Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel (40 page)

Back on board, we spent the afternoon cruising round the south of Arran and on towards the Mull of Kintyre and Campbeltown, our destination. We sailed into its loch, which is really a big bay, then found our pre-booked mooring on the pier and tied up for the night. Dinner hadn’t been planned, so I went ashore and found a restaurant that had one table left for five, my contribution to the trip. ‘You’re lucky to get in at such short notice on a Saturday night,’ the owner advised me, ‘but Paul’s not here just now, and so that makes a difference.’ At the time I didn’t have the faintest idea of what she meant, but Alex explained later.

The food, local shellfish and beef from Northern Ireland . . . we were closer to the Irish mainland than to our point of departure . . . was outstanding, but the greatest memory I have of that night is one of enlightenment.

As I looked at my surroundings, at my companions, and considered how we’d got there, I felt an epiphany, a realisation that I’d been shown a world outside that in which I’d been immersed for the previous fifteen years, and by which I’d become completely consumed. The evening is locked away in the treasure chest of my mind like a movie shot in soft focus, and every so often I close my eyes, take it out, and replay it.

Later, when everyone else had turned in, leaving Alison and me alone on the afterdeck, I told her what I was feeling. My excitement of the morning had grown into an understanding that all things were possible, and that my life need not necessarily be set on a course that was unalterable. ‘I could do this,’ I said to her. ‘I could sell my place in Spain, buy a boat like this, and operate it commercially. It is possible. This is just, so different, so . . . so damn nice.’

She smiled. ‘And what about Alex? Do you think she’ll settle for a life as a boat girl?’

‘In four years’ time,’ I pointed out, ‘Alex will be gone, off to university, to study law, she says, at Glasgow, same as me. A friend of mine at the golf club once said to me that a son will never leave home, truly, until he marries, but with daughters, once they’re gone, they’re gone. They need their own space.’

‘I’ll grant you that,’ she conceded.

‘There you are then. When that happens, I will barely have cleared forty. I will be a relatively young man. I could do this.’

We were still talking about it after we’d turned in for the night; I gave free rein to my liberated imagination, while Alison stayed practical. ‘Bob, this is the Firth of Clyde,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s been lovely today, but wet and windy is the norm. I’ve been out in those conditions, you haven’t, and believe me, when the weather is rough, the last thing you want is the worry of bloody passengers.’

That didn’t put me off. ‘Okay, then we won’t charter it out. We’ll just live on it.’

She laughed. ‘You couldn’t, not all the time. You’d go mad.’

‘No I wouldn’t. If we didn’t take passengers, I would write. There are a couple of true crime books I could do right now, and who’s better prepared than the likes of me to do crime fiction? Or we could sail the bloody world, and do travel books. I could make television programmes.’

She laid a hand on my chest and kissed me. ‘Calm down, big boy,’ she whispered. ‘If wishes were horses we’d all get a ride.’

‘But we can. Maybe we have to, Ali. You talk about going mad; there’s a far greater chance of that happening if I stay in the job than if I leave it. I began this week looking at dead people, some left where they had been killed. I saw a man who’d been disembowelled, in his own home, his own fucking castle. On Thursday I interviewed a kid who’d been systematically crippled with a baseball bat, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me. Later on that same day I had a confrontation with a guy who tried to pull a gun on me. I dealt with all that, love. I switched off from all the blood and the suffering, and I met the violence with greater violence. Then I went home to my daughter, and we had fish for tea. That is my life, and it’s yours; it’s how I live, it’s how you live. This weekend I’ve been shown a way of changing it, and you’re trying to talk me out of it?’

She stroked my cheek, my forehead, my hair. ‘No, lover, I’m not. If that’s how you feel and if that’s what you want, then I want it for you. But will you still want it on Monday morning? And what’s this “we” all of a sudden?’

‘Surely you can’t believe that I’d save my own life and leave you lost in the deep, dark jungle.’ I kissed her. ‘Besides, I’ll need someone to teach me how to sail the thing. Come away with me.’

‘Ask me again, when you’re really ready to do it.’

‘What will you say when I do?’

‘Surely you can’t believe that I’d let you head off into the sunset without a bloody clue how to set the sails?’

But I never did buy that damn boat. I never did ask her. If I had, I’d have saved her life. Ultimately she was someone else I betrayed.

My last great romantic vision endured through that night and into the morning. It stayed with me well into the afternoon, all through the cruise up the windward coast of Arran, and until we were within sight of Inverkip. For all that time, my mind was still set on sailing boats and sunsets.

And then my mobile sounded. I was in the cabin at the time, packing my bag. I retrieved it from the jacket I’d worn at the funeral, where it had spent the last two days. It was at the limit of its battery life, but there was just enough juice left for me to answer.

‘Bob, is that you?’

The voice threw me for a second or two, until I realised that it was Sergeant Payne. ‘Yes, Lowell, what’s up?’

‘I’ve done that checking up for you, on the McGrew family. It’s pretty much as reported in the
Tizer
. They lived in a house up Wellhall Road, past the Philips factory, a nice big place; a detached villa. The mother’s name was Violet, but there was never any dad around from when they moved in, and that was, oh, about fifteen years ago, when Alafair was at primary school. I had a chat with the neighbours, a Mr and Mrs Shearer; they say that she was a widow, left comfortably off by her late husband. She told them he had been “in business”, that was all. Violet died four years ago, when Alafair was about twenty, from cancer. The house was sold a couple of years later. The son kept it on for a while, then he left.’

‘She’s got a brother?’

‘Yes. He’s seven years older than she is. The Shearers had a lot of time for him.’

‘Did they give you his name?’

‘Yes, Peter.’

‘Anything else about him?’ I asked. ‘Do they know what he did for a living?’

‘Mr Shearer said that he joined the army after he left school. He came back home when his mother fell ill, but they hadn’t a real clue what he did when he lived there after that. Mrs Shearer did ask him once. He told her he was a company director, but no more than that. Their impression was that whatever it was, he worked from home, because he didn’t keep regular hours.’

Just as he finished, my battery gave out, so I couldn’t thank him for his help. But had he helped me? My gut told me that he had, but I couldn’t work out how. Alafair McGrew, the battered Alafair McGrew, had an ex-soldier brother. So was it possible that I’d been wrong about big Lennie? Had she turned to brother Peter, not Manson? Could Tony’s mumble about sending a message have been bullshit, to make me think that he was in charge of the situation? Men like him hate to lose face.

In my mind’s eye, a couple of bricks had moved, and begun to arrange themselves into a pattern. They were a long way from building anything solid, but it was a start, a move in the only direction I cared about, forward.

I didn’t admit it to myself then, but that’s when I knew that I wouldn’t buy that schooner, that I was what I was for a reason, and that I couldn’t run, walk, or sail away from myself.

I turned and saw Alison in the doorway. ‘Who was that?’ she asked.

‘Alex’s future uncle, with the result of a check I asked him to do for me. At the moment, it’s raised no more than a question, but it could turn into an answer to one of my puzzles.’

‘Mine too?’ she asked.

‘Sorry, no.’

She smiled. ‘That’s a pity. I’m not looking forward to that helicopter trip on Tuesday any more than you are.’

We went back into the marina under engine power and tied up. We all helped to make the schooner secure; once it was, I thanked Eden for the experience. ‘We’ll go further next time,’ he promised, ‘and maybe in more normal weather conditions. You’re not a real sailor until you’ve done a whole cruise in waterproofs.’

I made it back to Gullane just inside two hours from Inverkip. I asked Alison if she wanted to stay, but she’d run out of clothes, and also, she didn’t fancy another early start, so she headed back to Edinburgh. Before she left, I asked her to call Shell the next morning, and postpone the oil platform visit by a couple of days. Telfer would keep, and I had some digging to do. I started that evening. At the same course at the police college that John Govan had addressed, I’d met a little man who’d been introduced as Lieutenant Adam Arrow. He was there to talk to us about counter-terrorism; he’d been frank and some of the stories that he’d told had given us all a different slant on Northern Ireland, as well as opening our eyes to coming threats. He and I had bonded, after a fashion, and he’d given me a couple of numbers, office and mobile. As soon as Alex, as bushed after her weekend as I was, had gone to bed, I called him on the latter.

He took a few seconds to answer, time I guessed he was spending identifying my landline number. ‘Bob,’ he exclaimed when he did pick up. ‘How the fook are you?’ His Derbyshire accent tended to come and go, but it was genuine. ‘Who have you killed and what do you want us to clean up?’

‘It’s nice to know my phone isn’t tapped,’ I said.

‘Not by us, it isn’t. I can’t speak for other services, mind you.’

‘I don’t mind them hearing this. I’m looking for some background on a former army man. His name’s Peter McGrew, he’s Scottish, home town Hamilton, and I’m told his service began in the first half of the eighties and ended early nineties. That’s all I know about him.’

‘That should be enough, unless there are two of them. What’s he done?’ he asked.

‘Nothing, I hope. But his sister suffered a bit of domestic violence on my patch and now someone’s reshaped her husband’s legs. You might have read about it, since the guy’s a Scotland international footballer.’

‘That hit and run? Lad wi’ funny name?’

‘That’s the one,’ I confirmed. ‘No vehicle involved.’

‘A punishment beating? I wonder if the guy’s ever served in Ireland,’ he mused. ‘It wouldn’t look good if it came out that one of ours was copying the Provos.’

‘Don’t get too excited. There’s another strong suspect. Anyway, it won’t come out. The victim’s not going to change his story. I want to know the truth, that’s all, out of old-fashioned curiosity. It’s an itch that needs scratching.’

‘Then I will assuage it.’

Adam Arrow was always as good as his word. That was one of the things that kept us close to the very end. I made it into the office by a quarter to nine the next morning, to find a message on my desk, ‘Call Adam’, and a London number.

‘Got him,’ he said, as soon as he took my call. ‘Peter Hastings McGrew, date of birth fifteenth of March nineteen sixty-five . . . the fookin’ Ides of March, mate; beware . . . entered Sandhurst in eighty-three, commissioned one year later, served with the Tenth Gurkha Rifles until nineteen ninety-one, when he left the service shortly after being promoted captain.’

‘Excellent. Do you know where he is now?’

‘Not a fookin’ clue,’ he replied. ‘He could be anywhere in the world.’

‘But don’t your guys remain on reserve after they leave the service?’

‘Not this one. He had an accident while he was on exercise in Brunei. He severed a tendon in his left arm. As a result he can barely grip a cup of tea wi’ that hand, let alone a baseball bat. I’ve seen the medical report, Bob. If this bloke worked his brother-in-law over, then he did it one-handed.’

I sighed. My alternative theory had just gone up in smoke. ‘Thanks, mate,’ I said. ‘I owe you one.’

‘Be sure I’ll call it in one day,’ Arrow promised, and hung up.

I was still itching. I called Martin and McGuire into my office. ‘A job for you both,’ I told them. ‘I want information on a man called Peter McGrew, middle name Hastings, age thirty-one. He’s ex-army, ex-Gurkha Rifles, lived formerly in Hamilton, and he is Alafair Drysalter’s brother. I want to be fair to the family. Having spoken to her, I want to talk to him now. Andy, get on to the DVLA in Swansea. Let’s assume he has a driving licence; it’ll have an address on it. While you’re at it, find out if he owns a car; if he does, get its registration details. Mario, he told his former neighbours he was a company director. Phone Companies House. Give them his name, find out if that’s true, and if it is, what’s the company? On your bikes, lads.’

Computer systems weren’t nearly as advanced in those days as they are now, but they existed, and they worked. Martin was back to me first inside fifteen minutes. ‘He’s got a licence, boss, and there’s a car registered in his name. The address on both is in Wellhall Road, Hamilton.’

‘Fuck it!’ I snapped. ‘He hasn’t changed it.’

‘That’s an offence; we can do him for that.’ Martin smiled.

I didn’t. ‘What about the car?’

‘VW Golf GTI, black . . . what else? . . . registration L712FTG. He’s had it from new.’

‘That’s progress, Andy,’ I said.

‘Do you want me to put it on a watch list and have it pulled over on sight?’

‘We’ve got no reason to do that. Sit on it for now.’ I looked through the glass. McGuire was still on the phone, in deep discussion from the looks of things, but as we watched, he nodded a couple of times and hung up, then swung his chair round and headed for us, beaming.

‘Peter Hastings McGrew, boss,’ he began, almost before he was through the door, ‘is a director of several companies, all tying into a single holding company called Rodatrop plc. Together the group owns pubs all over Scotland, a casino in Glasgow, a video hire chain and three private hire and taxi businesses. McGrew is one of two directors of all the companies; the other’s his sister, Alafair Drysalter.’