seemed more content than I’d ever known him. Even then, I had the feeling that he was hiding in that marriage. From what, I don’t know; maybe from himself.
His other flaws? He can be cruel, he can be lethal, he can, on occasion, be petty. He makes instant judgements about people and they are usually irreversible, be they right or wrong. That exposes him to accusations of favouritism, of gathering an elite of cronies around him, and when he was less senior it laid him open to the sniping of his enemies, most notable among them a man called Greg Jay, a former CID colleague who found out in the hardest way that it is one thing to dislike Bob Skinner, but that crossing him is a luxury nobody can afford.
His inner circle? I’m one, so is Mario, Neil McIlhenney was a third, before he left for London, and Brian Mackie, my predecessor, the fourth until he went to Tayside. The closest of all, though, is Andy Martin. Bob promoted all of us, but Andy has flown highest, to a level at which there simply wasn’t room for both of them in our force.
There are, or have been others; Stevie, of course, and now DC Haddock. You look at young Sauce and you might well think that he’s Bob’s diametric opposite. In some ways he is; he’s gawky, and he has a tendency to say too much at the wrong time. But he’s also perceptive, and he has an analytical brain. It wasn’t the first thing that brought him to my attention. . no, his daft nickname did that. . but once I could see past the air-scoop ears, I realised that a serious mind lies between them.
Recently, the boy Haddock showed his patron’s propensity for landing risky women, but he’s come out on the right side of it. From what I’ve been hearing lately, that relationship survives; the surprising thing is that far from frowning on it, Bob seems to be taking an almost fatherly interest in its health.
And Griff Montell? Where does he stand in the serried ranks of Skinner’s army? That’s what I wondered as I peered at his file, at the summary of a career that began in South Africa, then migrated to Edinburgh. And what did Bob want me to do with him?
‘Your call,’ he’d said, ‘entirely your call.’
Sure, and what have I just said about Skinner being devious? What had Montell done? Why was he about to enter my office for a disciplinary interview that could lead to proceedings that would fire him from the force? He’d screwed up an undercover operation by telling his girlfriend all about it.
Yes, she was a cop, and yes, he’d assumed she was trustworthy, but the whole thing had blown up in his face, and very publicly at that. A serving officer had just been charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, and the indications were that he’d defend the charge.
Worse, from what Mario had added when he’d called me to break the news, there might even be a defence of impeachment, putting Montell’s girl on the rack. Either way he’d be a witness, and wasn’t that the real problem? Cowan was going for sure, but if he was still a serving officer, would he have any career left himself after taking a hammering from the defence in the witness box? Would I be doing him a kindness by recommending dismissal? Was that what Bob wanted me to do?
‘Hardly,’ I said aloud. For any appeal to an employment tribunal would go public, and if Montell chose he might allege that he’d been fired for personal, and not professional reasons. It wouldn’t hold, but it would be messy. No, there was another solution somewhere. It was in Bob’s mind already, and he expected me to catch on without being told.
‘Thanks, pal,’ I murmured as I pressed the button that would summon my visitor.
Detective Constable Griffin Montell
I took a deep breath and reached for the door handle. I’m not a nervous guy as a rule, but I could feel a fluttering inside. It reminded me of an oral exam I once faced as a student. My degree hung on it, and I knew that I would walk out of that room as a success or as a failure.
Earlier, I’d had a call from Sauce Haddock, apologising for dropping me in it. I admit that the day before I’d been thinking about ripping his head off with my bare hands, but when I’d cooled down, I knew that if our roles had been reversed, I’d have handled the situation in exactly the same way he did. I told him as much. He thanked me and wished me luck with my interview, from which I guessed that it must have been public knowledge.
‘You’ll come out okay, Griff,’ he said. ‘I did.’
I was grateful for his support, but I lacked his confidence. I was going in to see the deputy chief as a serving detective constable, one who’d expected, just forty-eight hours earlier, to be promoted to fill a vacancy for detective sergeant. Whatever Sauce thought, there was a chance I would come out with my card marked for dismissal. If that happened, it would have huge consequences.
Having ‘Sacked from the police force’ on your CV is not the best reference on the job market. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to stay in Britain. I’m a Commonwealth citizen with a Welsh grandmother, but I haven’t lived here for five years, so I don’t have permanent resident status. Being chucked out of the country was my biggest fear: I’d left South Africa for a whole raft of reasons, but chief among them was my need to make enough money to support my kids from my failed marriage. If I was forced to go back there, we’d all be in trouble.
I knew the woman who was holding my life in her hands, but not all that well. She has a rock-solid CID background, but she’d been moving back into uniform and heading for the command suite when I secured my international transfer and arrived in Edinburgh. I knew her husband much better, Stevie Steele, God rest him. He was my DI in Leith, before Sammy Pye. We’d got on, and I carried the small lingering hope that his widow might bear that in mind.
I knew why I was seeing her and not the chief; that didn’t need to be spelled out. My sister Spring and I moved to Scotland at the same time and bought a flat together in Stockbridge, right on the Water of Leith and right next door to Alex Skinner, his daughter. She and I became friends, and both of us being young, free, single and liberated, there were evenings when the five-yard journey home from her place seemed too long for me to contemplate. We were discreet about it, but inevitably there was a degree of office gossip, at Alex’s end, not mine: I don’t believe there’s anyone in the force stupid enough to accuse me of trying to sleep my way to the top, not to my face.
Our closeness was over by the time Alex moved house; she never spelled it out but I learned later that she’d taken the hump with me because I didn’t tell her that I’d been married. Since neither she nor I was looking in that direction, I didn’t think it was relevant, but I made a mental note not to be so secretive in the future.
She didn’t stand up to greet me, and she wasn’t smiling either. She was too busy frowning at an open folder on her desk, at some documents whose crest I recognised, even upside down. It was my career file, going right back to the beginning in South Africa. She finished the page she was on, and then looked up.
‘Good afternoon, DC Montell,’ she said. I tried to read her eyes as she looked at me, but they weren’t telling me anything. She was in uniform, but she wasn’t wearing her jacket, a small informality that might have been a good sign. . or might have meant, on the other hand, that she didn’t want to get blood on it. For a second I wondered if I should have worn mine, then was happy that I hadn’t, in case she’d taken it as an indication that I’d settle for being booted out of CID, as a better option than the sack.
She pointed to the corner of the big wood-panelled room, towards a low L-shaped leather seating arrangement, set on two sides of a coffee table. She rose to her feet. ‘When the chief had this room,’ she explained, ‘he held most of his meetings over there. I like to do the same.’
I looked at her as she led the way. DCC Steele is at the low end of medium height for a modern woman, five feet six tops, and her standout feature is probably her reddish hair, which she wears fairly short and has done, they say, since she went back into uniform. She has a figure that my sister, who works in Harvey Nichols ladies, would find easy to clothe. If she’d a mind to, Spring could make her look voluptuous, but that’s no way to think of a deputy chief constable, especially when she holds your career in her neatly manicured right hand. Neat: if there’s a single word to describe her, that’s it.
She steered me towards the seat facing the window. ‘Would you like coffee?’ she asked.
