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  Copyright © 2021 Portador Ltd

  Extract from The Roots of Evil copyright © 2020 Portador Ltd

  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 2021 by

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  This Ebook edition published in 2021 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, Arden Court, Alcester, Warwickshire

  Cover credit © Donna Carpenter/Getty Images Plus

  Elf Illustration © Sebastian ignacio coll/Shutterstock

  Author photograph © Chris Close

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 8283 5

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Also by Quintin Jardine

  Praise for Quintin Jardine

  About the Book

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Fifty-Eight

  Fifty-Nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-One

  Sixty-Two

  Sixty-Three

  Sixty-Four

  Sixty-Five

  Sixty-Six

  Sixty-Seven

  Sixty-Eight

  Sixty-Nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-One

  Seventy-Two

  Seventy-Three

  Seventy-Four

  Seventy-Five

  Seventy-Six

  Seventy-Seven

  Read the previous gripping mystery in the Bob Skinner series . . .

  About the Author

  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, he moved into the 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.me.

  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

  Private Investigations

  Game Over

  State Secrets

  A Brush with Death

  Cold Case

  The Bad Fire

  The Roots of Evil

  Deadlock

  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

  Praise for Quintin Jardine

  ‘The legendary Quintin Jardine . . . Such a fine writer’

  Denzil Meyrick

  ‘Scottish crime-writing at its finest, with a healty dose of plot twists and turns, bodies and plenty of brutality’

  Sun

  ‘Another powerful tartan noir that packs a punch’

  Peterborough Evening Telegraph

  ‘Incredibly difficult to put the book down . . . A guide through a world of tangled family politics, hostile takeovers, government-sanctioned killing, extortion and the seedier side of publishing . . . Quintin Jardine should be . . . your first choice!’

  Scots Magazine

  ‘Well constructed, fast-paced, Jardine’s narrative has many an ingenious twist and turn’

  Observer

  ‘Very engaging as well as ingenious, and the unravelling of the mystery is excellently done’

  Allan Massie, Scotsman

  ‘Remarkably assured, raw-boned, a tour de force’

  New York T
imes

  ‘Deplorably readable’

  Guardian

  ‘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

  ‘Gritty cop drama that makes Taggart look tame’

  Northern Echo

  About the Book

  Sir Robert Skinner’s stock is rising – after retiring from the police service he’s been promoted to head an international media organisation. Yet a series of unexplained deaths on his home turf in Scotland threaten to bring him crashing back down to earth.

  As Skinner helps the elderly in his local community, several residents seem to die of natural causes. But when a gruesome discovery is made in a Glasgow flat and one of Skinner’s long-time friends – an aspiring politician – emerges as the prime suspect, things become very murky indeed.

  After unpicking clues that go nowhere, Skinner and his team are left grappling the most baffling conundrum they have ever encountered – is there a mystery at all?

  This work is dedicated to Fiona Purves, and to Sunny the Second. Without them I would never have got through the last year and it would never have been written.

  One

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ Sarah asked, staring at the screen of her husband’s laptop.

  ‘It’s my Mental Elf,’ Sir Robert Morgan Skinner replied. ‘I’m very aware of him and protective of him too, all things considered. The virus can get you in all sorts of ways, even without your being infected. I have to say, Professor Grace,’ he added, ‘that your language has taken a turn for the worse over the last couple of weeks.’

  ‘Can you blame it?’ his wife protested. ‘Two weeks of confinement with you would have sent Saint Teresa of Calcutta into industrial paroxysms. I’ve been looking back over our eventful years, and I don’t think we’ve spent this length of time together, exclusively, since our honeymoon . . . our first one, that is.’

  He gazed at her. ‘Are we all right after it? Apart from your vocabulary.’

  ‘Which is still less colourful than yours.’ She reached across and grabbed a lock of his thick steel-grey hair, which was longer than she had ever seen it. ‘Yeah, we’re good. Never better in fact, now that we’ve come through on the other side of fucking Covid.’ She brandished a print-out of the email that confirmed their negative test results.

  His frown was sudden, and deep. ‘Not everybody has.’

  ‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Poor Xavi, losing Sheila to the monster; that is tragic. Will he get over it?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Bob sighed. ‘Xavi internalises everything. My guess is that he’ll work even harder, for their daughter’s sake. Paloma might be his salvation.’

  ‘You’re probably his best friend. Do you want to go over to Girona, spend some time with the two of them?’

  ‘I’m over there regularly on business,’ he pointed out. ‘But maybe I could stay longer next time, knowing that I have antibodies in my bloodstream. Meanwhile, we have our own family to catch up with. I’ve never missed the kids, all of them, as much as I do now. Talking to them through the window isn’t the same, and,’ he added, ‘God knows how the home schooling’s been going, unsupervised.’

  ‘I know,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve missed Dawn especially. If we hadn’t had Alex to look after them, I don’t know what we’d have done. Even so, it’s really been tough not being able to hold my baby.’

  Bob Skinner had contracted Covid-19 on a January business visit to Spain, for a board meeting of Intermedia, the Spanish company owned by his friend Xavier Aislado: he had become a director after leaving the police service. He had opted to fly to Girona in the recently acquired corporate Gulfstream jet, rather than take scheduled flights to Barcelona via London, in the expectation that the risk of second-wave infection would be less. He had taken Sarah along for what was for her a short vacation, a break from her duties as a pathologist, which had become stressful almost beyond endurance in pandemic conditions.

  The trip had been a disaster. On the third day, Sheila Craig, Xavi’s Scottish wife, had been hit by severe coronavirus symptoms. The Skinners had flown home immediately, and had gone into quarantine, only for Bob to test positive two days later. Sarah had been vaccinated in late December because of her profession, but she had been required to self-isolate with him. Bob’s symptoms had been mild, limited to a cough and bizarre changes to his sense of smell, but he knew that he had been one of the lucky ones, a fact underlined on the twelfth day of their isolation, when Xavi had called them through FaceTime. ‘Your daughter Alex told me that you’ve recovered, Bob. Sadly, I have to tell you that my lovely Sheila did not. She passed away last night.’

  ‘Are you ready to go?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘What? Yes. Sorry,’ he replied. Not for the first time over the last few days, he had been lost in contemplation of how he would have felt had things gone another way and he had been in his friend’s shoes. He stood and picked up the small case that held their clothing. He smiled lightly. ‘Let’s make the long journey home. We’ll still be locked down, but it’ll be nice to have a bit more room.’

  Sarah led the way out of the small apartment that had been built above their garage block as accommodation for Ignacio, Bob’s son from a relationship in the dying days of the last century. He was absent from the household; at university when lockdown was called, he had opted to shelter with Pilar, his girlfriend, in Perthshire with his mother, Mia, and his stepfather, Cameron McCullough. Bob had been irked by his choice, not least because he had been keeping Grandpa McCullough at a distance, after a situation a year before. They walked across the turning area at the end of their driveway, but before they reached the front door it was opened from inside and their younger sons emerged from the main house. Trish, the children’s live-in carer, had been stranded in Barbados since December, having visited her parents for Christmas. The boys and their younger sisters had been looked after during their parents’ isolation by Alexis, Bob’s daughter from his first marriage. She had been able to combine the role with her professional life, which had become largely virtual. She had left for Edinburgh that morning as soon as their test results had been confirmed, pleading a need to catch up with her correspondence.

  ‘Are you two not schooling?’ Bob exclaimed.

  ‘It’s Saturday, Dad,’ James Andrew exclaimed, in a deeper voice than either of his parents had heard before. To his mother, Jazz seemed a little taller, a little wider in the shoulders.

  Skinner laughed. ‘So it is. In there, every day was like the one before. Hey,’ he added, ‘remember that chat we had about puberty a year or so back? Seems to me you’ve dropped an octave in a fortnight.’

  ‘He’s got zits too,’ Mark volunteered. ‘And his—’

  ‘Nobody’s exempt from those,’ his adoptive father reminded him, raising an eyebrow as he cut him off in mid-sentence. The teenage Mark looked different too; Bob realised that the down on his top lip was missing. Christ, he’s started shaving, Bob thought. Even in a couple of weeks I’ve missed part of their lives.

  ‘You guys had breakfast?’ he asked.

  ‘Dad, it’s half past ten,’ Jazz pointed out. ‘We’re thinking about lunch. Haven’t you and Mum been eating over there?’

  ‘Time’s been a little fluid,’ Sarah confessed. ‘Your father’s been watching Australian cricket from God knows what hour. He’s tended to forget about mundane things like mealtimes. I’ve been reading medical articles about Covid, so I wasn’t best placed to remind him.’

  ‘What I need most is exercise,’ Bob confessed. ‘I’m going for a run. Do you guys want to come with me?’ Mark stared at him. ‘Okay son, I know that was a rhetorical question for you. Jazz, you up for it?’

  ‘Can we do that? Go out for a run?’

  ‘As long as we don’t mix with other h
ouseholds, I believe we can.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll take it easy on you, Dad. I mean, you have been locked up for a fortnight.’

  He nodded. ‘Tell you what, pal, you be the hare, I’ll be the tortoise. That way you don’t have to take anything easy.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Sarah murmured. ‘I’ve been dreading the day when it becomes really competitive between you two. It seems that it’s here. But Bob, are you sure? I mean—’

  ‘I had no symptoms. I’ll be fine.’

  Two

  ‘Well, how’s the tortoise?’ Sarah asked as her husband stepped into the kitchen, carrying his muddy trainers. She was leaning against the work surface, with the toddler Dawn on her hip.

  ‘Thoroughly knackered,’ Skinner admitted, breathing heavily. His tracksuit top was sodden with sweat. ‘The hare put on a sprint at the end and won by a couple of hundred yards. I tell you, I might have been mostly asymptomatic, love, but it’s had an effect. That was far more than just being out of shape.’

  ‘In that case, I’d better keep an eye on you for a couple of days. We don’t know nearly enough about the longer-term effects of the virus.’ Sarah paused. ‘Speaking of tortoises, Neil called.’

  Neil McIlhenney had acquired the tortoise nickname after his appointment to the top job in the Scottish police service, after the resignation of Margaret Rose Steele, overtaking his closest friend and virtual twin, Mario McGuire, in the process. All three had been protégés of Skinner during his time as chief of the former Edinburgh police service, before its replacement by the national force, but McIlhenney had lagged behind the others in rank, until a move to London and the Metropolitan Police had given new impetus to his career. In fact, there had been no contest for the post between the former Glimmer Twins, because McGuire had not applied.

  ‘The chief constable?’ Bob exclaimed. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘To congratulate us on our recovery,’ she replied.

  ‘How the hell did he know we were . . . ?’

  ‘Alex posted the good news on her Facebook page. “Now it can be revealed that my parents have emerged safe and sound from the viral nightmare,” she wrote.’

  ‘I’ll be having words with my oldest daughter about that,’ he declared. ‘I’m sure I said to keep quiet about it when I told her we had tested negative.’