Quintin Jardine: Grievous Angel

‘Mario, sir.’

‘Now there’s an odd mixture.’

‘Father Irish, mother Italian.’

‘Indeed? Well, Mario, please give Detective Superintendent Jay my compliments and tell him that my arse is going nowhere until he calls me himself and gives me a good reason why it should.’

‘Will do, sir.’ Something in the lad’s tone hinted that he would enjoy it too.

‘And one other thing,’ I added.

‘I know, sir. Forget the number I just called.’

My daughter looked at me, a little anxiously, as I came back to my seat. ‘Can you do that?’ she asked. ‘He’s a superintendent and you’re only a chief inspector.’

‘Nobody’s “only” a chief inspector, love,’ I told her. ‘Nobody’s “only” anything. “Only” isn’t a word I like to tag on to people.’ That said, I could have added that if you made chief inspector at thirty-three… I’d held the rank for three years by that time.. . then somebody who’d taken twelve years longer to make super would know that at some point down the road he’d be calling you ‘sir’, and thus wouldn’t be taking too many liberties.

I didn’t say it, though; instead I concentrated on finishing my lasagne before the phone rang again. I felt myself grin as I wondered whether that young constable had the stones to deliver my message verbatim, suspecting that he did.

It didn’t take Jay too long. I was in the kitchen when he called; Alex picked up in the dining room, before I could stop her. She answered in the same way I did, number only, as I’d taught her.

‘Yes, my father is at home,’ I heard her say. ‘Who’s calling, please?’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry,’ she continued, switching into young woman mode and sounding frighteningly like her mother. ‘Either you tell me who you are or I hang up. That’s what my father says I should do with anonymous callers.’ She waited, taking the phone away from her ear slightly, as if she was getting ready to put it down. ‘Thank you,’ she said, eventually, then turned to look at me. ‘Dad, it’s Detective Superintendent Jay.’

‘How soon can we start her on our switchboard?’ he drawled, as soon as I took the phone.

‘We’ll be minding hers before she’s done,’ I told him.

‘You finished your tea then, Bob?’ The sarcasm in Jay’s tone was only one of the reasons for my dislike of him.

‘And done the dishes.’

‘You ready to obey orders now?’

I didn’t want to upset Alex, so all I did was grin, when I really wanted to bite his ear off. ‘Since when were you my line manager?’ I asked him, quietly. ‘You’re at St Leonards, CID; I’m drugs squad commander. So please stop puffing out your chest and tell me exactly what the hell it is you want.’

‘Listen…’ he growled.

‘I’m listening.’

I heard a deep breath being drawn. ‘I’ve got a crime scene,’ he continued, eventually.

‘Infirmary Street Baths,’ I said. In the Victorian era Edinburgh’s civic leaders built several public swimming pools to combat the scourge of cholera. When I was young, my father took me to see his grandfather’s grave in a cemetery in Wishaw, Motherwell’s neighbouring town; as we approached it he pointed out a green area, without memorial stones, and told me that it was the site of a mass grave for victims of a cholera epidemic.

‘That’s right,’ Jay confirmed, brusquely.

‘I thought they were closed.’ A hundred years on, we weren’t so bothered about Biblical plagues.

‘They are. They were shut down about a year ago; they’ve been mothballed while the council tries to find a new use for the building, or for the site, if it comes to that. There are jannies going in every so often, to check the place out, make sure that everything’s all right.’

‘But today something wasn’t?’

‘That’s right. They found a guy in the pool.’

‘What stroke was he doing?’

‘Very funny. There’s no water supply to the building, but even if there had been, this one wasn’t swimming. He was at the deep end; right under the high diving board. His neck was broken.’

‘He took the plunge, eh?’

The superintendent allowed himself a grim chuckle. ‘That’s how it looks. But we don’t know for certain whether he dived off it or whether he was chucked off.’

‘What makes you think I can tell you?’ I asked.

‘If what Alf Stein says about you is right,’ I could see the sneer on his weasel face, ‘you probably could tell us just by looking at him.’ Detective Chief Superintendent Stein was our head of CID, Jay’s boss and mine. I’d heard myself described, with undisguised jealousy, by someone who didn’t know I was within earshot, as his protege, but Alf had never told me that I was. ‘But the reason I’d like you to look at him…’ he hesitated, ‘… this has got drugs overtones to it, Bob. There’s no ID on the body, but Alison Higgins reckons she’s seen this bloke before. She thinks that he’s one of Tony Manson’s crew.’

I could have said that I’d look at him next morning in the mortuary, but in truth, if Jay had done that to me I’d have been seriously upset. And there was something else: Alison wasn’t wrong too often. I told him to hold, and put my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. ‘Do you know if Daisy has anything on tonight?’ I asked my daughter.

She nodded. ‘She’s taking some pictures to show to a private buyer in Haddington.’

‘Do you have much homework?’

‘I’ve done it.’

‘Fancy a quick trip into town?’

‘Aw, Dad! Top of the Pops is on in a minute or two.’

‘We can record it. I need to do this.’

‘New jeans?’

‘Are you trying extortion on a police officer?’

‘It’s always worked before.’

‘Okay.’ I put the phone back to my ear. ‘I’ll be about forty-five minutes, give or take a couple,’ I told Jay.

‘Our guest will wait for you,’ he replied.

I let Alex set the VCR; we had no empty tapes so she and I had a brief argument about which to use. She won in the end, because I wasn’t really interested in catching up on Juventus winning the Champions League on penalties. She didn’t get to choose the music in the car, though. I never could stand R Kelly, and Wyclef’s language on one of the Fugee tracks was… well… ‘Mista Mista’ had become the anthem of the Edinburgh drugs squad, but it wasn’t for my daughter’s ears. Instead I forced her to listen to ‘Aria’, a strange, contemplative blend of opera and chill-out music by the Cafe del Mar maestro, that a friend had given me in Spain a few weeks before, at Easter.

Although it was a Thursday, most of the late evening shoppers were heading for home by the time we came into the outskirts of the city. I was thinking about Infirmary Street Baths, and what was waiting for us there. Alexis was thinking about something else; we were on Milton Link when she turned the volume down.

‘Dad,’ she said, abruptly, reclaiming my attention. ‘Why don’t we have a dinner party?’

‘What?’ I spluttered. ‘Why the hell would we do that?’

‘Why shouldn’t we? You never invite friends to the house. It’s as if we’re hermits. You’re a good cook, and I’m not bad at some things. We could manage.’

‘Who would we invite?’ As I thought about it, I conceded the point; we did live a secluded existence. Alex wasn’t my life in its entirety, but I didn’t have a legion of friends, not outside the job. Yes, I was invited to parties thrown by people who’d been part of our circle when I was half of a couple, but nobody expected me to take a turn as host myself, not with a kid… but she wasn’t any more, was she?

‘You could invite the Lloyds,’ she suggested. Jack Lloyd was my usual foursomes partner in the golf club. He and his wife were more than ten years older than me. ‘And Aunt Jean could come.’