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
