Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (33 page)

'But
through no fault of your own, you are way over your head in this. The Boss has
told me to rein you in on Scotland, very quietly. He told me to tell you that
you are still in charge of this investigation and, further, that he couldn't be
more impressed by the way you've handled it. Now you have to hold your horses
for a day or two.

'Lawrence
Scotland is missing, like I said. However there will be no man-hunt. There will
be the illusion of one, possibly, probably, but Lawrence Scotland will never be
found. The way it's looking now, your investigation will not conclude with the
conviction of Alec Smith's killer, but given what he was and did - far less
what we know about him now - that was never likely anyway.

'I
know this runs against all your training and your personal beliefs, but that's
the reality of it and you have to accept it.

'Listen,
Dan Pringle and John McGrigor will be going in the foreseeable future.
Whichever of those divisional CID commands you want is yours for the asking.
But do not shake this particular tree, otherwise what falls out might squash
someone very important. If that happened, and you were in any way responsible,
you wouldn't be forgiven.'

'What
do you mean?' She frowned, drawing back from him again.

'Mags,-
when he was in my job, Alec Smith did certain things that he shouldn't have.
No-one knew about them then, apart from his side-kick, and no-one outside our
very small group must ever know about them; otherwise questions will be asked.
Questions like, "Why was no-one aware of what Smith was doing?" and
then, "Who should have known?"

'Alec's
line commander at the time of these incidents was old Alf Stein, the Big Man's
predecessor as Head of CID. Once Mr Skinner took over, Smith behaved himself;
he knew better than to do otherwise. Stein's dead now, so if any of this shit
hits the fan it can only splash on one man - Chief Constable Sir James Proud.
If it became public he would be forced to resign; the Chiefs' Association
wouldn't be able to protect him. Our zealous new Justice Minister would have
him out.

'You
know as well as I do that Proud Jimmy is like a father to Bob Skinner. The DCC
would do anything to protect him from an ignominious end to his career.'

'Is
that what he did today?' Maggie asked, quietly.

He
put a finger to her lips. 'No more questions.'

'One
more, Mario, one more. This thing you saw today; if it was so horrible you
won't tell me about it, what will it do to you? How will you forget it?'

'Darlin','
he said. 'I won't. I will take it to my grave. But in the short term - I'm
going to drink another bottle of Amarone, then you and I are going to do what
we do best.'

48

A
great wall of mist, two hundred feet high, clung to the middle of the Firth of
Forth, shrouding part of the main shipping lane. Onshore, the weather was as
warm and sunny as it had been for over a week, yet incongruously, the sound of
a foghorn boomed across the water.

Bob
Skinner sat on a dune, on the beach, looking at the haar, trying to assess
whether or not it would sweep in from the sea before it burned off in the
morning sun.

"This
time last Saturday, eh?'

'Yeah,'
Andy Martin, murmured, lying on his back beside him in borrowed shorts and
tee-shirt. 'Seems like a long time ago. Fuck, it was a long time ago; I've been
dead since then.'

'Want
to talk about it? Or not
...
it's up
to you. You'll never have to if you don't want. Boy's in a hole up the
Pentlands; story's over.'

'Best
place for him.' Martin's voice; hollow, lifeless.

'Man
held a gun on me once,' Skinner murmured. 'Bastard shot me, but he made a
mistake; gave me a chance. I got the gun. Shot him fucking dead. Someone, not
Adam Arrow but like him, cleaned it up because of who he was, what he was.
Different circumstances though. That was national security stuff; Scotland had
to vanish to keep a lid on our local can of worms.'

'I
know, Bob. I know. Don't justify yourself to me; you don't have to. I know why
you did it and you were right.'

'I'm
glad you killed him, Andy. Glad.'

'He
died the way he lived. Alec should have shot him ten years ago, or someone in
Ireland should have taken him out.'

'If
he'd been on the other side, someone would have. Not all his orders came from
the Loyalists; most of them did, but not all. Adam told me that.'

'No
great surprise.'

They
lay in silence, watching the mist evaporate.

'He
pulled the trigger, you know.'

'Jesus.
I'd hoped not.'

'Twice.
Two bullets second time.'

'Andy
...'

'Third
would have been curtains. I just bellowed and went for him; went through him
like a fucking train.

'I
remember it all, Bob, in slow motion. Every single bit of it; the bitter taste
of his finger
...
I think that must
have been bone marrow
...
the blood.
I was fucking swimming in it, but I couldn't let go. Could still be dead if I
let go, I thought, and I couldn't die. Not there, not then, the time wasn't
right.

'So
I hung on, till the soldiers arrived, after that even
...
You know, looking at Alec, I thought,
I'll never see anything worse than this
...
far less that I'd do worse myself.

'What
did Scotland look like, Bob? When you saw him?'

'Dead,
Andy. Very fucking dead.'

Skinner
sighed. 'I didn't know at first, that he'd had you up there. Mario worked it
out. Knew at once when he saw the bullets lying around and in the gun.'

He
took a can of Irn Bru from his knapsack, opened it and handed it to Martin,
then opened another, for himself. 'So it was Scotland, eh?' he murmured. 'A
blast from Alec's past, come back as a nightmare.'

'Looks
that way. He told me he really wanted to take him back up there, but knew he'd
never manage it. I was second best. He knew someone would be for him
eventually. Took him ten years to pluck up the courage, or to catch Smith off
guard.'

'Where
could he have got that animal tranquilliser?' 'He did night security at the
zoo. He told me that
...
deliberately,
I suppose.' 'Ahh.'

'He
never actually said to me, "I killed Alec Smith" but
...'

'Maybe
not, but the overwhelming probability is that he did. If we keep the investigation
going, more than likely we'll be chasing an answer we've found already. I've
asked Mario to explain to Maggie, without telling her too much.'

'It
just goes away then?'

'It
dwindles; after a while I'll tell Royston that we have a prime suspect but that
he's disappeared, believed out of the country. He can leak that to the press; I
might even let him leak the real name. The guy isn't going to turn up
anywhere.'

'Only
in my dreams,' Martin whispered.

'They'll
fade, son. You don't think so now, but they will. Your mind protects you after
a while.'

Skinner
took a slug from his Irn Bru. 'Just one small niggle
...'
he said.

'What's
that?'

'Alec's
room; where he was killed. There was something odd about that. It's probably of
no significance, but it's wrong. It's just a feeling I have
...
only I can't figure out what it is.'

49

Karen
Neville rarely smoked; occasionally in the pub after a couple of drinks, but
never at home. She slammed her fourth cigarette of the day into the ashtray,
knowing that none of them had done her any good.

'Karen!'
she cried aloud. 'It'll be the drink next.'

She
could restrain herself no longer; she picked up the phone and called Neil
Mcllhenney. He sounded not in the least surprised to hear her voice.

'Hello,
girl,' he said, kindly. 'Doing your head in, is it?'

'And
how.'

'I
wish I could help, really, but you've just got to be patient.'

'Neil,
he really is all right isn't he? No-one's keeping anything back about him, are
they?'

'No,
love. I promise you they're not. Believe me, he's okay.' He hesitated. 'I saw
him myself last night.'

'You
did?' she exclaimed. 'Where?'

'Gullane.
He's out at Bob's. But you must not - understand, must not - try to phone him
there. Wait till he gets back to Edinburgh; that'll probably be some time today.'

She
heard him hesitate. 'But when he does get back home, Karen. What are you going
to say to him?'

She
fell silent, realising. 'I don't know,' she murmured, at last.

He
grunted. 'You don't? Well, it's bloody obvious to me. I don't know if it's
going to make you any happier, girl, but I do
know
you've got to get it out.' And then he chuckled. 'But you never know. You might
get a surprise
...
stranger things
have happened.'

'What
do you mean?'

'I
mean there's always a chance he might beat you to the punch.'

50

'So
this is where it happened,' said Skinner as he looked around the attic room.
'This is where the Diddler got done.' Detective Inspector Arthur Dorward's team
had finished their crime-scene work; the bedding and the binding ropes had been
removed for examination, but the bloodstains remained, disfiguring walls and
ceiling.

'Aye,
this is it, sir,' Pringle replied, gruffly. 'Come on and I'll show you how they
got rid of him.' He led the DCC back down the stairs to the hall where he found
a brass handle, recessed into the floor, and lifted up a wide trap-door,
revealing another flight of steps. The sound of lapping water came up from
below.

'Down
there is a wee jetty place. He was shoved in the water from there in the middle
of the night. The Water of Leith was still high and flowing fast last Friday
night, after all that rain the week before. They probably thought he'd be out
to sea by the next morning.'

"They
were hopeful, then,' said the DCC. 'If he hadn't snagged under that bridge,
he'd probably have been bobbing along through Leith when the dawn came up.

'You
said there was no money in his wallet?' he continued.

'No,
it was cleaned out. They left his cards, but took his cash.'

'His
watch?'

'Wasn't
here, Boss, and there was no personal jewellery
on
the body when we found him.'

'You
keep saying "They", Dan. What evidence is there that there was more
than one killer?'

'Nothing
hard, Boss, but
...
There's the hair,
right; the one caught in his dick. We've got that. We found more hairs on the
towels in the bathroom, and Dorward's preliminary report says that they match
that one and that they're all female. So the woman took a shower after having
sex with Mr Shearer.'

'...
and possibly also to wash off his blood.'

Pringle
looked at Skinner, doubtfully. 'I just don't fancy a woman as the murderer,' he
said. 'The battering that Mr Shearer sustained was ferocious.'

'Okay,
but I ask you again. What evidence for this male accomplice?'

'Other
people used that shower too, sir; males other than the victim. Let's say the
woman set him up and someone else did the butchery. Arthur found several
different hair samples down there, trapped in the wastepipe. Some belong to Mr
Shearer and some will be from his son, but there are others. There's a
possibility that some of them came from the bloke who used that baseball bat.'

'They
won't help us find him though; not unless they match with something on the DNA
database.'