Skinner's mission

12

Finding a needle in a haystack is rather easy, if it is the only one, and if the searcher has a sufficiently powerful magnet.

There was no Carl Medina listed in the Edinburgh telephone directory, but a single call to DVLC in Swansea uncovered one licensed driver of that name in the city, living at an address in Slateford. A subsequent check with the City of Edinburgh Council Finance Department revealed that the Council Tax for that address was paid by one Angela Muirhead, by monthly instalments, remitted from an account at the Clydesdale Bank in Charlotte Square.

Dave Donaldson pressed the entry buzzer at the smart, newly-built block of flats and waited. But no voice came from the small speaker in the casing, only the hum of the lock being released by remote control.

The flat, listed ‘Muirhead/Medina’ beside the buzzer stud, was on the third floor of four. There was no lift, but Donaldson and Maggie Rose took the stairs at a trot. Number 3c was at the end of a long, narrow hallway, heavy with intermingling stale cooking smells which made the detectives’ stomachs churn. The front door had obscure glazed panels, top and bottom, but no bell, only a letterbox with knocker attached.

It was six thirty, and the flat was dark inside. DCI Rose rapped the knocker, three times, hard and loud. After only a few seconds the hallway behind the door was lit up, and a tall figure approached.

‘Have you lost your keys, Angie? They’re not hanging up in the. .’ The voice, muffled at first behind the closed door tailed off as it opened, in a classic mixture of surprise and alarm as the man saw the two officers on the doorstep.

‘Carl Medina?’ asked Donaldson.

The man nodded. ‘Aye, that’s me.’ For all his Hispanic surname, his accent was pure Edinburgh, and his features and his fair, thinning hair, swept back from a high forehead, betrayed no Latin connection. He was a strikingly handsome man, around thirty years old, but he seemed, if anything, Nordic in his ancestry. Maggie looked at him, thought of her swarthy half-Italian husband, Mario, and was struck by the vagaries of genetic inheritance.

‘Superintendent Donaldson, DCI Rose, Edinburgh CID,’ her colleague announced. ‘We’d like a word. Can we come in?’

‘Aye, if you like,’ said Medina, with a sigh.

The two detectives stepped into the flat. Closing the front door behind them, Medina pointed them towards a room at the far end of the hall. As soon as she stepped into the sitting room Rose’s eye was caught by the late edition Evening News lying on the small couch, and by its front page heading, ‘City Woman Dies in Fiery Hell’.

‘What can I do for you?’ he asked.

Rose picked up the tabloid and held the front page towards him. ‘I think you know.’

Medina said nothing, but gave a brief nod, his gaze dropping to the grey-carpeted floor. He pointed the detectives to the two soft, cream-coloured armchairs on either side of the couch, on which he sat down himself.

‘We’d just like a chat for now,’ said Donaldson. ‘Later we might want you to make a formal statement, but we’ll cross that one when we get there.

‘Is this your permanent address?’ he asked.

‘Aye.’

‘You live here with Miss, is it, Angela Muirhead?’

Medina shook his head and smiled, for the first time. ‘That’s Ms. Angie’s very definitely a Ms.’

‘What does she do for a living?’

‘She’s a civil servant. She’s personal secretary to some high flyer, in the new place down in Leith.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Her boss works all hours. She’s no’ usually home before seven.’

‘Where do you work, Mr Medina?’ asked Rose.

‘I don’t, as I’m sure you know by now.’

‘Did you apply for a job recently?’

Medina glanced across at her, sharply. ‘I apply for jobs all the time. I hate that bloody Giro, Miss. . er, sorry, I didn’t catch the name.’

‘It’s Rose,’ said the DCI quietly. ‘Let me be more specific. Two or three months ago, did you apply for a job in the motor trade, with a Renault dealership?’

‘Aye.’

‘What was the job?’

‘Book-keeper. Unqualified accountant. That’s what I do.’

‘What was the outcome?’

He glanced at her, a sour expression crossing his face. ‘I’m still drawing the bloody Giro, amn’t I.’

‘Do you know why you didn’t get the job?’

Medina looked away from the officers, towards the wall. ‘Oh aye,’ he said, heavily. ‘One day the recruitment people said it was as good as mine, the next I was told that my last employer’s reference was, quote unquote, “unsatisfactory”. That wee bastard Jackie Charles!’

Donaldson leaned forward. ‘Come on, Mr Medina. You were sacked for dishonesty. Surely you couldn’t have expected Mr Charles to give you a reference after that?’ He paused. ‘You do admit that, don’t you?’

The fair-haired man laughed bitterly and rose to his feet. ‘Oh sure, I admit that I was sacked. But it had bugger-all to do with dishonesty. Carole fell out with me. It was her that put the boot in with Jackie.’

‘Come on, man. It’s easy to plead the innocent now. But you backed off from your threat to take Mr Charles to an industrial tribunal, didn’t you.’

Carl Medina looked down at him, in what seemed to be genuine surprise. ‘I never mentioned the word Tribunal, far less backing off from one. I knew there was no point.’ As the man paused, Donaldson glanced at Rose and saw a brief smile flicker around the corners of her mouth. ‘Listen, Superintendent,’ he went on. ‘I was accused of nicking small amounts of cash, here and there. That was nonsense on two counts.

‘One, if I was bent — which I’m not — I’m too good an accountant to do anything as obvious as adding up a few columns wrong. Second, for all you CID people may believe, there’s no cash flowing through a business like Jackie Charles Motors. No-one buys a Ferrari for readies these days, not even a lottery winner. It’s all cheques, in and out.

‘The only way to make a bit on the side is through backhanders from insurance brokers and finance houses. That doesn’t happen much, and when it does the sweeties don’t get anywhere near the book-keeper.’

‘So what did happen?’ asked Donaldson.

‘Carole fiddled the books herself, showed them to Jackie and said I did it. She told him to sack me. That was that. I haven’t worked since.’ Medina gave a weak smile, devoid of humour, and flopped down once more on the couch, shaking his head.

‘But why didn’t you go to a tribunal, if you’d been fitted up?’ asked Maggie Rose.

‘Like I said, there would have been no point. It would have been my word against Carole. Not just that either; I knew enough about Jackie Charles to realise that it would have been a bad idea.’

‘What did you know about him?’ snapped Donaldson.

‘Oh, things I’d heard. Not so much about Charles himself, but about that guy who works for him in his other businesses, Dougie Terry. He used to come around the showroom every so often, to see Jackie.’

‘What had you heard about Terry?’

Medina paused. ‘I work out a bit, in the gym at the Commonwealth Pool. I met a guy there once — about five years back, just before I started working for Charles — who told me that he knew a guy who did odd jobs for cash for Terry. We were just bullshitting, ken, about how you could make a few quid out of the bodybuilding. I was talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, but this guy started on about Dougie Terry.’

‘Did this man describe the sort of odd jobs he was talking about?’

He nodded. ‘Aye. He said they involved breaking people’s arms and legs: even, on occasion, breaking them so they’d never be right again.’

‘Did he mention anyone specific?’ Rose cut in, softly.

The man hesitated. ‘Aye, he did. Mind you, at the time I thought it was crap. I thought it was all crap until I saw Dougie Terry. This guy mentioned a footballer, a lad named Jimmy Lee, played for the Jam Tarts. He had a bad gambling habit, and he was rotten at it. He owed a bookie a stack of cash, far more than he was making, and the Hearts didn’t exactly look like winning the European Cup that year.

‘One Saturday night, after a Tynecastle game, Lee was on his way home in Wester Hailes when he was jumped in the hallway of the building where he lived.’

‘I remember that case,’ said Dave Donaldson.

‘The whole of Edinburgh remembers it. The boy’s kneecaps, and both his ankles, were smashed to bits. He’ll never walk right again, never mind play football. The guy I met at the Commonwealth Pool said that the guy he knew had been involved in it and that it had been set up by Terry, to settle the boy Lee’s score with the bookie.’

‘Can we put some names to this story, Mr Medina?’ asked Rose.

‘I don’t know the guy’s name. Working out you see people to talk to, between exercises, like, but you don’t usually get to know them.’

‘Have you ever seen the man since that conversation?’

‘Once or twice, but not in the last three years or so. He just stopped coming to the Commonwealth. Maybe he ruptured something. That can happen to the real keen guys, like this bloke was.

‘Could you pick him out if you saw him again?’

Medina nodded. ‘Sure. I don’t remember much about his face, other than that it was red and sweaty and that he had a big moustache, but he had a big vulture tattooed on his right shoulder. That was a one-off, and no mistake.’

‘Maybe we’ll take you on a tour of the gyms and health clubs, Mr Medina,’ said Donaldson, suddenly and sharply. ‘But let’s get back to the point here, okay?

‘You’ve said that Mrs Charles made false allegations against you, and had you sacked. You’ve told us that she fell out with you. You were the company book-keeper, and she was its finance director. If you were good at your job, as you say, why would she just “fall out with you”?’

‘Carl?’ The voice came from the hallway. All three heads turned and looked towards a slim, dark-haired woman as she appeared, framed in the doorway. She looked tired, concerned, and not a little puzzled as she frowned at them. The two men stood up, and Medina moved towards her.

‘Angie, love,’ he said, helping her out of her heavy, navy-blue woollen coat, ‘these people are CID officers. There’s been a death at the place where I used to work. The boss’s wife was killed in a fire, and they’re treating it as murder. It’s in the Evening News.’

Angela Muirhead looked at the detectives. ‘But why come here? It’s been years since Carl worked there.’ She turned to Medina. ‘How long is it since you were made redundant, Carl, two years now?’

The man looked at Donaldson, a plea in his eyes. ‘Look, Superintendent, can we finish this later?’

The detective shook his head. ‘Sorry, we either finish it here or you come down to the station with us right now, and we do the whole thing again, formally and under caution.

‘I think it best if Ms Muirhead knows the truth anyway, don’t you?’ Without waiting for a reply he looked at the girl. ‘Mr Medina wasn’t made redundant. He was sacked, so his former employer tells us, on grounds of dishonesty. Mr Medina denies that. He says that his boss’s wife, the victim in last night’s fire, fell out with him and made up evidence against him.

‘When you came in we were asking why she would do that. So, Mr Medina?’

The man looked from Donaldson to Angela Muirhead, who stared back at him, her frown deepening, then to Maggie Rose, who sat silent, returning his gaze, and finally back to the Superintendent.

‘Okay,’ he said at last, in a hard, bitter tone. ‘Carole Charles made a pass at me and I turned her down.’

‘Sure she did,’ said Donaldson, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

‘She did!’ cried Medina, insistently. ‘She liked the young lads, did Carole. She was always flirting when she came into the office. It was nothing that anyone else would notice, just the odd wink, the odd suggestive remark. It used to piss me off a bit, but I was hardly in a position to do anything about it.’

‘Except resign?’ said Rose.

‘Exactly, Chief Inspector, and I wasn’t about to do that. Angie and I were saving up for a new house, and jobs were even less thick on the ground then than they are now. So I put up with it. Anyway, Carole was nearly twenty years older than me. I thought it was all a bad joke.’ He paused.

‘Finally, one night I was working late, getting ready for the auditors, when she came into the office. We were the only people there. She came straight round the desk, pushed the books to one side, pulled up her skirt and sat on my lap, straddlin’ me.

‘She just went straight for my fly. She said, “I’m going to have you, son. No more messing around. This is your big night.” I’ll never forget it. All the time she was laughing at me.’ He looked across at Angela Muirhead, who stood staring at him, her right hand gone instinctively to her mouth.

‘What did you do?’ asked Rose.

‘I just lifted her off me, and sat her down, on her bum, on the desk. I said, “No way, Mrs Charles. I’m sorry, but I’m not daft enough to fuck around wi’ the boss’s wife.” I zipped myself up and I walked right out of there.’ He paused, and looked again at his fiancée.

‘I didn’t know what to expect when I went in to work the next day. But nothing happened, or was said. In fact, I didn’t see Carole for a week after that, till one afternoon she came in. She didn’t say a word to me. She just started going over one of the purchase ledgers, one I hadn’t opened for weeks.

‘After a few minutes she picked it up and went to see Jackie. Next day he called me in to see him. He said that Carole had caught me on the fiddle, and that I was fired. He said he was sorry, because he had always liked me, but his wife was adamant that I had been in the till and that was it.’

‘Did you deny it?’ asked the red-haired Chief Inspector.

The man shook his head. ‘What was I going to say? “Look Jackie, your wife made it up. She’s in the huff wi’ me because I wouldn’t shag her.” No, all I said was, “She’s wrong, but too bad.” Then I cleared my desk and I went home.’

‘Where were you yesterday evening?’ asked Donaldson, quietly.

Angela Muirhead answered. ‘He was here.’

‘All evening?’

‘Yes,’ said Medina. ‘Angie got in just before nine. I had the dinner ready to heat up.’

He smiled, then gave a soft laugh. ‘Look, I didn’t go anywhere near that garage. I’m not the vindictive type. But if I had wanted to sort out Jackie or Carole, I’d have taken a copy of something she left lying around in the office one day.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know what it was for sure, but it wasn’t about the car business. It was a ledger and it showed cash movements in and out, with dates, sources and recipients of payments, but with initials, not names. I scribbled a few notes at the time. It occurred to me afterwards that if I’d stuck the damn thing under the photocopier, I might have been able to use it to hang on to my job.’

‘Or you might have lost a lot more than that,’ said Maggie Rose, bristling inwardly, all of a sudden, with excitement. ‘You don’t still have those notes, do you?’

‘I might have. I’ve got lots of old junk in my briefcase. I’ll have a look through it. If I find anything I’ll let you have it.’

‘Okay,’ said Donaldson, sourly. ‘If you do turn up these mythical bits of paper, bring them with you to the St Leonard’s police office at four o’clock tomorrow, and ask for me. But be sure you turn up then even if you don’t find them. I’d like you to make that formal statement we mentioned.’

He nodded to Rose. ‘That’s enough for tonight, though, Maggie. I imagine these two will have some talking to do. Let’s leave them to get on with it.’

Angela Muirhead showed them to the door. It had barely closed before Rose looked up at Donaldson. ‘That was an interesting half-hour, and no mistake.’

The Superintendent’s eyebrows rose. ‘You thought so? The only thing that I could hear was a liar covering up the Porky Pie that he told his girlfriend when Jackie sacked him for cooking the books. Redundant, indeed!

‘As for the stuff about the man with the vulture tattoo; all that could just have been a half-hearted attempt to smear Charles.’

‘Maybe lies, maybe truth,’ said Rose, ‘but for sure, Carl Medina’s given us a few hares to chase. D’you think we should report this to Andy Martin tomorrow morning?’

‘Aw, come on, Maggie,’ said Donaldson. ‘I know that Martin’s in personal charge, but we don’t want to go running to him with every rumour we pick up off an informant, or a guy like Medina, who’s scared and tossing out crap.’

She stopped as they reached the top of the stairway. ‘I agree that the story about the man with the vulture tattoo was vague and a bit fanciful. But these notes that Medina promised us, that could be something else again. We’ve been looking for years for anything that ties Jackie Charles to the illegal activities which we know he runs or bankrolls.

‘Whether admissible as evidence or not, these scribbles that Medina says he made could be the first return we’ve ever had. Let me ask you something, Dave. If the Boss was running this investigation, would you hold something like this back from him?’

Slowly, the Detective Superintendent shook his head.

‘Well,’ said his deputy, ‘in that case my advice is, don’t for one second treat Andy Martin any less seriously than you would treat Bob Skinner.

‘Unlike the Boss, Andy’s famous for being even-tempered and imperturbable. But I’ve always had the feeling when something really does rattle his cage, the outcome could be spectacular!’