Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel (26 page)

‘Had you ever seen this man before?’ I murmured, just loud enough to be picked up by the tape.

He shook his head, vigorously.

‘Say it!’

‘No, sir. I’d never seen him before.’

‘But the description you’re giving us now is accurate?’

‘Aye, I swear!’

‘It better be, otherwise next time you see me, we’ll be having an even more serious talk. Do you think that Archie Weir could have known him? Is that possible?’

‘Ah don’t think so. If he did, he never said. No, he didnae. I’m sure he didnae.’

‘What did he call him, when he spoke to you after he’d stabbed him? Tell us again.’

‘He called him “your pervie pal”. At least that’s what it sounded like; I could have got it wrong. Maybe he said “your pushy pal”; maybe that was it. Mister, I was bleedin’, and I still thought he was goin’ tae stab me again.’

‘Do you know what he meant?’ Alison asked him.

He shook his head, then looked at me and replied, ‘No, miss,’ loudly.

‘That would be Detective Inspector,’ she said, icily. ‘Come on, Weir was your pal, you must have an idea.’

‘He wasnae a big pal, though,’ he protested. ‘We were at the school thegither . . .’

‘Which school?’ I interrupted.

‘Maxwell Academy,’ he replied, then carried on, ‘. . . and we go out for a pint, but he wasnae best man at my weddin’ or anything.’

‘You’ve got a wife?’

‘Aye. Ah got married three years ago; we’ve got two bairns.’

‘So what were you doing out on the batter with Weir?’

For the first time, he seemed hesitant. ‘The wife chucked me out a couple of weeks ago. I was bunking wi’ Archie for a bit. But Ah’m back home now, ken,’ he added.

‘I see.’ She paused. ‘When you went out with Archie, did anyone else ever tag along, any other men?’

‘No, no’ really. It would be just the two of us usually.’

‘Archie was single, wasn’t he?’

‘Aye, lucky bastard.’

‘Yes, dead lucky,’ she said. ‘Does the name Albert McCann mean anything to you?’

‘Naw, I don’t think so. Naw, it doesnae. Why?’

I leaned forward, eyeballing him again. ‘Because, Mr Wyllie, Albie McCann was murdered on Sunday night by the man who killed Weir and stabbed you, the man you effectively protected for a week by giving us that made-up bloody story.’

‘And you havenae caught him yet?’ he squealed. ‘Ah want protection.’

I nodded. ‘We’ll protect you, Robert. You lied to us; that’s a criminal offence. You’re going to be charged with perverting the course of justice. You’ll be held here overnight and will appear in court tomorrow morning. You can apply for bail if you like and the sheriff will probably allow it, since we’ll have no real reason to object, or you can stay nice and safe in the remand section at Saughton. It’ll be up to you.’ I rose to my feet. ‘Detective Inspector Higgins, I’ll leave the formalities to you and DC McGuire.’

Alison followed me out into the corridor. ‘Do you really want to be that hard on him?’ she asked. ‘The fiscal will probably reduce it to wasting police time.’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘He might, but my guess is he’ll let it run to secure a plea to the reduced charge. I know, Wyllie was a victim himself, and he was scared, but he concocted a story, and now we have two murders on our hands. There’s also the chance that he might still be in danger from this man, and we’ll be doing him a favour by locking him up. If the fiscal does query the charge, refer him to me and I’ll deal with him.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, smiling.

I grinned back at her, awkwardly. ‘What’s your next move?’

She turned serious. ‘To look for a connection between Weir and McCann. These may be two random attacks by a psychopath out for kicks, but then again, if there is a link between the two victims, it might provide the motive for both murders.’

‘Absolutely. Where will you start?’

‘With Maxwell Academy.’

‘Logical, but if McCann was at that lunatic asylum as well, wouldn’t Wyllie have known him?’

‘They could have been in different years.’

‘True. Okay, run with it and see where it takes you. But I’m interested in what the man said to Wyllie as well. Maybe he got it right first time. Have another look at Weir’s background too.’

‘I will, but I’ll also get warrants to search both victims’ homes. There might be things there that put them together.’

I left her to charge Wyllie and went back upstairs. I took Fred Leggat into my glass-walled closet and gave him a rundown on how the interview had gone, and on Alison’s investigation in general. I didn’t expect him to be involved, but he was my de facto deputy in the Serious Crimes Unit, so it was only right for me to keep him in the loop on all of its business, even that which had been slung our way for reasons of convenience, office politics and public relations. When I’d been offered the job by Alf and the chief, they’d given me fair warning that would happen.

‘What’s your thinking, Bob?’ he asked.

‘I don’t have any yet. Same weapon, same killer, same approach, provoke and attack. Three possibilities: it could have been random, the man with the knife could have had a grudge against the victims, or someone else might have. I’m not going to make any guesses; Alison’s are as good as mine at this stage, and she’s running the inquiry.’ I paused. ‘How are we going on the other priority task?’ I asked, without much optimism. There were no grounds for any: we were seven days from the murder, five days into the investigation, no sign of any motive and our two major suspects were nowhere to be found.

‘Well,’ he began; something in his tone took my attention. ‘I don’t think we’re any further forward than we were, but this fax came in from Newcastle.’ He’d been holding a couple of sheets of paper, clipped together. He laid them on my desk and pushed them towards me. ‘It’s the full intelligence file on the man Winston Church; there’s something in there that jumped out at me.’

I picked it up and began to read through it. Church was an archetypal local hoodlum of his era. He was sixty-nine years old, and had emerged in the post-war period as a black marketeer, diversifying, when rationing ended, into just about anything that was criminal and, typically, some things that were not. He had been the top man in his city through the sixties, seventies and through the eighties, by force of arms; the feudal lord of Tyneside. His file suggested that he was the man who had got the real Carter, in the real-life gangland episode that had been fictionalised for the screen. In a biopic of his life he might have been played by Ricky Tomlinson or Warren Clarke, or even by Michael Caine.

But he was history, the file said; an old man with little power left to direct or restrain the new breed who had moved in on his patch. They tolerated him, in the same way that the outgoing chairman of a football club is made president for life, and they ignored him. Even his one-time loyal retainers, like Milburn and Shackleton, had gone freelance, their muscle and other services for hire.

I was wondering why Fred had wanted me to read his tired story when a name jumped off the page at me, one of a list of ‘former associates’.

‘Alasdair Holmes?’ I exclaimed. ‘What the fuck was Al Holmes doing with this guy?’

‘Probably supplying him,’ Leggat volunteered. ‘If you look at the timeline in the file, Church’s decline began after the Holmes brothers were shot.’

‘That’s of some interest,’ I conceded. ‘We both know that Al never did anything on his own initiative. His brother was his keeper, in every respect. But as you say, they were indeed shot. Al’s dead, and even if Perry wasn’t a cripple with round-the-clock care needs . . . he never went within miles, personally, of the likes of Winston Church.’

‘So I understand,’ Fred agreed. ‘That’s why I don’t see it as relevant. Just a curiosity, really; that’s why I drew it to your attention.’

I gazed at the report, and I smiled. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s no more than that, but given who’s involved . . . I think I might just go and visit the sick.’

Thirteen

I
didn’t take grapes with me, or even a bunch of the petrol station flowers that were popular in those days (and may still be, for all I know) with guys who had wool to pull over their wives’ eyes. Perry Holmes might have been a basket case, but his past hadn’t been erased, not in my eyes, or in those of any cop who’d seen the aftermath of some of the things he’d ordered.

My former colleague Tommy Partridge was among them. He devoted a large chunk of his career to putting Perry away but he never came close, and because of it he was a bitter man when he retired. Holmes was much, much too clever, for all of us. He never got near to the things that were his, and he was never near anything that was done in his name. When I was in my last year at secondary school, an old policeman came to speak to my debating group. In an off-the-record moment, he told us, ‘You are all bright young people, with working lives ahead of you. I shouldn’t give you this employment advice, but the fact is that should any of you choose to go into crime, then with your intelligence and backgrounds, you probably have a ninety per cent chance of being successful.’ Holmes was living proof of the truth he spoke; he was a brilliant, ruthless man. Tony Manson had learned a lot from him, but he wasn’t his equal.

I’d only ever met him once, in the Western Infirmary, two years before, after Billy Spreckley had killed his brother and shot him four times. One of those bullets had lodged in his brain, and was still there. His consultant neurologists, all three of them, for Perry wasn’t a man to accept only a second opinion if he didn’t like it, said with unanimous certainty that he was going to die. He was conscious and responsive, though; I was sent by Alf Stein to interview him about the shooting, and about anything else he cared to discuss . . . to take a dying declaration, in effect.

He didn’t care to say a word, not a cheep. He didn’t care to die either. After a few months it became obvious that he wasn’t going to, not any time soon at any rate, and so he was transferred to a nursing home while a new house was built for him on an estate that he owned just outside the city, all on one level and fitted out to meet the needs of a quadriplegic.

He’d been kept under observation there, for a while, just in case his surviving old associates started to roll up to his door, but none of them had. No police time was spent on him any longer. Received wisdom, and the evidence of our own observation, was that his criminal enterprises died with his brother Al, and, shortly afterwards, with Johann Kraus. They had been his main conduits, the means by which his orders were delivered, and executed. Without them, and with no means of replacing them, the word was that he devoted himself from his wheelchair exclusively to the legitimate side of his business empire, the vast property portfolio that he had built up with very thoroughly laundered money, and a development wing which the banks and other institutions were always ready to fund, because he was very good at it, and always gave an excellent return on investment.

The underworld vacuum that he had left behind him seemed to have been filled not by one person, but by several, of whom Tony Manson was one. He was dominant in Edinburgh, but in other areas of the country there had been a couple of turf wars, with fatalities, before the new order had established itself.

I’d met Al Holmes often enough; he was pulled in quite regularly by the drugs squad, and given as hard a time for as long as the law would allow, but Perry’s system was foolproof. He swept his house and his office for bugs every day, and he never had discussions, only oneto-one meetings, with no third parties present. Al was a shit, and nowhere near as bright as Perry, but he was too scared of his brother ever to cross him.

Kraus and I had crossed paths too. He was almost as big as Lennie Plenderleith, but not in his league when it came to tough, or for that matter in the same league as me, as he found out one time when he took a swing at me in an interview room. I’d hoped he would; that’s why there was no one else there. He had a fearsome reputation, but only with a gun or a chainsaw in his hand. When one of our marksmen took him down, the squad had a whip-round for the shooter.

I was thinking of him as I pulled up outside Perry’s new house. Kraus had lived on a small farm that was part of the estate, and it was suspected that some of his victims, including most of Mia’s brother and uncle, had gone into an incinerator there. And that made me think of Mia for the first time in a few hours; it was just gone four o’clock and she was on air until half an hour before I was due at her place. Too late to cancel gracefully . . . if I’d really wanted to.

I stepped out of the Discovery and walked up a long white marble pathway that led to the front door. It was opened before I reached it by a man in a blue nurse’s tunic, a large black man, with short frizzy hair; he wasn’t smiling. I glanced around looking for the camera that must have picked me up, but I couldn’t see it.

‘Can I help you?’ the doorkeeper asked as I approached; his accent could have been from anywhere other than Scotland, and I’d never seen him before.

‘I’d like to speak with Mr Holmes,’ I replied.

‘Then you’ll be disappointed, sir. Mr Holmes does not receive visitors.’

‘I’m a hard man to disappoint,’ I countered. ‘I apologise for not calling ahead to make an appointment, but the matter is important, and it’s only just come up.’

‘You’d have been wasting your time trying to call. The number here is ex-directory.’

‘Those don’t exist for me.’ I pulled my warrant card and showed it: I’d no reason to hassle the guy, and he had every right to refuse me entrance. ‘That says I’m a police officer, Detective Superintendent Skinner. You’re doing your job, sir, but so am I, and mine overrides yours. So please go and ask Mr Holmes if he has five minutes to assist me in a murder investigation in which he is not, I repeat not, a suspect.’

He made his choice, and let me step into the hall. ‘Very well. Please wait here.’

I did. He left through a door in the far left corner. While he was gone I scanned the place carefully for the next camera, the one that I was sure was trained on the door, but I couldn’t spot that either. The guy was gone for five minutes, but I kept my patience. If he was going to ask me to leave he’d have been back sooner.