Funeral Note

Bob Skinner

Clyde Houseman. The name had been kicking around in my head since Amanda’s call. I knew it was somewhere in my memory banks, but I couldn’t access the file that held it.

I fixed the kids their lunch as soon as we got home, then asked Trish if she’d keep an eye on them, as I had an unexpected business meeting. Officially it was her day off, but she had nothing planned, and she’s flexible.

Normally, if I know that company’s coming I leave the driveway gate open, but I didn’t want any of my village pals turning up without warning, so I left it closed. My house has always been secure but when the First Minister, as she was then, moved in, it was stepped up. Now I have motion sensors in every area of the garden and video cameras that are so carefully placed that an expert couldn’t find them.

One of them picked up my visitor before he’d even pressed the button on the entryphone. He was tall and dark-haired, wearing razorcreased trousers and a navy blue blazer that was so well cut it was impossible to guess anything about his body shape, although the way he carried himself suggested that he was a fit guy. The clothes, and his grooming, screamed ‘military’.

I opened the single gate to the garden path without even asking him to identify himself. I’ve met enough spooks to know one when I see one, given advance warning. As he approached the house I opened the front door and stepped outside.

‘Mr Houseman.’ I extended a hand. As he shook it I studied his face. Yes, I had met him before; I was certain of it, but just as ignorant of the where or when. Nothing about him offered a clue. He was clean-shaven; his hair was short and looked freshly trimmed. At first glance I thought he was tanned, but at second, I wasn’t so sure. He was paler-skinned than Trish, but probably of mixed race, some Afro-Caribbean genes blended with the white.

‘Come in,’ I said, stepping aside to let him enter. ‘Let’s go in here.’ I showed him into my small private study, off the hall, where I’d watched him approach on the monitor. Normally I take visitors into the garden room, but this one wasn’t run-of-the-mill.

I sat at my desk; he took the chair alongside it. I opened the small beer fridge I keep in there, and offered him a drink. He peered inside and chose an Irn Bru; I chose the same, but I had a hard time resisting the Red Bull that was in there. That would have negated all my selfdenial. I hadn’t had a coffee all day and I was beginning to experience the withdrawal symptoms that Sarah had forecast.

All the time I was thinking, trying to nail him down, and all the time he knew it, as he looked back at me, with a faint, nervous smile on his face, incongruous when set against his bearing.

I don’t like losing at anything, but sometimes you have to admit your failures. ‘Go on,’ I said to him. ‘Tell me.’

He offered not a word in reply. Instead he slipped two fingers into his breast pocket and produced a white business card. I assumed that it was one of his, but as he passed it to me, face down, I could see that it was old, curled at the corners, and had a couple of stains on it.

I took it from him, turned it over. . and saw, beneath the police crest, my own name: ‘Robert M. Skinner, Detective Chief Inspector’.

‘Go back fifteen years,’ he murmured, but I was there already.

A call on the mother of a murder victim, a hard-as-nails cow called Bella Watson, in one of those places in Edinburgh that you will never see on a postcard. I’d taken the wrong car with me, my current BMW rather than the battered old Land Rover that was my usual work vehicle in those days. There had been a bunch of kids on the street, eyeing it up, and I’d singled out the biggest, the obvious leader, and explained to him what would happen to him, personally, if there was a mark on it when I got back. When I did, it was pristine. The lad had expected to be bunged for not touching it; I’d explained to him that if certain people in his street saw him taking money from a cop, it could be fatal. I wasn’t being a cheapskate; that was his world.

I’d seen something in the youngster as I spoke to him, something in his eyes that said that although he was trapped in his environment, he didn’t belong there. Now that I’d found my mental file, I could replay our conversation word for word.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Clyde Houseman.’

‘Well, Clyde, if it ever occurs to you that it might be a good idea to get out of this hellhole and get a life that gives you a chance to be different, you call me, on one of those numbers, and I’ll show you how.’

And I gave him, with none of his pals seeing it, a business card, the one that he’d just handed back to me.

I felt a huge surge of pleasure, maybe even pride, as I examined it. ‘All this time,’ I murmured.

‘Fifteen years,’ he replied. ‘At first I kept it as a reminder. Eventually I held on to it in the hope I’d be able to give it back to you one day.’

I laughed. ‘Amanda said you were bricking it. That’s why?’

‘Yes, sir, that’s why.’ He seemed to have left his accent behind in the slums.

‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Tell me your story.’

‘You scared me that day,’ he replied, ‘on two levels. One, I was a sixteen-year-old kid, the toughest in our street, no question. I didn’t think anyone in the world was harder than me, until I looked you in the eye and realised I was very wrong. Then on top of that there was what you said; it made me look around, and ahead. I lived with my mother and my stepfather in those days. She was a serial shoplifter and he was a serial alcoholic with a gambling habit; hopeless, the pair of them. My father was long gone, doing life in Peterhead Prison for stabbing a taxi driver in a row over the fare. When I met you I was on the fringes of grown-up gang stuff, not dealing, but protecting dealers. I’d never used drugs myself, but sooner or later I would have. You were right, sir; I was living in a hellhole, but it was all I knew so I didn’t recognise it as such. When I met you, you opened my eyes. Nobody had ever said anything positive to me before, never.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you use the card?’

‘I had to get further away,’ Clyde replied, ‘as far away from Edinburgh as I could, far away from everything I’d known until then.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I joined the Royal Marines. I walked into an armed forces careers office and said in effect, “Please help me, I have a shit life and I want to be different.” They told me I had to prove myself and I did. I blew the preliminary course away; I was a fit strong boy, and a good swimmer, so the physical stuff came easy to me. On top of that I had a stack of O Grades from school, so the intelligence tests were a breeze. To cut a long story down a little I was accepted. I served as a marine for three years, around the world, and I loved it; I made corporal by the time I was twenty, then I was invited to apply for a commission. Two years later, I joined the SBS, the Special Boat Service. That’s. .’

‘I know what it is,’ I told him. ‘Did you see much action?’

He nodded, and his eyes went a little dead. ‘Iraq; I did a couple of tours there operating out of Basra, targeting terrorists the Iranians were slipping over the border. When we caught them we sent them back.’

‘Intact?’

He looked at me. ‘What do you think?’ Answer enough.

‘After that,’ he continued, ‘it was Afghanistan; black ops.’

‘Not too many boats in Afghanistan,’ I observed.

‘They put our skills to use where they were most needed, sir.’ He glanced at the door; it was closed. ‘We were on constant stand-by. If intel picked up reliable information that a Taliban leader was on the move, we’d be mobilised. The Americans would watch them by satellite; if a window opened, we’d go in very fast by chopper, kill the target and get out again before the opposition even realised they were one down.’

‘Winning their hearts and minds,’ I murmured.

‘That was someone else’s job,’ Clyde said. ‘Ours was to blow their heads off.’

I nodded. ‘I know. So,’ I went on, ‘how did you get from being SBS in Afghanistan to being MI5 in Glasgow?’

‘My SBS engagement ended just over three years ago. I was Captain Houseman by that time, back in the Marines with a more conventional career ahead of me, but I had the sense that I’d plateaued. My special forces experience wasn’t going to help me climb the ladder; there aren’t many opportunities at major and above, and my time out of the mainstream had put me at the back of the queue. I had a conversation back in Plymouth with my unit commander. About a week later I was invited to go to London for a meeting in Whitehall. It turned out to be a job interview, with Amanda Dennis. She told me that the security service was responding to the terrorist threat by expanding its operations across the country and was looking for people with. . a broad range of skills, was how she put it. A few days after that, she offered me a job, and I accepted.’

‘What’s your area? I asked. I know how the security service works; a few years ago I was asked to help it sort out some in-house problems.

‘Counter-terrorism,’ he replied. ‘I spent my first two years in Thames House, then I was moved up to Scotland, in charge of the Glasgow regional office.’

‘How long have you been there?’

‘Best part of a year.’

‘So how come I haven’t heard of you before?’

‘Amanda told me not to get involved with the police,’ he said, bluntly. ‘She feels that the Strathclyde force is too big, and that because of its size the risk of leaks is unacceptable. Its Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Section feeds information to SO15 at Scotland Yard and we work with them. My contact with the locals is at a minimum.’

‘So, Clyde,’ I asked, ‘why are you so keen to talk to me today, other than to give me back that card?’

‘The image you sent to Amanda last night, the body that was buried for you to find; we know who he was.’