Fatal Last Words

Fifteen

He looked at the two cocker spaniels as they ran before him on the end of their extended leads. ‘Joe and Jarvis,’ he laughed, quietly. He had wondered how their classically military owner had come to name his dogs after two rock stars, until Colonel Rendell had volunteered the information, unprompted. The idea had been his daughter’s. That woman, Skinner reckoned, had a wicked sense of humour.

‘Dogs,’ he murmured. ‘Imagine, me walking dogs. What would you have thought about that, Mum?’

Robert Morgan Skinner had never been what his mother had called a ‘doggie sort of person’. There had been a time in his childhood when he had wanted a pup, a golden retriever like his friend John, the teacher’s son. He had been seven years old, he recalled, when he had put ‘Puppy like Toe-rag’ at the top of his Christmas list. John’s father, a veteran of the North Africa campaign, had christened the animal ‘Tuareg’, but in Motherwell, a hard-edged town built around vast steel mills, that name was never going to stick. But his mother’s frown, her dismissive use of the phrase, and the open contempt of his older brother Michael had planted in his young mind the notion that ‘doggie people’ were another race, incomplete personalities who were alien to the world that the family Skinner occupied.

At the same age, Alex had made the same plea, and he, too, had refused, one of the few occasions during her childhood when he had denied her anything. His reasoning had been legitimate, that as a busy single parent with unpredictable working hours, he simply could not fit a dog into his routine. She had accepted that, and had settled for a kitten; when it was flattened by a passing car, the pet phase had come to an end. Still, he had wondered, subsequently, whether he might have tried a little harder to make the canine work had it not been for the underlying prejudice instilled by his mother.

In middle age, Skinner rarely thought of his childhood family unit. He had been brought up in comfortable, even privileged circumstances; his solicitor father had been one of the most respected men in the community, and Bob had idolised him. His mother, though, had always been distant and, he had thought, unloving towards him. Of course he had been too young to have heard of closet alcoholism, far less to spot the secret that she had kept hidden from her husband for years, until after the seeds of her early death had been sown. Then there was his brother Michael, who had done his best to make his early years a nightmare, and who had returned to trigger a brief crisis in his middle age. Life was a coin, he sometimes thought, spinning in mid-air, with no logic or physical law determining which side finished on top. He did not regard himself as anything like the man his father had been, yet he had inherited his strengths and built a career upon them. Michael, on the other hand, had inherited their mother’s weakness, and had blended it with an innate cruelty that had often spilled into sadism. And if that spinning coin had landed with the other side up. .

His mind’s eye looked back at the family in which he had grown up, and at those he had raised himself. ‘What a record, eh, Bob?’ he mused. ‘If you’ve any honour you’ll spell out to Aileen the history she’s marrying into; give the girl fair warning. . and the chance to change her mind?’ Then he considered how he would feel if she did, and decided that instead he would do his best to learn from experience.

His musing was interrupted by a snarl, followed by a burst of furious barking from two German shepherd dogs, tethered to stakes in the ground outside a caravan, parked on the left of the road down which he was walking. Far from hiding behind him, Joe and Jarvis strained at their leashes, their feathered ears flapping as they tried to launch what in his eyes would have been a suicide mission.

As Skinner pulled them back towards him, winding in the retractable leads a couple of feet at a time, the caravan door opened and two men stepped out. The first was tall and lank-haired, clad in washed-out jeans and an Ozzy Osborne T-shirt. His companion was shorter, and lightly built; he wore a vest and tracksuit bottoms, and seemed all bones and angles. ‘Sorry,’ Ozzy called across, cuffing each Alsatian round the ears, silencing them instantly. ‘They’re bitches, and they’re both on heat. They wouldn’t hurt a fly, mister, honest.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’ He stopped, and looked along the line of mobile homes. The traveller seemed to interpret this as a signal, since he walked towards him. Skinner eyed him up and down; around forty, he reckoned, fit, air of authority about him. The other man could have been anywhere between early thirties and forty-five, his eyes narrow and much less confident.

‘Are you the neighbours?’ the tall man asked. The accent was predominantly Scottish, but with a faint touch of the Northern Irish.

‘You’ll forgive me if I say I hope not.’ The police officer glanced back over his shoulder. ‘My house is on the hill, yes.’

‘I didn’t think it would take long. Have the vigilantes gathered already, and are you the scouting party?’

Skinner shook his head. ‘No, I’m just walking a neighbour lady’s dogs, because she didn’t fancy coming down here this morning. Their names are Joe and Jarvis. . the dogs, that is.’

‘Same as half the cockers in Britain,’ the traveller chuckled. ‘And my name’s Baillie, Derek Baillie.’ He glanced down at the other man. ‘This is Asmir Mustafic; from the European side of the family, you might say. So, they aren’t hiding round the corner armed to the teeth, but it would be fair to say that the natives are restless, yes?’

‘Only a few so far, but word hasn’t really got around yet. And the people who use this beach on a fine Sunday in August, they haven’t started to arrive yet either. They will, though, soon, and a lot of them are going to be upset, just like they were at Dunbar, and at Longniddry and at Yellowcraigs.’

‘Upset to see a bunch of smelly, thieving pikeys sharing their space?’ the man challenged. ‘Just like you and your friends are upset by us spoiling your view?’

Skinner listened for aggression in Baillie’s tone, but heard none, only a hint of resignation. ‘To be frank,’ he admitted, ‘you don’t improve it. There are other places you could park, even in this village. Why here?’

‘We can get the vans in and out easily.’

‘I like the sound of “out”, I have to say.’

‘In good time. But look now, are you a golfing man, sir?’

‘I play, yes.’

‘Well, it would have been just as easy for us to park right in the middle of your course, but we didn’t do that.’

‘That’s private land.’

‘You try telling that to the Rights of Way Society,’ Baillie suggested.

‘We do. So tell me, how long do you plan to stay here?’

The man scratched his stubble. ‘It’ll be about three weeks,’ he replied. ‘That’s the way it usually pans out. Isn’t that right, Az?’ His companion nodded, and grunted assent. ‘The police will be here soon, and they’ll ask us to move. They might even pitch up mob-handed, but they won’t actually do anything. They’ll make it uncomfortable for us, but they won’t find us breaking any laws, for we don’t.’

‘Camping here is breaking the law.’

‘It’s for the court to say that, my friend, and that’s what will happen. The council will go to the Sheriff, and ask for an interdict against us. Eventually they’ll get it, and when we see it we’ll move.’

‘Where?’

‘Somewhere else.’ Baillie chuckled, and in spite of himself, Skinner grinned.

‘You’ve got it planned all right. I’ll tell you what-’

‘I’ll bet you will!’ As the two had conversed, a few travellers had emerged from the caravans, observing the scene with casual interest. From the steps that led to the third along, a man jumped, heading for them as he shouted. He wore shorts, a checked shirt, and Timberland boots over thick green socks. He was short but thick-chested, red-haired, with a full beard that seemed to bristle. ‘I know who you are!’ he announced, speaking to the crowd, rather than to Skinner. ‘Be careful, Derek, this man isn’t who he seems.’

‘And who do I seem to be?’ the policeman retorted. ‘Just another local idiot?’ He turned to Baillie. ‘For the record, my name’s Bob Skinner, and my day job is deputy chief constable, but that isn’t relevant to our conversation, unless you choose to make it so.’

‘Don’t talk to him,’ the newcomer barked.

‘Let the man make that choice for himself,’ the DCC said lightly. ‘Who would you be anyway, the shop steward?’

‘My name’s Hugo Playfair. I travel with the group, and I represent their interests.’

‘Those sound like well-chosen words, Mr Playfair. You travel with the group? “Their” interest, not “ours”? Does that mean you don’t see yourself as one of them? Without getting into stereotypes, your accent more than hints at that. Tell me, go on. Public school educated?’ The man’s right eye twitched. ‘Good guess, Bob. How about university? Oxbridge or red-brick? Degree in sociology? Want me to keep going?’

‘If you must know,’ he said, his voice fallen to normal level, ‘I’m attached to a voluntary body called REG, an acronym for Right for Ethnic Groups. We defend people like Derek, Asmir, and groups like theirs from people like you.’

Skinner glared at him. ‘You’re going to annoy me in a minute, chum. I promise you, you’ve never met anybody like me.’ He realised that his fuse had been lit; mentally, he stamped on it to extinguish it. ‘If you’ll grant me a few seconds’ silence, I’ll finish what I was going to say to Derek. A few hundred yards along from here there’s a flat area that’s kept as an overflow car park. It isn’t in anyone’s line of sight to the coastline; it’s used very rarely, and never in August. As a gesture of goodwill on your part, Mr Baillie, I’d like you and your group to move along there. As a gesture of goodwill on my part, I will ensure that the chemical toilets that I see alongside your vans are emptied by the council and I’ll have screens erected, to minimise friction between you and the local community, and to give you a bit of privacy.’

‘You’re going to get us out of sight?’ Playfair snapped.

‘You got it in one,’ said Skinner. ‘Does that bother you? Do you like being a public spectacle?’ He turned back to the travellers’ leader. ‘As I say, this would be co-operation between parties, no more, and doesn’t imply acceptance by me or anyone else of your being here. You will still be formally warned and asked to move; the council will still go for its interdict, and I’ll take a personal interest in seeing that it’s made as effective as possible. But my job is keeping the peace, and in the short term you’ll help me do that if you accept my suggestion.’

‘Be very careful. .’ Playfair began.

‘Shut up, Hugo,’ said Baillie sharply. He looked the policeman in the eye and nodded. ‘Az and I will talk to the group about it. That’s how we do things.’

‘How will I know what you decide?’

The traveller smiled. ‘Just look out your window in a couple of hours.’