Quintin Jardine: Grievous Angel

Two officers stood beside him. They were both dressed as I was, in one-piece sterile suits with hoods, but I knew them both. Alison Higgins had just made DI; she had been a sergeant on my team until a year before. I had engineered her move, without her ever knowing about it. She had chummed me to Infirmary Street once or twice… on lunchtimes when we weren’t back at her flat in Albert Street, banging each other’s brains out. Our thing had cooled off since then… not that it had ever been red hot… but we were still good friends.

The other suit was a detective constable, new to CID; his name was Martin, Andy Martin. He was from Glasgow, and he was reckoned to be a high-flier, not necessarily by Jay, but by me. He had helped me out on an investigation a few months before, when he was still in uniform, and I had recommended to Alf Stein that he be fast-tracked into CID. Jay thought that he had been favoured because he had a degree of fame as a rugby player, but if that had been so he’d have deserved it. The young Martin had played for Scotland B and had been a certainty to make full international status, until he had made it clear to the head coach that his job came before any squad training session, even in the newly dawned professional era.

‘So you think I might have an interest in this, Alison?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure I’ve seen him before, sir.’ She was always impeccably formal with me, on duty, when there were others around. ‘And I’m sure, too, that it was in my time on the drugs squad.’

‘Has the body been moved?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘So you’ve only seen him in profile, as he is now?’

‘That’s how sure I am,’ she replied, confidently.

‘Has the doctor been yet?’

‘And the pathologist,’ Martin volunteered, ‘and the photographers.’

‘Then turn him over.’

The young DC nodded, squatted down beside the corpse and rolled it on to its back, then straightened the arms and legs. The left side of the face had been smashed by the impact, but it was still recognisably human. And recognisable as…

‘Marlon Watson,’ I said, loud enough for Jay to hear, above us at the poolside. ‘Fucking hell, but that’s one unlucky family.’

‘Marlon?’ Martin echoed.

‘Age twenty-three or twenty-four, born in nineteen seventy-two, when The Godfather was the big film of the year. Mr and Mrs Watson didn’t have a lot of imagination when it came to naming their kids. This one had a brother called Ryan; he was born in nineteen seventy, the year Love Story came out. There was a sister, too, so I’ve been told, older than either of them. Her name’s Mia; spot the movie.’

‘ Rosemary’s Baby.’ Alison was a movie buff.

‘That’s right: a movie about the spawn of Satan, and Bella Watson called her kid after its star.’

‘Why did you say they’re unlucky?’ Jay asked.

I looked up at him. ‘Don’t you remember? Maybe not; it’s a few years back now. I wasn’t long on the force when it happened. This one’s brother was at Maxwell Academy, that hellish school they pulled down a few years ago, and his uncle, a bad bastard called Gavin Spreckley, had him selling heavily cut smack to the other kids, under the protection of the janitor. The Saltire newspaper got on to it and ran the story. We didn’t have enough on Gavin to lift him, but Ryan was arrested and remanded to a secure unit. He disappeared from there; he didn’t break out, though, he was snatched. The staff were careless, or maybe somebody was bribed. Anyway, a day or so later a parcel was delivered to the Saltire newspaper office. It was a box, with two right hands in it, the boy’s and the uncle’s, cut off after they’d been killed. We never found the bodies, but Tommy Partridge… he led the investigation… reckons that he knows what happened to them.’

Jay scowled. ‘That’s not bad luck as far as I’m concerned; it’s good luck for the rest of us.’

‘The boy was fourteen,’ I barked at him. ‘A year older than my daughter is now; he never stood a fucking chance, being brought up in that environment.’

‘Tough shit. I remember the wee swine now; he carried a razor, and cut somebody with it, one of our guys.’

‘Sure, and you carry a spring-loaded baton in your jacket pocket, Superintendent.’ His face flushed with anger, and I stopped short. I’d been drawn into an argument with the guy in front of his own troops, not a smart thing to do. ‘But the family trouble didn’t end there,’ I went on, cutting across any potential retort. ‘We all remember that,’ I glanced at the DC, ‘apart from you, Martin.’

‘What happened, sir?’ he asked me.

‘Mayhem. Partridge and his team knew who did for the pair of them; there wasn’t much doubt about that. Spreckley was a known dealer; his supplier was a guy called Alasdair Holmes, the younger brother of a man called Perry Holmes. I won’t give you Perry’s life story, but you can take it that he was a man of many business interests, some straight, others criminal on a national scale. Every cop in Scotland wanted him, but none of us could get near him. Anyway, the Holmes brothers knew nothing of what had been going on in the school, and when they found out…’ I felt my eyebrows rise.

‘The belief was that uncle and nephew were killed by Al Holmes and a big German monster who worked for them, called Johann Kraus, and Partridge’s bet was that they were cremated in an incinerator on a smallholding that Perry owned and where Kraus lived. He also believes that they made Gavin’s brother Billy watch the executions. If Gavin was small-time then Billy was tiny, a gopher, no more than that.’

I smiled, but I wasn’t laughing inside. ‘However,’ I continued, ‘there was a wee bit more to him than they thought. It took him a few years to work up the courage, but one day he walked into the Holmes business office just off Lothian Road and shot both the brothers. Alasdair was killed instantly and Perry took four bullets. He should have died, but he didn’t; instead he wound up in a wheelchair, paralysed. As for Billy, Johann Kraus saw him off, then he went berserk himself and killed an innocent bystander. There was a short siege, before one of our snipers blew his brains out.’

‘So what do you think this is?’ Higgins asked. ‘The next round?’

‘Perry Holmes exterminating the Watsons? No, I don’t see that. Perry’s a quadriplegic; from what I’ve heard he’s looked after by a couple of male nurses. He still runs his kosher businesses, but that’s all. The other side of his life ended when that bullet lodged at the base of his brain, where it is to this day. It all seems to have passed over to Tony Manson now.’

‘So is DI Higgins right?’ Jay interrupted. ‘Did this Marlon guy connect to Manson?’

I knew where he was heading, from the tone of his voice. ‘Closely,’ I told him. ‘He was his driver.’

‘So it is one for your drugs squad,’ he exclaimed, beaming at the prospect of spin-passing a tricky investigation to someone else.

‘Maybe yes, maybe no. Tony does other things, as you know very well.’

‘Sure, among them prostitution, which still makes it your baby.’

I sighed, because I knew that one way or another, he was right: but I wasn’t for letting him know it. ‘We’ll let the boss decide that,’ I declared. ‘How did he get in here?’ I asked Alison, to avoid any debate.

‘There’s a door at the side. It’s been jemmied. The building isn’t alarmed, so there was no risk.’

‘Time?’

‘The janitors call in twice a week. The entrances were all checked and secure on Monday. The pathologist is sure he’s been dead for at least thirty-six hours, because rigor mortis is starting to dissipate.’

‘So we’re looking at something that could have happened overnight on Tuesday. There’s a pub across the road, and steady traffic through this street, so we ought to start with the premise that the break-in happened after closing time.’ I gazed up at Jay. ‘Do you know when that boozer closes? Does it have a late licence?’