Quintin Jardine - Lethal Intent

Skinner laughed with him. 'If they are… well, I've seen bigger gangsters than them as visitors to my home village. There's nothing better than a golf tour for bringing out the worst in middle-aged men.' He paused, looking out of the window as they passed the turn-off for east Fife. 'When are you going to ask me, Neil?'

'You mean why we're heading for Kinross to meet Andy? No point, you'd only have to repeat it once we got there.'

'I didn't mean that. When are you going to ask me about Sarah and me?'

'I'm not. I'm going to wait for you to tell me, in your own time.'

'And what if I tell you that we're finished?'

The chief inspector concentrated even harder on the road ahead. 'Then I will be very sad,' he replied, slowly, 'for both of you, because you're both very fine people. But I'll be sadder for your children.'

'So will I, but if it isn't right for us, can it be right for them?'

'There's no simple answer to that. So, are you telling me that you're finished? Can't you save it? The fact that you came home alone might say as much.'

'No, I'm not saying that, not yet; but I'm having trouble finding anything to save, other than friendship.'

McIlhenney sighed. 'I've never been in that situation, so I can't offer anything. Can I chance my arm and ask you one thing, though? Does this have anything to do with Aileen de Marco? When the Justice Minister calls me on my private line and asks if it's okay if she picks you up from the airport rather than me, it's liable to make me a bit inquisitive.'

'Touche,' said Skinner. 'I might be deceiving myself here, Neil, but I honestly don't think it has. Aileen's… a friend; but if she didn't exist, Sarah and I would still have this trouble. There are issues between us that can only be resolved by one of us capitulating. I won't; I've told her so. Now she's got to decide how to deal with that.'

'I see.' The DCI drove on in silence for a while, until the exit for Kinross came into sight. As he drove off the motorway, he glanced across at his friend. 'Good luck, Bob,' he murmured. 'That's all I can say.'

'It's enough; thanks.'

They followed the road off the roundabout that took them into the small county town, and drove along its leafy main street until, on their left, they came to the Green Hotel.

George Regan stood in his kitchen, looking through the open door at his wife as he made another pot of tea: he thought that it was the fifth of the day, but in truth he had lost count. Jen was staring at the wall, at the same spot that had held her attention since the call had come about their son.

Finally, they were alone. Mary Chambers had just left, having come to tell them in person, rather than by phone, that the Procurator Fiscal had agreed to release George junior's body for burial. If such news could be described as good, it was, for at least it would give them something to do, something on which to focus for the next few days. After that they could both go back to work, him to the force, and Jen to her secretarial job with an accountancy firm.

Bob Skinner had called in too, with his Special Branch sidekick Neil McIlhenney. They had been en route to a meeting somewhere; Regan had found that a blessing, since both men were imagining all too obviously their own horror as parents at such a loss.

Before them there had been the grandparents, Jen's mum and dad and his own father, come as a group for no obvious reason. There was no consolation. The fact was that their visits, and those of their brothers and sisters, wee George's cousins, their colleagues and their close friends, only served to make the loss even less bearable. Each one brought their own grief, adding to the sum total in their quiet, still sitting room, and there had come a moment when George had wanted to scream, 'Please, thank you, whatever, just go and leave us to our private sorrows,' and another when Jen had run weeping from the room at the strident sound of the doorbell's ring.

In fact, that had not been another caller but another Interflora delivery. The house was full of flowers, more than they had vessels to contain them. They had been forced to borrow vases from the neighbours, and now the latest bouquet was displayed in an old ice-bucket that George had recovered from the garden shed.

As he dropped two Scottish Blend tea-bags into the green ceramic pot and poured in boiling water, he found himself wondering what it was that made people send flowers on every one of life's milestones: birth, marriage, anniversaries and most of all bereavement. He had been told, and maybe he would take Jen to see them, that dozens of floral tributes had been laid already at the spot where their son had died. But why? Was it an instinctive human reaction, or simply the result of subtle marketing?

Whatever it was, it was bloody good business for somebody, judging by the number of those cooler trucks from Holland that seemed to be about the city these days. He even remembered seeing one a few weeks back, parked at Fort Kinnaird at two in the morning. He and Jen had been on their way back from a party in Musselburgh and they had passed the bastard, parked on a public road for the night, skimming his expenses, no doubt, instead of taking a room in the King's Manor, less than a mile away. With a few cans under his belt, he had been for getting out his warrant card and rousting him out of his sleeping-bag, but Jen had refused to stop and driven on.

That party: high-flying Brian Mackie's promotion do, celebrating his elevation to command of the City Division, or the 'special forces', as George had christened it, another coppers' get-together. He thought of the guest list, trying to remember civvies who had been there. The only two he could recall were Brian's brother Rab, and Sheila's divorced sister Magdalena; they had made eyes at each other all night, until finally they had disappeared into the upper reaches of the house. The rest, though, had all been coppers.

He knew he wasn't the first to ask the question, and he wouldn't be the last. How many friends outside the force does your average police officer have? Damn few, was his answer. Inevitable, he supposed, that police people, being authority figures, should stand apart from the rest and group together socially, professionally, and even, in some cases, Masonically. It was getting worse, too. Now, with the increase in the number of female officers, more and more coppers were marrying other coppers. Look at Maggie Rose, for Christ's sake: she packs up with Mario McGuire and then she shacks up with Stevie Steele, swaps one CID suit for another. Not that George had anything against her, though. He liked Maggie, and Stevie too; a good lad and a lot safer bet than big McGuire. There was something about that one that said 'danger'. He was one of only three guys on the force, maybe anywhere, who were capable of scaring DS Regan, and the other two were not long gone from his house. Skinner himself, he was another example; his wife might not have been a cop, but she'd been a police surgeon when they had met, and his two closest friends were big Neil, and Andy Martin, who, come to think of it, also came into the 'scary' category… and who had married a detective sergeant.

'Should I chuck this job?' he mused aloud, as he poured the tea into two chunky mugs and added a dash of milk, no sugar, to each, not noticing that Jen had come to stand behind him.

'Why would you do that?' she asked.

He turned, surprised, spilling a little tea from one of the mugs as he picked them up. He kept that as his own and gave the other to his wife. 'Sorry, love,' he said. 'I was just talking to myself.'

'Sure, but when you do that it usually means something. Are you thinking of chucking the police?'

'If I did, maybe we'd get a life.'