Quintin Jardine - Funeral Note

I stood up and walked across to the window. My back was to her as I looked out over the garden and beyond, out to sea. I’d been having a private debate for some time, away from ACPOS, away from everyone, in my head. I hadn’t come to a conclusion, not until then, but my wife had brought me to it, not in anger as she had been, but calmly, as I accepted the inevitable.

I turned and faced her. ‘If that is everybody’s assumption,’ I said, ‘it’s completely off the mark. Not only would I never seek to command such a force, I couldn’t in all conscience even be a member of it. So when your chum introduces his bill, and you stand up to support it, I want you to bear in mind that you are putting my career on the line. So you’d better know this too: if you think for a minute that I won’t do everything in my power to defend it, even at the cost to you of yours, then neither of us really knows the person we married.’

I meant every word of it. As I looked at her, and as her angry eyes stared back at me from an uncharacteristically pale face, I knew that I had arrived at a sea-change moment in my life, one as instant and shocking as Myra’s death, bigger than my split from Sarah, which had been gradual, and the opposite from the end of my relationship with Alison Higgins, which had been an amicable, mutual decision.

Having said all I had to say, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know where to go. I might as well have been paralysed.

If I’d planned the exact moment that the phone should ring, I couldn’t have done it any better.

‘You pick your moments to slope off.’

I couldn’t resist having a dig as Jack McGurk unfolded himself from his car. I hadn’t seen him since the Lafayette’s operation went tits up. But all the big sod did was smile at me, and nod.

‘Didn’t I just. And am I pleased? You bet your little life I am. If I’d been there, I’d have sent you off after Kenny Bass, and I’d have done the check on that phone call.’

I know when Detective Sergeant McGurk is kidding me, and he wasn’t. I felt my eyes narrow. ‘Are you saying that you’d have handled it differently?’ I asked him.

‘No. I’d have done exactly the same as you, and that’s why I’m pleased I wasn’t there, or it would have been me that called the DI and blew the whistle that’s going to call time on the career of two fellow cops, and maybe three. Face it, lad, you will not be the most popular boy in the force when this gets out. The bosses will love you, sure. You might even get the DS vacancy that was earmarked for Montell, with Ray Wilding moving up. But Varley and Alice are liked in the job, especially Alice, so don’t be surprised if you ain’t, for a while at least.’

I’d worked that out for myself, from the very first moment I’d realised that the caller to the pub almost certainly had been a cop, but Becky Stallings, good gaffer that she is, had promised that she’d keep my name out of it. I told him so.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘And do you think Montell’s going to keep your name out of it too?’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

Jack stretched to his considerable height and rolled his eyes. ‘Figure it out,’ he drawled.

I didn’t. ‘Okay, he works with Alice. But she let him down. So why should he take it out on me?’

He laid a big rugby lock forward’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Let me lay out a scenario. Suppose a guy has this girlfriend, pillow-talk is exchanged, and she gets him into professional trouble. What’s he going to do? Sign up for her firing squad? No, once she’s finished crying on his shoulder he’s going to give her a big hug and tell her everything’s all right. You, of all people, should know that.’

He was getting personal. A few months ago I’d put myself into a very similar situation with a girlfriend. With another chief constable, it might have been career-ending; indeed Bob Skinner can be such a grim, ruthless bastard that at the time I’d expected it would be. Instead, to my astonishment, when I was summoned to his office at Fettes, in the ugly building that’s neither old nor modern, he gave me a cup of coffee, so strong that it was probably punishment enough, and told me, with a frankness that astonished me, that I wasn’t the first cop who’d let his dick bypass his brain, and that I was sitting beside another. ‘The trick, Sauce,’ he went on, ‘is not to let it do so twice.’

So when Ms Cheeky McCullough turned up on my doorstep a couple of nights later, what did I do? You guessed it. When she’d finished crying on my shoulder, I gave her a big hug and told her everything was all right. I was taking a chance, and I still am, because Cheeky’s granddad was. . and how I hope that past tense is right. . a villain, big time, but as long as I remember what Mr Skinner told me, it’ll be fine.

I’m still naive at times, though. For example, because they worked together, it hadn’t occurred to me for a minute that Montell and Alice Cowan might have been dancing the horizontal mambo out of office hours.

‘Oh,’ I said to Jack, ‘so I’d better steer clear of Leith for a while.’

He laughed. ‘And hope you don’t get that DS vacancy.’ Then his face went straight. ‘You want some serious advice? Call Griff. Don’t apologise for what you did, because you were right, but for the way it’s turned out. He’s a sound bloke. He might not thank you, but he’ll respect the approach.’

We had been walking as we talked, towards a line of trees; it was late in the evening, but being July, it was still bright enough for us to see well enough. At some point in time, the car park where we’d met up had been created in the centre of a mature wood, and what was left surrounded it. A man was waiting for us, mid-thirties, bad haircut, in uniform: at least we assumed he was waiting for us, since we had walked past three police vehicles and a dark blue van on our way towards him.

‘Why are we here?’ Jack asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘You’re the fucking sergeant; you tell me. I had a call from the gaffer telling me to get here sharpish, that’s all.’

‘Same here.’

‘Through there,’ the uniform said, standing aside to allow us to pass through a gap between two trees behind him.

McGurk stopped, so abruptly that I almost bumped into him. ‘Can I have your name, and your age, Constable?’

‘Harkins. What dae you want my age for?’

‘Ach, you know. We always like it in the story.’

‘Eh?’ As he muttered his incredulity, Jack whipped out his warrant card and displayed it; I did the same.

‘We could have been Sun reporters for all you know, PC Harkins,’ the big man told him, not unkindly. ‘You want to sharpen up. There’s real competition for jobs these days.’

The plod smiled; personally, I’d have preferred to see a little contrition from him. ‘Tough for them, eh. Sorry, Sarge.’ He chuckled. ‘But I’ve never seen anyone looks more like a polis than you do.’ He pointed into the trees, towards an area that had been taped off, and in which we could see people, moving under lights that had been set up. ‘It’s over there.’

‘What is?’ I snapped at him, irked by his indifference to everything.

‘The body. What did you expect here, son? This is Mortonhall Crematorium ye’re at.’

That much I’d known, but that was all the DI had said. She’d sounded flustered, and that was a first for her, in my experience. As she approached us, holding a crime scene tunic in each hand, she looked less than her cool self, too.

‘Lads, sorry to haul you out past your bedtimes, but this one isn’t the normal run-of-the-mill homicide.’

‘A definite homicide, though?’ Jack quizzed her as he started to climb into the paper suit that wasn’t going to fit him any better than the last one had.