The Roots of Evil (Bob Skinner)

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘We sell those things,’ William Jessop protested. ‘They’re perfectly adequate.’

  ‘Do you sell long-shafted screwdrivers too?’ John Cotter asked. ‘That’s all it would take to get past it.’

  ‘Okay,’ the merchant grumbled. ‘Mea culpa. I’ll know better next time.’

  ‘Once DS Cotter and I have had a look at the scene,’ the DCI told him, ‘we can lift the restriction, and you can get a specialist cleaner in here. Festina lente,’ she added.

  ‘Who? I’ve never heard of them. I’ll look for them in Yellow Pages.’

  ‘Clearly not a fluent Latin speaker,’ she chuckled as the proprietor walked away.

  ‘Why? Did you just tell him to fuck off, boss?’

  ‘Yes, but not to be in a rush about it. So, what are we looking at here, John?’ she continued, as they walked towards the wall where the victim had died. The smooth white paint was disfigured by several holes where he had been nailed up, and by lines of dried blood leading down to a great dark red circle on the floor. ‘A messy death, that’s for sure. More than that; there was real feeling behind it, a punishment killing if ever I’ve seen one. What do we know?’ she asked aloud. ‘Forensically, it’s a fucking nightmare. From a fingerprint viewpoint it looks as if the whole of Monklands has been through here, none of them with gloves on.’ She consulted her omnipresent notebook. ‘The victim’s name was Walter Thomson, aged thirty-seven, known to the police. Several convictions and three spells inside, the last being two years in the Bar-L, out of a four-year sentence for a ram-raid in a jewellers in Paisley. Released on parole three years ago, three arrests since then but no convictions, no charges, even. Time of death, early on the morning of January the first, cause of death, probably exsanguination, according to Graham Scott.’

  ‘When did the warehouse close for the holidays, boss?’

  ‘The Friday before Christmas,’ Mann replied. ‘Twelve days before he was killed. Ligature marks on his wrists and ankles, plus the fact that he was severely dehydrated and Graham reckoned that he hadn’t eaten for at least seventy-two hours before he died, indicates that he was left here for a while before his captors decided to deal with him.’

  ‘Whatever their issue with him was,’ Cotter observed, ‘it must have been serious. I’m glad we weren’t on the scene before he was removed. Seeing the photos and being at the autopsy was bad enough. Was he reported missing, did the local CID say?’

  ‘No, because he wasn’t missed. He lived with a twenty-two-year-old prostitute, Trudy George; he left her with enough of her earnings to buy drugs but no more, so she wasn’t going to be making any nine-nine-nine calls. I need you to check her background, though. If she has any male relatives who decided that enough was enough, we need to be looking for them. You get on with that, and we’ll let Mr Jessop get back to business. When you tell him, find out the make of that padlock. I want to be bloody sure that I never buy one.’ She paused, smiling. ‘It’s nice to be back on the uncivilised side of Scotland, isn’t it, John? Edinburgh’s far too genteel for me.’

  Seventy

  ‘Raymond Bright?’ Skinner repeated, gazing at the face on his computer screen. ‘It means nothing to me, Sauce, and if he was an Edinburgh criminal it probably would.’ Outside, the rain was turning to sleet, and he found himself looking forward to the following week’s InterMedia board meeting in Girona with even more enthusiasm than usual. He had persuaded Sarah to come with him, the clincher being the use of the company’s new Gulfstream jet.

  ‘No, gaffer,’ Haddock said. ‘He’s Glasgow. He’s fifty-one years old; he has two convictions in his teens for assault, then did five years in his early twenties for an attempted murder in Easterhouse, a few years after the ice cream wars. There are no convictions on his record after that until thirteen years ago when he was sentenced to eighteen years for drug offences, again in the East End of Glasgow. He had several failed applications for parole, until he was finally released four months ago.’

  ‘How does he relate to Terry Coats?’

  ‘That’s the thing. He doesn’t; not that I can see. All of Bright’s convictions were for offences in the same area. He was known to be active in the drugs trade, not at the top of the tree but quite high up, again always in the East End. When he was active Terry Coats was stationed in Ayrshire, in uniform at first, latterly in CID. He was never part of any specialist units that might have brought him into contact with Bright, and Bright’s record has nothing in it that connects through to Ayrshire. Terry did work in North Lanarkshire, but not until Bright was inside.’

  ‘Has he been lifted yet?’

  ‘I’ve asked Lottie Mann if she can do that. Bright operates in her area, and technically she’s still attached to the Torphichen Place investigation. She’s caught up in a new investigation of her own, a crucifixion in Airdrie . . .’

  ‘You’re kidding me,’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘Is she looking for a Billy Connolly fan?’

  ‘What?’ Haddock stared at him, bemused.

  ‘It was a famous comedy sketch: the live version was recorded in Airdrie.’ His protégé continued to stare. ‘Never mind,’ he sighed, ‘before your time. Come to think of it, it was almost before mine. Have you been in touch with Mary Chambers?’ he asked, changing the subject.

  ‘No, gaffer, I haven’t. Should I? Are you saying she might have known something about Spring and Griff’s other lives?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Am I suggesting you should be asking her that? Am I suggesting that if I was in charge of your investigation I would be looking at her financial affairs, to see if there’s anything inexplicable there? Am I suggesting that if you don’t, the fiscal might ask whether you were turning a blind eye because she used to be your station commander? You tell me?’

  ‘Point taken, boss. Am I thinking that maybe I should call her up for a sympathetic chat and let her tell me anything she needs to? Yes, I am and, yes, I will.’

  ‘You do that, and fairly soon, because we have a Saltire reporter flying out there this evening to interview her. If there is anything, emm,’ he hesitated for a second, ‘unfortunate, it would be good to have a hint of it before we run a nice cosy sympathetic feature and make an editorial arse of ourselves.’

  ‘Jesus, gaffer,’ Haddock laughed, ‘you’re good at walking on both sides of the street at the same time.’

  Seventy-One

  ‘This used to be bandit country, John,’ Lottie Mann said, as they approached the address they had been given by the probation service. ‘It looks all right now, but you can bet your life that some of those bandits are still there. A new generation maybe, but the same principles apply. It’s a sort of parallel universe, the counter-cultures in cities, the world you can see, the one that runs the schools and empties the bins, and the one that you can’t, the one that meets other needs, life-threatening cravings that it creates and then satisfies, whether the customers can afford it or not. I fucking hate people like Raymond Bright. Every time I lock one of them up, a happier woman goes home than the one who woke up that morning.’ She pressed the bell in the centre of the bright-blue-painted front door of the terraced house.

  And waited. In vain.

  ‘How do we get round the back?’ Cotter asked.

  ‘Through that door there, son.’ The gruff voice came from their left, from the house next door. Its owner was in his sixties, grey-haired and in want of a shave. ‘But there’s nae point. Him and Phoebe are away.’

  ‘Do you know where they are, Mr . . . ?’

  ‘Grimm, son, Joe Grimm. Aye, they’re away at their place in Tenerife. They left last Friday, so they’ll be back the morra. Raymond was looking forward tae it. He hasnae seen it for a while, but youse’ll know that.’

  ‘Do you know who they’re flying with, Joe?’ Mann asked. ‘There can’t have been too many options at this time of year.’

  ‘Ryanair, out of Prestwick. Raymond was lookin’ forward tae seein’ the Elvis Presley bar again. That’s if it’s still there.’

&nbs
p; ‘Thanks.’ She paused. ‘You realise, don’t you?, that if for any reason they don’t get on the return flight, you’ll be the first person we talk to.’

  ‘Nae worries,’ he assured her, ‘but ye never talked to me the day, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  The detectives turned and walked back to their car. ‘I’ll get on to the airline,’ Cotter said, ‘just to make sure he wasn’t sending us in the wrong direction.’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ the DCI assured him. ‘I don’t imagine he likes having Bright as a next-door neighbour. Do we know who Phoebe is?’

  ‘She’s his sister. Bright’s never been married, and neither has she.’

  ‘We’ll be waiting for them, then . . . the morra.’ She smiled in anticipation. ‘Nice and quiet; I’ll make sure we have two big plain-clothes lads just past passport control. We’ll stay out of sight until they’re in custody, then we’ll have them driven straight through to Edinburgh.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘Of course. There were two people involved, remember. Two cars drove into Torphichen Place, one drove away, with the driver of Coats’ car as a passenger. We’ll take Phoebe as well, until she proves it wasn’t her.’

  She was fastening her seatbelt when her phone buzzed, signalling an incoming email. She took it out and read it; as she did, her eyes widened. ‘This is the full background report on Walter Thomson that I asked for,’ she told Cotter. ‘As fry went, he was pretty small, so he didn’t rate a criminal-intelligence file, but what a gem just fell out of his past!’

  Seventy-Two

  Skinner gazed at the screen of his iPhone as the image of his youngest daughter was replaced by the name of an incoming caller. ‘Mary Chambers,’ he murmured. ‘Now, why am I not surprised by that?’

  ‘How are you holding up?’ he asked, as he accepted her call.

  ‘I’m still in shock, but now I’m just a wee bit concerned. Bob, am I somehow a suspect in this awful business?’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’ he replied. ‘You know I’m long retired.’

  ‘I also know you’re mentoring Sauce Haddock, and others. Griff told Spring; he wasn’t happy about anyone being given special treatment ahead of him. I just had a call from Sauce, and I suspect you knew about it before it was made.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he conceded. ‘Mary, you were one of the best officers I ever worked with in CID. You know that certain questions have to be asked, even when they know the answers. No, you are not a suspect and I doubt that Sauce came close to suggesting that you were. I’ll ask you straight out . . . which he probably didn’t . . . did you ever suspect that Spring had access to funds that she hadn’t told you about?’

  ‘No. She said that she and Griff had an investment through an offshore trust fund that would mature when they were forty-five. She said it was an inheritance from an uncle that had always been managed for them by an agent. She was always flush with cash, yes, but she told me that her design business was flourishing. She showed me her accounts and they bore that out. Okay, I know now they were phoney, but I had no reason to doubt her, or to suspect anything.’

  ‘What about Griff?’

  ‘You mean did I know that he had a gun in his safe and a medium-sized fortune in cash and gold? No, I didn’t. You knew him as well as I did. You’ll remember the explosion when Spring came out and he found out about us, but once he had got over that he was never anything but pleasant towards me. Okay,’ she added, ‘he was never going to be like a brother, but he didn’t freeze me out either. We didn’t talk much but he did let the odd thing slip, mostly about his frustration at being promoted into uniform. He said he only accepted it because he thought it would be short term. He got it into his head that Mario McGuire had manipulated him out of CID.’

  ‘He could have got back into CID any time he liked,’ Skinner told her. ‘All he had to do was accept a move to Inverness.’

  ‘He never told me that!’

  ‘He never told anybody that.’

  ‘The reporter you’re sending out,’ Chambers said, suddenly. ‘Will she be asking me this kind of question?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Lennox will be asking you about yourself rather than about them. The feature will be sympathetic, as I know she promised.’

  ‘Can she be stopped?’

  ‘I suppose she can, if you don’t want to go through with it.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she confessed. ‘I want to go home. I’ll talk to her, no problem, but I would rather do it in Edinburgh. This place is a nightmare for me just now. There are press photographers in the street outside. Louis Pollock has promised to keep them in order, but I feel like a prisoner in my own home.’

  ‘Will Pollock let you come back?’

  ‘He’ll have to arrest me to stop me. If he needs me as a witness I’ll return, but I have no evidence to offer him.’

  ‘Then go for it. I’ll ask June Crampsey to tell Lennox to cancel her flight . . . unless . . .’ He stopped as a possibility occurred to him. ‘Maybe she still could go out there, but to interview Spring instead. I wonder how Pollock would react to that? You book your flight, Mary: your meeting with Lennox Webster will still happen, but maybe not for a day or two.’

  ‘Jesus, Bob,’ she said. ‘You’re turning into a journalist.’

  ‘If I am,’ he said to his empty office after the call had ended, ‘there will be nobody with better sources.’

  He unlocked his desk drawer and removed a small green notebook with a gold House of Commons crest on the cover. It had been a gift from Aileen de Marco, his former wife, and it contained a list of telephone numbers, landline and mobile, that were too sensitive to be included in his handphone directory.

  He turned to the third page and called an entry that was prefixed ‘DAD’.

  ‘Just when I thought my day couldn’t get any worse,’ Dame Amanda Dennis sighed, ‘I get a call from my favourite trouble magnet. What have you got for me?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he told the head of the Security Service. ‘You don’t pay me for my consultancy services, so I want something in kind. It’s well below your pay grade so it shouldn’t be a problem. There’s a name that’s been run past me. I know nothing about him, but I’d like to know everything.’

  ‘Is he a threat to national security?’

  ‘I doubt it very much, but if I’m wrong I’m sure you’ll let me know. You got a pen handy? It’s quite a long name.’

  Seventy-Three

  ‘Sauce, I’m busy here,’ Skinner complained, frowning at the face on his screen. ‘I’ve got our IT manager coming to make a presentation any minute now.’

  ‘Sorry, gaffer,’ Haddock said. ‘I just thought I should let you know that I spoke to Mary Chambers. Your reporter can do the cosy piece you talked about. She’s in shock. I tried to make it as gentle as I could. I hope I succeeded.’

  ‘You may have fallen a bit short. She called me, for reassurance as much as anything else. Don’t worry about having upset her, ’cos you didn’t. She understood you had to ask her, given that Rogozin’s murder happened here, and Spring could have had advance knowledge.’

  ‘I’m working on that. We still don’t know why Griff had that prepaid phone, but I’ve asked Jackie to get hold of Spring’s mobile records. If he used it to call her in advance of sending the email that lured Rogozin to Scotland and to his death, and I can prove it, she’d be implicated.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Skinner said. ‘You’d need to extradite her, and I think you’d find that the South Africans won’t be letting her go anywhere until they’ve done with her, which will probably be at least twenty years from now. Also this; he had an untraceable phone, so the chances are she had too. It’s not worth it, Sauce.’

  ‘There’s justice, gaffer.’

  ‘For whom? What’s it worth to the Scottish taxpayer to prove that she knew in advance that her brother was going to kill their co-conspirator in a crime on another continent? To do that, you’d need to keep your investigation open until she was availa
ble for a very expensive criminal trial which might not take place for years. As long as that was a possibility,’ he pointed out, ‘the Crown wouldn’t be able to hold the FAI into Rogozin’s murder, and the Aisha Karman file in Manchester might have to stay open too. There’s justice, Sauce, but there’s pragmatism too. If I were you, I’d tell Jackie to stop looking.’ As Haddock digested his advice, he carried on. ‘Oh, by the way, the reporter didn’t go; Mary’s decided to come home as soon as she can get a flight. They’ll meet here.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ the DI said. ‘She sounded very low when we spoke, depressed even.’ On screen, he smiled. ‘It’s my turn to change the subject. I checked out that Billy Connolly sketch; very funny but I doubt that he’d get away with it now. I also had some interesting feedback from Lottie. It’s her investigation but she thought I should know. The crucifixion victim, his name was . . .’

  ‘Barabbas?’

  ‘No, he must have escaped. His name was Walter Thomson; he seems to have been a man of no great distinction, and Lottie still has no idea what got him executed Roman-style, but his last arresting officer was Detective Inspector Terry Coats.’

  Skinner stared at the young detective’s Facetime image. ‘What was his name again?’ he asked.

  ‘Walter Thomson.’

  ‘Fuck,’ he whispered.

  ‘No, Walter Thomson.’

  ‘Don’t piss about, Sauce, and don’t go anywhere either. I’m coming to see you.’

  ‘What about the IT manager?’

  ‘Sod her, she can wait. This is much more important.’ He ended the call, and reached for his overcoat, which hung on a hook behind his desk. He was halfway into it when his mobile sounded on his desk. ‘Dame Amanda,’ he exclaimed, as he took the call, ‘I didn’t expect you to call me in person.’

  Seventy-Four

  ‘This isn’t an airport, Lottie,’ John Cotter remarked, ‘it’s a ghost town.’