Skinner's Mission

56

They were waiting in the Travellers’ Inn when Tom Whatling returned from Upper Largo Kirk, and from his christening engagement. Skinner had spent almost half an hour studying the same small section of the image in the viewer, until Pamela had persuaded him to take some time out from the agonising task.

‘Any luck?’ asked Whatling.

Skinner nodded. ‘I’ve found the negative I was after. Sergeant Haig and PC Orr did a good job. They took three identical shots from most angles just to be on the safe side. Let’s hope that at least one of them was in focus.

‘Tom, can you do me a print?’ The ex-policeman nodded. ‘Can you isolate a single section of an image, and blow it up?’

‘Yes. I can’t guarantee what the resolution will be like - the cameras were often too complicated for the police photographers in those days - but we can only try it and see. Come on.’

He led them out of the pub and back to his shop. In the studio he switched on several pieces of equipment before turning back to Skinner. ‘Let’s see what you’ve found, then,’ he said quietly, switching on the viewer, in which the negative strip still lay. He winced as he looked at the shot.

The DCC handed him the magnifying glass. Pointing at the screen he traced a line with his finger around the lower right quarter of the rectangular image. ‘There, Tom, that section is what I need. In the middle of it, you’ll see a thin pipe, part of the hydraulics that were forced into the car by the impact. See it?’

Whatling peered through the glass. ‘I see it,’ he said. ‘It’s been burst open in the crash.’

Skinner shook his head. ‘No, not burst open. Cut half through, before the crash. That’s a wire braided, hydraulic brake fluid hose; good for 100,000 miles and virtually unbreakable in any impact. It might be ripped loose from its connection in a crash, but it would never go in the middle like that.’

He waved a hand towards the next room. ‘You’ve got hundreds of accident shots through there. You look through them all and I guarantee you that you won’t find another pipe that’s fractured in that way.’

‘Tell you what, sir,’ said Whatling. ‘I’ll do that. I’ll look through a selection, and I’ll make prints. If your theory’s right, that might help you prove it to a jury one day. Meantime, though, let’s print up this section and see how sharp we can get it. I’ll start with an eight by six. Highest I can go is about fourteen by eleven, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep the resolution at that size, on my equipment.’

He withdrew the negative strip. ‘Look, before I can isolate your section, I’ll have to study the whole image in positive form. You don’t need to see that, so why don’t you and Miss Masters go back to the pub and finish your drinks, if my wife hasn’t cleared them up.’

Skinner smiled, sadly. ‘You’re a kind man, Tom. The truth is that for the last four months, I’ve seen that image every time I’ve closed my eyes. And you’re right, the last thing I need is to see it while I’m awake.’

He led Pamela back into the Travellers’ Inn, where the Sunday evening crowd had gathered, many of them specifically to watch Manchester United tackle Liverpool in the day’s televised football match. Collecting their drinks from the table, the two police officers stood and watched with the rest, groaning or roaring with every passage of play, swaying as if they were back on the terraces of Fir Park, the ground where each had watched football as a youngster, ten years or so apart.

The match had been over for almost an hour before Whatling returned carrying a large flat envelope. Skinner and Masters were back at their fireside table, nursing a half-pint of shandy and a gin and tonic, as he crossed the room to sit down beside them.

Looking over his shoulder to make sure that there were no eavesdroppers, he laid the envelope on the table. ‘Sorry I was so long,’ he said, ‘but I had to wait for these to dry.

‘I’ve done you eight by six, ten by eight and fourteen by eleven, and I’ve focused in on the pipe as tight as I can without losing quality. The fourteen by eleven’s a bit fuzzy, but I think the ten by eight gives you what you’re after.’

Peering into the envelope, he withdrew an enlarged photograph and laid it on the table in front of Skinner and Masters. The damaged brake pipe leapt out at them, everything else distorted and out of focus by comparison. The print was so sharp that the camera’s flash could be seen reflected in the strands of severed wire braiding.

The cut had been made laterally, clean and straight across the top, not quite halfway through the diameter of the pipe, to a depth at which the fluid would have escaped under braking pressure gradually, rather than all at once.

Staring at the enlargement, Skinner realised that he was holding his breath. He blew it out in a great sigh, his shoulders sagging and his head dropping like a cross-country runner at the end of a race. ‘You’ve found it, boss,’ said Pamela. She grasped his hand in her excitement. Unconsciously, he squeezed hers, and held it tight.

As he stared at the image again, a flat, empty, feeling gripped the pit of his stomach, overwhelming him. With a final quick squeeze, he released Pamela’s hand, stood up from the table and walked quickly outside. She made to follow him, but Whatling put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Give him a minute, lass. There’s nothing you can say to him just now.’

He was back in five minutes. ‘Sorry,’ he said quietly, as he slipped into the bar and rejoined them at the table. ‘I just needed some air.’ He smiled at Masters, but she frowned at him, at the pallor of his face.

‘Tom,’ he said, as briskly as he could. ‘I can’t thank you enough, but what I can do is pay you for your time and materials.’ Whatling shook his head and held up the wrist on which his gold watch shone in the pub’s even light.

‘You did already, sir. Anything I can do, ever, to help a former colleague, I do with pleasure.’ He paused. ‘Listen, that’s the best I could manage with my equipment, but if you ask the boys at the lab, they have computer-aided gear that can get it a lot finer than that.’ He replaced the enlargement in the envelope and pushed it across the table. ‘The negative’s inside.’

Skinner took it and stood up. ‘Thanks again, then, Tom. I’m not sure where this will lead me, but without you I couldn’t have taken a step further.’ With a final wave, he ushered Pamela Masters out of the Travellers’ Inn, and into the Lower Largo evening.

The gloaming was giving way to darkness. They stood on the pavement listening to the lapping of the waves against the harbour wall, Masters gasping slightly at the sudden chill which had swept down from the north-west. Skinner nodded across the road, to the brightly-lit Crusoe Hotel.

‘I need food, Pam,’ he said, softly. ‘What would you say to supper before we head back?’

She smiled up at him in the darkness. ‘I’d say it was getting to be a habit, sir.’

The Crusoe’s dining room was empty, the weekend residents having gone back to Glasgow and to Edinburgh, but they were welcomed nonetheless. They followed the waiter’s recommendation of crab soup and roast beef salad, and chose a bottle of Findlay’s mineral water to wash it down.

Sipping the clear bubbling liquid, Skinner smiled across the table at his assistant. ‘You know, Pam . . . Sorry, Pamela . . . we’ve come this far in two days yet I haven’t told you the story behind this mission of mine.’

She grinned back at him, her big eyes smiling too. ‘Pam’s fine. It’s just Polly that I couldn’t stand. Made me sound like a bloody parrot. Yes, I like being a Pam.’ The smile vanished, as quickly as it had appeared, and was replaced not by a frown but by a look of concern. ‘So what is the whole story, sir? Why have you suddenly launched this investigation after eighteen years?’

He paused, as the waiter served the crab soup, adding a little crème fraiche, and left.

‘A few months back,’ he began, ‘I was stabbed.’

‘I remember. Everyone on the force was worried about you.’

‘I would have been too,’ he said quietly, ‘if I’d been conscious. The fact was, I nearly died. After my surgery, I experienced a reaction under sedation which made my consultant, and my wife, decide that I needed investigative hypnotherapy. So they called in a guy named Kevin O’Malley; the best in the business, so they say.

‘Kevin put me under and led me back to incidents in my past life, leading up to Myra’s death. He discovered . . . we discovered . . . that the experience of turning up at the scene of her death, and of what I saw there, had caused a traumatic amnesia.

‘Kevin took me back to the scene and, under hypnosis, I saw everything I’d seen before - including, I believed, that cut brake pipe.

‘Yet there was always a chance that I was wrong. Kevin admitted later that while the experience was real, he couldn’t be one hundred per cent certain that I didn’t add in that detail because of my own guilt . . . guilt because, as I told you, Myra was driving my car.

‘Now I know I wasn’t wrong, that I didn’t imagine any of the details.’ He looked, gloomily, down at his soup, stirring in the crème fraiche.

She looked up at him. ‘Then why are you so down?’ she asked quietly.

He sighed, long and deep, and tapped his chest. ‘I suppose it’s because, in here, I hoped that I was mistaken. What we got there wasn’t the answer I wanted, not in my heart of hearts. Until now, it’s been a theoretical exercise. Most of me wanted it to stay that way, for it to be stopped at the first hurdle, so that I could get on with my life, duty done.

‘Now I have my evidence and I have to carry on. The trouble is, the process is having side effects.’

‘Such as?’

‘My marriage, for starters. This thing has changed Sarah, just as it’s changed me. It’s made us different people. I can’t explain it any better than that. It has driven us apart.

‘It’s affecting Alex too. She’s now finding out things that I’ve held back from her since she was a child. That part’s a bonus, though. It’s time she found out for herself what a terrific woman her mother was.’

‘So what do you, we, do next?’ asked Pam.

‘I go to Shotts Prison tomorrow, to see that man I told you about. A remarkable man: a multiple murderer, but a remarkable man nonetheless. Our paths have crossed before. In fact he tried to kill me, once. His name’s . . .’

In the pocket of his jacket, slung over the back of his chair, Skinner’s mobile phone rang. He took it out and switched it on. ‘Yes?’

‘Boss, it’s Andy. I’ve been trying to get you for hours.’

‘Sorry, I was busy. The phone was off. What’s the panic?’

‘I’m in Alnwick,’ said Martin. ‘The police here pulled in Ricky McCartney for failing to stop and for speeding on the A1. Big Neil and I came down with a team to collect him. When we got here we found we had a bonus: our two kidnapped tourists from Birmingham, dead in the boot of McCartney’s car.

‘Now I find myself in a tug-of-war over him and his partner, Willie Kirkbride. The Northumbrian police are being difficult. They’ve found a caravan up on the Haggerston Castle site, and they’re assuming that the Brummies were killed there.

‘I’ve done my best to persuade them to let me have McCartney and the other fellow, but they’re digging their heels in. I’ve been right up to the Chief Constable himself, but he’s playing it by the book.’

‘Whose book?’

‘His own,’ said Martin, wearily. ‘Yet I have to get these two back home. As soon as I can take statements from them I can arrest Dougie Terry on a lifetime’s worth of charges, including, I’m sure, setting up these three murders.’

‘Bugger that,’ said Skinner. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll ask Proud Jimmy to speak to their Chief Constable first thing tomorrow morning. These guys are ours and we’re having them, even if I have to come down to collect them myself. For now, you and McIlhenney get yourselves home.

‘Meantime, Andy, keep a veil over this. I don’t want anyone outside the team to know what’s happening, until the moment that our hands feel Dougie Terry’s collar. After that, it’ll be next stop Jackie Charles!’