Pray for the Dying

Three

‘Can I get you coffee?’ the Lord Provost of Glasgow asked.

Bob Skinner smiled. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ he replied, ‘but given that it’s nine o’clock on a Saturday evening, if we accepted you’d either have to make it yourself or nip out to Starbucks. No, the use of your office for this short meeting is generosity enough. Now, if you’ll. .’

Dominic Hanlon took the hint. ‘Come on, Willie,’ he murmured. ‘This is operational; it’s not for us.’

‘Oh. Oh, aye.’ The two councillors withdrew.

The Lord Provost was still wearing his heavy gold chain of office. Skinner wondered if he slept in it.

‘Right,’ he said, as the door closed. ‘We’ll keep this brief, but I wanted a round-up before we all left.’ He looked to his right, at Lottie Mann, and to his left, at Lowell Payne, who had joined them as the press briefing had closed.

The conference had been a frenzied affair. It had been chaired by the Strathclyde force’s PR manager, but most of the questions had been directed at Skinner, once his presence had been explained.

‘Can you confirm the identity of the victims, sir?’ the BBC national news correspondent had asked. She was new in the country, and new to him, sent up from London to make her name, he suspected.

‘Sorry, no,’ he had replied, ‘for the usual next-of-kin reasons, not operational. However,’ he had added, halting the renewed clamour, ‘I can tell you that the First Minister is unharmed, as is the Scottish Labour leader, Aileen de Marco, who was also present.’

‘Joey Morocco says the victim inside the hall was female, and that she was sitting next to the First Minister.’

‘Joey Morocco was there. I wasn’t. I’m not going to argue with him.’

‘Why isn’t the First Minister here?’

‘Because he was advised not to be.’

‘By you, sir?’

‘By his own protection staff.’

‘Does that mean there’s a continuing threat?’

‘It means they’re being suitably cautious.’

‘There are two men lying in Killermont Street, apparently dead. It’s been suggested that they were the killers. Can you comment?’

‘Yes they were, and they are both as dead as they appear to be.’ Skinner had winced inwardly at the brutality of that reply, but nobody had picked up on it. ‘As is the police officer they murdered as they left the hall,’ he had continued. ‘His colleague is in surgery as we speak.’

‘Are you looking for anybody else?’

‘You’re asking the wrong person. I’m here by accident, remember. That’s a question for Detective Inspector Mann of Strathclyde. She’s the officer in charge of the investigation.’

Lottie Mann had handled herself well. She had given nothing away, but she had made it clear that the multiple killings at the concert hall would be investigated from origins to aftermath, like any other homicide.

The one awkward question had been put by a Sun reporter, with whom Mann had history, after arresting him for infiltrating a crime scene.

‘Aren’t you rather junior to be running an investigation as important as this one?’

She had nailed him with a cold stare. ‘That’s for others to decide. I was senior officer on duty tonight and took command at the scene, as I would have in any circumstances.’

‘By the way, you did fine in there, Lottie,’ Skinner told her, in the Lord Provost’s small room. ‘You did fine at the scene as well; took command, took no shit from anybody, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.’

‘To tell you the truth, sir,’ she confessed, as subdued as he had seen her in their brief acquaintance, ‘I was in a bit of a panic when I heard that ACC Allan had been taken away. I hope he’s all right.’

‘He is,’ Payne reassured her, ‘reasonably so. I called the Royal on my way down here. They gave him an ECG in the ambulance, and there’s no sign of a heart attack. They’re going to keep him in, though; apparently his blood pressure’s through the roof and he’s in shock.’

‘How about the wounded man?’ the chief asked. ‘What’s his name, by the way?’

‘PC Auger. Still in surgery, but the word is that he’ll survive. He was shot in the chest, but the bullet missed his heart and major arteries. It did nick a lung, though, and lodge in his spine.’

‘And his colleague?’

‘Sergeant Sproule. His body’s been taken to the mortuary.’

‘Who’s seeing next of kin?’

‘Chief Superintendent Mayfield,’ Payne told him. ‘She’s divisional commander.’

‘Okay. And Toni’s next of kin? Was she married? I don’t know,’ Skinner confessed. ‘She and I never got round to discussing our private lives.’

‘I don’t know either, sir. Sorry.’

‘No reason why you should, but raise the head of Human Resources, wherever he is, and find out. Whoever her nearest and dearest is needs to be told, and fast.’

‘Yes, they do,’ Lottie Mann said, ‘because the whole bloody world will soon know she was there if it doesn’t already. Chief Constable Field was a big Twitter fan. She posted every professional thing she did on it. No way she won’t have tweeted that she was chumming the First Minister to a charity gig.’ She scowled. ‘I’d ban that fucking thing if I could.’

Skinner whistled. ‘Thank God you didn’t say that to the press.’ He smiled. ‘Max Allan would never let either of us forget it. Lowell,’ he continued, ‘do you know where the other ACCs are?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I thought you’d need to know that. Bridie Gorman’s on holiday, in Argyll, I’m told, but ACC Thomas turned up at the concert hall just after you’d left. He was for taking command, but I told him that he’d better speak to Councillor Hanlon down at the City Chambers. He did, and when he’d done that, he went off in what I can best describe as the huff.’

‘Oh shit,’ the chief constable sighed. ‘That I did not need. I know Michael Thomas through the chiefs’ association. He was very much in the Toni Field camp on unification of the forces. In fact, at our last meeting, when things got a bit heated, I told him to shut the fuck up unless he had something original to say.’ He smiled. ‘Don’t worry, though, Lowell. I’ll make sure he doesn’t hold it against you when I’m gone in three months.’ He paused. ‘Till then, don’t worry about him. You might still be only a DCI in rank, but working directly for me as acting chief, you’ll be taking orders from nobody else. Now, have you located the CCTV footage?’

‘Yes, sir. There was only one camera, and I’m getting the footage. CCTV monitoring in the city is run by a joint body that’s responsible for community safety. Councillor Hanlon and ACC Gorman are on the board, and in a situation like this one, we get what we want. In fact, they were expecting a call from us. Their manager said the monitor person crapped himself when he saw what happened.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘What do you want me to do with it?’

‘I want you to keep it close to you. I want to see it on Monday, and obviously Lottie has to have access as senior investigating officer, but, Inspector, you and you alone are to view the footage.’

She frowned. ‘What am I going to see there?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know for sure, but if I’m right, I’ll be in shot. . Christ,’ he chuckled, ‘what have I just said?. . and so will someone else, with me. If that’s so, he is absolutely off limits.’ He paused. ‘Lottie, I hope you didn’t have a big date tonight. .’

‘Only with my husband and son,’ she said. ‘We were going for a Chinese.’

‘Well, I’m sorry about that, but I need you to go back up to the concert hall, resume command, and make sure that everything in this operation is done exactly by the book. By now they’ll have found shell casings, probably in one of the lighting booths overlooking the stage, and those two discarded police uniforms. Let’s just pray they don’t have bullet holes in them.’ He gave her a card. ‘That’s my mobile number. Keep me in touch.’

She smiled. Until then Skinner had not been certain that she knew how. ‘Yes, boss. But. . I’m only a lowly DI. There’s a whole raft of ambitious guys above me on the CID food chain, including my two line managers. What do I do when one of them turns up and says he’s taking over?’

‘One, you ask him why it’s taken him so long to get there. Two, you tell him he’d better have a bloody good answer to that question for the acting chief constable, first thing on Monday morning. Thing is, Lottie, Max Allan was the ACC responsible for criminal investigation. He won’t be around for a while, and in his absence CID will go straight to me. To be frank, even if he was, that’s how it would be. It’s the way I work. Questions?’

Payne and Mann shook their heads.

‘Good. You know where to get me if you have to. Get on with what you have to do. I’m off to stick my head in the lioness’s mouth.’