Private Investigations

Ten

‘Is this a precedent we want to be setting?’ Sir Andrew Martin asked, the computer screen showing his concerned frown.

‘Who says it’s a precedent at all?’ Mario McGuire replied, looking directly into the camera. He was alone in the room that he had commandeered in the Hawick CID office suite.

‘I see it as a one-off situation,’ the DCC continued. ‘A rich man’s five-million-pound toy went missing, and the Strathclyde force began an investigation that took months to get precisely nowhere. Our only role since replacing them has been to send a chief super in uniform to tell the complainant that he’s not getting his boat back. He’s not happy. Would you be?’

The chief constable raised a questioning eyebrow. ‘Were you party to that decision?’

‘No, I bloody wasn’t, and somebody is going to find out how much I dislike being embarrassed by it. That aside, the situation is that Eden Higgins feels that he’s been poorly served by the police. He could have come to you or to me and asked that the inquiry be re-opened, but he didn’t. Instead he’s asked our former colleague to look into it.’

‘I haven’t spoken to Bob in a while,’ Martin remarked, ‘but last I heard he didn’t have an investigator’s licence.’

‘Then you’re out of touch. He does now.’

‘Even so, handing over a complete police report to a civilian . . . if we do it for him, where does it stop?’

‘It stops the minute the file lands on his desk, as far as I’m concerned.’ McGuire paused. ‘What’s the alternative?’ he challenged. ‘Clearly, Mr Higgins is unhappy. If we withhold access to the file and he or his lawyer comes to you or me, we won’t be able to ignore him. The very least we’d have to do would be to order a detailed review of the so-called investigation and appoint someone, a detective superintendent or higher, to do it. Would that officer, whoever he or she might be, do a better job than Bob Skinner? No, not in a light year.’

‘You make it sound like he’s doing us a favour,’ the chief grumbled. ‘He’ll be getting big bucks for this, right?’

‘Right. So what? We’re not paying him.’

‘No.’ Martin frowned, and ran his fingers through his thick blond hair. ‘Still . . .’ he murmured.

‘What’s your problem?’ his deputy asked.

‘Ach, it’s Bob himself,’ he admitted, finally. ‘I come into this bloody office every day and every day I have a sense of him being here, like some spectral bloody presence. I want to cut myself free from him, Mario, not give him a toehold.’

‘You tried hard enough to keep him,’ McGuire pointed out. ‘The First Minister offered him more than a toehold, more like a complete bloody ladder, and he wouldn’t have done that without your agreement. Why do that and freeze him out now? I don’t get it.’

Martin leaned back in his chair and smiled. ‘I went along with that idea for a reason. Look, I won’t mince words; in every job I’ve ever had, even when I was deputy chief up in Dundee, I’ve felt that I was in Bob Skinner’s shadow.’

‘Come on, Andy,’ the DCC protested, ‘the man made us both. You and I started working for him on the same day, in Serious Crimes, and neither of us has looked back since. We weren’t in his shadow, ever; he lit the way for us to progress in the job.’

‘That may be true, I’ll grant you. But it’s history, and now we’re our own men. When I agreed to him being offered a role in the new service, I did it because I wanted it to stay that way. I wanted to tie him down, to limit him.

‘Mario, I have this dream; no kidding I do, and some nights it even wakens me up.

‘Next month, the chair of the Scottish Police Authority, the body whose statutory role is to hold us to account, comes to the end of his term of office. There are only two people being talked about as his potential successor. One is Sir James Proud, and the other’s Bob Skinner.

‘You know how bloody hands-on Bob was as a chief constable. Do you think anything’ll change if he becomes chair of the SPA? I was keen to keep him on the inside to take him out of the running, and that’s the truth of it. That’s why I went along with the First Minister’s offer. But Bob turned it down, and now I’m left with my bad bloody dream.’

He stopped, looking at the camera, waiting for a response. When it came it was a soft, rumbling chuckle.

‘Bob Skinner,’ McGuire exclaimed, ‘as chair of a committee? Never. The big man doesn’t oversee things, he runs them.’

‘Exactly! He’d run the SPA too, and then he’d be trying to run us.’

‘That’s bollocks . . . sir. It won’t happen, not least because . . . That post is salaried, yes?’

‘Of course.’

‘What’s the screw?’

‘Sixty thousand a year, part-time.’

‘For what? Maybe a hundred and twenty days a year, that’s five hundred quid a day. Eden Higgins and his insurers are paying him four times that, and his job with the owners of the Saltire brings in even more. The SPA can’t fucking afford him.’

‘My good God,’ Martin gasped, ‘I never knew that.’

‘Well, you do now. We don’t want to oppose him in this thing, man.’ McGuire’s chuckle became a booming laugh. ‘We should encourage him, so that when we retire he remembers and puts some of that our way.

‘But leaving that aside,’ he went on, ‘if we give him the report, he becomes an additional resource. He’ll either decide that ex-DI McGarry did a competent job, or he’ll kick-start the thing and run it properly. Who knows, he might even find the bloody boat.’

Martin capitulated. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let him have it, and tell McGarry to cooperate with him and answer any questions he comes up with. Bloody Skinner,’ he sighed, ‘he’s a magnet for crime.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ the DCC said. ‘This very morning . . .’