Deadlock Read online

  ‘What will the golf club committee have to say about that?’ she murmured.

  ‘Mr Stevens was a past captain, so they’ll probably allow it.’

  ‘Jesus, these Gullane members!’ Mullen sighed. ‘It would never happen at Newbattle, where I play. Okay,’ she declared, ‘you can go ahead with the post-mortem. If it turns up anything suspicious, we’ll even pay for it.’

  Thirteen

  Skinner suspected that Mrs Alexander would have been less than pleased to hear her home described as a tenement flat, but that was the phrase that his Lanarkshire upbringing brought to mind as he opened the green door on the Main Street and stepped into the stairway that in his home town would have been called a close.

  Many of his school mates in Motherwell had lived in closes. In the more deprived areas of Glasgow, that might have carried a certain social stigma. He frowned suddenly as he remembered a man he had met in his twenties, a politician who had been brought up in the Gorbals between the wars, the days before antibiotics when tuberculosis was rife. ‘Son,’ he had sighed, ‘there was not a close where the undertaker was a stranger.’ TB was known in Lanarkshire too . . . one of Skinner’s maternal uncles had spent a year, as a young man, in a sanatorium in Aberdeenshire . . . but his town was made prosperous by its steelworks, and its closes were occupied by healthy families whose children went to school well clothed and well fed.

  The steps that led up to the first floor flat were stone. They were made more secure by adhesive non-slip rubber tiles, but the handrails were too far apart for a vulnerable person to hold both of them. He understood why Mrs Alexander found them perilous.

  There were two doors on the landing. He guessed left, peered at the nameplate and went to the other, pressing a bell that sounded so shrilly that he thought it might have stopped a passing bus. It took the old lady some time to answer; when she did, he recognised her as someone he had seen around the village for years, without ever learning her name. He felt a flush of guilt asking himself, ‘Am I a stranger in my own home town?’

  ‘Sir Robert.’ As she greeted him, Mrs Alexander looked him up and down, not without difficulty as her spine was severely curved, by ankylosing spondylitis, he guessed, remembering a long-dead cousin of his father. ‘A pleasure to meet you. I’d have known you from your photo in the paper, even though you’re wearing your mask. It’s so good of you to help out in this way. Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?’

  ‘That would be nice,’ he replied, ‘but maybe not right now.’ He handed her the newspapers that he had picked up in the Co-op. ‘No Daily Star, I’m afraid. The Sunday edition sells out fast.’

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘You got Hello.’ From a table beside the door, she picked up a bank card and a folded sheet of paper. ‘The PIN number is on there,’ she told him, ‘along with my shopping list. It says sausages, but they have to be best beef, not pork, and no more than two of them. It says yoghurt too, but only Tesco own brand. Toilet rolls too, but definitely not Tesco own brand, only Andrex. Is that all right? If you draw out a hundred and fifty pounds from the machine, that should cover it all and leave me enough for my daily needs for a while.’

  ‘That’s all perfectly fine, Mrs Alexander, and I’m sure it’ll be enough. Is your wine choice on there too?’ he asked.

  ‘La Ina sherry, if they have it. And perhaps a bottle of a nice German Riesling, if it’s not too dear.’

  ‘I’ll look out for that. I’ll go along for eight tomorrow morning. It shouldn’t take long, but it’ll depend on how busy the place is, with the social distancing procedures and everything. I must confess that my wife and I do most of our food shopping online these days.’

  She laughed, a tinkling sound. ‘That’s all right for you young folks. The internet’s far too modern for the likes of me.’

  As he stepped out on to the street, closing the door behind him, Skinner was still beaming behind his mask at his inclusion by Mrs Alexander among the ‘young folks’. The grin was wiped off his face as a cycle whizzed past him, so close that he withdrew his left foot in a reflex action. He noted, as the young rider pedalled furiously away, that he had flowing shoulder-length hair and wore a green puffer jacket. ‘Hey!’ he bellowed after him. ‘Not on the pavement!’ The youth held up his right hand, middle finger extended. That was a mistake, son, he thought.

  Scowling, Skinner slid into his car, a Tesla that Xavi Aislado had insisted he take as a company vehicle. ‘Every executive director in Spain and Italy has one, Bob. You must too. Besides, there’s a great tax deal in the UK on electric company cars.’ He had accepted, although his beloved Mercedes still sat in the garage.

  The offending cyclist had crossed the road and was passing the golf pro shop, his speed unabated, hair still streaming out behind him. The Tesla would have caught him in seconds, but he decided to let it go. Instead, he turned into Sandy Loan, meaning to head for home, only to have a change of mind. No reason to wait until tomorrow, he thought. I might as well do the shopping now.

  There was still traffic during lockdown, but much less than in normal times. Happily, very little of it was heading for Tesco. When he arrived there, he found that the car park was no more than a quarter full and that the queue was short. Before joining it, he drew out Mrs Alexander’s cash from the ATM. Looking at the PIN number he hazarded a guess that she had been born on the third of March, nineteen thirty-four.

  The old lady’s shopping list was short and simple. She had good taste in sherry, he thought, but she was welcome to the Riesling as far as he was concerned. There was room to spare in the trolley, and so he loaded on three bottles of a Spanish verdejo, Sarah’s favourite drinking white, and a box of eighteen Corona beers to replenish further the stock that Alex had topped up during his confinement. He paid for his purchases first, with a card, then packed Mrs Alexander’s provisions into a reusable bag. Her list used up just over forty-three pounds of her hundred and fifty.

  When he stepped out of the stairway entrance after completing his mission, he paused, glancing in either direction for speeding young cyclists, hoping that he would find one in particular. ‘Long hair, green jacket,’ he murmured, as a reminder to himself for the report he intended to make to Noele McClair. ‘If that had been Mrs Alexander stepping out of her doorway, it could have been fatal. An eighty-something-year journey isn’t going to end like that, not on my watch.’

  Fourteen

  ‘Do you think the gaffer will take the huff?’ Chief Constable Neil McIlhenney asked his friend and deputy.

  Mario McGuire grinned. ‘That’s an absolute certainty,’ he replied. ‘But what’s equally certain is that he’ll never let us know. Look, I’ve been there before with him, after Maggie took over as chief and I became her designated deputy. She went to him for advice at the beginning of her tenure. I was a bit miffed that she didn’t rely entirely on me, and I let it be known.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘As I recall he just fucking ignored me. Before long I realised that I was leaning on him just as heavily as Maggie was. It’s the old story; Bob taught us everything we know, but he didn’t teach us everything he knows. He didn’t have time.’

  ‘So you’re saying I was wrong to be so blunt with him?’ McIlhenney suggested.

  ‘Not at all. You have to make your presence felt, to stake out your territory. You were right to do that.’ McGuire frowned. ‘Not just to him,’ he murmured. ‘You were staking it out to me as well. I was happy to use Bob as a mentor for rising stars like Sauce Haddock and Lottie Mann. You take a different view on that. You’re the chief constable and that view needs to be seen to prevail.’

  ‘Even over you?’

  ‘Absolutely over me; especially over me. Look, Neil; look, sir, there are still a lot of people in this force who know about you and me, even though you were away for a few years. We’ve been best mates all through our careers, even though I was a rank above for s
ome of the time. Man, we were fucking legends for a while. But now you’re back from your wee sojourn in London and you’ve jumped over me on the ladder.’

  ‘That was your choice, by not applying for the chief constable job,’ McIlhenney pointed out.

  ‘Never. That choice wasn’t mine to make,’ McGuire countered. ‘You’re selling yourself short, mate. If I had gone for it . . . and that was something I never intended to do at any time, by the way . . . and we’d both had interviews, any selection board would have been crazy to pick me over you. I’m a detective, pure and simple, with the emphasis on the simple. I was a small-city cop who never thought about leaving there. You did; you went off to the Met, and you picked up experience that makes you much better qualified than me to be chief constable. Jesus, if Bob himself had applied for it . . . and there was nothing stopping him from doing that, even though he’d retired. I know he was lobbied . . . you’d have been a better choice than him. Bottom line, you are right to be doing things your way and to be seen to. If that includes moving me out of the criminal investigation reporting chain, so be it.’

  McIlhenney looked at his friend, and gasped. ‘Why would I do that?’ he asked. ‘As you’ve just said, you’re bugger all good at anything else. You’re a strength, so why make you a weakness? That’s the one thing that made me hesitate before telling Bob I didn’t want him to be a mentor any more. Am I cutting off my own nose by doing that? Will the officers he was mentoring suffer as a result?’

  ‘I don’t think so. We’re talking about Lottie Mann in Glasgow, Sauce Haddock in Edinburgh and Lesley Gray in Inverness. All three are now heading up major incident teams; they can stand on their own feet.’

  ‘The only one of them that I know at all is young Haddock.’

  ‘Gray’s the oldest,’ McGuire told him, ‘and she’s been in post longest. She’s very efficient, popular and she has a good clear-up rate. Currently her only open investigations are historic, going back well before her time. She’s probably plateaued, but that’s fine, she can stay there until retirement. Lottie Mann, now she’s a formidable officer, in her mid-thirties. She’s known adversity in her time, maybe even career-threatening. But she overcame it. Her ex-husband, Scott Mann, was a cop, but a bad lot with links to criminals. He got found out and did some time as a result. In the old days she’d have been tarred with his brush, and at the very least stuck behind a desk until she died of boredom, but Bob was her chief then and he stood by her. She had it tough for a while in her private life too. When he got out, Scott, the cheeky bastard, tried to get custody of their son, Jakey. His father’s minted and turned out to be as big a shit as his son. He set some very expensive lawyers on her. They might have pulled it off, but big Bob got Alex to represent her at the Children’s Hearing, and she wiped the floor with them all. Lottie’s in a new relationship now, with Dan Provan, who was her DS until he retired. He’s twenty years older than her, but they fit together like a semmit and drawers. Lottie’s ACC material in the future, no question.’

  ‘And young Sauce,’ McIlhenney asked, ‘how’s he shaping up?’

  ‘He’s a DCI even though he’s still short of thirty. Okay, his progress was accelerated by poor old Sammy Pye being hit by career-ending illness, but the boy was always on the fast track. Five years from now, Sauce’ll be ACC Harold Haddock, in the job Becky Stallings has now, overseeing criminal investigation and reporting to me, or my successor. After that, whenever you decide to retire, he’ll move into this office. That’s the future I predict for him.’

  ‘Thanks to big Bob’s mentoring? Is that what you’re saying?’

  The DCC shook his head. ‘Not at all, Sauce was a flier from the moment he walked in the door. Yes, the gaffer’s done a lot for his career development, but it was actually Maggie who spotted him first, when she was a divisional head and he was a still-wet plod.’

  ‘And yet he’s done all that in spite of him being married to Cameron McCullough’s namesake granddaughter? Isn’t it surprising that didn’t hold him back?’

  McGuire frowned. ‘Look, Neil, there is actually no proof that Grandpa McCullough has ever been involved in organised crime. Sure, there was lots of intelligence saying that he was, but the fact remains the only members of the family who were ever nailed for anything were his sister, Goldie, and his daughter, Inez, young Cameron’s mother. Further to that, since Goldie died, Dundee’s gone quiet.’

  ‘On the other hand, could McCullough have cleaned up his act because he’s now got a connection to Bob Skinner?’ McIlhenney asked. ‘With him being married to the mother of Bob’s boy, Ignacio?’

  ‘It could, I’ll grant you,’ McGuire admitted. ‘I know that Bob keeps McCullough at arm’s length, particularly since those murders a year back, Montell and Coats. You won’t know this, but there was a piece of evidence linking Inez to them. It was uncorroborated though, and the Crown Office decided not to pursue it. I don’t think Bob believes Grandpa had anything to do with the killings, but there’s something niggling at him that he’s never spelled out to me.’

  ‘Have you ever asked him about it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Should you?’ the chief constable asked quietly.

  ‘Not unless you give me a direct order.’ He smiled, grimly. ‘Even then, I’d probably tell you to do it your fucking self . . . sir.’

  Fifteen

  ‘It’s funny you should call right now,’ Noele McClair remarked. ‘I’ve just had your husband on the phone.’

  ‘Christ,’ Sarah Grace laughed. ‘Can he not keep his hands off? What did he want?’

  ‘He was being a concerned citizen,’ the inspector replied, ‘reporting a kid on a bike who nearly knocked him over on the pavement on Gullane Main Street. I said I’d advise patrol officers to keep an eye out for that sort of behaviour . . . not that there’s a hell of a lot we can do about it, in truth.’

  ‘Lucky kid. I wouldn’t put it past Bob to have clotheslined him clean out of the saddle. We’re not great cycling parents,’ she confessed. ‘Jazz has a bike, and Bob did go out with him when he was younger. He also sent him to a police safe-cycling school. Now he goes out on his own pretty much all the time, knowing what’s right and what’s wrong.’

  ‘I’m not at that stage yet with Harry. The West Fenton road is too narrow and twisty; I wouldn’t feel safe on it myself on a bike.’

  ‘We’ll need to start with Seonaid soon,’ Sarah said. ‘When I say “we”, of course I mean Bob. I’ll ask him if he’ll take Harry under his wing at the same time.’

  ‘If he would, that would be great. He wants a bike for his birthday and I’ve run out of reasons why he can’t have one.’

  ‘When you go shopping for it,’ she warned, ‘make sure it’s a good off-roader. That’s where they’ll be going most of the time. The cycle shop in North Berwick is very good.’

  ‘That’s where I was thinking of going.’ McClair paused. ‘Now, why are you calling? I’m assuming there’s a work reason.’

  ‘There is,’ she confirmed. ‘I’ve just completed the post-mortem examination of Mr Michael Stevens. As I expected, he died of a cerebrovascular accident, in other words a major brain haemorrhage. From the size of the bleed, he’d have known very little about it: a few seconds’ headache and that would have been that. There were no contributory factors that I could see. The brain showed significant volume loss, the kind that I’d associate with Alzheimer’s. That suggests the vascular dementia diagnosis could have been wrong. He had a knee replacement when he was seventy-five . . . funnily enough, I remember that, because Bob played him in a golf tie when he was recovering. He was allowed to use a buggy, but he wouldn’t let Bob get in it, even though it was raining. His excuse was that it would be giving Bob an unfair advantage. Bob was livid when he got back home, not least because he lost three and two.’

  The inspector laughed. ‘Just as well we’re not talking about a suspicious death,’ she
chuckled, ‘otherwise Bob would be a person of interest.’

  ‘He would indeed. I think he’s forgiven him by now, but you never know. Between you and me, Sir Robert is no stranger to a long-held grudge. Mind you, neither am I. That was one of the reasons we split up for a while.’ She paused. ‘But I digress,’ she continued. ‘Mr Stevens: his knee repair worked out fine, although he did have osteoarthritis, affecting his hands quite badly. Also, he had a minimally invasive aortic valve procedure, three years ago. Because of that he was on Dabigatran, a blood-thinning medication, and a mild dose of Ramipril to keep his blood pressure in check.’

  ‘I thought most people were on Warfarin as a blood thinner,’ McClair commented.

  ‘Most people are,’ Grace agreed, ‘mainly because it’s as cheap as chips, but it’s a bit of a bugger to monitor. If patients complain, GPs are able to prescribe alternatives. Mostly it would be Apixaban, though; Dabigatran isn’t common.’

  ‘Are there any known side-effects from it that could lead to sudden death?’

  ‘None that have been identified. If you stop taking it for an extended period you could be in trouble, but with carers involved that wasn’t going to happen to Mr Stevens.’

  ‘Covid? Could that have been a factor?’

  ‘According to his medical records, which I accessed, he had his first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine four weeks ago.’ She sighed. ‘Look Noele, I understand the concerns of the family. Coming to terms with the sudden death of a parent can be difficult. Coming to terms with the sudden deaths of both can threaten to overwhelm a person. Jesus, I know that from personal experience.’

  McClair was taken aback by her sudden vehemence. ‘What happened to yours?’ she asked.

  ‘They were murdered, sitting on their own front porch. I saw the police photos. The place was gothic, idyllic, but they were as far from the Grant Wood painting as you can get. So you see, I empathise with the daughter to an extent, but the vision she’s conjuring up, it’s fantasy, a wildest dream, no more than that. Her father died a natural death, peacefully, in the fullness of his years. She should be happy about it; you can tell her that from me.’