"I know. He's still the main suspect. Suppose he tries to scare
Andrea again?"
"He needs the fear of Himself put in him then, just in case."
"No, he needs me to advise him and his lawyer, politely, about the need
to make no contact with Miss Strachan, while this enquiry is
unresolved, and she remains a potential witness. Sheringham's well
advised, Stevie. However personal you might find this thing becoming,
he'll be more afraid of the Law Society than he is of you." She smiled
at him.
"But keep an eye on her, informally," she offered, 'if you want.
Someone made that call, and if it wasn't our man downstairs, he's still
around, he knows about Andrea, and we don't know about him."
Steele nodded. "I agree. I'll keep her safe, don't worry." He looked
at Rose. "I like her; that's all I'm saying, but there's something
about her, Maggie. With her medication stable and her confidence back,
she really is a completely different personality. She's attractive,
and she's got a dry sense of humour about her that takes you by
surprise."
"But she's wounded, Steve. Don't forget that."
"I know she is. She knows what's happened to her, and even though
she's fine under treatment, she hasn't forgotten it. She can't hide
her pain completely... any more than you can."
Maggie started; she looked sharply at him, and for a moment he thought
that he had said something that would destroy their easy relationship,
until she turned her face away and looked out of the window.
"That obvious, huh?" she murmured.
"It is to me."
"Is the whole force talking about me, then?" she asked. "About me and
my husband?"
"Not the whole force; only those who don't know any better, although
that's about ninety per cent. Those who know you both, reckon that if
you've got problems, you're strong enough to sort them out in time.
While you're doing that, they don't change the people you are."
She turned back to face him, leaning back against the edge of her desk.
"We don't have problems, Stevie," she whispered. "I do. Mario's
sleeping with your ex-girlfriend ... his own cousin ... and I don't
mind. I wish I did, but I don't. That's all part of it, you see. I
don't and I can't."
"Maggie, sorry," he exclaimed. "I shouldn't have said anything. I
wasn't prying, honest."
"I know you weren't. Somebody had to say something, eventually; I'd
rather it was you than Dan Pringle, or George, or some other dipstick.
You may have a reputation among women as a dangerous guy, Stevie, but
as far as I'm concerned you're a nice bloke. You listen, and you care.
So listen to this. The thing is, I'm glad that Paula and Mario are
indulging themselves with each other. Because it takes a big weight
off of me! Understand?"
He put his hands on her shoulders; to her inward surprise, she did not
flinch, not pull away. "I think so," he replied. "Now you understand
this, Detective Superintendent Rose. I don't know what's happened to
fuck up your head, and instinct tells me that I do not want to know,
but whatever it is, however awful, it is not big enough to overcome
your spirit. You are a very attractive woman, Maggie, but you're more
than that. You're the strongest woman I've ever met, and I've admired
you through all the time we've worked together. You may have given in
to self-doubt, and persuaded yourself that you can never overcome this
problem, and have let it dictate how you live your life. If you have,
you are wrong. I don't believe there is anything that you can't face
down, with what's in here .. ." he put a finger against her forehead
'.. . and in here." He tapped the same finger against her chest,
between her breasts.
little informal, ma'am," he murmured. "But you're worth it."
She looked solemnly up at him, and realised that for the first time in
as long as she could remember, she felt no hint of revulsion at the
touch of a man. She lifted his hand, in turn, to her face, and held it
gently against her cheek for a few seconds, then let it go.
"Forgiven, inspector," she murmured, full of confusion, but smiling.
"And thanks for caring. What if you're wrong, though?"
He raised an eyebrow. "You're not going to tell me, are you, that you
don't have the courage even to try?"
Forty-Two.
It had been years since Neil Mcllhenney had seen Lenny Plenderleith.
Bob Skinner had told him that the man had changed during the years of
his imprisonment, and for the better, in many ways, but one thing
remained. He was still as big as ever.
The giant laughed softly. "So I can trust you with my life, can I," he
said. "He hasn't lost his touch, has he. So you're his man, are you?
What's happened that he can't come to see me himself? He always has
before."
Mcllhenney was struck by Big Lenny's quiet confidence. He had changed
indeed from his days as principal enforcer to the late and almost
unlamented Tony Manson. The gang leader had been mourned only by his
protege, a fact which had proved unfortunate to his killers.
Skinner said, after Lenny's imprisonment for the murder, that the
greatest mistake a man could make was to underestimate him. Some of
those who had were no longer around to regret it.
"He's got problems; family things. He's in America at the moment,
trying to sort them out."
"He's got one in Scotland that I know about; tough luck about his
brother winding up in that lady's basement. Do they know what it was
yet? Did somebody do him?"
"He died of a heart attack .. . while he was salmon fishing maybe."
Lenny Plenderleith leaned across the Shorts Prison visiting room table;
they were alone, at Mcllhenney's insistence. "You and I will get on
better, Mr. Mcllhenney, if you don't spin me any more fairy tales
Nobody goes salmon fishing when a river's in full spate, and bursting
its banks, especially not, as the Scotsman informed me, an alcoholic
who's lived the last thirty years of his life in a Jesuit hostel. Maybe
he did die of a heart attack, but how did he wind up in the Tay?"
"We don't know," the inspector admitted. "But he died of natural
causes, so finding out is not at the top of Tayside CID's things-to-do
list."
"They'd better move it up then, or is Bob not coming back from the
States?"
"He'll be back, all right, but I'm not sure when."
Lenny frowned. "So what's happened in America that's more important
than his brother?"
"It's a family matter, that's all; it's got nothing to do with this
visit, I promise you."
"I'm curious, though. I read about his in-laws being killed a few
months back; I even had a look at the New York Times website. The old
man rated quite an obituary; he was a friend of the Kennedys and the
Clintons, so it said."
"You certainly keep yourself informed," Mcllhenney observed.
"I have to do something in here; I've done my Open University degree. I
did ask if I could
get day release from here to do a doctorate at
Napier, but they wouldn't wear it. Bob said that after I'd done ten
years I should ask again, and he might be able to help. In the
meantime, I'm writing; I've done the obligatory reformed lifer's
autobiography, a book about the career of Tony Manson, drug lord with a
happened after it. I wanted to do one about Bob Skinner, too, but he
won't play."
"So what'll you do instead of that? Fiction?"
"Eventually maybe, but not yet; next I plan to do an academic study of
the homicidal mind. It'll go on to look at people like West, Dahmer,
Shipman, Sutcliffe and so on, and it'll try to give voice to their
thoughts as they did what they did."
"What about your own?"
Plenderleith looked sternly at his visitor. "Please, spare me that.
Although I have killed people, I don't have a homicidal mind in that
sense. I am a sociopath; that's allowed me to do what I've done in the
past. But I am also a clever sociopath; I know that I cannot continue
to do those things and retain the possibility of ever breathing free
air, and thanks to my inheritance from Tony I won't be under any
pressure to do them when I'm released. No one has a problem being left
alone with me; I'm probably the safest man in this place." He grinned
at Mcllhenney.
"I do virtually all my research on the internet. When I'm logged on I
read a selection of world newspapers, to keep up with current affairs.
There's some interesting stuff out there." Plenderleith paused and
glanced across at the policeman. "I even read about this actress," he
said, 'a year or so back, who chucked it all to marry some dumb copper
in Edinburgh ... lucky bastard that he is."
"Sure," said the inspector, with sudden bitterness. "So lucky that his
first wife died in her prime and left him with two kids. But you know
about widowhood, don't you, Lenny? You killed your wife."
The giant drew a breath; for a while, Neil thought that the interview
was at an end. But then he exhaled and glanced across to the window.
"Wrong subject for us, then," he murmured. "I'm sorry; I didn't know
that."
"You must have missed the Scotsman that day. My Olive had a fine
obituary; Bob Skinner wrote it."
"We all owe Bob, then," said Lenny, 'me as much as anyone. He might be
the guy who got me banged up in here, but he was only doing his job
..." he laughed '... not that I made it easy for him. He wasn't just
doing his job, though, when he put in a word to get me a standard
lifer's tariff, when any other copper... you included ... would have
left me here to rot, doing a minimum thirty years. So how can I help
him?"
Mcllhenney leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Apart from his family
things, the boss has had another problem lately. There's this
councillor, Agnes Maley; she's had it in for him for years. Just
lately, she's really been getting above herself. It's time she was
brought under control."
Lenny shook his huge head, smiling. "Black Agnes, eh."
"You know her?"
"Oh yes, I know her. If I'd read that she had been fished out of a
river the other day, rather than Bob's brother, it would have surprised
me a lot less. But you'll need to be nifty on your feet to get
anything on her."
"Maybe we have been. I've been looking into her past, and at some of
the people she's been associated with. About twelve years back, there
was a nasty murder in Edinburgh. It involved a rent boy, called Paul
Deary.. . yes, I know, an appropriate name. He was found, naked, in a
skip just along from the Elsie Inglis. Not just a murder; the way he
was killed told us that the lad had been made an example of. His
throat was cut and his balls were stuffed in his mouth." The inspector
gave an involuntary shudder.
"We leaned on a lot of people, and eventually we found out that he had
worked in a male brothel right in the middle of the Old Town, under the
control of a pimp called Jason Fargo. We raided the place mob-handed
and lifted everyone; I was in on it myself. We found the usual
selection of clients, but we let them go. One of them was a
journalist, so we were fairly certain it would be covered up. Instead
we concentrated on the boys who were working there; the Big Man led the
investigation himself. He showed them all photographs of Deary, at the
scene and in the mortuary. He asked them to imagine the boy's last
moments. He asked them to consider how safe they would all be if the
guy who did it wasn't caught. And then he locked them up and waited.
"It only took one night in the cells. Two of them started talking and
eventually they all did. They told us that Jason Fargo had come in the
night Paul was killed and taken him away. He'd pulled him out of
there, screaming, by the hair. They told us about another kid who'd
disappeared as well, about six months earlier. Both boys had been
freelancing; they'd been working the pubs in Leith and keeping all
their money. In Fargo's place, they got a third of what they earned,
if they were lucky. They were slaves.
"We turned Jason's flat over, looking for forensic traces, but there
was nothing; we were in trouble then, because we needed more for the
Crown Office to proceed with a murder charge. Then one of the boys
told us that he'd been with Jason once, and he'd stopped at a lock-up
garage out off Causewayside. He'd gone in, come out with a stereo,
locked it again and driven off. The lad had assumed, correctly, that
it was used to store knock-off, and had thought no more about it.
"He took us there; we opened it under a warrant, and went in. Bingo;
the kid's blood was up the walls, and his clothes were in a pile in the
corner. There was stolen gear all over the place and Jason's prints
were all over it. Fargo admitted it; it surprised us at the time, but
he just folded. He even took us to the spot in the Queen's Park where
he'd buried the first lad .. . poor kid, I can't even remember his
name. He told us what we had guessed, that he had killed Paul like
that to scare all the others off private enterprise.
"The Crown Office threw every possible charge at him; murder, forcing
under-age boys into prostitution, keeping a disorderly house, the lot.
The judge he drew was a well-known practising Catholic; he gave him a
minimum twenty-five years."
He stopped; Lenny Plenderleith applauded, silently. "Well told,
inspector. You had me right on the edge of my seat there. As a matter
of fact, I remember the case very well. Tony was very pleased when Mr.
Fargo got stuffed. He did not approve of the wee boy business. Yes,
I'll grant you, he was into saunas himself, but in Edinburgh, properly
run, they can be positively therapeutic. Your friend McGuire should
agree with that; Tony's estate, which I administer, sold a number of
them to his very attractive cousin .. . kissing cousin, from what I
hear.. . Ms Viareggio, although some of the purchase price was paid by
&nb
sp; a cheque signed by Mr. McGuire's mother."
The giant grinned as he watched Mcllhenney fail to mask his surprise.
"There's a lot big Mario doesn't tell you, eh Neil," he said. "On the
other hand, there's hardly anything that people don't tell me; nothing
at all when I want to know. But I'm sorry. Go on with your tale."
The inspector pulled himself together. Lenny had been right; the news
about Christina McGuire helping to fund Paula's sauna purchase had come
as a complete surprise. "Right, and this is where Maley comes in.
Fargo's place was in her council ward at the time, and she's like you.
She knows everything that happens on her patch. We didn't pursue that
angle at the time; it would have been pointless anyway. But the other
day, I went round a few people who were involved in that case. One or
two of the lads involved have made decent lives for themselves. I got