Funeral Note

Book 22: BOB SKINNER

by Quintin Jardine

Genres: General Fiction; City Life; Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

After a tip-off, a man's body is exhumed from a shallow grave in Edinburgh. Murder surely, yet he died from natural causes, so, case closed? Indeed was there ever a case? But Chief Constable Skinner and his people keep on digging. Who was the man, why was he buried so reverentially, and by whom? Meanwhile corruption is discovered within the force, and an investigation launched. Immersed in crises, his marriage heading for the rocks, Skinner finds his very career hanging in the balance, its fate beyond his control. Can he win out, or will his life implode?

Release date: May 24, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 385

Sample

For new readers, and old friends.

I have a birthday today. It’s not a big number, unless you’re a Satanist with a little imagination, but it’s a good day for reflection, to look back on my life and on some of the things that have happened along the way.

When this book appears in its first editions, twenty years will have elapsed since I signed my first contract with Headline, then a thrusting newcomer to UK publishing, now a member of the global Hachette group, and a major industry player. Twenty-two years will have passed since I accepted my late wife’s challenge to live up to my assertion that I could do a bloody sight better than the book I’d just finished and tossed away. Twenty-two years of living alongside, and occasionally in the shadow of, Robert Morgan Skinner.

The first decision I ever made about Big Bob, who is not my alter ego whatever anyone may say or believe, set the route for what at that time I had no notion would become a twenty-year (so far) journey. Having looked around the crime fiction genre as it existed then, both in printed form and in TV drama, I was struck by the fact that most of the cop protagonists out there, with the possible exception of Fat Andy Dalziel (a name I know how to pronounce, having grown up opposite Dalziel High School in Motherwell), were middle-ranking detectives with one hundred per cent clear-up rates and no prospects of promotion because of character flaws, ranging from alcohol, through arrogance, to sheer unlikeability, or they were toffs who regarded policing as a form of charity work.

Thus Skinner was created as a high flyer who had already flown, a detective chief superintendent on the first page of Skinner’s Rules, and promoted to assistant chief constable halfway through.

Or was he created? Even now I’m not sure about that. The greatest moments in this writer’s life are those in which a character appears on a page without any pre-planning, or warning, as if he’s come not from my imagination but from somewhere else. That’s how it was with Skinner, and as it was later with the likes of Lennie Plenderleith, Xavi Aislado and Paloma Puig, his abuela, although, with hindsight, she may owe a little to my own paternal grandmother. He imposed himself on me and left me to put shape to his existence. How could that happen? Does the mind work that way? Or is he really a separate entity, a personality in his own right? Could it be that I have a personality disorder? If so, I won’t be seeking treatment for it.

Once he was there, and in his place in a police force that is entirely fictional. . .

Explanation: in the real world, police services are provided in Edinburgh and its surrounding counties by Lothian and Borders Constabulary. That’s a phrase you will not encounter in any Skinner novel (I hope!). It’s a quirk of mine, to emphasise that his is a fictional world and that he is a clone of no living person.

. . . the benefits from that first determination about his place in the structure began to bear fruit.

Most significantly, the fact that Bob is where he is in his parallel universe means that he has more subordinates than those other cops and, therefore, that his stories tend to have a greater cast of characters. That has been fundamental to the durability of the series, in that it has allowed me, over the years, to bring people in from the back benches, explore them in more detail, cast them as hero/ines or occasionally villain/esses, then let them step back . . . if they’ve survived.

Should that make you imagine that the Skinner series possesses some of the elements of a TV soap, I’m fine with that. It’s what I’ve set out to give it, from an early stage in its development, as soon as I realised that I had more stories in me than I could number.

If I’ve learned one thing in twenty years it’s that readers are drawn to series by places, but stay with them because of people.

Today’s great British telly institutions such as Coronation Street and EastEnders won attention initially because they were set in recognisable, identifiable communities, but they haven’t held it for all those decades simply because people like Salford or Tower Hamlets. No, they’ve survived and prospered because of a constantly renewing cast of strong characters and powerful storylines.

New viewers come to these series with every episode that’s broadcast. When they do, they don’t need to know that Martha Longhurst sat down and died in the snug of the Rovers in 1964 or that Dirty Den Watts was murdered twice. But the scripts need to give them enough of a reference back for what’s happening so that they will understand it as well as anyone who’s been watching Corrie since December 1960, or been lodging in Walford since the Queen Vic opened twenty-five years later.

It’s the same with a long-running crime fiction series. Readers who’ve been with Bob Skinner since he presented his credentials to them at the dawn of the 1990s will know that the death of his first wife, Myra, wasn’t quite the accident he believed it to be, until the truth was revealed in Skinner’s Ghosts. Those who meet him for the first time on these pages have to be told how her story fits into his, but not necessarily all of it.

Newcomers need to know something of Skinner’s past life for certain references in subsequent books to make sense, but not every detail, for inevitably that would get in the way of the current plot, and in addition would cause the premature death of thousands of trees. Similarly, while it’s important that readers know George Regan to be a man marked by the loss of a son, so they can understand his situation, they don’t need to know how he died. Nor do they need an exact description of Stevie Steele’s passing, only the information that it happened on the job, and that he was the second husband of Maggie Rose, after her failed marriage to Mario McGuire. Similarly, Harold Haddock’s nickname is ‘Sauce’, but if I explained in every book that for people in the east of Scotland brown sauce is an essential condiment to a fish supper, it would become wearing.

That’s the line of accessibility, the chalk-mark on the floor; to provide the essential information that newcomers need without alienating old friends, or making them think we’re patronising them. It’s what Martin Fletcher, my editor, and I try to do with every book. We believe we walk that line without leaning too far to either side; I’m pleased to say that so far, feedback indicates that we do. If not, we would like you to tell us, and you can do so through my website, www.quintinjardine.com.

Three years ago, when I finished the twentieth Skinner novel, Fatal Last Words, I decided that would be a good moment to take a look back over the series and to appraise where I stood with each character. It didn’t take me long to realise that while I had spent quite some time, and turned many doomed trees into paper, developing the characters of cast members including Neil McIlhenney, Andy Martin, Sarah Grace, Jimmy Proud and several others the one of whom I, and as a result my readers, knew least was the main player, Skinner himself.

With that in mind, I embarked on Grievous Angel, a story set fifteen years back in Bob’s career, and narrated by the man himself as part of a therapeutic process. I set it fifteen years in the past, when my main man was balancing his climb up the CID ladder with the pressures on a single parent with a daughter entering her teenage years. I decided to set the book in the first person, for two reasons. One, I tend to rebel against convention, including that which decrees that cop stories should be told in the third person. Two, I wanted to get deeper into Skinner’s head, and to explore the Dark Ages of his life, the period between his first wife’s death and the coming of his second marriage.

A year later I felt confident enough to take the experiment a step further, to return to the present and to go further in determining what Chief Constable Bob’s colleagues, friends and family actually think about him, and occasionally about each other. That’s how Funeral Note was born, and that revelation will explain its structure. It has been described as my most ambitious work yet, and I will accept that as a fair assessment.

Like its predecessor, the book is in the first person, but this one is in multiple perspectives. It’s a series of inter-related, sequential narrations, each told to an unseen interviewer, and presented almost in the style of a documentary. With each contribution mystery is laid upon mystery and gradually a hidden, shapeless threat becomes terrifyingly apparent.

Along the way readers will find that Bob Skinner’s hope of a settled, stable family life was misplaced, they will find that his colleagues admire, fear and dislike him in almost equal measure and they will find that the unshakeable certainty that has made a success of his professional life turns destructive when it is challenged at home.

I’ve learned a lot about Skinner and his people in writing the last two books, but most of all about the man himself. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but now I realise that since the start of our acquaintance, his and mine, Bob has been in denial over the death of Myra, his teenage soulmate and first wife. He has blundered into several injudicious relationships, and a couple of ill-considered marriages, while at work he has become completely ruthless, although it seems that only there is he aware of his own weaknesses, as a conversation with ‘Sauce’ Haddock reveals in Funeral Note.

I know now that Bob Skinner is a very damaged man; I can see that his soul is broken. That’s my fault, for I did it to him. Can it be repaired? I can’t say for sure, but I’m going to try, even if it leads him to the funeral pyre of a hero.

That’s my promise, to him and to you. Now, please, read on, be you newcomer or old hand. When you’re finished, we hope that you’ll come back for more.

Quintin Jardine

L’Escala, Spain

29 June 2011

‘There is no wrong, there is no right; there’s only what happens. As a cop you deal with it, and leave the judgments to others . . . to the lawyers, to the jury, and if the verdict goes that way, to the guy on the bench in the wig and the red jacket.’

Paula gave me a long look, from beneath raised eyebrows. ‘Be nice if that was true, wouldn’t it?’ she said, in that long, slow drawl of hers. She slid her long-stemmed goblet across the table. ‘Top me up, McGuire.’

I took the sparkling Highland Spring from the ice bucket and obeyed orders; seven months before (or was it eight by then?) it would have been claret, or maybe, if she’d been feeling particularly Italian, a nice Chianti or a Sangiovese. The glass was to preserve the illusion.

‘It is,’ I insisted as I poured. ‘We are objective.’

‘Come on,’ my beautiful wife laughed. She shook her head, in that deprecating woman’s way. A flash of light, reflected from a building across the water, was picked up by her hair, and made it shimmer. I was still getting used to Paula’s auburn incarnation. She had been almost jet black when she was younger, as I still am . . . apart from the odd grey flecks that I regard as signs of distinction . . . until some twist in the mother’s side of her genes had turned her silver before her thirtieth birthday.

She’d let it stay that colour. Most people who’ve come to know her only in the last few years thought that she was ash blonde, and she didn’t make them any the wiser. But then she’d fallen pregnant: great news for us, and a nice one for Charlie Kettles, her hairdresser. His profits took an instant hike when she decided that it made her look too old to be a first-time mum.

She wasn’t done with our discussion. ‘Remember that guy,’ she persisted, ‘the one who slashed Maggie a few years back, when she tried to arrest him? He cut her arm right to the bone, so I heard. Were you objective with him when they had him locked up in the cells at St Leonards?’

‘Absolutely,’ I insisted . . . perhaps a little too insistently. Was she guessing, I wondered, or had someone been talking out of school?

‘Aye, that’ll be right,’ she scoffed. ‘I’ll bet you even made sure he was tucked in at night, and had a full Scottish breakfast in the morning.’

I nodded. ‘Complete with a slice of fried dumpling.’

‘That’s if he had teeth left to chew it.’

‘He had, I promise you.’ That much was true; I hadn’t left a mark, for all the pain I’d visited on him.

‘Okay, okay, okay.’ She held up a hand, as if she was conceding the point. ‘So you’ve always been purer than the driven slush. I assume that explains why you’re being so hard on these naughty cops of yours.’

‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘It’s the chief constable who’s chucked the book at them.’

‘Not quite, Mario,’ she argued. ‘All that Bob Skinner’s done is hand you the book and told you to clobber them with it.’

‘No . . .’ I was going to contradict her, but I didn’t. I’d have been wasting my time.

I never win arguments with Paula, even when I’m right and she’s wrong. She’s the most single-minded woman I’ve ever met in my life; when she sets herself a goal, or takes a position, be it a business decision, a major life issue or in a simple debate, she always scores. Ally that to her determination . . . some might call her obdurate, or obstinate, but there isn’t really a word strong enough to define her . . . and you have an exceptional person.

Her pregnancy’s a classic example. When I was married to my first wife, we had a phase when we tried to start a family. No, I’ll be honest with you: I was always more keen than Maggie was. She went along with the idea for my sake, not from any great desire of her own. We never told anyone about it. That was just as well, for after a year of earnest by-the-book effort, cycle-watching and all that stuff, and Mags never being as much as a day late, we consulted a fertility specialist. He examined us both, gave us the full range of tests. She passed with flying colours. I failed. The cock-doctor, as Neil McIlhenney, who is and always will be my best friend on the planet, christened him when I finally got round to confessing all, pronounced that my baby-juice was entirely unfit for purpose.

I suppose that was the beginning of the end for Maggie Rose Steele and me. In truth, she had sexual hang-ups that went back to her childhood, and I always suspected that marital relations . . . with me, at any rate . . . always did require a certain amount of thinking of Scotland on her part. When I found that I was thinking of Italy at the same time, I knew we were done.

There were no hard feelings on either side when we split, and Paula and I began, those two events being simultaneous. No, any difficulty there was lay within my circle of friends and family, or rather, ours. You see, Paula and I are first cousins.

There’s no reason why anyone should think twice about that, but people did. My mother was one of them, for a while, and sure as hell Uncle Beppe, Paula’s dad, would have disapproved as loudly as he could, if he’d still been alive to continue his unspoken feud with me.

Fact is, I was in the ‘anti’ lobby myself for a while. I’m a few years older than Paula, so our paths crossed very little as kids. It was only as young adults that I became properly aware of her, when she started hanging out in the same pubs and clubs as my crew. She claims that she was after me even then; if that was true, and I still doubt it, the guys she pulled made a pretty good smokescreen. And in those days, I was as constrained in my thinking as most people. Sure, she used to flirt with me, but when she came to me for help dealing with a bloke who was showing signs of not taking ‘No!’ for an answer, I decided that she saw me as Big Brother, and that was it.

Yes, that was it: until there came a morning, after a party we’d both been at and where I’d really tied one on, when I woke up to find the other side of the bed crumpled and heard someone in the en suite, brushing teeth. When Paula walked out, wearing a short-sleeved Hibs football outfit, minus the shorts and socks, I stared at her like someone, she said at the time, and still does, who’s realising he’s been stitched up by the News of the World.

‘Tell me nothing happened,’ I croaked: yes, I had been that drunk. She wouldn’t, though; her only reply was a wink and a broad smile. (It took me years to make her confess that she hadn’t been able to rouse me, in any way.) When I sobered up, I was shaken up by the incident, confused, and not a little alarmed by the fact that the sight of her in that green and white shirt had made me, instantly, as stiff as a chocolate frog. In the aftermath, I was careful to keep distance between us, even when I was married and she was going through a series of short-term relationships with guys, including Maggie’s future second husband, the ill-fated Stevie Steele.

I made myself think of her as just another family member, and even imagined rivalry between us when it came to the future destiny of the Viareggio family businesses, although I’d never had any real interest in running them. Uncle Beppe had taken over after my grandfather’s death, and he and I never got on. When I told him that I’d decided to join the police force rather than work with him, he couldn’t keep the smile from his face.

He wouldn’t have been grinning if he’d been around when, finally, I looked at Paula and saw not a kid cousin, but the woman I’d loved all along, even through the years of my marriage. As it failed, I turned to her for comfort, and discovered that I didn’t want to be anywhere else, ever again.

My old inhibitions didn’t disappear in a flash, nor in anything like it. For a while the fact that we were sleeping together was a secret to be kept, even from our mothers. When the shackles were finally broken it was by the unlikeliest person: Nana Viareggio, our grandmother, our matriarch. She’s a wise old bird and she spotted the difference between us before it had dawned on anyone else. When she asked me about it, I started to apologise to her, to seek her understanding, if not her forgiveness.

She laughed at me. ‘You must be a secret Calvinist, boy, for all you were raised in the Holy Catholic Church. That’s Scotland for you; where your Papa and I came from, your relationship would have been encouraged. His father and my mother were cousins. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that? What’s wrong with such marriages? The European royal families have been marrying with each other for hundreds of years.’

She was right; Nana’s wisdom encouraged me to do some research on the subject, and I discovered that in many cultures, it’s the norm, not an exception. When I showed this to Paula, she laughed, and told me that she knew three women in the Edinburgh merchant community who were in happy marriages with cousins, arranged when they were children.

Nobody’s ever told us they disapprove of our relationship . . . or even been foolish enough to try . . . but I know we were the subject of gossip when we moved in together, as we did after a period of maintaining separate homes, for show. The chattering classes were pretty much silenced though, by our friends, first among them Bob Skinner. He made a point of inviting us, as a couple, to every formal dinner with which he was involved, and the chief constable, or deputy as he was then, hosts or organises plenty of those. He and Aileen, his politician wife, and Neil and Louise McIlhenney, were the only non-family guests when Paula and I were married in a private ceremony in Kelso just over a year ago, and they’re still among very few people who know that we’re man and wife.

It wasn’t long after we tied the knot that Paula got broody. Ironically, Maggie, my ex, had a lot to do with it. She remarried and had a baby daughter, born a few months after Stevie, her cop father, was killed, tragically, while on duty, by an explosive device that was meant for someone else. We gave her as much support as we could, saw a lot of her and the wee one, and it was those first few weeks of Stephanie Rose Steele that triggered a full-blown outbreak of the baby blues.

‘When you were told you were infertile, what was the diagnosis?’

The question came out of the blue, across the table in a corner of Ondine, a trendy restaurant on King George IV Bridge that Paula had booked for my fortieth birthday dinner. (Just the two of us: I’d warned her that if she organised a surprise party for me, I would tell the world when she hits the same mark.) I was taken aback, but more by the content than the timing, for I’d read the signs by then. However, I’d been expecting her to ask what I thought about adoption. If she had, I’d have said ‘Fine’, without missing a beat. But I’d misread her. She didn’t simply want to be a mother; she wanted to have a child.

I frowned, as I recalled the moment when the cock-doctor had broken the news. ‘Diagnosis?’ I repeated. ‘How many ways are there of telling you your tadpoles don’t work?’

‘Lots,’ she replied. ‘What did he actually say?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Word for word, I can’t recall. He gave me the headline news straight up: “Mr McGuire, you’re the problem.” Then he said I was producing sperm, but that they were no use.’

‘You mean the count was too low?’ she persisted, like a QC in court.

‘I dunno. That was what I assumed.’

She drew me that look, over her glass. ‘You did want a baby, though.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Pfffff. Why does any bloke? Because he’s married and it’s what you do. We did try, you know; we read textbooks on the subject, took her temperature, did it with a cushion under her bum. We even went by the phases of the moon for a while. None of it worked.’

‘So you gave up?’

‘What else could we do? We weren’t left with any choice.’

‘My darling boy,’ she purred, ‘do the words “second” and “opinion” have any significance for you?’

‘The man who did my tests was an expert, a top consultant,’ I protested. ‘He cost a load of money.’

‘For which you didn’t get value,’ she suggested, ‘if that’s all he told you.’

‘There was more,’ I admitted, ‘but I wasn’t listening. He gave us a written report, but I never read it.’

‘Aw!’ she exclaimed, with more than a hint of mockery. ‘Poor wee boy. Mario threw a huff. You took it personally, saw yourself as unmanned, so you went away and flexed your muscles in a corner, without even thinking “underlying cause”, and looking into it.’

I felt myself go red. ‘If your sperm is useless, love, that’s it,’ I muttered.

‘Not necessarily,’ she countered. ‘Do you still have the report?’

‘Hell no. It hit the bin the next day.’

‘Can you get another copy?’ she asked.

‘I imagine so.’

‘Will you?’

I looked her in the eye and I saw something I’d never seen there before, an unspoken thing that was, beyond any doubt, a plea. She wasn’t asking me to go back to the cock-doctor; she was begging me.

‘Of course I will, love,’ I promised. ‘With neither hope nor expectation, but I’ll do it.’ I paused. ‘And if it confirms what I believe, then we’ll look at other options, like a donor, for example.’

‘No.’ She reached out and touched my cheek. ‘I want your baby, nobody else’s.’ Then she grinned. ‘But I warn you. If the consultant says there’s just one viable tadpole in there that’ll do the job, and I have to squeeze it out with my own bare hands, then I will.’

Thank God, it didn’t come to that. When the copy of the report hit my email inbox and I read it, I found out that it said that the problem required further investigation before the precise cause of my infertility could be established. I went straight back to the consultant and told him to go ahead. My output was collected and observed. It didn’t take the specialist long to tell me that I suffer from what he called asthenospermia; what that means is, the little buggers were there, but they were lousy swimmers. That being the case, he proposed that we assist them by trying in-vitro fertilisation. He warned us that the odds were against success, even after several attempts, but he didn’t know Paula. The first shot was a bullseye.

When her pregnancy was confirmed, I’ve never seen her so happy. No, scratch that; I’ve never seen anyone looking so happy. Me? Looking at her, I couldn’t stop myself; I cried like the baby she’s expecting.

She picked up the metaphorical bones of our unfinished discussion and gnawed on them some more. ‘So how are you going to play it?’ she asked.

‘Like any other criminal investigation,’ I replied.

‘Criminal?’

‘Yes. Varley and Cowan compromised a CID investigation; worse than that, they leaked information to a suspect. Jack McGurk and Sauce Haddock had a man called Kenny Bass under surveillance in connection with a cigarette smuggling operation; they’d had a tip that he’d imported a cache of dodgy fags, and they were playing him. They had an authorised phone tap in place on Bass’s mobile, trying to pull in other people involved in the scam. Late yesterday afternoon, when they were just about to finish for the day, they were told about an exchange of texts setting up a meeting that same evening. They traced the other number to a man called Freddy Welsh. He’s a building contractor, and he has no criminal record, but the fact that he initiated the get-together interested my guys. The venue was Lafayette’s, Regine Zaliukas’s pub out in Slateford.’

Paula looked puzzled. ‘Which one’s that? I thought I knew everywhere in Edinburgh.’

‘It used to be called Caballero’s, before Regine made her now departed husband move it upmarket and clear out the pole dancers.’

‘Ah, that place.’ She smiled. ‘I went out with a guy once and he took me there. I did not go out with him twice.’

‘Did I know him?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Just as well for him. Anyway, our two planned to be in there, waiting for Bass and the other man when they turned up, but . . . Jack couldn’t make it. He and his partner were going to a wedding rehearsal last night, and he’s the best man, so he begged off. Becky Stallings, the DI in overall charge of the operation, called Sammy Pye, down at Leith, and asked him if he could borrow a replacement. Ray Wilding, Pye’s DS, was off limits, obviously, not just because he and Becky live together, but also because he was on the verge of leaving on promotion, so big Griff Montell got the call.’

‘Montell? As in Alex Skinner’s ex?’

‘She’d probably deny that, say they were just friends, but yes, him. He and Sauce watched them arrive, Bass first, then Welsh . . . they’d found a picture of him by that time so they knew what he looked like. They let the pair of them get settled into a booth with a table, and then moved in close enough for Sauce to use a very cute wee directional microphone, and eavesdrop on the conversation, while Montell filmed them with a video cam small enough to fit into his hand. They’d only been there for about a minute, talking about nothing much more than the weather, when one of the bar staff asked if there was a Mr Welsh in the place, for there was a phone call for him. He went off to take it. Because he’s a good cop, Sauce went with him, still close enough for the mike to pick him up as he took the call at the bar. I’ve heard the tape. Welsh says, “Freddy here. Who’s this?” There’s a pause, and then he says, “You’re fucking joking.” Another pause, and he says, “Thanks, you’re weighed in for this.” Then he hung up, turned around, and walked straight out the door without even looking at Bass.’

Paula was wide-eyed, hooked on the story. ‘What did Bass do?’

‘He sat there for a while, looking puzzled.’ I knew this for sure, because I’d seen the video too. ‘Eventually he figured out that Welsh wasn’t coming back, finished his drink and left. Sauce sent Montell after him, to make sure they weren’t meeting up outside . . . which they weren’t . . . while he went and asked the bar staff about the call. The girl who took it could only tell him that it was a man’s voice. When he tried to check the number on one four seven one, it came up as unavailable, but BT were able to trace it for him later. And guess what? It was a public phone box, about a hundred yards away from Gayfield Square police station.’

‘Which anyone could have used,’ she pointed out, ‘so how did you link it to your two? Come to that, how did you even think to?’

‘Young Sauce is going to be a great cop,’ I told her. ‘His gut, and some logical thinking told him there had been a leak, and a very recent one at that. So who was new on the team? Montell. He called Stallings on her mobile, and asked her to meet him. He was even bright enough, or brave enough even, to tell her to say nothing to Ray Wilding, because he worked with Montell. He told Becky what had happened. First thing she did was promise him she’d said nothing to Ray. The second thing she did was call me. I went straight to Special Branch, Dorothy Shannon and Tarvil Singh, and I told them to find out as much as there is to know about Freddy Welsh’s background. A couple of hours later, Shannon got back to me. Welsh is Inspector Jock Varley’s wife’s cousin, Jock Varley is DC Alice Cowan’s uncle, and Jock Varley’s based at Gayfield Square. Tarvil had checked the st