Edinburgh, very few people contributed to his going-away present, but we’d all have been happy to chip in for his train fare.
The gaffer read my mind. ‘He’s changed,’ he rushed to tell me. ‘Apparently he’s cleaned his act up. He had some sort of a breakdown, possibly alcohol-related. When he recovered he was a different man. He’s a superintendent now, in uniform, and he’s the exec officer in the command suite through there. It seems that nobody calls him “Bandit” any more.’
‘Mmm,’ I grunted. ‘Have you ever seen a stripy leopard?’
He laughed at that one. ‘Come on, Lowell, forgive and forget. Look, Bob Skinner would not have entrusted this investigation to him if he had any doubts about him. From what the ACC told me, it’s a very delicate situation. You should take it as a compliment that you’re wanted on it. Do it, get a result and. . no promises mind, but it might give you an edge when the next superintendent slot comes up.’
I took that with a pinch of salt. I’d been passed over for promotion three times already, and I was pretty sure that them upstairs had decided I’d reached my ceiling. Not that I was complaining; I’d never expected to make it beyond inspector, but my career surged in my mid-thirties. It started with a move to CID about fifteen years ago, as a DS. I was promoted fairly quickly after that and for the last five years I’ve been a DCI. I’m a year short of fifty and have thirty years’ service, so I’ll be in the happy position of being able to retire on full pension while I’m still young enough to enjoy myself, and with a lump sum that will help Myra, my twelve-year-old, through university if that’s where she wants to go.
One more promotion would be nice, but that wasn’t the carrot that made me say, ‘Okay, sir, I’ll take it on.’ No, when it came to it, it was the prospect of working close to Bob Skinner. It’s not that I’d ever held that ambition, rather that I was curious to find out what sort of a boss he really is, without it being permanent.
I first met Bob at the funeral of his father-in-law, Thornton Graham. Thornie would have been my father-in- law too, but my wife Jean and I weren’t married when he died. I’d heard of Skinner even then, and not just from her. He’d been running the drugs squad in Edinburgh for a few years, he’d had a number of high-profile results, and the grapevine talk had him as a certainty for the top job in Strathclyde one day, since he’d been a Motherwell boy. A few senior officers were said to be afraid of that happening, for he was reputed to be a very hard man with no sense of humour and no time for below-average performance.
Some of that talk must have come from his enemies, for when he and I did meet, he didn’t scare me a bit. Yes, he’d just made detective super at that time, while I was still a sergeant, and yes, since he’s only a couple of years older than me, that did put our careers in perspective straight away. But he didn’t treat me as other ranks. He was polite, pleasant and generally friendly, although I did have the impression that behind it all he was quietly assessing my suitability for Jean, his late wife’s sister.
His daughter Alexis was there too, early teens, a year or two older than my lass is now. I recall that one or two of the senior relations frowned on the way she was dressed, but Jean would have none of it, telling them that Thornie would have wanted her that way. She told me, afterwards, when the funeral sandwiches were finished and everyone had buggered off to get on with their lives, that one of them had also muttered that the kid took after her dead mother, and that it hadn’t been meant as a compliment.
‘They thought our Myra was flighty,’ she said, ‘to put it politely.’ Then she laughed. ‘She was too, and Bob was putty in her hands.’ Another crack in that legendary armour. ‘He’s been a lost soul since my sister died; maybe the one he had with him today will make him happy.’
She did, as it happened, but only for a while: Alison, her name was. When they split, Jean’s take was that it hadn’t worked because she’d been as career-driven as him.
Since that first meeting, I haven’t seen a lot of him, but Alexis has always kept in touch with her aunt and with the younger Myra; she takes a special interest in her cousin, because she was named after her mum. His path and mine did cross, professionally, though, just after the funeral. He had an investigation in progress and a line of inquiry led him to Hamilton, where I was stationed, in the sergeant’s uniform that I thought I’d be wearing for another twenty years. I checked something out for him, informally, but I never did find out if it led anywhere. It wasn’t long afterwards that I hung up the tunic and moved into CID. I did wonder at the time whether he had anything to do with it, but when I asked him, at my wedding reception, he laughed, and said, ‘Do you think your bosses would listen to a single word of mine, Lowell?’
‘When do I start?’ I asked the chief super.
‘Tomorrow afternoon; ask for the chief constable when you get there. Stay till you’re done, in a hotel if you have to. They’ll be paying your expenses.’
‘Jesus. It’s that urgent?’
He told me to report to the Edinburgh headquarters building, two o’clock sharp. I’d been there once before, for a liaison meeting, but that had taken place in what looked like a gymnasium, near the entrance, so I knew very little about the layout of the building. I showed my ID, two minutes early, to an unsmiling civilian on the reception desk. He peered at it until a light went on in his eyes, then he nodded, with an attentiveness that would have shamed Uriah Heep. ‘Yes, Mr Payne. The chief constable’s asked me to send you up to his room. Go up those stairs behind me, then along the corridor that you’ll find straight ahead of you. You’ll see his office on the left. I’ll call and let his assistant know you’re coming.’
The directions were spot-on. When I reached the chief’s outer office, the door was open and a man stood framed by it. He was in his thirties, medium height, well groomed and in civvies. ‘DCI Payne,’ he greeted me. ‘I’m Gerry Crossley, Mr Skinner’s personal assistant; he’s asked me to show you right in.’
The Man Himself was standing in front of his desk when I entered. He stepped towards me, hand extended. ‘Lowell, I’m glad you can do this,’ he greeted me as we shook. ‘How are Jean and the wee one?’
‘Jean’s fine, thanks, and the wee one’s not so wee any more. She’s twelve.’
‘Twelve?’ he gasped. ‘Bloody hell! It all goes by so fast. But why should I be surprised? My own kids are shooting up. Mark’s starting high school, James Andrew’s becoming a bruiser, and Seonaid’s too damn smart for her own good.’ There was a gentleness in his eyes as he spoke of them. Then he switched to official mode; in that instant they turned hard as steel, and I admit that I was shaken as I found myself looking at a man I’d never met.
He led me to a small meeting table in the corner of the room; as I sat he poured two mugs of coffee from an ancient, battered, filter machine on a stand against the wall. ‘Milk?’ he asked.
‘Yes, please, but no sugar.’
He nodded. ‘Alf Stein, my old boss, gave me this contraption when he retired and I succeeded him as head of CID. He also taught me how to get the most out of it. When I leave, it’ll stay here.’
He handed me a mug. I took a mouthful and wondered how Stein had survived to retirement.
Bob spotted my reaction. ‘Alf smoked a pipe,’ he volunteered. ‘His room was always as stuffy as hell, but nobody ever got drowsy at his meetings, not when we were drinking that stuff.’ He sat, facing me.
‘David Mackenzie’s going to join us shortly,’ he continued, ‘but I want a quiet word with you first. I need to emphasise that he’s not the character you knew. I’m well aware of what he was like. He tried to come the smart- arse with me once, and I had to put him right. But I still rated him highly enough to poach him and bring him to Fettes.’ He leaned forward, frowning. ‘David had a rough time, in a rough situation, a few years ago. He came out of it full of self-doubt, and for someone as he was that’s not good. He hit the bottle, and it hit him back. For a while I thought we were going to lose him from the job, but I refused to allow that. Now he’s one of my real trusties, and a better officer than he was before he crashed. Just don’t call him “Bandit”, not even in fun.’
‘Noted,’ I said.
‘Good; now, the job I’ve brought you here to do. I’ve got a cop who’s gone bad. I need to know how bad. Best case, you may come to say simply that he’s let himself down. Worst case, you might find that he’s disgraced my force. If that’s how it turns out, I will fucking crucify him, upside down.’
‘What’s your instinct?’ I asked him, bluntly.
‘Worst case,’ he grunted. ‘This man has had a respectable, but low-profile career, so circumspect that a man who left this force with the rank of chief superintendent was able to come back this morning as an independent interviewer because he’d never met him. When you’re that good at not being noticed, what the fuck else are you good at?’
I took another swig of the coffee. It must have made me reckless, for I asked him, ‘What about you? Presumably you knew him.’
‘Yes,’ he confirmed. There might have been a warning in his tone, but I pressed on.
