Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (16 page)

Now
here stood another young Turk in front of him. He
looked
up into McGurk's eyes - a long way up, since the lad was six feet five - and
saw that they were bright, lit with more than enthusiasm. He shuddered,
faintly, as he felt an army walk over his grave.

It's
nearly time to hand on the torch, he thought. Rose, McGuire, Mackie,
Mcllhenney, Steele, even Neville, and now this boy; hand-picked, all of them,
by Skinner and Martin. They 're the future and, in a very short time, Dan, they
'11 be the present. The Chief, Jim Elder, John McGrigor, me
...
maybe even Big Bob himself; we 're
being lined up to march off into the sunset with our fat pensions and our
gongs. Ah shit, it's been fun, though.

He
forced himself to listen to McGurk as he continued. 'The pathologist said that
she was confident of the general shape of the face and of the prominent
features. The cheekbones were too badly smashed for her to be certain of their
shape; she said that conceivably the face might have been longer, but that this
is her best shot at it.'

Pringle
grunted. 'Okay. Get it along to the
Evening
News
office, as fast as
you can; ask the desk sergeant to whistle up a bike. Then speak to Alan Royston
at Fettes and tell him it's on its way. He can get on to his contacts at the
paper and get it a good show; the front page, I hope.'

'I
could call the
News
myself, sir. I've got a contact there too.'

The
Superintendent's eyebrows rose. 'Is that so? Well, take some advice from your
old Uncle Dan, and forget about it. Alan Royston's the force Media Manager.
He's a civilian, a specialist, and he's our only contact with the press. The
DCC and the Head of CID are red hot on that; they both believe in controlling
the flow of information, and the best way to do
that
is to have it come through a single source. I see their point too; if every
bloody DS was free to play his own games with the papers, it'd be bloody
anarchy.'

McGurk
nodded, making a mental note to make his relationship with his journalist
brother-in-law purely social in the future. 'Understood.' He took back the
portrait from Pringle and headed for the door.

As
it closed behind him the Superintendent picked up his telephone and dialled the
Head of CID's office. To his surprise, Andy Martin answered the call himself.
'Where are Karen and Sammy Pye?' Pringle asked

'They're
checking vets in Edinburgh and West Lothian, to help Maggie with her
investigation. Alec Smith was shot full of animal tranquilliser before his
killer started to burn bits off him.'

'Jesus.
Just like bloody Daktari, eh.'

'It
wasn't Judy the fucking chimp that did that to him, I can tell you.' Martin
paused; a grim silence. 'What have you got for me. Dan? An ID on the floater?'

'No,
worse luck, but his likeness should be in the
News
this
lunch time. Sarah's done us a picture. We'll give copies to the dailies as
well, and television.'

'I've
seen what she's done. I've been sent a copy. Mr Average, isn't he?'

'Aye,
but he's someone's Mr Average.'

'So
what are we doing about finding him?'

'Now
we've got the e-fit, we're going to canvass houses from Roseburn up to your
place, up to half a mile distant from the river, initially. I know that sounds
a lot, but we'll use the Voters' Roll and eliminate households where there are
no males registered.'

'A
single woman might still know the man. Shouldn't you knock all the doors?'

'Give
me Neville and Pye when they've finished the vets and I could. Otherwise I have
to set priorities. It's holiday season, Andy; I've got my deputy, a DI, and two
DCs on leave.'

'Okay,'
Martin conceded. 'If you still need Karen and Sammy by then you've got them.'

Pringle
beamed. 'Thanks, Andy. I was half-joking when I said that.'

'Why?
It's a reasonable request. I don't want anyone ever to be able to say that your
investigation is less important, or has a lower priority than the Alec Smith
job. One's an ex-copper and the other's a nameless stiff who's been dead for
three days without being missed, but we have the same duty to them both, and
they have the same claim on my CID resources.'

19

'Ahh
bugger it, I hate this sort of job!' Mario McGuire shouted in sudden
frustration, leaning back in his chair, right fist punching upwards towards the
ceiling. 'My wife can sit with piles of case folders, going through them for
hour after hour like this, looking for linking factors. I don't have her sort
of patience. I suppose that's why she's a DCI and I'm only a poor bloody
Inspector.'

'With
prospects,' said Stevie Steele.

'Aye,
unless I get too good at this job and wind up stuck here like poor old Alec' He
stood up, walked to a small desk in the corner of the room, and switched on an
electric kettle. 'Time for a caffeine fix.' The Sergeant watched as he mixed
two mugs of Alta Rica coffee, added a dash of milk to each and brought them
across to the table at which they had been working.

'Right,'
he said. 'We're about a third of the way through working backwards; we've
eliminated the obvious no users -which is most of them - and set aside our
prospects. Let's see what we've got. You go first, Stevie.'

'Okay'
The Sergeant laid down his coffee and picked up a folder. 'In here are Angus
Morrison, date of birth June 28, 1954, and Wendy Forrest, bora April 4, 1959.
He was a bus driver, she was a low-grade civil servant. They lived together at
an address in Lasswade. They were founder members - as far as I can see the
only members - of something called the
Scottish
Republican movement. They were jailed in September 1991 for twelve years each
after conviction at the High Court in Edinburgh for possession of gelignite and
attempting to blow up an electricity pylon in Midlothian.

'According
to Alec's file, they were observed every step of the way. SB officers watched
them lay their explosives then lifted them before they could set them off.

'How
about them?' he asked. 'They should be out by now, with remission.'

McGuire
hunched his shoulders and took a sip of the strong coffee. 'Good trick if it was
Wendy Forrest. She hanged herself in her cell in Cornton Vale in 1995. Gus
Morrison's another matter, though. He was paroled in 1998. From what I remember
of that file, she reads like a poor wee mouse, but he was a real nasty
bastard.'

Steele
nodded. 'That's what it says right enough. It says also Alec Smith and another
SB officer gave evidence against them
in
camera;
but DCI Smith notes
on the file that Morrison got a good look at them all in the witness box. Where
will Morrison be now, d'you think?'

'He's
not under my eye yet, I can tell you that. He's out on parole, so the probation
service will have him under supervision. We'll check with them. Who's next?'

'Lawrence
Scotland. Date of Birth January 7, 1961, unmarried, lives in Gilmerton.
Usually unemployed in the past, but a known associate of criminals, most
notably one Tony Manson. According to this, Scotland was a known contact of the
Ulster Volunteer Force, and was suspected of killing several Catholics in
Northern Ireland during the 1980s. He was under SB surveillance, but became
aware of this. In 1990 he slipped his watchers and disappeared for several
weeks. There were
sightings of him in Ireland
during this period, which coincided also with a spate of assassinations of
senior Provisional IRA figures in Armagh.

'Scotland
doesn't seem to have been convicted of anything. There's a note on the file by
DCI Smith; all it says is "Interviewed, December 2, 1990," nothing
else, but there are no reports of activity after that.'

McGuire
grunted. 'I'm not surprised.'

'Why
not?'

The
Inspector looked at his colleague, unblinking. 'I've got a DC on my strength
called Tommy Gavigan. He's been in SB for years, can't go anywhere else. I
spoke to him on Sunday, just the two of us, asking for anything he knew about
Alec that wasn't on the files. He told me about that "interview".

'He
and Alec picked Scotland up at six in the morning; they drove him up into the
Pentlands, to the part the army uses, where no-one else goes. They got the boy
out of the car and walked him up the hill. Then Alec took out a revolver. He
took out one bullet, showed it to him so he'd know it wasn't blank, loaded it,
spun the chamber, put it to Scotland's head and pulled the trigger. The guy
fainted.

'Alec
kicked him in the ribs to bring him round and stood him up. He loaded another
bullet, spun the chamber again, pointed the gun right at the middle of his
forehead and pulled the trigger. Scotland shat himself and dropped to his
knees, crying like a baby.

'Alec
looked down at him and said, "Next time, Lawrence, there'll be six bullets
in the fucking gun." Then he and Gavigan just walked off and left him
there, squatting in his own shit.'

Steele's
mouth hung open in amazement. 'How did Smith manage to make sure that the
hammer hit an empty chamber?'

'He
didn't.' 'You mean
...'

'Five
to one against first time, two to one the second; if Scotland had lost the bet,
they'd have left him there and the Army would have buried him.'

'Just
like that?'

'Just
like that. The guy was believed to have killed at least ten people and he was
thumbing his nose at us.' 'But
...'

'Either
way, he never did it again. Gavigan's been keeping an occasional eye on him.
Does the file say where he is now?'

'Still
in Pilton. He's got a job now; he's been with Guardian Security since 1995.'

'Guardian?
Jesus! And that dopey old bastard Tommy never thought to tell me.'

'Maybe
he didn't know that Smith had gone there.'

'Maybe
not indeed,' the DI conceded. 'Alec never told him things; he just told him to
do things.'

'What
else have you got?'

'One
more. Shakir Basra, date of birth not known, but believed to be around 1950,
resided in Little France. An Iranian who wangled political asylum after the
Shah fell; he was kept under surveillance here after he moved up from London.
The main thing about him was that he was suspected of sexually abusing
children, and of several child murders in London. He was never charged there
but, according to the file, SB actually had a photo of him with an
eight-year-old boy who was found raped and murdered near Craigmillar Castle in
1994. It's missing from the folder, though; the file stops just after that time
with a handwritten note by Alec Smith, saying, "Left the District".
Doesn't say where he went.'

'Forget
him. Gavigan told me that story too. Basra's dead.'

Steele's
face twisted with incredulity. 'He's not up the fucking Pentlands, is he?' he
gasped.

'No,
no, no, Alec wouldn't have dirtied his hands on that one. The fact is, there's
a real Iranian dissident group in Edinburgh; they're just political activists
mostly, but there are one or two real hard men among them. We know all about
them, and they're smart enough to know about us. Alec went to see them; he gave
them the photo, plus one of the kid's body, and he told them all about Basra.

'They
took him away one night, executed him, Islamic-style, and let Alec know
afterwards. They castrated him, then cut his head off with a sword and buried
him, near where he killed the boy.'

'My
God.' The young Sergeant looked distressed. 'What sort of a man was this Smith?
Were there any more?'

'Not
that Gavigan knew of. I sweated him a bit, but he swore blind that he was never
involved in any other - what do we call it? - unofficial action. As to what
sort of a man Alec was, he was a copper with the power to do what many others
wish they could, and the strength of will to go through with it.'

'But
he was a vigilante,' Steele protested.

'And
an elder of his church when he lived in Pencaitland.' McGuire smiled at him, a
dangerous, high-intensity grin. 'Have you never thumped anyone, Sergeant?
Remember that guy who slashed Maggie's arm? She heard what you said to him when
you had him on the floor, with your knee in the middle of his back. Something
about cutting his fucking ears off, wasn't it?