A Hint of Death (A Bob Skinner Short Story) (Kindle Single) (4 page)

‘Look, Mrs Jones, I might be forced to share this with a senior officer, and hand the investigation over to others with no personal knowledge of the people involved. My problem is that everything Hazel says hangs on her physical description. Even if the record of the alleged abortion can be traced, it won’t identify Mr Christie as the father. As for the birthmark, she could have learned about that from you.’

Tammy Jones shook her head. ‘No, Sergeant Haddock, she couldn’t. I never knew about the damned birthmark until she told me.’

‘Hold on a minute, Mrs Jones!’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ve just told me that you and Mr Christie …’

‘Slept together, yes, but I have never seen him naked.’ She hesitated, looking down at her lap. ‘You see, I have my own peculiarity. Crawford was born in the south of Italy, a month early, when we were on a touring holiday; he was in the wrong position and they gave me an emergency Caesarean. The doctor who delivered him used a vertical incision and he made a dreadful job of stitching me up. He left me with the scar from hell. It’s quite possible it was the beginning of the end of my marriage. My husband found it repulsive, and so do I.

‘No way was I going to put Trevor off me before we even got started, and so I made sure that we undressed in the pitch dark every time; curtains drawn, lights off. Since he never saw my blemish, I never saw his.’

She seemed to reach a decision; she stood up, unfastened her black trousers and pulled them down, exposing her abdomen, all the time gazing at the ceiling. ‘See?’

‘Yes,’ Haddock gulped. ‘I’d have taken your word for that.’ He reached a decision. ‘And I believe what you’ve just told me.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Tammy Jones asked, as she rearranged herself.

‘Christie and I need another chat, that’s for sure. But if he contradicts you, we could be back to your word against his. Either way, the Fiscal would need corroboration to lay charges.’

‘I’m not kidding,’ she said, ‘he’s not getting the money back. Hazel would return it, I think, but I’m damned if I’ll let her. He needs to be punished in some way, without her being hurt any further. If our informal fine is the only weapon we have, then so be it. There’s some justice in that.’

‘I’ll talk to him. If he agrees to write off the money, that’ll be the end of it as far as I’m concerned … provided that you give me your word you’ll leave it at that too.’

‘I never want to see the man again.’

‘Then make sure you don’t.’

‘I’ll move Crawford to another school.’

‘There won’t be any need for that,’ Haddock told her, firmly. ‘He’ll be resigning. I couldn’t let him continue as a teacher, knowing what you’ve made me believe.’

‘Can you make him do that?’

‘On my own, probably not. But I won’t be alone when I see him; I plan to bring in the heavy team.’

He rose and she walked him to the door. They were in the hall when the phone rang. ‘Hold on,’ she said, picking it up.

‘Mum,’ she exclaimed, ‘what …’ As he watched her, the detective sergeant saw her face go deathly pale, she dipped at the knees and clutched the hall table for support. ‘I have to go,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be over when I can.’ Her hand shook as she put the phone back in its cradle.

‘What?’ Haddock asked, her fear infecting him.

‘It’s Hazel,’ Tammy Jones gasped, as the first tears coursed down her cheeks. She was trembling violently. ‘She’s dead. Mum came in and found her lying in the kitchen, with her head smashed in. The police are there now. They’ve made an arrest. It’s …’ Her eyes rolled, and she fainted.

‘I hadn’t appreciated until now how instinctive our trust in our teachers is, at every level.’

Bob Skinner’s expression was contemplative, but his tone was loaded with menace. Haddock had heard it before, and it had never gone well for the person lined up in his old boss’s sights.

‘Even Sauce, here, on his way to becoming a pretty decent detective once he does a bit more work on his objectivity: he still sees me as a mentor, and he trusts me enough to have come to me with this situation, after it blew up in his face.

‘Yes, I’ll admit to you that I chewed his arse for having confused the roles of police officer and mediator, but in practice, he got it right … or would have, but for you, Mr Christie.’

‘Me?’ the man in the armchair exclaimed. ‘I couldn’t have known what …’

‘Stop right there!’ Skinner snapped. ‘Everything that’s happened is entirely down to you. It’s all your fault; nobody else’s. You’re a liar, you’re a phoney and you’re a fraud. You have no conscience. Your daughter is in police custody now, refusing to speak, after being found sitting beside the body of Hazel McVie, with the hockey stick she used to crush her skull lying on the floor beside her.’

Christie buried his face in his hands. ‘Josey,’ he murmured.

‘You can chuck that, pal,’ the grey-headed cop told him. ‘It doesn’t fool me for a second.

‘Josey’s is yet another life you’ve ruined, just as you wrecked little Hazel McVie’s when you abused her, a pupil in your care.

‘
In loco parentis
, teachers are, in the place of the parent. On that basis, what you did to Hazel was almost incest. And she was only fourteen when it started. Man, the parent in me wants to smear you all over that wall. If DS Haddock wasn’t here I’d probably do just that.’

‘I’ll step outside if you like, sir,’ Haddock said, coldly.

Skinner glanced at him. ‘No, stay here, Sauce; that would put us in the wrong … and also he’d recover too quickly. I have other plans for this one.’

He looked down at the teacher. ‘Hazel’s sister told Sauce that she never recovered from what you did to her. You took an already introverted child, you fed her fantasies, and you used her as a sex object.

‘When it went wrong, you had your lady friend, your mistress, Mrs Andries, fix it for you, and afterwards you blanked the girl. The two of you filled her with the sadness that she carried for the rest of her short life … which you’ve now helped bring to an end, you cold-hearted, horrible bastard.’

Christie’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘I couldn’t have known what Josey would do, Mr Skinner.’

‘Yes, you could,’ the cop countered. ‘Sauce’s DI, Sammy Pye, checked her school records. He discovered that she’s been excluded twice for violence, once against a fellow pupil and once against a teacher. She should probably have been reported to the police for at least one of those, but her head teacher knew you and did you what he thought was a favour.’

‘Playground scraps happen all the time,’ Christie said. ‘Consider this before you accuse me of anything: I only did what Harold said I should; I told my daughter the truth about what happened to her mother’s jewellery, that it was sold to pay off a blackmailer.’

‘No!’ Something snapped in Sauce Haddock. The horror that he had managed to contain within him welled up and spilled over. He started for the man and would have reached him had Skinner’s arm not slammed across his chest, halting him in mid-stride.

‘You told her your version of the truth,’ the sergeant shouted, ‘the same carefully edited tale you spun to me, when my naive, unsuspecting questions backed you into a corner. You were afraid it would all come out, so you went on the attack and tried to use me as your foot soldier, to scare Tammy Jones out of coming back for more.

‘I nearly swallowed it; I had swallowed it, God help me. If I hadn’t talked to Audrey Shields …

‘You see, sir …’ He paused. ‘Why the fuck am I calling you “sir”? You see, Christie, I’d all but forgotten about you and Mrs Andries, until Audrey mentioned the girlie gossip that she’d heard at the school. But it was more than gossip to me. In our final year, Stewie Morrison saw the pair of you, parked in the woods up Corstorphine Hill. You never saw him but he had a right good look. What was it with you and that Volvo estate? Could you only get it up on a travelling rug?’

‘Easy, son,’ Skinner murmured, ‘or we’ll both wind up battering the shite out of this guy, and that would not do.’

When he was sure that Haddock was calm once more he turned back to Christie.

‘Everything we’ve said, that’s what happened, I’m sure. Whether you admit it or not, that’s irrelevant: I don’t give a monkey’s, because I know. You controlled poor wee Hazel, and you controlled Mrs Andries as well. When one became a problem you got the other to fix it. And after all this time, when it reared its head again, threatening to destroy your life, you had someone else take care of it, someone else you could manipulate, someone even closer to you.’

A phrase came back to Haddock. ‘There’s always a woman to blame,’ he murmured.

‘Guys like you really hate women inside, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Nothing’s ever your fault, it’s always theirs. A girl who was your victim is dead, and you don’t really give a shit. Your own daughter’s facing a life sentence thanks to you and still you’re shucking off the blame.’

‘I could not have predicted what my daughter would do,’ Christie insisted, calmly.

‘But she’d promised to do exactly that,’ the detective sergeant snapped. He took a sheet of paper from a pocket and unfolded it.

‘This is the statement that Jackie Wright, my colleague, took from Josey. I won’t read it all, just this bit: “Miss Christie said that the stolen jewellery was her last connection with her mother, and added, ‘If ever I find the person who did this I will kill him, I will fucking kill him.’ I had to pause the interview at this point until she controlled herself.” That’s Jackie’s record; if she said that to a cop, I’m damn sure she said it to her father.’

The teacher turned his face away, mumbling inaudibly.

‘Excuse me?’

He looked back at the detective. ‘I said, so what? Do you really think I took her seriously?’

‘Yes.’ The reply came from Bob Skinner. ‘I believe you did. When you thought about it you began to worry that having Sauce on your side might not be enough.’

‘You’ll never prove it,’ he snapped, ‘not in a million years.’

‘I’m not even going to try,’ Skinner said, ‘for I don’t believe that you actually ordered Josey to silence your accuser, not specifically. You’re too smart for that. However, you knew how furious she was, you knew of her history of violence and you did point her in the right direction.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘Simples, like those meerkats say. Until you told Josey about her in your twisted little tale, no way had she ever heard of Hazel McVie. Yet she went straight to her house and beat her to death. There are a couple of dozen McVies in the Edinburgh phone directory, and there’ll be a few more of them that are ex-directory, I’m sure. How did she know which one to pick?’

Christie’s eyes were impassive. ‘That of itself does not make me an accessory to murder.’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Skinner agreed, ‘not as the prosecution could establish to the satisfaction of a jury. But all three of us in this room know that the thought, and probably even the hope, was in your mind.’

‘No one has ever known what was in my mind,’ the teacher whispered.

Haddock shuddered as he gazed into the coldest eyes he had ever seen, and at a man who, he realised, had always been a stranger to him. He longed to leave there, to put his nightmare day off as far behind him as he could, to go back to the comfort of his girl and his safe, ordered life.

‘They’re going to have a good idea pretty soon, though,’ Skinner replied. ‘I don’t have any formal locus in this business. I’m no longer head of Sauce’s force and I’m only here at his request. But I do have friends, Christie. Once I’ve spoken to them and used my influence, this is what I’m confident will happen.

‘Josey’s charge will be reduced to culpable homicide, on a plea bargain. There will be no trial, but the Advocate Depute, the prosecutor, will make a statement to the court before sentence is passed. That statement will be full and frank, and will take in everything that Detective Sergeant Haddock has learned today. In that situation, in criminal court proceedings, there can be no defamation; you will be hung out to dry, in detail, in public, and you will have no comeback.

‘You can’t be charged with what you did to Hazel when she was a pupil in your care. You can’t be charged with causing her death. But you will be convicted nonetheless, on both counts, by the modern supreme court of public notoriety. End of career, end of comfortable existence, end of your life, as you’ve known it.

‘If I were you I’d probably look out my sharpest kitchen knife and run a bath. That was the grand Roman way out, wasn’t it?’

He turned to Haddock. ‘Come on, lad, let’s leave him to it.’

In the street outside, sitting in Skinner’s car, some minutes passed before either man could speak. It was Haddock who broke the silence.

‘Do you think he will, sir?’

‘Top himself? No, I don’t see that. What would he put in his suicide note? He doesn’t do guilt, and there isn’t another woman left in his life that he can blame.’

Read on for an exclusive extract from

LAST RESORT

Quintin Jardine’s brand-new Bob Skinner mystery

Out in May 2015 from Headline

Go to
www.headline.co.uk
to pre-order your copy now

W
hen the call came, the one that put me back in place as a functioning human being, I was, not to put too fine a point on it, really screwed up inside my head.

I had begun a year that seemed to be full of promise, but if I’d been granted foresight of what most of those promises actually were, I’d probably have stayed in bed on the first of January and waited out the next twelve months.

I’d have been on my own, though; even then I should have been able to spot the fault lines in my unstable marriage to Aileen de Marco.

When our relationship became public knowledge, a smart-arse broadsheet journalist wrote a flowery piece about the attraction of unlike poles, the policeman and the politician, the authoritarian (me) and the libertarian (her), and topped the allegorical nonsense off by labelling us ‘Scotland’s most magnetic couple’.

I fell for some of that for a while, until the day when I realised that it was the diametric opposite of the truth. Aileen and I were both leaders in our chosen professions and we were both (although I’d have denied it) ambitious. However, she was as authoritarian as me, and neither of us had any trace of compromise in our nature.