Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (13 page)

'In
case you were in any doubt, I was joking.'

'That's
good. Handling rejection's never been my strong suit.'

'What
do you mean?' 'I mean I don't like being chucked.' 'What happened with your
fiancee? Who really chucked whom?'

'Let's
say that we agreed it wouldn't work.'

'Sure
you did. And that's why you have her photograph on the sideboard downstairs.
All these girlfriends of yours, yet she's the only person on display, other
than your mother. Something big happened. What was it?'

'Don't
push it.'

'Ah,
you did catch her, then.'

Sharp,
way too sharp. 'Actually, she got pregnant, then had our child aborted without
telling me about it.' 'So you broke off the engagement?' 'Yes. Immature, eh?'

'No.
Principled, I'd say. I can tell how much it hurt you to finish with her, yet
you had to.'

'Oh
yeah? And why did I have to? Why couldn't I have gone along with it?'

'Because
if you had, you'd never have been your own man again, not completely. And
someone like you has to be, doesn't he?'

He
looked at her, so close that it was an effort to focus his eyes on her. She was
right; he had searched for months for an answer to the riddle of himself. Now
Rhian had come up with it, on "their second night together. And of course,
Alex, her father's daughter, was exactly the same; she had his
no compromise
gene. That was why it could never work again,
because neither of them was physically capable of doing the thing that would
make it so; yielding to the other's will.

'So
what about you?' he asked. 'What would you do in Alex's shoes?'

'I'd
have the baby
...
but I'm not Alex. I
mean, I'm not knocking her or condemning what she did. It was her right. But
families are a two-way commitment, aren't they? Could you handle a family,
properly, and your job at the same time?'

He
rolled on to his back and stared at the ceiling. 'You were at that post-mortem
this afternoon. Did it affect you?'

'I'm
a doctor, or I'm going to be. I'm being trained not to form emotional attachments
with live patients. Dead ones on a slab should be no problem for me.'

'Don't
give me theory, give me fact.'

She
thought about it for a few seconds. 'It wasn't the dissection,' she said finally.
'It was the commentary; the way Sarah described, for the tape, the things that
had been done to that man. Did you know that he actually drowned in his own
blood?'

'No,
but it doesn't surprise me. I looked into the guy's face, or where his face should
have been, as soon as we took him out of the water. I saw his hands and feet,
his legs, his chest, everything that was done to him.

'I
saw worse on Friday night; yes, worse than that. And you know what? Afterwards,
I went home with Karen, my sergeant; she was there, she saw it too. We've got a
history together, and right then we needed to help each other get over that
hellish thing. We spent the night together because neither of us could face
going home alone. I'm sorry if that hurts you, but it's the truth.' He looked
into her eyes, and saw her flinch.

'Now,
to bring it all back to your original question, could I handle family life? The
fact is, Rhian, I don't know for how much longer I can live as I do, and carry
on doing my job. I'm really envious of Bob, in that respect. I need stability,
I need the normal home life that Alex and I had for a while. I suppose I've
been looking for it since we split.

'Otherwise,
things like Alec Smith's murder, or like looking at that bloke last night and
realising that there's a fair chance we'll never even find out who he was
...
I have this fear that the job will
either break me, or take me over to the point that there will be no room in me'
- he tapped his chest - 'here, inside me, for anything else. When I can look at
an ex-colleague with his-' He stopped himself. 'When I can look at that then go
home as if it's just another day at the office, as a man, I'll be done.'

She
gripped his fingers in hers, squeezed them and held them between her breasts.
'Then let's just make sure, that there's always someone there for you.'

She
rubbed her forehead on his shoulder. 'Maybe I've been looking for something
too,' she whispered. 'And maybe, just maybe, the first time I saw you, I knew
I'd found it.'

14

Detective
Inspector Mario McGuire wore a broad grin. 'Welcome to the shadowy, glamorous
world of Special Branch, Sergeant,' he boomed. 'Welcome to the centre of this
spider's web of intrigue. Exciting, isn't it?'

Stevie
Steele leaned back in his hard chair and looked around the drab room, with its
bare, magnolia-painted walls, and its single small window. 'Wow,' he said.

'This
is the reality of the job, Steve. We're the true crime-prevention department;
we keep an eye on potential trouble and even more important, on potential
trouble-makers. That's the way it's always been. Back in the fifties and
sixties, we used to keep an eye on the local communists and fellow-travellers:
trade-union guys, left-wing Labour Party guys and acknowledged CP members. Now
terrorism, more than anything else, is the perceived enemy.

'Back
in the old days we had help, of course - local journalists who'd go along to
meetings and report back to us for a few quid. We could trust the local
newspaper hacks, they were poorly paid and always needed the money. But there
were journos on the other side too. The NUJ had a communist as its president
back in the sixties: wherever he travelled, all over the country, he had a
Special Branch escort.

'The
boys in Glasgow, they had a permanent bug in the offices of the
Daily Worker,
but of course the hacks there knew it, so there
was never anyone in their bloody office.

They
used to do all their business in pubs and send their copy to London from phone
boxes. Everything we did, of course, was to ensure that guys like them couldn't
deliver this great democracy of ours into the slavering Soviet maw.'

'It
worked, then,' said Steele, dryly.

'Not
really. Like I said, SB priorities changed in the early seventies when Ireland
blew up. We had to stop playing with the wild-eyed Left to a great extent and
concentrate on the real danger. It's been a different game since then, with a
constant IRA and Loyalist threat for thirty years and, at the same time, the
growth of international terrorism. We haven't always been successful in
preventing attacks, but for every one that's succeeded there have been a right
few others that we've headed off.'

'Isn't
it quieter now than it was?'

'No
it ain't. Sergeant. There will always be fanatics with a mission to destroy,
quote, unquote, our decadent Judea/ Christian Western society, and there will
be idiots among us who admire and support them. The Special Branch task has
never really altered; the enemy just changes every so often, that's all.'

'Have
you always liked politics, Inspector?'

'It's
Mario in here and in the pub - and I've never liked politics. That's why I'm in
the job. In fact I hate politics. It doesn't matter whether they are the
politics of state, religion, race, gender, or just wealth, they are inherently
fucking dangerous and they can get you killed. There used to be a famous
copper in the West of Scotland who argued that all crime was related to the
theft of non-ferrous metals. I disagree; I believe that all crime is related to
politics of one sort or another. They got me shot, for a start.

'I
tell you, Stevie, politics can be hazardous to your health. Most of the people
who practise them are well meaning, well-educated fools, but a minority of
them, usually those who make it to the very top, are bloody dangerous.

'That's
why we're the key players in the Alec Smith investigation. Alec moved in this
world and he was good at it - the best, I'm told. He was an apolitical guy,
just like me, like Brian Mackie, like Andy Martin, tasked with keeping an eye
on politicians of all sorts.'

'Tasked
by whom?'

McGuire's
laugh was a bellow. 'By politicians, of course; to keep an eye on their
enemies. But from the start, SB has taken the view that there can always be an
enemy within.'

'So
what are we looking for here?' Steele asked.

'We're
looking for all the enemies Alec might have made in his time. We'll do it by
sifting through the files for the period in which he was in my job, and through
the private papers which I've brought here from his house.'

'And
where do we begin?'

'We
begin by interviewing the Deputy Chief Constable, who might be the only bloke
here who can tell us anything about Alec Smith as a man, as well as a police
officer.'

Steele
gulped, involuntarily, as McGuire pushed himself up from his chair, and stepped
out from behind his desk. 'Come on; he'll be waiting for us now'

The
Inspector led the way out of the Special Branch suite. They marched briskly out
of the high-rise section of the Fettes headquarters complex and along the link
which led to the Command Corridor, above the main entrance, where the chief
officers were based.

McGuire
leaned into a small room, off to the right. Ruth

McConnell
smiled up at him.
Gorgeous as
always,
he thought. 'The Boss
in?' he asked.

'Yes.
He said to send you along when you arrived. Go on, and I'll buzz him.'

'Thanks.'
Beckoning Steele to follow, he walked a few yards to Skinner's door, knocked
and led the way inside.

The
Deputy Chief was in uniform, unusually. He caught McGuire's surprised glance as
he rose from his swivel chair and stepped across towards the low seating in his
reception area, where Neil Mcllhenney was sitting. 'Visitors,' he explained. 'A
delegation from the Mossos Esquadra, the Catalan national police force. Then
tomorrow, I'm off to a three-day conference in London. Great week, eh?' he grumbled.
He pointed to a coffee filter in the corner of the big, bright room with a
wall-to-wall window which gave Skinner a view of everything going on outside.
'Help yourselves, if you want. I've had my ration for the morning.'

Steele
poured coffee for McGuire and for himself and joined the senior officers around
the low table.

'So,
Mario,' the DCC began briskly. 'What do you want to know?'

'Everything
you know about Alec Smith, sir. We've got nothing out of North Berwick, or out
of his widow even. We were told that you and he used to mix socially as well as
professionally. I was hoping you might help us get a handle on the man.'

'I
thought you might say that. Yes, Alec and I had a common interest away from the
office; he was one of the Legends for a while.'

Steele
frowned, puzzled.

Skinner
explained. 'A bunch of us play five-a-side football
-
or four, or six, depending on how many turn up - every Thursday night at North
Berwick Sports Centre. We've been at it for twenty years and more; we call
ourselves the Legends because these days we're all so fucking old.

⁴
We had a vacancy, oh, maybe ten years ago. I knew
Alec had played a bit in his youth, and he lived in East Lothian, so I asked
him if he wanted to come along. He was one of us for about five years, till he
chucked it. He decided his right knee wasn't up to it any more.

'But
that was the extent of our social mixing. The Legends is as much about the
get-together in the pub afterwards as it is about the game itself but Alec
rarely mixed in with that. More often than not, he'd get dressed, pay his
money, say goodnight and go home to Pencaitland. He never came to any of our
Christmas Dinners, no matter what time of year we held them
...
they're never at Christmas.

'On
the odd occasion he did come to the pub, he rarely had much to say. He was
pleasant enough, you understand; I never heard Alec Smith say a hard or rude
word in my life. He was just a very quiet man, that's all.'

He
turned to Mcllhenney. 'Neil, you worked with him in SB once. How did you find
him?'