Buffalo is not the most sophisticated shopping city in America, but it had enough to occupy them. He had already bought his funeral suit, and so while Sarah shopped for clothes for herself and Seonaid, he concentrated on the boys.
He had just bought a New York Mets cap for Mark, and the smal est basebal glove in the store for James Andrew, when his phone sounded in his pocket. When he took the call, Willie Haggerty's gravel voice sounded 278 over the satellite link. He checked the time; ten fifteen, mid-aftemoon in Edinburgh.
'McGuire was right, Bob,' the ACC said, without pleasantries.
'Mcl henney's enquiries confirmed what he suspected. But it's worse; it looks as if the man Rosewell is still around. He's getting ready to move, though.' He told Skinner about the discovery in Bonnington, and about the dead girl's link to the man they were after.
69
'Who knows that he's Maggie's father?' asked Skinner.
'Only McGuire, Mcl henney and me; I didn't see the need to tell Pringle.'
'Good, keep it that way. When was the girl kil ed?'
'Yesterday afternoon, the doctor reckoned.'
'Do we know for sure it was Rosewel?'
'He's the only runner in the field. Plus, we can check. The lass put up a fight; they found skin under her fingernails, so we have a DNA trace.
We're going to have to take a blood sample from Maggie Rose; if it matches, it's him.'
'Bloody hell. Who's going to ask her?'
'If it comes to that, it'l be down to me. Things are bad between Mario and her just now.'
Skinner sighed. 'I was afraid of that. Wil ie, I reckon we should take McGuire off this investigation as well.'
'Who else is there, Bob? He knows the case, he Joiows the people involved. If Rosewell's killed the girl, he's maybe gone already, but if not, he won't be here for long. My feeling is that we let Mario run, but have big Mcl henney at his side al the way, to keep him in check.'
'He's the only man I know who could do that,' the DCC admitted.
'Okay, do it, but keep tabs on it al the way.'
Sarah was frowning at him as he returned his phone to his pocket.
'Business at home,' he told her. 'Nasty, but you don't need to know right now.'
'BeppeViareggio?' she asked.
'Partly, but let's drop it.' She looked as if she had no inclination to do so, but he was saved by the bell, or the tone, of his cellphone as it sounded again.
'Yes,' he answered, expecting Haggerty again.
'Mr Skinner?' It was an American woman's voice, low and even.
'Yes.'
'This is Philippa Doherty. I have some bad news for you.' Bob's head swam and his stomach lurched. He leaned against the store counter feeling the blood rush from his face. 'I got back from my flight this morning. When I let myself into the apartment I found Dad dead in bed.'
'Oh no,' he hissed.
'The doctor reckons he had a massive heart attack in his sleep.' He heard the girl catch her breath, keeping hold of her control. 'We've been warning him for years about his smoking,' she said. 'I guess it's finally caught up with him. I know you were in touch with him recently, and I found your number on his pad, so I thought I'd better tell you, along with his other friends and col eagues.'
As she spoke a wholly unreal feeling swept over Skinner; it was as if he was in a room full of people, everyone on the move, steadily, not rushing, but heading somewhere. He started to slide down the counter, until Sarah caught his arm. 'Bob!' she exclaimed. 'What is it?'
Slowly he realised that he had passed out for a few seconds, but his wife's touch, her voice and that of Philippa Doherty, asking if he was stil there, seemed to have brought him back to the present. He nodded to Sarah, and spoke into the phone. 'Yes, yes. It's a terrible shock, that's all.
Poor old Joe. I wil miss him so much. My condolences to you and al the family.'
For a moment he was on the verge of asking if she had found a floppy disk in the house, but he realised that would have been pointless, and maybe even dangerous for her. There would be no floppy disk, and Jackson Wylie's recovered iBook would either vanish or yield nothing.
'Philippa,' he told her, instead, 'I'm stil in the US as it happens, so please, let me know the funeral arrangements. And thank you for thinking of me; thank you for letting me know.'
For the second time in five minutes, he ended a cal, but this time looking stunned, not just worried.
'Joe Doherty?' asked Sarah, incredulous.
He nodded. 'Coronary, they say.'
'You doubt it?'
'No; at least I'm sure that's what a post mortem will show. I've never yet heard of a cat that actual y died of curiosity.'
70
Mario McGuire hated plastic coffins, the containers the mortuary guys brought with them to murder scenes. Whatever little dignity they allowed was more than offset by their odour; a mix of polyurethane and disinfectant, and by the brutal truth that they had been used on uncounted occasions in the past, to carry victims of all shapes and sizes.
He had seen people being crammed into these things. One corpse, that of a man stabbed to death in a pub fight early in the career of young PC McGuire, had been so gross that the crew of the meat wagon had simply left the arms hanging over the buckling sides as they had carried it away.
As they lifted her into her container, Ivy Brennan, who had been Baldwin, looked like nothing more than a broken dol. There was something especially tragic about her, the tiny, flawed innocent who had deserved so much more from life than to be the victim of George Rosewell, that even the black humour of the attendants was silenced.
Mario had banished his earlier weakness; grateful that only his friend had been there to see him overcome. It had been replaced by a huge, towering rage, which seemed to emanate from him in waves as he thought about everything that had gone wrong so suddenly in his life, and contemplated what he was going to do to the man who had brought it al about.
'Are you absolutely sure,' asked Mcllhenney, forcing his way into his musing, 'that Ivy couldn't have been El a Frances?'
McGuire turned away as a mortuary porter placed the lid on the coffin; he walked across to the window and peered through the slit between the drawn curtains. 'I'm as sure as she's dead,' he answered harshly. 'Ivy lived her odd life with her old sugar daddy next door, but she had no idea of what he was really up to.
'If she had, she wouldn't have pointed me at him with the tip about the beard, or made up that daft story about Uncle Beppe; no, she'd have done the opposite of those things. What she might have done, though, innocently, was set up the Viareggios.'
'Uh?'
'Maybe. I asked Paula some more about her last night. She started coming about the deli in Stockbridge when Rums was no more than an infant. Talked nineteen to the dozen, according to Paulie; she asked all sorts of questions about the shop. She told her that she didn't just come to buy stuff; she said that she liked being there, she liked the smell of it.
She said that she liked just to stand there and breathe in because it reminded her of where she used to live… although she never said where that was, and Paula never asked.
'She asked her about the special wines we stock as well, and whether you can buy them anywhere else. Paula remembered telling her no, that we imported our own, and that we owned a commercial warehouse where they were bonded.
'There was a man too,' said McGuire. 'She told me that once or twice, at weekends, a bloke came into the shop with Ivy; an older bloke, stocky, swarthy, hard-looking, with a grizzled beard. Paulie thought he might have been her father, but she never asked about that either. She said that she was happy to talk to the kid… she liked her well enough… but she didn't want to get involved in her life, so she always tried to keep her at arm's length. She never spoke to this man, and he never spoke to her.'