, through a guy my dad knew. Myra was well pregnant when we moved in, and Alex was born just a couple of weeks later.

  ‘Salad days those were, but they didn’t last long.’ The big man shook his steel grey head, as if to clear away a memory.

  He looked round at Martin and he grinned again. ‘Christ, Andy, were we full of ourselves on that squad, when we linked Charles to Indico.’

  ‘How did you follow it up?’

  ‘Roy Old and I . . . he was a Sergeant then, poor Roy . . . were told to go and talk to her. Archie Gillespie, our gaffer, decided that he would send out a couple of junior guys rather than fire off the big guns too early.

  ‘We interviewed her at the showroom, the very one we’ve just left. She handled all the paperwork for the business in those days. That was the first time I had ever met her or Jackie. We were told not to put the wind up her, just to tell her that we were interviewing everyone connected with Indico, and it had taken us that long to get around to former staff.’

  He laughed out loud. ‘That’s what we were told, and that’s what we told her. By God, but she was a cool one, was Carole, even then. Jackie wanted to sit in on the interview, but she just fluttered her eyelashes and shooed him away. Roy Old did the talking at first, just like we’d been ordered. “Nothing to worry about, routine enquiry,” all that stuff.

  ‘When he asked her if she had knowledge of the payroll delivery route and timing, those eyelashes stayed rock solid. She didn’t bat either of them, not one bit. She just looked at Roy and said, “Yes”. That was all. And I knew right then that she had come up with the information for the robbery and that Jackie had set it up.’

  He tapped his strong, straight nose. ‘It came off her in waves, her self-assurance. You know how people react, Andy. Everyone who’s asked a question like the one Roy asked her - especially, in my experience, those with nothing to hide - will show some sign of discomfort, or alarm, or downright panic. Not Carole. When she looked Roy dead in the eye and said, “Yes”, she was as good as saying, “So fucking what, you’re never going to prove anything, and all three of us in here know it.”

  ‘Then she gave me the look as well; and she got to me. The red mist came down. I could have blown my CID career right there. I forgot Gillespie’s orders. I gave her the Evil Eye, as hard as I could, and she didn’t flinch. I’ve met maybe half a dozen people in my life that I couldn’t stare down. Carole Charles is one of them.’

  He paused in thought. ‘Her husband now, he isn’t. He knows I’ve never been able to nail him for anything, but he reckons that one day I probably will, and for all that he’s a ruthless, clever wee bastard, he can’t look me in the eye for long.

  ‘Yet that morning, twenty-three years ago, she did. And you know what, Andy, she was gorgeous with it. As I looked at her I realised that she was giving me the eye, and that I fancied her. There I was, with a new wife, starting to get a hard-on over some bird who was simply taking the piss out of me. That made me feel guilty and angry all at once, and all of a sudden. I stood up, and I looked around the showroom. With my John Henry bulging my Y-fronts, I pointed a finger at her and I said, none too quietly, “A few other people knew about the payroll too, but you’re the only one with a husband who’s just spent a hundred fucking grand on his business.”

  ‘That brought Jackie over, and it scared the shit out of Roy, who knew Archie Gillespie better than I did. He hustled me out of there, and told me to write up a report that showed we had followed the Gaffer’s orders. So I did, but I finished it with my personal opinion that we need look no further.’

  Martin looked sideways at Skinner, as they sat at a red traffic light. ‘What was the outcome?’

  ‘I got my arse kicked by Gillespie, in front of the whole team. Not because of the report, but because of Jackie Charles. He was so confident that he made a joke of it to his father. He told him that because he had borrowed to invest in his business and because his wife had worked at Indico, they were being accused of being Bonnie and Clyde.

  ‘Charles Senior was in the same Masonic Lodge as Archie Gillespie, and over their next handshake he complained to him about me. So my Superintendent told me out loud - very loud - that if I ever wanted his job, I’d better learn fast about the limits of delegated authority . . . in other words about obeying fucking orders!

  ‘Archie took over the enquiry, of course, and because Martin Senior had tried to use the Masonic thing, he went for Jackie with everything he could. Gillespie knew from the off that I was right, but the Charleses were too cool, and too well covered.

  ‘We firmed up on a theory eventually, although theory it remains to this day. We discovered that Jackie had sold a couple of cars to Tony Manson. Our hypothesis was that he, and Carole, had dreamed up the Indico job, and that Jackie had taken it to Manson. Terrible Tony had supplied the men and the shooters, and he and Jackie had split the proceeds.

  ‘You know the story from then on. There have been fifty-seven armed robberies from regional and sub-Post Offices around Central Scotland in the last twenty years, and thirty-four raids on small town banks. All that improved criminal intelligence that I was talking about earlier has led us to believe that Jackie Charles has been involved in funding most of them, in the same way that Tony Manson backed him in the Indico job.

  ‘We know also that he is the money man behind just about every loanshark in Edinburgh and Midlothian, that through nominees he owns half the minicab licences in the area and that by a process of straightforward extortion he has a financial interest in the rest.

  ‘We know all that,’ said Skinner grimly, in the dark. ‘But we’ve never been able to prove it, because people are too frightened, or too well rewarded, or just hate us too much to co-operate with us.

  ‘On top of that,’ he growled, ‘national police intelligence sources tell us that Jackie Charles has been responsible for supplying out of town wet contractors, or hit-men as Joe Punter would say, to take care of local difficulties around Britain. They say that he’s a member of a Magic Circle of organised criminals, connecting London, Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland.’

  The DCC glanced across at Martin. ‘I’ve had two failures in my career, Andy. There have been just two guys I couldn’t nail: Tony Manson and Jackie Charles. Tony’s dead; now maybe Jackie’s gone the same way.

  ‘Maybe, finally, through all that he’s upset someone enough to have a wet contractor brought in on him.’ Skinner looked out of the window of the Mondeo as it drew up at the foot of a long driveway which wound up towards an impressive villa just off Ravelston Dykes Road. ‘Let’s go and find out.’

  The two detectives climbed out of the car. Skinner checked his watch in the glow of a sodium street lamp. It was 3.25 a.m. He turned up the collar of his trademark black leather overcoat to protect himself as best he could against the rain, which had grown heavier since they left Seafield, and followed Martin up the herringbone-patterned red-brick driveway.

  No lights showed in the house, but the door of the double garage was raised. Inside, dimly they could make out the shape of a car. They had almost reached the house when they were blinded, their approach triggering a 500-watt halogen security light mounted over the garage door.

  Cursing softly and shielding his eyes from the glare, the Chief Superintendent took a torch from his pocket and shone the beam towards the blackness of the garage doorway. It illuminated the rear of a gleaming new Jaguar XK sports car, registration number ‘CHC 1’.

  ‘It’s as if Carole left the garage open for Jackie coming in, and went to bed,’ said Skinner, quietly.

  ‘Let’s find out,’ said his colleague. He stepped up to the front door, under its stone vestibule, and pressed the bell, leaning on it for several seconds. The pol
icemen took a few steps back, out into the rain, and waited, looking at the upper windows. They were out of the arc of the movement detector attached to the halogen light; after a few seconds it winked out.

  ‘Cocky bastard,’ growled Skinner. ‘So confident that his security’s minimal.’

  Martin was almost ready to ring the doorbell once again, when a light went on in one of the upper windows, to their right. Behind the damask shade they saw the silhouette of a figure peering out into the pitch-black garden, looking around but failing to spot them. Eventually the windowframe swung open slightly, and a disgruntled, sleepy voice called out . . . a male voice.

  ‘Christ, Carole, have you lost your bloody keys?! And what the hell are you doing coming in at this time anyway?’ At once, both detectives recognised Jackie Charles’ clipped voice, and his well-groomed accent. They had heard it often enough, yet it carried a frustrated, peevish tone that was new to them.

  Martin took a full, deliberate step sideways back into the arc of the security light, triggering it once more. ‘It isn’t Carole, Jackie. It’s Chief Superintendent Martin and DCC Skinner. We need to talk to you, now. Come down and let us in, please.’

  Jackie Charles’ tone changed at once. ‘God, Bob Skinner, you always were a tenacious bastard. Now you’ve got this one at it. Have I got to write to my MP to stop you lot harassing me?’

  ‘Your new MP’s a friend of ours, Jackie,’ said Skinner. ‘I don’t think she’d listen to you. Anyway, this isn’t harassment. Like Andy said, we need to talk to you.’ He laid heavy stress on the word, and his tone was an unquestionable command. The window closed.

  Less than a minute later, the front door opened, and Jackie Charles held it wide for them to enter. He was wearing a blue silk dressing-gown, over matching pyjamas, with Morland leather sheepskin-lined slippers on his feet. He was a dapper man, around five feet eight, but with a stocky build which made him appear shorter. His dark hair, heavily flecked with grey, was expensively but traditionally cut, and looked neat even in the middle of the night, as it swept back from his temples and from his forehead.