Private Investigations

Copyright © 2016 Portador Ltd

The right of Quintin Jardine to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in this Ebook edition in 2016 by
HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

eISBN: 978 1 4722 0569 8

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About the Author

Quintin Jardine was born once upon a time in the West: of Scotland rather than America, but still he grew to manhood as a massive Sergio Leone fan. On the way there he was educated, against his will, in Glasgow, where he ditched a token attempt to study law for more interesting careers in journalism, government propaganda, and political spin-doctoring. After a close call with the Brighton Bomb, he moved into the riskier world of media relations consultancy, before realising that all along he had been training to become a crime writer.

Now, more than forty published novels later, he never looks back. Along the way he has created/acquired an extended family in Scotland and Spain. Everything he does is for them.

He can be tracked down through his website
www.quintinjardine.com
.

Praise for Quintin Jardine

‘A triumph. I am first in the queue for the next one’
Scotland on Sunday

‘Well constructed, fast-paced, Jardine’s narrative has many an ingenious twist and turn’
Observer

‘Very engaging as well as ingenious, and the unravelling of the mystery is excellently done’ Allan Massie,
Scotsman

‘The perfect mix for a highly charged, fast-moving crime thriller’
Glasgow Herald

‘[Quintin Jardine] sells more crime fiction in Scotland than John Grisham and people queue around the block to buy his latest book’
The Australian

‘There is a whole world here, the tense narratives all come to the boil at the same time in a spectacular climax’
Shots
magazine

‘Engrossing, believable characters . . . captures Edinburgh beautifully . . . It all adds up to a very good read’
Edinburgh Evening News

By Quintin Jardine and available from Headline

Bob Skinner series:

Skinner’s Rules

Skinner’s Festival

Skinner’s Trail

Skinner’s Round

Skinner’s Ordeal

Skinner’s Mission

Skinner’s Ghosts

Murmuring the Judges

Gallery Whispers

Thursday Legends

Autographs in the Rain

Head Shot

Fallen Gods

Stay of Execution

Lethal Intent

Dead and Buried

Death’s Door

Aftershock

Fatal Last Words

A Rush of Blood

Grievous Angel

Funeral Note

Pray for the Dying

Hour of Darkness

Last Resort

Private Investigations

Primavera Blackstone series:

Inhuman Remains

Blood Red

As Easy As Murder

Deadly Business

As Serious as Death

Oz Blackstone series:

Blackstone’s Pursuits

A Coffin for Two

Wearing Purple

Screen Savers

On Honeymoon with Death

Poisoned Cherries

Unnatural Justice

Alarm Call

For the Death of Me

The Loner

Mathew’s Tale

About the Book

Former Chief Constable Bob Skinner has uncovered his fair share of shocking crime scenes over his thirty-year police career. But few have affected him quite as much as the horrifying sight he finds stowed in the back of a stolen car that collides with his own on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

As his former colleagues investigate the mystery, Skinner is left to take on the unusual challenge of tracing a multimillion-pound yacht, vanished from its mooring.

From the outside, the two events couldn’t seem less connected. And yet, as the body count rises, a link surfaces that could provide the key to both.

And as discord spreads within the newly unified Police Scotland, it will soon become clear whether Skinner is on the side of the angels . . . or working against them.

This book is dedicated to Mr David Lewis, consultant vascular surgeon, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, and his dedicated team. He’ll know why.

One

I’ve never felt more positive than I did when I left home that day for the start of my working week; I was the new Bob Skinner, new career, new attitude, new life; I’d turned a corner.

A couple of months before, I’d been in a proper mess, in such a confused state of mind that I’d taken myself off to Spain to sort myself out, and to try to shape a new life plan.

One exciting road trip with a friend was all it had taken. A different environment, a new challenge, and a satisfactory solution to a seemingly insoluble problem, and I felt that I was back in shape. When our journey was over, I had made a clear decision to walk away from the police service, for good. I even had a new job, part-time, one that was ideally suited to a man of my talents and experience.

Best of all, for the first time in years I had a secure and happy home life. I was reunited with my ex-wife Sarah, the mother of two of my five kids. Although she still had her own house in Edinburgh, we were spending more and more time
en famille
in Gullane.

Okay, my oldest son was a few months into a prison sentence, and his mother was about to marry a gangster, but isn’t it true that perfection can lead too easily to complacency?

I had set out that morning to spend some time in my office. The new employment? I am a director of a Spanish company, InterMedia, of which my friend Xavi Aislado is chief executive. It owns the
Saltire
newspaper in Edinburgh, but that’s only a small piece of its portfolio of online and printed newspaper titles, plus radio and TV stations, across Spain and Italy. It’s a real job; I have independent oversight of all group investigative activity, and I instruct young journalists on developing relationships with police that do not rely on brown envelopes changing hands.

Contractually it’s on a one day a week basis, but in practice I contribute more than that. I have a base in the
Saltire
building in Fountainbridge, and I share a secretary with June Crampsey, the managing editor.

That’s where I was headed on the Monday it all kicked off. I planned to spend the morning finalising a training manual I’d written, preparing it for translation into Spanish, Catalan and Italian, before moving on to a working lunch with an old acquaintance.

He had contacted me a couple of weeks earlier, asking for my help with what he had described only as ‘a certain situation’. It had taken that long for him to find time to meet me, so I assumed that whatever it was, it couldn’t be too pressing.

Before she left for work that morning, Sarah asked me to do her a favour. ‘Honey, I have a sudden, uncontrollable craving,’ she confessed, ‘for Marks and Spencer lemon drizzle cake. I woke up with it this morning; it must be the effect of reading Mary Clark’s book. I don’t have time to pick one up on the way in, and I’m not sure when I’ll be finished, so . . . would you be a love and call in there on the way to the office?’

What Sarah wants Sarah gets . . . it wasn’t always that way, I confess . . . although I was still wondering about ‘uncontrollable cravings’ as I cruised into the Fort Kinnaird shopping mall, and parked as close as I could to M&S.

Its food store is always busy, even at nine fifteen on a Monday morning: when I reached in and grabbed the last lemon drizzle cake from the rack, I beat a blue-rinse matron to the punch by less than a second. She glared at me, as if she expected me to hand it over. I smiled and shook my head.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but my future happiness may depend on this.’

She sniffed, and gave me another long look. It told me wordlessly that if I died in utter misery she wouldn’t give a damn, and allowed me to go to the quick checkout without a single fragment of guilt.

I paid and went back to my car, laying the precious confection, in its five-penny bag, on the front passenger seat. Before starting the engine, I called Sarah via Bluetooth.

‘Got it,’ I told her, ‘although I had to fight for it.’

‘I’ll bet,’ she chuckled. ‘Those cakes go like crazy.’

‘So, this craving of yours . . .’ I ventured. ‘Should I read anything into that?’

‘No, you should not,’ she replied, still with a smile in her voice. ‘As if . . .’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We have an extra room in Gullane.’

‘Which we could need this year,’ she countered, ‘when Ignacio comes out of the young offenders place.’

She had a point. Ignacio is the teenage son I never knew about until we met last year in Spain, by which time his reckless mother, Mia, had allowed his life to become seriously fucked up; he was going to need a secure roof over his head, and I did not want it to be hers. She was about to marry a man named Cameron ‘Grandpa’ McCullough, a millionaire Dundee businessman, whose legitimate enterprises had been built with cash laundered from serious organised crime. Better coppers than I had tried to put Grandpa in jail, but none had ever succeeded.

Initially, I had decided not to visit Ignacio in prison; my reasoning was that he’d be endangered if he was revealed as the offspring of a very senior cop. However, a few months into his sentence, I realised that we could waste no more time bonding, and a cooperative governor had allowed us private meetings, away from the open hall where routine visits took place.

‘He and I will discuss that next week,’ I told Sarah, ‘but you have a point. See you tonight.’

I ended the call, and turned on the engine, letting it warm up for a few seconds. With my foot on the brake, I slipped the lever from P for Park, into R for Reverse, then checked my mirrors, all three of them, and the screen that shows the view from my car’s reversing camera.

Satisfied that all was clear I began to reverse out of my space, slowly. I had travelled no more than a yard when, on the edge of my vision, I saw it coming, a red car travelling towards me at a speed that was way too high for a shopping mall park.

I braked, instantly, but it was too late; the idiot, a man in a hoodie, I registered, caught the nearside corner of my rear bumper, bounced off it sideways, into the middle of the narrow carriageway and stopped, just in time to avoid hitting a Grand Cherokee that was coming in the other direction.

The law is imperfect; whatever the constitution may declare, there are occasions where there is indeed an assumption of guilt, and that situation was one of them. I’d driven with due care and attention, yet I was well aware that insurance companies, and all too often the courts, take the view that the reversing driver is in the wrong, automatically. When I was a chief constable, I instructed my traffic officers that every incident should be approached with an open mind, but those damn insurers paid no attention.

My car, a nice silver Mercedes, was less than six weeks old, yet there it was with damage to its rear end, thanks to some clown who didn’t know the difference between a shopping centre car park and Brands fucking Hatch . . . and chances were, the bloody insurers were going to pin the blame on me!

Worst of all, the bag on the passenger seat had hit the gear lever, bursting it open and smashing Sarah’s precious lemon drizzle cake. That lit my fuse; I’d been a happy family man, joking with the love of my life, only to become, in the space of a few seconds, an explosion waiting to happen.

I popped my seat belt and stepped out, ready to do battle with the stock car driver in the red car; it was a BMW, I noticed, with a few years on the clock. I was ready for whatever story the bloke came up with, ready for a confrontation, ready to blow him out.

I waited for him to climb out and face me. To my surprise, he didn’t; instead he began to move forward, blasting his horn at the Grand Cherokee that was blocking the roadway, as if the sound could push it backwards. The big jeep didn’t move. Its lady owner sat behind her steering wheel, looking bewildered and a little frightened.

Giving her a wave and a sign that I hoped she would read as ‘Stay where you are’, I moved towards the Beamer. Its driver, seeing no way forward, started to reverse, but got no further than a couple of yards before slamming hard into a Mini that had come to a halt behind him. He was trapped; no escape route.

We made eye contact as I advanced on him. I saw a thin, sharp, youngish Caucasian face within the hood, eyes narrowed. I guess he saw a tall, angry, grey-haired bloke in a dark suit, white shirt and blue tie.

My view of him lasted for only a couple of seconds, for as long as it took a cloud that had obscured the low winter sun to pass by, and for a ray of light to hit the red car’s windscreen, reflecting into my eyes and blinding me momentarily.

I took a couple of steps to my left to escape it; by the time my vision had cleared the man was out of his car and legging it across the park. I gave a moment’s thought to chasing him, but abandoned the idea, for he was moving like a bat out of hell. I still go out running along the coastline in front of my house, but I never was a sprinter. I knew that he had too big a start, plus he had at least twenty-five years on me.

Instead I walked round to the Mini. Its bonnet had been crunched, and its engine had stopped, probably stalled on impact. The driver was also a lady, but older than the Grand Cherokee’s pilot. She was white haired and in her seventies, I guessed.

She was shocked. She stared straight ahead, heavily veined hands grasping her wheel, so tightly that her knuckles showed bony white.

‘What the hell was that all about?’ a voice demanded. Grand Cherokee woman, a striking redhead in her thirties who could have been modelling her M&S clothes, had overcome her initial scare and stood behind me.

‘You know as much as I do,’ I replied. ‘This thing,’ I nodded towards the BMW, ‘hit me, and the driver legged it.’

‘Why would he do that?’ she asked.

‘My best guess,’ I told her, ‘is that this is stolen, probably from this car park. Look, do me a favour,’ I added. ‘Will you take care of the old lady? She’s had a hell of a fright and might need medical assistance. If you do that I’ll call for help and alert site security.’

She nodded and stepped up to the Mini’s driver door, while I dug out my phone. I have the police communications centre number stored. I retrieved it and pressed the onscreen button.

‘This is Bob Skinner, formerly chief constable,’ I told the civilian operator who answered. ‘I’m in the Fort Kinnaird car park, close to T K Maxx and M&S. There’s been a traffic incident involving my car and two others. The driver of one of them, registration,’ I glanced at the plate, ‘Charlie Oscar Sierra One Echo, has fled the scene on foot. White male, twenties, slim, medium height, wearing a grey hoodie and blue jeans. I suspect vehicle theft; either that or he’s uninsured, and just panicked. I need police attendance, and paramedics for a third driver, an elderly lady who looks to be in shock, after the so-and-so drove into her vehicle.’

‘Officers and an ambulance will be with you as soon as possible, Mr Skinner,’ the man replied. ‘You’ll need to remain at the scene yourself.’

‘I know that, pal,’ I snapped: my temper was still on a hair trigger. In fact, I couldn’t have gone anywhere even if I’d wanted to, for our little section of roadway was blocked at either end by the redhead’s off-roader and the old dear’s damaged car.

Pocketing my phone, I turned to the BMW once again. The driver’s door was open and the engine was still running. I walked round, leaned inside and turned it off, using a handkerchief to twist the key and touching nothing else. As I did so I could see my own car through the windscreen. As I had expected there was a dent in the corner, but it looked drivable.

Backing out, I took a longer look at the red saloon. The personalised number gave no clue to its age, but from the dullness of its paintwork and its boxy lines, I judged that it had to be at least ten years old. For sure, ‘COSIE’, its personalised plate, was worth more than the car itself.

‘So why steal it?’ I murmured to nobody in particular. ‘Not just for the number surely . . . unless the guy’s a total idiot, for that only has value to the registered owner.’

I moved slowly around the vehicle, inspecting its damage. The collision impact on the front nearside wing was less than that on my Merc: old steel versus modern plastic, I imagined. There was a scratch along the side, the kind a vandal might leave with a key or a nail, but it was the rear end that had been most affected by the shunt. A light cluster was smashed, and the boot was distorted, its catch shaken loose.

I took out my handkerchief again, wrapping it round my fingers before giving the metal a firm push. But the lock didn’t take; instead the lid swung slowly upwards, opening fully and revealing what was inside.

In the moment that I saw it, I jumped backwards, my reactive scream muffling itself in my throat.

A child stared up at me, a little girl. She looked to be around the same age as my younger daughter, Seonaid. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was open too, as if she was as startled by me as I was by the sight of her. She was dressed in a tartan skirt and a blue quilted jacket. Beneath, she wore a sweatshirt with a cartoon penguin on the front, the type of garment that has taken the place of a blazer in many schools.

I reached into her place of containment and touched her cheek, as gently as I touch Seonaid’s sometimes, when she’s asleep, but I didn’t need to feel the coldness against my fingertips to know that the poor little innocent was dead.

I couldn’t put a number to the crime scenes I’ve visited over a thirty-year police career, or to the number of victims of violence I’ve stood over.

Latterly, I was involved in a couple of really bad ones; they got to me in a way that others hadn’t, and made me vow to walk away, to leave the bloody aftermath to others while I could still feel some compassion for the dead, before I became as dehumanised as they were.

I never quite managed that as a serving officer, not even as a chief constable, but as a civilian, that day in that car park, I did something I’d never done before. I buried my face in my hands, so that nobody could see my tears.

That’s how I was standing when the cops arrived.