Fallen Gods

Sixty-three

The place was understated, if anything. It was a very plain house, conservative in its design, without the ramparts and turrets found all too often in folly dwellings of its age, built from locally quarried stone, and smaller than might have been expected in such extensive grounds. And yet, there was something about it that reeked of money, and old money at that, maybe two hundred years old. Andy Martin's staff had established that it had been in the same family's ownership since they had built it in the late nineteenth century.

Bob Skinner stopped his BMW just where the driveway opened out into a wide garden area in front of the mansion. He was blocking the narrow road, but that did not worry him; in fact it suited his purpose. It was well into the evening, but the day had been fine, and the summer sun was still bright.

As he looked around the grounds, they reminded him of Fir Park Lodge, but these were kept better. He could see the stripes on the close mown lawn, and appreciate the neatness of the flower beds, and the careful way in which the shrubs and bushes had been trimmed. Off to the back and to the left, he saw outbuildings; stables once upon a time no doubt, but now garaging for a russet-coloured Range Rover, which stood gleaming outside. He stood for a moment and listened; from somewhere not far away came the splashes of a river running. Even though the spate was over, it still sounded full and fast.

A small sign on the lawn asked him to "Keep off the grass', but he ignored it and marched straight across, towards the grey granite house.

He was several yards short of the heavy brown front door when it opened. A tall thin man appeared; he was wearing grey corduroy trousers from an age when fashion meant nothing, a green pullover with suede patches on the shoulders and elbows, and he was glaring at his visitor.

"Can't you read, man?" he barked, as Skinner approached. "And look where you've parked your car."

"Sure I can read," the policeman answered, "English, Spanish and French, in fact. But sometimes I like to ignore rules, if I think they're stupid. There's a bit of a rebel in me, you see. As for my car, I left it there because I didn't want it to disfigure your charming house." He walked on, unbidden, through the wide doorway and into a panelled hall; he stopped and looked around.

"Very nice," he said, amiably.

"Get to hell out of there!" the other man exploded. "Just who the hell are you and what do you think you're doing here?"

Skinner beamed at him. "Just imagine that I'm Michael Aspel, that this

Jiffy bag I've got under my arm is a big red book, and I'm saying, "David Candela, This is Your Life". Let's start off there."

Candela made a furious, exasperated sound. "You're a lunatic," he exclaimed, 'a well-dressed lunatic, but a lunatic nonetheless. I'm calling the police."

Suddenly, Skinner seemed a little less amiable. "I wouldn't do that. I am the police."

"In that case I'll complain to your inspector."

"You'd be several ranks too low if you did that."

Candela blinked, then stepped into the hall himself, heading for a small silver box on the wall, beside a grandfather clock. "Don't do that either," his visitor advised. "I know what that is; it's a panic button linked to your alarm system. It would only be an inconvenience to your monitoring station if you activated it. There wouldn't be a response."

The lawyer stopped. "Very well," he said. A little uncertainty had crept into his voice, but he was still in control of himself and showing no sign of alarm. "If this is an official visit, you'd better come through to the drawing room. I've seen a few of you people over the last ten days or so; I have to say they were all a damn sight more polite than you."

Skinner smiled at him, cheerily. "This is me being polite, Mr. Candela," he exclaimed. "I'm nowhere near being rude, not yet, and rude's only a step along the way to nasty."

"Bloody lunatic," Candela muttered as he led the way into a long room, oak-panelled like the hall. It was furnished with big soft armchairs in flowery fabrics; a refectory table stood near the door, and three portraits, each carefully lit from above, were suspended from a rail along one wall. Windows looked out and down towards the river, and a double patio door opened out on to the grounds.

"Nice place," the policeman commented; a sincere compliment. "I suppose it's been in your family since the nineteenth century?"

"Yes, we built it," the lawyer snapped impatiently. "Look, do I know you?"

"You should; if you were serious about your precious firm and not just a fucking dilettante, you'd know me all right. You know my family, though; Candela and Finch has represented it for about thirty years.

And of course you have a personal connection with us."

Candela frowned. "Would you like to explain that?"

"I'll explain it by asking you something. How did my brother Michael die?"

The colour drained from the thin man's face in an instant. He looked towards the patio door as if he was about to run for it; Skinner forestalled any attempt by taking a step to his right, blocking the way. "You're…" he gasped.

"I'm Bob Skinner," said the policeman. "I'm pretty well known in

Edinburgh, but you're not really interested in the city, are you?

You're interested in the casino and in playing up here. For all you pretend, your position as senior partner is written into your firm's constitution. You don't actually manage it, one of the other guys does that."

He took the padded envelope from under his arm. "It really is all in here, you know, your whole exciting life."

Candela had gathered his thoughts. "I know nothing about your brother!" he exclaimed. "I read about his death in the newspapers, but that's all."

"Oh, don't be fucking silly," Skinner retorted. "I wouldn't have brought it up if I didn't know for certain. Before I came here, I spoke to a man called Angus dAbo, in Birnam. I showed him your photograph…" he tapped the envelope '… and he identified you right away as the man who came into his local with Michael a few days before he died. Mike got completely trousered and you carted him off.

Before I spoke to dAbo I faxed the same photo to Brother Aidan at Oak

Lodge. He clocked you too, old as he is. He identified you as the man my brother called Skipper, the man who took him away from his home and never brought him back." The DCC grinned; he was taking a deadly enjoyment from the account.

"Skipper was your nickname in the army, Mr. Candela," he said, then saw the man's eyes narrow. "Yes, I've got your service file in here too; I had it sent up to me by secure fax this morning. I've got Michael's as well, of course. They tell me that the two of you served together in Honduras; you were a company commander in the Scots Guards, and he was a lieutenant in the Sappers. When you went out on patrol, he and his guys would often go with you, in case something needed blowing up."

The policeman paused; a corner of his mouth flicked upwards, a strange gesture. When he spoke again there was a catch in his voice. "There was so much I never knew about my brother, Candela, because I never asked. I did as my father wanted and I left him to live out the rest of his life away from me; at first because I couldn't trust myself near him, then eventually because I didn't see the point of reminding him of the old hatred between us. Rodney Windows… in case you don't know him either, he's one of your partners in Candela and Finch… sent me reports on him every year, but that was all I ever knew about him.

"When I read his army file this morning, though, I found out a hell of a lot. For example, he was some sort of a fucking genius at demolition. You guys were on special ops down there, weren't you? He wasn't there just to clear fallen palm trees in the jungle. You were setting traps for the insurgents, booby-trapping their supply dumps, setting remote devices in their villages, all sorts of brutal stuff that never got reported anywhere. Mike was so good at it that for a while your CO and his turned a blind eye to his drinking. Until the fire-fight incident, that is."

Skinner held up the Jiffy bag and took a single step towards the other man. "It really is all in here, Candela; everything, including the answer to something that's always niggled me. When my father eventually told me about Michael's discharge from the army; he said that he was spared prosecution for manslaughter because of my dad's own military record. If he told me that, then that's what he believed, but as a policeman I always doubted it. And I was right. The two guys who were killed were shot by his weapon, all right, but there was no evidence of him actually firing it. More than that, some of his guys, the other Royal Engineer lads with the unit, testified that when you ambushed those rebels and the fire-fight happened he was so cross-eyed drunk that he couldn't have fired anything. They said that he wasn't even there; he was flat on his back at your camp in the jungle."

The policeman took another step towards Candela. "Then there's this; the two guys who were killed had duties with the quartermaster's unit.

There had been major stock discrepancies from that unit in the days leading up to the incident. You had orders to arrest those two guys and hold them for military police questioning as soon as you got back from that mission. And those orders were confidential; only you knew about them. No one could prove anything about you either, of course.

The engagement happened in the dark, and friendly fire incidents do happen. But still…"

He paused." So you resigned your commission, revived the law degree you'd put on ice, and went into the family firm, a year ahead of schedule. Mike resigned his too, and came back to Mother well to become a piss-artist, until finally he got out of control, I tried to batter his brains out, and he had to be put away.

"And you knew about that, of course. My father set up the trust that looked after him through your firm, rather than use his own. He did it for the sake of confidentiality, but it backfired on him. You found out, and naturally, you didn't forget."

He tossed the envelope on to a chair. "All information is useful, isn't it, Candela? It's my stock in trade; I take pieces of information and use them to build models; of events, scenes, crimes. My officers down in Edinburgh, and one in particular, has done a bloody good job on you over the last week. He worked out that the fire in the

Academy was a scam, and from there it was a short step to Tubau Gordon.

Once he got in there, and he looked at the circumstances of that fire, at where and when it was started, your name jumped out at him. When he was told about the thirty-million-pound loss that's been uncovered since, your motive, and your guilt, became self-evident."

Skinner smiled. "That's as far as he could go, though, poor lad; that's all the information he had, so the model he could build with it only shows how fucking clever you've been. Giving us the girl might have been risky, only it wasn't, because of the way you set her up.

It's funny, setting up Andrea was much the same as you did in the jungle… when you used someone else's weapon and left him to take the blame."

For a moment Candela relaxed, but only until Skinner took another step towards him. "Ah, but I've got more knowledge, though. I can build the model a bit higher. Looking at the timings involved, I know that when you realised that you had lost the biggest and most exciting gamble of your life, and that you were about to be exposed, arrested, disgraced and all that stuff, you thought of my poor brother. After all these years, maybe he'd prove useful again. So you checked that he was still in Oak Lodge, and you got in touch with him.

"I can almost hear the conversation, you know. At some point you established that Mike still had his skills… I knew that myself from something Aidan told me… and then you invited him to your place in the country. Once he was here, you told him what you wanted him to do."

Skinner sighed. "I hope he didn't agree just like that; I'd prefer to believe that he didn't. So how did you force him, I wonder? Did you really beat him with a hammer? Was it you who put those marks on his body, not some drunken fall? Or did you torture him by filling him full of drink and then depriving him of it, until he did what you wanted, and built you a device to trigger the fire in the painting, and another one for the computer, undetectable because everyone, even the experts, would think it was part of it?"

He saw Candela's eyes narrow, very slightly. "Yes, that was it, wasn't it." He nodded. "Know what I think Mike did? I reckon he made a device that would blow out the fuses of the computer and cause a big power surge that would start a massive electrical fire, then he showed you where to install it within the computer, and how to set it as a timer. The security records show that you went into Tubau Gordon on

Thursday evening, less than two days before the fire. I suppose you did it then. It worked, too; I've seen the reports. The heat was so intense that there was nothing identifiable left; a nuclear explosion couldn't have done more. Score one for Michael."

He stared at Candela; his pretence of amiability was gone. "So?" he hissed. "How did my brother die?"

"He had a heart attack," said the lawyer 'simple as that. We had dinner here, he got drunk as usual, and he fell down dead. Naturally, I didn't want him found here, so I gave him to the river, at the foot of the garden." He gave the policeman a look of pure contempt.

"And that's all I'm telling you."

"You don't have to tell me any more. I know everything now."

"And much good may it do you, Mr. Skinner. You still don't have a case you can take to court. There's no forensic evidence, Michael's dead, and you cannot prove, nor will you ever, that I was responsible for one penny of that loss."

"You're really not much of a fucking lawyer, are you," said the DCC.

"Superintendent Rose and Inspector Steele of my staff are, even as I stand here, working overtime putting together a report for the Crown Office. Tomorrow morning they will present it to the Lord Advocate, in person. It's touch and go, but you're a betting man, Mr. Candela.

Knowing how the LA feels about bent lawyers, would you lay a tenner against him taking you before a jury?"

"He'd never get a conviction."

"No?"

"Not one that would stand up at appeal."

"Does that matter? As soon as they get a warrant for your arrest, Maggie Rose and Steven Steele will pick you up, either here or in Edinburgh. I'd like it if they were able to huckle you out of your office, actually. That would be nice."

"I'd still be acquitted though."

"You'll be ruined too."

"Don't you believe it."

The policeman let out an explosive, brutal laugh. "You don't get it, do you, Candela? This is personal. Whether you killed him or not, you took Michael away from somewhere he was happy, and you forced him back into his past, to do your will. You used him one last time, and then you just threw him away. Listen, I'm under no illusions. My brother was little short of a beast as a young man; he was a drunken, sadistic thug. But somewhere along the line, with help from the good Brother Aidan, he found the good within him, and he lived a contented, if unfulfilled life.

"Then you came along and took him away from it. And you did worse; you treated him like a dog, before and after he was dead."

Skinner's eyes were chilling as he looked at the lawyer. Finally, fear showed on Candela's face. "Suppose you do walk away from your so-called perfect crime, you're still going to account for it in public and for the rest of a life which I hope, if you have any sense, will be very short.

"You're going to be a pariah, Candela, a social outcast. If necessary, our report to the fiscal will be, regrettably, leaked to the media. You think no one will use it? Ultimately, we might not have enough for a criminal conviction, but a civil jury would be pretty certain to find against you, should you choose to sue for defamation… especially as you couldn't offer any defence, since you're guilty as fucking sin." He picked up the envelope. "If you don't believe me, ask my daughter, like I did; she's a bloody sight better lawyer than you ever have been, or ever will be."

"But leaking that report would end your own career," the man whispered.

"Don't be stupid. It would never be traced back to me. Don't you have any idea of what I can do?"

He started for the door. "Think about it, Candela. There's about a twenty per cent chance you're going to prison. But there's a one hundred per cent certainty you'll be disgraced. Plus, you'll have me on your back for the rest of your life."

He glanced around the distinguished room. "This place must have a library. And, gun control or not, you've probably got a pearl-handled revolver lying about somewhere.

"Ask yourself this," said Bob Skinner, as he left. "What's expected of a real gentleman in your situation?"