Skinner's Ordeal (2 page)

`Call Brian Mackie too, just in case there are foreign nationals on board. Oh, and you might as well tell Mario he's on Special Branch duty as of now. He's to report to Brian this morning, as acting DI.

`Remember, Mags, every available officer. By God, we're going to need them!'

FOUR

The spinning blue light in his rear-view mirror snapped him out of his trance, breaking the fearful thoughts which gnawed at his stomach.

In his quarter of a century as a police officer he had attended so many scenes of carnage, that sometimes he had the strange feeling that the bulk of them had fused together in his mind, into a single bloody experience. Some had not. He recalled a bomb outrage in an auditorium in the heart of Edinburgh, where many had been killed and maimed, torn apart as they had watched an innocent entertainment. He recalled the aftermath of a fire-fight, where four people had been shot dead, and one of his own men badly wounded. He had walked in the aftermath of these bloody occasions, and of many others, not coldly, but professionally and objectively.

Yet there was something un-nameable dreadful about this call, something that had him trembling behind the wheel of his BMW.

Skinner glanced at his speedometer as the siren's whine sounded behind him. He was doing 85 m.p.h. down a straight stretch of the B6368, just past Humbie. He had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he could not remember overtaking the patrol car. He slowed down and waved an acknowledgement behind him, but the vehicle overtook him at speed and pulled in, stopping unnecessarily quickly in his path, and forcing him to brake hard. Two bulky officers jumped out of the white Peugeot and headed back towards him.

Hissing with annoyance, the Deputy Chief Constable pressed his window button. The two uniforms were both Constables, in their late twenties.

`Who the fuck d'you think you are,' shouted the driver as he approached. 'Michael bloody Schumacher?'

When Skinner felt his temper go, he always began counting to ten, but he rarely made it past six. He swung the door open and stepped out of the driver's seat to face the man and his partner, staring at them, unblinking, with deep blue eyes. His features were set hard as he moved to meet the policemen.

`You tell me who I am, Constable,' he said, with something in his tone that made the driver freeze in mid-stride and his passenger edge backwards towards the patrol car.

The officer's truculence seemed to drain out of his boots. He stared at Skinner, his mouth hanging open, trying to say, 'Sorry sir,' but struck speechless.

`What's your name, Constable?' Skinner snapped.

The man recovered control by standing rigidly to attention. `PC Reader, sir.'

`Very good, Reader. At least that's something you know. Listen, I don't have time to fillet you in the way you deserve, but let me tell you this. From now on I'll be watching you like one of those things . . .' his right index finger jabbed upwards at a kestrel hovering in the still morning air above the hedgerow on the opposite side of the narrow road, intent on its prey . . and if I ever hear of a complaint against you of incivility to a member of the public, I'll make you wish you'd joined the Brownies rather than this police force. Now tell me this. Have you two been called to an emergency near Gifford?'

Reader nodded. 'Yes, sir.'

Òkay, here's something else you should know. That takes priority over everything, especially over hassling your DCC.

Now get back in that car, keep that blue light flashing and lead me to the scene, just as fast as you can.'

FIVE

The door of Yester Kirk was open as the two cars swept through Gifford village, their speed moderated.

People stood on the pavements of its wide main street, in groups of two or three, some in deep conversation, others staring at the sky, as if awaiting a slow-motion replay of the disaster.

A white-collared minister waited outside the Kirk. Skinner thought that he looked stunned, as if trying to reconcile his faith with the reality of what his Saviour had allowed to happen on his doorstep.

The cars swept up the hill out of the village, climbing towards the moors. At first the road was lined with trees, clinging to the last of their autumn colours in the wan morning sun, but gradually woodland gave way to cattle-dotted fields as the slopes began to level out.

The transition from farmland to moorland was almost instantaneous. The cars rumbled across a cattle grid, and past a final copse of trees; suddenly, the pasture grass had been replaced by acres of brown and purple heather, rolling and undulating in a strange alien landscape. Skinner looked ahead as a mottled valley opened out before him. On the far side, in the middle distance he could see three, no, four thin columns of black smoke rising towards the sky.

The smoke grew nearer, the columns thicker as they drove on over and through the bumps and hollows of the otherwise featureless moorland. At last they came to a fork in the road, with twin signs each pointing to
Duns, via Cranshaws
, and
via Longformacus
.

A uniformed Sergeant stood by the signpost, as if on guard. Skinner flashed his headlights at his escort car, and pulled to a stop himself. The officer approached as he climbed out.

Skinner recognised him at once. 'Hello, Sergeant Boyd,' he said, but without his usual affable smile of greeting. 'Where is everyone?'

The whey-faced, forty-something policeman gave him a loose, wavy salute. 'Chief Superintendent Radcliffe took the rest of the lads up the Longformacus Road, sir. He left me here to divert the traffic and to direct. So far there's only six of us here.'

Skinner grunted. 'That's a start. But in just a few minutes this place is going to be like Princes Street at the Fireworks.' Footfalls sounded behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw PC Reader and his partner approach from their parked car.

`You two,' he said, not unkindly, beginning to feel guilt over his savaging of Reader, who, after all, had been only doing his job, if a little over-aggressively. 'Stay here with Sergeant Boyd. Use your car as a road block, and divert any traffic from Gifford down the Cranshaws Road. As our people and the other emergency services get here, send them on up the road.' He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. 'Others, and especially the press and telly, hold here. Don't let them past you, and don't let them head on down the other road where they can get round behind you. I don't want cameras all over the scene, at least until the rescue operation's well under way . . . Sergeant, get on your radio and make sure that this road's being blocked at the other end too. I'm off to find Mr Radcliffe.'

He folded himself back behind the wheel of the white saloon and headed off down the narrow roadway, towards the four columns of smoke. They were beginning to spiral on a light morning breeze, which Skinner guessed would have been triggered by the turning of the tide in the estuary a few miles distant. On either side of him, the heather was thicker than ever. The Longformacus Road was steep and twisting as it plunged and climbed in and out of a succession of featureless gullies. At first the smoke beacons were dead ahead of him but as he grew ever nearer, they veered round to his left with the curving of the road.

As he drove he was concentrating more on the smoke signals than on the road, and so, when his eye was caught at last by the shapeless, mangled body he had to brake hard, throwing himself painfully against the restraining seat-belt.

The thing lay across the roadway, blocking most of it, only a few yards short of the crest of a steep climb. At first, Skinner registered only a red, torn mass beyond the bonnet of the BMW. Breathing heavily, he squeezed his eyes shut as he composed himself. Then, running his fingers through his steel-grey hair, he braced himself and stepped out of the car.

SIX

It was a sheep.

As Skinner stared at it, shuddering in spite of himself, he could see, protruding from the carcass, the long, jagged piece of metal which had caught the animal as it plunged from the sky, eviscerating it and hurling it, in a trail of gore and entrails, from the heather in which it had been grazing across the road. It was almost wholly red, looking for all the world as if science had produced a new strain of pre-dyed wool. His nostrils were filled with the smell of it, the almost palpable reek of blood and guts and faeces, and he turned his head away, staring back down the slope where the rest of the flock had gathered together as if for security, against the terror which had seized one of their number.

Suddenly his senses were caught by another odour, one which overcame even the stench of the sheep. It was an acrid smell of burning, of the reek of ignited aircraft fuel which still hung over the fields. He looked up the slope, to its crest; his dread returned as he realised that he was very close to the disaster scene. As he stared, a faint voice reached his ears, borne on the breeze.

With an effort of will, he switched off his revulsion. Seizing the dead sheep by its bloody forehooves, he dragged it from the roadway into the heather, ignoring the slithering sound it made as more of its innards were loosed into the light of day.

Wet tendrils of vegetation tugged at his calves, soaking his woollen trousers, and he swore softly. Leaving the animal to the attention of the huge black crows which were circling above, he jumped back out on to the tarmac and opened the BMW's boot. Rummaging inside he found his trusty old black Wellingtons and pulled them on, discarding his black Loakes. He had carried his rubber boots, and their predecessors for as long as he could remember, all year long in successive motor cars.

The pedals were awkward under the heavy, ridged rubber soles, and so he eased the car slowly up the last few feet of the climb, pulling it off at the summit into a flat grassy area, beside a navy blue police personnel carrier which had been parked there. Inside sat a man, his face buried in his hands. Skinner looked at him and decided, quickly, that he could wait.

The long shallow valley spread out before him, like a subdivision of Hell. The closest of the four smoking columns was perhaps thirty yards away. The heather around it was burning and its heat reached out to him, yet not even the high octane fuel could make much progress through its thick growth, saturated as it had been by the heavy, almost continuous rain of one of the wettest Scottish autumns on record. Beyond the fire, as if contained by it and the other three main blazes, hundreds of yards away in the far slopes, a great black slash, perhaps half a mile long and fifty yards wide, had been scorched into the valley floor. Here and there, isolated flickers of flame and tendrils of smoke drifted upwards. At the head of the valley, lay the plane's twin engines.

Skinner closed his eyes. As vividly as if he had been there, he saw the plane's belly crash into the ground, exploding in a white-hot blast. He saw the engines cartwheeling on. He saw the deadly rain of jagged metal plunging from the sky.

He opened his eyes to escape the vision, and felt a renewed trembling wrack his body. The sheer scale of the disaster seemed almost too much to take in. As he looked down into the valley, he thought of his own recent flights, and felt the guilt as an involuntary surge of relief swept through him, that others were lying there, not him nor his own.

Standing out against the dark scar, and around it, against the purple of the heather that remained untouched, Skinner saw a sea of myriad spots of colour. There were reds, blues, greens, yellows, whites, hundreds of them, scattered in a great circle all over the walls and floor of the valley. Some lay still on the dark ground, others flapped on the breeze.

Skinner knew what many of these coloured markers represented, and his eyes moistened at the realisation. Among them were more than a few Day-Glo splashes. He guessed that they might be life-jackets donned in some last faint hope.

The aircraft had blown apart on impact. All around Skinner, and all around the crest of the site, pieces of shrapnel, like the one that had slaughtered the sheep, were tangled in the undergrowth, or sticking into the ground. The only part of it that remained more or less intact was the tail section. It lay, recognisable but upside down, at the top of the southern slope.

For a second the DCC felt that he would be overwhelmed by the immensity of the thing, but suddenly looking down, he saw five small figures moving among the wreckage. They were all in uniform, and all wore Wellingtons. The officer closest to him, who was perhaps 300 yards away, wore a cap heavy with silver braid.

`Charlie!' Skinner shouted. The man looked up, and the two headed towards each other through the heather, one down the slope and one back up, each of them looking not at the other, but at their feet, as they walked.

They were fifty yards apart when Skinner's eye was caught by something away to his left.

A grey line showed just above the stubby, thigh-high shrubs. He veered towards it, motioning Radcliffe to follow, but not looking at him. As he drew closer, he saw that the grey shape was at the centre of a deep circular depression in the ground-covering plant. A fist of apprehension grasped at his stomach.

He was still almost ten yards away when he knew for certain that it was an aircraft seat. It was lying on its side, its back towards him and it was impacted into the ground. As he closed the distance, he realised that the seat was still occupied. He stepped around to the other side.

The body strapped into the chair was that of a man. It was intact, but the head hung at a grotesque angle, and the legs were broken and bent back under the chair. The face was bloody and unrecognisable, and the blue business suit was torn to shreds. Skinner guessed that while the heather might have cushioned the impact as the seat hit the ground, it had taken its toll too.

Chief Superintendent Radcliffe's footsteps sounded behind him and then stopped. Skinner heard his colleague's heavy breathing interrupted by a sudden sharp gasp as he caught sight of the victim.

`God, sir,' he said. 'We've all rehearsed this often enough, but it doesn't really prepare you, does it?'

Skinner turned to face him. 'No, Charlie. Nothing ever could.' He nodded towards the valley. 'What's it like down there?'