‘What is it about women, cars and me?’ The thought escaped without my realising it, and once it was out there I had to finish. ‘Myra, she died in a car, on her own. Alison, so did she.’ I looked at Sarah. ‘Can we arrange it so that we always travel in the same vehicle from now on?’
She rolled off her sunbed and on to mine, pressing her body against me. ‘Lover, I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned that; I’d forgotten it was her.’
She was upset, so I stroked her hair, and kissed her. ‘It’s all right,’ I assured her. ‘Shit happens. And another reason why I won’t care if that job doesn’t.’
‘But you will. For the same reason that one phone call blew your boat right out of the water; it’s what you are. Anyway, it’s all academic, because the job will happen.’
She sat up, put her feet on the ground, and pushed herself upright. ‘Now, before you get horny, I’m off to consider what we might have for lunch.’
I followed suit. ‘And I’m off to swim, and think.’ I do some of my best thinking in the pool.
I took a step towards the chair where I’d left my trunks to dry off after my early morning exercise, then stopped. They weren’t there.
‘Hey,’ I called to Sarah, catching her halfway through the doorway, ‘did you move my swim shorts?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Why would I?’
‘No idea, but somebody has.’
‘Maybe they blew back into the pool.’
‘Good thought,’ I conceded and went to check. On the bottom I saw three leaves and what must have been a very careless gecko, but absolutely no garments. I swore quietly and went indoors for a replacement.
As I crossed the living area, the wall clock told me that it was just short of two twenty-five. I picked up the TV remote, hoping that the timepiece wasn’t slow and that I hadn’t missed the Scottish news.
I headed upstairs and changed into a new pair of Speedos. When I came back down, Sarah was standing in the middle of the room, staring at the television.
‘Look at this,’ she said, without taking her eyes off it. ‘Hold on, I’ll go back to the beginning.’
Our satellite decoder has two feeds, allowing us to pause and rewind live programmes. That’s what she did, until she had found the start of the item she’d been watching.
‘It’s a press briefing in Edinburgh,’ she said, ‘about the autopsy I performed on Friday.’
I stepped alongside her as the presenter led into the piece, then felt my eyebrows rise as another face appeared on screen. ‘What the. .’ I took the remote and froze the image.
‘That’s David Mackenzie,’ I exclaimed, ‘the Bandit. He’s the Command Corridor exec. What the hell’s he doing there?’
She looked up at me, surprised. ‘Didn’t you know? Maggie’s moved him into Neil’s old job, as Edinburgh CID coordinator. Sammy Pye told me on Friday.’
‘Bloody hell!’
Since Maggie Steele had been appointed as my successor in the Edinburgh job, I’d been avoiding any professional contact, so I couldn’t be accused of influencing her thinking. . not that I could have done that anyway. I knew she’d handle some things in a different way from me, but that one took me by surprise. I’d always have put a proven team player in that job, and our David was, unfortunately, the opposite; poaching him had not been one of my better moves.
‘It could have been worse, I suppose,’ I muttered. ‘She could have made him head of CID; that would have been a real risk. Sammy told you, you said. That means Mackenzie didn’t come along to post-mortem, yes?’
‘Yes, no, whatever; he wasn’t there. I don’t blame him; I wish I hadn’t been myself. She’d been in the water for two to three weeks and quite a bit was missing.’ She drew a line across her chest with her finger, from alongside her right breast to the edge of her left collarbone. ‘That much, plus the left arm just below the elbow. She got tangled up with a fairly large vessel.’
Until then she hadn’t told me any details about the job, but she didn’t need to for me to know that it had been messy.
She reclaimed the remote and pushed the play button. ‘Let’s hear what he’s got to say. Maybe they’ve found the rest.’
Fat chance, I thought. The prop probably minced it.
Indeed they hadn’t. What Mackenzie came out with was, essentially, the losing gambler’s last roll of the dice, an appeal for any information about late middle-aged women who hadn’t been seen for a while, the kind that usually attract hundreds of calls to the hotline and do no good at all. When he said, ‘A murder investigation,’ I glanced at Sarah and she nodded.
‘She was stabbed,’ she explained, as Bandit wound up.
On the face of it. . unfortunate choice of words. . there was little or no chance of a result. In all probability the partial cadaver would stay in the freezer until the prosecutor’s office authorised its burial or cremation. I knew it, and so did Mackenzie, although I knew equally well that if we were both wrong, he’d grab all the glory that ensued.
‘He seemed earnest and impressive,’ Sarah said, as the presenter moved on to the next item.
‘Oh, he’s all that on the surface, is David,’ I agreed. ‘We could do with him over here.’
Her frown expressed bewilderment.
‘Why?’
‘He might find out what happened to my swimming trunks.’
Six
‘Are we both sure about this?’
Alex Skinner turned her head and gazed evenly at her partner. They were seated on the small balcony of her duplex apartment, with its vistas of the Salisbury Crags, and across the unconventional, and controversial, roof of the Scottish parliament building.
Privately, Andy Martin hated their viewpoint. He would never admit to a fear of heights, but it was there nonetheless, and amplified by the structure of Alex’s terrace, which was no more than a steel frame jutting out from the building, giving him the feeling of hanging over the edge of a cliff.
Whenever his children visited, as they would do over the coming weekend, or Alex’s young half-siblings, the glass door from the living room was always locked, and bolted.
‘We’ve been over this,’ she replied. ‘We’ve had this discussion with my father. It was his suggestion that you should apply for the new chief constable post. I understand his reasoning. . maybe better than you do. . and I agree with him.
‘In fact I agree with him so much, that I’m not going to trust you to post that completed application form. I’m going to take it to work tomorrow and in my lunch break I’m going to take it to the post office and send it off myself, first class, recorded delivery.’
‘It’s a huge step,’ he said.
‘No it’s not. It’s a declaration of intent, if nothing else.’
‘I’m way too young.’
‘Forty-two is not way too young for anything, other than a pension. You’ve got the service, the skills and the seniority. You’re also calm, unflappable, a first-class man-manager, and a natural leader. Christ, my dad doesn’t tick all those boxes. I told him so, but he knew it anyway.’
‘But you want him to get the job.’
‘Of course I do’, she retorted, then realised that she had fallen into the pit he had dug for her. ‘That’s to say. . Andy, you will sit in that office one day, I have no doubt about that, even if I believe that my father deserves to sit in it first, given what he’s done in his career.’
‘I know that, kid. But, go back to what you said earlier on about understanding his reasoning better than me: what did you mean by that?’
‘That he wanted you to apply because you’re a worthy candidate, but more than that, you’ll be his safety net.’
‘Against what? Acts of God and stuff?’
‘Not just that; against his own ambivalence. With your application in place, he’ll be free to walk away if he chooses.’
He looked away from her across to the sunlit Crags, and the Radical Road, where tiny figures walked. ‘No chance,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ve known Bob for more than half your life; he’s a driven man.’