Skinner's ghosts

61

Arthur Dorward stripped the last of the tape from the underside of the drawer. Hands encased in latex gloves, he lifted the receipt very carefully, and slid it into a large plastic envelope, with a fastening along the top.

'We won't do any tests here, sir,' he said to Cheshire, as his sergeant placed the envelope in a document case. 'I'd much prefer to have my full lab facilities available when we start to look for traces.'

'Fair enough, Inspector,' said the investigator, 'but if you don't mind, Mr Ericson and I will come with you.'

Dorward's face set instantly into a frown, as he sensed an implied slur on his integrity. Andy Martin stepped in quickly. 'That's al right, Arthur,' he said. 'It's necessary to the enquiry.'

'Very good, sir.' The red-haired man nodded but his expression remained frozen.

'Before we go to get on with it,' he said, 'could I have a word with you, and with the Chief, in private?'

'Of course,' said Sir James Proud, who was standing near the door of Skinner's office. 'Come across the corridor.' He glanced, unsmiling, at Cheshire and Ericson. 'Excuse us, gentlemen.'

He led his two officers out of the room, and into his own suite.

The veteran Chief looked confused, angry and very upset. 'I stil don't believe it, you know.'

Dorward sighed. 'Who wants to, sir? But if we find Mr Skinner's prints on that receipt…'

'Then you better hadn't!' Proud Jimmy barked.

The Inspector glanced at Martin, with a look of panic, but the Chief soothed him almost at once. 'Oh, Arthur, make no mistake, I want you to do your job as honestly and as well as you always do. I just hate all this, that's all.

'Now, what did you want to see us about? Here, man, sit down, you're not on report.'

As the Chief Constable ushered them to chairs, Dorward's brows knitted. Looking at him, Martin thought that he might be trembling slightly

'I had a cal this morning from a specialist unit which my lab uses on a consultancy basis. They were reporting on a task I'd given them.'

His voice was weak, faltering. 'I hardly know how to put this, gentlemen,'

'Try,' said the Chief Superintendent, so tersely that Proud looked at him in surprise.

'Very good, sir. It's like this, then. Remember, we found a number of hair samples trapped in the plumbing of Mrs McGrath's new bathroom?' Martin nodded, almost as a reflex.

'Well, as we thought, we were able to identify four of them very easily. The victim, the child, the nanny and the cleaner: al the people we knew had used the basin. That left us with two hair samples.' He hesitated again. This time it was the Chief Constable who urged him on with an impatient frown.

'We've subjected both of them to intensive analysis. They're both from men, for a start. Also they have different blood groups. One is perfectly common, almost regulation issue you might say. But the other is unusual.

'It's not a one-in-a-million type, but it is very unusual. Now as you know, ordinary medical records don't necessarily include blood type, so we have no way of knowing, other than statistically, how many people have this group, and we certainly can't identify them all. But where a person has been treated in hospital, there you'll find a note.'

Inspector Dorward gulped. 'Natural y, we checked at once with the hospitals in our Health Board area. They gave us a quick response.

Five men with that blood group have been treated in Edinburgh hospitals since the beginning of last year. Two of them are dead. One of them is still in the Western. A fourth is seventy-seven years old.

The fifth…' He faltered once more. He glanced at Martin, but he was looking at the floor.

'The fifth,' he said at last, 'is Mr Skinner.'

Silence has a quality and a value of its own. It may allow time for reflection. Between loving partners, it may contain expressions which need not be committed to words. But the silence which enveloped Sir James Proud's office as Dorward finished his story, was the type which follows the lighting of a fuse.

Eventually, the explosion came. 'Sweet suffering Christ!' boomed Chief Constable Sir James Proud. 'Are there any more rabbits in this fucking hat?'

He glowered at Martin, then looked across at Dorward. 'Thank you, Arthur. Difficult job, telling us that. On you go with Cheshire now. Not a bloody word about this to him, though, not even if he asks you straight out. He does that, refer him to me.'

Neither of the senior officers stood as the Inspector left the room.

'Jesus Christ and General Jackson,' barked the unusually eloquent Proud as the door closed behind him. 'Bob's up to his neck in the 210 shit with this corruption thing. Does this make him a murder suspect now?'

Martin, impassive, shook his head. 'No it doesn't. Chief. He was with Pam at the time of the murder.'

'Could he have left the hair when he visited the murder scene?'

'No. He was suited up then, and he didn't use the basin. He left it there on another occasion.'

'Did you know about this?' the chief asked, suddenly, his eyebrows rising. 'You were awful quiet when Dorward came out with it.'

The Head of CID nodded. 'Bob told me about it, yesterday. He said that he was pretty certain that one of those hair samples would turn out to be his.'

Proud Jimmy's mouth hung open slightly as he stared at the younger man, with incredulity spreading across his face. 'Oh, in the name of… He wasn't screwing Leona McGrath as well, was he?'

In spite of himself, Martin smiled, momentarily, at the Chief's reaction as the truth dawned. 'It happened just once, he told me, before the Pam relationship began, but at a time when he and Sarah were having very real difficulty. Ever since the air disaster, when Bob rescued the wee chap, and with al the things that happened afterwards, he always took a special interest in Mark.

'After Leona was elected, he used to look in on them on a Friday evening, after work, just to say hello, and check that they were okay.

The role that Al Higgins would have filled, had things not…' He paused, as he and Proud exchanged glances.

'Well,' he continued, 'there was one Friday when Bob was dropped off there, rather than calling in his own car. He'd been visiting one of the Midlothian offices, I think, and he'd used a driver. Leona invited him to stay for supper. They had a couple of drinks, he was down, she was pretty low too. After wee Mark went to bed one thing led to another, and so did they.

'Afterwards, Bob told me, they agreed that it would be a one-off, for everyone's sake. He started to phone her on a Friday, or at the weekend, instead of looking in. He told me that he was never in the house again until I called him on the day of the murder.'

Andy Martin shook his blond head. 'Think about it, Chief. One evening Bob's in that room, in her bed; next time he's there, he's looking at her raped, battered, strangled body. He said to me that holding it together was one of the most difficult things he's ever had to do.'

'I can imagine,' said Proud. 'Why didn't he tell you about this sooner, though, or tel me for that matter?'

'He didn't think we needed to know, Chief. It was only when he worked out how Arthur Dorward would conduct that investigation that he realised it would come out anyway.'

Sir James stood up, and walked to his window. 'It's a mess, Andy, a horrible mess. I never thought I'd see a day like this. What d'you think Cheshire will make of this development?'

'If we tell him,' said Martin. 'This is part of the McGrath investigation, not his.'

'Careful, son,' warned the Chief. 'You have to remember to think like a policeman here, not as a friend. This has to do with Bob; Cheshire's investigating Bob. We don't have any choice but to tell him. He won't think Bob's implicated in the murder, not for a second, but he'll be entitled to consider it to be evidence of moral instability.'

The Chief Constable shook his silver head, wearily.

'I mean, if we look at this thing dispassionately, if we just think in terms of Mr X and do our jobs, what have we got? A secret account for a hundred thousand for the benefit of Mr X. His signature lodged with the bank. The deposit receipt found, concealed, in his office.

Against al that, what is there? Alex's point, which you mentioned, about the Bank of England notes, and the fact that the courier may or may not have been Leona McGrath's killer, who may or may not have a grudge against Mr X. Not the strongest defence I've ever encountered.'

Proud Jimmy sighed. 'Let's face it, all we have is the fact that you and I can't believe that Bob Skinner could possibly be corrupt. Yet take your mind back twelve months, and ask yourself at that time whether it's possible that in a year, he'll be split from his wife and son and living with another woman.'

He looked back at Martin, who looked at the floor and shook his head, slowly.

'Anyway Andy,' the Chief Constable went on, 'none of that is either relevant nor proper. We are senior police officers, with a public duty.

If this was anyone else, he'd be charged by now, on the basis of those facts alone.

'See if Cheshire and Ericson are still in the building, will you. We have to tell them what we know.'