Quintin Jardine - Stay of Execution

‘Prepare salute!’ A dozen thumbs drew back hammers, and the side-drummers began a long roll.

Malou counted to ten. ‘Fire!’ he yelled, making himself heard above the bandsmen.

The noise was deafening. Several members of the official party were seen to jump backwards, and even across the street, the colonel saw that the crowds were startled. Good , he thought, as he always did at such a moment. They should know, they should know .

Bob had always liked the smoking room in the Gullane golf clubhouse, the big front lounge with its oak panelling, and the gold-inscribed boards high on the wall, listing the club champions and past captains. Once he had entertained hopes of seeing his own name on the former, but his erratic putting stroke had thwarted him in each of the three or four years when he had come close.

He had told McGuire to be there for eight o’clock, but he and Sarah had arrived a good fifteen minutes early, to be on the safe side. He had chosen a bottle of Chablis from the list; it sat on their table in an ice bucket, as they waited, sipping the gentle white wine and making small-talk, sitting close together to make themselves heard above the conversation of the other dining parties.

The Gleneagles weekend had been a good move, Bob had told himself on the way back. The surroundings had encouraged them both to say things that had needed saying, and as a result there was a degree of restored warmth between them, where before the atmosphere had been chilly and unpredictable. Their marriage was not out of the woods, but at least there was light shining through the trees.

If the clock above the fireplace had had a chimer, it would have struck eight at the precise moment that McGuire’s bulky form appeared in the doorway. The big superintendent wore a navy blue blazer and slacks, but even in a white suit he would still have managed to cast a dark figure, Skinner thought. His hair, his complexion and his eyes worked together to create that impression, and also to radiate considerable menace to those who did not know him, although he was by nature the most amiable of men.

Skinner rose to greet his guests, making for Paula Viareggio first. They had met before at a few social events around Edinburgh; he had always found her as striking a figure as her cousin, although in a different way. She was as typically Italian as he could imagine, save for her silver hair, long and sleek and shining, which made her olive skin seem even richer. Heads at every table turned in her direction as she walked into the room.

‘Hello,’ he said warmly, leaning forward to kiss her cheek, bending only slightly, for she was tall. ‘Good to see you.’

He turned to the American; the two shook hands. ‘Inspector, welcome to Gullane. How’s your day been so far?’

Both Mawhinney and McGuire smiled. ‘Interesting,’ the Scot replied, as they all took seats at Skinner’s table. ‘Colin’s been learning some of the finer points of Scottish tribalism,’ he continued, as their host poured each of them a glass of wine. ‘We did the blue-rinse tour in the morning. . Jenners, Harvey Nicks, Frasers. . then we had a pint and a bridie at the Diggers’ for lunch and finished up at Tynecastle. It was a draw, by the way, if you haven’t heard.’

‘That’s good,’ said the DCC happily. ‘They’ve taken two points off each other; that suits me. What did you think of the game?’ he asked the visitor. ‘Are you a football man?’

‘Neither ours nor yours, sir, I’m a baseball fan. But I enjoyed the match very much. A different atmosphere, I gotta say. Those songs! We hear nothing like that in Yankee Stadium, I promise you. And maybe just as well, because some of them would probably be in breach of our public-order laws.’

‘Some of them might be against ours,’ said Skinner, ‘and we enforce them where we can, but how are you going to arrest a whole football crowd?’

‘That’s complacent!’ Sarah protested. He turned, surprised by his wife’s intervention. ‘What if they all started chanting racial abuse?’

Bob frowned. ‘You think that never happens? Maybe not in Edinburgh, but it does elsewhere. It’s easy to say, “Arrest them,” but sometimes it’s impossible to do it. Not even NYPD would have enough officers to lift five thousand people.’

‘So you’d let it go on?’

‘No. If it was down to me, and it became intolerable, I’d change the law so that clubs could be fined for the behaviour of their crowds. . and not just the home clubs either. . and grounds closed if necessary. If there was serious racial abuse going on at a stadium on my patch, and the home support was clearly responsible, I’d like to give them one warning, and on a repeat offence, close the place for three months.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Mawhinney concurred.

‘Mmm,’ said Paula, as the lady-steward handed out the dinner menu, in blue leather folders. ‘You two guys, and Mario, you give the word “draconian” a whole new depth of meaning.’

‘That’s cops for you, the world over,’ Skinner countered cheerfully. ‘But you can relax. For a start the problem isn’t that bad, and if it was, the politicians would take years to pluck up the courage to tackle it.’

‘Speaking of politicians,’ the American intervened, ‘I read that you have a new Justice Minister.’

‘Yes, we have. I have hopes for this one. Not many of them have what it takes to make a real difference; this lady might just be one of the exceptions.’

‘If the men around her give her a chance.’ Sarah snorted.

‘They might not have the option.’ He looked across the table to McGuire. ‘By the way, how did Manny’s do go last night?’ he asked.

The superintendent laughed. ‘He surprised everyone by getting rat-arsed. He wanted to take everyone on to Ryrie’s for more, but we wound up sticking him in a patrol car and sending him home for the rest of his life.’

‘I thought the chief was a bit liberal with the Laphroaig in the afternoon. I’m sorry I had to miss it, but we had other places to be.’

‘Nice places?’ Paula asked Sarah.

‘Gleneagles.’

‘Mmm. That qualifies. When did you get back?’

‘Early afternoon. I can only escape the humdrum for so long. Saturday tends to be Tesco day, for the kids have to be fed.’ She turned to Bob. ‘Speaking of which, honey, I saw the strangest thing in Haddington this afternoon. It was a parade, by a marching band, in uniforms, with a squadron of guys following behind with muskets. They were very good, but at the end they lined up and they fired their old blunder-busses up in the air. What a hell of a noise they made. I had Seonaid with me, and she almost jumped out of her skin. For a moment I thought they’d really frightened her, until she started to laugh.’

Her husband grinned. ‘Those must have been the Belgians,’ he said.

‘Who?’ asked Paula.

‘The Bastogne Drummers; they’re a group from Belgium and they’re over to play at the Pope’s Murrayfield rally next week.’

‘What a strange choice,’ Sarah remarked. ‘Whose idea was that?’

‘Pope John the Twenty-fifth’s idea; he asked for them. Monsignor de Matteo told me he’d heard them on a visit to Belgium.’

‘He could have been on a trip to Holland and he’d still have heard them. They go off with quite a bang.’ She glanced up at the waitress who had come to take their dinner orders. ‘I’ll start with the smoked fillet of beef, please.’

They placed their orders and talked quietly, the two women and the three men developing their own conversations, until they were called upstairs to the dining room. They were in the hallway when Sarah put a hand to her side, to the pocket of her cream-coloured jacket. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘that’s my phone, trembling away. I know it’s anti-social, but I always like to be contactable for Trish. You all go up, I’ll take it in the ladies’ lounge.’