Quintin Jardine: Skinner's trail

But now, as the young nurse put his son into his arms for the first time, the questioning voices within him were stilled. Perched carefully on the table, he looked down at tiny Jazz, looking for his own likeness, and finding it, as Sarah had said he would, in the quiff of hair which fell over the child's forehead, and in the strange deep vertical line between his eyebrows. The baby blinked, and Bob was sure that he was peering at him, trying to focus on his face, adjusting his eyes to these strange new phenomena of light and movement that had come into his world.

For months, Bob had anticipated this moment when first he would cradle his son in his arms. He had thought of many profound, wise, and probably pompous things that he would say to him. But, now that the time had come, there were no words. Only the widest smile of his life, only the happiness of journey's end, only the private thought: 'If you can do this, Skinner, you're okay. You're okay.'

He kissed the tiny forehead. 'And you're okay, too, Jazz my boy. . and how!' he said softly.

He held the baby proudly, as the nurses eased Sarah into a wheelchair, and he followed as they pushed her back along the corridor to the private room in which she had been installed on their arrival at the hospital three hours earlier. She climbed-into bed gingerly, but still smiling. Without waiting to be asked, Bob bent and passed their child, from the cradle of his arms, to his mother. He stripped off his green robe and tore open the Velcro fastening of the face mask which hung around his neck, forgotten until that moment. Throwing both on to a chair beside the window, he walked over and retrieved his leather jacket from the small wardrobe facing the bed. 'Let's tell some people,' he said, and took his mobile telephone from the right-hand pocket. He switched it on and punched in an American number, handing the small instrument to Sarah as he pushed the SEND button. 'Your father.'

The call was picked up on the fourth ring.

`Dad? Sorry, that's Granddad!' She cried a few happy tears with her father in New York State, then, promising to write, said her goodbyes.

Bob took back the phone, and called his daughter. As he had anticipated, Alex was at home in her Glasgow flat studying for the last of her university Law exams, in hot pursuit of a first-class honours degree.

`I am sorry, Pops,' she said, after he had broken his news. 'I am twenty-one years old, and I just cannot get my head round the idea of having a baby brother. He's going to have to call me Auntie — that's all there is to it.' She laughed at the other end of the line. 'Seriously, I am so pleased for you both. And so proud. He's a new chapter in all our lives, and you know what? We deserve him.' Her voice sounded suddenly wistful, almost vulnerable.

Bob's third call was to another mobile. It rang out several times; then, just as a puzzled look began to creep across his face, the ringing stopped.

`Martin.' The man on the other end sounded testy, annoyed at the interruption.

`Skinner.'

Detective Superintendent Andy Martin's tone changed in an instant. 'Bob! News?'

`Aye, news indeed, uncle. James Andrew Skinner checked in around half an hour ago. He and his mother are both A1 — repeat A1, my boy.'

`Bob, that's wonderful. No problems?'

`None at all.'

`Smashin'. Hey, did you say Andrew?'

`Yes. . Sarah's idea, of course. I don't know which is more dodgy: naming him after two coppers or after two saints. Anyway, we're not going to call him either one. His using name's going to be Jazz — that's spelt as in Acker Bilk. It sort of suits his American half. He's a well-behaved wee chap too; hardly a murmur since he was tidied up.'

`Terrific. When can I come to see him?'

`You can come today, if you like.' He glanced at Sarah for confirmation, and saw her nod vigorously. 'They're in the posh parent ward, so visiting hours aren't a problem. Come this evening if you like.

`Fine. I should be clear by then.'

`Okay. Where are you just now? You sounded a bit grumpy when you answered.'

`Looking at stiffs still gets me that way. I'm at a murder scene.

Skinner frowned. Since his promotion at the beginning of April, following a three-month secondment to the Los Angeles Police Department, Andy Martin had been in command of the force's Drugs and Vice Squad, two formerly separate units combined by Skinner into a single department because of the strong link between narcotics and prostitution, and the AIDS-related dangers which this trend had created.

`What are you doing at a murder?'

`Ah, boss, this isn't any old murder. The stiff here's a celebrity.' Martin paused, and Skinner's eyebrows rose. 'But you don't want to know about this just now, do you?'

`Come on, boy. Who've you got there?'

`Well, if you insist. Tell Sarah you forced it out of me, though. The guest of honour here is only Mr Tony Manson, that's all.'

Skinner's surprise expressed itself in a low, drawn-out whistle. 'Terrible Tony! Murdered? There's no doubt it was murder?'

`If it wasn't, he's made a bloody good job of hiding the suicide weapon.'

`Where are you?'

`At his place, out in Barnton. I'll show you the pictures tomorrow.'

`Trinity? Oh yes, I remember. I knocked that house over a few years back, when I was doing your job. Found bugger all, of course.' Skinner paused. He glanced over at the bed. 'Listen, Andy. Stuff the pictures! Keep him on ice. This one I've got to see for myself. Sarah and wee Jazz will probably go for a sleep soon. I'll be down then.'

The dead ones bothered him so much more now.

Before. . well, before it had been part of the job. He had been called in and there they were: carcasses, no more than that. It didn't matter whether they had been men, women or children. At the moment of his first contact, they were all just victims, and Skinner had been able to deal with them on that basis, however bloody the remains, however cruel the killing.

Oh, he had been righteously angered on many occasions. There had been a child killer a decade ago; Bob had seen to it, with a word to an assistant governor, that the man's first night as a convicted prisoner had been spent in open association with the rest. His next three weeks had been spent in hospital, and all the years since then in segregation. Yet, on the whole, Skinner had coped dispassionately with the nasty side of the job. It was, after all, an essential part of leadership. It had helped him take the fast track to his present exalted position as Assistant Chief Constable and head of criminal investigation in Scotland's capital, a city whose cruel streak is never shown to the tourists but which lurks there, nonetheless.

Yet Bob Skinner, like the great majority, had reached his forties without ever having seen another human being actually die, without looking into a person's face as the last breath was drawn. Now he had been there, done that. In fact, he had done more — much more. Now, every time he was called to a murder scene, the centre of attraction was more than just a victim. Skinner found himself stepping into that person's mind, thinking their thoughts, forming a picture of that last moment, not as an observer but as a participant experiencing the rage and terror of the life as it was stolen.

`Theft. That's what murder is .' As he opened the heavy brass shy;bound front door, flanked on either side by a row of four granite curling stones, Skinner recalled a sombre speech made to a police-force dinner party by a senior judge. 'The most serious theft of all: the theft of life, of time, of years unfulfilled. And for what? Once it's stolen, it can't be used. It has no resale value, no value to anyone other than its owner, to whom of course it is beyond price. Mostly, the theft takes place without thought, in a moment of anger, and is regretted the instant it is done. But life isn't a magazine filched from a rack, or a can of beans from a supermarket shelf. You can't sneak a stolen life back to the shop and pretend that nothing happened.'