Pray for the Dying

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Not a bit.’

  He wandered back into the kitchen, and took another Rolling Rock from the fridge. He had just uncapped it when the phone rang. He frowned, irked by the interruption, wondering which of the few people with access to his unlisted number had a need to call it on a bloody Sunday, when they all knew it was the day he liked to keep to himself.

  ‘Yes,’ he barked, not choosing to hide his impatience.

  ‘Is that Joey Morocco?’ a female voice asked.

  ‘Depends who this is.’

  ‘My name’s Marguerite Hatton. I’m on the political staff of the Daily News.’

  ‘And I’m a bloody actor, so why are you calling me?’ Hatton, Hatton; the name was fresh in his mind. Of course, the woman from the press conference, she who had tried to give Aileen’s husband a hard time, and had her arse well kicked.

  ‘I’m trying to locate Aileen de Marco,’ she replied. ‘I’d like to talk to her about her ordeal last night and how relieved she feels that the killer got the wrong woman.’

  ‘So?’ he challenged. ‘Why are you calling me?’

  ‘You’re quoted as saying, last night as you left the concert hall, that you’re a friend of hers,’ she explained. ‘I’m calling around everyone; the Labour Party, Glasgow councillors, anyone who might know her, actually, but she seems to have disappeared. Do you have any idea where she might be?’

  ‘Why should I? And if I did, do you really think that I’d betray her by setting you on her? If you want to find her, ask her husband, why don’t you?’

  ‘I rather think not,’ Hatton drawled. ‘Can you tell me about your relationship with Ms de Marco, Mr Morocco?’

  ‘No,’ he snorted. ‘Why the hell should I do that?’

  ‘But you did say you’re a friend of hers.’

  ‘Yes. So what? Aileen has many friends. She’s Glasgow’s leading lady. Ask a real journalist and they’ll tell you that.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m a real journalist, Mr Morocco,’ she told him. ‘Be in no doubt about that. How long have you known Ms de Marco?’

  ‘For a few years.’

  ‘How close are you?’

  ‘We are friends, okay? Is there any part of that you don’t understand?’

  ‘What’s the nature of your friendship?’

  ‘Private. Now please piss off.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  He felt himself boil over. ‘Listen, hen,’ he shouted, lapsing into Glaswegian in his anger, ‘you want to talk to me, you go through my agent or my publicist. By the way, both of those are owed favours by your editor, so don’t you be making me have them called in.’

  ‘He owes me a few as well, Joey,’ she countered. ‘I keep bringing him exclusives, you see. When did you last see Ms de Marco?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ he snapped and slammed the phone back into its cradle.

  ‘You’ve been a while,’ Aileen said, as he rejoined her.

  ‘I had a nuisance call,’ he replied.

  ‘There’s a number you can call that stops you getting those.’

  ‘It doesn’t always work. But hopefully that one’s gone away to bother somebody else.’

  Eleven

  ‘How’s the force reacting to Mr Skinner’s appointment?’ Harry Wright of the Herald called out, from the second row of the questioning journalists gathered in the Pitt Street conference room.

  ‘Come on, Harry,’ Malcolm Nopper began to protest, but Lottie Mann cut across him.

  ‘How would I know?’ she replied, her deep booming voice at a level just below a shout. ‘I’m just one member of this force, and for the last,’ she made a show of checking her watch, ‘twenty hours, minus a few for sleep, I’ve been leading a murder investigation. I think I can say for everybody that we’re all still shocked by what happened to our former chief constable. As for the new chief, he’s keeping in close touch with my investigation, but he’s confirmed me as the lead officer.’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Nopper exclaimed, ‘people, I know these are unique circumstances, but I remind you that we’re here to discuss an ongoing inquiry into a suspicious death.’

  A few explosions of laughter, some suppressed, some not, came from the gathering at his blatant use of police-speak. Skinner winced, and reflected on his insistence that the chief press officer should take the chair at the briefing. He had slipped into the room at the first call for order, and was standing at the back, half-hidden behind a Sky News camera operator.

  ‘Okay,’ Nopper sighed, shifting in his seat before the Strathclyde Police logo backdrop as he tried to rescue the situation. ‘At least that got your attention. My point was that this is a murder we’re here to talk about and that it should be treated just like any other, regardless of who the victim is. Now can we stick to the point?’ He looked towards the Herald reporter. ‘Harry,’ he invited, ‘do you want to ask a proper question?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I thought that was, but never mind. Detective Inspector, you were able to confirm for us that the police victims are Chief Constable Field and Sergeant Sproule. Now can you tell us anything about the other two men? Do you know who they are . . . were, sorry?’

  Lottie straightened in her chair, and took a deep breath, in an effort to slow down her racing heart. ‘We believe so,’ she replied, speaking steadily. A murmur rippled through the media, and she paused to let it subside. ‘They’ve been identified as Gerard Botha and Francois Smit. They were both South African citizens, and they’ve been described to us as military contractors.’

  ‘Mercenaries?’ a female Daily Record hack shouted.

  The reporter was so suddenly excited that Lottie suspected she had spent her career waiting to write a crime story that didn’t involve domestic violence, homophobia or dawn raids on drug dealers. ‘If you want to use that term,’ she said, ‘I won’t be arguing with you.’

  ‘Who gave you that description?’ John Fox asked, from his customary front and centre seat.

  ‘Intelligence sources,’ the DI told him.

  ‘MI6?’

  Lottie looked him in the eye, then gave him the smallest of winks. ‘Be content with what I’ve given you.’ She came within a couple of breaths of adding, ‘There’s a good boy,’ but stopped herself just in time, realising that Pacific Quay’s top crime reporter was someone she did not need as an enemy.

  Fox grinned. ‘I had to ask, Lottie. These men were the killers, yes?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘To what degree of certainty?’

  ‘Absolute.’

  ‘Do you know as certainly how they came to die?’

  ‘Yes,’ the DI said. ‘But with the greatest respect, I’m going to tell the procurator fiscal before I tell you. Fair enough?’

  The BBC reporter shrugged his shoulders slightly as if in agreement, but some others tried to press the point. She held her position until eventually Harry Wright changed the angle of approach.

  ‘DI Mann, the concert hall had security cover and the event was policed, yet these two men seem to have smuggled a weapon in there regardless. Is your investigation focusing on your own security and on the lapses that allowed this to happen?’

  ‘We know how they did that too, but again I’m not able to share it with you.’

  ‘Same reason, I suppose,’ Wright moaned. ‘The fiscal gets to know before the public.’

  She shook her head, firmly. ‘No. It’s information that we have to keep in-house for now. There are aspects of it that we need to follow up.’

  ‘Continuing lines of inquiry?’

  ‘Sure, if you want to say that, I’m content.’

  ‘DI Mann, why isn’t Mr Skinner sitting alongside you?’ Marguerite Hatton cried out from the side of the room.

  ‘Relevant questions only,’ Nopper exclaimed. ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘I’ll decide what’s relevant,’ the woman protested. ‘I’ll disrupt this press conference until you answer. Why isn’t the new chief constable present?’

  ‘He is!’ />
  Every head in the room, apart from the two seated at the table, turned at Skinner’s bellow.

  ‘Satisfied?’ he boomed. ‘DI Mann is leading this investigation and she enjoys my full confidence.’

  ‘How is your wife today, Mr Skinner?’ Hatton shouted back.

  Slowly, the chief constable walked towards her. A press office aide stood at the side of the room, holding one of the microphones that were available so that every reporter’s questions could be heard. He held out his hand for it and took it, then stopped.

  He knew that the TV cameras were running and that still photographs were being shot, but made no attempt to have them stop.

  ‘Lady,’ he said, into the mike, ‘I don’t know who you think you are, or what special privileges you expect from me, but you’re not getting any. You’re here at our invitation to discuss a specific matter, and now you’re threatening disruption, as everyone here has heard. I’m not having that. One more word from you and I’ll have you ejected.’

  ‘This is a public meeting,’ she protested.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ he snapped back at her. ‘It’s a police press conference. I mean it. One more word and you are on the pavement.’ He held her gaze, his eyes icy cold, boring into hers, unblinking, until she subsided and turned away from him.

  ‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘As long as we’re clear.’ He looked at the platform. ‘Carry on, Malcolm.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ the chief press officer said.

  The Daily Record reporter raised her hand. Nopper nodded to her. ‘Can we take it that Chief Constable Field’s relatives have been told?’

  ‘Of course,’ he replied. ‘We released her identity, didn’t we? Her mother arrived in Glasgow this morning.’

  Shit, Skinner thought, they’re going to love you for that when the media turn up on their doorstep.

  ‘Did they identify the body?’

  Malcolm Nopper put a hand to his mouth, to hide a laugh.

  ‘They knew who she was, Penny,’ John Fox pointed out.

  Twelve

  ‘So you’re the armourer,’ ACC Mario McGuire said to the man who faced him across the table in the Livingston police office. There was nobody else in the interview room.

  Freddy Welsh was a big man, one with ‘Don’t cross me’ in his eyes, but someone had. There was a deep blue bruise in the middle of his forehead and his right hand was bandaged. For all that, he still looked formidable. ‘I don’t recognise that name,’ he murmured.

  ‘Maybe not, but it seems that other people do. People like Beram Cohen.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  McGuire leaned back and sighed. ‘Look, Mr Welsh, can we stop playing this game? You’ve never been in police custody before, so I appreciate you’re only doing what you’ve seen on the telly, but really it’s not like that. There’s no recording going on here.

  ‘You’ve already been charged with illegal possession of a large quantity of weapons. We have the gun that was used in last night’s murder in Glasgow, and we are in the process of proving beyond any doubt that it came from the crate that was found yesterday afternoon in your store. You can take it that we will do that, and as soon as we do, the Crown Office will have a decision to make.’

  ‘And what would that be?’ Welsh asked.

  ‘Are you really that naive, man?’ McGuire laughed. ‘Do I have to spell it out? The kill team that executed Toni Field are all dead.’

  The prisoner’s eyelids flickered rapidly. He licked his lips.

  ‘You didn’t know that?’ his interrogator exclaimed.

  Welsh shook his head. ‘I’ve been locked up since last night, and I wasn’t offered my choice of newspaper with breakfast this morning. How would I know anything? I don’t even know who this bloke Tony Field is, or how Glasgow comes into it.’

  ‘Antonia Field,’ McGuire corrected. ‘The Chief Constable of Strathclyde. She was the victim. Your customer, Mr Smit, put three rounds through her head. You told my colleague Mr Skinner it was a woman he and Botha were after, and you were right.’

  The other man frowned, as he took in the information. McGuire had assumed that he knew at least some of it, but it was clear to him that he had been wrong. ‘And they’re dead?’ he said.

  The ACC nodded in confirmation. ‘Yeah. Cohen, the planner, the team leader, he died of natural causes, a brain haemorrhage, but you knew that much. As for the other two, Mr Skinner and the other man you met,’ as he spoke he saw the shadow of a bad memory cross Welsh’s face, ‘arrived on the scene too late to save Chief Constable Field, but they did come face to face with Smit and Botha as they tried to escape, over the bodies of two other police officers they’d just taken down. They were offered resistance and they shot them both dead.’

  The armourer started to tremble. McGuire liked that. ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘dead. It’s one thing being the supplier, Freddy, isn’t it? You’ve been doing that for donkey’s years, supplying the weapons to all sorts, but never being anywhere near them when the trigger was pulled. Not like that here, though. You’re too close this time, and it’s scary. Isn’t it?’

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out two photographs and laid them in the table. One showed the body of Antonia Field, the other that of Smit.

  ‘Go on, take a good look,’ he urged. ‘That leaky grey stuff, that’s brain matter. Awful, isn’t it?’

  Welsh pushed them back towards him.

  ‘You don’t like reality, do you?’ he said. ‘It’s not good to be that close.’ He leaned forward again. ‘Well, you are, and far closer than you realise. That woman, her whose photo I’ve just shown you, when that was done to her, my wife,’ his voice became quieter, and something came into it that had not been there before, ‘my heavily pregnant wife, was in the very next seat. When I got her home last night she was in a crime scene tunic that Strathclyde Police gave her, because the clothes she’d been wearing before had Toni Field’s blood and brains splattered all over them, and she couldn’t get out of them fast enough.’

  He stopped, then reached a massive hand across the desk, seized Welsh’s chin and forced him to meet his gaze.

  ‘So far I know of four people who I hold responsible for that, Freddy. You are the only one left alive, and that puts you right in it, because now only you can tell me who commissioned this outrage. And you will tell me.’ He laughed, as he released Welsh from his grasp.

  ‘You know, Bob Skinner suggested that if you didn’t cooperate, I should get the MI5 guy here to persuade you. But I don’t actually need him. He’s just a spook with a gun, whereas I am a husband who’s going to wake up in cold sweats, for longer than I can see ahead, at the thought of what might have happened to my Paula and our baby if that sight you supplied with your Heckler and fucking Koch carbine had been just a wee bit out of alignment.

  ‘I’ve been playing it cool up to now, because Paula’s amazingly calm about it and I want to keep her that way, but that’s been a front. Inside I’ve been raging from the moment it happened. Now I can finally let it out. You’re a big guy, but you’re not tough. There’s a hell of a difference. I’m probably going to beat the crap out of you anyway, but what you have to tell me may determine when I stop.’

  He sprang from his seat and started round the table.

  Thirteen

  ‘So what have your people got?’ Skinner’s jacket . . . while he disliked any uniform, his hatred for the new tunic style favoured by some of his brother chiefs was absolute . . . was slung over the back of the new swivel chair that had been in place by the time he had returned from the press briefing. He had refused all requests for one-on-one interviews, insisting instead that these be done with Lottie Mann, as lead investigator.

  His visitor was as smartly dressed as he had been the day before, but the blazer had given way to a close-fitting leather jerkin. No room for a firearm there, the chief thought. Just as well or security would have gone crazy. The garment was a light tan in colour almost matching Clyde Houseman’s skin to
ne, but not quite, for his face sported a touch of pink. ‘Have you caught the sun?’ he asked.

  The younger man smiled. ‘Did you think I’d just get browner?’ he responded. ‘I’m only one quarter Trinidadian, on my father’s side. The rest of me gets as sunburned as you. And the answer’s yes. I went for a run this morning, a long one; not on a treadmill either but around the streets.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Along Sauchiehall Street, then down Hope Street to the Riverside; over the Squinty Bridge, along the other side for a bit then I crossed back further up, past Pacific Quay. Up to Gilmorehill from there, round the university, and then home.’

  ‘Is that your normal Sunday routine?’

  ‘Hell no. Normally I go out for breakfast somewhere. There are a few places nearby.’

  ‘Where is home?’

  ‘Woodlands Drive.’

  Skinner’s eyebrows rose slightly. ‘Woodlands Drive, indeed. I had a girlfriend who had a flat share there, in my university days. Louise.’ His eyes drifted towards the unfamiliar ceiling, and then back to his visitor. ‘Are you married, Clyde?’

  Houseman shook his head. ‘Half my life in the Marines and special forces, seeing action for most of it, then on to MI5. No,’ he chuckled. ‘I couldn’t find the time to fit that in. Not that I had any incentive, given the happy home I grew up in.’

  The two men’s first encounter had been in a squalid housing estate in Edinburgh, when Skinner had just made detective superintendent. Houseman had been a street gang leader, son of a convicted murderer and a thief, until the scare the cop had thrown into him had made him rethink his entire life and join the military.

  ‘Hey,’ the chief constable said, ‘mine wasn’t that great either. It didn’t put me off marriage, though, not that I’ve been very fucking good at it. I’ve had three goes so far. My first wife died young, car crash, second marriage ended in divorce, and now the third’s going the same way.’

  ‘You and the politician lady?’

  ‘Yeah. She had this notion that I should help her fulfil her ambitions, which are substantial. That would have involved me following behind, in the Duke of Edinburgh position. Not my scene, I’m afraid, so we’re calling it a day.’