Quintin Jardine - Aftershock

‘He’d get a bigger lift if we actually caught the bastard. Have you had any more feedback on that?’

‘I make a point of asking every week. I wish to Christ it was our inquiry, not the Northumbrian force’s. . and I think they’re beginning to feel that way too. I’m becoming a nuisance to them. . not that I’m apologising for it. . but the story I’m getting hasn’t hanged. “We believe that Dražen Boras is in the USA and we’ve asked the FBI to assist in tracking him down.” Big help that is! I bloody well know he’s in the USA: it was the DCC and me who told them so. We also told them they’d need political pressure to stir the FBI into action, and that’s where they’re failing. Maybe we’ll get some movement when the big man gets back from Spain. He knows the buttons to push.’

‘Sure,’ said McIlhenney, grimly, ‘but nothing’s going to happen in a hurry. . if it ever does. Boras will be well under cover by now; he’ll have a new identity, maybe even a surgically altered appearance. He’ll never come within our reach again.’

He started, as the mobile phone in his pocket began to vibrate. He took it out and flipped it open. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Sir, it’s Jack McGurk,’ a voice replied. ‘I’m in Corstorphine, up the hill, in a wooded area just above Murrayfield golf course.’

‘Crime scene?’

‘Maybe, sir; a suspicious death for now. I’m looking at the body of a young woman, fully clothed, lying on her back. Her eyes are closed and there’s no sign of a struggle.’

McIlhenney felt a prickling in the short hair on the back of his neck. ‘Jack,’ he ordered, ‘take a photo with your mobile and send it to me, on this number.’

‘Is that secure, sir?’

‘It’s as secure as we need for now. Do it.’ He closed the phone and held it in his hand.

‘What’s that?’ McGuire asked, his curiosity underlined by his expression.

‘Maybe nothing. Wait.’

After a few seconds the mobile vibrated once again. The superintendent opened it, and accessed the incoming picture message. He stared at the image, then whistled softly, and handed the open phone to McGuire.

The head of CID’s eyes widened. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered.

‘Yes,’ said McIlhenney. ‘Does that look familiar or what? We’d better get out there.’

Andy Martin had a secret: well, maybe no longer a secret, as he had shared it with Karen, his wife, and with Bob Skinner, his closest friend, but it was definitely something that, with those two exceptions, he kept strictly to himself. The subject had not come up during the interview that had taken him to chief officer rank in the Tayside force. If it had, he doubted that he would be wearing the extra braid on his uniform.

The young Martin had been raised in a Christian family. He had been baptised and confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church; its values had been instilled in him throughout his childhood, and carried with him into his adult life. Yet he was in no way a prude. He had played rugby at near international level, and had been as ruthless as the game required. As a single man he had gathered a reputation as something of a swinger, with a succession of partners leading up to an ill-fated engagement to Alexis Skinner, Bob’s daughter. For a while, he had endured his friend’s wrath, but eventually they had been reconciled, and the bond between them renewed. In fact it was stronger than ever, and had survived the acrimonious break-up of that relationship.

Its ending had been due entirely to the influences that had moulded Martin’s character. He had loved Alex, but when she had terminated a pregnancy without consulting him, he had found it unforgivable. His Christianity was founded on the principles of the Ten Commandments, and although he and Alex had laughed about coveted asses, when it came to ‘Thou shalt not kill’, he could find no room for compromise.

They had split and he had drifted into a couple of dangerous liaisons, before finding security with Karen Neville, a serving officer herself at that time. They were happy together, with Danielle, their toddler, and with another on the way, and if a small part deep within him still yearned occasionally for Alex, he managed to keep it suppressed. He felt a warm contentment as he glanced at his wife, sitting beside him at the coffee-table in their conservatory, enjoying a rare Monday together after Andy had spent the weekend supervising the policing of an outdoor music festival.

His secret? No, not that: the world knew he had carried a torch for Alex for a while. No, the elephant hiding in Andy Martin’s briefcase, the truth that might have constrained his career if he had brought it out into the open, had to do with drugs.

For much of his police service in Edinburgh, he had been involved in the suppression of the illegal trade, and in the pursuit and prosecution of users and dealers alike. In his time he had met a few cops who had been known to smoke a wee bit of grass, and he had let it be known quietly that if they ever indulged around him, he would do them, just like any other punter. On his arrival in Dundee, to take over the deputy chief’s post, he had made it just as clear that, however liberal public attitudes had become, any of his serving officers caught with cannabis, or any other proscribed drug, would be sacked.

And yet although he enforced the law on illegal narcotics as stringently as any officer in Scotland, privately Andy Martin did not agree with it. He had searched the teachings of his faith for grounds to justify the control or prohibition of what people might choose to take into their bodies, and had found none. There was nothing in the Ten Commandments that said, even by implication, ‘Thou shalt not take drugs’. And in his view, if there was no moral basis for a law, then that law was flawed.

While he recognised the terrible effects that hard drugs could have on users and their families, he knew that control by prohibition was proving to be globally unsuccessful. His core belief was ‘prescription not proscription’. He felt, instinctively, that legalisation and licensing was the only long-term way to rid the streets of dealers and the world of their brutal suppliers. The US had proved in the Twenties and Thirties that legal prohibition of alcohol, another narcotic, was untenable, and governments around the world continued to draw much of their revenue from the taxation of tobacco. Therefore, as he saw it, if the same was recognised to be true of the narcotics trade, and it was legalised, regulated and taxed, with the resources currently devoted to the pursuit, prosecution and imprisonment of those involved in it being diverted to health education, society could only be improved.

Martin believed, sincerely, this to be true. But he knew with equal certainty that if he ever said so, publicly, he would be putting his career on the line. This had been brought home to him forcefully by Bob Skinner, a natural politician for all that he had said about the breed over the years.

‘Many people would agree with you, Andy,’ he had said, in one of their after-dinner discussions of the subject. ‘To be honest, when you put it like that, it’s difficult to see the counter-argument. The trouble is that many more people would disagree with you, vehemently, because that’s the way they’ve been conditioned to think. The truth is that you and I and the entire Association of Chief Police Officers could stand up and argue the case and it wouldn’t make any difference. Even if we did secure majority support in this country, even if decriminalisation became government policy, even if it became the goal of the entire European Union, it wouldn’t matter a damn. Any about-face of that size would have to be implemented internationally. First and foremost, the Americans would have to be on board, and believe me when I tell you that there is not the slightest chance of that happening. If you want my advice, keep your mouth shut and get on with the job.’