14 - Stay of Execution Read online

  Stay of Execution

  QUINTIN JARDINE

  headline

  www.headline.co.uk

  Copyright © 2004 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.

  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 2008

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  eISBN : 978 0 7553 5370 5

  This Ebook produced by Jouve Digitalisation des Informations

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachettelivre.co.uk

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Praise for the Bob Skinner series:

  ‘Jardine’s narrative has many an ingenious twist and turn and the novel has psychological depth as Skinner deals with the crisis in his marriage and the delving into his family background’ Observer

  ‘Deplorably readable’ Guardian

  ‘If Ian Rankin is the Robert Carlyle of Scottish crime writers, then Jardine is surely its Sean Connery’ Glasgow Herald

  ‘It moves at a cracking pace, and with a crisp dialogue that is vastly superior to that of many of his jargon-loving rivals . . . It encompasses a wonderfully neat structural twist, a few taut, well-weighted action sequences and emotionally charged exchanges that steer well clear of melodrama’ Sunday Herald

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

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

  ‘Robustly entertaining’ Irish Times

  Finally, too long delayed, this book is dedicated to the ladies and gentlemen of Lothian and Borders Police, for their inspiration, their public service, and for tolerating the existence of a wholly fictional force in their midst without complaining too much. (Or even at all.)

  Acknowledgements

  The author’s thanks go to . . .

  The Central Intelligence Agency, for publishing its

  World Factbook on the internet.

  Les Marcheurs Belges, who have to be seen to be

  believed . . .

  and even then, it’s difficult.

  Carme Rivera Caballero, for lending me her dog.

  Eddie Bell and Pat Lomax, for helping me carry this

  off . . . and on.

  Martin Fletcher, for his unfailing support.

  Kim Hardie, for hers.

  Mira and Nurmi, for giving me such stiff competition.

  And . . .

  Eileen, for putting up with all the writing months when

  she finds herself living with a grizzly.

  1

  The big Scots detective stood in silence, because there was nothing to say. He was a mature man, over the crest of the hill that leads into middle age, and he had known his share of life’s inevitable sadness; indeed, if truth be told, more than his share. Yet the place in which he stood affected him in a way that he had not experienced before. He had seen it on television, and he had read of it, from the awful beginning and through the grim weeks and months that had followed, but nothing had prepared him for the actuality of it. It was vast, yet no greater than he had expected. There was no sepulchral silence about it: even on a Saturday the traffic rushed past nearby. And yet there was a sense of something all around, something that with very little imagination could have been the echoes of the screams of three thousand souls.

  A voice broke into his meditation. ‘By sheer evil chance, I was on my way here when it began to go down,’ his companion said, quietly. ‘After the first plane had hit, I saw people standing, staring at it, like they didn’t believe it. Some of them even had camcorders. They stood there filming, like it was some movie special effect or whatever, and they’d got lucky. They were the tourists, though. Our guys, the New Yorkers, most of them were running for their very lives.’

  Mario McGuire looked to his right, towards his host rather than at him, for the man seemed to be staring at a point in the distance, an imaginary screen on which the scene was being re-run. He wondered how often he had seen that movie, in the light of day and in the dark of night, and how many more times he would see it in the rest of his life to come.

  ‘Not you though,’ he said, respectfully. ‘Not your people; they ran into it.’

  ‘And twenty-three of them didn’t walk out. I knew every one of them, from John d’Allara to Walter Weaver: four sergeants, two detectives and seventeen patrol officers. But, aah, the fire-fighters . . .’ He looked down, then up, then away, as if he was composing himself. ‘New York Fire Department lost three hundred and
forty-seven people, of all ranks. Twenty-three fire chiefs died here, you know. Those people even killed the Department chaplain.’ When, finally, he glanced at McGuire, the look in his eye seemed to say that however well he knew the facts, however often he recited the names of the dead, aloud and in his head, he was still having trouble making himself believe in its raw, terrible truth.

  Inspector Colin Mawhinney, commander of the 1st Precinct, New York Police Department, which takes in Manhattan Island’s financial district, looked to be in his early forties. He and his guest were of equivalent rank in their respective forces, and although the Scot surmised that he was the younger by a few years, he wondered how quickly he would have risen through the ranks in a body almost twenty times larger than his own.

  Everything about the New Yorker looked classy. His hair, more grey than black, was cut close, to fit neatly inside the uniform cap that he held respectfully in his hand. His uniform was immaculate, and his shoes shone as brightly as its badges. McGuire, on the other hand, was in plain clothes, and more specifically, a lightweight Italian suit: he was glad that he had packed it, since New York was much warmer in October than it had been in April on his last visit, ten years before.

  He had expected to be taken to the site of the World Trade Center, although privately he had hoped that it would not happen. He had been there before, as a brash young tourist, and had taken the elevator to the top, accompanied by his trembling girlfriend of the time, a nurse called Rachel. Her face had become a blur in his past, but the rest of that day had not. It had left him with the belief that the WTC was one of the genuine wonders of the modern world, and despite the warning shot of the first terrorist attack on the edifice, or perhaps because of it, that it was invulnerable. And so he recognised the look that he had seen in Mawhinney’s eyes; for he suspected that it had been in his own.

  The visit had been obligatory, though, right there on the programme for the first day of his official visit. Before September Eleven, one or two of his hosts might have called him, jokingly, a visiting fireman, but not since. That term had gone from the lexicon of Americana, and instead he had been received as plain Detective Superintendent McGuire, divisional CID commander. The formalities had been completed at the beginning, on his arrival a day earlier: the Scot had been received at One Police Plaza by the head of the Patrol Bureau. There had been a photo-call, at which he had handed over a cheque for eighty-one thousand dollars, the proceeds of a series of fund-raisers run by the Edinburgh police force’s NYPD Friendship committee, in aid of fallen officers’ families. Then, after a tour of the headquarters building, he had been turned over to Inspector Mawhinney for the rest of his stay.

  That morning, they had followed a parade up to Ground Zero from Battery Park, where the patrol car had dropped them. The procession formed itself into ranks behind a red fire tender, decorated on either side by hand-painted banners asking God to bless America. The people themselves, young women and children just outnumbering the elderly, wore no mourning clothes. They were casually dressed, and many carried placards displaying the names and images of their loved ones. They were led by an Irish band of drums and bagpipes, its members wearing green kilts and feather-plumed bonnets. It played no laments along the way; the tunes were stirring. There were no tears among the marchers, no overt displays of grief; instead they smiled and held their heads high. Their message was one of defiance, and more, of pride in what they had given overcoming the sorrow for what they had lost.

  At first McGuire had hung back, fearful of being taken for a ghoulish intruder, but Mawhinney had drawn him forward, joining the tail of the parade. ‘We’re both cops, Superintendent,’ he had said. ‘We’re welcome here, I assure you.’

  ‘I’m in plain clothes, though.’

  The American had released what was almost his first smile since their introduction. ‘You could be wearing a Sioux war-bonnet and you’d still look like a cop.’

  They had processed in silence, the precinct commander drawing salutes from the patrol officers who lined the route, and returning them with military sharpness and with a nod of recognition. McGuire had served in uniform long enough to be able to judge a senior officer’s popularity from the body language of those under his command, and he read more than respect among Mawhinney’s men and women: he read a degree of reverence.

  The route was short, less than a mile; it reached an assembly point. The band played ‘Amazing Grace’, and photographs were taken by the marchers, of the site and of each other. Then they dispersed, drifting back towards the southern tip of Manhattan, to the point from which they had set out, leaving the two policemen to make their way down into the great crater.

  ‘How long have you been precinct commander, Inspector Mawhinney?’ McGuire asked, as they stood, looking up and around, aware that high above, several dozen people were looking at them from a roughly built viewing gallery. He thought that, as a survivor of the horror, the man might be having difficulty just being there, and he sought to change the mood.

  ‘I’ve been down here for almost five years now,’ the American replied. ‘And let’s drop the formality, uh, before we run into a problem over who should be calling who “sir”. I moved here from the 34th Precinct, up at the north end of the island.’

  ‘Was it a big contrast?’

  ‘It’s not far in mileage terms . . . this isn’t a big island . . . but yeah, it was quite a change, from an ethnically mixed community, with a strong academic core, to the heart of the global economy . . . although since you’re British, you’d probably say that’s in London.’

  McGuire shook his head. ‘I may be only a simple detective, but I can count.’ He nodded to the east. ‘I know the value of shares traded along there on Wall Street, compared to any other stock exchange on the planet. Besides, I may have been born in Scotland, but my dad was from Dublin and my mother’s the daughter of two Italian immigrants.’

  Mawhinney chuckled softly. ‘What does that make you?’

  ‘My bosses back in Edinburgh would say it makes me unmanageable; I prefer to think that it makes me broad-minded.’

  ‘Your bosses must rate you, or they wouldn’t have sent you on this trip.’

  ‘Nah. Bob Skinner, my DCC, put a dozen names in a hat and drew mine out. Mind you,’ he added, ‘it helped that I was prepared to pay my own expenses.’

  ‘DCC?’

  ‘Deputy chief constable.’

  ‘Does that mean that your boss isn’t a detective?’

  McGuire laughed. ‘Sure, and if he isn’t, then as like as not, the next time I go to church I’ll see Ian Paisley coming out of the confessional. Big Bob may be on the executive floor at headquarters . . . some would say he runs the force, but God help them if he hears them . . . but he’ll always be a detective. We have a head of Criminal Investigation, that’s Dan Pringle, my one-up boss. He’s supposed to be in command on a day-to-day basis. The DCC’s role is way up there, doing crime strategy and all that stuff, and deputising for Proud Jimmy . . .’

  ‘Who?’ exclaimed Mawhinney.

  ‘Sorry. Our chief constable’s name is James Proud. Sir James Proud, in fact; hence his nickname. The DCC’s his number two and stands in for him as necessary, but Pringle reports to him directly; the big guy’s the bane of Dan’s life, for he just can’t keep his hands off. There’s a legend about him once taking his three-year-old son on a stake-out, long after he’d left the active line.’

  ‘A legend? Is it true?’

  ‘Not quite. As I understand it, Master James Andrew Skinner was only two at the time.’ He paused. ‘He’s kept hold of Special Branch too; that’s outside the normal CID loop. I reported to him when I ran it.’

  ‘Special Branch?’

  ‘Our semi-secret police. They tie into the security services, which really do stay secret despite the best efforts of our government.’

  ‘Something like our National Security Agency, then. You’ve heard of that?’

  ‘The NSA . . . isn’t it also known as No Such Age
ncy? Sure, I’ve heard of it; and the stories about it.’

  Mawhinney gave a grim, humourless smile. ‘I read somewhere that a famous person said, “There are powers at work in this country” . . . meaning yours . . . “of which we know nothing.” The vast majority of Americans could say the same thing.’ He glanced round, and slightly up, at McGuire. ‘You mentioned your boss’s son. Do you have kids?’

  ‘No.’>

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Yes, but we’re separated. It’s amicable and all that; we’re just sitting out the two-year period, before we can apply for a simple divorce.’

  ‘You’ll still have lawyers’ bills, though, I’ll bet.’

  ‘You’d lose. Where there are no kids involved, you can do it all yourselves: and we will.’

  ‘That sounds like a good system you have in Scotland. It can be anything but simple here.’

  ‘It is, and I’m thankful. The last thing either Maggie or I would want would be to set out the breakdown of our relationship in open court.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that there’s anything scandalous about it, but with us both being senior police off icers . . .’ He saw the inspector’s eyebrows rise. ‘She’s a detective too,’ he explained. ‘Superintendent like me, CID divisional commander, like me, only she’s in the city and I’m in Borders.’

  ‘Borders?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a rural area; bit of a fucking backwater, if truth be told, but it’s okay for a first command posting. I don’t think I’ll be there much longer, though. There’s changes in the wind, and they could blow me somewhere else. Things could be happening right now, for all I know.’