Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (24 page)

'Later
on this afternoon. When it's quieter at the St Leonard's' office.'

'Well,
just watch it, eh.'

'Sure,
as always.'

Skinner
pushed himself up from his low seat and walked across to the big window of his
office. 'Now, about Gavigan. Where is he now?'

'In
a cell up at St Leonard's. I was so angry last night, I just locked him up.'

'Good
for you. Mario had got rid of him, effectively; we were going to give him early
retirement and send him on his way'

'Not
any more, I hope.'

'Ah,
it's not as easy as that. As President Johnson said of J. Edgar Hoover, the
last thing I want is a guy like him outside the tent pissing in. It's always
more comfortable the other way around.

'Ask
yourself. What can we do with him? We could charge him with perverting the
course of justice, perjury and all the rest. But this is all undercover stuff.
Christ, his perjured evidence was
in
camera.
On top of that, Alec
Smith's dead, Wendy Forrest is dead, Angus Morrison is unbalanced and that
anonymous letter to the
Sunday
Post
will have been burned
to ashes and crushed up long ago.

'Even
if it was politically acceptable to try him, it would be legally impossible to
get a conviction. Gavigan corroborates Morrison's story, but interview him
formally with a lawyer present and he'd clam up, and all we've got is the
unsupported allegation of a schizophrenic.

'Gus
Morrison will be pardoned and compensated; it'll have to be done very quietly,
but I'll see to it. As for our man, he's going to have to walk, Andy
...
but not before I've had a chat with
him. Have Pye bring him down here.'

The
Head of CID nodded. 'Will do.' He rose and headed for the door. 'I'll let you
know how it goes with the other fella.'

31

'What's
she like, this Mrs Smith?'

'She's
a really nice woman, and very attractive for her age.'

Maggie
Rose looked severely at her Sergeant across her Haddington office. 'The
menopause doesn't make you ugly, Stevie. I can think of any number of women who
became even more attractive the older they got
...
my own mother among them.

'I
meant did she strike you as completely frank, or might she have been holding something
back from us? Do you think she was telling the truth about Alec's apparent lack
of interest in photography?'

'Why
should she lie?' Steele asked.

'What
if he had some photographs of her that she doesn't want found?'

'I
don't believe that for a second. Everything she told me bears out everything
else I've learned about Alec Smith; that he was obsessively secretive. In their
case, it turned the two of them into virtual strangers to each other.'

'So
what does it leave us to go on, apart from the keys? What did you get from
her?'

The
Sergeant grinned. 'He walked his dog at Yellowcraigs.'

'Once,
that we know of
...
and we can hardly
dig up the whole place. Anyway, if Smith did have a secret set of photographs
and files, he was hardly the sort of guy to keep them in a knot-hole in a tree,
was he? Whatever my daft husband or I
may
have said, the dog is not going to turn out to be our star witness.'

'Okay,
there's the gay son.'

'Whom
his father shunned. He's been dead for five years; how could he tie in?'

'Like
you say, his father shunned him. Maybe John Smith had a partner who hated him
for it.'

'A
nice respectable lawyer, his mother told you. Maybe. Not. You can check it out
if you like, but I don't see it as a runner.'

'Mrs
Smith said that he let slip once, about ten years ago, that he was afraid of Mr
Skinner. She said it was just a casual comment, but should we ask him if there
was a reason around that time why he should have been?'

Rose
chuckled, quietly. 'Nothing sinister in that, Stevie. All the villains in
Edinburgh, and most of the coppers, are afraid of Bob Skinner. I'll ask him;
but even if he and Smith did have a falling-out, way back, I don't see how it
could connect to this investigation.'

'In
that case, we're just left with that standing order as our only unanswered
question. Mrs Smith didn't know anything about it.'

'Are
you one hundred per cent on that? Maybe she hasn't been declaring it to the
Inland Revenue and didn't like to admit it.'

'I'm
certain, ma'am. If that money was for her then it was invested somewhere that
she didn't know about.'

'Best
tidy it up anyway. The Dundee solicitor firm was called Biggins and McCart.
Give them a call and see what he was paying them for. Use my phone; ask the
switchboard to get the number for you and put you through.'

Steele
gave the instruction to the constable who answered the Haddington switchboard,
replaced the phone and waited. Eventually it rang; he picked it up. 'Miss
Malone, of Biggins and McCart, Sergeant,' the constable announced.

'Hello,
Miss Malone,' said the detective.

'Hello,'
a young female voice answered in an unmistakable Dundonian accent. 'Fit can ah
do for you?'

'I'm
Detective Sergeant Steele,' he began. 'I'm involved in an investigation here
...
a murder investigation,' he added to
capture her interest, as well as her attention. 'We've discovered that the
victim, a Mr Alexander Smith, of Shell Cottage, North Berwick, maintained a
standing order in favour of your firm, paying you one thousand two hundred
pounds, annually.

'We'd
like to know what it was for.'

'Ah'll
need tae check, like. Can ah ca' you back?'

'Sure,
but as soon as possible.' He gave her the Haddington number then hung up once
more.

This
time, they had to wait for ten minutes before the phone rang again. 'Miss
Malone,' the constable repeated.

'Yes?'
asked Steele as the girl came on the line. 'What have you got for me?'

'I've
found that payment,' she said, brightly. 'But Ah'm no allowed to talk tae yis
about it. It's one o' Mr McCart's files; and only he's allowed tae talk about
it. Ah'm no.'

'Okay.
Can I speak to him then?'

'He's
no here. He's away till Monday.'

'Monday.
Is there no-one else?'

'Well,
there was Mr Biggins
...
but he's
died.'

'Miss
Malone,' said Steele heavily. 'This is an important investigation.'

'Ma
job's important to me. Mr McCart said Ah was never to give information off his
files tae anybody.'

The
Sergeant looked across at DCI Rose. She shook her head. 'Leave it. Alec's not
going to be any deader, or any less dead, by Monday; this can wait till then.
The chances are it's nothing anyway.'

'Okay,'
Steele conceded, finally, to Miss Malone. 'But you tell Mr McCart to be there.
I'm coming up to see him myself.'

32

DC
Tommy Gavigan was thin-faced, weaselly.
The
desiccated shell of a man,
Skinner
thought as he looked at him across the table of the small room. He was wearing
a brown suit that was overdue a trip to the dry cleaners, he needed a shave,
his grey hair looked lank and oily and he smelled of sweat. A night in the
cells had done him no favours
...
or
did he always look like that?

Gavigan,
a Detective Constable, was older than the Deputy Chief Constable himself. He
had been around for all of Skinner's career, and yet not around, since for
almost half of that time he had been buried in Special Branch, doing the
bidding of Alec Smith and his successors, Martin, Mackie and McGuire. Too
convenient to transfer, too stolid to promote, he had stayed there,
anonymously.

The
big DCC took off his jacket and hung it over the back of the empty chair
opposite the prisoner policeman. The room was hot; it was in the basement of
the headquarters building and he had chosen it deliberately, knowing that
Gavigan would have conducted more than a few interviews there himself, in his
time.

He
made as if to sit, but instead leaned across the table. A big hand flashed out
and slapped the other man, powerfully, on the side of the head, sending him
tumbling from his chair on to the floor.

'That
wasn't just from me, Tommy,' he said, as the Detective
Constable
stared up at him, earlier apprehensiveness turned to sheer terror. 'That was
from the Chief, ACC Elder, DCS Martin, Inspector McGuire, and everybody else
whose work, whose very lives, you've soiled.

'Get
up man!' he snapped. 'I'm not going to hit you again; you'll walk out of here
...
for now.' He waited as Gavigan, hair
dishevelled, tie askew, clambered back on to his chair. Finally, Skinner sat
himself.

'I
know that I'm rarely accused of sentimentality,' he went on, 'but the fact is I
love this force. I have done from the moment I joined, from the first day I put
on its ill-fitting, uncomfortable uniform. I'm intensely proud of the job we
do; I mean, in essence, that we protect the innocent and pursue the guilty.

'It
makes me want to chuck my breakfast to learn of a case where the innocent have
been persecuted. And it compounds it to know that in this case, I'm going to
have to protect the guilty
...
by
which I mean you, you little toe-rag, and if you show me even a glimmer of a
smile of relief, I will break my word and put you back on the deck again.'

All
the time he spoke, he stared across the desk at Gavigan, cold, deep and
unblinking, mesmerising the man, holding him as securely as a hand on his
throat.

'I've
never gone into a murder investigation with mixed feelings before, but in the
case of Alec Smith, I do. I dread the thought of what else we're going to find
out about the man; I am gripped by a sort of certainty that whoever it was tortured
him to death had a bloody good reason for doing so.

'DCS
Martin has just interviewed a man who was driven mad by what Alec Smith and you
did to him. Gus Morrison, poor sad bastard that he is, was a prime suspect, but
we're
certain that he didn't do it. If he had I'd have
been really sorry about locking him up. I hate it when one of mine goes rotten.
The only other time it happened I wanted to kill the bastard, and I was glad
when he hanged himself in his cell. His widow got a pension and will be able to
tell her kids, for a few years at least, that their daddy died in the service.
On top of that the force wasn't embarrassed by a trial.

'I'm
glad Alec's dead too, but I need to know who the other madman is, the one with
the strength to do what Morrison wanted to, but couldn't.

'How
many others are there, Tommy? How many others like him, framed and persecuted
by Smith because they upset him, or found out too much about him? You had
better tell me now, because if you don't and I find out later that you've kept
something from me, I promise you it will change altogether the way I think
about you.'

He
kept his gaze on Gavigan, reading the fright on the thin face. 'None that I
know of, Mr Skinner, honest,' the man exclaimed. 'There was Lawrence Scotland,
there was that Iranian, Basra, and there was Morrison and Forrest
...
that's all.'

'Did
you ever give perjured evidence against anyone else?' 'No
...
sir.'

'Or
combine with Smith to force a confession out of anyone?' 'No, sir.'

'Or
turn a blind eye to anything that Smith was doing?' 'Sir, I never knew what DCI
Smith was doing, unless he told me about it.'

'Scotland
and Basra
...
you sure they were
guilty?' 'Dead certain, sir.'

Skinner
paused for a few moments. 'Remind me,' he continued, eventually. 'When you and
Smith played your game with Scotland, what did he tell you would have happened
if Scotland had lost?'