Skinner's rules

69

Skinner left Martin to dine with the visitors. McGuire drove him home to Stockbridge. Sarah was back into the full swing of her practice, and of her police work. When Skinner let himself in, he found her sprawled on the couch, still wearing a heavy tweed jacket, with a woollen scarf wound around her neck. The gas fire was still warming up.

‘Hi, love, busy day?’ He leaned over and kissed her neck, above the scarf.

Sarah nodded. ‘A real bugger, as you Scots say so eloquently. Began with a heroin overdose in Leith, and ended with a ten-year-old kid in Muirhouse coming home from school to find his mother with her head in the gas oven. Life as it is really lived, or died, as the case may be. How about you?’

Bob shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Oh, just humdrum stuff. Threatened one minute by a man I thought was a friend. Soft-soaped the next by someone I had down as an enemy. Just a typical day in the life of a hard-working polis!

‘Let me open a medicinal bottle of something and tell you the details.

They sat on the sofa, Sarah in the curve of Bob’s arm, Haydn’s Miracle Symphony on the CD player, and sipped smooth white wine. Yet, instead of unwinding as the music and the grape did their work, Bob grew more tense.

‘Hey, big boy, steady down! Is this Syrian job more tricky than you’re saying?’

‘No, don’t worry about that. Allingham’s had his card marked. If everyone does their bit it’ll be a dawdle. No, it’s the other thing.’

With mounting outrage, he told Sarah of his visit to Fulton.

‘He told me just to go along with the Yobatu story. Can you imagine that? I know that our man’s still out there; it’s bloody obvious, and yet he told me to lay off. I tell you, Sarah, it stinks.’

‘And what are you going to do?’

‘What do you think?’ He almost shouted at her for the first time in his life. ‘Sorry, love, I must learn to leave these things outside.’

‘No, I’m sorry, that was a silly question. But what will Fulton do? What can he do?’

He kissed her on the forehead, and some of the tension seemed to leave him. ‘He’ll huff and he’ll puff, but he can’t go public. He might try to lean on Proud Jimmy, to get him to order me to pack it in. He’d have to lean pretty hard, but it’s possible. He could use the Crown Office to try to stop me.

‘In theory he can’t do anything. Hughie Fulton is a non-person, the sort of guy that Le Carré and Len Deighton write about.’

Sarah looked at him, and he saw a hint of fright in her eyes. But quickly she turned it into a joke. ‘What, licensed to kill, do you mean?’

Bob looked at her, unsmiling. ‘Listen, Doctor, I’m licensed to kill if it comes to it. Far more so than Fulton. I carry a police warrant card and I’m a high-rated marksman, trained to take people down, like everyone on my Syrian team.

‘Fulton isn’t like that. I think he smells something that might embarrass his masters, and he’s trying to cover it up. Remember, the ex-Lord Advocate, the Foreign Office, and probably our own Secretary of State had Yobatu hustled out of the country on a stretcher; now he turns out to have been innocent, there may be no more to it than Hughie trying to save his bosses’ blushes. What makes me mad is that the man was one of the best policemen in Scotland. A real Blue Knight. Now he’s just an arse-licker!’

Sarah put a hand on his chest. ‘All right. Now forget him. Tell the Chief about your meeting and put it out of your mind. Just do it your way.. but don’t get obsessive.

‘Now, let’s discuss weddings!’