Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (20 page)

'One
more thing. Margot told me you bet her that you could pull me. Is that true?'

She
nodded.

'Well,
you'd better not take her money. I guess you've lost.' She came to him and put
her head on his shoulder. 'Give me a chance, Andy, please.'

'I
did, but you fucked it up. With me you only get one shot.' She pushed him away
and ran down the staircase, ran out of the house. He heard his door slam, then
hers. He thought about the two sisters together, at each other's throats. Something
made him pick up the phone and dial their number. Margot answered.

'Give
me Rhian,' he said coldly. He waited for a few seconds, until he heard a
mumbled 'Yes?'

'It's
me. Listen, I'm sorry I was so rough. Will you be okay?'

'Yes.
I'll be fine. My sister may not, but I will.'

'Don't
blame Margot. You know that wouldn't be fair.'

'Okay,
I promise.' She hesitated, then spoke again, tentatively, almost pleading.
'Andy, can I come back in? Can we talk it through again?'

He
hesitated. 'Rhian, I
...'
A bell
rang, near him. 'Shit, that's someone at the front door. No, please leave it
for now. Let's give each other some breathing space.' He put the phone down and
jogged downstairs.

When
he opened the door, Maggie Rose and Mario McGuire were standing on the step.
The Inspector was carrying a large briefcase. He stared at them. 'Hello you
two,' he said. 'What the hell brings you here?'

'Didn't
you get any of our messages?' Rose asked.

'I'm
sorry. I've been busy with some personal stuff. Come on in; straight up those
stairs and into the living room.' He followed them and pointed them at his
sofa. 'Where's the fire, then?'

McGuire
tapped his briefcase and began to open it. 'In here, sir. You'd better sit down
yourself

Wife
and husband took the Head of CID slowly, meticulously, through the Alec Smith
papers, pointing out the gaps, and explaining their theory, that the numbered,
dated photographs were in fact an index for an undiscovered stockpile of
material. When they were finished, he leaned back in his chair and looked at
them.

'Okay,'
he said. 'You were right to come here. I buy your theory too. Now that you've
told me, what do you need from me?'

McGuire
replied. 'I have two possible enemies of Alec from the SB files; their names
are Gus Morrison and Lawrence Scotland. They need to be lifted quickly,
interrogated and, if necessary, given psych, tests. But I have to get after
finding these other photographs and papers, if they exist.

'I
need you to give me someone solid to take care of Morrison and Scotland, while
I do that.'

'I
can fix that for you, no problem.' Martin chuckled, but to neither Maggie nor Mario
did he seem to be laughing. 'I've got the very man for that job; someone who's
really good at sweating hard cases like these. Have your files sent along to me
in the morning. Once I've got rid of some other business, I'll take care of
them both myself.'

24

Martin
glanced into the Torphichen Place CID room. He was pleased to see that it was
empty: it meant that everyone was where they should have been, out on
enquiries, trying to put a definite name to the man with a provisional face.

Everyone,
that was, but Dan Pringle and Jack McGurk; they were waiting for him in the
Superintendent's office, where he had told them to be.

'Hi
guys,' he said, as he walked into the room. 'How's it going?'

'Imagine,
if you will, an old lizard's dick,' Pringle said. 'Imagine how dry and wrinkled
it must get, after long years of being dragged around deserts, hot rocks and
such, with not so much as a sniff of a lady lizard. Then take that concept and
transfer it to the fruits of this investigation. That's how we've come out so far
in terms of results
...
dry as an old
lizard's bone.'

'You
should know about that, right enough,' Martin chuckled. 'The door-to-door's
given you nothing, then?'

'Well,
it did turn up a boy in the new flats opposite the Roseburn pub who acted
shifty when Sammy Pye knocked his door. Without any pressure at all, he
confessed to growing cannabis plants in his back window box. Apart from him
though, it hasn't given us a fucking thing. We've still got a lot to do mind,
but
...'

'Did
Sammy lift the guy?'

'Aye,
but there were only a few plants. I gave him a warning and let him go.'

'You
both did right. What about empty properties? Have you checked them out?'

'There
are none; not in the area we're looking at. Every flat and house is occupied,
or at least there's Council Tax being paid on every one; there are registered
voters at almost every address. They're still looking for possibles in Glasgow
too, but so far all their gangsters are present and correct. I could have told
you all this on the phone, you know. You've had a wasted journey.'

'That's
not why I'm here,' said the Head of CID. 'I wanted to tell you personally, you
and Jack here, that I've tracked down the leak to the
News'

'Who
was it?' asked Pringle, eagerly.

'Me.'

He
looked up at McGurk. 'Your brother-in-law and I have someone in common. Her
name's Rhian Lewis. She's a final-year medical student. I let something slip
the other night; I also fixed it for her to sit in with Sarah on Mr Nobody's
autopsy. She, in turn, passed it on, in similar circumstances, to your man
Blacklock.

'I've
spoken to Alan Royston already. Now I want to apologise to you both; to you,
Dan, for compromising your investigation and to you Jack, for getting you
implicated.'

'Not
your fault, sir,' said Pringle, tactfully. 'We all talk in the dark.' He
paused. 'The Margot girl's older sister, right?'

'Right.'

McGurk
said nothing; Martin glanced at him again. 'I want him sorted, Jack.

'I
don't want you to ruin your sister's life, necessarily;
whether
you tell her or not, that's down to your judgement. But I want you to let that
brother-in-law of yours know from me that if he ever goes near Rhian again, far
less tries to use her to get sensitive information out of me, then he is
fucking dog-meat. 'Understood?'

The
giant Sergeant looked down at him, his face thunderous. 'Don't you worry, sir.
After I've finished with him he won't be touching anything female for a long
time, especially not my sister or your friend.'

25

'Where
do we start?' Stevie Steele looked round the big living room of Shell Cottage.
The blinds were open; outside the untypical spell of early summer sunshine
continued unbroken. The tide was out and people were walking, in ones and twos,
on the wet sands, some of them giving their dogs a chance to run off the leash.

'The
most obvious place,' said McGuire, beside him in the doorway. 'With that desk
over there.' He looked around the rest of the room. Smith's clothes were gone,
bagged as evidence and sent to the lab; the whisky glass was gone too. All of
the ornaments which he had seen on the previous Saturday, each one carefully
positioned, now stood together on the table.

The
room seemed souless; Mario thought of a house which he and Maggie had looked at
before their marriage - the home of a dead person, being sold by her executor.
It had given them the same chill that came now from Alec Smith's cottage.

'That's
an antique, that thing. There may be a panel in it, a secret drawer, that
Arthur Dorward's lot missed.'

'It
couldn't be big enough to hold much in the way of papers,' Steele pointed out.

'No,
but there could be something inside it that tells us where they are.'

'True.'
The Sergeant crossed the room and examined the heavy desk. He slid out every
drawer in the two pedestals,

pulling
each one free from its runners and turning it over, looking for anything that
might have been taped underneath. He looked inside the empty space which they
had left, then examined the panel above the kneehole, pressing it but finding
it unyielding.

Finally,
he and McGuire lifted the empty carcass of the desk from its position beneath
the window and examined its front. The Inspector leaned over, peering at the
section which mirrored the central panel on the other side. He looked at it, at
the line of its inlay to the rest of the woodwork, then he blew, gently, at the
joints, sending motes of dust flying, and rapped on it with his knuckles,
quickly and firmly as if he was knocking on a door.

With
a click, the panel sprung two inches clear of its surround, revealing a shallow
drawer. 'How about that then?' he said, beaming with undisguised pride.

'Papa
Viareggio - my mother's father - had a desk like this with a secret drawer; and
no-one knew about it but him
...
and
me. When I was ten, he told me about it, and showed me how to open it. When he
died, six years later, he left it to me in his will. He was a well-off man, my
Italian grandfather; owned a chain of fish-and-chip shops. My uncle inherited
the business, my mother got a big bequest, and he left ten grand each to my two
girl cousins. I was his only grandson and yet all he left me was his bloody
desk.

'My
mother was bloody livid; she said he had always been a crazy man. She was going
to ask my granny to keep the desk and give me ten grand like the girls, but I
told her to wind her neck in. "That's what Papa wanted," I said,
"that's what's going to happen." So they brought the desk to our
house and I made space for it in my room.

'The
first time my folks were out, I tapped the panel, just like Papa Viareggio told
me, and the drawer popped out, just like that one. There was a key inside to a
safe deposit box and a letter from Papa giving me the address of the bank where
it was kept, and another addressed to the manager. My letter said,
"When you turn twenty-one you can open this.
Meantime, sell the bloody desk; it s a cumbersome thing but it
's
worth a few quid."
Some man, my Papa.'

'What
did you do?' Steele asked, fascinated.

'I
did as he told me. The desk was far better quality than this one. I got ten
grand clear for it at auction, the same as he left the girls
...
he never liked them. When I was
twenty-one, I opened the safe deposit box and found all the paperwork related
to a trust fund in the Cayman Islands. Papa had set it up with fifty grand when
I was ten and it had been growing big-time ever since: it still is. I won't
tell you how much it's worth, but the income - all legal, tax paid and
everything -will pay off our mortgage by the time I'm forty.'

'What
happened to the business?'

McGuire
laughed. 'Ah, Stevie son, that's another story. Just before he died, Papa put
together this plan to float it as Viareggio pic and develop it, nationally and
internationally, on a franchise basis. A week before he was due to push the
button on it, he took a heart attack in his office and dropped down dead. My
uncle didn't think it was such a good idea, so he cancelled everything.

'Every
time I drive past a Harry Ramsden, I think of my Uncle Beppe, and I marvel at
what a stupid fucker he is.'

He
looked at the desk again. 'Alec's estate might get a couple of grand for this
thing, but that's all. Still, let's be careful with it.' Gently, he drew out
the hidden drawer. Inside, the two detectives saw a small cloth pouch, secured
by a red drawstring, a box, and three keys on a ring. McGuire picked up the
bag, loosened the binding cord, and slid back the cloth to reveal the muzzle of
a small, black, oiled automatic pistol.

'Nine
millimetre something or other, I'd say
...'
He looked closely at the barrel. 'Beretta, I think.'

Steele
opened the box. 'Ammo,' he said.

'Aye,
and just as illegal as this gun.' McGuire took the weapon out, checked that it
was unloaded, then secured it in its pouch once more and slipped it into his
pocket. 'Whatever Alec was up to, he must have perceived a threat, to have
taken the risk of keeping this. Even for an ex-SB guy, possession of a firearm
and ammunition would have meant prison for sure.'