Skinner's Mission

inheritance.

‘Superintendent Donaldson, DCI Rose, Edinburgh CID,’ her colleague announced. ‘We’d like a word. Can we come in?’

‘Aye, if you like,’ said Medina, with a sigh.

The two detectives stepped into the flat. Closing the front door behind them, Medina pointed them towards a room at the far end of the hall. As soon as she stepped into the sitting room Rose’s eye was caught by the late edition Evening News lying on the small couch, and by its front page heading, ‘City Woman Dies in Fiery Hell’.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

Rose picked up the tabloid and held the front page towards him. ‘I think you know.’

Medina said nothing, but gave a brief nod, his gaze dropping to the grey-carpeted floor. He pointed the detectives to the two soft, cream-coloured armchairs on either side of the couch, on which he sat down himself.

‘We’d just like a chat for now,’ said Donaldson. ‘Later we might want you to make a formal statement, but we’ll cross that one when we get there.

‘Is this your permanent address?’ he asked.

‘Aye.’

‘You live here with Miss, is it, Angela Muirhead?’

Medina shook his head and smiled, for the first time. ‘That’s Ms. Angie’s very definitely a Ms.’

‘What does she do for a living?’

‘She’s a civil servant. She’s personal secretary to some high flyer, in the new place down in Leith.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Her boss works all hours. She’s no’ usually home before seven.’

‘Where do you work, Mr Medina?’ asked Rose.

‘I don’t, as I’m sure you know by now.’

‘Did you apply for a job recently?’

Medina glanced across at her, sharply. ‘I apply for jobs all the time. I hate that bloody Giro, Miss . . . er, sorry, I didn’t catch the name.’

‘It’s Rose,’ said the DCI quietly. ‘Let me be more specific. Two or three months ago, did you apply for a job in the motor trade, with a Renault dealership?’

‘Aye.’

‘What was the job?’

‘Book-keeper. Unqualified accountant. That’s what I do.’

‘What was the outcome?’

He glanced at her, a sour expression crossing his face. ‘I’m still drawing the bloody Giro, amn’t I.’

‘Do you know why you didn’t get the job?’

Medina looked away from the officers, towards the wall. ‘Oh aye,’ he said, heavily. ‘One day the recruitment people said it was as good as mine, the next I was told that my last employer’s reference was, quote unquote, “unsatisfactory”. That wee bastard Jackie Charles!’

Donaldson leaned forward. ‘Come on, Mr Medina. You were sacked for dishonesty. Surely you couldn’t have expected Mr Charles to give you a reference after that?’ He paused. ‘You do admit that, don’t you?’

The fair-haired man laughed bitterly and rose to his feet. ‘Oh sure, I admit that I was sacked. But it had bugger-all to do with dishonesty. Carole fell out with me. It was her that put the boot in with Jackie.’

‘Come on, man. It’s easy to plead the innocent now. But you backed off from your threat to take Mr Charles to an industrial tribunal, didn’t you.’

Carl Medina looked down at him, in what seemed to be genuine surprise. ‘I never mentioned the word Tribunal, far less backing off from one. I knew there was no point.’ As the man paused, Donaldson glanced at Rose and saw a brief smile flicker around the corners of her mouth. ‘Listen, Superintendent,’ he went on. ‘I was accused of nicking small amounts of cash, here and there. That was nonsense on two counts.

‘One, if I was bent - which I’m not - I’m too good an accountant to do anything as obvious as adding up a few columns wrong. Second, for all you CID people may believe, there’s no cash flowing through a business like Jackie Charles Motors. No-one buys a Ferrari for readies these days, not even a lottery winner. It’s all cheques, in and out.

‘The only way to make a bit on the side is through backhanders from insurance brokers and finance houses. That doesn’t happen much, and when it does the sweeties don’t get anywhere near the book-keeper.’

‘So what did happen?’ asked Donaldson.

‘Carole fiddled the books herself, showed them to Jackie and said I did it. She told him to sack me. That was that. I haven’t worked since.’ Medina gave a weak smile, devoid of humour, and flopped down once more on the couch, shaking his head.

‘But why didn’t you go to a tribunal, if you’d been fitted up?’ asked Maggie Rose.

‘Like I said, there would have been no point. It would have been my word against Carole. Not just that either; I knew enough about Jackie Charles to realise that it would have been a bad idea.’

‘What did you know about him?’ snapped Donaldson.

‘Oh, things I’d heard. Not so much about Charles himself, but about that guy who works for him in his other businesses, Dougie Terry. He used to come around the showroom every so often, to see Jackie.’

‘What had you heard about Terry?’

Medina paused. ‘I work out a bit, in the gym at the Commonwealth Pool. I met a guy there once - about five years back, just before I started working for Charles - who told me that he knew a guy who did odd jobs for cash for Terry. We were just bullshitting, ken, about how you could make a few quid out of the bodybuilding. I was talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, but this guy started on about Dougie Terry.’

‘Did this man describe the sort of odd jobs he was talking about?’

He nodded. ‘Aye. He said they involved breaking people’s arms and legs: even, on occasion, breaking them so they’d never be right again.’

‘Did he mention anyone specific?’ Rose cut in, softly.

The man hesitated. ‘Aye, he did. Mind you, at the time I thought it was crap. I thought it was all crap until I saw Dougie Terry. This guy mentioned a footballer, a lad named Jimmy Lee, played for the Jam Tarts. He had a bad gambling habit, and he was rotten at it. He owed a bookie a stack of cash, far more than he was making, and the Hearts didn’t exactly look like winning the European Cup that year.

‘One Saturday night, after a Tynecastle game, Lee was on his way home in Wester Hailes when he was jumped in the hallway of the building where he lived.’

‘I remember that case,’ said Dave Donaldson.

‘The whole of Edinburgh remembers it. The boy’s kneecaps, and both his ankles, were smashed to bits. He’ll never walk right again, never mind play football. The guy I met at the Commonwealth Pool said that the guy he knew had been involved in it and that it had been set up by Terry, to settle the boy Lee’s score with the bookie.’

‘Can we put some names to this story, Mr Medina?’ asked Rose.

‘I don’t know the guy’s name. Working out you see people to talk to, between exercises, like, but you don’t usually get to know them.’

‘Have you ever seen the man since that conversation?’

‘Once or twice, but not in the last three years or so. He just stopped coming to the Commonwealth. Maybe he ruptured something. That can happen to the real keen guys, like this bloke was.

‘Could you pick him out if you saw him again?’

Medina nodded. ‘Sure. I don’t remember much about his face, other than that it was red and sweaty and that he had a big moustache, but he had a big vulture tattooed on his right shoulder. That was a one-off, and no mistake.’

‘Maybe we’ll take you on a tour of the gyms and health clubs, Mr Medina,’ said Donaldson, suddenly and sharply. ‘But let’s get back to the point here, okay?

‘You’ve said that Mrs Charles made false allegations against you, and had you sacked. You’ve told us that she fell out with you. You were the company book-keeper, and she was its finance director. If you were good at your