Quintin Jardine - Private Investigations

‘Rachel,’ Eden exclaimed, breaking into my thoughts, ‘finally, this is the man you always said you wanted to meet. I don’t know why it never happened, back in the old days.’

She smiled up at me. ‘I do,’ she murmured. ‘Your sister was afraid I might be competition.’

Pretty brazen , I thought, to say that to her husband . I grinned back at her, hoping that she couldn’t read the truth in my eyes.

And that was, I wouldn’t have fancied her in a hundred years, not because she was physically unattractive . . . which she wasn’t . . . but because she had an unfortunate habit of looking at people as if she was appraising them, and making an instant assessment of their worth. I really hate that, and so did Alison. That was the real reason for her keeping a distance between Rachel and me.

However I was her husband’s guest that lunchtime, so I shook her hand, doing my best to avoid a large emerald and diamond ring, gave her the full Skinner smile, and replied, ‘The only competition Alison ever saw was the job, and ultimately she was right.’

Eden had hired caterers. A little extravagant, I thought, when we could have walked a couple of hundred yards to Ondine, or the Witchery, but if that’s what really rich folk do, then who was I to object?

We talked our way through lunch, mostly about our careers and how they had developed. ‘I never thought you’d chuck it,’ Eden said, brow wrinkled with the effort of cracking a lobster claw.

‘Three years ago, I’d have agreed with that,’ I conceded, ‘before all this unification crap came above the horizon. Now I look at my life, and every day I thank the First Minister for not giving in to my insistence that he was a crazy man in pushing ahead with the venture that the politicians, probably on the advice of their PR people, have decided to rename ScotServe.’

‘You thank him?’ Rachel repeated. ‘So you agree with the single force now?’

‘Hell no!’ I retorted. ‘It gave me the impetus to get out, that’s what I’m saying.’

‘There must be some good about it, surely,’ she protested.

‘Okay,’ I conceded, ‘there is some good, but not a hell of a lot. The new one-zero-one phone number for non-urgent reports and inquiries, that’s okay, but it’s general.

‘As for the rest,’ I continued, ‘the detachment of much of the force from its senior management, the problem of the distant communities being policed by a man who’s never set foot in those places, that’s a disaster waiting to happen, Rachel. Andy Martin knows little or nothing about places like Dingwall. I know little or nothing about Dingwall. Only the locals know all the twists and nuances of their community. If you have a serious crime there, the people who fly in to deal with it, they’ll be looked on as an invading army. The same is true of any of the islands and much of the northern mainland.’

‘How about morale?’ Eden asked. ‘I have to say the woman who came to tell me that they’ve given up on my boat . . .’

He’d started me thinking about team spirit, and Sammy Pye’s last words to me as I’d left Fort Kinnaird. When he mentioned ‘woman’ I held up a hand. ‘Name?’

‘Chief Superintendent Chambers,’ Rory volunteered. ‘A big bluff woman.’

I smiled, for I couldn’t quarrel with that description.

‘How can I put this?’ Eden continued. ‘She didn’t seem one hundred per cent committed to the message she was delivering. That’s all she was of course, a delivery person. The investigation into the theft started off as a Strathclyde matter, when you were chief. Now ScotServe’s kicked it into touch. It was quite clear that Ms Chambers wasn’t a party to the decision, yet she was the one who had to communicate it. Would that have happened under the old system, Bob?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Don’t blame Mary, for she’s a good cop. If I was still in post and I’d known about it, I’d have told you myself. But it would have been out of friendship, that’s all.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘And you’d have given me the same message, that the Princess Alison was gone for good?’

I smiled. ‘I might have put it more subtly than that, but essentially it would have been the same, if that’s how the investigation’s turned out. If the police and other services haven’t found a vessel that size within a month of it going missing, they aren’t going to. What’s its range?’ I asked.

‘On a full tank? Maybe around fifteen hundred miles at cruise speed,’ Rory volunteered.

‘How much fuel was on board when it was taken?’ I continued.

‘Dunno.’ He turned to Eden. ‘Dad?’

‘Hodgson reckoned about a quarter tank, maybe a bit more,’ his father replied.

‘Enough to get it to the south of England, for example,’ I suggested.

Eden nodded. ‘Or the Irish Republic: that’s what the police assumed at first. They contacted their opposite numbers over there, but without success. There was no trace of it having docked anywhere to take on fuel.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘there was no trace of the Princess Alison , but what’s the first thing you’d do if you stole a large and very conspicuous luxury yacht?’

‘I’d change the name,’ Rory retorted. ‘And I’d disguise as much of the superstructure as I could.’

‘Minimum,’ I agreed. ‘Eden, anyone who can make a seventy-five-foot power yacht disappear has either taken her a short distance and sunk her out of malice, or they had a very sophisticated plan, possibly with inside help. Does the vessel have a permanent crew?’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘not exactly. It takes only two to run it, captain and engineer.’

‘Captain?’ I interjected. ‘What does that make you?’

Eden laughed. ‘It makes me the bloody admiral, I suppose. The captain’s name is Walter Hurrell, he’s ex-navy, and when he’s not driving my boat he’s driving my car, and doing other things for me. He’s on the holding company payroll as my personal assistant. The engineer is another ex-naval bloke, Jock Hodgson; he’s retired. When we need him we hire him by the day. If you’re suggesting they might have been involved, either one of them, I’d disagree with you. I’d vouch for both of them.’

I nodded. ‘Okay, I’m going to assume that both of them were checked out by the investigating officers and came up clean.’

‘Better than that,’ he said, ‘they were checked out by me, before I hired either of them. They’re sound, both of them.’

‘Did the police interview them?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ Eden admitted. ‘I’m not privy to the extent of their inquiries, only the few details that they’ve volunteered.’

It seemed that I was being asked for my opinion of little or nothing, but I pressed on. ‘Where was the vessel moored? Inverkip?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘We have a small estate just north of Rhu. It has a purpose-built deep-water mooring with a jetty and a boathouse. The Princess Alison was actually in secure premises when she was stolen.’

‘It must be a hell of a size of a boathouse,’ I observed, ‘to hold a seventy-five-foot yacht.’

‘It is,’ Rory confirmed. ‘It’s like a bloody aircraft hangar. It has an alarm, linked to a central monitoring station, but it goes through a telephone landline. They cut that as they broke in.’

So what? I thought. ‘Didn’t that very act trigger the alarm?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘When the phone line goes down, the system switches to a back-up mobile phone. It takes a few seconds; by that time they’d cut the padlock, got in, and had disabled the sensor above the door.’

‘Now,’ Eden exclaimed, ‘the damned insurers are trying to say that the system wasn’t effective. Even though they specified it! Would you believe that?’