Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel Read online

  ‘Okay, so what if I am? Dad, it’s been a long time. You’ve got to . . .’

  ‘Move on?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alex, I have moved on.’

  She looked across at me. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

  ‘You know that I don’t.’

  ‘I know that you never bring any women home, but that’s all.’

  ‘Well I don’t.’

  ‘None at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You mean you’ve been celibate since Mum died?’ She pronounced the bombshell word carefully, as if she’d just learned it.

  ‘Hey!’ I protested, laughing. ‘Jesus, kid, what sort of a question’s that for a thirteen-year-old to be asking her father?’

  ‘That means you haven’t. If the answer was “yes” you’d have said so. People prevaricate when they have something to hide; that’s what you told me.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ I insisted.

  I had, of course. Nine months before, I had left Alex in Daisy’s care and gone to Spain for a long weekend, to do some maintenance on the house that I’d bought with part of my father’s estate, and to commission an extension. I’d flown from Glasgow to Barcelona and Jean had come with me. Her suggestion, not mine; nothing had been said in advance about the sleeping arrangements, but I suppose we’d both known what was going to happen. It wasn’t a disaster, but it did feel a little weird. We had some laughs, the sex was good, and I didn’t imagine for a second that Myra would be turning in her grave, but when Jean made it clear at the end of the trip that it would be a oneoff, I felt relieved rather than slighted. She hadn’t been my only fling; there had been other women, a few over the years, but always away games, work as far as Alex was concerned, the truth and nothing but the truth with the understanding Daisy.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I offered her. ‘No dinner party, but we’ll have a barbie in the garden, one Sunday afternoon. We’ll invite friends from the village, you can ask some of yours from school, if their parents are okay with it, and I might ask some from work. You can invite our Jean if you like, but don’t you be surprised if she wants to bring a man.’

  The notion that her aunt was capable of independent thought and action sent her into silent contemplation. ‘You up for that?’ I asked, as I negotiated a troublesome roundabout.

  ‘We’ll see.’The idea of a joint adult-kids party left her underwhelmed, as I had guessed it would. Negotiations were suspended, and I drove on, letting the music fill the void.

  Infirmary Street had been closed at either end as I turned into it off the Cowgate. The uniform on duty waved a ‘get on your way’ gesture at first, but he was looking at Alex rather than at me. He knew me well enough; his name was Charlie Johnston and he wasn’t going anywhere other than towards retirement and a PC’s pension, his objective from the start. He and I were contemporaries. The first thing he’d done on joining up was to learn, off by heart, the book and how to play everything by it without ever risking his head above the parapet. After a closer look, he stepped aside and moved a traffic cone.

  Jay was waiting for me on the pavement outside the old building, sucking on a cigarette. Even now, it’s difficult for me to paint a word picture of the man. He came closer than anyone I’ve ever known to being a walking definition of ‘nondescript’. The only feature that stopped him from going all the way was the colour of his eyes, as grey as the stone of the bathhouse behind him.

  They flickered as Alex stepped out of the car, and I didn’t like what I saw in them. She was tall for her age, and dressed as she saw fit. That evening her choice had been jeans, ripped at the knee, and a baggy, custom-made, white T-shirt that one of her friends had given her the Christmas before. It had ‘WARNING! CID brat!’ emblazoned on the front.

  ‘Bob,’ he said, his face twisting into what passed for a smile. ‘Glad you could come. It might help us get a head start.’

  ‘I know that.’ There was a cop standing in the doorway behind him, a PC in his mid-twenties, around my height, six two. Modern police tunics make some officers look fat, but not this guy; he just looked massive. He had to be McGuire, even if he did look a lot more Italian than Irish. His hair was darker than dark, the purest jet black, and his eyes, a complete contrast to Jay’s limpid puddles, were deep blue pools which twinkled with laughter and excitement. I’d seen him around but hadn’t put a name to him before. He was usually to be found in the company of another young plod, his equal in size if not in temperament.

  ‘Mario?’ He nodded. ‘You’ve got an important and dangerous job.’

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘Look after my daughter while I’m inside.’

  He beamed. ‘She couldn’t be in safer hands, boss.’

  ‘It’s your safety I’m worrying about.’ I winked at Alex. ‘I won’t be long.’ She shrugged; at that moment she was more interested in her new minder than she was in me.

  ‘Come on then,’ Jay grunted. He led the way inside, past what had been the ticket booth, and up a few steps into the pool area. There was plenty of natural light, from a window that ran along the full length of the roof, but not enough for the scene of crime people apparently; four big lamps, on stands, had been set up in the drained pool. I took a look around, reacquainting myself with my surroundings. I had been in the baths a couple of years before, as a user. When I had taken over command of the drugs and vice squad it had been based in Gayfield Square, and I had gone there to swim on a few lunch breaks. The pool was flanked by individual changing cubicles, women on one side, men on the other. The designer had left gaps at the top and bottom of the doors, a sign that the building dated back to a time before electric lighting. There was an upper tier, with more cubicles, for individual baths, relics of the days when all there was in many homes was a tin tub in front of the fire.

  A ladder had been placed at the deep end, where the tiled floor was flat. A red-haired guy stood at the top, a DS called Arthur Dorward; he was a graduate, as was I, but his degree was in chemistry. He was wearing a scene of crime suit, and handed one to me. ‘What about you?’ I asked Jay, as I put it on.

  ‘I’ve seen all I want to see down there,’ he retorted.

  I climbed down the ladder, jumping off with a couple of rungs to go. The body was lying as the superintendent had described it; it was that of a young man, a big bloke, white, dressed in black trousers and shirt, with shiny lace-up brogues and patterned socks. It was face down, the limbs were splayed out and the head was at the sort of angle you’d expect from a well-executed hanging. There was a little blood, but no more than a smear.

  I looked up, towards the diving platform which jutted out above my head, a solid structure and wide enough to accommodate at least two people and possibly three. It was fifteen or sixteen feet higher than the edge of the pool, add on another couple for the water level then twelve for safe diving depth; yes, the guy could have fallen thirty feet, more than enough to do the job.

  Two officers stood beside him. They were both dressed as I was, in one-piece sterile suits with hoods, but I knew them both. Alison Higgins had just made DI; she had been a sergeant on my team until a year before. I had engineered her move, without her ever knowing about it. She had chummed me to Infirmary Street once or twice . . . on lunchtimes when we weren’t back at her flat in Albert Street, banging each other’s brains out. Our thing had cooled off since then . . . not that it had ever been red hot . . . but we were still good friends.

  The other suit was a detective constable, new to CID; his name was Martin, Andy Martin. He was from Glasgow, and he was reckoned to be a high-flier, not necessarily by Jay, but by me. He had helped me out on an investigation a few months before, when he was still in uniform, and I had recommended to Alf Stein that he be fast-tracked into CID. Jay thought that he had been favoured because he had a degree of fame as a rugby player, but if that had been so he’d have deserved it. The young Martin had played for Scotland B and had been a certainty to make full international status
, until he had made it clear to the head coach that his job came before any squad training session, even in the newly dawned professional era.

  ‘So you think I might have an interest in this, Alison?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen him before, sir.’ She was always impeccably formal with me, on duty, when there were others around. ‘And I’m sure, too, that it was in my time on the drugs squad.’

  ‘Has the body been moved?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘So you’ve only seen him in profile, as he is now?’

  ‘That’s how sure I am,’ she replied, confidently.

  ‘Has the doctor been yet?’

  ‘And the pathologist,’ Martin volunteered, ‘and the photographers.’

  ‘Then turn him over.’

  The young DC nodded, squatted down beside the corpse and rolled it on to its back, then straightened the arms and legs. The left side of the face had been smashed by the impact, but it was still recognisably human. And recognisable as . . .

  ‘Marlon Watson,’ I said, loud enough for Jay to hear, above us at the poolside. ‘Fucking hell, but that’s one unlucky family.’

  ‘Marlon?’ Martin echoed.

  ‘Age twenty-three or twenty-four, born in nineteen seventy-two, when The Godfather was the big film of the year. Mr and Mrs Watson didn’t have a lot of imagination when it came to naming their kids. This one had a brother called Ryan; he was born in nineteen seventy, the year Love Story came out. There was a sister, too, so I’ve been told, older than either of them. Her name’s Mia; spot the movie.’

  ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ Alison was a movie buff.

  ‘That’s right: a movie about the spawn of Satan, and Bella Watson called her kid after its star.’

  ‘Why did you say they’re unlucky?’ Jay asked.

  I looked up at him. ‘Don’t you remember? Maybe not; it’s a few years back now. I wasn’t long on the force when it happened. This one’s brother was at Maxwell Academy, that hellish school they pulled down a few years ago, and his uncle, a bad bastard called Gavin Spreckley, had him selling heavily cut smack to the other kids, under the protection of the janitor. The Saltire newspaper got on to it and ran the story. We didn’t have enough on Gavin to lift him, but Ryan was arrested and remanded to a secure unit. He disappeared from there; he didn’t break out, though, he was snatched. The staff were careless, or maybe somebody was bribed. Anyway, a day or so later a parcel was delivered to the Saltire newspaper office. It was a box, with two right hands in it, the boy’s and the uncle’s, cut off after they’d been killed. We never found the bodies, but Tommy Partridge . . . he led the investigation . . . reckons that he knows what happened to them.’

  Jay scowled. ‘That’s not bad luck as far as I’m concerned; it’s good luck for the rest of us.’

  ‘The boy was fourteen,’ I barked at him. ‘A year older than my daughter is now; he never stood a fucking chance, being brought up in that environment.’

  ‘Tough shit. I remember the wee swine now; he carried a razor, and cut somebody with it, one of our guys.’

  ‘Sure, and you carry a spring-loaded baton in your jacket pocket, Superintendent.’ His face flushed with anger, and I stopped short. I’d been drawn into an argument with the guy in front of his own troops, not a smart thing to do. ‘But the family trouble didn’t end there,’ I went on, cutting across any potential retort. ‘We all remember that,’ I glanced at the DC, ‘apart from you, Martin.’

  ‘What happened, sir?’ he asked me.

  ‘Mayhem. Partridge and his team knew who did for the pair of them; there wasn’t much doubt about that. Spreckley was a known dealer; his supplier was a guy called Alasdair Holmes, the younger brother of a man called Perry Holmes. I won’t give you Perry’s life story, but you can take it that he was a man of many business interests, some straight, others criminal on a national scale. Every cop in Scotland wanted him, but none of us could get near him. Anyway, the Holmes brothers knew nothing of what had been going on in the school, and when they found out . . .’ I felt my eyebrows rise.

  ‘The belief was that uncle and nephew were killed by Al Holmes and a big German monster who worked for them, called Johann Kraus, and Partridge’s bet was that they were cremated in an incinerator on a smallholding that Perry owned and where Kraus lived. He also believes that they made Gavin’s brother Billy watch the executions. If Gavin was small-time then Billy was tiny, a gopher, no more than that.’

  I smiled, but I wasn’t laughing inside. ‘However,’ I continued, ‘there was a wee bit more to him than they thought. It took him a few years to work up the courage, but one day he walked into the Holmes business office just off Lothian Road and shot both the brothers. Alasdair was killed instantly and Perry took four bullets. He should have died, but he didn’t; instead he wound up in a wheelchair, paralysed. As for Billy, Johann Kraus saw him off, then he went berserk himself and killed an innocent bystander. There was a short siege, before one of our snipers blew his brains out.’

  ‘So what do you think this is?’ Higgins asked. ‘The next round?’

  ‘Perry Holmes exterminating the Watsons? No, I don’t see that. Perry’s a quadriplegic; from what I’ve heard he’s looked after by a couple of male nurses. He still runs his kosher businesses, but that’s all. The other side of his life ended when that bullet lodged at the base of his brain, where it is to this day. It all seems to have passed over to Tony Manson now.’

  ‘So is DI Higgins right?’ Jay interrupted. ‘Did this Marlon guy connect to Manson?’

  I knew where he was heading, from the tone of his voice. ‘Closely,’ I told him. ‘He was his driver.’

  ‘So it is one for your drugs squad,’ he exclaimed, beaming at the prospect of spin-passing a tricky investigation to someone else.

  ‘Maybe yes, maybe no. Tony does other things, as you know very well.’

  ‘Sure, among them prostitution, which still makes it your baby.’

  I sighed, because I knew that one way or another, he was right: but I wasn’t for letting him know it. ‘We’ll let the boss decide that,’ I declared. ‘How did he get in here?’ I asked Alison, to avoid any debate.

  ‘There’s a door at the side. It’s been jemmied. The building isn’t alarmed, so there was no risk.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘The janitors call in twice a week. The entrances were all checked and secure on Monday. The pathologist is sure he’s been dead for at least thirty-six hours, because rigor mortis is starting to dissipate.’

  ‘So we’re looking at something that could have happened overnight on Tuesday. There’s a pub across the road, and steady traffic through this street, so we ought to start with the premise that the break-in happened after closing time.’ I gazed up at Jay. ‘Do you know when that boozer closes? Does it have a late licence?’

  ‘Only at weekends,’ Martin volunteered. ‘It shuts at eleven through the week.’

  ‘Okay, that indicates a window from around midnight Tuesday onwards.’

  ‘Maybe he was in the pub before he broke in here,’ the DC suggested. I glanced upwards again; Jay had gone. He was doing his level best to dump the investigation on me, and the way things were going, he was succeeding.

  ‘That’s a possibility that should be checked,’ I said. ‘Was he? If so, was he alone or did he have company?’ I turned back to DI Higgins. ‘But first things first; you should get Marlon off to the morgue . . . that won’t take long, since it’s just round the corner . . . and you need to find out whether anyone knew what he was doing on Tuesday.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but . . .’ She knew the game that was being played between her boss and me, and she wasn’t having any of it. She needed clear direction, unambiguous; she didn’t need to be caught in the spray of a pissing contest between two guys who might be letting their dislike of each other get in the way of their judgement.

  ‘Fuck it!’ I hissed. Thing was, I knew something that none of them did: I knew about the announcement
that was going to be made the next morning, at 9 a.m., on a force circular and an hour later to the press. ‘Detective Superintendent Jay,’ I shouted.

  A few seconds passed before he reappeared, shoulders hunched in his baggy jacket, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He looked sour, ready for a fight. ‘Yes?’ he murmured, a challenge.

  ‘I’m taking over this investigation,’ I announced.

  ‘Just like that?’

  Perverse bastard! It was what he wanted, but not how he’d wanted it. His hope was that if he couldn’t order me himself, Alf Stein would, that I’d be put in my place. His mistake was that I knew what that place was, he didn’t.

  ‘Just like that,’ I echoed. ‘Either I do it tonight with your agreement, or tomorrow morning, with or without it. For the sake of the investigation it’s best that it’s now.’