Hour Of Darkness (32 page)

Sixty-Four

‘I can’t get my head round this,’ Sammy Pye said.

‘I have trouble myself,’ Karen Neville admitted, ‘but it’s true nonetheless. I called Jack McGurk and asked him if he knew about it. He didn’t but he rang me back half an hour later, after he’d spoken to DI Stallings . . . I don’t know her, she came in after I’d gone to Perth with Andy, but I’m told she’s Ray Wilding’s other half . . . and managed to get something out of her, on a colleague-to-colleague basis.’

‘These are heavy grapes, even for the force vine.’

‘Tasty metaphor, Sam,’ she acknowledged. ‘It seems that Ray’s been coordinating a national search for the Mackenzies since Monday, after they both disappeared. The fear was that he’d done her in, not the other way around, but from what Ray said, she turned up safe and sound this morning, claiming no knowledge of where her husband was.

‘He was called in by the chief to talk to her, but not at home, in his nick. Even then, no alarm bells were ringing with him. But when he got to Gayfield, Bob Skinner turned up and more or less took over the interview. Next thing Ray knew, he was being told to arrest her on suspicion of murder, and turn the thing over to Mary Chambers and the ACC.’

‘But only suspicion of murder?’

‘At that point yes, but Stallings . . . what’s her first name?’

‘Rebecca . . . Becky.’

‘Right. She told Jack that Ray had just been sent by Maggie Steele to an address in Lanarkshire, where a second, related, arrest had been made by Strathclyde.’

‘Does Becky know who it is?’

‘No, Ray wasn’t told. But he did say that the chief sounded very tense indeed.’

‘Jeez,’ the DI whistled. ‘You were right. This is going to be top of the news cycle when it breaks; we’ll get blown out of sight.’

‘Don’t get too down about it. If the Spanish can’t trace this Mia woman, that might be a good thing.’

‘Yes, but even if they do, Karen, it’s her mother’s death that we’re investigating. I know, if what Alafair told you is true, there’s no love lost between them, but even so, her mother . . .’

‘Is that so different from Cheryl Mackenzie murdering her husband?’ She frowned. ‘We’ve been friends for a long time, so I can say this to you. I’d say it to Andy as well, for it’s true of him too . . . of all of you really. You guys, in your heart of hearts, you want to be Bob Skinner, but he is what he is because there’s no evil beyond his comprehension, nothing so dark that he can’t see its detail.’

‘I don’t know if I fancy that,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe I’ll settle for being Sammy Pye.’

‘That would be a good choice,’ she told him. ‘When you go to the other place, there’s no way back.’

‘Hey,’ Sammy exclaimed, ‘that has the sound of personal experience about it.’

‘Probably, but I don’t want to talk about it. All I’m saying is that when it comes to homicide, nothing’s off limits.’

‘Okay but there’s this too. Everything has to be proved in court, however obvious it may be to the likes of us.’

‘That’s true,’ she agreed, ‘and it’s what I really meant about Mia not being traced being a good thing. We can put her van in Caledonian Crescent at the time of Bella’s death, but we can’t put her in it. Who knows, we might find her DNA in the flat, eventually, but as we’ve just discovered with Hastie McGrew, and as you said yourself a few minutes ago, that won’t prove anything, other than that she went to see her mother.’

Pye yawned. ‘And with that discouraging word,’ he pushed himself to his feet, ‘I’m out of here.’

The DS checked her watch. ‘Me too, in half an hour,’ she said, ‘but I might just go and investigate a break-in in Costa Coffee that I thought had been reported.’

‘Got big plans for tonight?’

She shot him a raised eyebrow glance. ‘Big plans and I don’t go together. I’ve forsworn them, for ever.’

‘Oh dear,’ he chuckled, ‘sorry I asked.’

‘Not your fault. Just when I thought it was time to go back in the water, I found it was too salty for my taste.’

‘I won’t even try to understand that. There are always dating sites you could try.’

‘Online poker, maybe. Online dating, never.’

Pye turned towards the door of his office, to find that it was open and that Jackie Wright was standing there.

‘I’ve just had a call from the Fife police,’ she began. ‘Remember we put out an appeal for any sightings of a wooden blanket chest along the coast? There was one found a few days ago, washed up on the beach at Kinghorn.

‘It’s in the local nick; they weren’t sure what to do with it. They were going to give it to a local antique dealer. They said if we want it, it’s ours, but we’ll have to collect it.’

The DI looked at the DS, and smiled. ‘That could be your evening taken care of,’ he said.

Sixty-Five

Trepidation is one of those words that has never really figured in my vocabulary, nor even in my adult life.

If I’m honest, it was a big part of my childhood, although I couldn’t have put that name to it at the time. It was what I felt whenever my bedroom door opened at home. If my mother came into the room, or less frequently, my dad, that was all right. If it was my brother, Michael, that agitation turned into fear, or even terror, depending simply on the expression on his face.

It has occurred to me on occasion that maybe I should have sought him out while I had the chance, not to give him some more of his own back, but to thank him. Reason being, having survived him, I’ve never really been afraid of anything else that might happen to me.

More than that, he left me with an acceptance of some of the things I’ve encountered as a police officer that few other cops have. The notion, ‘surely he couldn’t have done that to another human being’, has never held me back. Thanks, brother.

Yet I might have gone the other way. It was clear to me that David Mackenzie hadn’t survived his abuse. I understood the boy who had thrown that superhot oil over his uncle. Part of me even admired him. He did something about his awful treatment; I didn’t.

My revenge could have been a lot simpler than his. I could have told my father, but I was too scared by Michael’s promise of the consequences, specifically, the amputation of my thumbs with garden shears, ever to do that. Instead I bore it and waited for my growth, turning myself gradually into someone far more formidable than he had ever been, making myself the one to be feared.

I went on to become, I reckon, a properly functioning adult. I learned how to love, rather than despise. I don’t believe that David Mackenzie ever did the same. He’s been accused by many of being in love with himself, but when I talked to Lennie about him, afterwards, he was convinced that the opposite was true, and that ultimately the man had been consumed by self-loathing.

But I wasn’t thinking of David as I dialled Mia’s number, from a lay-by on the outskirts of Edinburgh. As those bedroom door butterflies returned to my stomach, I was thinking of Michael.

‘Hello, Bob,’ she said, before I had a chance to utter a word.

‘Hello, Mia,’ I replied. ‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Nobody else has this number. It’s a throwaway, bought with cash and a false identity.’

I surprised myself by laughing. ‘How many have you got, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Three. I still have the paper version of my Mia Watson UK driving licence, and a Tunisian passport in another name, the one I showed when I bought the phone. The Spanish need an ID for all phones these days. Officially, though, I’m known as Maria Centelleos. But I suspect you know that by now.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I told her truthfully. ‘I haven’t been part of the investigation into your mother’s murder. I know none of the details, none at all, but I knew your name had come up. You should contact the police in Edinburgh, not me. I’m not part of that force now.’

‘I know you’re not,’ she told me. ‘I know most of what there is to know about you, Bob. You have a very high profile on the internet; key in “Robert Morgan Skinner” and all sorts of stuff comes out.

‘For a start, your wives, including the most recent one dropping her knickers for that actor Joey Morroco. Then there’s Alex’s progress . . . I thought that kid would go far; she could play you like a Stradivarius. Stories about your big cases, your rise to the top, to the very top.’ She paused, for breath I thought, but no, for effect. ‘Which I could have halted with one phone call, at any time.’

Trepidation? Yes, it was back well and truly, but I cuffed it round the ear and sent it scurrying.

‘You reckon? How would that work out?’ I asked.

‘It would work out because the only thing that you can’t Google is you and me, and what happened between us when you were investigating my brother’s killing.’

‘One night, lady, that was all. One night of admittedly pretty good sex, and then you brushed me off in the morning.’

‘I didn’t brush you off,’ she claimed indignantly. ‘You went psycho on me when you woke up.’

‘I had a bad dream, Mia,’ I protested, suddenly aware that we were having an argument that had been postponed from one century into the next. ‘I’d been at a crime scene in Newcastle the night before,’ I went on, agitated by the memory. ‘Christ, I’d seen a guy with his tripes out on his own kitchen table! Of course I was fucking jumpy!’

‘It wasn’t just that,’ she said. ‘All your dreams weren’t bad. You kept calling me “Alison” when you were talking in your sleep.’

If I’d been standing, that might have cut the feet from under me, but she wasn’t to know that.

‘Are you sure it wasn’t “Myra”?’ I snapped. ‘Or maybe “Madonna”. I fancied her at one point. Either way, this is not “career ending with one phone call” kind of stuff.’

‘Maybe not, but tipping me off that I’d become a suspect in my brother’s murder and warning me to get out of town, that might cut some ice.’ She had a point there, I must concede . . . but it wasn’t conclusive.

‘The way I read the press,’ she continued, ‘that First Minister guy doesn’t like you much.’

‘Then read again. Clive Graham and I get on okay.’

‘If you do, it’s out of necessity on his part. This new single force he’s setting up: with you in the top job you’d be as powerful as him. No politician wants that. Yes, he’d be very interested in what I have to say.’

‘Then go ahead,’ I challenged.

‘No, because there’s more than that, something that you could not possibly survive professionally. You help me and it will stay a secret. I’ll tell you what it is, but it has to be face to face.’

Her intensity got to me. What the hell, there would be no harm done, and maybe even a little good.

‘Suppose I agree to meet you. Where? Starbuck’s in George Street. The Sheraton Hotel lobby, where we met once? Your old place in Davidson’s Mains, so we can go over old times?’

‘Nowhere as convenient for you, but not completely inconvenient. Your favourite family restaurant, you called it, so you’ll know the place I mean. I’ll meet you there.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow. Eight thirty, dinner. You’re paying; I got the lunch in the Sheraton, remember.’

‘You’re kidding me,’ I gasped. ‘It’s in another country.’

‘I’m not kidding in the slightest. I’ve checked, and you can do it. Hell, you’re Bob Skinner, you can do anything.’ She gave a small laugh and then her voice seemed to be younger, that of the Mia I’d known. ‘Apart from remembering the name of the woman you’re sleeping with, that is.’

Sixty-Six

Maggie Steele believed that she would not have survived as a person, far less a chief police officer, without her daughter. She had been in the middle of her pregnancy when she had been hit by two piledrivers, the sudden and unexpected death of her husband Stevie, and her own cancer diagnosis.

At one point she had been given a likely choice between her own life and that of her child, but she had delayed the surgery until Stephanie Rose Steele had been safely delivered, and they had both pulled through, mother and daughter together.

It had been a fecund couple of years in her force, she had observed one evening to her sister, who lived with her and did much of the daytime child caring. ‘First Stevie and me, then Mario and Paula; now Ray Wilding’s gone and got Becky Stallings up the duff.’

Bet had reacted with a smile ‘That’s nice, though, isn’t it? That you all have something at home to take your mind off your jobs, especially the detectives.’

‘That’s easy for you to say, sis, but you don’t have to manage a team around maternity and paternity leave. Bloody nightmare!’

‘You set the example,’ Bet had pointed out.

‘Maybe, but I never thought then that I’d wind up as chief. Mind you, there were lots of things I never thought.’

Stephanie was playing happily at her feet as she faced Mario McGuire across her round kitchen table, the one that Stevie had built in when he had moved into the place, before they had been as much as a lustful gleam in each other’s eye. Her mug of green tea was warm within the circle of her hands. She had asked Mario to phone her after the interview of Cheryl Mackenzie was over, but he had called on her in person.

‘Were there any glitches at all?’ she asked.

‘No. She gave us it all without any pressure. They had a fight, over the way he’d reacted to an argument he and I had, and he hit her. He went crazy, she said. She thought he was insane, and maybe he was.

‘However, she may not be too attached to reality herself, because she’s decided it was a mercy killing. She talked us all the way through it, repeating for the tape all of the stuff that Bob uncovered in the first interview.’

‘Her lawyer was happy?’

‘As happy as you can be when your client’s confessing to murder, but yes; he didn’t raise any objections.’

‘I’m glad about that, for I was worried,’ Maggie confessed. ‘I thought Bob might have gone too far with her earlier.’

‘Me too,’ Mario murmured, ‘and that’s interesting. In all the years we worked under Bob, you and I never questioned the way he did things, never doubted his judgement. Yet now, even though he’s barely out the door, here we are second-guessing him.’

‘Welcome to command rank,’ she told him. ‘We are him, now. Back then he was responsible for everybody else’s mistakes, along with his own. Now we’re in that position, carrying the can for everything that’s done in our territory, by everyone . . . including him when he goes on one of his solo missions.’

McGuire laughed. ‘He’ll never stop doing that; doesn’t matter which office he’s in. That reminds me, is everything done and dusted on his patch?’

‘Yes, they’ve begun recovering Mackenzie’s body, and Max Allan’s been taken into custody. He’s being held in Pitt Street over the weekend, for court on Monday.’

‘Will they be tried jointly or separately, him and Cheryl? What do you think?’

‘That,’ Maggie said, ‘is the Lord Advocate’s problem, not mine or Bob’s. I’d guess they’ll be in court together, but the way things are just now, a trial looks unlikely. Max has a separate charge to answer, though, if the fiscal in Glasgow decides to go ahead with it.’

‘Poor old bastard. He’ll spend the first part of his retirement under lock and key.’

‘Maybe not,’ she suggested. ‘He wasn’t a party to the killing, only the concealment, and from what Bob said, Cheryl was like a daughter to him. With a good advocate, and a sympathetic judge, maybe one of the ladies on the Bench, he could get a suspended sentence.’

‘Yes, sure.’ Mario’s voice was smeared with sarcasm. ‘And maybe I’ll apply for the top job in Police Scotland and you’ll all be working for me in a few weeks. There’s no chance of any of that happening. He was a cop, Mags. I can’t think of a single judge who’d brave the media storm that not jailing him would cause.’

She was about to concede his point when she noticed Stephanie’s face going red, and rushed to pick her up. ‘Steph,’ she cried out, ‘you’re supposed to tell me when you need to poo. Get used to this, Mario, it’s coming your way.’

‘News for you, it’s here already.’

As he spoke, the door chime sounded. ‘Get that, please,’ Maggie asked. ‘I’ve no idea who it might be.’

‘Sure.’ He went down the few steps from the hall, wondering what casual caller would choose an early Saturday evening, and threw the door open.

A red-haired man stood on the threshold, confusion stamped on his face.

‘Arthur?’ McGuire exclaimed.

‘Mario?’ Dorward countered.

‘I’m here on business,’ the ACC said quickly, ‘before you get any ideas.’

‘Me too, before you do. But it’s maybe as well you are.’

‘You’d better come in, then. Maggie’s attending to some paperwork, you might say.’

He led the way up and across to the sitting room. ‘It’s Arthur Dorward,’ he called, ‘and I don’t think he’s come to sell you tickets for the Forensic Service dance.’

‘Minute,’ a voice replied from the nursery.

One stretched into two before Maggie appeared, carrying her refreshed child on her hip. ‘Mr Dorward,’ she said, ‘to what do we owe?’ Then she looked at his expression and her smile vanished.

‘Something’s come up in our analysis of the samples from one forty-two Caledonian Crescent,’ he began. ‘You’ll recall we found a trace of grandfamilial DNA, and established that it wasn’t from the lad you thought it was. Well, to try to identify it more clearly, we followed standard practice and ran it through the entire male database looking for a match.’

He stopped, and took a brown manila envelope from under his arm. ‘Most things I do over the phone. Some I send by email. But this one, this has to be done in person; it’s for your eyes only, and it’s bloody dynamite.’