Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (9 page)

'I've
been changing,' Rhian answered.

'That'll
be the day, honey. You'll never bloody change.' There was a familiarity in the
exchange; two people comfortable with each other. Andy eyed the other man
appraisingly, remembering Rhian's remark about older lovers, trying to guess
his age. He was small but trim, with dark, grey-flecked hair which was thinning
on top; well-preserved, but probably in his early forties.

She
brought him back by squeezing his hand. 'Don't listen to this so-and-so. Have
you two met before? Andy, this is Spike Thomson, Edinburgh's oldest teenager
and a legend in his own mind. Spike, this is Andy Martin; he lives next door.'

The
man's eyebrows rose. 'Ah. I've heard of you. You're Bob Skinner's pal, aren't
you?'

The
detective looked at the other man warily, although he was not certain why. 'You
know Bob?'

'Of
course. I'm one of the Thursday mob.'

Spike
Thomson.
Get the brain in
gear, Andy boy. How many Spike Thomsons can there be?
'The disc jockey? Fair footballer too, according
to Bob.'

'That's
kind of him. How come we've never seen you on a Thursday night?'

The
detective grinned down at his new acquaintance. 'I've been asked, but
football's definitely not my game. I used to play rugby.'

'Me
too. I played scrum-half for North Berwick High, then for the rugby club for a
while. What was your position?' He took a pace backwards and looked Martin up
and down, noting the thickness of his neck, the breadth of his shoulder.
'Prop?'

'For
a while, at school, but I played all my senior stuff as a flanker.'

'Ah.
That explains why you're not a football man. Bloody lethal on the football
field are flankers, to a man. Who'd you play for?'

'West
of Scotland.'

'Any
good?'

The
policeman smiled at the directness of the question, sportsman to sportsman.
'Some folk thought so. I played for Glasgow District a few times; got as far as
an international trial, but that was it. I joined the force and packed it in.'

'Why,
for God's sake? Couldn't you have carried on playing as a policeman? Others
do.'

'Maybe,
but working shifts in Edinburgh meant that I couldn't guarantee to make
training in Glasgow. I could have played for Edinburgh Accie Firsts at one
point, but I decided against it. I took the view that, since the force was
going to be my career, I'd better devote myself to it full-time if I was going
to make a success of it.'

'You've
done all right so far, haven't you?'

'I'm
more than pleased with where I am now, yes.'

'Where
do you want to wind up?'

'In
a Chief Constable's chair.'

Thomson
looked up at him. 'Won't that mean leap-frogging Bob?'

Martin
shook his head. 'No, it doesn't mean that at all
...
although there is a hell of a lot of leap-frogging in the
police. No, there are other forces. I'll have to leave Edinburgh sometime if I
want to carry on up the ladder, I know that.'

He
might have said also that he would have to leave to move out of the Deputy
Chief Constable's shadow, but that was a thought which he had voiced to only
one man, Bob Skinner himself.

He
looked over his shoulder at Rhian, but she had moved away to join another
group. Turning back to Spike Thomson, he realised that he had been quizzed
gently by a professional interviewer. He had his own skills in that department.

'How
about you?' he asked. 'What was your career path?'

The
little man smiled. 'A lot less conventional than yours. I went to Heriot-Watt
University and did a Chemistry degree, then went to work in a path lab. On the
way through Uni, I did discos at weekends to make a few extra quid; eventually
I realised that I was far more interested in that than in my day job. This was
back in the seventies, when commercial radio was in its infancy - the pirates
had just come on shore, so to speak - so I sent in a tape to the managing
director of Radio Forth, just for fun.

'To
my great surprise, he liked it
...
no
taste, that man. He gave me an audition and hired me on a short contract, to
present the weekend breakfast programme. Twenty years or so on, I'm still
there.'

'You've
been at Forth all that time?'

'More
or less. About fifteen years ago, I was lured away to the flesh-pots - Glasgow
- but it didn't feel right so, after a year, when Forth asked me to come back
and be the station's Head of Music, I haggled for about half a minute, then
agreed.'

'Have
you never fancied the BBC?' Martin asked.

Spike
Thomson drained the last of his red wine. 'I was approached, a while back, by
Radio One. They offered me a bigger salary and the chance to increase my
ancillary earnings about ten-fold. But I'd have had no control over anything, I'd
have had to start by doing a through-the-night show for six months, and it
would have been another short-term contract.

'Didn't
fancy it. I like my local audience, I like the instant feedback we get from our
listeners, and I like the feel of what I do. This might sound pompous, but I
believe that local radio is socially important. We talk to a lot of people, and
we have the ability to change the way they think.'

'Why
don't you work more closely with my Drugs Squad then?'

'Because
as soon as we start to sound like a mouthpiece for the police - or anyone else
for that matter - we're dead. We're
independent
local radio, remember; the word
means something. Don't worry, Andy, we get the drugs message across, all of
us, but through the attitude of our presenters, not through propaganda.'

The
disc-jockey paused. 'Come in and watch us at work sometime. You can sit in with
me in the studio.' He grinned. 'You can bring Rhian if you like, although she's
been already.'

He
caught Martin's look. 'Some girl, that. Twenty-one going on forty; you watch
yourself there. She can be a real heart-breaker.'

'You
speak from experience?' the detective asked. There was an edge to his tone.

Spike
Thomson held up a hand, as if to keep the big policeman at bay. 'Not guilty,
honest, officer,' he protested. 'The truth is that my interest is in her
mother. Juliet and I have been seeing each other for a while.'

He
broke off. 'You eaten yet?'

'No,'
Martin replied, hunger biting at once.

'Come
on then, let's get some grub and a refill.'

They
were halfway to the barbecue when the detective's mobile phone sounded in his
shirt pocket. He stopped and took it out. 'Yes?'

'Andy,
it's Maggie.'

'Hi,
Mags. How's it going out there?'

'A
town full of brick walls so far. I do have Sarah's postmortem report though:
it answers a couple of questions. I'm having a team briefing tomorrow morning,
at ten in the mobile. Want to come?'

'Sure,
I'll be there.' He ended the call and put the handphone away. 'Work,' he said
to Thomson.

'Not
that thing our newsroom was on about today, was it? Out in my home town.'

'I'm
afraid so.'

The
little man shook his head. 'Poor old Smithy. He was one of us, you know; one of
the Thursday Legends. Something come back to haunt him, did it?'

Martin
frowned at the shrewdness of the question. 'Maybe, maybe not. Too early to
tell. Come on, there's been enough shop all round. Let's get to the grub.'

They
were almost there when the scream rang out behind them; short, sharp piercing,
then dying into a gasp. The detective turned on his heel. Margot, the birthday
girl, was standing to the left of the garden with her back to her guests,
leaning over the boundary fence and gripping its rail tightly. She was staring
down, back along the river towards the Belford Bridge.

The
rest of the gathering seemed to turn in slow motion towards her, but Andy
Martin was by her side in three strides. 'What's up, Margot?' he asked
urgently.

The
girl said nothing, did not move, as he put a protective arm around her
shoulders. She could only gaze at the greenish-tinged water, her mouth hanging
open slightly. At last she raised a hand and pointed. 'There,' she whispered.
'What's that thing along there? Is it what I think it is?'

The
detective followed the direction of her outstretched finger, leaning outwards,
just as she did. At last he saw it, just under the far parapet of the bridge
which carries the road above across Edinburgh's little river. It was a large
green, puffy object, swollen by the water, not going with the flow but snagged
on something. He might have thought that it was no more than a roll of carpet -
but for the thing, the pale white thing, which floated on the surface.

'Oh
no,' he muttered. 'Just what I need to round off a perfect day.'

He
felt a strong hand tug at his elbow and turned to face Rhian. Juliet, Spike and
the others had gathered behind her, one or two of them leaning out over the
fence. 'Back,' he called out, sharply. 'Everyone get back towards the house,
please.

'There's
something in the river and it's given Margot a fright. It's probably nothing -'
He knew as he spoke that his urgency made his lie sound unconvincing. '- but
I'm going along to check it out, just in case. Come on now, back, please.'

Frowning,
Juliet Lewis took her younger daughter, who had begun to tremble, by the hand
and drew her away from the fence, while Rhian began to usher the rest of the
gathering towards the back of the garden as Martin had asked. As she did, he
glanced down at his clothes, then eased out of his sandals to stand barefoot on
the grass. He stripped off his Hugo Boss shirt and hung it over the top rail
then, deciding that his cotton slacks were expendable, vaulted over the fence
on to the sloping embankment which ran along the other side.

The
arch of the bridge was about fifty yards away; he made his way crabwise along
the grass banking until he reached it, then stepped out into the murky waters.
Almost at once he was more than waist deep, wading through ooze and slime,
pausing to balance himself as he stepped on the occasional slippery stone. The
river was no more than a few yards wide, but under the bridge it was so gloomy
that he could not see the object clearly until he was almost upon it.

Close
to, the pale thing had a bluish tinge. It was a hand, on the end of a
shirt-sleeved right arm which seemed to have worked its way awkwardly from the
dark-coloured rug which had enclosed it. The head was almost clear too; a man's
head, face down in the water, sparse hair floating on the surface.

The
detective allowed his eyes a few more seconds to become accustomed to the
gloom. Gradually he saw that the rug had been tied with thick twine, top,
middle and bottom. It was hooked on the branch of a tree, which had fallen
somewhere upstream and become snagged itself on the riverbed.

Something
made him look again at the hand, closely this time. The thumb and little finger
were missing; bones showed where they had been snipped or sawed off. He
switched his attention to the other end of the rug. Two bare feet protruded:
the big and little toes had been severed on each.

'Fuck,'
he swore quietly, feeling his stomach prickling. He decided to touch nothing.
The rug was stuck fast to the branch which was itself solidly based in the
river: there was no chance of anything floating away. Taking care not to slip,
he turned and waded back across the river, scrambling, with some difficulty
since his feet were slippy with mud, back up the embankment.

Rhian
was standing by the fence. Everyone else was standing around the barbecue, but
no-one was eating.

'What
is it?' she asked.

'Male,
human and very dead,' he answered, grimly. 'What we in the business call a
stiff. It had to happen tonight, too, and here. Just great for poor wee
Margot's birthday. Do me a favour. Fish my cell-phone from my shirt pocket. It
was a bit pricey so I don't want to muck it up.'

She
did as he asked. He switched it on and pressed buttons in sequence to call a
short-coded number. 'Aye?' came a gruff voice as his call was answered.