If I’d planned the exact moment that the phone should ring, I couldn’t have done it any better.
Detective Constable Harold ‘Sauce’ Haddock
‘You pick your moments to slope off.’
I couldn’t resist having a dig as Jack McGurk unfolded himself from his car. I hadn’t seen him since the Lafayette’s operation went tits up. But all the big sod did was smile at me, and nod.
‘Didn’t I just. And am I pleased? You bet your little life I am. If I’d been there, I’d have sent you off after Kenny Bass, and I’d have done the check on that phone call.’
I know when Detective Sergeant McGurk is kidding me, and he wasn’t. I felt my eyes narrow. ‘Are you saying that you’d have handled it differently?’ I asked him.
‘No. I’d have done exactly the same as you, and that’s why I’m pleased I wasn’t there, or it would have been me that called the DI and blew the whistle that’s going to call time on the career of two fellow cops, and maybe three. Face it, lad, you will not be the most popular boy in the force when this gets out. The bosses will love you, sure. You might even get the DS vacancy that was earmarked for Montell, with Ray Wilding moving up. But Varley and Alice are liked in the job, especially Alice, so don’t be surprised if you ain’t, for a while at least.’
I’d worked that out for myself, from the very first moment I’d realised that the caller to the pub almost certainly had been a cop, but Becky Stallings, good gaffer that she is, had promised that she’d keep my name out of it. I told him so.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘And do you think Montell’s going to keep your name out of it too?’
‘Why shouldn’t he?’
Jack stretched to his considerable height and rolled his eyes. ‘Figure it out,’ he drawled.
I didn’t. ‘Okay, he works with Alice. But she let him down. So why should he take it out on me?’
He laid a big rugby lock forward’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Let me lay out a scenario. Suppose a guy has this girlfriend, pillow-talk is exchanged, and she gets him into professional trouble. What’s he going to do? Sign up for her firing squad? No, once she’s finished crying on his shoulder he’s going to give her a big hug and tell her everything’s all right. You, of all people, should know that.’
He was getting personal. A few months ago I’d put myself into a very similar situation with a girlfriend. With another chief constable, it might have been career-ending; indeed Bob Skinner can be such a grim, ruthless bastard that at the time I’d expected it would be. Instead, to my astonishment, when I was summoned to his office at Fettes, in the ugly building that’s neither old nor modern, he gave me a cup of coffee, so strong that it was probably punishment enough, and told me, with a frankness that astonished me, that I wasn’t the first cop who’d let his dick bypass his brain, and that I was sitting beside another. ‘The trick, Sauce,’ he went on, ‘is not to let it do so twice.’
So when Ms Cheeky McCullough turned up on my doorstep a couple of nights later, what did I do? You guessed it. When she’d finished crying on my shoulder, I gave her a big hug and told her everything was all right. I was taking a chance, and I still am, because Cheeky’s granddad was. . and how I hope that past tense is right. . a villain, big time, but as long as I remember what Mr Skinner told me, it’ll be fine.
I’m still naive at times, though. For example, because they worked together, it hadn’t occurred to me for a minute that Montell and Alice Cowan might have been dancing the horizontal mambo out of office hours.
‘Oh,’ I said to Jack, ‘so I’d better steer clear of Leith for a while.’
He laughed. ‘And hope you don’t get that DS vacancy.’ Then his face went straight. ‘You want some serious advice? Call Griff. Don’t apologise for what you did, because you were right, but for the way it’s turned out. He’s a sound bloke. He might not thank you, but he’ll respect the approach.’
We had been walking as we talked, towards a line of trees; it was late in the evening, but being July, it was still bright enough for us to see well enough. At some point in time, the car park where we’d met up had been created in the centre of a mature wood, and what was left surrounded it. A man was waiting for us, mid-thirties, bad haircut, in uniform: at least we assumed he was waiting for us, since we had walked past three police vehicles and a dark blue van on our way towards him.
‘Why are we here?’ Jack asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘You’re the fucking sergeant; you tell me. I had a call from the gaffer telling me to get here sharpish, that’s all.’
‘Same here.’
‘Through there,’ the uniform said, standing aside to allow us to pass through a gap between two trees behind him.
McGurk stopped, so abruptly that I almost bumped into him. ‘Can I have your name, and your age, Constable?’
‘Harkins. What dae you want my age for?’
‘Ach, you know. We always like it in the story.’
‘Eh?’ As he muttered his incredulity, Jack whipped out his warrant card and displayed it; I did the same.
‘We could have been Sun reporters for all you know, PC Harkins,’ the big man told him, not unkindly. ‘You want to sharpen up. There’s real competition for jobs these days.’
The plod smiled; personally, I’d have preferred to see a little contrition from him. ‘Tough for them, eh. Sorry, Sarge.’ He chuckled. ‘But I’ve never seen anyone looks more like a polis than you do.’ He pointed into the trees, towards an area that had been taped off, and in which we could see people, moving under lights that had been set up. ‘It’s over there.’
‘What is?’ I snapped at him, irked by his indifference to everything.
‘The body. What did you expect here, son? This is Mortonhall Crematorium ye’re at.’
That much I’d known, but that was all the DI had said. She’d sounded flustered, and that was a first for her, in my experience. As she approached us, holding a crime scene tunic in each hand, she looked less than her cool self, too.
‘Lads, sorry to haul you out past your bedtimes, but this one isn’t the normal run-of-the-mill homicide.’
‘A definite homicide, though?’ Jack quizzed her as he started to climb into the paper suit that wasn’t going to fit him any better than the last one had.
‘He didn’t bury himself,’ she replied.
‘How was he found?’ I asked, looking across at the sterile area we’d soon be entering. ‘This doesn’t look like a place where people walk their dogs.’ The woods seemed too thick, close though they were to the houses that I could just make out on the other side. I sniffed the air and caught the scent of cat piss: but no putrefaction, I noted.
‘He wasn’t. We were told where he was.’
‘We were told. .’ Jack repeated.
She nodded. ‘You heard me right. There was a phone call, an hour and a half ago, on the public line to the communications centre. The caller said that there was a body buried in the woods, and told us precisely where. He even gave map co-ordinates.’
‘And communications called you?’ I knew what he was getting at. We were out of our area.
‘No, I did.’
The voice came from behind us, but we didn’t have to turn to know who owned it, or that he was not best pleased. He joined us, just as I fastened my paper pyjamas. We’d all been advised to walk as if on eggshells around DCS Mario McGuire, our head of CID, ever since his ‘soul brother’, Neil McIlhenney, had shocked the world by moving to the Met.
In truth walking on eggshells around McGuire is advisable at any time. There are a few people in this world on whose good side you always want to be, and he’s one of those for sure. He’s just over six feet tall, and built like a brick shit-house, although he’s always dressed to disguise the fact. He has thick curly hair, jet-black, but with some grey creeping into it, as you’d expected in someone around the forty mark. He’s usually amiable, but as someone once said, ‘If Mike Tyson ever gets into bother in Edinburgh, McGuire’s the man they’ll send to lift him, and Iron Mike will come quietly.’ I took a quick look at him, trying to assess his amiability gauge; it seemed to be still above the danger level.