06 - Skinner's Mission

by Quintin Jardine

  He gave a small shudder and the moment passed.

  ‘Like you said, Dave,’ he said. ‘The boy didn’t have a chance. Any guesses about how the killer got into the building?’

  ‘All the entrances are secure, boss, but he could have done it like we did: pressed any bell and said he was the postman. Or, he could have been someone Medina was expecting.’

  Skinner frowned. ‘Don’t fancy that. In that case the victim would probably have been at the door waiting for him by the time he climbed the stairs, and he wouldn’t have been taken by surprise. He looks to have been quite a fit lad, too.’

  He turned to Dr Banks, who was standing on the other side of the body. ‘Got any idea of the time of death, doctor?’

  Banks looked hesitant, as usual. ‘Well, as you know it’s hard to be precise.’

  ‘Well don’t be precise, man,’ the Deputy Chief Constable snapped. ‘For once, just fucking guess!’

  The doctor flushed. ‘Very well. Late morning, I’d say . . . but I won’t be bound by that.’

  ‘No,’ thought Skinner, ‘you won’t. Yet my wife could give me the time down to the half-hour and probably tell me what the killer had for breakfast.’ Inside him, a river of loss threatened to burst its banks, but with an effort of will he contained it and turned back to his men.

  ‘I don’t understand this,’ he said. ‘We’ve only got one suspect as the orchestrator of this murder, yet he was the guy who put us on to Medina in the first place. Why would Jackie offer him up as a candidate, and then have him knocked off?

  ‘Is the little shit so arrogant that he’s trying to tell us he’s more powerful than we are?’

  He slammed his right fist into his left palm, the speed of the gesture startling Donaldson. ‘If he is, then he’s in for a nasty shock. Once and for all, I’m going to get this villain.

  ‘Dave, you, Neil and Dorward’s team comb through this place for those notes of Medina’s. Don’t worry about looking after his girlfriend. I’ve called Pamela Masters into action earlier than she expected. She’s picking her up from her office, breaking the news to her and finding her somewhere else to stay tonight.

  ‘Meantime . . .’ he looked at DCS Martin, ‘. . . Andy, let’s you and I pay that little bastard Charles a visit!’

  25

  ‘Chief Superintendent, Bob; if I’m all of the things which you have been on a mission over the years to prove that I am, then surely the fact that I’m still walking about shows that I have just a wee bit of intelligence.’

  Jackie Charles looked at the two detectives coldly, with the self-assured expression of a successful general.

  ‘If that is accepted,’ he said, ‘you can’t think, surely, I would be so stupid as to mention my connection with this man Medina to you and then do something like this?’

  Skinner stared back at him. ‘Jackie, where you’re concerned, I wouldn’t discount anything. You’re one of the most villainous bastards I’ve ever met in my life. You stand here in your fine house, waving your old school tie, and maintaining your honest business front.

  ‘In reality you’ve been behind just about every crime in the book. If something had happened since yesterday to make you think that Medina was a danger, I wouldn’t, for one second, put it past you to have had him killed. So far, that’s our principal theory.’ He walked over to the window of Charles’ study, on the villa’s upper floor, and looked out, westwards, over Murrayfield Golf Course.

  ‘The question is, what could have happened to make you pop the boy. Try this for size. After our people saw Dougie Terry this morning, he was straight on to the phone to you. That much I know. Telecom have confirmed that a call was made from his number to your mobile, around the time our guys left Stafford Street.

  ‘I reckon that something could have been said during that interview which made you think that Medina was a risk after all. Something they asked for upset you, made you think that it might lead us to something which your former book-keeper might have seen in your wife’s possession, and might have been able to identify in court, for all that the entries were in coded language, as being connected to you.’

  He glanced at Andy Martin, then gazed back again at Charles, harder than ever, but the man stood his ground. ‘Maybe Carole told you once that she thought Medina might have seen this thing. Maybe then you thought little of it. Maybe today you changed your mind.’

  Jackie Charles leaned against his handmade desk and picked a piece of dark fluff from his coral pink Pringle sweater. Then he looked up at Skinner and said, quietly and with the same assurance as before, ‘If that’s your principal theory, Bob, then you’d better get another. Because I had absolutely nothing to do with this man’s death.’

  The DCC shook his head. ‘No, no, Jackie, we’re not letting you off the hook.’ He looked out of the window once more. ‘I’ll tell you something,’ he said, over his shoulder, ‘although you may have worked it out already.

  ‘I’ve got a reputation for being a bit volatile: short-fused, you know. But Andy here knows me better than anyone, and he’ll tell you that I’m the most patient man in the world. When it comes to crime, I think long-term. I see criminals as my mortal enemies, and in pursuing them I never get discouraged, and I never give up.’

  He turned and he smiled: a hangman’s smile. He raised a hand, palm upward, fingers curling. ‘I have this guiding principle, you see. I believe that if I’m patient, and if I wait long enough, then one day, God will deliver the balls of my enemy into my strong right hand.

  ‘Be in no doubt: when that happens, I don’t even try to resist the temptation to squeeze as hard as I can!’ As he closed his powerful fist, tight, Jackie Charles, in spite of himself, winced.

  He walked towards the door, Martin beside him. ‘Your turn’s coming, Jackie. It’s coming soon. And when it does, I’ll be using both hands.’

  The two policemen hurried down the stairs and out of the house, to Skinner’s car which was parked at the head of the driveway.

  ‘Sir,’ said Martin, formally, and with a touch of caution. ‘You’ve had Charles in your sights for a long time now. We’ll get him eventually, but as far as you’re concerned, don’t you think you’re becoming a bit . . .’

  ‘Obsessional, you were going to say.’ The DCC shook his head and laughed. ‘Christ, everyone’s accusing me of that these days.

  ‘This time, you might be right though. I’d forgotten how much I hate that wee bastard. I have done, I think, from the first moment I ever saw him, and I’m quite certain that I always will. In fact the cold-hearted way that he’s accepted his wife’s death has made it worse.

  ‘I’ve got half a mind to take him down to the mortuary, and make him look at her body. Only I’m pretty certain that it wouldn’t faze him one bit.

  ‘Maybe you should keep me at arm’s length from this investigation from now on, Andy, for everyone’s sake, mine included. Keep me informed, but through Pamela, not directly. I’ll try my best to steer clear of you.’

  He switched on the engine and put the car in gear. ‘Starting now. Time’s getting on. I have something to pick up from headquarters, then I want to look in to say goodnight to my son.

  ‘Last of all, I have a date with my daughter.’

  26

  It was another fine evening. The lights of Edinburgh shone brightly across the dark waters of the Forth Estuary as Bob gazed out of the dining-room window of the Green Craigs Hotel. Across the table, his daughter sat quietly, her coffee cooling in its cup.

  ‘So that’s the story, Alexis.

  ‘That’s why I’m out here, and that’s why Sarah and your wee brother are in Edinburgh. Irreconcilable differences, you lawyers call it.’

  Alex looked at him anxiously. ‘Come on, Pops. Not irreconcilable, surely? You can work things out between you. Look, I know you think that what Sarah did was wrong, and if you force me to it, I agree with you.

  ‘But you have to ask yourself why she did it. Surely it was for you, because she was worried abo
ut you and because she loves you.’

  He looked back from the window. ‘I wish it was as easy as that, sweetheart, I really do. You think I didn’t ask myself why she did it? I did, and I asked her, and I saw the same answer both times.

  ‘Sarah didn’t manipulate your Uncle Jimmy for me, she did it for her, to stop me from doing something she didn’t want me to do. Because that something involves your mother.

  ‘I can’t reconcile that with the Sarah I fell in love with and married. It’s a part of her I didn’t know was there. She looks at me now and she sees a different man, and that’s true too. But . . .’

  He paused and looked across at her and she could see the depth of his hurt. ‘Alex, am I a selfish man?’ he asked, quietly.

  She looked at him and shook her flowing, wavy locks. ‘Pops, you . . . and my fiancé . . . are the two least selfish men I know.’

  ‘Well that’s not how Sarah sees it. By her way of it I am selfish in my determination to investigate your mother’s death. Yet when I try to explain to her that this is something that I have to do, she won’t see it that way. She sees it as my own selfish mission.

  ‘“Myra is dead. Let her stay dead.” That’s what she demands. As if I could bring her back to life!’ He said it suddenly and bitterly.

  He reached across the table and squeezed his daughter’s hand. ‘Come on. Let’s go back to Gullane. There’s something I want to show you.’

  He paid the bill and they drove home, up the mile-long straight and through Aberlady. They sat in gathering silence. As Bob steered smoothly round the curve where Myra had died, it became unbearable.

  ‘I miss her too, Pops,’ said Alex at last, her faced framed in the amber glow of the dashboard. ‘Every day of my life I think of her. All those years, when you were being father and mother rolled into one I still couldn’t help missing Mum.’ Her voice faltered.

  ‘I never expected you to stop missing her, my darling,’ Bob whispered. ‘It’s just that I did my best not to, myself. But now the dam has burst.’

  The Goose Green was quiet as usual, as he parked in front of the cottage, beside Alex’s Metro, and led her indoors.

  The projector was set up on the dining-room table, a reel of film loaded and ready to run. He sat Alex down on a straight-backed dining chair and turned off the lights. ‘I want you to see this,’ he said.

  The film flickered white at first then into life. Alex stared at the beautiful young woman in her strikingly effective bikini. As the camera shot widened and panned out she recognised Gullane beach, thronged with day trippers on a bright summer’s day. The tide was almost full.

  Her hand went to her mouth as she saw the toddler. The little girl, wearing nothing but a sun-hat and a smile, as she lurched and staggered in the sand, falling backwards, laughing, at her mother’s feet.

  The film rolled on. When it finished and Bob switched on the light, she was in tears. ‘Oh Pops,’ she said, quietly as he stilled the spinning reel. ‘How beautiful she was. The photos don’t do her any sort of justice.’

  ‘No,’ said Bob, quietly. ‘They don’t, do they. She was alive, your mother, in a way that very few people are. She was bright, funny, wanton and loving. She lit the place up. We had only lived here for a few years, but the whole village turned out for her funeral. Everybody.’ He smiled. ‘Even a certain wee man that your fiancé is currently trying very hard to lock up. I remember how touched I was by the turnout, and I remember noticing how shocked everyone was.’

  He began to rewind the film. ‘There are more movies of the two of you together,’ he said, ‘and others as well. I’ll have them all transferred to video, save one. That’ll come to you after I’m dead.

  ‘Meantime - and it’ll be a long meantime, mind - there’s something else I want you to have. It’s under the table, out of the way.’

  Alex looked down, and saw the trunk. ‘That? It’s the old box from the attic. The one you told me not to touch. You were so serious about it that I never dared.

  ‘What’s in it?’

  Her father reached across the table and squeezed her hand once again. ‘Your mother’s life is in it. Everything about her. Her Highers certificate, her College diploma, her photographs, records of her teaching career, some of her favourite books, some of her clothes: I put them all in there after she died, in a sort of time capsule. With them, you’ll find the diaries that she kept so faithfully all her years. Everything of her is in there.

  ‘I could never bring myself to reopen it, save once. I should have given it to you a long time ago. I want you to take it now, away from here; through to Glasgow, not to Andy’s.

  ‘When you’re alone, and only then, open it, and go through everything. Learn about your mother. Read the diaries. I suppose she was writing them for you, in a way, writing down all the things she did, that we did, that we talked about.

  ‘When you’ve finished, you should decide what’s to be done with everything that’s in there. Whether you should keep it, to show your daughter eventually; whether some things should come back to me. Each of those decisions will be yours.’

  He pulled the trunk from under the table and stood it on end. Alex heard its contents shift inside. ‘Open the door,’ he said, ‘and I’ll carry it out to your car. It’s been gathering dust for far too long.’

  ‘Okay,’ said his daughter. ‘I was going to stay tonight, if you wanted, but if you don’t mind I’ll go back through to Glasgow now. Andy isn’t expecting me or anything.’

  She hugged him as he stood there. ‘Pops, I don’t know what to say. But somehow, I think it was right of you to keep the box upstairs till now. I don’t know if I’d have been able to handle it before. Even now, I’m not sure how I’ll feel. I only know that this will be the most private thing I’ve ever done.

  ‘You sure you don’t mind if I go?’

  ‘Not a bit, love. You do what you have to do.’ He nodded towards a big brown envelope which lay on the table. ‘Anyway, I’ve got some reading of my own to do.

  ‘But not tonight, I think. That I have to keep for the morning light.’

  27

  The midnight oil was burning in the Scottish Prison Service headquarters. Maggie Rose and Sammy Pye sat before computer terminals at adjacent desks, in a big open-plan office, lit only by neon tubes over each exit and by the glow from their screens.

  They were finishing the third round of coffees provided by sympathetic security guards, surrounded by the remnants of Burger Kings fetched by Pye from the Gyle Centre four hours earlier.

  ‘You’d think, ma’am, wouldn’t you,’ said the Detective Constable, ‘that in this day and age there would be a simpler tracing system than going through every individual file.’

  Rose groaned her agreement. ‘It would be nice, wouldn’t it, if we could just key “Vulture” into the system and press a button. But no, we have to open and read every file. It takes so much time. How far d’you think we’ve got?’

  Pye pulled up a notepad window. ‘We’re a quarter of the way through, ma’am, that’s all.’

  ‘And that quarter has given us three possibles to be followed up, of men listed as having large tattoos on their bodies.’

  The Chief Inspector leaned back and switched off her terminal. ‘That’s it for now, Sammy. I’m cross-eyed. Let’s knock off for tonight, and get back here for nine thirty tomorrow morning. The Cunningham woman was right. We are in for a long, boring weekend, and probably a fruitless one. I can see us slogging around those health clubs after all.

  ‘Maybe I’ll persuade my husband to come in to help us.’ She paused. ‘Wait a minute, I outrank him again. Stuff the persuasion, I’ll order him!’

  28

  Alex Skinner sat in the mingling glow of a large red candle and of the gas fire.

  The trunk looked even bigger on the floor of the tiny living room in her flat in Glasgow’s University district. She stared at it, nursing a long-stemmed wine glass which she held pressed between her breasts.

  She sat t
here for perhaps half an hour, motionless apart from occasional sips from the glass, doing her best to prepare herself mentally to lift the lid on her mother’s life, as Adam Duritz sang, unnoticed, from her stereo speakers.

  She was alone, as her flatmate had left that afternoon for Easter vacation. The weekend was hers, if she chose. She had intended to spend it with Andy Martin, but he had warned her that he was heavily committed to the Charles investigation.

  For most of the life that she could recall, her mother had been a misty, mystical figure. Unknown to Bob, she had begun to hold secret conversations with Myra only a few weeks after her death, as a means of consolation, and of keeping the pain of bereavement under control.

  Over the years she had kept her mother alive in her heart, as best she could. Now she had seen her again for herself, she realised that the mother she had made into an imaginary friend had been no more than a candy floss fantasy beside the real Myra, a woman whose vitality had proclaimed itself like a fanfare, even from the flickery old cine film.

  She had remembered her hair, her face, her soft breath, her smell, but the power of her mother’s personality had been beyond her comprehension at the time of her death. In the film shot on the beach, when she had taken over the camera, her father had seemed to be completely under her spell. Now so was Alex, once again.

  She thought of the diaries. What would she see, through these windows into her dead mother’s soul?

  For a while, she considered going to bed, and leaving her reading for the morning, like her father. But a mix of daring and curiosity overwhelmed her. She switched on the overhead light, and opened the box.

  Everything inside was in brown paper parcels, save for a pair of black high-heeled shoes, and a maroon-coloured tube containing, Alex guessed, her mother’s College diploma.

  She picked out one parcel. It rattled as she lifted it. She squeezed and shook it and felt the round surfaces of bracelets and necklaces. She replaced it and took out another which yielded to her touch, until she encountered a curving wire which she guessed to be the support of a brassiere cup.