‘Where do I go with this one, sir?’ he asked, quietly, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear him sounding uncertain.
‘Not far,’ I suggested. ‘We’re stymied for identification until Sarah’s done her autopsy. But,’ I paused, ‘does anything strike you about this, Sam?’
He frowned, considering his answer, considering, as it turned out, whether to tell the head of CID to his Italian-Irish face that he was talking bollocks.
‘I heard what you said to Dr Grace,’ he ventured, once he’d decided. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see this being a crime of sexual jealousy. It’s not just that there were two vehicles involved, so at least two perpetrators. It’s the fact that they’ve gone out of their way to make it difficult to identify the bodies. The number plates are gone: not melted, gone. The passenger cabin, that’s clean. Arthur swears that there was nothing in it, no paperwork, no old crisp packets or drinks cans, none of the stuff you’d expect in a working van. Also there were two seats to the fire, not just in the back but in the cabin too. We’re not meant to know who these people are, or who this van belonged to: at least we’re not meant to find out in a hurry.’
He was earnest and he was right. I had to smile. ‘One thing they couldn’t have known, though,’ I countered. ‘We’ve got our brightest and best on the case. Plus we’ve got my remarkable record of being a lucky bastard. Fingers crossed for the autopsy, Inspector, and fingers crossed also that these people didn’t know where the chassis number is on Movano vans.’
Aileen de Marco
I didn’t have any constituency business in Glasgow that Saturday morning, but I told Bob that I had as an excuse for getting out from under his roof.
Marriage hadn’t been on my agenda at the time I met him. I was Deputy Justice Minister in Tommy Murtagh’s Holyrood administration, but my immediate boss was on the way out and I was expected to move up, and into the Cabinet. However, nobody ever imagined that I would replace Murtagh himself. . nobody but me, that is.
I wouldn’t join an orchestra with the sole ambition of playing second fiddle; it isn’t in my nature, any more than it’s in Bob Skinner’s. I am sure that’s what attracted me to him, that shared trait that we have, attracted me strongly enough for me to ignore any concerns over the fact that he was married. Not that I had many of those. I’ve always taken the view that when someone plays away, it’s because the game at home isn’t so hot, and so as far as I’m concerned Dr Sarah Grace’s problems were entirely self-inflicted.
Maybe I should have felt uncomfortable about it, and maybe what happened in the end is my punishment for my lack of scruples. Maybe, but the truth is I don’t give a bugger. I fancied the man, I sent out signals and he came homing in on them like a guided missile. Even then, I wasn’t bothered about marrying him, but by that time I was First Minister of Scotland, so when he asked me I agreed, on the grounds that it would be seemly, but more practically that the tabloids wouldn’t be hounding us if we were man and wife.
Bob would tell you now, I’m sure, that I saw it as a political alliance from the start. You know what? He’d be right. From the day I came into politics, my ambition has always been the same: to go as far as I can. That’s true of many of my fellow members of Scotland’s parliament, but I don’t know any who appreciate that there is a life beyond that building if you’re young enough to go for it.
I have never stood for Westminster, but that’s only because I haven’t tried. . yet. I will, soon. My party will resume power after the next election; of that I’m reasonably confident. I’ll become First Minister again, I will serve loyally and faithfully for a couple of years, and then I’ll use my influence in London to find myself a safe seat south of the border at the next Westminster election, expecting to move straight on to the front bench.
That’s been my scenario for a while, and when I married, it was in the assumption that I’d have the full support of my husband in making it happen. When I say full support, I mean that exactly. Robert Morgan Skinner is many things; some are pleasant, some are not, but he has one quality that sets him apart. He’s an achiever, and I figured that with him spearheading my back-room team, there was nowhere I couldn’t go.
My game plan was to take him out of the police force, where he was approaching burn-out anyway as I saw it, and make him my chief of staff. Who better for the job of managing my rise to the top than someone who loved me but loathes just about every other politician in existence? I thought I could bring him onside, I honestly did. I thought that his unquenchable ambition would transfer to me, making that easy.
Unfortunately, my grand design had a couple of flaws. One you know already, I’m sure; Bob’s infuriating and unbending resistance to the idea of a single, unified Scottish police force, to which I am committed irrevocably, as part of my plan for stuffing Clive Graham’s lot at the next election. I’d prepared the way a year or two earlier by asking Bob to do me a paper on the subject, on how it would work. He did that, without setting out any furious counter-argument, so his blowing up at me when I told him it was going to happen was completely unexpected.
I might have hung in there and gone to work on him. If I had done, I might have, could have, won his support or, if not, won his silence at worst. I’ve decided not to, because now I know that my ship is sunk, holed below the waterline by the other thing I hadn’t anticipated.
When Bob and his second wife split, I assumed that she would take her kids with her wherever she went. Even after she decided to go back to the US, and the children stayed with Bob, I was sure that it would be a temporary arrangement and that once she was settled they would join her. I mean that’s what mothers do, isn’t it?
But no, not that one. She and Bob worked out their friendly, no-fault split with a shared custody arrangement that meant effectively that the kids were with us most of the time. Was I consulted? Was I hell! No, regardless of the fact that I’m a legislator and leader of the country’s largest political party, I found that I was expected to be a Goddamn mother figure as well!
Sorry, that is not me. It’s not that I hate kids. What it is, I don’t understand them, I can’t empathise with them, I have no interest in them. Thank God we had a nanny or I’d have blown a fuse a long time ago. As it was I let Trish get on with her job, and she enabled me to get on with mine.
I probably shouldn’t have phoned him that Saturday morning. He assumed I was checking up on him, and maybe I was. He likes having a shoulder to cry on, preferably female. I know that because he used mine for a while. We didn’t speak for long, but in the time that we did, things went from worse to irrevocable. At the end of it, we both knew our marriage was in pieces, and that all the counselling in the world couldn’t put it back together.
To tell you the truth, for all my blazing anger at his intransigence, I was relieved. No more sham, no more Mummy Aileen, no more Sex By Numbers with sighs afterwards. His, not mine. If he couldn’t make me come, that was his lookout. The only pressing problem I had left after our Saturday conversation was that I was saddled with Paula fucking Viareggio as my chum at Clive’s bloody concert.
No, that’s not fair. Of all the women in that circle, I like Paula most; she’s honest, up front, a truth-talker, and not affected by her business success. The rest?
There’s Alex, prodigiously talented they say, but endowed with all the same qualities that I’ve come to dislike so much in her father.
There’s that DI I met once, Stallings; ten minutes with her is like watching
There’s a hugely repressed lesbian superintendent called Mary Chambers.
There’s the widow Steele, with her miracle child, a police goddess with shards of shattered glass ceiling at her feet, yet with something very cold and rather scary at her centre.
And then there’s the newly returned Sarah; if you want him back, you can have him. . honey.
Yes, you can keep all of those ladies, as far as I’m concerned.
It was only Paula’s blooming maternity that made me regret having been manoeuvred into inviting her. But I had been, and I had to make the best of it. So I decided to let the government car service be her taxi, freeing me of the chore of driving her myself, since I no longer had plans to go on to Gullane after I’d dropped her off.
I called her to tell her about the arrangement, and also in the vain hope that she might pull out. She was up for it, though, excited, even. How was she to know that when she told me that she was wearing the same colour dress as me, I almost screamed at her, for putting the glace cherry on the icing on the pile of shit that my week had
