Funeral Note Read online

  FUNERAL NOTE

  Quintin Jardine

  Copyright © 2012 Portador Ltd

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

  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.

  First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012

  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

  eISBN: 978 0 7553 5705 5

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Also by Quintin Jardine

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Detective Chief Superintendent Mario McGuire

  Chief Constable Robert Morgan Skinner

  Detective Constable Harold ‘Sauce’ Haddock

  Dr Sarah Grace

  Aileen de Marco Skinner

  Andrew Martin, Director, SCDEA

  Detective Inspector Becky Stallings

  Deputy Chief Constable Margaret Rose Steele

  Detective Constable Griffin Montell

  Detective Chief Inspector Lowell Payne

  Maggie Steele

  Superintendent David Mackenzie

  Detective Sergeant Jack McGurk

  Sarah Grace

  Detective Inspector George Regan

  ‘Sauce’ Haddock

  Lowell Payne

  Aileen de Marco

  Paula Viareggio McGuire

  Alexis Skinner

  ‘Sauce’ Haddock

  Mario McGuire

  David Mackenzie

  Detective Sergeant Lisa McDermid

  Bob Skinner

  Lisa McDermid

  Bob Skinner

  Lowell Payne

  ‘Sauce’ Haddock

  Andy Martin

  Bob Skinner

  Mario McGuire

  Sarah Grace

  Cameron ‘Cheeky’ McCullough

  Lowell Payne

  Griff Montell

  Paula Viareggio

  Bob Skinner

  Mario McGuire

  Aileen de Marco

  Becky Stallings

  Bob Skinner

  Mario McGuire

  Sarah Grace

  Clyde Houseman, senior regional field officer, MI5

  Lowell Payne

  Bob Skinner

  Maggie Steele

  Clyde Houseman

  Bob Skinner

  Paula McGuire

  Twenty years ago Quintin Jardine abandoned the life of a media relations consultant for the more morally acceptable world of murder and mayhem. Over thirty published novels later, it’s a decision that neither he nor his global network of fans have ever regretted. Happily married, he splits his time between Scotland and Spain, but he can be tracked down through his website www.quintinjardine.com.

  Praise for Quintin Jardine’s novels:

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

  ‘Remarkably assured...a tour de force’ New York Times

  ‘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

  ‘A complex story combined with robust characterisation; a murder/mystery novel of our time that will keep you hooked to the very last page’ The Scots Magazine

  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

  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

  Primavera Blackstone series:

  Inhuman Remains

  Blood Red

  As Easy As Murder

  The Loner

  About the Book

  The brilliant new Bob Skinner mystery by the master of crime fiction, his most ambitious yet.

  After a tip-off, a man’s body is exhumed from a shallow grave in Edinburgh. Murder surely, yet he died from natural causes, so, case closed? Indeed was there ever a case?

  But Chief Constable Skinner and his people keep on digging. Who was the man, why was he buried so reverentially, and by whom? Meanwhile corruption is discovered within the force, and an investigation launched. Immersed in crises, his marriage heading for the rocks, Skinner finds his very career hanging in the balance, its fate beyond his control.

  In a tale seen through the eyes of each of its leading players, Quintin Jardine, the Crimemaster, lays mystery upon mystery until the greatest threat of all those facing the Chief is revealed, and a deadly race begins. Can he win out, or will his life implode?

  This is for Bett and Bob.

  Foreword

  For new readers, and old friends.

  I have a birthday today. It’s not a big number, unless you’re a Satanist with a little imagination, but it’s a good day for reflection, to look back on my life and on some of the things that have happened along the way.

  When this book appears in its first editions, twenty years will have elapsed since I signed my first contract with Headline, then a thrusting newcomer to UK publishing, now a member of the global Hachette group, and a major industry player. Twenty-two years will have passed since I accepted my late wife’s challenge to live up to my assertion that I could do a bloody sight better than the book I’d just finished and tossed away. Twenty-two years of living alongside, and occasionally in the shadow of, Robert Morgan Skinner.

  The first decision I ever made about Big Bob, who is not my alter ego whatever anyone may say or believe, set the route for what at that time I had no notion would become a twenty-year (so far) journey. Having looked around the crime fiction genre as it existed then, both in printed form and in TV drama, I was struck by the fact that most of the cop protagonists out there, with the possible exception of Fat Andy Dalziel (a n
ame I know how to pronounce, having grown up opposite Dalziel High School in Motherwell), were middle-ranking detectives with one hundred per cent clear-up rates and no prospects of promotion because of character flaws, ranging from alcohol, through arrogance, to sheer unlikeability, or they were toffs who regarded policing as a form of charity work.

  Thus Skinner was created as a high flyer who had already flown, a detective chief superintendent on the first page of Skinner’s Rules, and promoted to assistant chief constable halfway through.

  Or was he created? Even now I’m not sure about that. The greatest moments in this writer’s life are those in which a character appears on a page without any pre-planning, or warning, as if he’s come not from my imagination but from somewhere else. That’s how it was with Skinner, and as it was later with the likes of Lennie Plenderleith, Xavi Aislado and Paloma Puig, his abuela, although, with hindsight, she may owe a little to my own paternal grandmother. He imposed himself on me and left me to put shape to his existence. How could that happen? Does the mind work that way? Or is he really a separate entity, a personality in his own right? Could it be that I have a personality disorder? If so, I won’t be seeking treatment for it.

  Once he was there, and in his place in a police force that is entirely fictional. . .

  Explanation: in the real world, police services are provided in Edinburgh and its surrounding counties by Lothian and Borders Constabulary. That’s a phrase you will not encounter in any Skinner novel (I hope!). It’s a quirk of mine, to emphasise that his is a fictional world and that he is a clone of no living person.

  . . . the benefits from that first determination about his place in the structure began to bear fruit.

  Most significantly, the fact that Bob is where he is in his parallel universe means that he has more subordinates than those other cops and, therefore, that his stories tend to have a greater cast of characters. That has been fundamental to the durability of the series, in that it has allowed me, over the years, to bring people in from the back benches, explore them in more detail, cast them as hero/ines or occasionally villain/esses, then let them step back . . . if they’ve survived.

  Should that make you imagine that the Skinner series possesses some of the elements of a TV soap, I’m fine with that. It’s what I’ve set out to give it, from an early stage in its development, as soon as I realised that I had more stories in me than I could number.

  If I’ve learned one thing in twenty years it’s that readers are drawn to series by places, but stay with them because of people.

  Today’s great British telly institutions such as Coronation Street and EastEnders won attention initially because they were set in recognisable, identifiable communities, but they haven’t held it for all those decades simply because people like Salford or Tower Hamlets. No, they’ve survived and prospered because of a constantly renewing cast of strong characters and powerful storylines.

  New viewers come to these series with every episode that’s broadcast. When they do, they don’t need to know that Martha Longhurst sat down and died in the snug of the Rovers in 1964 or that Dirty Den Watts was murdered twice. But the scripts need to give them enough of a reference back for what’s happening so that they will understand it as well as anyone who’s been watching Corrie since December 1960, or been lodging in Walford since the Queen Vic opened twenty-five years later.

  It’s the same with a long-running crime fiction series. Readers who’ve been with Bob Skinner since he presented his credentials to them at the dawn of the 1990s will know that the death of his first wife, Myra, wasn’t quite the accident he believed it to be, until the truth was revealed in Skinner’s Ghosts. Those who meet him for the first time on these pages have to be told how her story fits into his, but not necessarily all of it.

  Newcomers need to know something of Skinner’s past life for certain references in subsequent books to make sense, but not every detail, for inevitably that would get in the way of the current plot, and in addition would cause the premature death of thousands of trees. Similarly, while it’s important that readers know George Regan to be a man marked by the loss of a son, so they can understand his situation, they don’t need to know how he died. Nor do they need an exact description of Stevie Steele’s passing, only the information that it happened on the job, and that he was the second husband of Maggie Rose, after her failed marriage to Mario McGuire. Similarly, Harold Haddock’s nickname is ‘Sauce’, but if I explained in every book that for people in the east of Scotland brown sauce is an essential condiment to a fish supper, it would become wearing.

  That’s the line of accessibility, the chalk-mark on the floor; to provide the essential information that newcomers need without alienating old friends, or making them think we’re patronising them. It’s what Martin Fletcher, my editor, and I try to do with every book. We believe we walk that line without leaning too far to either side; I’m pleased to say that so far, feedback indicates that we do. If not, we would like you to tell us, and you can do so through my website, www.quintinjardine.com.

  Three years ago, when I finished the twentieth Skinner novel, Fatal Last Words, I decided that would be a good moment to take a look back over the series and to appraise where I stood with each character. It didn’t take me long to realise that while I had spent quite some time, and turned many doomed trees into paper, developing the characters of cast members including Neil McIlhenney, Andy Martin, Sarah Grace, Jimmy Proud and several others the one of whom I, and as a result my readers, knew least was the main player, Skinner himself.

  With that in mind, I embarked on Grievous Angel, a story set fifteen years back in Bob’s career, and narrated by the man himself as part of a therapeutic process. I set it fifteen years in the past, when my main man was balancing his climb up the CID ladder with the pressures on a single parent with a daughter entering her teenage years. I decided to set the book in the first person, for two reasons. One, I tend to rebel against convention, including that which decrees that cop stories should be told in the third person. Two, I wanted to get deeper into Skinner’s head, and to explore the Dark Ages of his life, the period between his first wife’s death and the coming of his second marriage.

  A year later I felt confident enough to take the experiment a step further, to return to the present and to go further in determining what Chief Constable Bob’s colleagues, friends and family actually think about him, and occasionally about each other. That’s how Funeral Note was born, and that revelation will explain its structure. It has been described as my most ambitious work yet, and I will accept that as a fair assessment.

  Like its predecessor, the book is in the first person, but this one is in multiple perspectives. It’s a series of inter-related, sequential narrations, each told to an unseen interviewer, and presented almost in the style of a documentary. With each contribution mystery is laid upon mystery and gradually a hidden, shapeless threat becomes terrifyingly apparent.

  Along the way readers will find that Bob Skinner’s hope of a settled, stable family life was misplaced, they will find that his colleagues admire, fear and dislike him in almost equal measure and they will find that the unshakeable certainty that has made a success of his professional life turns destructive when it is challenged at home.

  I’ve learned a lot about Skinner and his people in writing the last two books, but most of all about the man himself. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but now I realise that since the start of our acquaintance, his and mine, Bob has been in denial over the death of Myra, his teenage soulmate and first wife. He has blundered into several injudicious relationships, and a couple of ill-considered marriages, while at work he has become completely ruthless, although it seems that only there is he aware of his own weaknesses, as a conversation with ‘Sauce’ Haddock reveals in Funeral Note.

  I know now that Bob Skinner is a very damaged man; I can see that his soul is broken. That’s my fault, for I did it to him. Can it be repaired? I can’t say for sure, but I’m going to try, even if
it leads him to the funeral pyre of a hero.

  That’s my promise, to him and to you. Now, please, read on, be you newcomer or old hand. When you’re finished, we hope that you’ll come back for more.

  Quintin Jardine

  L’Escala, Spain

  29 June 2011

  Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,

  As his corse to the rampart we hurried;

  Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot

  O’er the grave where our hero we buried.

  ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna’, Charles Wolfe

  Detective Chief Superintendent Mario McGuire

  ‘There is no wrong, there is no right; there’s only what happens. As a cop you deal with it, and leave the judgments to others . . . to the lawyers, to the jury, and if the verdict goes that way, to the guy on the bench in the wig and the red jacket.’

  Paula gave me a long look, from beneath raised eyebrows. ‘Be nice if that was true, wouldn’t it?’ she said, in that long, slow drawl of hers. She slid her long-stemmed goblet across the table. ‘Top me up, McGuire.’

  I took the sparkling Highland Spring from the ice bucket and obeyed orders; seven months before (or was it eight by then?) it would have been claret, or maybe, if she’d been feeling particularly Italian, a nice Chianti or a Sangiovese. The glass was to preserve the illusion.

  ‘It is,’ I insisted as I poured. ‘We are objective.’

  ‘Come on,’ my beautiful wife laughed. She shook her head, in that deprecating woman’s way. A flash of light, reflected from a building across the water, was picked up by her hair, and made it shimmer. I was still getting used to Paula’s auburn incarnation. She had been almost jet black when she was younger, as I still am . . . apart from the odd grey flecks that I regard as signs of distinction . . . until some twist in the mother’s side of her genes had turned her silver before her thirtieth birthday.