'Svart, Ingemar. Age 29, currently residing at 43 Close Avenue, Stockbridge. Student. Swedish national. Interpol check run.
Nothing known.'
'Hm. Just as well for you, pal.'
He was about to toss the sheaf of paper into his out-tray when a name at the foot of the page caught his eye. For an instant it made his stomach drop, but a quick look reassured him 'Skinner, Alexis. Age 20, currently residing at 20 Fairy house Avenue, Edinburgh.
Student. Nothing known.'
The sight of Alex's name listed there with the herd, and vetted with the rest, touched his heart. He laughed, but it was forced.
'Just as well for you too, my girl.'
He spent the next half-hour trying to restore a semblance of normality to his working life. In spite of Jimmy Proud's assurance, at the time of his promotion, that the attainment of Chief Officer rank would not affect his operational status as a working detective, inevitably Skinner had become caught up in the bureaucracy that all high command brings with it. He read through the pile of reports, circulars and standing orders which had been left in his pending tray by Ruth, the secretary he shared with the other two Assistant Chief Constables. Fortunately, most were circulation copies of documents which had been dealt with by Harry Gass, the ACC responsible for Management Services. He absorbed their essence as quickly as possible, committing them to memory as best he could. The few which called for his executive action he placed to the side, to be dealt with when his concentration was less affected by the immediate crisis.
Eventually he gave up. He picked up his jacket and headed along the corridor to the Special Branch suite. The outer door had been labelled 'Anti-terrorist Squad'.
Adam Arrow was seated behind a desk, reading the Sun and looking bored.
'Come on, Adam. You've had the Mario McGuire tour of Edinburgh. Now I'll give you the Bob Skinner version.'
They left the building and climbed into the BMW, which was parked in one of half-a-dozen reserved spaces in front of the main entrance.
Skinner's tour of Edinburgh followed none of the usual routes.
Arrow noticed the absence of open-topped, green Guide Friday tourist buses in the parts of the city through which he was driven.
'All this, Adam,' Skinner said as he drove, 'all this is ours. This is where my people and I work most of the time. There's little or no corporate crime in Edinburgh, or anywhere else in Scotland, you know. My Fraud Squad, and the Regional Crime guys, occasionally get to deal with a bent lawyer diverting clients' funds, or with some idiots who think they can get away with mortgage swindles, but dishonesty up here mostly involves poor skint bastards turning over the DSS for a few extra quid. Normally, the city centre's as clean as a whistle. Edinburgh, at the top end of the social scale, is a city of Holy Willies. Not like Glasgow. You'll find far more spivs and hooligans through there. But down here in the bits of Edinburgh that the visitors don't get told about – is where my CID does its real hard slogging. I've seen detective officers in tears of sheer frustration at the work they have to face here. I've lost a couple of them through emotional breakdowns.
Ten years ago this place was Smack City; we bad one of the worst drug problems in Europe. Every week we found at least one kid dead up a close with a needle hanging out of his arm.
'We had families living in hell, respectable people but with a drug-dealer next door, who'd be turning the stuff out through his kitchen window like ice-cream. And these poor folk would be terrified that, if we turned the place over, the guy's pals would assume they'd grassed, and they'd get a kicking, or worse. And that happened too. I remember once when some of my lads busted a dealer. One of them knew the bloke next door slightly. He nodded to him, just briefly, as they took the villain away. Two nights later, the same neighbour staggered into his house with his throat cut, and bled to death on the living-room carpet in front of his wife and kids.'
Arrow hissed, grim-faced, sucking breath between his teeth. 'Is it still like that?'
'Not so bad now. It took us years, but we broke most of the big drug-dealers. None of them was hard to find. Christ, they used to fit steel doors to their council houses, so it would take longer for us to bash then in. The trick for us was to catch them dirty. We just kept battering away at them, though. We used every legitimate trick in the book: bogus DSS investigations, officers dressed up as meter readers, council workmen, you name it. One by one, we nicked them, and when we did, our judges did the business. As a policeman I've got a lot of time for the old boys in the High Court, in their red robes. "Dealing in Horse, my man?
That'll be fifteen years of your time, thank you very much. Next case please." They didn't piss about when we needed them.
'All the big dealers are gone now. There's still a fair bit of drugs about, but it's well underground now. There seems to be a different distribution network. The estates aren't blighted and terrorised the way they used to be, but they're still hard, violent places. These blocks of flats might not look so bad, at least not the ones that have had a lick of paint, but a lot of them are still castles of misery, lived in by poor, frightened people, bullied by the DSS, the tally-men, even at times, I have to admit, by the police.'
He negotiated a roundabout, glowering across at Arrow. 'But do you know what hacks me off, Adam? Back in the Eighties, there we were tackling and beating one of the worst drug problems in Europe, and few if any people outside Edinburgh knew or cared about it. They didn't know, because it wasn't hot news. It was like murders in Ireland, everyday occurrences, so it only got a wee bit of coverage, short-lived and mainly local. Didn't matter that it was a tragedy. It had no news value. Yet look at Edinburgh now.
Some arseholes set off a firework and murder a primadonna, and we've got every news organisation in the world demanding to know what we're going to do about it. The world's unjust, Adam.
A rich and famous person becomes a victim, and we have a media shit-storm. OK, well and good, and so we should have. But where were they all eight years ago when that poor wee man died in his front room, with his blood spraying all over his three-year-old daughter? Just two newspapers carried that story. Two: that's all.'
As Skinner spoke, they wound their way through the area which had been the battleground in the fight against the dealers. Wester Hailes, the windows of its high-rise blocks glinting in the sun.
Niddrie, beginning to look scruffy again a few years on from its last cosmetic repainting. Pilton, much of it still grey and terrible, its poverty proclaimed by the boarded windows, the steel shutters guarding its shops even as they did business, and the burnt-out cars in its school grounds.
Skinner swung the car down towards Newhaven and the east. 'Enough, Adam, enough. Now at least you know that all human misery isn't concentrated in Belfast. Come on and I'll show you the other side of my patch. I need to clear my mind.'
They drove through Leith and Seafield, by-passed Portobello, and beaded out of the city on the A I. As they passed the Craigpark retail centre, he glanced across at his passenger.
'You a golfer, Adam?'
'Not so's you'd fookin' notice, but I play.'
'Good lad. It's too nice a day to waste.'
Twenty minutes later they were in Gullane, in Bob and Sarah's 'other house', as they had come to call it. As Adam admired the garden in full bloom. Bob delved into a cavernous cupboard, emerging eventually with his golf kit, Sarah's ladies' clubs, and a pair of her studded shoes which proved an ideal fit for the stocky little soldier.
Gullane number-one course was mostly clear. There were no party bookings, and as Bob looked down the first two fairways and up to the third tee, high on the hill, he could see only one match, nearing the long second green in its peculiar ravine. He recognised the players: two of the club's many retired bankers.