‘No,’ Aileen replied, ‘I’m not, I’m just mixing it. I’m lousy at omelettes.’ She smiled up at him cheerfully. ‘You’re much better at them than I am, big fella, so you get on with it while I juice some oranges.’
She stepped away from the cooker and handed him a long spatula as he moved in to take her place. At first he was focused entirely on his task, and over a minute went past before he raised his eyes to look out of the kitchen window.
‘Bloody hell!’ he barked. ‘They’re here now!’
‘Oh,’ said Aileen quietly. ‘I wondered how you’d react when you saw them.’
Bob’s eyes were fixed on the scene below. The car park that served Gullane’s broad, sandy beach seemed to have been turned into a holiday camp overnight. He did a quick count and determined that twenty-one caravans, some approaching the maximum length that could be towed legally, were parked there. Each had at least one car alongside, and several vans and pick-ups were lined up beyond.
‘Just what I need,’ he moaned. ‘Tinkers.’
‘Bob,’ she reproved him gently, ‘you’re being politically incorrect You’re supposed to call them travelling people; they’ve got the status of an ethnic group, even though technically our courts have never recognised them as one.’
‘They’re recognised everywhere as a fucking nuisance,’ he fumed, ‘and that’s for sure. I’ve got no objection to them camping on authorised public caravan sites for travellers, but that down there is not one of those. It’s a car park for families who want to enjoy a day on the beach. You know as well as I do what’s going to happen: parents and kids will be scared off. Look at them: half of them have got dog kennels outside their vans, and those will not be for wee dogs. These characters don’t keep pets, they keep bodyguards. Christ, I can see three Alsatians tethered down there. . and a bloody Rottweiler.’ He flipped the omelette over in the pan, cursing quietly as he broke it in the process. ‘As soon as we’re done here, I’m going to give them the message.’
‘No, you’re not,’ said Aileen quietly.
‘I bloody am,’ he insisted.
She shook her head and took the pan from him. ‘Think about this,’ she told him as she divided its contents into unequal portions and laid them on two plates, then carried them over to the breakfast bar, where cutlery and two stools waited. ‘Where have they come from? Do you know?’
‘I’ve been hearing stories about them from Brian Mackie for the last few months,’ he told her. ‘Assuming it’s the same group, they’ve come from the beach park at Dunbar. It took three weeks to move them out of there. The council had to get an interdict from the Sheriff Court before we could act. Before that they were at Longniddry, same story, and before that Yellowcraigs.’
‘Why did it take three weeks?’ she asked. ‘And why the need for an interdict in the first place?’
‘You must know as well as I do,’ Bob replied, ‘that the law on the subject’s completely upside down. There’s an Act that says they can’t do things like that down there, but we can’t just enforce it, in case we infringe their human bloody rights, or we subject them to racially aggravated harassment. It’s bollocks, a ridiculous situation. You should give priority in Parliament to sorting it out and giving us the power to act quickly against them.’
‘I’ll do that after I make the A1 a motorway,’ she chuckled. ‘But seriously, if ACPOS ask us, we’ll look at it. But that’s as may be. When they were at Yellowcraigs, or Longniddry or Dunbar, did the deputy chief constable turn up in person and tell them to move on?’
‘No,’ he sighed.
‘And if you do it now, do you imagine these people are so other-worldly that none of them will think of getting on the phone to the tabloids and complaining that Bob Skinner’s threatened them because they’re spoiling the view from his kitchen window? Then how long will it be before there are stories that you did it because I told you to?’
‘OK.’ He held up a hand, and a forkful of omelette. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I’m still not having it, not for our sake, but for the sake of the kids who’re going to be put off using the beach and for the local dog-walkers who’re going to be scared off by that pack of wolves tethered down there. I can sort them out in other ways.’
‘Such as?’
‘Vehicle inspections. I can send officers to check the tax, MOT and insurance status of every one of their cars.’
‘Big deal.’
‘One at a time. On the hour every hour. Starting at two in the morning.’›
Aileen gasped. ‘Bob, these folk have children.’
‘So they won’t hang around long.’
‘And if someone happens to tell them who lives up the hill? No, you’re going to have to do this by the book.’
He bolted down the last of his breakfast and swung himself off his stool. ‘In that case, the book says that the first thing we do is ask them, nicely, to move to a designated traveller site. You don’t mind if I do that myself, do you?’
‘You think you’re capable of nicely?’
A broad smile creased his face. ‘When I put my mind to it, I am. I’ll be so polite they’ll bend over backwards to please me.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘Then they’ll wish they had.’
Eleven
‘What would you be doing if you weren’t here right now?’ Sammy Pye asked Ray Wilding.
‘That’s a bit personal, is it not?’ the detective sergeant replied. ‘Same as you, maybe.’
‘And then again maybe not. Ruth’s away at her mother’s; she often does that when I’m on this shift. She’ll be back by the time I knock off, though. We’ll probably go out for something to eat later on.’
‘Us too. The sad truth is, if I wasn’t on duty I’d be stuck up a ladder with a roller in my hand. Becky’s in a redecoration frenzy at the moment, and I’m the painter.’
‘Is that right? When she moved up from London, I thought she was talking about getting a place of her own.’
Wilding smiled, sheepishly. ‘She was, but we’re. . we’re getting on fine together, so what’s the point?’
Pye whistled. ‘Is this Ray Wilding I’m hearing? The man with more notches on his headboard than Billy the Kid had on his gun.’
‘I’m afraid it is. And I always swore blind I’d never marry a cop.’
‘Marry? Did you say marry?’
‘Well, in a manner of speaking,’ the sergeant admitted. ‘We’re going to see how it goes.’
‘And DI Stallings isn’t missing the Met? She doesn’t regard this as a backwater?’
‘Hell no. On that last investigation she had the best result of her career. The DCC might have been involved in the arrest, with big Montell and me, but he faded right into the background afterwards, as is his way. Becky’s on the record as the senior investigating officer. She’d never have got near something that size in London.’
‘Excuse me, gentlemen.’ The voice came from the speaker above their heads, breaking into their conversation. ‘You’re supposed to be witnessing this, aren’t you?’
Both detectives looked through the glass screen that separated them from the autopsy room. In truth they had been trying to ignore, as best they could, the little old man in the green gown, while he and his assistant delved into the remains of the late Ainsley Glover as he lay naked on the stainless-steel table. ‘Sorry, Prof,’ said Pye, leaning forward to speak into the microphone that was set into a console beneath the window. ‘I didn’t realise we were getting to the exciting part.’
‘You think you jest, young Detective Inspector,’ said Professor Joe Hutchinson, Scotland’s pre-eminent pathologist. ‘Let me wipe the smile off your face. I have a cause of death for you. Would you like to step into my office?’ He stretched out a hand in a gesture of invitation. ‘It’s OK, we’ve put all the bits away, or back.’