‘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.
‘So you think I might have an interest in this, Alison?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure I’ve seen him before, sir.’ She was always impeccably formal with me, on duty, when there were others around. ‘And I’m sure, too, that it was in my time on the drugs squad.’
‘Has the body been moved?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘So you’ve only seen him in profile, as he is now?’
‘That’s how sure I am,’ she replied, confidently.
‘Has the doctor been yet?’
‘And the pathologist,’ Martin volunteered, ‘and the photographers.’
‘Then turn him over.’
The young DC nodded, squatted down beside the corpse and rolled it on to its back, then straightened the arms and legs. The left side of the face had been smashed by the impact, but it was still recognisably human. And recognisable as…
‘Marlon Watson,’ I said, loud enough for Jay to hear, above us at the poolside. ‘Fucking hell, but that’s one unlucky family.’
‘Marlon?’ Martin echoed.
‘Age twenty-three or twenty-four, born in nineteen seventy-two, when The Godfather was the big film of the year. Mr and Mrs Watson didn’t have a lot of imagination when it came to naming their kids. This one had a brother called Ryan; he was born in nineteen seventy, the year Love Story came out. There was a sister, too, so I’ve been told, older than either of them. Her name’s Mia; spot the movie.’
‘ Rosemary’s Baby.’ Alison was a movie buff.
‘That’s right: a movie about the spawn of Satan, and Bella Watson called her kid after its star.’
‘Why did you say they’re unlucky?’ Jay asked.
I looked up at him. ‘Don’t you remember? Maybe not; it’s a few years back now. I wasn’t long on the force when it happened. This one’s brother was at Maxwell Academy, that hellish school they pulled down a few years ago, and his uncle, a bad bastard called Gavin Spreckley, had him selling heavily cut smack to the other kids, under the protection of the janitor. The Saltire newspaper got on to it and ran the story. We didn’t have enough on Gavin to lift him, but Ryan was arrested and remanded to a secure unit. He disappeared from there; he didn’t break out, though, he was snatched. The staff were careless, or maybe somebody was bribed. Anyway, a day or so later a
