Last Resort Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Quintin Jardine

  The right of Quintin Jardine to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in this Ebook edition in 2015 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  Jacket photograph © Joanna Jankowska/Arcangel Images

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 0565 0

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About Quintin Jardine

  Praise for Quintin Jardine

  Also by Quintin Jardine

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  PS

  About Quintin Jardine

  Quintin Jardine was born once upon a time in the West: of Scotland rather than America, but still he grew to manhood as a massive Sergio Leone fan. On the way there he was educated, against his will, in Glasgow, where he ditched a token attempt to study law for more interesting careers in journalism, government propaganda, and political spin-doctoring. After a close call with the Brighton Bomb in 1984, he moved into the even riskier world of media relations consultancy, before realising that all along he had been training to become a crime writer.

  Now, more than forty published novels later, he never looks back. Along the way he has created/acquired an extended family in Scotland and Spain. Everything he does is for them.

  He can be tracked down through his website www.quintinjardine.com.

  Praise for Quintin Jardine

  ‘A triumph. I am first in the queue for the next one’ Scotland on Sunday

  ‘The perfect mix for a highly charged, fast-moving crime thriller’ Glasgow Herald

  ‘[Quintin Jardine] sells more crime fiction in Scotland than John Grisham and people queue around the block to buy his latest book’ The Australian

  ‘There is a whole world here, the tense narratives all come to the boil at the same time in a spectacular climax’ Shots magazine

  ‘Engrossing, believable characters . . . captures Edinburgh beautifully . . . It all adds up to a very good read’ Edinburgh Evening News

  By Quintin Jardine and available from Headline

  Bob Skinner series:

  Skinner’s Rules

  Skinner’s Festival

  Skinner’s Trail

  Skinner’s Round

  Skinner’s Ordeal

  Skinner’s Mission

  Skinner’s Ghosts

  Murmuring the Judges

  Gallery Whispers

  Thursday Legends

  Autographs in the Rain

  Head Shot

  Fallen Gods

  Stay of Execution

  Lethal Intent

  Dead and Buried

  Death’s Door

  Aftershock

  Fatal Last Words

  A Rush of Blood

  Grievous Angel

  Funeral Note

  Pray for the Dying

  Hour of Darkness

  Last Resort

  Primavera Blackstone series:

  Inhuman Remains

  Blood Red

  As Easy As Murder

  Deadly Business

  As Serious as Death

  Oz Blackstone series:

  Blackstone’s Pursuits

  A Coffin for Two

  Wearing Purple

  Screen Savers

  On Honeymoon with Death

  Poisoned Cherries

  Unnatural Justice

  Alarm Call

  For the Death of Me

  The Loner

  Mathew’s Tale

  About the Book

  LAST RESORT is the twenty-fifth novel in Quintin Jardine’s ever-popular Bob Skinner series, and sees the Edinburgh cop back as never before.

  After thirty years of service, former Chief Constable Bob Skinner faces the possible end of his police career, at its pinnacle.

  A quiet trip to Catalunya to contemplate his future soon takes on a different flavour when Skinner is approached by an old friend, media owner Xavier Aislado, with an unusual request. One of his business’s brightest talents, Hector Sureda Roca, has vanished without trace. Now it’s up to Skinner to track him down.

  But as he conducts his search it soon becomes clear that another manhunt is also in progress, and that he himself is the target.

  While his daughter Alex fights that battle on the home front, his search for Sureda takes one sinister turn after another, until he is faced with the toughest question of all. Is natural justice sometimes the only answer?

  This one’s for Martin Fletcher, who keeps Skinner honest. Cheers, mate.

  One

  When the call came, the one that put me back in place as a functioning human being, I was, not to put too fine a point on it, really screwed up inside my head.

  I had begun a year that seemed to be full of promise, but if I’d been granted foresight of what most of those promises actually were, I’d probably have stayed in bed on the first of January and waited out the next twelve months.

  I’d have been on my own, though; even then I should have been able to spot the fault lines in my unstable marriage to Aileen de Marco.

  When our relationship became public knowledge, a smart-arse broadsheet journalist wrote a flowery piece about the attraction of unlike poles, the policeman and the politician, the authoritarian (me) and the libertarian (her), and topped the allegorical nonsense off by labelling us ‘Scotland’s most magnetic couple’.

  I fell for some of that for a while, until the day when I realised that it was the diametric opposite of the truth. Aileen and I were both leaders in our chosen professions and we were both (although I’d have denied it) ambitious. However, she was as authoritarian as me, and neither of us had any trace of compromise in our nature.

  When we found ourselves on a collision course over the future of the Scottish police service, and its implications for my personal
position, with Aileen determined to ensure that her side of the argument came out on top, and having the power to make that happen . . . well, to complete that journo’s analogy, the like poles that, in reality, we had been all along, repelled each other, as they always do.

  Everything fell apart after that, very quickly indeed; not only my marriage, but my job, my career, my vision of the future; they were all cut from under me.

  The one saving grace . . . and that’s something of a pun, given her family name . . . was the return of Sarah, the wife I should never have left in the first place, and the cautious rebuilding of our relationship. She and I have only two things in common: we love each other and we love our kids. She’s good for me and I know now that I was lost in the time we were apart.

  When disaster followed disaster in my life, and everything reached its grim conclusion, it was only Sarah who kept me on the rails. I’d have sat brooding indefinitely in the house, over the offer of an unspecified role at an unspecified rank, or giving my lawyer a hard time as he tried to sort out the alternative, the terms of my departure from the police service. Indeed that’s what I did for a few weeks until she had enough of it.

  ‘Bob,’ she said, plucking what would have been my fourth Corona of that Saturday evening if she’d let me uncap the bottle, ‘this will not do. I know how shitty the last few months have been, but not even you can undo an Act of Parliament.

  ‘I know you’re having difficulty with the fact that you’re not Chief Constable Skinner any more, but it is not the worst thing that’s ever happened.

  ‘You’ve given thirty years of public service. Now it’s somebody else’s turn to catch the bad guys, to clear up after the pubs close, and to keep the traffic flowing smoothly, and those people are more than capable, since your generation has trained most of them. There was a police force before you and there will still be one without you, if you decide to go completely. What you have to work out is what you might be without it.’

  I felt the corners of my mouth turn down as I watched her put the beer back in the fridge. ‘I might be nothing,’ I countered, mournfully. ‘Being a policeman might be the only shot I had in my locker.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ she laughed. ‘You’ve already been offered three non-executive directorships.’

  ‘I don’t do non-executive anything, love. You know that.’

  ‘Then you could write.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Your career.’

  ‘I’d have to leave too much out. A lot of my files are closed.’

  ‘You could try fiction,’ she suggested. ‘You could jump on the Tartan Noir bandwagon.’

  ‘Christ,’ I complained, ‘can’t we find a word in our own language to describe a Scottish institution, rather than nicking one from the bloody French?

  ‘If I did that, love,’ I pointed out, ‘. . . although I doubt that I have the talent . . . everyone would be convinced that it was all Skinner’s Casebook thinly disguised. There could be all sorts of legal problems . . . and besides, I don’t have the patience.’

  ‘Then you could teach.’ She pointed an authoritative figure at me. ‘I’ll bet that if you put the word out that you fancied a university chair, you’d have half a dozen offers.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say that, my dear,’ I countered. ‘You’re a consultant forensic pathologist; you can do your job and teach it at the same time. Mine wasn’t like that. What would my lectures be about? Police procedure? Criminal investigation?

  ‘Sure I could do that stuff, but what I couldn’t teach, probably couldn’t even explain, is the instinct that separates an efficient officer from an exceptional one; the reason why one patrol officer in twenty will know when it’s time to kick a door in, then finds a sick old person or an abused child behind it, or why only a single detective in a squad might be able to look at all the known facts of a case, understand logically what must be hiding behind them, and then back his own judgement. I wouldn’t be interested in turning out clone cops, only risk-takers.’

  She smiled, challenging. ‘Well?’

  ‘There would be no market for them. Risk only works when it’s rewarded.’

  ‘It worked for you.’

  ‘God knows how.’ I heard myself chuckle. ‘When I think of some of the chances I took . . .’

  ‘Then take another.’

  ‘How?’

  She took a few moments to frame her reply. ‘Get the hell out of here for a while. The longer you sit around here sulking, the likelier it is that you’ll wind up as a middle-aged house husband with a shrinking golf handicap and an expanding waistline.

  ‘Already you’re drinking more beer than you should, and your coffee addiction’s come back. Is that what you want from the rest of your life?’

  ‘Probably not,’ I conceded, ‘although I like the bit about the golf handicap.’

  ‘You can play golf anywhere, and you need to do it somewhere else for a while. It’s less than a month to Christmas; take yourself off to the Spanish house for some of that time. You’ll be able to look at the future more objectively out there.’

  ‘I’m needed here,’ I protested. ‘My kids need me . . . all of them.’

  ‘They can do without you for a couple of weeks . . . they’ve had to in the past. Go away, Bob, and look forward, not back.

  ‘You’re in a great position. With the pension you’ll have kicking in if you decide to leave the force, you’ll be financially fireproof for life. The world’s the shellfish of your choice, since I know you don’t like oysters. Go: work it out.’

  Two

  These days I have a simple rule: what Sarah wants, Sarah gets. Two days later, on the following Monday, I was on a flight to Barcelona, with a one-way ticket.

  I hadn’t expected to be heading back to L’Escala so soon; my last trip to my Spanish hometown had ended calamitously, and that bad memory was still burned into my brain.

  The flight touched down late in the evening, so I spent the night in a hotel above Estacio Sants, the main railway station in Barcelona, and took a train north after breakfast.

  The house was cold when I arrived on Tuesday morning, just before midday. Anyone who believes that the north of Spain enjoys a year-long summer has never been there in the winter. My priority task was firing up the heating; that done, I unpacked, and then made the place habitable by moving the garden furniture out of the living room. By the time everything was as I wanted it, I was experiencing lunchtime symptoms, so I left a message on Sarah’s phone to let her know that I’d got there okay, and strolled down into the old town, the heart of L’Escala.

  Although I’ve had a home there for all of twenty years, I had never visited Spain in early December. I’d expected the place to be quiet, with half the cafes and restaurants closed for holidays or maintenance, so I was surprised by the buzz around the little beach.

  The tourists were gone, but the expatriate population was out in numbers. The languages that caught my ear as I sat at a pavement table in one of the few bars that caught the watery early afternoon sun were mainly English and French. If it hadn’t been for a trio of Spanish business people . . . the two guys in the group were wearing ties, and that’s a real giveaway . . . I might have been the youngest person there.

  As I leaned back in my chair and looked across the bay, watching the waves lapping against the rock they call El Cargol, the snail, I was seized by the curious notion . . . erroneously, as I was to discover very soon . . . that I was an unseen observer of my surroundings, encased in an invisibility bubble.

  It didn’t take me long to rationalise the feeling: I was in the midst of a crowd of people and nobody, not one person, recognised me.

  I’ve never regarded myself as a celebrity, but in recent years I’ve been forced to recognise that as a chief constable I was a public figure. Even before that, when I was involved in hands-on criminal investigation, my image featured regularly on television and in the press. I was used to heads turning when I walked into a room, and to registe
ring the expressions of people as they clocked me. (You can tell a lot from that first glance.)

  I smiled as I ordered a beer, a couple of tapas, and a long flauta sandwich. As the waiter departed, I logged my iPhone on to the house wi-fi, and checked my emails. Apart from my daily newspapers, I had three. One was from Gullane Golf Club, setting out its programme for Christmas and New Year, the second was from Mitchell Laidlaw, my lawyer, and the third was from Neil McIlhenney, on his personal account rather than his Metropolitan Police address.

  I opened that first, and read. ‘Thanks for the good wishes,’ he began. I’d left him a voice message the day before congratulating him on his promotion to Commander.

  It’s bloody ridiculous that I’m still climbing the ladder while you might be jumping off it, given that I’d probably never have made it past DS if not for you. Good luck to Andy as the first head of Police Scotland, and to Maggie as his deputy, but we’re all sorry that you might not be there. If you fancy a complete change of scene, there are whispers of an assistant commissioner vacancy down here, one that would suit you down to the ground.

  I smiled as I closed the message. Those whispers had reached my ears, straight from the mouth of the Met Commissioner herself, who’d called me to sound me out. I declined as politely as I could; a few years ago I was encouraged to apply for the job that she holds now, but a London move has never held any interest for me.

  Neil was right. A large part of me did indeed want to jump off that damned ladder, for a whole raft of reasons, some professional, others personal; the latter included one that had made me judge my position to be untenable. Better to leave it to the next generation, I’d been thinking, even if launching myself into the unknown was a daunting prospect.

  I was a cop in limbo; officially I was still on the strength, but the force that I’d led had disappeared in the creation of the new unified service. I was on sabbatical; the PR people had said that the Police Authority was looking at possible roles for me in the new service.

  That was true, but its chief executive had come up with nothing of any interest to me. I had made noises about wanting out, but the authority was reluctant to negotiate a severance package, and I was equally reluctant to go down the tribunal route. Also I was unsure.