Skinner's Mission

49

He leaned down to kiss her, smiling. She made to pull away, but he held her head firm between his hands and did it anyway, a big wet one in the middle of her forehead.

She stared up at him puzzled. ‘What’s put the spring into your stride?’ Sarah asked, as she stepped newly-dressed into the garden where Bob had been playing with his son. ‘Got a new woman or something, or maybe an old one?’ For a second a shadow flickered across her face at her poor joke.

‘Sorry,’ she said, quickly. ‘No more cracks about Myra, I promise. It’s just that you seem happy, and I don’t think I like that.’

His smile vanished. ‘You don’t?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Do I?’ he asked. ‘Do you mean that I’m supposed to wander around like a lost sheep, just because you and I have got a problem?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I mean that I hoped you’d still be missing me a bit, rather than coming in here looking like the cat that got the canary.’ She gazed across the back garden at Fairyhouse Avenue, where Jazz stood in a playsuit, supported by a baby walker on wheels. It was a sunny morning, but there was a chill in the air which suggested that winter might be preparing a rearguard action against the change of seasons.

He looked sideways at her. ‘Whatever happens to us, I’ll always miss the way we were. Who knows, maybe we’ll get over this. But if we don’t nothing can take away how it was between us. Or can it?’

Still staring across the garden, she shook her head, very briefly.

‘The reason I’m smiling,’ he said, carrying on, ‘is because I’ve finally got my Mission, or Crusade, whatever you want to call it, under way. Yesterday, I had a look for the people with an interest, eighteen years ago, in killing me or getting me out of the way. I’ve narrowed it down to a very short list.

‘Today, I’m off on the track of hard evidence to support what I believe I saw in the car. If it exists, I know where to find it.

‘The thing is, now that I’m finally under way, I feel more focused than I have in months. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to prove anything, or bring a prosecution. Yet knowing will be enough; it’ll have to be if, as might be the case, the man behind it is dead.’ His face grew suddenly very dark. ‘Maybe that’s why I look happy. Maybe I’d rather have a dead culprit than have to live with the knowledge that whoever did it is still walking around. Maybe I couldn’t take that.’

He looked at the ground. ‘I’ve read the post mortem report. Myra was pregnant when she died. A boy.’

There was a long silence. Sarah walked across the garden and lifted Jazz out of the baby-walker. ‘Bob, I’m sorry. I can’t talk about this. It’s not just part of your past, but of your life today that I can’t be involved in. Call it jealousy if you like, but I can’t take that. I feel just as I would if you were having an affair. So if we have to talk, let’s make it about something else.

‘I heard noise last night up in Ravelston Dykes Road. What was it? Do you know?’

He nodded. ‘Andy called me at Gullane. We had a tip that some people were coming up from the south to kill Jackie Charles. We had the place staked out, but someone beat us to it. One of the visiting team was shot, and died on the way to hospital. The other two were abducted.’

She gasped with alarm. ‘None of our people was hurt, were they?’

‘No. They were too far away to be involved.’

‘What about the two men who were kidnapped?’

‘I don’t think they were going to a dinner party in the Caley Hotel. My guess is that sometime soon we’ll find two stiffs in Birmingham, gift-wrapped as a warning.’

‘That’s horrible! How did someone manage to beat you to them?’

He smiled, grimly. ‘That’s a good question. The God of the criminal works in devious and mysterious ways.

‘But there’s good news too. While we’re no nearer tracing the fire-raiser from last Wednesday, we have learned a few interesting things about the victim. And the net’s closing in on Jackie Charles too. Maggie and young Pye are going up to Peterhead today to put the frighteners on a witness who might help us nail his gopher, Dougie Terry.

‘If we get something on him that could earn him fifteen years, I’m hoping that Terry will give up Charles.’

She walked towards him, carrying their wriggling son. ‘That’s your real world, Bob, isn’t it. That’s where your heart lies.’

He reached out and ruffled James Andrew’s hair. ‘No Sarah,’ he said, sincerely, ‘but right now it’s all I feel that I have.’

‘What about him?’

‘He used to be ours. Now he’s yours and mine . . . big difference. Soon, like Alex, he’ll be his. That’s the way it is.’