Hour Of Darkness (8 page)

Fourteen

‘It’s confirmed?’ Sammy Pye said, in anticipation, with his mobile pressed against his ear.

‘Yes,’ Karen Neville told him. ‘My missing person’s become your homicide, and you’re the senior investigating officer, by order of Detective Superintendent Mackenzie,’

‘So he told me yesterday. There’s an about-face for you. I’d never heard someone grit his teeth over the phone, but I’ll swear he did. I wonder what came over him.’

‘Are you kidding? I think we could both come up with the right answer for that one. Dark curly hair, become a dad recently?’

Pye smiled. ‘Probably. Here, you don’t have a problem with me being SIO do you, Karen?’

‘Hell no. You inspector, me sergeant. Besides, this might turn out to be an overtime job and I’m not in a position to do much of that, as you know. It’s much better that you lead and I give you what help I can, with Jack McGurk’s approval, of course. He is my boss, after all.’

‘That’s fair enough; I’ll square anything I need from you with him. What do you know, that I need to?’

‘I was in the middle of typing up a summary when Forensic Services called to confirm that the blood in the flat came from Cramond Island woman, now known to be Isabella Spreckley or Watson.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ the DI said, his tone cautious. ‘Do we really know for sure that it’s her?’

‘One hundred per cent? We don’t, not without a familial DNA match, and we’ve got no way of getting one. However,’ she paused, and he could hear satisfaction in her voice, ‘I have rousted out her medical records from the NHS. They tell me that she had her appendix out when she was forty-two, and that she had an abdominal aortic aneurysm, a condition that’s one-third less common in women than men. It was being monitored by the vascular department at the Royal Infirmary. The partial remains in the morgue tick both those boxes. Do you have any reasonable doubt left?’

‘No,’ he conceded, ‘I’m convinced. What’s your summary going to say?’

‘That we’ve interviewed all the neighbours on that stair. It seems that Miss Spreckley kept herself very much to herself. The only one who was on anything more than nodding terms was Mrs McConnochie, who lived below. If you met her you’d think it would be impossible to keep secrets from her, but Miss Spreckley managed, mostly. For example, she told the old dear she had a sister, and a niece, even though she hasn’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Tarvil checked this morning with the Registrar General’s office.’

‘On a Sunday?’

‘He’s got a cousin works there. He went in and ran a trace for him. Miss Spreckley had two brothers, but no sisters. She was visited, though, Mrs McConnachie could tell us that much.’

‘But not by whom? Could she tell you that?’

‘It was a young woman with a kid, she said. She called the victim “Auntie Bella” when Mrs M opened the street door for her and asked her who she wanted. There was a man too; he arrived later and he was definitely not to her taste. “Rough looking,” she said.’

‘Is that as detailed as she could get?’

‘I didn’t press her. Now we know for sure what we’re dealing with I can go back and try to get better descriptions of them both.’

‘You could get Tarvil to do it,’ Pye suggested.

‘I don’t think she’d be too comfortable with DC Singh. It’s got nothing to do with race,’ Karen explained. ‘She’s of a certain age, and I think she feels more comfortable with a woman than a man.’

‘Understood. You’ve just described Ruth’s granny.’

His wife frowned at him; they had been in the kitchen when his mobile had rung. ‘What’s my granny been up to?’ she murmured.

‘She got caught fire-bombing the mosque.’

‘Sammy!’

‘Joking, joking,’ he laughed. ‘It was only shoplifting.’

‘Sammy!’

‘It’s okay; she did a runner and they never caught her. Sorry, Karen,’ he said, into the mobile. ‘My wife’s very protective of the old biddy. As for your lady,’ he continued, ‘there’s something else she didn’t get out of Miss Spreckey, nor have you from her records. She didn’t have those kids out of wedlock. She was married and her husband’s name was Watson.’

‘How do you know that?’ Neville asked, puzzled.

‘ACC McGuire told me.’

‘He did? That explains a lot. He phoned me when I was at the scene yesterday, after Mr Mackenzie had briefed him. When I told them there was a picture on her mantelpiece, he asked me to copy it and send it to him. Are you saying he knew her?’

‘Not just him alone; Bob Skinner knew her as well, from quite a way back. Your ex did too, so big Mario said.’

‘Did he? Andy’s never mentioned anybody of that name that I recall . . . either Spreckley or Watson.’

‘Like I said, it was a while ago. Before our time on the force.’

‘Then she must have been pretty special if they all still remember her.’

‘She was part of a special family, from what the boss said. But he didn’t volunteer anything. He said he’d brief me once the match was made. Were there any links to her past in the flat?’

‘Sammy,’ she replied, ‘there were hardly any links to her present. She kept official correspondence, pension, NHS stuff, but that was all. No,’ she said, contradicting herself immediately, ‘she did keep some Christmas cards. There were only three of them. One was signed “Susie”; that’s all, just “Susie”. Another was signed simply “Vicky, Patrick and baby Susan”, and the third said “Merry Christmas, Lennie”. Whoever he is, he’s really extravagant with words by comparison with the rest.’

‘There were no envelopes, I suppose.’

‘No, sorry.’

‘Are the cards bagged?’

‘Of course, but not dusted for prints, if that’s what you were going to ask next.’

‘It was,’ Pye conceded. ‘I’ll get moving on that. Maybe they’ll tell us who these people are. Every TV cop show hammers home to you at some point that nine times out of ten the victim knows the killer, but it’s bloody true in the real world as well.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not surprised you’re fine with me being SIO. So far we’ve got a real information vacuum; I’ll need to shake some loose, if I can. Maybe the ACC will have some thoughts for me. You got anything else?’

‘Only another knowledge gap, I’m afraid. Isabella was living rent-free, all bills paid, but I still don’t know who her benefactor was.’

‘Could it have been this mysterious non-sister, “Susie”, if that was her that sent the Christmas card?’

‘Possibly, but if we assume that Vicky’s the so-called niece and her daughter, surely she’d have known which flat it was that her mother owned. I’ll find out tomorrow, though. I have an appointment with the law firm that looks after it. They’ll be able to tell me straight away.’

‘Let’s hope so, otherwise Mario McGuire’s done me no favours by putting me in charge of this thing. It’s got high profile written all over it. Great if you get a result. A ticket back to uniform if you don’t.’

Fifteen

I’d taken a bit of a punt on the Barcelona hotel, but it paid off. Placa Reial is one of the city’s night-time highlights and our room overlooked it. As a bonus, the chef turned out to be Michelin class. We ate there on the Saturday night, had a couple of schnapps in the square outside, then slept like logs until the sun woke us next morning, in time for a leisurely breakfast and a day spent on the tourist trail. It ended with a visit to Camp Nou, the great amphitheatre that’s home to FC Barcelona. I’d neglected to tell Sarah that there was an early evening match on, but she took the news pretty well.

We found a taxi outside the ground more easily than I’d anticipated, and didn’t get caught up in the post-match traffic, so we made it back to the hotel in good time. I’d have been happy to give the chef another turn, had Sarah not seen a restaurant called Los Caracoles on a television food show. When she discovered that it was two minutes’ walk from our hotel and stayed open late, there was no holding her.

We even enjoyed the flight home next day, an anonymous couple on the world’s most controversial airline, if not its favourite. We’d gone budget for three reasons; the cost (once a Scot always a Scot), the fact that it was a direct flight and the greater chance that nobody would know us.

We could have gone through Heathrow or City, but I can’t board a flight to London these days without being hailed by someone or other, even people I barely know. With my marriage to Aileen having ended in a blaze of newspaper headlines, I wasn’t keen to be spotted on the shuttle with my other ex-wife, in case that found its way into the tabloids as well.

It wasn’t until mid-afternoon, when we were in an Edinburgh taxi, en route for Sarah’s place where I’d left my car, that I switched on my mobile. I’d called the office in Glasgow first thing in the morning, to let my exec know that I’d be out of touch during the day, and so I was expecting most of the voicemail calls that were there when I checked. Pure tedium, nearly all of them, issues that could have been dealt with further down the chain of command, but that’s what happens when you’re new in post as a chief constable: your subordinates don’t know you quite well enough to take a chance.

I’d barely finished sighing over the complex issue of the most efficient management of the available traffic cars in Argyll and Clyde, when the one I wasn’t expecting popped up.

I confess that I was having a hard time dealing with the emotional wrench of leaving Edinburgh. I had thought everything through before accepting the Strathclyde job, and I’d been satisfied that I was doing the right thing. The time had come to move on, I’d persuaded myself, to give my colleagues, protégés and friends the opportunity to get one more promotion on their dockets before the Scottish police forces were merged into one, so that they would be as well placed as possible in the shake-up that would follow.

I’d done what I’d been sure was the right thing, but that didn’t stop me being desperately homesick every time I walked through the door of HQ in Glasgow, missing my old office in one of the capital city’s ugliest buildings, missing the streets I’d stalked for so many years, missing everyone, up to and including Maisie, the waitress in the senior officers’ dining room, who’d served Sarah and me lunch on the day that we’d had the heart-to-heart that blew away the smoke that had been obscuring my view of her and led, very shortly afterwards, to us getting back together.

With all that emotional baggage, my stomach flipped a little when I heard Mario McGuire say, in his most serious professional tone, ‘Bob, can you call me, soon as possible. A name’s come up in what’s now officially the Bella Watson homicide investigation, and before I let anyone pursue it, I need to talk to you.’

Sixteen

Mario McGuire, who had a dislike of the unexpected that he tried to keep to himself, looked up with a flash of annoyance at the sound of knuckles rapping on his door. If it had been the chief constable, he would have been fine about it, but hers was a much lighter touch, and in any event she would probably have walked straight in.

He frowned as he pressed the button that activated the green light in the corridor, staring at the door as it opened . . . and Bob Skinner stepped into the office, dressed as informally as the ACC had ever seen him, in light cotton cargo trousers and an FC Barcelona top.

He was grinning. ‘It feels strange to see you in my old room,’ he said. ‘In a nice way, though,’ he added. ‘Sorry if I’m interrupting a private moment, chum, but your new secretary said there was nobody with you.’

‘No worries, boss.’ McGuire chuckled. ‘Listen to me with the “boss”: force of habit. Actually, I was dozing, to tell you the truth.’

‘I know that, otherwise you’d have spotted me coming up the drive. That’s why I always liked this room, you can see all the comings and goings from that window. How are Paula and wee Eamon, by the way? I take it he’s the reason you’re nodding off on the job.’

‘You take it right. He’s turning night into day. But I don’t care. I never thought I’d be a dad.’

‘Don’t miss a moment. I never thought I’d get a second chance, after Myra died. It makes your life complete.’

‘You don’t need to tell me that,’ McGuire assured him, ‘or Paula either. She’s really funny, you know. She’s got a wardrobe full of designer clothes and now her boobs are so big she doesn’t see herself getting into any of them ever again. Does she care? Not a bit of it. She slops about in my T-shirts and looks great in them.’

‘They’ll fit her again. Sarah was the same, both times, but she was back to her normal cup size pretty soon after she stopped feeding.’ He laughed. ‘Hey, that’s a hell of a subject for two chief police officers, is it not?’

‘True,’ the ACC agreed. ‘Hey,’ he exclaimed, suddenly, ‘when I called you on Saturday: you and Sarah, in Spain? Bob, if you don’t mind me asking, what the hell’s going on?’

Skinner shot him a quick, self-conscious, sideways look, and a small almost shy smile. ‘We are,’ he replied. ‘Sarah and me. It’s early days yet and we’re keeping our own houses, but yeah, we’re back together, sort of. We’re keeping our heads down, obviously, but we’re both pretty happy about it, and needless to say, so are the kids.’

‘How about the big kid?’

‘Alex? She’s good with it too. She’s in much the same sort of relationship herself with Andy, for now at least, until she finally decides to make me a grandfather . . . although I suspect that one of my boys might beat her to it, and Mark’s only just starting high school.’

He stretched some residual stiffness from the flight out of his back, then dropped into a chair that faced across the ACC’s desk. ‘I got your message. You sounded very businesslike so I thought I’d better come and see you rather than do it over the phone. Sorry about the gear,’ he grinned and raised his right foot to display a tan moccasin but no sock. ‘I’m hot off the plane.’

‘You’re lucky it’s warm here today. It was chilly for most of last week.’

‘The weather hasn’t been holding you back, from the sound of your message. So that definitely was old Bella that got washed up, was it?’

McGuire nodded, in confirmation. ‘Most of her; there’s not a chance of us ever finding the rest.’

‘And you know that she was killed in her house?’

‘Her flat, yes, in Caledonian Crescent.’

‘She moved up in the world then,’ Skinner observed, ‘from that fucking awful street she lived in. You know, Mario, for years I had this mad idea. I was going to advertise mystery tours for Festival visitors, fill up buses, then drive them round some of our worst housing schemes, to show them the conditions that the city council was prepared to tolerate.’

His friend laughed. ‘Nice idea, but it would have been a crap career move. Have you always been a closet leftie?’ he asked.

‘I’ve never hidden it. I was married to a Labour politician, wasn’t I?’

‘True . . . but not for long. Anyway, Bella had no choice but to move up. They demolished her street twelve years ago, and there was no “down” from there. We’re not sure where she lived in the period after that, before she moved into Caley Crescent.’

‘I can’t see that mattering,’ Skinner said. ‘How’s the investigation going?’

The other man frowned. ‘At this moment, we’ve got no obvious suspects,’ he admitted. ‘In fact we know very little about the woman’s life in the years since we investigated her son Marlon’s murder. It’s a gap that I’d like to fill.’

‘Why are you talking to me about it? I know that she worked for Tony Manson after that but she was always under the radar as far as we were concerned. I can’t help you there.’

‘Maybe not, but you know a man who can.’

‘I do? How come.’

‘Bella didn’t own the flat she lived in,’ McGuire said, ‘but she didn’t pay rent on it either. In fact, she didn’t pay anything. The council tax, gas, the electric, phone, broadband and cable telly were all taken care of. She wasn’t short of cash either; as well as her state pension, she had six hundred quid paid into her bank account every month, not taxable income, but an allowance.

‘We only found out this morning who her benefactor was, when Karen Neville spoke to a partner in the law firm that manages the property. It’s owned by a company called Dominic Jackson Investments, and they cover all the costs and forward Bella’s money too.’

‘Dominic Jackson,’ Skinner repeated.

‘That’s right. The name was news to me at first, but it’s familiar to you, yes?’

‘Of course it is. Dominic Jackson doesn’t exist; the name’s an alias, set up a long time ago by Tony Manson as an alternative identity for his informally adopted heir, someone you and I both met in extreme circumstances: Lennie Plenderleith.’

‘That’s right; the team found that out this morning. Are you surprised that Lennie’s been looking after the old bat?’

‘Now you tell me, I’m not a bit surprised. You know as well as I do that Bella didn’t just work for Tony Manson. With that history, I can see that Lennie should have looked after her.’

‘Do you think he might have got fed up with it?’ the ACC asked, quietly.

‘And had her bumped off?’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘Not a fucking chance. You’re not serious about that, are you? Or do I detect David Mackenzie’s steely mind behind the theory?’

‘Hell no! Anyway, Mackenzie’s warned off; he tried to grab the glory when the body was found, and I had to point out to him a bit forcefully that’s not his role. I think he’s in the huff. He missed his Monday meeting with Mary Chambers, and I haven’t seen him since. But no, I’m not really serious about Lennie being involved, just bouncing the thought off you, that’s all.’

‘Who are you sending to interview him? Luke Skywalker?’

McGuire chuckled, softly. ‘You know his nickname too? Sammy’s the obvious choice, only . . .’ He paused in mid-sentence. ‘He doesn’t know Lennie at all; he was just a plod out in East Lothian when he was put away. The truth is, Bob, I was wondering whether you could find some time to brief him on Plenderleith’s background, how best to approach him and so on. I know that you’ve kept in touch with him since he’s been inside, so I’m sure Sammy would appreciate any guidance you could give him.’

‘I’m sure he would,’ Skinner agreed, ‘given the level of young Pye’s ambition, but even if he walked in there with a necklace made out of my pearls of wisdom, in his mind he’d still be a cop interviewing a lifer looking for info on a victim’s background. He might also be less ready than us to dismiss him as a suspect.

‘Lennie’s a very clever guy. He’s been studying since he was put away and now he’s got degrees and a doctorate in criminal psychology. I’m sure he’d give Pye all the facts he knows, but he might give me more than that.

‘You’re right, Mario. I have visited him on the inside, more often than you’d suppose. I’ve always done it on the quiet, to ensure that no other cons ever knew of our meetings. Last thing I wanted was to get him a reputation as a grass.’

‘Yes,’ McGuire mused. ‘I can see how that might put him at risk.’

His former chief smiled. ‘I was more concerned about the safety of anyone daft enough to have a go at him. He’s been a model prisoner and I’d hate to see a blemish on his record, even if he didn’t go looking for it.’

‘Are you saying that you’ll talk to him yourself if we want?’

‘I’m probably insisting on it. It’s my call anyway. The service isn’t unified yet, Mario. Lennie’s in HMP Kilmarnock, and you’re required to inform me if you want to send a man into my patch. You’ve done that and I’m saying no, that I’ll take care of it.’

‘You’ll go and see him? Have you got time for that, Bob? I know how busy you are now.’

‘It won’t be a problem. I don’t need to go all the way to Kilmarnock. He can come and visit me.’