Private Investigations

Five

Yes, there is indeed history between Eden Higgins and me. It stretches back twenty years or so, to the days when I was the newly promoted Detective Superintendent Skinner, heading up Edinburgh’s Serious Crimes Unit, to the years when I was a single parent, widowed and doing my best to raise my adolescent daughter Alexis on my own.

That said, I wasn’t always alone: between Myra’s death and my meeting Sarah, my second wife, there were a few ladies in my life, and of those the most serious was Alison Higgins. She was a cop like me, a detective sergeant, then detective inspector, and she matched me in most ways, not least in ambition.

We were a natural couple; we liked each other, we were good together, vertically and horizontally, and our tastes were similar. Alex approved of her too; that was a prerequisite of any relationship, and Alison passed that test from the start. Although we never formally lived together, she was the only woman who had clothes hanging in my wardrobe, and whose toothbrush stood alongside mine in the mug, until Sarah came into my life.

She didn’t talk about her family much, not at the beginning. Looking back, I recognise that may have been because in those days, I never talked about mine. I was still hurting too much over Myra, and my childhood was an absolute no-go area. Thus, it was a complete surprise when she invited Alex and me to go sailing with her one weekend, on her brother’s yacht.

Anyone who watched commercial television in those days had to be aware of Dene Furnishing; it was one of the nation’s biggest retailers, with a huge turnover and an advertising budget to match. When Myra and I set up house as a very young couple, most of our furniture came from its Bathgate store; indeed, I still have some of it.

I knew all about Dene, but I had no idea that it was owned and had been built, from the ground up, by Eden Higgins, Alison’s older brother. She’d mentioned him to me, but only vaguely. On the other hand, he knew all about me. Once we met, on board his schooner, it didn’t take me long to realise that he’d had me checked out.

I didn’t hold that against him. He was a very wealthy man, and if he was on his guard against fortune hunters, it was understandable. Indeed, I felt the same way: Alex was my fortune and I knew that in a few years’ time I’d be vetting her potential suitors. (Not very effectively, as it transpired.)

That sailing weekend was a landmark event in my life, but it was never repeated. The offer of another trip was made, more than once, but conflicting diaries, or weather, contrived to ensure that I never returned to the Palacio de Ginebra, Eden’s casually named Gin Palace.

The vessel didn’t live up, or maybe down, to its name; it was a sleek, speedy, no-frills racing yacht, and when we berthed in the Inverkip marina, after our cruise to Campbeltown, I had a couple of blisters to prove that I wasn’t as hard handed as I’d believed.

Eden and I met up again at a few social events over the next couple of years, until Alison decided that being with me was a hindrance to her career. Jimmy Proud, our chief constable, knew of our relationship; he had always kept us apart professionally, and Alison came to believe that had ruled her out of the running for a couple of jobs she’d fancied. She may have been right . . . honestly, I do not know, and there’s no point in asking Jimmy now . . . but in any event, the truth was that our thing had run out of steam by then.

The split was easy and amicable, not least because we’d never moved in together. Afterwards, when she did come into my police orbit, we kept it formal . . . at her insistence, not mine, for I was never precious about rank. At work I was ‘Sir’ to her, and she was ‘Inspector’ to me, then ‘Chief Inspector’ and finally ‘Superintendent’.

She might have become ‘Ma’am’, if she’d lived, if she hadn’t been killed by a car bomb that was meant for someone else.

The last time I’d seen Eden, before our reunion on the Mound, had been at Alison’s funeral. We shook hands at the door of the church after the service. All I could say was, ‘So sorry, mate.’ He nodded briefly, but that was all; his silence may have been because Sarah was with me, or quite simply because he was so choked up that he couldn’t speak.

We didn’t stay in touch after that, but that didn’t prevent me from shopping in Dene Furnishings, or from noticing when Eden sold the business for many millions, to focus on the venture capital involvement that had been a sideline for a few years.

His career was very easy to follow from then on; if he ever put a foot wrong in business, it never made the press, but every success, and there were plenty of them, made headlines.

My progression was high profile too, but boy, how I wish my judgement had been as good as his.

‘How can you know that?’ he asked me, after I’d had my revelation.

‘I saw it, a few months ago: I was in L’Escala, in Spain, where I have a house.’

He nodded. ‘I remember. You took my sister there.’

Eden was right; his memory was better than mine, for I’d filed that fact at the back of the mental drawer. I don’t believe that I ever loved Alison, or that she loved me, but as I’ve said, I liked her, more than any woman I’ve ever been with, apart from Sarah, and her death hurt me more deeply than I let anyone see at the time.

‘Yeah,’ I murmured, as another recollection came to me. ‘She didn’t like it in the summer. She said it was too hot for her. But she, Alex and I spent a Christmas there; she enjoyed that.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘She told me so. Then less than a year later, she told me she’d decided it was you or her career, and her career won.’

‘What she told me,’ I replied, ‘was that she’d make a better chief constable than a wife, and that since she didn’t believe she could be both, we’d better pack it in.’

‘Did you try to talk her round?’ he asked.

‘No, I didn’t,’ I admitted, ‘because I felt exactly the same way about myself. I was a lousy husband while I was a cop, Eden. A couple of ladies would tell you that. Now I’m out of it, I find that I’m enjoying domesticity more than I ever have before.’

He paused. ‘In that case, am I wrong to be bringing this situation to you?’

‘Not at all,’ I insisted. ‘You’re a friend. Also, the chances are that anything I can do will be advisory, no more. Now, back to the matter in hand. Last autumn, in L’Escala, I was in the marina, and I saw the Palacio de Ginebra in a mooring there. I didn’t believe it at first, thought my mind was going, but I went back and checked and, for sure, it was your boat. So, it looks like we have a starting point.’

He thwarted my triumph with a few words. ‘No, Bob, I’m afraid we don’t. I sold the schooner years ago, to a pop star looking for a hobby. It had too much of Alison about it. The truth is that she was always a more enthusiastic sailor than I was. Rachel, my wife, has her own sports; she skis and she was an international bi-athlete in her youth, but unfortunately she gets seasick in the bath. As for our boy, Rory decided that go-karting was his sport of choice.

‘So I got rid of the working boat, and bought something more suited to a gentleman of means.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a seventy-five-foot motor yacht, and I named her the Princess Alison. I use it more for business entertainment than for my own pleasure.’ His smile vanished. ‘Or I did, until it was taken.’

He was interrupted, by a rap on the door. It opened, and Eden’s secretary, a tall late-thirties brunette, who had introduced herself as Luisa McCracken when I arrived, advised us that lunch was ready.

My host led me through to his dining room. The table was large enough to hold a dozen, but there were only four places set. One of them was occupied by a young man; I recognised him from times past. He’d been a child, but even then he’d had his father’s high forehead, and his aunt’s sky-blue eyes.

His mother sat opposite him. I’d seen Rachel Higgins before, at a couple of those social events, but Alison had never introduced us. She’d never been close to her sister-in-law, and she’d made a point of keeping us apart.

Rory stood as we entered, extending a hand. ‘Mr Skinner,’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s good to see you again.’

Higgins Junior was as tall as me, and had a firm handshake. ‘And you,’ I replied. ‘You work with your dad now?’ I asked.

‘He’s my eyes and ears,’ Eden said. ‘I have a majority shareholding in more than twenty companies in several business sectors: retail, information technology, housing and light engineering, principally. I’m on the board of every one of them, and chairman of eight, but I don’t get involved on a hands-on basis if I can avoid it. Rory’s a chartered accountant by profession; he’s employed by the holding company as a sort of travelling auditor. Each subsidiary’s management accounts come to him. If he sees something that needs attention, he points it out to the CEO of the company in question. If he felt that it really,’ he underlined the word, ‘needed attention he would bring it to me. But that’s never happened.’

He smiled. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘he’s learning the hard way. I can’t have him seen as the boss’s son throwing his weight around. He isn’t on any of the boards, subsidiary or parent company, he has no executive authority, and he’s paid the going rate for the job, reflecting his responsibility and experience.’

‘Nevertheless, that’s a pretty responsible job,’ I commented. ‘I hope it pays for your karting, Rory.’

He laughed. ‘It wouldn’t, but that’s a thing of the past. When I started I saw myself as a Formula One driver, but that dream died young, when I kept on growing past five feet nine, and my weight went past seventy-five kilos. Now I play tennis and golf.’

‘Where did you complete your CA qualification?’ I asked.

He replied with a set of initials that I recognised as one of the big three firms. ‘I got my practising certificate when I was twenty-three,’ he said, ‘and worked there for three years, until I joined Dad two years ago. Higgins Holdings isn’t the most glamorous name for a company, but it’s a challenging job.’

His answer told me that I’d been right in my calculation of his age. He’d been ten when we’d all gone sailing. Alex was there too; she was into her teens, and so she’d barely noticed him. She would now, I thought. He’d turned into a good-looking guy.

‘Rachel,’ Eden exclaimed, breaking into my thoughts, ‘finally, this is the man you always said you wanted to meet. I don’t know why it never happened, back in the old days.’

She smiled up at me. ‘I do,’ she murmured. ‘Your sister was afraid I might be competition.’

Pretty brazen, I thought, to say that to her husband. I grinned back at her, hoping that she couldn’t read the truth in my eyes.

And that was, I wouldn’t have fancied her in a hundred years, not because she was physically unattractive . . . which she wasn’t . . . but because she had an unfortunate habit of looking at people as if she was appraising them, and making an instant assessment of their worth. I really hate that, and so did Alison. That was the real reason for her keeping a distance between Rachel and me.

However I was her husband’s guest that lunchtime, so I shook her hand, doing my best to avoid a large emerald and diamond ring, gave her the full Skinner smile, and replied, ‘The only competition Alison ever saw was the job, and ultimately she was right.’

Eden had hired caterers. A little extravagant, I thought, when we could have walked a couple of hundred yards to Ondine, or the Witchery, but if that’s what really rich folk do, then who was I to object?

We talked our way through lunch, mostly about our careers and how they had developed. ‘I never thought you’d chuck it,’ Eden said, brow wrinkled with the effort of cracking a lobster claw.

‘Three years ago, I’d have agreed with that,’ I conceded, ‘before all this unification crap came above the horizon. Now I look at my life, and every day I thank the First Minister for not giving in to my insistence that he was a crazy man in pushing ahead with the venture that the politicians, probably on the advice of their PR people, have decided to rename ScotServe.’

‘You thank him?’ Rachel repeated. ‘So you agree with the single force now?’

‘Hell no!’ I retorted. ‘It gave me the impetus to get out, that’s what I’m saying.’

‘There must be some good about it, surely,’ she protested.

‘Okay,’ I conceded, ‘there is some good, but not a hell of a lot. The new one-zero-one phone number for non-urgent reports and inquiries, that’s okay, but it’s general.

‘As for the rest,’ I continued, ‘the detachment of much of the force from its senior management, the problem of the distant communities being policed by a man who’s never set foot in those places, that’s a disaster waiting to happen, Rachel. Andy Martin knows little or nothing about places like Dingwall. I know little or nothing about Dingwall. Only the locals know all the twists and nuances of their community. If you have a serious crime there, the people who fly in to deal with it, they’ll be looked on as an invading army. The same is true of any of the islands and much of the northern mainland.’

‘How about morale?’ Eden asked. ‘I have to say the woman who came to tell me that they’ve given up on my boat . . .’

He’d started me thinking about team spirit, and Sammy Pye’s last words to me as I’d left Fort Kinnaird. When he mentioned ‘woman’ I held up a hand. ‘Name?’

‘Chief Superintendent Chambers,’ Rory volunteered. ‘A big bluff woman.’

I smiled, for I couldn’t quarrel with that description.

‘How can I put this?’ Eden continued. ‘She didn’t seem one hundred per cent committed to the message she was delivering. That’s all she was of course, a delivery person. The investigation into the theft started off as a Strathclyde matter, when you were chief. Now ScotServe’s kicked it into touch. It was quite clear that Ms Chambers wasn’t a party to the decision, yet she was the one who had to communicate it. Would that have happened under the old system, Bob?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘Don’t blame Mary, for she’s a good cop. If I was still in post and I’d known about it, I’d have told you myself. But it would have been out of friendship, that’s all.’

His eyebrows rose. ‘And you’d have given me the same message, that the Princess Alison was gone for good?’

I smiled. ‘I might have put it more subtly than that, but essentially it would have been the same, if that’s how the investigation’s turned out. If the police and other services haven’t found a vessel that size within a month of it going missing, they aren’t going to. What’s its range?’ I asked.

‘On a full tank? Maybe around fifteen hundred miles at cruise speed,’ Rory volunteered.

‘How much fuel was on board when it was taken?’ I continued.

‘Dunno.’ He turned to Eden. ‘Dad?’

‘Hodgson reckoned about a quarter tank, maybe a bit more,’ his father replied.

‘Enough to get it to the south of England, for example,’ I suggested.

Eden nodded. ‘Or the Irish Republic: that’s what the police assumed at first. They contacted their opposite numbers over there, but without success. There was no trace of it having docked anywhere to take on fuel.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘there was no trace of the Princess Alison, but what’s the first thing you’d do if you stole a large and very conspicuous luxury yacht?’

‘I’d change the name,’ Rory retorted. ‘And I’d disguise as much of the superstructure as I could.’

‘Minimum,’ I agreed. ‘Eden, anyone who can make a seventy-five-foot power yacht disappear has either taken her a short distance and sunk her out of malice, or they had a very sophisticated plan, possibly with inside help. Does the vessel have a permanent crew?’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘not exactly. It takes only two to run it, captain and engineer.’

‘Captain?’ I interjected. ‘What does that make you?’

Eden laughed. ‘It makes me the bloody admiral, I suppose. The captain’s name is Walter Hurrell, he’s ex-navy, and when he’s not driving my boat he’s driving my car, and doing other things for me. He’s on the holding company payroll as my personal assistant. The engineer is another ex-naval bloke, Jock Hodgson; he’s retired. When we need him we hire him by the day. If you’re suggesting they might have been involved, either one of them, I’d disagree with you. I’d vouch for both of them.’

I nodded. ‘Okay, I’m going to assume that both of them were checked out by the investigating officers and came up clean.’

‘Better than that,’ he said, ‘they were checked out by me, before I hired either of them. They’re sound, both of them.’

‘Did the police interview them?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ Eden admitted. ‘I’m not privy to the extent of their inquiries, only the few details that they’ve volunteered.’

It seemed that I was being asked for my opinion of little or nothing, but I pressed on. ‘Where was the vessel moored? Inverkip?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘We have a small estate just north of Rhu. It has a purpose-built deep-water mooring with a jetty and a boathouse. The Princess Alison was actually in secure premises when she was stolen.’

‘It must be a hell of a size of a boathouse,’ I observed, ‘to hold a seventy-five-foot yacht.’

‘It is,’ Rory confirmed. ‘It’s like a bloody aircraft hangar. It has an alarm, linked to a central monitoring station, but it goes through a telephone landline. They cut that as they broke in.’

So what? I thought. ‘Didn’t that very act trigger the alarm?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘When the phone line goes down, the system switches to a back-up mobile phone. It takes a few seconds; by that time they’d cut the padlock, got in, and had disabled the sensor above the door.’

‘Now,’ Eden exclaimed, ‘the damned insurers are trying to say that the system wasn’t effective. Even though they specified it! Would you believe that?’

I had to smile. ‘When it comes to insurers, my friend, I’ll believe anything. However, you should have asked the police to check it out and look for weaknesses.’

He frowned. ‘What damn weaknesses?’

‘For a start,’ I told him, ‘the sensor should have been as far away from the door as possible. I’m guessing,’ I continued, ‘that there was a big gate at the end of the boathouse.’

Rory nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. The boathouse is really a U-shaped dock. The gate goes down to just below the water level. It’s powered, of course, and operated by a remote control that’s kept on the navigation deck. The thieves closed it after they left. If they hadn’t done that the gardeners might have seen that it was open, and we could have found out about the theft a lot sooner. It was discovered on the tenth of October, but we know from the alarm company that it happened six days earlier, at three a.m.’

I took a deep breath, taking time to ensure that what I said next wouldn’t be too blunt, then ventured, ‘Guys, are you absolutely sure about your two crewmen?’

Eden stiffened in his chair, ‘Yes,’ he snapped, ‘absolutely. Walter’s our right-hand man, and as for Jock . . . when you meet him, you’ll realise there isn’t a dishonest bone in his body.’

‘When I what?’ I asked, quietly.

He flushed a little. ‘I’m hoping that you’ll meet the guys, and that you’ll take a look at the boathouse. Bob, the truth is that while the insurers are refusing to pay out full value on the vessel on the basis of the police report, they have said they’ll go halfers on the cost of an independent review of investigation. If it’s successful, and the Princess Alison is recovered, they’ll pay all of it, plus a premium of ten per cent of the insured value. Will you take it on?’

Would I take it on? That was a hell of a big question. Would I step into an investigation that the police had been running for four months without getting anywhere? Would I waste my time looking for a rich man’s corporate toy, one that had quite possibly been repainted, renamed, altered cosmetically and sold on for a couple of million?

Yes, I would, for the original Alison’s sake. And of course a success bonus of half a million pounds was an added incentive.

‘Very well,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll look at it, but before I do I have to tell you that this was not an opportunistic theft. It’s been planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing, and almost certainly by someone who’d seen the interior of the boathouse, because of the way the alarm was neutralised.

‘Whoever stole the Princess had some sort of insider knowledge; that’s a racing certainty, and it should have been the basis of the police inquiry. Tell me, were you ever asked for a list of all the people who’ve been on board her, going back at least a couple of years?’

‘No,’ Rory replied. ‘We never were. We’d be able to provide it, but only up to a point. Some of our hospitality invitations were general; key execs of some of our customers and client companies regularly joined us for a day’s sailing, with partners. We don’t have the names of all of those partners, and we can hardly go back and ask them, especially not the customers. “Excuse me, but can you tell me your other half’s name so she can be eliminated from police inquiries?” No, I don’t think so.’

‘No,’ I conceded, ‘but if I’d been involved in this I’d have wanted that list. Who was the senior investigating officer?’

‘His name was Detective Inspector McGarry,’ Eden volunteered. ‘First name Randolph, I think. He was based in Dumbarton.’

‘Did you meet anyone else?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Not until Chief Superintendent Chambers came to see me. McGarry was my only contact throughout. I met him on the estate, at the scene of the crime, so to speak. He visited me a couple of times after that, to update me, but nobody else came near me, no more senior officer.’

I was incredulous. I was still in command of the Strathclyde force when the Princess Alison was stolen, a five-million-pound heist that nobody had seen fit to report to the chief constable. A major rural crime, dropped into the hands of a detective inspector, whose caseload would be entirely urban and who would have no specialist marine knowledge. If I had known of it at the time, arses would have been kicked. As it was I was going to make a fuss. ‘You never thought to take it up the line?’ I asked.

Eden stared back at me. ‘To whom? I didn’t know anyone else.’

‘You know me,’ I retorted. ‘I was in Pitt Street when it happened, getting ready to hand over to my successor in ScotServe. I’d have raised merry hell if I’d known that a DI had been assigned as the investigating officer. I’m not saying that the outcome would have been different, but there would have been a hell of a lot more resources committed, that is for sure.’

‘What can you do after the event?’ Rory asked. ‘Do we have a realistic chance of getting the Princess back?’ I sensed his accountant’s mind at work.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him, candidly. ‘I promise you this: as soon as I see it’s hopeless, I’ll tell you. I won’t waste my time or yours.’

‘Fair enough,’ his father said. ‘How will you begin?’

‘By seeing how much influence I still have,’ I replied. ‘I need to get my hands on the police report.’