Skinner's rules

21

Detective Sergeant Mackie had just returned from hospital, where his injured elbow had been pronounced sound, when Skinner buzzed from his office.

Mackie went through to the inner sanctum. ‘Hello, sir. I didn’t know you were back. Did our man put in an appearance at the funeral?’

‘I won’t know for sure till I’ve seen the photographs. That’s the first thing I want you to chase up for me. These are the others.’ He issued a series of clear concise orders. ‘And I want them now!’

The funeral photographs arrived two hours later.

Skinner sifted carefully through the blown-up prints. Some of the people, he recognised, but most, he did not. However the most telling thing was that no one seemed to be out of place, or standing in isolation, other than, in one photograph, himself.

‘Christ,’ he muttered aloud. ‘No one would ever know I was a copper from that! Not bloody much!’

Skinner scanned the prints again, to confirm his first impression. There were no oddfellows there. And no one in the gathering looked in the slightest oriental.

The photograph of Toshio Yobatu, Managing Director of Fu-Joki Blood Products plc, arrived half an hour later. Mackie brought it, having been handed the print in a brown envelope, in a pub behind the Scotsman office, by a photographer with whom he maintained a mutually beneficial acquaintance. Mackie had agreed that his friend’s lack of curiosity about the reason for the request would earn an extra favour at some time in the future.

Skinner tore open the envelope and withdrew the photograph. He looked at it and caught his breath. Alongside him, Mackie gave a soft whistle.

The picture had been ‘snatched’ as Yobatu left the High Court in Glasgow, following the acquittal of the two Chinese youths. It had been blown up until most of the features were fuzzy, but nothing could dim the ferocity of the eyes which blazed out at the two detectives.

Nothing could have been further from the image of the smiling Japanese businessman. Even in a bad photograph, Yobatu’s ferocious gaze had an almost hypnotic effect. Not a hint of humour or compassion lay there, only a burning anger, accentuated by a tight mouth, which seemed to have been slashed across the man’s face.

‘Jesus, boss,’ Mackie whispered, ‘if this character had sat staring at me for three-and-a-half days in a High Court trial, I think I’d have jumped under a bloody train as well!’