But there’s another possibility, a suspicion that lingers at the back of my mind and won’t go away. He might have realised that it was time for the Glimmer Twins (back in our rock and roll youth, some wag bestowed on us the nickname adopted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and it stuck) to be separated, in the interests of good policing in Edinburgh. You see, neither one of us is the other’s strongest critic, and there were times when, probably, one of us should have been.
With Neil’s move the old CID city structure is back in place, with Detective Inspectors Sammy Pye, in Leith, Becky Stallings, at Torphichen Place, and, as of the very day of Paula’s inquisition, Ray Wilding, on promotion to DI at Gayfield Square, reporting directly to me from their divisions. God help them all, I laugh to myself sometimes, without my mate McIlhenney to hold me down when they screw up.
‘What’s your next move?’ Paula asked, breaking into my musing.
‘I’ll interview Varley, formally, tomorrow. Because what he’s accused of is so bloody serious, the boss and I are agreed that I need to have a senior officer from an outside force alongside me. Bob’s persuaded Andy Martin to fill that chair. As head of the Scottish Serious Crimes Agency he outranks me, but what the hell, he lives in Edinburgh now, so it’s handy for everybody. Also, he doesn’t know Varley, only of him; their paths don’t seem to have crossed at all when Andy was one of us. When we’ve taken his statement. . that’s if he gives us one. . I’ll probably charge him then send a report to the Crown Office. It’ll be up to the fiscal to decide whether to go ahead with a prosecution.’
That’s the way it works in Scotland; officially, the police investigate crime as agents of the Crown.
‘Will he?’
‘Too bloody right he will,’ I growled, ‘or I’ll want to know why. But that will only be stage one. As the chief said, we’ll have to find out all there is to know about Mrs V’s cousin Freddy, the mystery man, and we’ll have to go back over Jock’s entire career to see if we can find other instances of him having tipped him off about anything. He’s putting a separate unit on that. He’s going to use David Mackenzie, his executive officer. . again, he has no history with Varley. . putting him together with another outside man.’
‘Who’s that? Do you know yet?’
‘He’s bringing in a man called Lowell Payne. He’s a DCI from Strathclyde; I believe that he and Mackenzie know each other slightly, from our David’s days in the west.’
‘Strathclyde?’ She winced. ‘That’s a bit like having next door wash your skid-marked underwear, isn’t it?’
‘This man will be discreet. He’s hand-picked. The boss let it slip that he’s Alex’s uncle: he’s married to Bob’s sister-in-law, from his first marriage.’
Paula laughed out loud. ‘To think that you used to fret about us being cousins! Skinner seems to be filling this whole investigation with his family.’
‘Payne never was family, not really,’ I pointed out. ‘From what the chief told me, Myra Skinner had been dead for about eight years before her sister even met him. The bloke helped him out in an investigation about fifteen years ago, but since then he’s seen very little of him, and nothing at all professionally.’
‘He’s seen plenty of Andy Martin though.’
‘Andy’s not family.’
‘As good as,’ she murmured, with a sly grin. ‘He was engaged to Alex once, and it’s not long since he left his wife for her.’
‘Hey,’ I cautioned her, ‘that’s not true. Andy and Karen just came to the end of the road, that’s all.’
Her favoured eyebrow rose again. ‘Would that have been before or after he got caught shagging Alex?’
‘After,’ I conceded, ‘but the two of them had got over that. It wasn’t why they split.’
She smirked. ‘You may believe that, but most of female Edinburgh thinks she’s a bitch who crooked her finger and he came running back.’
‘Female Edinburgh better not let her father hear them saying it. Me neither, for that matter; Alex Skinner is okay.’ I smiled at a memory. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you about the first job Bob Skinner ever gave me. He had me looking after Alex when he had to bring her along to a crime scene. I was still in uniform at the time, but that night helped me through the door of CID.’
‘He did that?’ she exclaimed. ‘He took that chance?’
‘Come on, she was only thirteen at the time, and I was much too careful ever to consider that she might have looked a few years older. No, I repeat; Alex is okay. Besides, she and Andy are both career people now. That’s all they have time for.’
‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘and my school pal Lorna’s husband is a taxi driver. Alex has his number and she uses him a lot; from her place to Dean Village is a regular evening trip of his, but he never takes her in the other direction. And who lives in Dean Village? Andy Martin.’
I gasped in sheer admiration. ‘Paulie, my love,’ I said, ‘when the boss put Neil up for that covert policing job, it’s as well he had no idea what you’re capable of or he might have offered you to the Met instead.’
We were still laughing when the phone rang. I’d thought my life was complicated enough then: but what did I know?
Chief Constable Robert Morgan Skinner
The older I get, the more often I’m asked why I chose to be a police officer. My reply has always been simple: unlike too many people, I was lucky enough to find my vocation early in life and to have been able to practise it ever since.
That’s absolutely true as far as it goes, but it’s a pretty vague response, and I do not invite supplementary questions. If I did, the sharpest would be, ‘How did you find it?’
If it was put to me, my honest answer would be, ‘Thanks to Big John Wintergreen.’
Beyond doubt, most people would then ask, ‘And who the hell is Big John Wintergreen?’
John never existed, not in reality. He’s the doomed hero of a movie called
In the film, ‘Big’ John. . he was only five feet four. . is a motor-cycle cop in Arizona, whose dream, asleep or awake, is to be a detective, and that elephant under his ass is the Harley Davidson they make him ride and from which the movie’s title is drawn. He gets lucky; he’s in the right place at the right time and he’s promoted to plain clothes, homicide division. But it doesn’t work out for him. An unfortunate tendency always to say what he thinks, a dislike for the office politics, and a liking for his boss’s girlfriend, combine to see him busted back to traffic and back on board that two-wheeled pachyderm. The story has a very sad, but very beautiful ending, and I was choked up when we left the cinema, so I didn’t say anything on the train home, until we were almost at Motherwell. But all the time I was thinking about John and about his determination and about the job he had lived for and ultimately been denied, and as the train pulled into the station I said to my father, ‘Dad, I want to be a detective.’
‘Now,’ he replied. ‘That’s what you want now. Let’s see how you feel in five years or so.’
He didn’t say, ‘When you’re grown up,’ because I was almost as tall as he was by that time, but that’s what he meant. His ambition for me was never stated, but I knew it was the obvious, that I would follow him into the law practice that he had started after the war. He had a couple of partners who did carry it on eventually, but I have no doubt that he saw me settling into his chair when he was finished with it.
There was a time when circumstances might have made me do that, but the flame that John Wintergreen lit didn’t go out overnight as, most probably, he’d hoped it would. It was still burning six years later, when I graduated from university with an arts degree, and when I applied to join the police force in Edinburgh. I ruled out Glasgow because I didn’t like the way things were at that time in that city. I’d seen too many cops chasing the wrong people for the wrong reasons, and I wanted no part of that.
I made detective, pretty quickly; once there, I kept Big John’s fate in mind. I made a point of being
