The Roots of Evil (Bob Skinner) Read online

  A crime scene tent had been set up at the entrance to the station. It was large, covering the pavement and half the roadway. At its entrance a ginger-haired man was climbing into a disposable tunic.

  ‘He’s here?’

  McGuire nodded. ‘Aye, Bob; for this one, accept no substitutes.’

  Arthur Dorward was head of the Scottish Police Authority’s Forensic Services Unit, and he was not a delegator. For major incidents he was usually the first on the scene. He turned as they approached, frowned, then stepped inside the tent.

  ‘He’s not happy about a Hogmanay call-out either, it seems,’ Skinner murmured.

  ‘Who would be?’ the chief constable replied. ‘We all need to be suited and booted,’ she continued, accepting a package from a crime scene technician.

  Skinner shed his overcoat and donned the sterile garb as quickly as he could, only to find that McClair had a problem. She was wearing a skirt. ‘Sauce never said,’ she protested.

  ‘That’s okay, Noele,’ McGuire assured her. ‘Nip into the station and change in the ladies.’

  ‘Mario,’ Skinner barked as she left them, irritation overcoming him. ‘What the fuck is this?’

  As he spoke a tall young man emerged from the tent, grim and white-faced. His ears had escaped from his sterile cap. He stopped short when he saw his former chief and continuing mentor, his eyes widening. ‘Are you going to tell me what this is about, Sauce?’

  Detective Inspector Harold Haddock’s mouth tightened until it was no more than a slash across his face. He shook his head and looked away, then retraced his steps.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Skinner growled. He made to follow, until Steele put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Please, Bob, wait for DS McClair. She’s going to need you, as a friend.’

  Scowling, he obeyed her, biding his time until the DS returned, her change of clothing completed, then stepped through the opening into the covered enclosure, with her following behind.

  The area was bathed in cold, bright white light. At its centre was a car, a blue estate; a sheet had been placed over the windscreen and roof, against glare from the floodlights, he supposed. It looked vaguely familiar to Skinner, but he was unable to place it . . . until Noele McClair spoke.

  ‘That’s Terry’s car,’ she cried out. ‘It’s my ex-husband’s car. What’s it doing here?’

  ‘That’s the thing, Noele,’ Sauce Haddock replied. ‘It was dumped here at twelve forty-one. The driver jumped out, got into the passenger seat of a car that was following him and it got the hell out of here. He was wearing a black balaclava, so we never got a look at his face.’

  ‘But why?’ she asked, her anxiety building. ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘This is the reason,’ the chief constable said. She stepped up to the car and pulled the covering sheet away exposing some of the windscreen.

  Reflected light blazed off the glass, blinding them all for a second, until Skinner moved past McClair, up to the vehicle, and looked inside.

  The front seats were unoccupied but two male figures were sprawled in the rear. He jerked the nearside door open and leaned inside. He knew Terry Coats, the detective inspector who had lost his career for sailing too close to the wind, the husband who had lost his wife and daughter for going far beyond it. He recognised him at once, even with a third eye in the middle of his forehead from which a single trickle of blood ran down his nose, across the stubble on his upper lip and into his mouth.

  He stood, turning to face Steele and McGuire, fury in his eyes. McClair had moved up behind him, but he held his position, blocking her view of what was inside the car. ‘What the fuck!’ he hissed. ‘I thought I’d trained some tact into you two. Obviously you skipped a couple of lessons, to be pulling this stunt.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ the chief constable replied. ‘It was my call, not Mario’s. Neither of us have ever experienced anything like this, so I felt your advice was essential.’

  ‘You must have skipped the self-confidence lesson as well, Maggie. Okay,’ he continued, calming a little, ‘I’ll take that as a compliment, but why bring Noele here?’

  ‘What was the alternative? Having a police car call at her house, with her child there? Sauce knew that her mother would be there for New Year, so I thought it was best if she was brought to the scene.’

  ‘You got that fucking wrong!’ he yelled at her, in a way that he never had when she had been an officer under his command.

  McClair looked up at him. ‘The scene of what, Bob?’ she asked, quietly.

  He sighed. ‘Terry’s in there, lass, and he’s dead. He’s been shot.’

  The colour fled from her face, in an instant. Her cheeks seemed to collapse into themselves, giving her a skeletal look. She leaned against him, and he put his arms around her. ‘What’s the silly bugger done now?’ she murmured, into his chest.

  ‘That we will find out, Noele,’ he promised her. ‘I’m sure he’ll have left a trail. From what I knew of the man, he didn’t do subtle.’

  ‘Can I see him?’ she asked, her voice tremulous. ‘I mean, we’ll need a formal identification, won’t we?’

  ‘You can do it at the morgue, before the autopsy. But it’s not “we”. You can’t be involved in the investigation.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said, bitterly, disengaging herself and looking back at Steele, McGuire and Haddock. ‘We were divorced.’ She paused. ‘Or do you have to eliminate me as a suspect? Is that it?’

  ‘The thought never crossed our minds,’ Haddock replied. ‘You’re too close; that’s all, Noele, you must know that. I will need to talk to you though, about Terry’s movements, associates, stuff like that.’

  ‘I won’t be able to tell you much, Sauce. I only see Terry,’ she gulped, ‘only saw, him when he came to pick up our Harry every other Saturday.’

  ‘We may have to go further back than that.’

  ‘But not now,’ Skinner declared firmly. Even in her distress, McClair had the impression that he had effectively taken command. ‘You’ve done what you saw as necessary, Maggie. Now do what’s decent and have Bertie Auld take her back to Gullane right away.’

  ‘Back to my car,’ she corrected him, as the first tears began to fall.

  ‘No, back home. You’re not driving tonight. PC Gregg can drop Sergeant Auld off in Aberlady; he can take your motor back.’

  ‘He can’t,’ she murmured. ‘He’s not insured.’

  ‘He is, as a police officer. Don’t you worry about that; let’s just get you home to Harry and your mother. And if you need someone to look after the wee fella in the next few days,’ he added, ‘you can drop him off at mine. Sauce,’ he ordered, ‘take her back inside to change, then straight to the car.’

  As Haddock obeyed his instruction, Skinner, still bristling with anger glowered at the two senior officers. ‘I can see why you wanted me here,’ he conceded, ‘but bringing her here was miles over the top. You could have told me about Coats, and I could have gone to see Noele at home.’

  ‘I agree, Bob, we could, and in hindsight, we should,’ McGuire was grim-faced, as tense as before. ‘But there’s more. You need to look in the other side of the car.’

  Puzzled, he did as the DCC asked; he walked round behind the vehicle, and once again opened the rear passenger door and leaned in. As he did, he noticed for the first time the rank smell of death with which he had become familiar during his police career, a mix of blood, sweat and human waste.

  The other occupant was slumped sideways, restrained only by the curve of the back seat. He wore a heavy knitted sweater and faded denim jeans. Skinner recognised his trainers as Air Jordan, James Andrew’s choice of Christmas present, and seriously expensive, the top of the Nike basketball range. The man also had been shot, but through the back of the head: that was all too obvious as the bullet had exited through the left eye, taking all of it away, turning the socket into a mess of gore and bone chips.

  He stood once again. ‘Yeah,’ he said with a shudder.r />
  ‘Look again, Bob,’ Maggie Steele told him.

  He did so, forcing his gaze away from the awful wound and fixing it on the undamaged section of the slack-jawed head. He stared at the body for several seconds; as he did so, a cold hard fist seemed to grip his stomach and twist.

  ‘Aw my God,’ he gasped. ‘Is this for real? It can’t be. How the fuck . . . this is Griff Montell?’

  ‘Yes,’ the chief constable confirmed. ‘Inspector Griffin Montell. You recruited him as chief in Edinburgh, and you have a personal connection with him through his friendship with your Alex. We need to know how he wound up dead in the same car as Terry Coats, and we’re hoping you can help us find out.’

  Skinner’s head swam, as he recalled his history with the dead man. It was an exaggeration to say that he had recruited him, but he had approved his transfer from his police force in South Africa and had made the best use of the skills outlined in his service record by putting him straight into CID, without any pointless acclimatisation in uniform. Montell had more or less been driven out of his home country when a failed marriage had left him with court-awarded child support costs that he could not have met on a Rand-based salary. The solution he had chosen had been to move to Scotland where the conversion rate from sterling allowed him to do that easily.

  Montell was a colourful character, as well as being a good detective. Skinner’s daughter Alex had been attracted to him when they were neighbours in Stockbridge. And there had been a third person in that block, he realised.

  ‘What about Spring?’ he asked. ‘She’s his next of kin. Has she been told?’

  Montell’s twin sister had emigrated with him. She was gay, and her romance with Superintendent Mary Chambers had caused family and professional friction for a while; indeed it might have cost Montell his job if Skinner had not been there as a moderating influence.

  ‘She doesn’t live in Edinburgh full-time any longer,’ McGuire told him. ‘She moved in with Mary, and after she retired they bought a flat in Pretoria, where she and Griff grew up. That’s where they spend the winter. I know this because Mary told me. I have her mobile number, so I’ll try that. If it’s switched off I’ll ask the police there to track her down and get her to contact me, and I’ll ask her to break the news.’

  ‘What about his ex-wife and kids? You might have contact details for her on his personal file. She’ll have to be told.’

  ‘Again, that’s a job for the morning. I might ask Mary to do that too.’

  ‘Meanwhile I’ve got to tell Alex,’ Skinner murmured.

  ‘Were they still . . . ?’ Steele ventured. ‘We all know that when she was attacked in her home, Griff was there. He was injured protecting her, wasn’t he?’

  ‘If you’re asking whether they were still sleeping together,’ Skinner retorted, ‘not so far as I know. It wasn’t a steady thing. Griff was a friend, and if she was lonely or low, she could give him a call.’

  ‘She’ll need to be interviewed,’ the chief constable said.

  Something about her manner brought Skinner’s temperature to boiling point once again. ‘She’ll need to be consoled,’ he snapped, ‘and that’s my job, mine and Dominic’s.’

  ‘You mean Lennie,’ Steele observed.

  ‘No, I don’t, Maggie. Lennie’s in the past; Dominic Jackson is a different person altogether.’

  The chief constable frowned. ‘I’m a sceptic when it comes to rehabilitation,’ she declared. ‘I’m not convinced by people who claim to have reinvented themselves in prison.’

  ‘Across the board, neither am I,’ he fired back, ‘but I knew the big fella before you did, and I liked him. The fact is you don’t really know him at all, and you never did. Many of us are moulded as people by our social circumstances; I’m one of them . . . and so are you. So was the young Lennie Plenderleith, but he didn’t have my good fortune. He wasn’t born into a middle-class professional family so he was never spotted by the education system. In his case, his father was a brute and he was brought up that way.’ He paused, recovering his temper. ‘The prison service doesn’t do IQ tests on inmates as a matter of course, but I had them run one on Lennie and it was off the fucking scale.’

  ‘You never told me that,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Nor did I tell you that I visited him a couple of times a year when he was inside, in the Governor’s office so the other prisoners didn’t twig and mark him down as a grass.’

  ‘No, you didn’t; not even when I was your executive officer. You didn’t trust me?’

  ‘It wasn’t a matter of trust, Mags, it was private, between me and Dominic, that’s all. However, I do trust him to take care of my kid, and that’s all you need to realise now.’ He paused. ‘No, not quite, you also need to realise that if anyone in the media ever makes a connection between him and Lennie Plenderleith and I find out that it came from the police, I will find the source and I will end their career. Now,’ he barked, abruptly, ‘can we get indoors, sit down with the SIO . . . Sammy Pye, I assume . . . and work out how this double-murder investigation will proceed.’

  To McGuire and Steele, it was as if Bob Skinner had never left the service. Automatically he had slipped into command mode. Automatically, they obeyed. The DCC nodded and led the way into the police station. They removed and discarded their sterile clothing in the reception area, then climbed one floor to the station commander’s office, which Steele had occupied herself earlier in her career, before the old Edinburgh force had become part of the unified Scottish police service.

  ‘Mario,’ she said, as the door closed behind them, ‘text Sauce and ask him to join us. You were wrong about Sammy being SIO, Bob; he’s on extended sick leave and Haddock’s filling in for him as Serious Crimes commander in Edinburgh.’

  ‘What’s his problem?’

  She hesitated; he realised that she was considering what she could tell him. ‘Within these four walls, he’s been diagnosed as having motor neurone disease,’ she replied. ‘Don’t breathe a word, though: not even Sauce knows. He thinks it’s a virus.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Skinner sighed. ‘What a New Year this is turning out to be. Poor Sammy, we’ve all known him since he was a . . .’ He stopped in mid-sentence as there was a knock at the door.

  Haddock came into the room without waiting for a reply; he was still wearing his paper suit. ‘Chief, sir, gaffer,’ he said. ‘You wanted me.’

  ‘Yes, Inspector,’ McGuire replied, ‘we do. We have an investigation to launch, and you’re in charge.’

  ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘Who else? It’s a serious crime; that’s what it says on your office door, and you’re in charge of the team.’ He hesitated. ‘Okay, Sauce; we know you’re relatively new in rank and inexperienced, but the chief and I have got faith in you. By the same token, we’re not going to leave you exposed to everything. The media will swallow its collective tongue when it learns that a police officer and a former cop have been executed like this. I’ll front up all the public statements and briefings, and Allsop’s team in the press office will deal with one-off questions, so you won’t be in the spotlight at all, until the day that you make an arrest. Then, you can go out front. You can run the inquiry out of this office if you like, with all the personnel you need. If the investigation goes beyond Edinburgh, you’ll have the support of Serious Crimes wherever necessary. They’ll report to you, regardless of the rank of the senior officer. On top of that, Sir Robert will be there in the background, acting as a mentor, as he’s done in the past.’

  Skinner started, but McGuire forestalled him. ‘I don’t need to ask you, Bob, do I? You’re as keen to find the person who pulled that trigger as we are.’

  ‘No, you don’t need to,’ he agreed, ‘but you and I won’t be seen together, Sauce. When we meet, it won’t be here, and we won’t be observed. I’ll help you every way I can, but if I’m seen to do so, it’ll undermine your authority, in the eyes of the press, and possibly of your own team. Now,’ he continued, ‘what’s your fir
st priority?’

  ‘Process the crime scene,’ Haddock replied immediately.

  ‘You don’t know where the crime scene is,’ Skinner pointed out. ‘One was shot in the back of the head, the other,’ he touched his forehead, ‘right there. Coats might have been killed in the car, but Griff wasn’t, no way. Even if he’d been leaning forward so that the gunman could get a shot off, if that had happened there would have been debris all over the place, blood, bone fragments, brain tissue. Earlier you described the car being dropped off. I take it you’ve got CCTV footage.’

  ‘Yes, there are three cameras; one covers Torphichen Place, one’s on Dewar Place Lane, and the third looks at the rear of the building and the car park.’

  ‘What about the other vehicle? What do you have on that?’

  ‘We have a registration,’ Haddock told him. ‘Problem is it belongs to a Vauxhall Insignia, three years old, owned by a leasing company in Bristol. The car on camera is a Renault Megane.’

  ‘You’ll be able to narrow that by looking at the style of the vehicle, model details and so on.’

  ‘I’m not holding my breath, gaffer. Before you ask, I’ve ordered a search of all available street camera footage, for both vehicles. If we get lucky . . .’

  ‘Don’t call it luck; call it the result of proper police procedure.’

  McGuire grunted. ‘We’ll be sure to do that at the press briefing. But if we do get lucky,’ he continued, ‘we’ll find footage of the driver and the passenger getting out and they won’t have bloody helmets wrapped around their coupons.’

  ‘Which makes that your top priority, Sauce,’ Skinner added. ‘The next being to process the vehicle and get every trace of DNA from it. You’re bound to find traces of wee Harry, Terry and Noele’s son, in there, but it’ll be so similar to his dad’s that you won’t need to take a sample from the wee chap. Likewise, Noele, for hers is on the database for elimination purposes. Again, add on the luck factor and you might find someone who’s on the system for the wrong reasons.’ He paused. ‘That’s what we’re thinking,’ he said. ‘Now, tell us, as the SIO, what’s in your head?’