'The way things stand we will not get into that safe without Alec Smith's personal combination… and DCI Smith was not the man to leave it lying around for us to find. I'm pretty sure it was stored away in his head when he died. Stevie Steele's already asked the wife if she knew; but he never as much as told her what day of the week it was.'
'What about the usuals? First four letters of pi, wife's date of birth and so on?'
'Pick any two from a couple of dozen commonly used, sir. We've only got two shots at getting it right. After that the lock will freeze up and it'll be easier to get in and out of Chernobyl intact.'
'If it comes to it, Mario, you may have to take those two shots, and hope that the magic ingredient's on your side.'
He put the phone down and shifted the baby in his arms. 'Where's your mummy then?' he asked her, as he raised her, kicking and chortling above his head 'Cutting up cadavers? Or making our lunch? Or both?
'Ann. There she is.' Through the open conservatory doors he saw Sarah, in white shirt and cut-away denim shorts, pluck James Andrew from the top of his brightly-coloured climbing frame. She turned towards him, to exchange one child for another, he guessed.
She was in the doorway, arms outstretched to take Seonaid, when the phone rang again. His burden gone, he picked it up, to hear Andy Martin's crisp, sombre voice.
'Morning, Bob. How's the stookey?'
'Itching like hell — which my wife tells me is probably a good sign.'
'For the sake of all concerned,' Martin grunted dryly. 'I thought I should bring you up to date on something. We've now completed a full trawl through DVLA and through all the manufacturers and importers of the sort of vehicle that hit you on Saturday. There haven't been that many supplied countrywide in black or very dark blue, with the tint of glass you describe, but there are some.
'Spike Thomson, for example, has a black Toyota Landcruiser with smoked glass windows…'
'Spike?' Skinner snapped. 'He's another Legend!'
'I knew you'd say that,' the Head of CID countered. 'Forget the Legends link, for God's sake, and forget Spike. When that car hit you he was broadcasting live to East Central Scotland, filling in for one of the weekend presenters who's on holiday. His vehicle also has a factory-fitted alarm and immobiliser system which makes it thief- proof.
'However, one other potential suspect car, a black Range Rover with glass to match, was reported stolen in Barnton on Sunday evening, after the owner and his wife got back from a weekend away in their other car, and was discovered this morning, junked in a small gorge up behind Nunraw. It's bashed to hell, but we're going all over the inside for prints and looking at the body work to see if we can find anything clinging to it; fibres from your jeans, for example.'
Skinner sighed. 'Okay,' he said heavily. 'Maybe it was someone with an unconnected grudge. Maybe Scotland did Alec, right enough. Maybe this man Luke Heard did hire someone to batter Diddler unrecognisable. Maybe my Legends theory is all balls.
'But I want you to do one thing for me, Andy. I heard you on radio yesterday, selling the concept of the detective as the true forensic scientist. Now I want you to prove it. I want you to gather together all the evidence in all three cases, including the attack on me, and I want you to examine it minutely.
'Strand by strand, boy, strand by strand… and see if you can tie just two of them together. If you can, the rest will fall into place just like that… a web, with a big and very poisonous spider right at the centre.'
61
Dan Pringle's experience of bank managers had left him unimpressed; but Andrew John was different. For a start, he was a friend of Bob Skinner, and the Big Man did not surround himself with tedious or foolish people. But even more significantly than that, Pringle knew him of old.
More than thirty years before, the young Constable Pringle had occasionally drawn what were euphemistically known as crowd-control duties at Easter Road, home of Hibernian Football Club. He remembered the teenage wing-half who had forced his way into the side; one-footed but skilled, if not quite in the manner of Baxter or Puskas, a good passer of the ball and a solid tackier, and capable of bursting out of mid-field to change the course of a match.
Young Andrew John had flourished briefly in that sixties season, until visiting sides realised that he was at his most effective when Hibs were playing down their notorious slope, yet strangely anonymous and one-paced for the other half of the game. Word spread and he was marked accordingly.
The bubble had burst one winter day with the Hibees three-nil down to Falkirk before a sparse and unenthusiastic crowd, slogging uphill into cold sleety rain. Pringle had been there when it happened, when the wag had stood up in the front row of the season-ticket area and shouted, as the struggling midfielder allowed a blue- shirted opponent to evade him, 'See you, son, you're deceptively slow!'
Breaking all the unwritten rules, and a couple that were written, the young player had stopped and glared up into the murky stand. His hopes of lasting stardom in senior football, of great days at Hampden Park and around the world, all ended in that moment.
A month later he had been sent back to the reserves and, eighteen months after that, he had quit the game to concentrate on his career in banking, where there were, in those days at least, no hecklers.
'I saw you play, you know,' Detective Superintendent Pringle told him across the desk in his St Andres Square office. 'See if you'd had two good feet-'
'I'd have finished playing at thirty-five,' the banker retorted, 'and have come to see a guy like me to beg him to lend me the money to buy a wee pub somewhere. Now if I was a young player today, I'd work at it until I had two feet — and I'd do hill running as part of my training.
'Everybody used to laugh at the teams that trained on sand dunes, you know.' He paused. 'Don't start me reminiscing, or we'll be here all day. What can I do for you? You said when you phoned that it was something to do with the Diddler.'
Pringle nodded. 'That's right; the Shearer investigation. It's come to my attention that there was an incident at a bank function for business customers last Christmas. The Deputy Chief Constable suggested that I should get in touch with you. He hoped you might be able to tell us something about it, or you might remember a colleague who saw it.'
Andrew John gave a short, gruff laugh. 'Hah, that's come out, has it? I should have known it would.
'I saw it myself, Superintendent. Very unpleasant it was, at the time. Afterwards, the Diddler asked me to say no more about it, so I've never discussed it with anyone, until now.
'The man Heard must have had a drink before he got there, or he must have been going at the champagne flat out, for the party hadn't been going for very long before he started niggling away at the Diddler. In company too, it was; completely out of order.' The banker looked down and shook his head. 'Very unpleasant.'
'What happened exactly? We were told that the man took a punch at Mr Shearer.'
'Eventually, but there were a lot of verbals before that. Heard went on and on, just chipping away. The wee man tried to ignore him; I even took him away to another group, but the guy followed us. Finally, the Diddler said something back to him, something mild by comparison
… I think he joked that Paris Simons couldn't invest in a book of stamps without losing on the deal.
'That was all the excuse that Luke Heard needed; he dropped his glass and took a swing at the Diddler with his good arm.'
'Did he hit him?'
'No, no, he was well gone by then; he missed by a mile. The wee man saw it coming and ducked out of the way. I stepped in at that point, got hold of Heard and huckled him out the door. I told him that he wouldn't be welcome at another bank function until he apologised for his behaviour, both to the Diddler and to the Governor of the bank.
'All the top brass were all there, you know. They all saw it.'
'What did Heard say to Mr Shearer?'
John looked the policeman in the eye. 'He said, 'I'll fucking kill you, you little bastard.' His very words.'
