Thursday legends - Skinner 10 (45 page)

'Don't
wait up for me. I could be pretty late.'

71

'How
the hell did you get in here?' Spike Thomson's face was a picture of surprise
as he turned in response to the tap on his shoulder to see Andy Martin standing
before him.

'I
showed my warrant card,' the detective replied.

'Even
so, the doormen here have instructions to call the management if the police
turn up, not to just let them in.'

'Ahh,
but I can be persuasive, Spike.'

'I'll
bet you can,' Thomson grinned, raising his voice still louder over a sudden
surge in the volume of the thumping music. 'It's just as well you're plain
clothes, though. Otherwise people would die in the crush, trying to get out of
here.'

Martin
frowned as he looked around the big, smoky, former warehouse, which had been
transformed into House 31, Edinburgh's trendiest underground night-club. 'Why?'
he asked, his voice raised above the din. 'Is there a drug problem here that we
should know about?'

'If
there was,' the disc jockey replied, 'I wouldn't be here. No, this place is
very respectable; properly licensed for entertainment and drinks, fire-safety
inspected, and everything else. We have our own undercover drugs police on
patrol all the time. Any dealer caught here is always handed over to you boys,
so they don't risk it.

'No,
it's just that these punters like to think they're doing something daring when
they come to an unconventional place
like
this, so they're conditioned to run at the first sight of a uniform.'

The
policeman grinned. 'The whole world used to operate like that; not any more though.
The good people run, the bad ones stand their ground and dare us. Here,' he
observed. 'I noticed a "we", back there.'

'I
have an interest in the place.'

'How
big an interest?'

Spike
Thomson leaned towards him, speaking in as close to a whisper as he could
manage. 'One hundred per cent. Don't tell anyone, though. The bright young
things might not like it if they found out that the operation was actually
owned by a middle-aged, middle-of-the-road AM presenter. "Ma granny
listens tae Forth AM." That's what one kid said to me one night, with
scorn all over her face. No, the presenters here are all FM jocks; some from
Forth, the odd one from further afield, and quite a few just trying to impress
me, in the hope I can get them into radio somewhere
...
anywhere.

'What
brings you here anyway?' he asked. 'You never said when you called me on my
mobile.'

'I'll
tell you, if you can find a place where I won't be telling the whole fucking
world.'

'Sure.
Come on through here.' Thomson led the way from his place beside the dee-jay's
booth, moving quickly through the ranks of twisting, jumping sweating dancers,
with the detective at his heels, until they came to a small door marked
'Private'. He nodded to the security man standing guard and stepped inside.

The
room was sparsely furnished: a desk, two chairs and a table, on which sat a row
of monitors, each showing a different
part of
House 31, and each linked to a video below, on the floor.

An
elderly man sat behind the desk, counting cash into piles. 'Give us a minute,
Uncle Bob,' said Spike.

Martin
looked after the old man as he closed the door. 'He really your uncle?'

'Sure;
my mother's brother. He's my book-keeper. It's great, because I can trust him
not just with the cash, but to supervise the ticket sellers and keep an eye on
the bar, too. If anyone was at it, he'd know.'

The
detective nodded towards the neat bundles of money on the desk. 'What's that?'

'Tonight's
takings at the door.'

'Jesus.'

'No,
I'm not; but when He comes back, He's promised me that He'll make a personal
appearance. Now, what can I do for you?'

Martin
sat on the edge of the desk and gazed at him, evenly. He glanced at his watch;
it showed a quarter to one. 'I've had a busy few hours, Spike. I began by
reading a report into the suicide of one Dafyd Ogston Lewis. Then I interviewed
two men, Ronald Johnston-White, of whom you've probably heard,' he looked
quickly at Thomson as he mentioned the name and saw that his guess had been
correct, 'and Luke Heard, of whom you probably haven't, although you may have
come across his daughter, Sophie.'

'In
the nicest possible way, you mean?'

He
took out a small tape recorder, checked the battery and recording levels, and
set it down beside him on the desk top. 'I doubt that, chum; I really do.' He
switched it on. 'Anyway, now there are a few things I have to ask you about
...
starting with that bloody parrot.'

72

Gazing
at her as she stood there, holding the door open, he wondered whether Juliet
Lewis had ever, in all of her life, looked even slightly dishevelled. She
returned his gaze calmly, as if it was the middle of the evening, rather than
the early hours of the morning and as if she was dressed for a night on the
town, rather than standing there in a pink, silk, dressing gown.

She
smiled at him; she actually smiled. 'Andy,' she exclaimed, with a hint of a
laugh in her voice. 'Did you forget your keys? Did you ring the wrong bell?'

He
shook his head. 'No, Juliet, no,' he replied. 'Every bloody bell I've rung
tonight has come up trumps. I'm in the right place. Are the girls home?'

'Yes,
but they're asleep. I wasn't; I don't, not much anyway, when Spike's not here.'
She looked at him again, a gleam in her eye. 'What is this, anyway? Are you having
second thoughts about dumping Rhian?'

'No,'
he answered, roughly. 'It's the first thought I regret; the fact that I got
involved with her in the first place, and wound up setting up my best friend.'

She
frowned, taking in a long breath. 'I see. I don't think I like the tone this
conversation's taking.'

'We'd
better carry it on indoors, then.' He stepped past her uninvited, closed the
door, then took her arm and eased her upstairs, in front of him, to her living
room.

She
turned towards him, without a word. He had known that he was right before
ringing the doorbell, but it was almost unnerving to see the truth confirmed in
the sudden iciness of her stare.

He
walked across to the stand by the window and whipped off the white covering sheet.
'Hello, Juliet’ he said.

'Hello,
Juliet! Hello, Juliet!' the bird echoed back. He threw the drape back over the
cage and turned back to face the woman.

'You
were crazy enough to tell me,' he exclaimed. 'Right at the very start.
"His name's Hererro." Remember, you said you thought it was some
South American reference. You know bloody well that it means
"Blacksmith" in Spanish; only that should be two words, shouldn't it?
Black Smith; black-hearted Alec!

'Why
did you take it, for God's sake? You couldn't have thought that it would blurt
out your name to the first copper to come though the door. The bird's a great
mimic, but it's got no fucking memory. For sure, it would have made a lousy
witness in a murder case.

'I
know that you took the cage down from its hook to string Alec up there, but why
did you take it with you afterwards?'

'To
remind me of him!' Her sudden hiss chilled him even more than her eyes. 'I look
at Hererro and I think of him, hanging up there. That beast tortured my husband
to death; you cannot imagine how good it felt to do the same to him.'

He
had known, of course. He had thought that he might have had difficulty making
her confirm the truth, but she seemed eager to tell of it, to boast of it,
even.

'Your
husband topped himself, Juliet. In his garage, with a hose-pipe into the car.'
He took a note from his pocket, and read:

'My
darling

'I
can't go on, living as I have done. I have deceived you. I have fallen in love
with someone else; a very dear man with whom I have had a relationship for some
months now. I can't keep this secret any longer, nor can I live with it.

Tell
the girls, I loved you all. Goodbye. Dafyd

'That
was in the police file into your husband's suicide. It was an open-and-shut
job; the Fiscal closed the case without a Fatal Accident Inquiry. And that
note; that was all you knew at the time, wasn't it?'

She
shook her head, violently, looking away from him. 'No. I knew about Dafyd's
affair all along. I realised not long after I married him that he had this
thing in him, and I feared that one day it would have to express itself. But
that didn't stop me from loving him with all my heart. He was my whole life
and, for most of the time, the girls and I were his. He would never have left
us, and if he and Ronald hadn't been betrayed, I would have gone on turning a
blind eye.'

'How
did you know?'

'There
were signs. He made love to me in different ways for one thing. There were
vague trips to weekend conferences. Also, if your husband never wears
aftershave but comes in smelling of someone else's, you tend to notice, and
wonder.'

'Did
you know who the man was?'

'Not
at that time, no. I didn't want to know, for I bore him no malice, none at all;
nor do I now. He was helping Dafyd be himself, and it didn't make him any less
loving towards me; at least that's how I've always seen it.'

'But
when Spike told you the whole truth, that made it all different, didn't it?'

'Oh
yes,' she hissed once more. 'When he told me about that vicious, cruel, twisted
man, and that miserable little weasel, Shearer, who betrayed Dafyd and Ronald
...
that made it very different.

'They
killed him, between them; they put him through such mental torture. It was as
if they had strapped him into that car and turned on the engine.' She paused.
'Does Spike know what I did?'

Martin
made a slight, dismissive gesture. 'No. He never suspected a thing. Even now, I
don't think he understands. But he did admit to me that he had told you what
Howard Shearer - the Diddler, they called him - confessed to him, one night,
with an extremely guilty conscience.

'He
told me, as he had told you, that the Diddler was an inveterate gossip; he knew
it, but couldn't help himself.

'That
one Thursday night after a football gathering, he told Alec Smith that his
partner, Ronald Johnston-White, was gay and was having an affair with a
gynaecologist called Dafyd Lewis.

'That
later, he learned from Johnston-White that Smith had a pathological hatred of
homosexuals. That he had approached your husband and told him that he was not
going to tolerate a - his words - queer gynaecologist, and that if he did not
resign his hospital position and leave Edinburgh, some very nasty career-ending
stories about him and Johnston-White and you, would appear in the tabloids.'

The
policeman looked almost despairingly, into the woman's iron-hard face. 'Diddler
was totally conscience-stricken, you know, when he learned of the consequences
of that single indiscreet remark to Smith. He had to confide in someone. He
chose, from the Thursday night crowd, his oldest and closest friend, Spike
Thomson.

'And
four years on, Spike, poor bugger that he is, met you. When he realised who you
were, he felt that he had to tell you the whole story.'

She
nodded. 'Very good. Is that as far as you've got?'

He
laughed, bitterly. 'Hell no; though I wish it was. No, Juliet, I've got all of
it.... although this next part is guesswork. I think you knew Alec Smith.
Remember, you told me that you'd been out in the field, through your job? I
think, that like all crazies, you dropped me a little hint there. Not as
outrageous as the one with the parrot, but a hint nonetheless. I think that you
met him then and that, when you needed to, you were able to find out where he
had gone, after he left the force to pursue his own lunacy.

'Alec's
phone records show that he had a call on the evening he died, from a public
phone-box in Edinburgh. I think that call came from you, and that you made an
appointment to see him on some pretext or other; job-related research, maybe.