‘So he’s actually Lebanese?’
‘By nationality, yes.’ I stood to leave. ‘Would you like to be collected?’ he asked. ‘I can arrange for a government car.’
I smiled. ‘No thank you, Clive. We’re still political opponents, remember. I expect to have access to those in my own right before too long. Until then, I’ll make my own way.’
If that was the way he wanted it, yes.
Andrew Martin, Director, SCDEA
Mario McGuire and I go back a long way, fifteen years at least, to when he was a plod and I was still a raw detective constable. I’ve made chief officer status, and he’s only one rung short, so you could say that our careers have developed along parallel lines. You could say that, but I’ve always believed secretly that Mario has more ability than me, but less ambition.
I played rugby in my youth, at a very high level, but I set it aside when the job demanded, for that was my priority. As far as I know Mario never played any organised sport in his life, and certainly not rugby; probably just as well, because I’d have hated to have scrummed down against him. But if he had, and had been given the choice between an international future or early entry to CID and a fast track to the top, he’d probably have grinned that piratical grin and gone on to win a boxful of caps for Scotland. . or Ireland, or Italy, as he’d have been qualified for all three.
He and I do have one thing in common; it’s a link on which nobody ever comments, but I’m only too well aware of it, and I know he is.
Both of us made the same mistake: we each married cops. Mario and Maggie Rose got together on an investigation years ago, when they took the concept of undercover policing very literally indeed; they drifted into a union that seemed happy at first, until the smiles left their faces and the whole thing fell apart. Maggie had a brief breakdown, and Neil McIlhenney dropped a hint about a suicide attempt, but I didn’t pry.
Mario moved on, giving the force a wide berth second time around in his choice of partner, and I hear that Paula’s pregnant: great. Maggie remarried also, only she stuck her head in the lion’s jaws for a second time. But that’s too painful even to think about; it would only depress me.
Karen and me? That’s a long story. At first, she and I. . honestly, it was lust, pure and simple. Then I had a bad day at the office, a very bad day; my counsellor told me I could expect to experience posttraumatic stress and I told him he could expect to experience my boot up his arse, because I had always been mentally tight and able to walk away from a bad experience then move on to the next good one.
But he was right. I did have problems in the aftermath; nightmares, cold sweats, all the stuff that was only supposed to happen to other people. When they hit me, Karen soothed the fever when I needed it and I decided that what she gave me was what I wanted for the rest of my life.
And yes, I decided that I was well and truly over Alex Skinner.
I’m a Catholic, something else that McGuire and I have in common. But he’s pretty much lapsed, whereas I’m devout. . when it suits me. That’s why I went off the end when Alex had a termination without telling me. No, let’s be totally honest, Andy. While that was the reason I gave to everyone, myself included, I know now that the real truth was that I resented the fact that she’d made what was in effect a career choice that didn’t fit with the way I’d imagined our future.
I’ve known Alex since she was a teenager, a kid not as precocious as she looked, following her then single dad around like a puppy, and eyeing up every woman he ever dated, even Alison Higgins, whom he did a lot more than date, as a potential interloper.
When she grew up, she did so fast. The kid just disappeared and someone completely different took her place. When she and I got together, as she was moving into her twenties, I hadn’t kept up with her development as a woman, not at all.
Confession: I was pretty dumb where the female psyche was concerned. I had spent too much of my time sowing wild oats to notice that society had moved on from the one I’d grown up in. My mother was a traditional housewife, and I thought of my new young fiancee along those lines. Bottom line, I saw my career as more important than hers.
Alex? Homemaker? Mistake.
When he realised what had happened to us, her father actually apologised to me. I remember it well. ‘Your trouble, Andy,’ he said, ‘is that you’re an old-fashioned Scots proddy cunningly disguised as a Tim. There’s a lot of John Knox in you, not far from the surface. Okay, you might not see women as weak, sick and impotent like he did, and in the workplace you accept them without question as your equal, but at home, whether you know it or not, you’re still the sort of guy who wants the little woman there, tea on the table, kids fed and bathed, when you get home at night. I should have realised it earlier and warned you off, for my daughter will never be like that. I’m sorry, mate, for both of you.’
At the time I told him that he was talking bollocks, but he was right, as I proved with Karen, for that’s exactly what I made her into. I took a strong vibrant woman, encouraged her to leave a job that she probably did as well as I do, and in the process I diminished her being. Where once we had been two pieces of flint, in the end she and I couldn’t manage a spark.
Alex and I, though, we always did that. When our paths crossed again, after a few years, we found that our flame had never gone out, for all that we had stamped on it, hard.
Yet I insist, that wasn’t why Karen and I finished. ‘It isn’t unfaithful Andy I can’t live with any more,’ she told me in the end. ‘It’s the boring middle-aged fart you’ve become at home and the person you’ve made of me.’
We could hardly post that on the bulletin board, so when I moved out, everyone and his uncle assumed they knew why.
So, Alex and Andy, where are we now? Not where we were, and that is for certain. She will never give me dominion over her and I will never want it, never again. Yes, we have a relationship, but no, there’s no commitment on either side. The only rule is the one that she made, after her first surprise visit to my place, that neither of us will ever arrive unannounced on the other’s doorstep. What she does when I’m not there, I have no idea; and my job as Director of the Serious Crime and Drugs Enforcement Agency involves quite a lot of travel.
It was by sheer chance that I was around when Bob Skinner called me to ask if I could do him a professional favour. ‘No worries if you can’t handle it personally, but if you can’t, I’d appreciate it if you could send me someone senior to sit alongside Mario.’
But I was clear, and to be honest, I saw it as a chance of a long weekend in Edinburgh, since the interview he wanted me to do would inevitably last too long for me to get to my base in Paisley for any sort of meaningful work.
My SCDEA badge didn’t work when I arrived at the police head-quarters building in Fettes Avenue, not even with ‘Director’ on it in bold print. The door security officer didn’t know me from Morecambe and Wise. . his lack of humour was written all over his face. . and he made me wait until I could be fetched by someone from CID.
Mario came down himself. He was ready to take a piece off Cerberus, but I hauled him away before he could do too much damage. ‘That’s the trouble with these civilian staff,’ he growled, ‘no nous, no initiative. Ah, it’s not their fault, I suppose. The politicians want to see as many uniforms on the street as possible so we con them by hiring civvy security officers. We have to vet them to make sure they’re legit, and that takes time, then once they’re in the job, they don’t have any flexibility about them. Last month, one of them made Aileen wait down here until Gerry Crossley came to collect her. You can imagine what happened when Bob found out.’
‘Oh yes,’ I laughed. ‘Has the fall-out cleared or is the place still radioactive?’
He walked me up to the head of CID’s office. It hadn’t changed a bit since it was mine, save for the photo of Paula (and bump) on the desk and a couple of very classy landscapes on the walls.
I took a guess. ‘Your mother’s work?’
He nodded. ‘That’s what she retired to Italy to do. She gives them away, you know.’
