It was by sheer chance that I was around when Bob Skinner called me to ask if I could do him a professional favour. ‘No worries if you can’t handle it personally, but if you can’t, I’d appreciate it if you could send me someone senior to sit alongside Mario.’
But I was clear, and to be honest, I saw it as a chance of a long weekend in Edinburgh, since the interview he wanted me to do would inevitably last too long for me to get to my base in Paisley for any sort of meaningful work.
My SCDEA badge didn’t work when I arrived at the police head-quarters building in Fettes Avenue, not even with ‘Director’ on it in bold print. The door security officer didn’t know me from Morecambe and Wise. . his lack of humour was written all over his face. . and he made me wait until I could be fetched by someone from CID.
Mario came down himself. He was ready to take a piece off Cerberus, but I hauled him away before he could do too much damage. ‘That’s the trouble with these civilian staff,’ he growled, ‘no nous, no initiative. Ah, it’s not their fault, I suppose. The politicians want to see as many uniforms on the street as possible so we con them by hiring civvy security officers. We have to vet them to make sure they’re legit, and that takes time, then once they’re in the job, they don’t have any flexibility about them. Last month, one of them made Aileen wait down here until Gerry Crossley came to collect her. You can imagine what happened when Bob found out.’
‘Oh yes,’ I laughed. ‘Has the fall-out cleared or is the place still radioactive?’
He walked me up to the head of CID’s office. It hadn’t changed a bit since it was mine, save for the photo of Paula (and bump) on the desk and a couple of very classy landscapes on the walls.
I took a guess. ‘Your mother’s work?’
He nodded. ‘That’s what she retired to Italy to do. She gives them away, you know.’
‘Literally?’
‘Well, no,’ he conceded, ‘she’s still a Viareggio. No, she sells them through a gallery in her village, when they’re easily good enough for her to get them into an outlet in Firenze and make three times the money.’
‘How does she feel about being a granny?’ I asked.
‘Ecstatic. She’s talking about moving back to Scotland. I’m doing my best to talk her out of it, but I’ve never been any effing good at that.’ He frowned, suddenly. ‘Hey, by the way, I’m sorry about you and Karen. Haven’t seen you since it happened, but. . You know, sorry.’
‘Yeah, thanks; appreciated. Now, brief me. Bob only gave me the bare bones yesterday. What am I here to do?’
‘He said that you don’t know Jock Varley. . Inspector John Varley?’
‘No, I don’t in any personal sense of the word. I know who he is, obviously, but we have never actually met face to face, not that I can recall.’
‘And you would,’ he snorted, ‘given your legendary memory. You’re right; he’s spent virtually all his career in uniform, while you’ve been in CID. The situation is that he has an in-law called Freddy Welsh, whose name came up in an operation that the Torphichen Place team had under way. There was a meeting between him and our target, and Varley stopped it with a phone call.’
I asked the obvious. ‘How did he know about it?’
‘His niece told him. DC Alice Cowan.’
I did know her. ‘Special Branch Alice?’
‘Not any more, she got booted off SB about a year ago for tipping off Uncle Jock about something else he was involved in. Obviously you didn’t know that.’
Actually, I did. ‘Oh shit, yes, he was that guy.’ It came back to me. I’d been in a similar situation then, an outside force officer brought in from Tayside as an objective eye, but not too objective.
‘You got it. Varley was, very briefly, a suspect in a murder investigation, but he was exonerated.’ Indeed: I had come very close to meeting him at that time. ‘He was in Livingston then, and he was moved to Gayfield afterwards, diplomatically.’
‘How seriously are we taking this?’ I asked.
Mario stared at me; he was offended. ‘Very. We don’t want you to help us rubber-stamp a cover-up here. Nothing is off the table in terms of action as far as we’re concerned. If you say at the end of the day that we should hand the whole investigation to another force, or to your agency, we will do that.’
That was what I’d wanted to hear. ‘That’s good. You want me for just the one interview, then?’
‘That’s all it was going to be,’ he said, ‘but I’ve had a rethink overnight. I saw Alice myself yesterday; she said she’d co-operate and I suspended her, pending a full hearing. But I want us both to interview her as well, again so that you’re happy with the way I’m proceeding.’
‘Fine, but there’s another officer in the chain, as I understand it. What about him?’
Mario frowned. ‘He’s being dealt with separately; I’ve taken a statement from him and I’m satisfied that he’s guilty of no more than careless talk. But I don’t want to handle the discipline. He’ll be on Maggie’s carpet later on.’
‘But shouldn’t I interview him too,’ I wondered aloud, ‘as part of this process?’
‘That wouldn’t be appropriate, Andy. It’s DC Montell, and he has. .’ He hesitated, and I knew why.
I nodded, and said it for him. ‘He has a history with Alex. You’re right; that disqualifies me. But let’s be clear; you’re satisfied that he hasn’t done anything that could possibly be seen as criminal.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Okay, that’s enough for me,’ I said. ‘Is he suspended too?’
‘Hell no! That would have emptied the Leith CID office; Sammy Pye would have done his nut.’ He paused, his face twisting into a grimace. ‘Would you believe, I called him “Stevie” the other day? At a meeting Maggie was at, too.’
I shrugged. ‘Come on, they worked together. It’s an easy mistake to make. Plus it would show her he’s remembered.’
‘That’s what Maggie said; it didn’t stop me looking for a hole to hide in, though.’ He stood. ‘You ready to go?’
‘Sure. Downstairs?’
He shook his head. ‘No. I’ve had Varley held overnight, down at Leith. We’ll go there.’
Bob had said no half measures when he’d asked for my help, but that took me by surprise. ‘You serious? He’s a cop and you’ve held him in custody?’
‘I’ve got grounds,’ he insisted. ‘If he wasn’t a cop, what would I have done, or what would you?’
He was right; I don’t take prisoners either.
Mario drove us down to Leith, since I’d walked the ten minutes from my place to Fettes. There are no attractive police offices in Edinburgh, damn few anywhere for that matter, but at least the building on the corner of Constitution Street and Queen Charlotte Street has the benefit of being old. It has an impressive pillared entrance and if the stone was cleaned up it wouldn’t look bad, not the best piece of architecture in the city, but the most distinguished nick, and certainly more attractive than Torphichen Place; to my eyes that’s always managed to combine age and ugliness.
We paid a courtesy call on Detective Inspector Sammy Pye as soon as we arrived. He hadn’t expected me, but he seemed pleased to see me nonetheless. He and I, and Alice Cowan for that matter, go way back, to our days in uniform in East Lothian, when I was on sabbatical from CID. He met us at the top of the stairs and led us straight into his office. Through the glass I could see the back and shoulders of Detective Constable Griffin Montell, hunched over his desk with the phone to his ear.
Yes, he did have a history with Alex (they lived next door to each other for a while) but she’d told me that it had never been serious with either of them, and that the physical side of it had ended for good when she’d discovered that he had an ex-wife and two kids in South Africa that he’d neglected to mention. However, he did once get her out of a very nasty situation, which had earned him so many bonus points with her dad. . and with me for that matter, though I barely knew him. . that it would take him a long time to run through them.