Funeral Note Read online

  ‘She works with Montell, and more besides. He’s been giving her one for months. He was supposed to see her that evening, and he told her why he had to cancel: in detail, far too much detail. Unfortunately Alice has a track record for helping her uncle; she knew who Welsh was and she called Jock. She’s done too. The best I can do for her will be to let her give evidence against him, but she’s probably finished in the force. It’s a bloody shame for Alice and I hate it, because I like the girl, and because she’s put her life on the line for the job in the past, but I can’t hold back on either of them.’

  ‘What about Montell?’

  I shook my head at that one. ‘I’m having nothing to do with that. I told big Bob as much. The guy insists he knew nothing about the family relationship with Welsh, but he’ll still face a disciplinary. The boss will pass that on to someone else too, for the personal reasons you mentioned. So I guess our new deputy chief constable will decide his fate.’

  She frowned. ‘Will Maggie be tough on him? Could she kick him out?’

  ‘Oh yes, she could recommend that. Whether she will or not, we’ll have to wait and see. I can’t speak to her about it, and neither can the chief, other than to brief her. I’ll tell you one thing, though. If her predecessor, Brian Mackie hadn’t gone to the top job in Tayside, and he was dealing with it, Detective Constable Montell would be fucked. Brian’s a real hardliner.’

  ‘And what about this man Bass, what about the illegal fags?’

  ‘Oh, we picked him up this morning. We knew where the fags were from day one; the lads followed Bass to a lock-up he owns out in West Calder. Actually they were no big deal. They’re Spanish, a brand called Ducados; they had tax labels on them, so we found out very quickly they were part of a consignment stolen from a freight depot in Alicante. They’re crap. The street value’s maybe a few thousand quid, at the very most, and even then only if you could find anyone daft enough to put them on their shelves, or in a cigarette machine, given that a foreign brand would stand out a mile. Bass isn’t saying how he found out about them. Indeed he didn’t say a dicky bird to Becky and Sauce when they interviewed him and charged him. He is, as his brief’s told him to say, maintaining his right to silence; currently maintaining it in the remand wing at Saughton jail.’

  ‘How did he get them to Scotland?’

  ‘Again, we don’t know for sure, but given the quantity, he might have paid a trucker to smuggle them in. Either that, or Kenny could have gone for them himself. Maybe Varley’ll be able to tell us when we grill him. He was arrested this morning, and he’s being held overnight, down at Leith. There’s a lot we don’t know. Bass has been on our radar in the past, but not for anything like this. Then there’s Welsh; he’s a substantial businessman, so what was he doing buying dodgy fags from a small-time smuggler?’

  Paula lapsed into cop-speak. ‘Has Welsh been lifted?’

  ‘For what? We’ve got no grounds. There was nothing incriminating in the texts they exchanged, and they don’t say a single significant word to each other on Sauce’s tape. They were interrupted by Varley’s phone call before they could. I did think about bringing him in for questioning, but Bob vetoed it. He says we need to find out more about him before we do that.’

  I must have sighed, for she reached out and stroked the back of my hand. ‘You’re feeling really isolated just now, aren’t you?’ she whispered.

  I knew what she meant, but didn’t say so. ‘Isolated? Of course not, I’ve got you . . . you two, even, for wee Eamon’s starting to make his presence felt in there.’ That was very true; Paula was in her last month and I could see him kicking sometimes.

  ‘Don’t dodge the issue,’ she said. ‘The Glimmer Twins are no more; you don’t have Neil alongside you. You’ve lost your sounding board, and you must miss him a lot.’

  I made no further attempt at denial, because I couldn’t. She was right. McIlhenney and I have been bosom pals from the day we joined the force. I made CID a few months before he did, but our careers had developed from then on, if not quite in parallel, then pretty close to it. When I made detective chief superintendent, and was appointed head of CID, he was moved in as detective superintendent in charge of all criminal investigation in Edinburgh, and my deputy.

  Neil and I are similar physical types, but he’s much less volatile than I am, and when he has to be, he’s a calming influence on me. I was going to miss him by my side in dealing with the Varley-Cowan affair, and no mistake.

  How did his move come about? I suspect that the occasionally subtle hand of Bob Skinner was behind it. He and Neil are pretty close as well, and when the Commissioner of the Met decided to look outside his force to fill a command vacancy in his covert policing department I wasn’t surprised when my pal was put in the frame. My suspicion was, and still is, that somehow Bob might have instigated the vacancy, before helping to fill it.

  Quite apart from the prestige of the job, and the chief super promotion that came with it, a move to London was timely for Neil. Louise, the lady he married a couple of years after his wonderful wife Olive passed away, and with whom he has a third child, is an actress. She took time off from her career to have wee Louis, but her agent had been pestering her about making a comeback. The chief knew that, and it would be typical of him if he had gone out of his way to help.

  But there’s another possibility, a suspicion that lingers at the back of my mind and won’t go away. He might have realised that it was time for the Glimmer Twins (back in our rock and roll youth, some wag bestowed on us the nickname adopted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and it stuck) to be separated, in the interests of good policing in Edinburgh. You see, neither one of us is the other’s strongest critic, and there were times when, probably, one of us should have been.

  With Neil’s move the old CID city structure is back in place, with Detective Inspectors Sammy Pye, in Leith, Becky Stallings, at Torphichen Place, and, as of the very day of Paula’s inquisition, Ray Wilding, on promotion to DI at Gayfield Square, reporting directly to me from their divisions. God help them all, I laugh to myself sometimes, without my mate McIlhenney to hold me down when they screw up.

  ‘What’s your next move?’ Paula asked, breaking into my musing.

  ‘I’ll interview Varley, formally, tomorrow. Because what he’s accused of is so bloody serious, the boss and I are agreed that I need to have a senior officer from an outside force alongside me. Bob’s persuaded Andy Martin to fill that chair. As head of the Scottish Serious Crimes Agency he outranks me, but what the hell, he lives in Edinburgh now, so it’s handy for everybody. Also, he doesn’t know Varley, only of him; their paths don’t seem to have crossed at all when Andy was one of us. When we’ve taken his statement . . . that’s if he gives us one . . . I’ll probably charge him then send a report to the Crown Office. It’ll be up to the fiscal to decide whether to go ahead with a prosecution.’

  That’s the way it works in Scotland; officially, the police investigate crime as agents of the Crown.

  ‘Will he?’

  ‘Too bloody right he will,’ I growled, ‘or I’ll want to know why. But that will only be stage one. As the chief said, we’ll have to find out all there is to know about Mrs V’s cousin Freddy, the mystery man, and we’ll have to go back over Jock’s entire career to see if we can find other instances of him having tipped him off about anything. He’s putting a separate unit on that. He’s going to use David Mackenzie, his executive officer . . . again, he has no history with Varley . . . putting him together with another outside man.’

  ‘Who’s that? Do you know yet?’

  ‘He’s bringing in a man called Lowell Payne. He’s a DCI from Strathclyde; I believe that he and Mackenzie know each other slightly, from our David’s days in the west.’

  ‘Strathclyde?’ She winced. ‘That’s a bit like having next door wash your skid-marked underwear, isn’t it?’

  ‘This man will be discreet. He’s hand-picked. The boss let it slip that he’s Alex’s uncle: he’s married to
Bob’s sister-in-law, from his first marriage.’

  Paula laughed out loud. ‘To think that you used to fret about us being cousins! Skinner seems to be filling this whole investigation with his family.’

  ‘Payne never was family, not really,’ I pointed out. ‘From what the chief told me, Myra Skinner had been dead for about eight years before her sister even met him. The bloke helped him out in an investigation about fifteen years ago, but since then he’s seen very little of him, and nothing at all professionally.’

  ‘He’s seen plenty of Andy Martin though.’

  ‘Andy’s not family.’

  ‘As good as,’ she murmured, with a sly grin. ‘He was engaged to Alex once, and it’s not long since he left his wife for her.’

  ‘Hey,’ I cautioned her, ‘that’s not true. Andy and Karen just came to the end of the road, that’s all.’

  Her favoured eyebrow rose again. ‘Would that have been before or after he got caught shagging Alex?’

  ‘After,’ I conceded, ‘but the two of them had got over that. It wasn’t why they split.’

  She smirked. ‘You may believe that, but most of female Edinburgh thinks she’s a bitch who crooked her finger and he came running back.’

  ‘Female Edinburgh better not let her father hear them saying it. Me neither, for that matter; Alex Skinner is okay.’ I smiled at a memory. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you about the first job Bob Skinner ever gave me. He had me looking after Alex when he had to bring her along to a crime scene. I was still in uniform at the time, but that night helped me through the door of CID.’

  ‘He did that?’ she exclaimed. ‘He took that chance?’

  ‘Come on, she was only thirteen at the time, and I was much too careful ever to consider that she might have looked a few years older. No, I repeat; Alex is okay. Besides, she and Andy are both career people now. That’s all they have time for.’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘and my school pal Lorna’s husband is a taxi driver. Alex has his number and she uses him a lot; from her place to Dean Village is a regular evening trip of his, but he never takes her in the other direction. And who lives in Dean Village? Andy Martin.’

  I gasped in sheer admiration. ‘Paulie, my love,’ I said, ‘when the boss put Neil up for that covert policing job, it’s as well he had no idea what you’re capable of or he might have offered you to the Met instead.’

  We were still laughing when the phone rang. I’d thought my life was complicated enough then: but what did I know?

  Chief Constable Robert Morgan Skinner

  ‘I am here to tell you that there ain’t nothing in the world I hate worse than that elephant under my ass.’

  The older I get, the more often I’m asked why I chose to be a police officer. My reply has always been simple: unlike too many people, I was lucky enough to find my vocation early in life and to have been able to practise it ever since.

  That’s absolutely true as far as it goes, but it’s a pretty vague response, and I do not invite supplementary questions. If I did, the sharpest would be, ‘How did you find it?’

  If it was put to me, my honest answer would be, ‘Thanks to Big John Wintergreen.’

  Beyond doubt, most people would then ask, ‘And who the hell is Big John Wintergreen?’

  John never existed, not in reality. He’s the doomed hero of a movie called Electra Glide in Blue that my dad took me to see in an art house cinema in Glasgow when I was fifteen years old, and the line that I’ve just quoted is the one that sticks most firmly in my mind. There were no big stars in it; the cast were mostly familiar faces of the era in which it was made, and the guy who played John went on to win more notoriety than fame. But somehow my buttons were pushed by the character and by his desperation to get where he wanted to be.

  In the film, ‘Big’ John . . . he was only five feet four . . . is a motor-cycle cop in Arizona, whose dream, asleep or awake, is to be a detective, and that elephant under his ass is the Harley Davidson they make him ride and from which the movie’s title is drawn. He gets lucky; he’s in the right place at the right time and he’s promoted to plain clothes, homicide division. But it doesn’t work out for him. An unfortunate tendency always to say what he thinks, a dislike for the office politics, and a liking for his boss’s girlfriend, combine to see him busted back to traffic and back on board that two-wheeled pachyderm. The story has a very sad, but very beautiful ending, and I was choked up when we left the cinema, so I didn’t say anything on the train home, until we were almost at Motherwell. But all the time I was thinking about John and about his determination and about the job he had lived for and ultimately been denied, and as the train pulled into the station I said to my father, ‘Dad, I want to be a detective.’

  ‘Now,’ he replied. ‘That’s what you want now. Let’s see how you feel in five years or so.’

  He didn’t say, ‘When you’re grown up,’ because I was almost as tall as he was by that time, but that’s what he meant. His ambition for me was never stated, but I knew it was the obvious, that I would follow him into the law practice that he had started after the war. He had a couple of partners who did carry it on eventually, but I have no doubt that he saw me settling into his chair when he was finished with it.

  There was a time when circumstances might have made me do that, but the flame that John Wintergreen lit didn’t go out overnight as, most probably, he’d hoped it would. It was still burning six years later, when I graduated from university with an arts degree, and when I applied to join the police force in Edinburgh. I ruled out Glasgow because I didn’t like the way things were at that time in that city. I’d seen too many cops chasing the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and I wanted no part of that.

  I made detective, pretty quickly; once there, I kept Big John’s fate in mind. I made a point of being circumspect in what I said and did, and if there was anything about the office politics I didn’t like, I made a mental note of it and stored it away, until the day when I was in a position to do something about it. And yes, my DS’s girlfriend was strictly off limits.

  Myra and I were married by then, we were living in Gullane, my dad having given us the deposit on a nice cottage as a wedding present, and our first child had arrived. Our life was planned out; once Alex was of school age, we’d have another child, Myra would take another two- or three-year sabbatical from her teaching career, and our family would be complete. But Robert Burns was right, even if he did express the truism rather differently; all too often the most sensible of plans wind up being royally fucked up. Ours never came to be either; a very solid tree got in the way of her speeding car . . . Myra didn’t do slow . . . and thank God Alex wasn’t in the kiddie seat behind her mother at the time.

  I’ve never said this before, but in a strange way, I reckon that Myra’s death helped my career. It brought me to the attention of a couple of people who hadn’t taken too much notice of me before, since I was a man of the West, and also, the rebellious kind who wasn’t a freemason. One of them was Alf Stein, the Brahma bull of our CID at the time; under his tutelage and, I admit, with the benefit of his patronage, I never looked back. He was kind to me, and exceptionally tolerant on a few occasions when I pushed my luck to a degree that might have been beyond another man’s limits. I rode the wave, and instead of being my father’s successor, I became Alf’s. As a matter of fact, in some ways I might have been closer to old Stein than to my dad. That’s something on which I don’t dwell, but I’m conscious of it. My father had a bad war, a secret war, and it marked him.

  When Alf retired, Jimmy Proud became my mentor. Sir James was the last of the old breed of chief constables, the kind that were appointed for the duration, not for a fixed term, and who had extra power and influence because of it. Once, I heard some clown dismiss him as a career administrator, but he was more than that. Jimmy was a fixer supreme at many levels; he even fixed it for me to have a spell of outside duty that overcame the normal rule that prevents an officer being promoted to chief within h
is own force. For that’s how he saw me from an early stage, as the guy he had measured up for his uniform, and when Jimmy wanted something, he got it. In my case, he encouraged me to overcome my own doubts, not about my ability to do the job, but about the effect it would have on me. I’ve always been a front-line detective, even as assistant chief, then deputy.

  ‘I didn’t join the police to be weighed down by silver braid on my shoulder,’ I used to insist, when we spoke about it. I have never liked being in uniform and that’s the truth.

  That’s the elephant under my arse. I will have no truck with the modern habit of making detectives wear the tunic unless they positively have to be in civvies for the purposes of the job. Beat officers have to be visible and recognisable as such, CID do not; end of story.

  Jimmy would shrug at my objections, and tell me, ‘Then do it your way. Every chief puts his own stamp on his office.’

  Eventually he wore me down, with the help of my third wife, Aileen, who was Scotland’s Justice Minister, and then briefly First Minister of its government in the devolved Holyrood Parliament, before Labour lost office. She made herself the exception to my inbuilt antipathy towards politicians. She came into my life at a pivotal moment. My second marriage was in a state of chaos and mutual recrimination, on the most jagged rocks you can imagine. Simultaneously something had happened at work, something up close and bloody, that I was having trouble handling on a personal level. Aileen was there for me to lean on; I came through it all. As soon as I had, before I knew it, she’d eased me into the chief constable’s office.

  Mind you, I did consult my older daughter before I applied for the job. She knows me better than anyone else, and if she’d been against it, she’d have said so. As it was, Alex was neutral. ‘There’s part of me that would like you to walk away from it all now,’ she said, ‘and buy the boat that you fantasised about that time we went sailing on the Clyde. But the other part, the realist Alexis, not the romantic, would be afraid of what might happen to you if you did. Your call, Pops.’