Quintin Jardine - Hour Of Darkness

She smiled, and its warmth seemed to wash over the boy. ‘You could do much worse. . What’s your name?’

‘Nacho, senora.’

‘Then good luck with your career, Nacho.’

‘Thank you, senora.’

‘But before you get that far,’ I interrupted, ‘do you know what to do with a sambuca?’

‘Of course, senor; I set it on fire.’

‘That’s right. But you’d be best to do it at the table, not at the bar. You might want to work here again next summer, and John will not take it too well if you burn down his restaurant.’

‘That is true, senor,’ he agreed, with a smile. ‘I will bring matches.’

He turned and strode into the restaurant.

Sarah’s eyes followed him. ‘Nice kid,’ she murmured.

I sensed an unspoken ‘But’.

‘But …?’

She frowned, then shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘One of those “walk on my grave” moments, but it’s gone. I had a strange feeling that I’d seen him before, that’s all. But it’s nonsense, for I’ve never been to Cordoba in my life.’

‘Was it a quiet weekend, Sauce?’ Sammy Pye asked his recently appointed detective sergeant, across the desk in his small office.

‘Yes thanks, boss. Yours?’

‘Yes, quiet and pleasant. A nice counter to the way we ended last week, with that awful post-mortem.’

‘Mine too. I was a bear on Friday evening. Cheeky was great, though. She saw straight away that I was struggling, and put me right. As far as she could, that is. I was still a wee bit on edge, in case we got a call-out.’

‘Mmm,’ the DI murmured. ‘But we didn’t, neither of us, and in a way that isn’t good news. It means that the scientific bods haven’t come up with a DNA match for our victim, and that the trawl that we put in place across the force area on Friday for a missing white female, probably in her sixties, with an appendectomy scar and a history of childbirth hasn’t come up with a single possibility.’

‘So we’ve got a murder in our hands, but with no way of identifying the victim.’

‘That’s the story, Sauce. Plus we’ve got a new boss in the city CID who’s only going to be interested in keeping his clear-up rate at one hundred per cent.’

Haddock frowned. ‘Am I the only one that thinks his appointment was a bit of a surprise?’

‘Hell no,’ Pye retorted, ‘you’d be a minority of one if you didn’t. “Come back, Neil McIlhenney, all is forgiven,” that’s the general view. . not that the big fella did anything to forgive, before he headed south.

‘I know what was behind it, though; my dear wife might not be a Command Corridor secretary any more, but she still has her sources. There are a couple of reasons. First, neither Chief Constable Steele nor ACC McGuire wanted a superintendent as their exec. The truth is, Bob Skinner only put the guy there as part of his rehabilitation after his breakdown. But on top of that, they say that ACC McGuire does not like Superintendent Mackenzie, and vice versa.’

‘Uh?’ the DS grunted. ‘Then why. .’

Pye laughed. ‘Why did he give him a key CID job? So that he can prove himself one way or another.

‘David Mackenzie might have been in a uniform for the last couple of years, clicking his heels and saying “Yes, sir. No, sir” to the high heid yins, but the arrogant bastard that ran our drugs squad and brought the nickname “Bandit” with him when he moved from Strathclyde, that guy never went away. He’s always lurked there under the surface. If you ask me, what Maggie Steele and Mario McGuire have done is let him out again.’

‘To piss all of us off?’

‘Hardly. They’ll be judged in part by his success or failure. Also, remember this; the fact is that until he crashed and burned, Mackenzie was a good detective; an arsehole, certainly, but a good detective. Bob Skinner would never have brought him through from Strathclyde otherwise, and I cannot believe that the bosses would have put him where he is now out of malice.’

‘Why doesn’t the ACC like him?’

‘I think it’s because Mackenzie misread him. When he came here he thought he would leapfrog him on his way up the ladder, so he didn’t take him seriously enough, didn’t treat him with the respect he was due. That was a huge mistake. ACC McGuire might be an amiable bloke, but he’s very sharp, and he’s a fucking monster if you get on the wrong side of him.’

‘So why’s he put him in the city coordinator job?’

‘That’s complicated,’ Pye said. ‘It’s only a guess on my part, but I think it goes back to the time when he was head of CID and Neil McIlhenney, before he moved to London, was in the job Mackenzie has now.

‘Those two are the best buddies from hell, the Glimmer Twins, they called them; because of that neither of them ever questioned the other. As a result mistakes were made. I believe that Mario’s learned from that; he chose Mackenzie for that job knowing that their personalities might clash.’

‘In which case,’ Haddock suggested, ‘won’t Mackenzie wind up as roadkill?’

‘No, because he’s got a buffer between them, Mary Chambers, DCS Chambers; she’s head of CID, remember. Mackenzie reports to her, not directly to the ACC.’

‘She’s no soft touch either,’ the DS pointed out. ‘I was in her division, till we both got moved out.’

‘Mary’s fine.’

‘But one extra rung away from us.’ He paused. ‘You know, Sammy, I get the impression that the ACC isn’t the only one who doesn’t like Superintendent Mackenzie. I suspect he’s not on your Christmas card list either.’

The DI smiled. ‘They told me you were a perceptive sod. . unless women are involved. No, I don’t like the Bandit; I’ll admit that. But it’s an old story, it goes back to something that happened far away from here. If you want to know about it you’ll have to go and ask Bob Skinner.’

‘I’ll pass on that one,’ Sauce laughed. ‘I wish he was here, though.’

‘Why?’

‘He might have an idea where we go with this murder inquiry.’

‘How we get a head with it, you mean?

Haddock nodded. ‘Yes.’ Then his eyes widened and his jaw dropped as he caught up with Pye’s black wisecrack. ‘Aww, fuck off. . sir.’

‘Sorry, Sauce,’ the DI said, chuckling at the younger man’s indignation. ‘I don’t have any more inspiration than you have.’

‘That’s what I like,’ Haddock grunted. ‘The smack of firm leadership.’

‘Call it delegation.’ Pye leaned back in his chair. ‘Seriously, where do we go? What’s your thinking?’

‘Limited as always, but here goes. We have an autopsy report that says the woman died between. .’ the DS paused to make a quick mental calculation, ‘. . fourteen and twenty-one days before she was put in the water. She sustained six stab wounds, of which five wouldn’t have killed her; the one that did ripped right through her heart, indicating that the blade was no less than eight inches long. It had a serrated edge, and the pathologist suggested that it might have been a kitchen knife.

‘She said also that the angle of entry suggested that the killer stood behind the victim and stabbed her in an upward direction. She was of the opinion that the attacker was male, given the degree of force that must have been needed, given that two of the blows cut clean through ribs and a third penetrated the sternum.’

‘What do you read into all that?’

‘Not a lot, boss, but I hardly think this was a professional hit. Six wounds but only one meaningful. This is not an expert, surely. A pro would just have cut her throat.’

‘How do you know he didn’t?’ Pye asked quietly.

The DS waved a finger. ‘Touché,’ he whispered, grinning.