Funeral Note

Clyde Houseman

There was a gleam in Mr Skinner’s eyes, and a narrow, wicked smile on his face as he pointed to the Merc that had been reversed into the driveway of the house that faced back down the dead-end street. As I looked at him, I wondered how a man who clearly loved being in the thick of any action that was going had allowed himself to be constrained in a chief constable’s uniform.

‘That’s number seven,’ he said, ‘and I think we might just have come up lucky. Drive on down there,’ he continued, ‘very quietly, and block the exit. Take it easy, though.’

I did as I was told, looking at the house as I approached. It was a villa, with four windows to the front, two up, two down. The curtains were closed on what I took to be a bedroom window on the upper floor, but there was no sign of movement behind any of the others.

There was a second car, some sort of old banger, parked beyond the FJW plate, but the drive was long enough to accommodate a third, so I cruised in there and switched off. ‘Quiet now,’ the chief murmured, as he opened his door and stepped out, closing it behind him, but not fully, to avoid any risk of noise. I checked my weapon, and then I followed him.

‘Back entrance,’ he whispered. There was no doubt about who was in command: I knew my role and I trusted him.

The drive was covered in small white pebbles, so we stepped as lightly as we could. We walked silently along the side of the house, past the two cars. The ground at the rear, which sloped down towards fields beyond, was landscaped, with a small neat lawn surrounded by rose beds and a classic herbaceous border, all of it beautifully tended. Someone in the Varley family had been a gardener. I had a fleeting thought of the contrast with the street where I’d grown up, where any flower that poked its head above the surface was liable to wither and die of embarrassment, that’s if it wasn’t yanked out by a rough and lawless kid like me.

Mr Skinner held out a hand, signalling me to pause. A sound came from somewhere around the corner, a muffled noise of something being dragged. He stepped out beyond the house, into the open, and I followed, my hand inside my blazer, on my gun. There was nothing else to do.

The villa had been extended at the back; it was a proper two-storey construction, not one of those glass box things that the double-glazing guys, and Kenny Bass, call conservatories. Beneath, as Bass had said, there was what appeared to be a cellar, or storeroom. It was windowless, for its door was a little ajar and we could see that it was lit within, on a summer evening. I checked behind me to make sure that no neighbour could overlook and see us, then drew my pistol.

‘I go first,’ I murmured to the chief, my only show of insubordination.

‘You’ve got the fucking gun,’ he replied, his voice as quiet as mine, ‘so fair enough.’ He was smiling again.

We crossed quickly to the entrance and I stepped through it. The space was not what I expected, a single room; instead it was divided into two. The side into which I’d stepped was full of gardening equipment, nothing more, but on my left there was a second doorway, in which a large, heavyset man was framed. Even as I saw him he was in the act of throwing something at me, a box; it was aimed straight at my head, and travelling. Instinctively I threw my arm up to protect myself; it caught me on the wrist and sent my weapon flying. And then he was on me, knocking me aside with brute strength as he headed for the exit. . into the path of Bob Skinner.

The chief hit him, not with his fist, but with the heel of his hand, right in the middle of the forehead, as hard a blow as I’ve ever seen. It halted Freddy Welsh, big and all as he was, in mid-stride, lifted him off his feet and sent him crashing on to his back, spark out.

‘Jesus!’ I exclaimed. My first thought was that he’d killed the guy.

‘I used to do karate,’ he offered, almost apologetically. ‘I’m out of practice. A few years back, he’d never have got that close to me.’

I didn’t bother to ask him what belt he’d attained; that was obvious.

Stretched out on the cement floor, Welsh proved that he was still alive by making a snorting noise. The chief leaned over him, seized the waistband of his trousers and started to drag him into the other chamber, from which he had come. ‘There’s a tap over there,’ he grunted. ‘Fill a bucket, or anything like it you can find. Then close the outer door and come in here.’

I reclaimed my pistol and did as he had said. As it happened there was a bucket just beside the tap.

‘Close that door too,’ he told me, as I joined him and handed him the bucket. I did. ‘This might get a bit noisy,’ he added, as if in explanation. I looked around me as he spoke. The room was bigger than the other; it wasn’t full, or near it, but there were four crates in the middle of the floor, tea chests, the sort that furniture removers use, and a box with the lid removed.

Welsh was beginning to regain consciousness; Mr Skinner helped him by pouring half of the bucket’s contents over his face, slowly.

‘Moving the stock, are we, Freddy?’ he asked, as the man came to, spluttering and choking.

As he did that I was looking through the chests; they were full of boxes, and most of them bore a manufacturer’s name; I recognised them all, Colt, Smith and Wesson, household names, many of them, albeit in the sort of household that watches combat movies, and some more obscure. ‘Hey,’ I exclaimed, ‘he’s got a Beowulf in here.’

‘Indeed?’ he replied. ‘What’s a Beowulf?’

‘A specialist, high-quality rifle; American.’

‘Is that what you supplied to Smit and Botha?’ the chief asked.

‘Fuck off,’ Welsh snarled, and started to rise, but a foot in the centre of his chest slammed him back down.

‘No, you stay there. You can answer my questions just as easily from the floor. And those are: number one, did Kenny Bass know what was in the box he brought here hidden among the cache of bootleg fags? My guess is no. Our Kenny might be up for a driving job, but he does not have the bottle for being part of the weapons supply chain in an assassination. Number two, what type of weapon did you supply Cohen? Number three, did he describe his operation to you? Number four, did Varley know anything about the operation you were running from underneath his house, or did he know everything about it? Number five, why the hell did you have to kill him, and your cousin? Number six, who was careless enough to leave Jock’s wallet in his pocket, and dumb enough not to realise that even if you can wedge off the engine number, every vehicle can be traced through a unique chassis identifier that’s hidden way out of sight?’ He paused, smiling down at the man on the ground.

‘I’m saying nothing,’ Welsh hissed. ‘I want a lawyer.’

Mr Skinner shook his head. ‘It isn’t that sort of situation, Freddy. It’s the kind that calls for advanced interrogation techniques, of which officially I do not approve, unless we need information quickly about a potential terrorist assassination, in a venue where my wife and the wife of a friend will be present. Now that I’ve explained that, let’s deal with my questions.’

Welsh stared up at him. He was afraid by then, but there was still resistance in him.

The chief held up the bucket. ‘Ever heard of waterboarding?’ he asked.

‘You’re kidding,’ our captive grunted.

‘Yeah, you’re right. We don’t have time for that.’ He put it down and squatted beside him, leaning close. ‘Have you ever seen that Liam Neeson film,’ he murmured, ‘where he plays a CIA man whose daughter’s been kidnapped? There’s a bit in it where old Liam. . if anyone ever makes a movie of my life,’ he said conversationally, ‘I want that man to play me. . where he’s on the phone to the bad guy and he says something along the lines of, “I have a particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a long career.” My young colleague here hasn’t had all that long a career, but he has those skills. If you don’t talk to me, I’m going to leave the room and let him practise them.’

‘I know who you are,’ Welsh hissed. ‘You’re Skinner, the cop. You wouldn’t fucking dare.’

The chief stood up again. ‘Oh no?’ He turned to me. ‘The floor is yours.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, sir; but you really must leave the room. I’ll call you when our friend has something to say.’

‘Okay.’ He did, and closed the door.

As he left, Welsh tried to rise, but I kicked his legs out from under him. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

‘That’s irrelevant. All you need to know is that I’m the man with the gun. Are you going to talk to us?’

‘No fucking chance.’

The truth is, I don’t have any advanced interrogation skills. I was planning on making them up as I went along, as once or twice we had to in Iraq. Holding my gun on the man on the floor, I took the Beowulf from the chest with my free hand. ‘Lovely weapon,’ I said, ‘fifty calibre.’ I checked the magazine; it held seven rounds and it was loaded; I slipped my pistol into my pocket then hefted the rifle. ‘If I shot you in the kneecap with this,’ I asked, ‘do you think you’d ever walk properly again? Personally I’d doubt that.’

‘You can’t do that,’ he sneered. ‘This is Scotland.’

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I countered. ‘This is the cellar of a police officer you’ve just murdered in the course of an act of terrorism. No rules apply here, and I’m an agent of the state. I can make you disappear. It will be the easiest thing in the world for a third cremated body to be recovered from your van.’

In such situations, there is only one imperative; you must make them believe you. I was getting there with Freddy Welsh, but I could still see scepticism in his eyes. So I shot him.

The bullet creased the back of his right hand, ricocheted off the floor and buried itself in the plastered wall. He screamed, from pain and fright, and crawled backwards, away from me, as I raised the rifle again and aimed at his knee.

‘Enough!’ he yelled. ‘I’ll talk to him.’ He paused. ‘If I do, what’s in it for me?’

‘I won’t kill you. That’s all that’s in it.’ I kicked one of the tea chests. ‘As for your arsenal here, what happens about that depends on the man outside. So my advice to you is, hold nothing back.’ I stepped across and opened the door.

Mr Skinner came back into the room. ‘I can leave again,’ he promised, ‘just as easily.’ Welsh nodded; he believed. ‘So tell me about it.’

‘Bass had no idea,’ the arms dealer began; he had pulled himself up to a sitting position, leaning against the wall. ‘As far as he was concerned, he was only going for the cigarettes.’

‘Why did you set it up that way?’

‘I didn’t. My Spanish suppliers did. It was part of the deal. These people, they’ll fence anything. They can source me specific weapons, usually stolen from the police or military, maybe even bought from them, for all I know. But it’s knock for knock, and sometimes they want me to take other stuff off their hands. Handy in a way; you were right about Kenny; he’d never have gone just for the guns.’

‘Guns plural?’

‘Yes.’

‘This place,’ Mr Skinner said. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘I built it for Jock, for free. The deal was that I got the use of this room.’

‘Did he know what it was for?’

Welsh stared at him. ‘Of course he bloody knew. Having built the fucking room, I had to rent it off him as well. The money went into a offshore bank account in Ella’s name.’

‘Did she know about it?’

He shrugged. ‘She must have known something went on here. How much Jock told her, I’ve no idea.’

‘That doesn’t matter now they’re both cinders,’ the chief constable said, roughly. ‘Go on, tell us about the operation.’

‘I was approached about five weeks ago,’ Welsh replied, ‘by an Israeli bloke called Beram Cohen. I knew him. I’d supplied him before with guaranteed clean handguns. Somebody was paying him to take out radicalised Muslims.’

I laughed. Welsh glared at me. ‘What’s so fucking funny?’ he snapped.

‘You are,’ I told him. ‘You supplied weapons to a guy like him, in his world, and yet until five minutes ago, you didn’t realise that makes you part of it yourself, as disposable as he was. If I was ordered to kill you, you’d go into a crematorium oven at night and nobody would be any the wiser.’

‘That’s what they should have done with Beram,’ he muttered.

‘Yes, what about that?’ the chief asked. ‘Tell me.’

‘I’d arranged for Beram to meet me in Edinburgh last Wednesday,’ he replied, ‘at my yard, not here. He was going to pay me for the weapons.’

‘What did they buy from you?’

‘One of the carbines that Bass brought from Spain,’ he explained. ‘The other two were handguns from my stock. Anyway, they turned up, the three of them. I wasn’t expecting Smit and Botha, but Beram said he’d brought them to drive because he had this bloody awful headache. He had the money in a backpack. He handed it over, and a minute later, he died. Just like that. He stiffened, then he fell over; he kicked a bit, then he was dead. His mates tried to resuscitate him, but it was no use.’

He frowned, as if he was seeing it all over again. ‘The three of us, we were all shocked, but those South Africans, they were,’ he struggled for words, ‘they were just beside themselves. Once we were all back in control, I offered them the money back, but they said no, that they had a commission and that they would go ahead. Beram wasn’t involved in the actual hit; he did the planning and took care of the escape.

‘I told them they’d need to get rid of the body. I suggested putting it in my truck, driving it out past North Berwick and tipping it into the sea. They went crazy at that; I thought they were going to kill me. They said that he was a fallen comrade and all that guff, and that he had to be treated with respect, not just stuck in a hole and forgotten about.

‘I said fair enough but I had nowhere to keep him. We could hardly take him to hospital, and they wouldn’t leave him somewhere and call the ambulance service. It was Botha who came up with the idea of doing what they did with him, burying him and then calling your lot. As it happened, I’d bought some bed linen for the house that day. I gave them a sheet to wrap him in; they stripped him and left me his clothes to burn, so they couldn’t be used to trace him. They said they didn’t want him identified for a couple of days. Smit asked me where they should take him. Given that he was dead, Mortonhall sounded like as good a place as any to me, so I suggested that.’

‘So it had nothing to do with setting a false trail for the police,’ Mr Skinner asked, ‘given that the operation’s in Glasgow?’

‘Is it?’ Welsh asked. ‘That’s news to me. I never want to know any detail about things like that. Anyway, no, it had nothing to do with that.’

‘So they went away,’ he continued, ‘and last night they came back here, to collect the gun. Is that what happened?’

He nodded. ‘Aye. And when I brought them round here, at one in the morning, who was standing upstairs, looking out the window but bloody Jock.’ He sighed.

‘You see, the arrangement was that every time I brought a client here to collect an order, Jock would always take Ella off somewhere for the night. He didn’t last night, though. There he was, as large as life, but not for much longer. He saw both the South Africans, and they saw him. They wanted to know who he was, and I had to tell them. I’d hoped they’d be okay about it, but when I gave them the weapon, the imported one, Botha took it. . he’s an animal, by the way. . and said he was going to test-fire it.’

Welsh looked away. ‘I knew what he was going to do,’ he muttered, ‘but all I could think about was that he was going to kill me as well. I heard three shots from upstairs, inside the house, then just after, three more. I’d brought my van with me, not the car. I guess you know by now what they made me help them do. When it was finished, they dropped me back at my yard. I stayed there all night, thinking, and most of today. Eventually it dawned on me that you’d be bound to identify Jock eventually, and that I had to clear this place out or I’d be in it up to my nuts. Enter you two,’ he took a deep breath, ‘and that’s the whole story.’

‘Not quite,’ the chief said. ‘What were the weapons?’

‘A Heckler and Koch MP3 carbine and two Glock pistols. There were six H and Ks in the box that Kenny Bass brought back from Valencia.’ He nodded towards the open box. ‘The other five are still there.’

Mr Skinner’s eyes widened. ‘Cohen ordered them specifically, by name?’

Welsh nodded.

‘Is that significant?’ I asked.

‘Too damn right,’ he retorted. ‘They’re police weapons.’ He glared at Welsh. ‘Lucky for you that I sent Maggie through there.’

‘What are you talking about?’ the man on the floor muttered.

‘I’ve sent my deputy to the concert hall with a warrant for the arrest of the target, on a made-up charge that only needs to hold for an hour or so. He’ll be halfway to Edinburgh by now.’

‘He?’ Welsh repeated. ‘When Smit picked up the carbine, he said, “This baby will take her out, no question.” I don’t know who you’ve picked up, but believe me. . the target’s a woman.’