But you didn’t; instead you merely grunted and went back to sleep.
The logs seemed to be hugging. ‘What the hell?’ I murmured, to the person who had climbed into the wreck after me. ‘Could they have been screwing? Caught in the act by a jealous husband with a petrol bomb?’
‘That’s if they’re man and woman,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ll tell you that in a couple of hours.’
‘Men get up to naughties as well,’ I pointed out.
‘But not face to face. . well, not in that position, if my understanding of these things is correct. Besides, if they were having sex, it was necrophilia on somebody’s part.’ She used a pen to point to a lumpy bit of the log nearer to us. ‘This one was dead before the fire was set. There’s a massive hole in the back of the head that, in my opinion, can only be an exit wound. And if he or she was, then the assumption must be that so was the other.’
‘Maybe jealous husband. .’ I persisted.
‘Or jealous wife,’ she interrupted.
‘If you insist. . or jealous wife. . caught them in the act and shot them, then torched the van. Or shot them somewhere else, put them in the van and brought them here?’
‘And drove two vehicles? Arthur’s certain there was another here.’
‘In which case,’ I offered, hopefully, ‘maybe jealous husband of one and jealous wife of another.’
She nodded and jumped out of the van. I followed her. ‘That I cannot rule out,’ she admitted, pulling off her face mask, ‘not until I’ve separated them from their grotesque dance of death, as at least one tabloid is bound to say when this comes to court.’
‘Okay,’ I told her, ‘you’d better do it. You can have ’em.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ she grinned. She seemed exceptionally full of life; or maybe it was simply the contrast with her surroundings. Whatever, I found myself smiling with her. She was like the old Sarah back again, the one we knew before everything between her and Bob got buggered up.
‘Roshan,’ she called to another paper suit, ‘the boss man says we can have ’em. Let’s go to work.’
‘What are you going to be able to give me?’ I asked.
‘Their genders, and cause of death, certainly. Time of death, no, not unless I’m wrong and the fire killed them. Place of death, the same applies. Identification? Given the material, I’ll probably have to do DNA comparisons with people reported missing. I’ll give you as much as I can as quickly as I can, Mario. That’s all I can offer.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said.
I stood back and watched as the mortuary crew began the task of removing the bodies. I didn’t know where Lowell Payne was while it was happening, but I was bloody sure he hadn’t gone for a takeaway. Sammy, though, he stood beside me, shoulder to shoulder, putting down yet another marker.
‘Where do I go with this one, sir?’ he asked, quietly, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear him sounding uncertain.
‘Not far,’ I suggested. ‘We’re stymied for identification until Sarah’s done her autopsy. But,’ I paused, ‘does anything strike you about this, Sam?’
He frowned, considering his answer, considering, as it turned out, whether to tell the head of CID to his Italian-Irish face that he was talking bollocks.
‘I heard what you said to Dr Grace,’ he ventured, once he’d decided. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see this being a crime of sexual jealousy. It’s not just that there were two vehicles involved, so at least two perpetrators. It’s the fact that they’ve gone out of their way to make it difficult to identify the bodies. The number plates are gone: not melted, gone. The passenger cabin, that’s clean. Arthur swears that there was nothing in it, no paperwork, no old crisp packets or drinks cans, none of the stuff you’d expect in a working van. Also there were two seats to the fire, not just in the back but in the cabin too. We’re not meant to know who these people are, or who this van belonged to: at least we’re not meant to find out in a hurry.’
He was earnest and he was right. I had to smile. ‘One thing they couldn’t have known, though,’ I countered. ‘We’ve got our brightest and best on the case. Plus we’ve got my remarkable record of being a lucky bastard. Fingers crossed for the autopsy, Inspector, and fingers crossed also that these people didn’t know where the chassis number is on Movano vans.’
Aileen de Marco
I didn’t have any constituency business in Glasgow that Saturday morning, but I told Bob that I had as an excuse for getting out from under his roof.
Marriage hadn’t been on my agenda at the time I met him. I was Deputy Justice Minister in Tommy Murtagh’s Holyrood administration, but my immediate boss was on the way out and I was expected to move up, and into the Cabinet. However, nobody ever imagined that I would replace Murtagh himself. . nobody but me, that is.
I wouldn’t join an orchestra with the sole ambition of playing second fiddle; it isn’t in my nature, any more than it’s in Bob Skinner’s. I am sure that’s what attracted me to him, that shared trait that we have, attracted me strongly enough for me to ignore any concerns over the fact that he was married. Not that I had many of those. I’ve always taken the view that when someone plays away, it’s because the game at home isn’t so hot, and so as far as I’m concerned Dr Sarah Grace’s problems were entirely self-inflicted.
Maybe I should have felt uncomfortable about it, and maybe what happened in the end is my punishment for my lack of scruples. Maybe, but the truth is I don’t give a bugger. I fancied the man, I sent out signals and he came homing in on them like a guided missile. Even then, I wasn’t bothered about marrying him, but by that time I was First Minister of Scotland, so when he asked me I agreed, on the grounds that it would be seemly, but more practically that the tabloids wouldn’t be hounding us if we were man and wife.
Bob would tell you now, I’m sure, that I saw it as a political alliance from the start. You know what? He’d be right. From the day I came into politics, my ambition has always been the same: to go as far as I can. That’s true of many of my fellow members of Scotland’s parliament, but I don’t know any who appreciate that there is a life beyond that building if you’re young enough to go for it.
I have never stood for Westminster, but that’s only because I haven’t tried. . yet. I will, soon. My party will resume power after the next election; of that I’m reasonably confident. I’ll become First Minister again, I will serve loyally and faithfully for a couple of years, and then I’ll use my influence in London to find myself a safe seat south of the border at the next Westminster election, expecting to move straight on to the front bench.
That’s been my scenario for a while, and when I married, it was in the assumption that I’d have the full support of my husband in making it happen. When I say full support, I mean that exactly. Robert Morgan Skinner is many things; some are pleasant, some are not, but he has one quality that sets him apart. He’s an achiever, and I figured that with him spearheading my back-room team, there was nowhere I couldn’t go.
My game plan was to take him out of the police force, where he was approaching burn-out anyway as I saw it, and make him my chief of staff. Who better for the job of managing my rise to the top than someone who loved me but loathes just about every other politician in existence? I thought I could bring him onside, I honestly did. I thought that his unquenchable ambition would transfer to me, making that easy.
Unfortunately, my grand design had a couple of flaws. One you know already, I’m sure; Bob’s infuriating and unbending resistance to the idea of a single, unified Scottish police force, to which I am committed irrevocably, as part of my plan for stuffing Clive Graham’s lot at the next election. I’d prepared the way a year or two earlier by asking Bob to do me a paper on the subject, on how it would work. He did that, without setting out any furious counter-argument, so his blowing up at me when I told him it was going to happen was completely unexpected.