Quintin Jardine - Funeral Note

I must have sighed, for she reached out and stroked the back of my hand. ‘You’re feeling really isolated just now, aren’t you?’ she whispered.

I knew what she meant, but didn’t say so. ‘Isolated? Of course not, I’ve got you. . you two, even, for wee Eamon’s starting to make his presence felt in there.’ That was very true; Paula was in her last month and I could see him kicking sometimes.

‘Don’t dodge the issue,’ she said. ‘The Glimmer Twins are no more; you don’t have Neil alongside you. You’ve lost your sounding board, and you must miss him a lot.’

I made no further attempt at denial, because I couldn’t. She was right. McIlhenney and I have been bosom pals from the day we joined the force. I made CID a few months before he did, but our careers had developed from then on, if not quite in parallel, then pretty close to it. When I made detective chief superintendent, and was appointed head of CID, he was moved in as detective superintendent in charge of all criminal investigation in Edinburgh, and my deputy.

Neil and I are similar physical types, but he’s much less volatile than I am, and when he has to be, he’s a calming influence on me. I was going to miss him by my side in dealing with the Varley-Cowan affair, and no mistake.

How did his move come about? I suspect that the occasionally subtle hand of Bob Skinner was behind it. He and Neil are pretty close as well, and when the Commissioner of the Met decided to look outside his force to fill a command vacancy in his covert policing department I wasn’t surprised when my pal was put in the frame. My suspicion was, and still is, that somehow Bob might have instigated the vacancy, before helping to fill it.

Quite apart from the prestige of the job, and the chief super promotion that came with it, a move to London was timely for Neil. Louise, the lady he married a couple of years after his wonderful wife Olive passed away, and with whom he has a third child, is an actress. She took time off from her career to have wee Louis, but her agent had been pestering her about making a comeback. The chief knew that, and it would be typical of him if he had gone out of his way to help.

But there’s another possibility, a suspicion that lingers at the back of my mind and won’t go away. He might have realised that it was time for the Glimmer Twins (back in our rock and roll youth, some wag bestowed on us the nickname adopted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and it stuck) to be separated, in the interests of good policing in Edinburgh. You see, neither one of us is the other’s strongest critic, and there were times when, probably, one of us should have been.

With Neil’s move the old CID city structure is back in place, with Detective Inspectors Sammy Pye, in Leith, Becky Stallings, at Torphichen Place, and, as of the very day of Paula’s inquisition, Ray Wilding, on promotion to DI at Gayfield Square, reporting directly to me from their divisions. God help them all, I laugh to myself sometimes, without my mate McIlhenney to hold me down when they screw up.

‘What’s your next move?’ Paula asked, breaking into my musing.

‘I’ll interview Varley, formally, tomorrow. Because what he’s accused of is so bloody serious, the boss and I are agreed that I need to have a senior officer from an outside force alongside me. Bob’s persuaded Andy Martin to fill that chair. As head of the Scottish Serious Crimes Agency he outranks me, but what the hell, he lives in Edinburgh now, so it’s handy for everybody. Also, he doesn’t know Varley, only of him; their paths don’t seem to have crossed at all when Andy was one of us. When we’ve taken his statement. . that’s if he gives us one. . I’ll probably charge him then send a report to the Crown Office. It’ll be up to the fiscal to decide whether to go ahead with a prosecution.’

That’s the way it works in Scotland; officially, the police investigate crime as agents of the Crown.

‘Will he?’

‘Too bloody right he will,’ I growled, ‘or I’ll want to know why. But that will only be stage one. As the chief said, we’ll have to find out all there is to know about Mrs V’s cousin Freddy, the mystery man, and we’ll have to go back over Jock’s entire career to see if we can find other instances of him having tipped him off about anything. He’s putting a separate unit on that. He’s going to use David Mackenzie, his executive officer. . again, he has no history with Varley. . putting him together with another outside man.’

‘Who’s that? Do you know yet?’

‘He’s bringing in a man called Lowell Payne. He’s a DCI from Strathclyde; I believe that he and Mackenzie know each other slightly, from our David’s days in the west.’

‘Strathclyde?’ She winced. ‘That’s a bit like having next door wash your skid-marked underwear, isn’t it?’

‘This man will be discreet. He’s hand-picked. The boss let it slip that he’s Alex’s uncle: he’s married to Bob’s sister-in-law, from his first marriage.’

Paula laughed out loud. ‘To think that you used to fret about us being cousins! Skinner seems to be filling this whole investigation with his family.’

‘Payne never was family, not really,’ I pointed out. ‘From what the chief told me, Myra Skinner had been dead for about eight years before her sister even met him. The bloke helped him out in an investigation about fifteen years ago, but since then he’s seen very little of him, and nothing at all professionally.’

‘He’s seen plenty of Andy Martin though.’

‘Andy’s not family.’

‘As good as,’ she murmured, with a sly grin. ‘He was engaged to Alex once, and it’s not long since he left his wife for her.’

‘Hey,’ I cautioned her, ‘that’s not true. Andy and Karen just came to the end of the road, that’s all.’

Her favoured eyebrow rose again. ‘Would that have been before or after he got caught shagging Alex?’

‘After,’ I conceded, ‘but the two of them had got over that. It wasn’t why they split.’

She smirked. ‘You may believe that, but most of female Edinburgh thinks she’s a bitch who crooked her finger and he came running back.’

‘Female Edinburgh better not let her father hear them saying it. Me neither, for that matter; Alex Skinner is okay.’ I smiled at a memory. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you about the first job Bob Skinner ever gave me. He had me looking after Alex when he had to bring her along to a crime scene. I was still in uniform at the time, but that night helped me through the door of CID.’

‘He did that?’ she exclaimed. ‘He took that chance?’

‘Come on, she was only thirteen at the time, and I was much too careful ever to consider that she might have looked a few years older. No, I repeat; Alex is okay. Besides, she and Andy are both career people now. That’s all they have time for.’

‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘and my school pal Lorna’s husband is a taxi driver. Alex has his number and she uses him a lot; from her place to Dean Village is a regular evening trip of his, but he never takes her in the other direction. And who lives in Dean Village? Andy Martin.’

I gasped in sheer admiration. ‘Paulie, my love,’ I said, ‘when the boss put Neil up for that covert policing job, it’s as well he had no idea what you’re capable of or he might have offered you to the Met instead.’

We were still laughing when the phone rang. I’d thought my life was complicated enough then: but what did I know?

‘I am here to tell you that there ain’t nothing in the world I hate worse than that elephant under my ass .’

The older I get, the more often I’m asked why I chose to be a police officer. My reply has always been simple: unlike too many people, I was lucky enough to find my vocation early in life and to have been able to practise it ever since.