Hour Of Darkness Read online

  ‘Let him have enough rope, you mean?’

  ‘No, I don’t. He might just fool us both by getting it right. If he doesn’t, I don’t want him to have anyone to blame but himself.’

  Five

  I’m not addicted to television, not by a long way, but someone in my position does have a need to keep up to date with current affairs, and events. That’s why I have UK satellite television in my Spanish place, as most Brits do, whether they’re resident ex-pats or occasional visitors like us.

  Not that I was thinking of home.

  Sarah and I had just come home from a late breakfast in Casablanca, a café down in the old part of L’Escala, and a couple of hours reclining on the town beach, which it overlooks. Holidays are my time for catching up on my reading list (normally I’m one of those people who take forever to get through a book, since I consume it in ten- or fifteen-minute bursts, in bed, last thing at night, before my eyes go blurry and sleep catches up with me), and that morning I’d finished the latest tale of the recently unretired DI Rebus . . . unconventional or not, with his clear-up rate he’d have gone a lot higher in my force, trust me . . . and moved on to a novel called As Serious as Death, the latest in a series that’s set in an authentic Spanish village that I can see from our house.

  ‘You know what?’ I said to her as we settled on our sunbeds beside the pool.

  ‘What?’ she murmured.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Nice. I love you too. Now what else were you going to say?’

  ‘Ach, nothing really, I’ve been thinking all morning about last night at La Clota and what we wound up talking about.’

  ‘That young waiter?’

  ‘Who?’ I frowned for a moment; I’d forgotten all about the lad. ‘Ah him,’ I said. ‘No, not him, the job; as always, the bloody job. You know, if the new board in its doubtful wisdom decided that they wanted someone else to do it, I’ve decided that I wouldn’t give a fuck. There are other things in . . .’

  ‘Ahh,’ she said, cutting me off in the wise-woman tone that always brings me down to earth whenever she thinks I might be floating above it. ‘We’re back to buying that boat, are we?’

  ‘What boat?’

  ‘You know damn well. Alex told me about it. When she was a kid, you and she went for a weekend’s sailing in the Clyde estuary, with your girlfriend of the time. Before it was over you were all for giving up your career, buying a boat of your own and doing chartered cruises for a living.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I whispered. ‘That boat.’ That weekend, that warm, lovely woman: poor dead Alison, another cop, who was even more career-driven than me, and might have overtaken me, if she hadn’t got into the wrong car at the wrong time and . . .

  ‘What is it about women, cars and me?’ The thought escaped without my realising it, and once it was out there I had to finish. ‘Myra, she died in a car, on her own. Alison, so did she.’ I looked at Sarah. ‘Can we arrange it so that we always travel in the same vehicle from now on?’

  She rolled off her sunbed and on to mine, pressing her body against me. ‘Lover, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned that; I’d forgotten it was her.’

  She was upset, so I stroked her hair, and kissed her. ‘It’s all right,’ I assured her. ‘Shit happens. And another reason why I won’t care if that job doesn’t.’

  ‘But you will. For the same reason that one phone call blew your boat right out of the water; it’s what you are. Anyway, it’s all academic, because the job will happen.’

  She sat up, put her feet on the ground, and pushed herself upright. ‘Now, before you get horny, I’m off to consider what we might have for lunch.’

  I followed suit. ‘And I’m off to swim, and think.’ I do some of my best thinking in the pool.

  I took a step towards the chair where I’d left my trunks to dry off after my early morning exercise, then stopped. They weren’t there.

  ‘Hey,’ I called to Sarah, catching her halfway through the doorway, ‘did you move my swim shorts?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Why would I?’

  ‘No idea, but somebody has.’

  ‘Maybe they blew back into the pool.’

  ‘Good thought,’ I conceded and went to check. On the bottom I saw three leaves and what must have been a very careless gecko, but absolutely no garments. I swore quietly and went indoors for a replacement.

  As I crossed the living area, the wall clock told me that it was just short of two twenty-five. I picked up the TV remote, hoping that the timepiece wasn’t slow and that I hadn’t missed the Scottish news.

  I headed upstairs and changed into a new pair of Speedos. When I came back down, Sarah was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the television.

  ‘Look at this,’ she said, without taking her eyes off it. ‘Hold on, I’ll go back to the beginning.’

  Our satellite decoder has two feeds, allowing us to pause and rewind live programmes. That’s what she did, until she had found the start of the item she’d been watching.

  ‘It’s a press briefing in Edinburgh,’ she said, ‘about the autopsy I performed on Friday.’

  I stepped alongside her as the presenter led into the piece, then felt my eyebrows rise as another face appeared on screen. ‘What the . . .’ I took the remote and froze the image.

  ‘That’s David Mackenzie,’ I exclaimed, ‘the Bandit. He’s the Command Corridor exec. What the hell’s he doing there?’

  She looked up at me, surprised. ‘Didn’t you know? Maggie’s moved him into Neil’s old job, as Edinburgh CID coordinator. Sammy Pye told me on Friday.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  Since Maggie Steele had been appointed as my successor in the Edinburgh job, I’d been avoiding any professional contact, so I couldn’t be accused of influencing her thinking . . . not that I could have done that anyway. I knew she’d handle some things in a different way from me, but that one took me by surprise. I’d always have put a proven team player in that job, and our David was, unfortunately, the opposite; poaching him had not been one of my better moves.

  ‘It could have been worse, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘She could have made him head of CID; that would have been a real risk. Sammy told you, you said. That means Mackenzie didn’t come along to post-mortem, yes?’

  ‘Yes, no, whatever; he wasn’t there. I don’t blame him; I wish I hadn’t been myself. She’d been in the water for two to three weeks and quite a bit was missing.’ She drew a line across her chest with her finger, from alongside her right breast to the edge of her left collarbone. ‘That much, plus the left arm just below the elbow. She got tangled up with a fairly large vessel.’

  Until then she hadn’t told me any details about the job, but she didn’t need to for me to know that it had been messy.

  She reclaimed the remote and pushed the play button. ‘Let’s hear what he’s got to say. Maybe they’ve found the rest.’

  Fat chance, I thought. The prop probably minced it.

  Indeed they hadn’t. What Mackenzie came out with was, essentially, the losing gambler’s last roll of the dice, an appeal for any information about late middle-aged women who hadn’t been seen for a while, the kind that usually attract hundreds of calls to the hotline and do no good at all. When he said, ‘A murder investigation,’ I glanced at Sarah and she nodded.

  ‘She was stabbed,’ she explained, as Bandit wound up.

  On the face of it . . . unfortunate choice of words . . . there was little or no chance of a result. In all probability the partial cadaver would stay in the freezer until the prosecutor’s office authorised its burial or cremation. I knew it, and so did Mackenzie, although I knew equally well that if we were both wrong, he’d grab all the glory that ensued.

  ‘He seemed earnest and impressive,’ Sarah said, as the presenter moved on to the next item.

  ‘Oh, he’s all that on the surface, is David,’ I agreed. ‘We could do with him over here.’

  Her frown expressed bewilderment.<
br />
  ‘Why?’

  ‘He might find out what happened to my swimming trunks.’

  Six

  ‘Are we both sure about this?’

  Alex Skinner turned her head and gazed evenly at her partner. They were seated on the small balcony of her duplex apartment, with its vistas of the Salisbury Crags, and across the unconventional, and controversial, roof of the Scottish parliament building.

  Privately, Andy Martin hated their viewpoint. He would never admit to a fear of heights, but it was there nonetheless, and amplified by the structure of Alex’s terrace, which was no more than a steel frame jutting out from the building, giving him the feeling of hanging over the edge of a cliff.

  Whenever his children visited, as they would do over the coming weekend, or Alex’s young half-siblings, the glass door from the living room was always locked, and bolted.

  ‘We’ve been over this,’ she replied. ‘We’ve had this discussion with my father. It was his suggestion that you should apply for the new chief constable post. I understand his reasoning . . . maybe better than you do . . . and I agree with him.

  ‘In fact I agree with him so much, that I’m not going to trust you to post that completed application form. I’m going to take it to work tomorrow and in my lunch break I’m going to take it to the post office and send it off myself, first class, recorded delivery.’

  ‘It’s a huge step,’ he said.

  ‘No it’s not. It’s a declaration of intent, if nothing else.’

  ‘I’m way too young.’

  ‘Forty-two is not way too young for anything, other than a pension. You’ve got the service, the skills and the seniority. You’re also calm, unflappable, a first-class man-manager, and a natural leader. Christ, my dad doesn’t tick all those boxes. I told him so, but he knew it anyway.’

  ‘But you want him to get the job.’

  ‘Of course I do’, she retorted, then realised that she had fallen into the pit he had dug for her. ‘That’s to say . . . Andy, you will sit in that office one day, I have no doubt about that, even if I believe that my father deserves to sit in it first, given what he’s done in his career.’

  ‘I know that, kid. But, go back to what you said earlier on about understanding his reasoning better than me: what did you mean by that?’

  ‘That he wanted you to apply because you’re a worthy candidate, but more than that, you’ll be his safety net.’

  ‘Against what? Acts of God and stuff?’

  ‘Not just that; against his own ambivalence. With your application in place, he’ll be free to walk away if he chooses.’

  He looked away from her across to the sunlit Crags, and the Radical Road, where tiny figures walked. ‘No chance,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ve known Bob for more than half your life; he’s a driven man.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that? He’s been that way since my mum died, and it’s why he’s never been very good at relationships . . . until now, that is. Please God, let him and Sarah make a go of it this time.’

  He turned his face back towards her, smiling. ‘You might put in a word for us too, while you’re at it.’

  ‘We don’t need His help,’ she declared. ‘As long as we get the children thing right this time,’ she added.

  ‘You really don’t want kids, do you?’

  ‘No. Certainly not now, and I’m not sure I ever will. I’m not full of love, Andy. I’ve only got so much in me to share around.’

  ‘We’ll see how you feel in a few years. Either way, I’ll be fine about it. I want what you want, end of story. But in a way, it’s interesting that you feel the way you do.

  ‘You think it was your mother’s death made Bob what he is? I don’t quite see it like that. I believe that his children are his driving forces, starting with you, of course. He wants you all to be proud of him. Even on the occasions when he’s had to put his life on the line, and there may have been more of those than you know about, he’s done it because he couldn’t bear you to think that he was afraid to. When I first met him, you were all he talked about. Even when he was in relationships you were the absolute centre of his universe.’

  Alex smiled. ‘I think I knew that. When I was thirteen I actually told him I didn’t fancy another woman in our kitchen full-time. Can you believe that?’

  He laughed. ‘Of you, sure I can.’

  ‘It was when he was with Alison Higgins . . . not that I had anything against her, but there was someone else in the picture at that time and I didn’t see her as suitable, not at all.’

  ‘Was there? I don’t remember that. Mind you, I was a new kid in town then.’

  ‘Weren’t you just! You and Mario too. I look back and I realise how young you were, the pair of you. I didn’t think so then, though. You were very glamorous to a thirteen year old.’

  ‘Come on,’ Martin protested, ‘we’re not that old yet.’

  ‘You’re eternally young, my darling, both of you. Hey,’ she asked, spontaneously, ‘do you think Mario ever had a driving force?’

  ‘I know he did; he told me once. He joined the police to show both sides of his family that he could succeed at something that had no connection with their businesses.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ve never thought about it, but if I did . . . You? My kids?’

  ‘Never Karen?’

  He frowned. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Probably I should never have married her, or she should have known better than to marry me.’

  ‘That’s not true. It seemed right to you both at the time, so no regrets.’

  ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any. I have two lovely kids to show for it.’

  ‘Now that is true, and they are.’ Her face became solemn. ‘But Andy,’ she ventured, ‘do you never worry about people saying that you just used Karen as a brood mare, and then came back to me?’

  ‘Why, does that worry you?’

  She pursed her lips, an odd gesture for her. ‘I’m under no illusions about what people think of me, especially women. One, who shall be nameless, called me a disgrace to my gender, right to my face.’

  ‘Then she’d better remain fucking nameless or I’ll be having words with her.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I had some myself. I threatened her with a defamation action.’ She winked. ‘Being a lawyer has its advantages sometimes. But if she’d said anything about you, I’d have needed one myself, for I’d have laid her as broad as she was long.’

  He reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘Don’t you worry yourself. That thing has been said, in fact, that I just used Karen, but to her, not to me, at a women’s gathering up in Perth. She told me about it, and she was spitting nails when she did.’

  ‘Oh, that’s awful. What tactless bitch did that?’

  ‘No idea, but I do know she had her tail docked. Karen told her that, if anything, she was the user not me, because she’d wanted children more than I did. She even told the unfortunate lady that she, Karen, that is, was in your debt, because she’d always wanted to resume her career eventually, and as a serving chief constable’s wife, no way could she have done that.’

  ‘It would be nice if she really believed that,’ Alex murmured.

  Andy sighed. ‘Look, you’re never going to be her best pal, but she’s okay about you. If she wasn’t, she’d give me grief about you being around Danielle and Robert, or about us taking them to Bob’s place at Gullane for the weekend. She doesn’t mind, Alex; that’s the honest truth. And also, she really is loving being back at work.’

  Seven

  If Detective Sergeant Karen Neville had put her mind to it, she could have hated Alexis Skinner; not for stealing her husband, but for dumping him when she had and throwing him back into the Edinburgh man pool, just as she herself was rebounding hard from a disastrous relationship.

  But she believed that life was wasted if it was spent carrying grudges, plus she and Andy were agreed that they had done at least two things right in what had become, eventually
, a sad, distant marriage, a point she had reiterated the evening before when he had picked up Danielle and Robert from her new house in Lasswade.

  She believed also that hatred could only be destructive. She had seen enough of it in her career, and looking at the file that sat on top of the small stack of live investigations on her desk, her conviction was reinforced.

  When she had applied to rejoin the police force, after her divorce and her move from Perth, she had expected to be accepted at her former rank but had assumed, more or less, that her first posting would be in uniform, somewhere, anywhere on the force’s extensive area. Her interview had been conducted by Mario McGuire, with a po-faced bloke from Human Resources sat alongside him, to keep the ACC serious and on message, she guessed.

  That had worked, until they reached the point of confirmation, and the HR bod had produced a list of available postings for a uniformed sergeant. The big guy had taken it from him, politely, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it into a waste basket, ten feet away. If he had missed, it might have spoiled the moment, but he hit it, dead centre.

  ‘With respect,’ he lied, ‘if Personnel thinks that I’m going to deprive CID of the services of a proven, experienced detective officer, it’s got it badly wrong. Karen, do you want to go back into CID?’

  Her reply had been automatic. ‘Absolutely, sir.’

  ‘Okay. I need somebody in the office at the West End. Becky Stallings is going off on maternity leave, Jack McGurk’s being bumped up to acting DI, and with young Sauce Haddock . . . you probably don’t know him . . . going down to Leith on promotion, I’m light on experience at detective sergeant level. If the chief constable approves, and I believe she will, are you up for it?’

  ‘Yes please. Can my shift pattern include weekends?’

  ‘Are you sure about that? The stuff can hit the rotor blades on Saturdays and Sundays in that division.’

  She had smiled at him. ‘Been there, and been splattered by that stuff; it would help with the kids, that’s why I ask.’