Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel (3 page)

‘How soon can we start her on our switchboard?’ he drawled, as soon as I took the phone.

‘We’ll be minding hers before she’s done,’ I told him.

‘You finished your tea then, Bob?’ The sarcasm in Jay’s tone was only one of the reasons for my dislike of him.

‘And done the dishes.’

‘You ready to obey orders now?’

I didn’t want to upset Alex, so all I did was grin, when I really wanted to bite his ear off. ‘Since when were you my line manager?’ I asked him, quietly. ‘You’re at St Leonards, CID; I’m drugs squad commander. So please stop puffing out your chest and tell me exactly what the hell it is you want.’

‘Listen . . .’ he growled.

‘I’m listening.’

I heard a deep breath being drawn. ‘I’ve got a crime scene,’ he continued, eventually.

‘Infirmary Street Baths,’ I said. In the Victorian era Edinburgh’s civic leaders built several public swimming pools to combat the scourge of cholera. When I was young, my father took me to see his grandfather’s grave in a cemetery in Wishaw, Motherwell’s neighbouring town; as we approached it he pointed out a green area, without memorial stones, and told me that it was the site of a mass grave for victims of a cholera epidemic.

‘That’s right,’ Jay confirmed, brusquely.

‘I thought they were closed.’ A hundred years on, we weren’t so bothered about Biblical plagues.

‘They are. They were shut down about a year ago; they’ve been mothballed while the council tries to find a new use for the building, or for the site, if it comes to that. There are jannies going in every so often, to check the place out, make sure that everything’s all right.’

‘But today something wasn’t?’

‘That’s right. They found a guy in the pool.’

‘What stroke was he doing?’

‘Very funny. There’s no water supply to the building, but even if there had been, this one wasn’t swimming. He was at the deep end; right under the high diving board. His neck was broken.’

‘He took the plunge, eh?’

The superintendent allowed himself a grim chuckle. ‘That’s how it looks. But we don’t know for certain whether he dived off it or whether he was chucked off.’

‘What makes you think I can tell you?’ I asked.

‘If what Alf Stein says about you is right,’ I could see the sneer on his weasel face, ‘you probably could tell us just by looking at him.’ Detective Chief Superintendent Stein was our head of CID, Jay’s boss and mine. I’d heard myself described, with undisguised jealousy, by someone who didn’t know I was within earshot, as his protégé, but Alf had never told me that I was. ‘But the reason I’d like you to look at him . . .’ he hesitated, ‘. . . this has got drugs overtones to it, Bob. There’s no ID on the body, but Alison Higgins reckons she’s seen this bloke before. She thinks that he’s one of Tony Manson’s crew.’

I could have said that I’d look at him next morning in the mortuary, but in truth, if Jay had done that to me I’d have been seriously upset. And there was something else: Alison wasn’t wrong too often. I told him to hold, and put my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘Do you know if Daisy has anything on tonight?’ I asked my daughter.

She nodded. ‘She’s taking some pictures to show to a private buyer in Haddington.’

‘Do you have much homework?’

‘I’ve done it.’

‘Fancy a quick trip into town?’

‘Aw, Dad!
Top of the Pops
is on in a minute or two.’

‘We can record it. I need to do this.’

‘New jeans?’

‘Are you trying extortion on a police officer?’

‘It’s always worked before.’

‘Okay.’ I put the phone back to my ear. ‘I’ll be about forty-five minutes, give or take a couple,’ I told Jay.

‘Our guest will wait for you,’ he replied.

I let Alex set the VCR; we had no empty tapes so she and I had a brief argument about which to use. She won in the end, because I wasn’t really interested in catching up on Juventus winning the Champions League on penalties. She didn’t get to choose the music in the car, though. I never could stand R Kelly, and Wyclef’s language on one of the Fugee tracks was . . . well . . . ‘Mista Mista’ had become the anthem of the Edinburgh drugs squad, but it wasn’t for my daughter’s ears. Instead I forced her to listen to ‘Aria’, a strange, contemplative blend of opera and chill-out music by the Cafe del Mar maestro, that a friend had given me in Spain a few weeks before, at Easter.

Although it was a Thursday, most of the late evening shoppers were heading for home by the time we came into the outskirts of the city. I was thinking about Infirmary Street Baths, and what was waiting for us there. Alexis was thinking about something else; we were on Milton Link when she turned the volume down.

‘Dad,’ she said, abruptly, reclaiming my attention. ‘Why don’t we have a dinner party?’

‘What?’ I spluttered. ‘Why the hell would we do that?’

‘Why shouldn’t we? You never invite friends to the house. It’s as if we’re hermits. You’re a good cook, and I’m not bad at some things. We could manage.’

‘Who would we invite?’ As I thought about it, I conceded the point; we did live a secluded existence. Alex wasn’t my life in its entirety, but I didn’t have a legion of friends, not outside the job. Yes, I was invited to parties thrown by people who’d been part of our circle when I was half of a couple, but nobody expected me to take a turn as host myself, not with a kid . . . but she wasn’t any more, was she?

‘You could invite the Lloyds,’ she suggested. Jack Lloyd was my usual foursomes partner in the golf club. He and his wife were more than ten years older than me. ‘And Aunt Jean could come.’

I smiled. I must have looked condescending, for she frowned. ‘When you’re a lawyer,’ I told her, ‘and you have an opposition witness on the stand, you’ll need to take your examination more slowly than that, or you’ll have no flexibility left, no wiggle room. It’s the biggest mistake defence counsel make when I’m in the box.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she snapped.

‘Yes you do. You’re matchmaking, and you’re not very good at it.’

Alex and her aunt, her mother’s younger sister, had always got on. So had Jean and I, for that matter. But neither my daughter nor I could stand her husband Cameron, one of the very few men that Myra had ever detested absolutely. Jean had joined our camp a couple of years earlier. She had celebrated her thirtieth birthday by chucking him out, and had called a week before to tell us that her divorce had been finalised.

‘Okay, so what if I am? Dad, it’s been a long time. You’ve got to . . .’

‘Move on?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alex, I have moved on.’

She looked across at me. ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

‘You know that I don’t.’

‘I know that you never bring any women home, but that’s all.’

‘Well I don’t.’

‘None at all?’

‘No.’

‘You mean you’ve been celibate since Mum died?’ She pronounced the bombshell word carefully, as if she’d just learned it.

‘Hey!’ I protested, laughing. ‘Jesus, kid, what sort of a question’s that for a thirteen-year-old to be asking her father?’

‘That means you haven’t. If the answer was “yes” you’d have said so. People prevaricate when they have something to hide; that’s what you told me.’

‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ I insisted.

I had, of course. Nine months before, I had left Alex in Daisy’s care and gone to Spain for a long weekend, to do some maintenance on the house that I’d bought with part of my father’s estate, and to commission an extension. I’d flown from Glasgow to Barcelona and Jean had come with me. Her suggestion, not mine; nothing had been said in advance about the sleeping arrangements, but I suppose we’d both known what was going to happen. It wasn’t a disaster, but it did feel a little weird. We had some laughs, the sex was good, and I didn’t imagine for a second that Myra would be turning in her grave, but when Jean made it clear at the end of the trip that it would be a oneoff, I felt relieved rather than slighted. She hadn’t been my only fling; there had been other women, a few over the years, but always away games, work as far as Alex was concerned, the truth and nothing but the truth with the understanding Daisy.

‘Tell you what,’ I offered her. ‘No dinner party, but we’ll have a barbie in the garden, one Sunday afternoon. We’ll invite friends from the village, you can ask some of yours from school, if their parents are okay with it, and I might ask some from work. You can invite our Jean if you like, but don’t you be surprised if she wants to bring a man.’

The notion that her aunt was capable of independent thought and action sent her into silent contemplation. ‘You up for that?’ I asked, as I negotiated a troublesome roundabout.

‘We’ll see.’The idea of a joint adult-kids party left her underwhelmed, as I had guessed it would. Negotiations were suspended, and I drove on, letting the music fill the void.

Infirmary Street had been closed at either end as I turned into it off the Cowgate. The uniform on duty waved a ‘get on your way’ gesture at first, but he was looking at Alex rather than at me. He knew me well enough; his name was Charlie Johnston and he wasn’t going anywhere other than towards retirement and a PC’s pension, his objective from the start. He and I were contemporaries. The first thing he’d done on joining up was to learn, off by heart, the book and how to play everything by it without ever risking his head above the parapet. After a closer look, he stepped aside and moved a traffic cone.

Jay was waiting for me on the pavement outside the old building, sucking on a cigarette. Even now, it’s difficult for me to paint a word picture of the man. He came closer than anyone I’ve ever known to being a walking definition of ‘nondescript’. The only feature that stopped him from going all the way was the colour of his eyes, as grey as the stone of the bathhouse behind him.

They flickered as Alex stepped out of the car, and I didn’t like what I saw in them. She was tall for her age, and dressed as she saw fit. That evening her choice had been jeans, ripped at the knee, and a baggy, custom-made, white T-shirt that one of her friends had given her the Christmas before. It had ‘WARNING! CID brat!’ emblazoned on the front.

‘Bob,’ he said, his face twisting into what passed for a smile. ‘Glad you could come. It might help us get a head start.’

‘I know that.’ There was a cop standing in the doorway behind him, a PC in his mid-twenties, around my height, six two. Modern police tunics make some officers look fat, but not this guy; he just looked massive. He had to be McGuire, even if he did look a lot more Italian than Irish. His hair was darker than dark, the purest jet black, and his eyes, a complete contrast to Jay’s limpid puddles, were deep blue pools which twinkled with laughter and excitement. I’d seen him around but hadn’t put a name to him before. He was usually to be found in the company of another young plod, his equal in size if not in temperament.

‘Mario?’ He nodded. ‘You’ve got an important and dangerous job.’

‘What’s that, sir?’

‘Look after my daughter while I’m inside.’

He beamed. ‘She couldn’t be in safer hands, boss.’

‘It’s your safety I’m worrying about.’ I winked at Alex. ‘I won’t be long.’ She shrugged; at that moment she was more interested in her new minder than she was in me.

‘Come on then,’ Jay grunted. He led the way inside, past what had been the ticket booth, and up a few steps into the pool area. There was plenty of natural light, from a window that ran along the full length of the roof, but not enough for the scene of crime people apparently; four big lamps, on stands, had been set up in the drained pool. I took a look around, reacquainting myself with my surroundings. I had been in the baths a couple of years before, as a user. When I had taken over command of the drugs and vice squad it had been based in Gayfield Square, and I had gone there to swim on a few lunch breaks. The pool was flanked by individual changing cubicles, women on one side, men on the other. The designer had left gaps at the top and bottom of the doors, a sign that the building dated back to a time before electric lighting. There was an upper tier, with more cubicles, for individual baths, relics of the days when all there was in many homes was a tin tub in front of the fire.

A ladder had been placed at the deep end, where the tiled floor was flat. A red-haired guy stood at the top, a DS called Arthur Dorward; he was a graduate, as was I, but his degree was in chemistry. He was wearing a scene of crime suit, and handed one to me. ‘What about you?’ I asked Jay, as I put it on.

‘I’ve seen all I want to see down there,’ he retorted.

I climbed down the ladder, jumping off with a couple of rungs to go. The body was lying as the superintendent had described it; it was that of a young man, a big bloke, white, dressed in black trousers and shirt, with shiny lace-up brogues and patterned socks. It was face down, the limbs were splayed out and the head was at the sort of angle you’d expect from a well-executed hanging. There was a little blood, but no more than a smear.

I looked up, towards the diving platform which jutted out above my head, a solid structure and wide enough to accommodate at least two people and possibly three. It was fifteen or sixteen feet higher than the edge of the pool, add on another couple for the water level then twelve for safe diving depth; yes, the guy could have fallen thirty feet, more than enough to do the job.

Two officers stood beside him. They were both dressed as I was, in one-piece sterile suits with hoods, but I knew them both. Alison Higgins had just made DI; she had been a sergeant on my team until a year before. I had engineered her move, without her ever knowing about it. She had chummed me to Infirmary Street once or twice . . . on lunchtimes when we weren’t back at her flat in Albert Street, banging each other’s brains out. Our thing had cooled off since then . . . not that it had ever been red hot . . . but we were still good friends.

The other suit was a detective constable, new to CID; his name was Martin, Andy Martin. He was from Glasgow, and he was reckoned to be a high-flier, not necessarily by Jay, but by me. He had helped me out on an investigation a few months before, when he was still in uniform, and I had recommended to Alf Stein that he be fast-tracked into CID. Jay thought that he had been favoured because he had a degree of fame as a rugby player, but if that had been so he’d have deserved it. The young Martin had played for Scotland B and had been a certainty to make full international status, until he had made it clear to the head coach that his job came before any squad training session, even in the newly dawned professional era.