Martin shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, there isn’t; you just have to leave us to our work. We’ll do our best to trace this woman Donna, but at the same time, if the body is that of your wife, we’ll work to confirm it as quickly as possible.’
‘You’re alone here, Jackie, yes?’ asked Skinner.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you have any live-in help?’
‘No. We don’t go in for them.’
‘In case they see or hear too much,’ the hard-nosed policeman in Martin almost muttered, but he recognised that Skinner had declared a truce in the battle to nail his number one criminal enemy. Instead, he said as sincerely as he could, ‘Would you like us to send someone to be with you?’
From the midst of his grief, the real Jackie Charles shot him a piercing, proud look. ‘You must be fucking joking!’ he said.
Bob Skinner, in spite of himself, smiled. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but remember, until you hear from us again, do nothing.’ He looked the man hard in the eye, and as he did he saw that the shock was fading, to be replaced by a burning anger. ‘You understand me,’ he repeated, with emphasis, ‘nothing at all.
‘We’ll be back to see you as soon as we can, with good news or bad. And when we come back, we’ll want to have a much longer talk.’
3
Bob Skinner and Andy Martin sat in an all-night greasy spoon café just off Leith Walk, beloved of coppers, Chinese waiters and other night people.
Coffee steamed in great white mugs before them, and four freshly-baked rolls, crammed with fried egg and grilled bacon, lay on a plate in the centre of their table.
Skinner looked around at his unpretentious surroundings. ‘D’you remember, Andy, the last time we were here? You were a Sergeant and I was in your job. I was a simple widower with no greater burden than a teenage daughter, and you were a bachelor boy, footloose and fancy free.
‘Now I’m a hudden-doon married man, and you’re engaged to said burden.’
Martin smiled. ‘Come on, Bob, you never thought of Alex in anything like those terms.’
The big man across the table shook his head. ‘No, of course I didn’t. Watching her grow into a woman has been the great continuous joy of my life so far.’ And then, his face darkened. ‘I just wish that Myra had been around to share it with me.’
‘Sure you do,’ said his friend, softly, ‘but she wasn’t. She died, man, eighteen years ago.’
Skinner nodded. ‘That’s right, she died. And through all those years, no-one, not even you, not even Alex, ever realised how much I missed her.’
He looked up, his eyes piercing. ‘You want to know the truth? I still miss Myra, just as much as I ever did. Here I am, I’m married to Sarah, something that I never really imagined in all those lonely years. We have the son I always wanted, wee James Andrew Skinner, and he’s a cracker too. My daughter’s graduated and engaged to be married, and my best pal’s sorted himself out in the process.
‘I’ve got all that going for me, and guess what?’ He tapped his chest. ‘In here, a great part of me is still torn up with grief and longing for Myra, who’s been gone since Alex was four years old.’
Suddenly he reached across the table, grasped Andy Martin’s hand, and squeezed it, hard, momentarily. ‘Yes, Andy; as you said, Myra died: just like - let’s not kid ourselves - Carole Charles did tonight. Villain or not, my friend, I feel for wee Jackie. I’ve worn the shoes he’s in this morning.
‘Eighteen years ago someone tried to kill me, and Myra died instead. Tonight, as I see it, someone tried to kill him, and Carole got in the way.
‘You’re going to find out who killed Carole, and put him away for life. And I’m going to find out, finally, who sabotaged my car and killed Myra. They might have been poles apart as women, with vastly different moral values, but they both deserve the same justice, Andy. Everyone does.’
The younger man nodded, but there was a look of doubt in his eyes. ‘I agree with you one hundred per cent about Carole Charles, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘Well there’s Sarah to consider, isn’t there. I was there, remember, the night you got home from hospital four months ago. I remember how she reacted when you said to her what you’ve just said to me. I remember the argument and the atmosphere between you. All of a sudden you became a couple I didn’t know.’
Bob looked across the table, chewing on a mouthful of egg and bacon roll. ‘You saying you agree with Sarah?’ he mumbled.
‘Come on, man. You two are going to be my in-laws. Ask me to referee if you like, but don’t ask me to take sides between you. What I’m saying is that I can understand what Sarah feels, especially after what you said a minute or two ago.’
Andy looked over his shoulder to ensure that there were no eavesdroppers, but the café’s only other occupant was seated on the other side of the room, deep in an early edition Scotsman. He leaned forward and said, almost in a whisper, ‘Look, you had a terrible experience last year. You were stabbed, and Sarah sat by your bedside for a couple of days not knowing whether you would live or die.
‘Then you had to have hypnotherapy, and all sorts of deeply buried experiences were turned up, including the one from the scene of Myra’s death. Now, on the basis of that recovered memory, you’ve decided that she was murdered, and you’ve announced that you’re on a mission to find her killer.
‘On top of that, you’ve just told me that you miss Myra as much as ever. You think Sarah won’t have picked that up? Or have you told her too, straight out?’
‘Don’t be daft! What d’you take me for?’
‘For a confused man, and maybe for an obsessive.’
‘What do you suggest I do about it?’
‘I suggest that you try to think objectively. Okay, a long time ago you suffered traumatic amnesia. Now you believe that under hypnosis you experienced a complete recollection of the scene of your wife’s death. Maybe, just maybe, you were wrong about the details at least. Why not focus on that possibility, and get your life back in perspective?’
Bob shook his head. ‘It’s not a possibility, Andy. I’m not wrong. You want to try regressive hypnotherapy, mate. It’s a virtual reality helmet, only it isn’t playing a movie or a game. It’s replaying your life.
‘Remember, son, I was at the scene of the accident where Myra died. That was one of the things that Kevin O’Malley showed me in his treatment. I arrived not long after the Mini Cooper S - the car I would have been driving, not her, on any other day - hit the tree. I knelt beside the car and I looked inside.
‘I looked at every detail of that car. Myra’s handbag with her Chanel bottle broken. The bag of chocolate raisins that I had left on the shelf, strewn all over the place. The Cooper’s front end smashed in, and most of the car’s works in the passenger compartment.’ He paused and looked Martin straight in the eye.
‘And the hydraulic brake fluid pipe, cut about halfway through. Not broken, not snapped, but cut so that the fluid would leak out, until all of a sudden, with no warning, the car would have no brakes. I looked at all that, and being a bloody good Detective Sergeant, I made a mental note of every detail.
‘Then, when there was nothing else in the car that I hadn’t inspected and logged in my mind, nothing else to distract me and when I couldn’t avoid it any longer, I looked at my wife and I saw her, covered in blood and glass, with her chest smashed in by the steering column, and her face wrecked by the wheel.
‘I looked at that scene, I went into shock, and the trauma closed my mental notebook, closed it tight until Kevin O’Malley reopened it for me four months ago.’
He looked across again at his friend, and Martin saw a plea for understanding in his eyes. ‘There’s no mistake, Andy. I don’t think it’s even possible to dream things up under that sort of treatment.