Thursday legends

46

The nine Legends sat around the table in the Golf Hotel bar, stunned and subdued. As a group they were rarely lost for a word but, after the bombshell which Skinner had dropped, not one of them had anything to say.

It was David McPhail who broke the seance-like silence with a blunt question. 'How come it took so long to identify him, Bob? I mean, a whole week…'

The DCC was stung by the implied criticism of Dan Pringle's team. 'Look, nobody reported him missing. Edith and the family were away, and his colleagues didn't want to make their client base nervous.'

He looked across at McPhail and added tersely, 'The fact that he didn't have a fucking face wasn't a big help to us either. My wife did the post-mortem; she knew the Diddler well — he lived just up the road from us, remember — and she didn't know who it was.'

'What happened to him?' Grant Rock looked a wholly different man when he was being serious; this occurred so infrequently that the policeman felt almost as if he was facing a stranger.

'I don't like to talk about it, and I only tell you guys on the basis that it doesn't leave this room. He was tied to the bed at his son's place, then beaten to death with a baseball bat. We only made a positive identification from blood samples.'

'Tied to the bed,' Stewart Rees mused. 'Was the Diddler diddling again?'

'Let's not speculate about that.' 'Has Edith been told?'

Skinner held up his empty glass and nodded to the Friday barmaid, prompting a rush of refills.

'I called France this afternoon,' he said, when everyone was settled again. 'They have a friend down there, a Scots guy; I met him once. I called him and had him go along to break the news to Edith. Always better face to face; it's harder to believe a voice on the telephone.

'She called me just before we came along here. Poor woman. She's flying home tomorrow morning with Victoria, Air France from Nice through Charles de Gaulle; I've said I'll meet them at the airport.'

'What are you going to do about your car?' Mcllhenney asked, casually. 'It's still up at Fettes, remember.'

'I'll pull rank. I'll have a patrol car pick me up in the morning and take me to collect it. Andy too, if Sarah says he can go home.'

The Inspector leaned back against the window and whispered, so that no-one else could hear. 'You going to tell me what happened today?'

Skinner shook his head.

'Never?'

Skinner nodded his head.

'Fair enough then,' Mcllhenney murmured. 'I won't ask again.'

'Bob,' said Mitch Laidlaw from across the table, 'it can't have escaped anyone's attention that two of our number have met violent deaths very close to each other.' He seemed to send a shiver round the table.

'It hasn't escaped mine, Mitch, that's for bloody sure. That's the other reason I called us all together… I mean, apart from believing it appropriate to give you all the bad news in person. You can forget the idea that there is any sort of a vendetta against our honoured group. There's no-one out there who wants our Thursday time at the Sports Centre so badly that he's prepared to bump us off one by one to get it.

'To put the thing in perspective, two guys who played together among us, for a fairly short time, set against the years we've been at it, met violent deaths within hours of each other. But they were very different deaths.'

'How was Alec killed, then?' asked McPhail.

'You do not want to know, David,' Skinner frowned at the interruption. 'The point I was about to make was that I am assured by an eminent and highly skilled forensic pathologist — with whom I am currently sleeping — that Alec Smith and the Diddler were killed by two different people.

'I can tell you also, in police speak, although I cannot go into detail, that I have reason to believe that the Alec Smith investigation will be closed pretty soon.

'So relax, lads. We don't have a stalker.'

'Yeah,' said Grant Rock, returning rapidly to normal. 'But what if there's a whole crowd of them after our time?'

Mcllhenney looked at him from beneath his heavy eyebrows. 'If there was, the smart thing to do would be to give it to them.'

'I'll never be hung for being smart,' said Rock.