‘What’s your thinking, Bob?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have any yet. Same weapon, same killer, same approach, provoke and attack. Three possibilities: it could have been random, the man with the knife could have had a grudge against the victims, or someone else might have. I’m not going to make any guesses; Alison’s are as good as mine at this stage, and she’s running the inquiry.’ I paused. ‘How are we going on the other priority task?’ I asked, without much optimism. There were no grounds for any: we were seven days from the murder, five days into the investigation, no sign of any motive and our two major suspects were nowhere to be found.
‘Well,’ he began; something in his tone took my attention. ‘I don’t think we’re any further forward than we were, but this fax came in from Newcastle.’ He’d been holding a couple of sheets of paper, clipped together. He laid them on my desk and pushed them towards me. ‘It’s the full intelligence file on the man Winston Church; there’s something in there that jumped out at me.’
I picked it up and began to read through it. Church was an archetypal local hoodlum of his era. He was sixty-nine years old, and had emerged in the post-war period as a black marketeer, diversifying, when rationing ended, into just about anything that was criminal and, typically, some things that were not. He had been the top man in his city through the sixties, seventies and through the eighties, by force of arms; the feudal lord of Tyneside. His file suggested that he was the man who had got the real Carter, in the real-life gangland episode that had been fictionalised for the screen. In a biopic of his life he might have been played by Ricky Tomlinson or Warren Clarke, or even by Michael Caine.
But he was history, the file said; an old man with little power left to direct or restrain the new breed who had moved in on his patch. They tolerated him, in the same way that the outgoing chairman of a football club is made president for life, and they ignored him. Even his one-time loyal retainers, like Milburn and Shackleton, had gone freelance, their muscle and other services for hire.
I was wondering why Fred had wanted me to read his tired story when a name jumped off the page at me, one of a list of ‘former associates’.
‘Alasdair Holmes?’ I exclaimed. ‘What the fuck was Al Holmes doing with this guy?’
‘Probably supplying him,’ Leggat volunteered. ‘If you look at the timeline in the file, Church’s decline began after the Holmes brothers were shot.’
‘That’s of some interest,’ I conceded. ‘We both know that Al never did anything on his own initiative. His brother was his keeper, in every respect. But as you say, they were indeed shot. Al’s dead, and even if Perry wasn’t a cripple with round-the-clock care needs… he never went within miles, personally, of the likes of Winston Church.’
‘So I understand,’ Fred agreed. ‘That’s why I don’t see it as relevant. Just a curiosity, really; that’s why I drew it to your attention.’
I gazed at the report, and I smiled. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s no more than that, but given who’s involved… I think I might just go and visit the sick.’
Thirteen
I didn’t take grapes with me, or even a bunch of the petrol station flowers that were popular in those days (and may still be, for all I know) with guys who had wool to pull over their wives’ eyes. Perry Holmes might have been a basket case, but his past hadn’t been erased, not in my eyes, or in those of any cop who’d seen the aftermath of some of the things he’d ordered.
My former colleague Tommy Partridge was among them. He devoted a large chunk of his career to putting Perry away but he never came close, and because of it he was a bitter man when he retired. Holmes was much, much too clever, for all of us. He never got near to the things that were his, and he was never near anything that was done in his name. When I was in my last year at secondary school, an old policeman came to speak to my debating group. In an off-the-record moment, he told us, ‘You are all bright young people, with working lives ahead of you. I shouldn’t give you this employment advice, but the fact is that should any of you choose to go into crime, then with your intelligence and backgrounds, you probably have a ninety per cent chance of being successful.’ Holmes was living proof of the truth he spoke; he was a brilliant, ruthless man. Tony Manson had learned a lot from him, but he wasn’t his equal.
I’d only ever met him once, in the Western Infirmary, two years before, after Billy Spreckley had killed his brother and shot him four times. One of those bullets had lodged in his brain, and was still there. His consultant neurologists, all three of them, for Perry wasn’t a man to accept only a second opinion if he didn’t like it, said with unanimous certainty that he was going to die. He was conscious and responsive, though; I was sent by Alf Stein to interview him about the shooting, and about anything else he cared to discuss. .. to take a dying declaration, in effect.
He didn’t care to say a word, not a cheep. He didn’t care to die either. After a few months it became obvious that he wasn’t going to, not any time soon at any rate, and so he was transferred to a nursing home while a new house was built for him on an estate that he owned just outside the city, all on one level and fitted out to meet the needs of a quadriplegic.
He’d been kept under observation there, for a while, just in case his surviving old associates started to roll up to his door, but none of them had. No police time was spent on him any longer. Received wisdom, and the evidence of our own observation, was that his criminal enterprises died with his brother Al, and, shortly afterwards, with Johann Kraus. They had been his main conduits, the means by which his orders were delivered, and executed. Without them, and with no means of replacing them, the word was that he devoted himself from his wheelchair exclusively to the legitimate side of his business empire, the vast property portfolio that he had built up with very thoroughly laundered money, and a development wing which the banks and other institutions were always ready to fund, because he was very good at it, and always gave an excellent return on investment.
The underworld vacuum that he had left behind him seemed to have been filled not by one person, but by several, of whom Tony Manson was one. He was dominant in Edinburgh, but in other areas of the country there had been a couple of turf wars, with fatalities, before the new order had established itself.
I’d met Al Holmes often enough; he was pulled in quite regularly by the drugs squad, and given as hard a time for as long as the law would allow, but Perry’s system was foolproof. He swept his house and his office for bugs every day, and he never had discussions, only oneto-one meetings, with no third parties present. Al was a shit, and nowhere near as bright as Perry, but he was too scared of his brother ever to cross him.
Kraus and I had crossed paths too. He was almost as big as Lennie Plenderleith, but not in his league when it came to tough, or for that matter in the same league as me, as he found out one time when he took a swing at me in an interview room. I’d hoped he would; that’s why there was no one else there. He had a fearsome reputation, but only with a gun or a chainsaw in his hand. When one of our marksmen took him down, the squad had a whip-round for the shooter.
I was thinking of him as I pulled up outside Perry’s new house. Kraus had lived on a small farm that was part of the estate, and it was suspected that some of his victims, including most of Mia’s brother and uncle, had gone into an incinerator there. And that made me think of Mia for the first time in a few hours; it was just gone four o’clock and she was on air until half an hour before I was due at her place. Too late to cancel gracefully… if I’d really wanted to.
I stepped out of the Discovery and walked up a long white marble pathway that led to the front door. It was opened before I reached it by a man in a blue nurse’s tunic, a large black man, with short frizzy hair; he wasn’t smiling. I glanced around looking for the camera that must have picked me up, but I couldn’t see it.