Skinner's Festival Page 15

  'Then thank you. Father, for your love and trust.’ The living-room door rattled on its hinges as she slammed it behind her.

  Bob turned to Sarah. Amazement, tinged with hurt, showed on his face. 'What the bloody hell was all that about?’

  'Hey, big man. Cool down.’ She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him slowly, ruffling his hair. 'Read the signs, Dad. She thought you were attacking her man, so she defended him.’

  ‘What d’ you mean, her man?’

  'I mean that our Alex has got it bad, and it shows – to everyone but you, that is.’

  'But she’s only a-’

  'Slip of a girl, you were going to say? Oh no she isn’t, my darling. Oh no, she isn’t.’

  TWENTY-SIX

  SCOTLAND DEFIANT AGAINST TERROR.

  The banner headline of Monday morning’s Scotsman blared up at Skinner from the table as he joined Sarah for breakfast in the conservatory. He picked it up and saw himself on the front page, seated beside a subdued Ballantyne at the press conference, and looking hard at Dave Bassett as he faced him down.

  He scanned the accompanying stories, which took up the entire front page, then turned to the leader column. He snorted quietly as he read the editorial, which praised the Secretary of State for displaying a firm and resolute face to the terrorists, and for his good sense in handing over complete responsibility to his security adviser.

  'Mr Skinner and his newly formed squad bear a heavy responsibility,’ it read. 'We are confident that they are up to the challenge. Yet it must be noted that however distinguished they may be as police officers, they are inexperienced in facing the type of threat which now confronts them. While no blame can be attached to any individual for failing to prevent the two deaths which took place at the weekend, security precautions are now in place and the public have a right to expect them to be effective.’

  He threw the paper on to a chair and glanced at Sarah. 'Did you see the leader?’

  She nodded, unsmiling. 'Odd, isn’t it. It seems to say that Ballantyne’s done all he possibly can, and that from now on it’s all down to you if anything else happens.’

  Bob shrugged his shoulders. 'Joe Compton, the editor – he’s an old chum of Ballantyne, and it bloody well shows there. That’s politics for you.’

  'What are the chances of some other calamity happening?’

  'Depends what they want to do. It’ll be dangerous for them to target individuals from now on, but unless they’ve run out of Semtex we can look for some more bangs. There’s bugger-all we can do about someone leaving a Marks Spencer bag in the middle of Marks Spencer, for example. That’s what I expect, anyway. My reading of these characters says that they won’t

  expose themselves to direct danger – not the ringleaders at any rate. What d’ you think? Got any sort of a profile for me yet?’

  'No chance. I’ve only got three short letters to go on, and frankly there just isn’t enough in them to tell me anything about the man who wrote them.’

  'Man? Is that an assumption?’

  'No it is not. That’s one thing I am fairly sure of: it wasn’t a woman who wrote them. There’s something about – how do I say? – the posture of the language that is decidedly male. Very

  assertive. Confident. In fact certain. Let me put it this way. If the writer of those letters isn’t a man, then we’re looking for someone as forceful as Germaine Greer – or, and it’s just a thought, for more than one person.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Skinner reached his office he found ample evidence that the security operation was in full swing. His in-tray was piled high with folders, each one listing a different Festival location.

  He picked one off the top of the heap. Its subject venue and its contents were noted on the front. He murmured quietly to himself as his eye scanned down the page.

  'Signet Library.

  'Description of venue.

  'Potential hazards.

  'Risk assessment.

  'Recommendations.

  'Inspecting officer’s signature: Margaret Rose, Detective Sergeant.’

  He opened the folder and read the report. As he expected of a Maggie Rose job, it was thorough, concise, and its recommendations were sound. The Signet Library, she had concluded, was an unlikely target. It would be the location of only four events, each

  of them part of the 'Official’ Festival.

  The spectacularly beautiful, pillared room, with its valuable collection of volumes arranged on two levels, was well alarmed.

  All of the potential access points, other than the main door, were bolted shut, and there was permanent building security all year round. Maggie Rose recommended that the security firm

  be deployed on a round-the-clock basis, with regular and ostentatious visits by uniformed police officers. Finally she proposed that, during performances, an armed officer, in uniform, should be posted at the main entrance. Her report closed with the suggestion, couched in properly respectful terms, that her senior officers might consider whether widespread

  deployment of high-profile armed police, in uniform, at all major venues might offer the double benefit of deterring would be terrorists, while boosting public morale.

  Skinner closed the folder and smiled to himself. 'Nice one, Maggie. You’ll make inspector before that man of yours, I reckon.’ He picked up the telephone and told Martin of her

  suggestion.

  'She’s right, boss. We might have enough people to do it, but they’ll all have to be qualified marksmen. That could give us a problem.’

  'No problem at all. Adam Arrow’s SAS guys arrive this evening. Ask him if he minds us sticking them into police uniforms and using them as armed sentries.’

  'Will do. Adam’s right here.’

  Skinner read through the rest of the reports. Each one was marked 'Actioned’, with Andy Martin’s initials alongside. When the last of the reports had been consigned to the out-tray, he came upon a ribbon of computer printout sheets, still in fan-fold. A glance told him that they were the results of at least the first checks on the application forms completed by Festival performers.

  Subjects were listed by name, nationality, and home city. Almost all were marked 'Nothing Known’. Occasionally there would be a note of some past encounter with the law, mostly motoring offences, with a few drug-use or theft convictions scattered among them. He flicked through the sheets, scanning the names, which were listed as they had been fed into the computer. Near the end, he found the entry for which he had been looking.

  'Svart, Ingemar. Age 29, currently residing at 43 Close Avenue, Stockbridge. Student. Swedish national. Interpol check run.

  Nothing known.’

  'Hm. Just as well for you, pal.’

  He was about to toss the sheaf of paper into his out-tray when a name at the foot of the page caught his eye. For an instant it made his stomach drop, but a quick look reassured him

  'Skinner, Alexis. Age 20, currently residing at 20 Fairy house Avenue, Edinburgh.

  Student. Nothing known.’

  The sight of Alex’s name listed there with the herd, and vetted with the rest, touched his heart. He laughed, but it was forced.

  'Just as well for you too, my girl.’

  He spent the next half-hour trying to restore a semblance of normality to his working life. In spite of Jimmy Proud’s assurance, at the time of his promotion, that the attainment of

  Chief Officer rank would not affect his operational status as a working detective, inevitably Skinner had become caught up in the bureaucracy that all high command brings with it. He read through the pile of reports, circulars and standing orders which had been left in his pending tray by Ruth, the secretary he shared with the other two Assistant Chief Constables. Fortunately, most were circulation copies of documents which had been dealt with by Harry Gass, the ACC responsible for Management Services. He absorbed their essence as quickly as possible, committing them to memory as best he could. The few which called for his executive action he p
laced to the side, to be dealt with when his concentration was less affected by the immediate crisis.

  Eventually he gave up. He picked up his jacket and headed along the corridor to the Special Branch suite. The outer door had been labelled 'Antiterrorist Squad’.

  Adam Arrow was seated behind a desk, reading the Sun and looking bored.

  'Come on, Adam. You’ve had the Mario McGuire tour of Edinburgh. Now I’ll give you the Bob Skinner version.’

  They left the building and climbed into the BMW, which was parked in one of half-a-dozen reserved spaces in front of the main entrance.

  Skinner’s tour of Edinburgh followed none of the usual routes.

  Arrow noticed the absence of open-topped, green Guide Friday tourist buses in the parts of the city through which he was driven.

  'All this, Adam,’ Skinner said as he drove, 'all this is ours. This is where my people and I work most of the time. There’s little or no corporate crime in Edinburgh, or anywhere else in Scotland, you know. My Fraud Squad, and the Regional Crime guys, occasionally get to deal with a bent lawyer diverting clients’ funds, or with some idiots who think they can get away with mortgage swindles, but dishonesty up here mostly involves poor skint bastards turning over the DSS for a few extra quid. Normally, the city centre’s as clean as a whistle.

  Edinburgh, at the top end of the social scale, is a city of Holy Willies. Not like Glasgow. You’ll find far more spivs and hooligans through there. But down here in the bits of Edinburgh that the visitors don’t get told about – is where my CID does its real hard slogging. I’ve seen detective officers in tears of sheer frustration at the work they have to face here. I’ve lost a couple of them through emotional breakdowns.

  Ten years ago this place was Smack City; we bad one of the worst drug problems in Europe. Every week we found at least one kid dead up a close with a needle hanging out of his arm.

  'We had families living in hell, respectable people but with a drug-dealer next door, who’d be turning the stuff out through his kitchen window like ice-cream. And these poor folk would be terrified that, if we turned the place over, the guy’s pals would assume they’d grassed, and they’d get a kicking, or worse. And that happened too. I remember once when some of my lads busted a dealer. One of them knew the bloke next door slightly. He nodded to him, just briefly, as they took the villain away. Two nights later, the same neighbour staggered into his house with his throat cut, and bled to death on the living-room carpet in front of his wife and kids.’

  Arrow hissed, grim-faced, sucking breath between his teeth. 'Is it still like that?’

  'Not so bad now. It took us years, but we broke most of the big drug-dealers. None of them was hard to find. Christ, they used to fit steel doors to their council houses, so it would take longer for us to bash then in. The trick for us was to catch them dirty. We just kept battering away at them, though. We used every legitimate trick in the book: bogus DSS investigations, officers dressed up as meter readers, council workmen, you name it. One by one, we nicked them, and when we did, our judges did the business. As a policeman I’ve got a lot of time for the old boys in the High Court, in their red robes. “Dealing in Horse, my man? That’ll be fifteen years of your time, thank you very much. Next case please.” They didn’t piss about when we needed them.

  'All the big dealers are gone now. There’s still a fair bit of drugs about, but it’s well underground now. There seems to be a different distribution network. The estates aren’t blighted and terrorised the way they used to be, but they’re still hard, violent places. These blocks of flats might not look so bad, at least not the ones that have had a lick of paint, but a lot of them are still castles of misery, lived in by poor, frightened people, bullied by the DSS,

  the tally-men, even at times, I have to admit, by the police.’

  He negotiated a roundabout, glowering across at Arrow. 'But do you know what hacks me off, Adam? Back in the Eighties, there we were tackling and beating one of the worst drug problems in Europe, and few if any people outside Edinburgh knew or cared about it. They didn’t know, because it wasn’t hot news. It was like murders in Ireland, everyday occurrences, so it only got a wee bit of coverage, short-lived and mainly local. Didn’t matter that it was a tragedy. It had no news value.

  Yet look at Edinburgh now. Some arseholes set off a firework and murder a prima-donna, and we’ve got every news organisation in the world demanding to know what we’re going to do about it. The world’s unjust, Adam.

  A rich and famous person becomes a victim, and we have a media shit-storm. OK, well and good, and so we should have. But where were they all eight years ago when that poor wee man died in his front room, with his blood spraying all over his three-year-old daughter? Just two newspapers carried that story. Two: that’s all.’

  As Skinner spoke, they wound their way through the area which had been the battleground in the fight against the dealers. Wester Hailes, the windows of its high-rise blocks glinting in the sun. Niddrie, beginning to look scruffy again a few years on from its last cosmetic repainting. Pilton, much of it still grey and terrible, its poverty proclaimed by the boarded windows, the steel shutters guarding its shops even as they did business, and the burnt-out cars in its school grounds.

  Skinner swung the car down towards Newhaven and the east. 'Enough, Adam, enough. Now at least you know that all human misery isn’t concentrated in Belfast. Come on and I’ll show you the other side of my patch. I need to clear my mind.’

  They drove through Leith and Seafield, by-passed Portobello, and beaded out of the city on the A I. As they passed the Craigpark retail centre, he glanced across at his passenger.

  'You a golfer, Adam?’

  'Not so’s you’d fookin’ notice, but I play.’

  'Good lad. It’s too nice a day to waste.’

  Twenty minutes later they were in Gullane, in Bob and Sarah’s 'other house’, as they had come to call it. As Adam admired the garden in full bloom. Bob delved into a cavernous cupboard, emerging eventually with his golf kit, Sarah’s ladies’ clubs, and a pair of her studded shoes which proved an ideal fit for the stocky little soldier.

  Gullane number-one course was mostly clear. There were no party bookings, and as Bob looked down the first two fairways and up to the third tee, high on the hill, he could see only one match, nearing the long second green in its peculiar ravine. He recognised the players: two of the club’s many retired bankers.

  Waved on to the tee by the bespectacled starter, he showed his guest the line to the first green with a low straight shot, hit with a two iron. The ball seemed to run for ever on the hard, brown fairway.

  Arrow selected Sarah’s metal three wood, teed low, and boomed off a drive which headed straight for the far side of the roadway, and for the garden of one of the big white houses which ran parallel to the fairway on the right. But just as Skinner’s hand crept up to cover his eyes, the ball drew back in towards the fairway, cleared the waiting sand-trap, bounced, and ran on to finish only twenty yards or so short of the green.

  ' “Not so’s you’d fookin’ notice,” indeed!’ Skinner mimicked.

  They each took four, then halved the next three holes, before Arrow’s aggression lost him a ball on the difficult, rising dogleg fifth. Skinner was still one up when they climbed on to the seventh tee, the highest point on Gullane Hill. Like all first-time visitors to the famous old course. Arrow was stunned by the finest view in golf. The wide estuary of the River Forth sparkled in the sun, its waters flat calm at ebb tide. The watermark was so low that the

  grounded wreck of the Great War submarine in Aberlady Bay could be seen clearly.

  Bob recited the names of each of the six golf courses which were in view from the hill-top, then pointed his way along the Fife coast opposite, past Kirkcaldy and the Methil rig yard, on to the East Neuk villages. Largo, Earlsferry, Elie, St Mohans, Pittenweem, Anstruther and, in the far distance, Crail.

  'By Christ, Bob. Why bother to play fookin’ golf? Why not just come
straight up here and enjoy it?’

  Skinner laughed. 'Many’s the time I’ve wished I had done just that, mate. And it tends to be all downhill from here, in more ways than one.’

  Their match continued as tight as it had begun. Each was fiercely competitive, and Sarah’s clubs seemed to suit Arrow perfectly. However Skinner’s straighter game gave him the edge,

  until they shook hands on the green of the short sixteenth, after the little soldier had missed a ten-foot putt for a match-saving half. Both to celebrate and to demonstrate, on the seventeenth tee Bob took out his boron-shafted driver for the first time, and sent a huge shot soaring over the downward-sloping fairway. His body English seemed to give the shot extra yardage as it squeezed over the cross bunkers guarding the approach to the green.

  Arrow came very close to following him, but his ball found the sand.

  As they walked down the steep slope, the little soldier looked up at his partner. 'Cool bugger most of the time, ain’t yer, Bob. It’s as well you don’t give people the same treatment you gave that fookin’ ball there. Tell me something. You’ve told me one thing that makes you angry, but is there anything that makes you really mad, really blow your stack?’

  As he continued down the hill. Bob looked deep into himself, as if searching for the other Skinner, the one whose appearance he dreaded, as if analysing him, working out what brought him to the surface. Eventually, on the ridge above the bunker, he stopped,

  and leaned on his clubs.

  “That’s a better question than you know, Adam, and it’s a tough one to answer honestly. But I’ll try. You say I’m a cool bugger, but you’re wrong. I might be controlled, but that’s a

  different thing. There are, I think, just two things that would make me lose self-control. Christ, I hope there are only two. One is any direct threat to my nearest and dearest: to my wife Sarah or my daughter Alex. Most people would say the same. The other one is betrayal. An act of serious betrayal. That gets me. And if that betrayal is bad enough, then – well let’s just say I’m not so nice to know.’