Thursday legends

48

A great wall of mist, two hundred feet high, clung to the middle of the Firth of Forth, shrouding part of the main shipping lane. Onshore, the weather was as warm and sunny as it had been for over a week, yet incongruously, the sound of a foghorn boomed across the water.

Bob Skinner sat on a dune, on the beach, looking at the haar, trying to assess whether or not it would sweep in from the sea before it burned off in the morning sun.

"This time last Saturday, eh?'

'Yeah,' Andy Martin, murmured, lying on his back beside him in borrowed shorts and tee-shirt. 'Seems like a long time ago. Fuck, it was a long time ago; I've been dead since then.'

'Want to talk about it? Or not… it's up to you. You'll never have to if you don't want. Boy's in a hole up the Pentlands; story's over.'

'Best place for him.' Martin's voice; hollow, lifeless.

'Man held a gun on me once,' Skinner murmured. 'Bastard shot me, but he made a mistake; gave me a chance. I got the gun. Shot him fucking dead. Someone, not Adam Arrow but like him, cleaned it up because of who he was, what he was. Different circumstances though. That was national security stuff; Scotland had to vanish to keep a lid on our local can of worms.'

'I know, Bob. I know. Don't justify yourself to me; you don't have to. I know why you did it and you were right.'

'I'm glad you killed him, Andy. Glad.'

'He died the way he lived. Alec should have shot him ten years ago, or someone in Ireland should have taken him out.'

'If he'd been on the other side, someone would have. Not all his orders came from the Loyalists; most of them did, but not all. Adam told me that.'

'No great surprise.'

They lay in silence, watching the mist evaporate.

'He pulled the trigger, you know.'

'Jesus. I'd hoped not.'

'Twice. Two bullets second time.'

'Andy…'

'Third would have been curtains. I just bellowed and went for him; went through him like a fucking train.

'I remember it all, Bob, in slow motion. Every single bit of it; the bitter taste of his finger… I think that must have been bone marrow… the blood. I was fucking swimming in it, but I couldn't let go. Could still be dead if I let go, I thought, and I couldn't die. Not there, not then, the time wasn't right.

'So I hung on, till the soldiers arrived, after that even… You know, looking at Alec, I thought, I'll never see anything worse than this… far less that I'd do worse myself.

'What did Scotland look like, Bob? When you saw him?'

'Dead, Andy. Very fucking dead.'

Skinner sighed. 'I didn't know at first, that he'd had you up there. Mario worked it out. Knew at once when he saw the bullets lying around and in the gun.'

He took a can of Irn Bru from his knapsack, opened it and handed it to Martin, then opened another, for himself. 'So it was Scotland, eh?' he murmured. 'A blast from Alec's past, come back as a nightmare.'

'Looks that way. He told me he really wanted to take him back up there, but knew he'd never manage it. I was second best. He knew someone would be for him eventually. Took him ten years to pluck up the courage, or to catch Smith off guard.'

'Where could he have got that animal tranquilliser?' 'He did night security at the zoo. He told me that… deliberately, I suppose.' 'Ahh.'

'He never actually said to me, "I killed Alec Smith" but…'

'Maybe not, but the overwhelming probability is that he did. If we keep the investigation going, more than likely we'll be chasing an answer we've found already. I've asked Mario to explain to Maggie, without telling her too much.'

'It just goes away then?'

'It dwindles; after a while I'll tell Royston that we have a prime suspect but that he's disappeared, believed out of the country. He can leak that to the press; I might even let him leak the real name. The guy isn't going to turn up anywhere.'

'Only in my dreams,' Martin whispered.

'They'll fade, son. You don't think so now, but they will. Your mind protects you after a while.'

Skinner took a slug from his Irn Bru. 'Just one small niggle…' he said.

'What's that?'

'Alec's room; where he was killed. There was something odd about that. It's probably of no significance, but it's wrong. It's just a feeling I have… only I can't figure out what it is.'