A Hint of Death (A Bob Skinner Short Story) (Kindle Single) (3 page)

Haddock smiled. ‘What about Hazel McVie?’ he asked. ‘What did you think of her? She always struck me as a quiet, withdrawn wee lass, never one of us.’

‘She always struck me as a duplicitous little twat!’ Audrey retorted. ‘You guys were all taken in by her. She wanted you to feel sorry for her, since she never thought any of you’d ever fancy her. She was also a fucking grass.’

Haddock smiled at her vehemence. ‘Come on, that’s a bit extreme.’

‘You think? Remember that time when you were a prefect and full o’ yourself, and you belled me off for bullying McVie? If I hadn’t been so bloody hurt by you, I’d have told you at the time I wasn’t bloody bullying her. I was squaring her up for having fed Andries a story about me shagging Pete Collins, who just happened to be Andries’s nephew.

‘That cow of a teacher had me in her room over that, for a “woman to woman chat”, as she called it. I’d no idea what she was talking about. There was nothin’ between me and Pete, and I told her as much. When I got laid back into her, she let it slip that the story had come from wee Hazel. That made it all clear; I was going with Alan Grierson at the time and the wee bitch fancied him herself. She knew she’d no chance so she tried to make trouble for me.’

‘I see,’ Haddock murmured. ‘I had no idea about any of that stuff.’

‘Why should you? By that time you could see nothin’ but Mary McDougal’s admittedly impressive tits.’

‘Mmm. You’re not wrong there.’ He paused. ‘But hold on, how did I hurt you?’

‘Jesus Christ, Sauce,’ Audrey gasped. ‘Was my reputation really that bad? Did you really believe I was Raleigh the school bike? I didn’t take you into that shed at Barry’s party just to pass the time. I had a serious case of lurv, my boy.’ To his astonishment she blushed bright pink.

‘I might have been brassy and more than a wee bit flirty, but the truth was, I was as innocent as you were. But how would you have known that, eh?’

‘You said you were on the pill,’ he responded, lamely.

‘I was too, but that was down to my mother bein’ determined that lightning would not strike twice. She was sixteen when she had me, and no, she never did marry my dad. The fact was, Sauce, you broke my heart.

‘Of course, you, being a guy, would probably say it was my fault. A guy’s always got to have a woman to blame.’ She bit another large chunk off her pizza.

‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’d never say that. I felt the same way about you; I just couldn’t bring myself to say it, that was all. I couldn’t even pluck up the courage to ask you out, not even after we’d … because I still thought you’d knock me back.’

‘So,’ she said, when she had finished her mouthful, ‘we were both a pair of young fools?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Then it was probably just as well: I’d fallen in love with someone else six months later, and you had your head stuck between Mary McDougal’s racing Zeppelins. Still, I feel better for this wee chat. Let it be a lesson to you as well, Sauce,’ she added. ‘Picking brains can be risky if you don’t know what’s in there.’

‘Never go into an interview room with preconceptions about the interviewee. Leave your prejudices in the corridor outside.’

That CID mantra had been drummed into Sauce Haddock from his first day as a detective constable by some very formidable mentors. The foremost of those had been Bob Skinner, the first chief constable he had ever served under, and the scariest man he had ever met. Skinner had since taken himself off to Glasgow, but his influence still hung heavily around his old patch in the capital city.

Sauce had the dictum firmly in mind as he walked up the path to Tammy Jones’s front door.
She must have done all right in her divorce
, he thought. The house was a substantial detached villa in a new estate in Liberton, less than a mile from Drumdonald Academy.

It had taken him less than an hour and a couple of phone calls to trace her, and to build a profile. Mr Jones … whose forename was George, a coincidence that would have delighted Tammy’s country and western crazy dad … was a partner in a fund management firm. They had been married for eleven years, until he had traded her in for an investment analyst.

She had a career of her own, in the same Edinburgh business community as her husband, but in a different profession. Her national insurance record showed she had interrupted it for only a year after having young Crawford. She was a recruitment consultant, making good money, although nowhere near her ex-husband’s salary bracket.

He rang her bell with no certainty that she would answer, only the hope that a single mother would be at home with her son on the evening of a school day. In the event, it was the boy who opened the door, a tall kid, with suspicious eyes.

‘Is your mother in?’ he asked. ‘My name’s Haddock.’

‘Are you a client?’ he asked, with a hint of aggression.

‘No, I’m a cop; detective sergeant.’

As he spoke he heard the swish of a door opening over carpet, and a second later Tammy Jones stepped into the hall, behind her son. ‘I’ll deal with this, Crawford,’ she said. ‘You get up to your room and do your homework.’

With a final frown at the visitor, the boy obeyed. ‘I’m sorry,’ his mother said. ‘I only caught the detective sergeant bit.’

Haddock repeated his name and showed his warrant card.

‘You’d better come in.’ She stood aside. ‘First door on the left.’

Yes indeed you scored in the divorce
, Haddock said to himself as he surveyed the furniture in her lounge. He had seen something almost identical when he and Cheeky had gone shopping for a new dining table, and remembered gasping at the price.

Tammy Jones swept her strawberry hair away from her face. ‘Am I in the shit?’ she asked quietly.

‘Not right now,’ he replied. ‘As for the future, that depends on the next ten minutes or so.’

‘This is about Trevor, isn’t it?’ she said, dropping into a soft leather chair, and watching him as he sat opposite her on a matching settee.

‘Yes,’ he conceded.

‘So the stupid bastard went to the police?’

‘Not exactly.’ He explained how he had become involved. ‘This isn’t formal yet,’ he told her. ‘Mr Christie isn’t too keen on all this going public, you’ll be glad to hear.’

‘I’ll bet he isn’t,’ she snorted. ‘Look, I know that what we did was wrong, but morally, I don’t feel that I have anything on my conscience.’

‘You think that extortion is okay, do you, Mrs Jones?’

‘I don’t see it as extortion.’

‘You might not, but if Trevor Christie makes a formal complaint, you could find that the High Court sees it very differently.’

She threw her head back. ‘He’d be mad to do that.’

‘No, just angry: but he doesn’t have to do it himself. On the basis of what I’ve been told, I’m within my rights to caution you right now and take you down to Leith for questioning.’

‘Then do it,’ she declared. ‘I’ll get my coat. Crawford can stay with the boy next door for a couple of hours, for that’s as long as I’ll be.’

As Haddock looked at her, that old mantra, and Bob Skinner’s frown, came back into his mind.
No preconceptions, Sauce
.

‘Let’s keep it here for now,’ he said, ‘and start from the beginning. You met Mr Christie when you enrolled your son at Drumdonald, yes?’

‘True.’

‘After which you met several times, socially?’

‘We had dates, yes.’

‘You had a weekend away at a cottage in Wooler?’

‘Again, true. It was a big step, for both of us, I think.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, for a start, I hadn’t been with a man since my marriage ended, and Trevor said he had been alone since his wife passed away. I was very nervous and so was he. Look,’ she sighed, ‘do you need all the gory details?’

‘As many as you think are necessary.’

‘All right, if you must: Trevor had difficulty getting …’ she paused, clearly embarrassed. ‘He had difficulty sustaining an erection, but eventually he managed. It wasn’t the dream weekend I’d been hoping for, but I felt sorry for him, so we had a few repeat performances.’

‘Where?’

‘Here, in my house, while Crawford was with his father and his tart.’ Sudden anger flared in her eyes.

‘This house is pretty impressive, Mrs Jones,’ Haddock ventured. ‘You don’t look as if you’re stuck for a few quid. So why did you ask Mr Christie to lend you a thousand?’

‘Crawford’s school term fees were due, my ex was away in America unexpectedly, and I had a cash flow problem. I’m paid on a commission basis and my money comes in irregularly. If George had been here it wouldn’t have been a worry, but he was in bloody Alaska looking at oilfields. Trevor was the easy option.’

‘Did you tell him exactly why you needed the money?’

‘No, because it involved his own school; I didn’t want to explain that to him.’

‘Is that the truth, Mrs Jones? Could it be that the first thousand was a test, a toe in the water to see how flush he was, before going back and demanding ten grand?’

‘No, it wasn’t!’ she retorted. ‘I had no intention of asking for more. Not at that point anyway.’

‘So what happened to change your mind?’ he asked. ‘Did you have another financial crisis?’

‘No. My sister Hazel found out that I was involved with Trevor. She was here one night and I told her. She went crazy; she screamed at me that I was to have nothing to do with that man. I calmed her down and then I asked her what was wrong. That’s when she told me about the abuse.’

‘What, exactly, did she tell you?’

‘That Christie had sex with her, while she was his pupil. She was only fourteen the first time it happened.’

‘And you believed that? You’re sticking by this accusation?’

‘I admit that it came as a complete shock to me, but of course I believed it. So would you if you’d seen her. You have to understand Hazel; she was always a funny kid. She really craved attention, but none of the boys at her school took her seriously. As for the girls, they picked on her because she wasn’t “one of them”. She wasn’t interested in the pop idol of the moment, she wasn’t interested in who was hot in
OK!
magazine that month.’

‘I remember,’ Haddock murmured. ‘I was one of those boys. Hazel and I were in the same year.’

Her eyes widened. ‘You were? Then you’ll remember what she was like.’

‘I do,’ he agreed, ‘but I don’t recall even a hint of anything about her and Mr Christie.’

‘Nevertheless,’ Tammy insisted, ‘it happened. She told me that it started when he gave her a detention, for something trivial. She’d had a bit of a crush on him. It was her deep dark secret, but I think he must have sensed it, for he came on to her. He said that she was a very attractive young lady. She wasn’t … you’ll know … but she was desperate for someone to tell her that. He offered her private tuition. They met up, far away from the school of course. He made her laugh, she said, he made her smile. That was rare for our Hazel; indeed it still is. He told her he loved her, and that there would come a time when they had a future together. She believed it. They had sex, in his car mostly, over the best part of a year.’

‘Why did it stop?’

‘Hazel became pregnant.’

Haddock’s eyes widened. ‘I definitely don’t remember that,’ he exclaimed.

‘You wouldn’t, because it was sorted. When she broke the news to him, he insisted that she went to Mrs Andries, the guidance teacher. She was puzzled, but she did as she was told. The woman didn’t even ask who the father was, Hazel said; she just told her that she’d get into terrible trouble if it all came out but that she wasn’t to worry, for she would arrange a termination. Nobody would ever know about it, she promised; most important, Mum and Dad and I would never know. The abortion happened in a clinic in West Lothian, and we never did find out, not till that night when Hazel went crazy here.’

‘The thing with Christie: how did Hazel say that finished?’

‘The Andries woman told her that she must never see the father again. If she did, then she said that Mum and Dad would have to hear about the abortion. From then on, Christie just ignored her. He cut her dead in the corridor. And she was never in one of his classes again. She tried to fight back, by chasing boys in the vain hope of making him jealous, but that did her no good. She never caught any and it only made her more enemies among the girls.’

She leaned forward and gazed into Haddock’s eyes. ‘She’s never had a relationship since, Detective Sergeant. She’s never held down a job, and she’s never had a place of her own. She still lives with Mum. Dad died three years ago,’ she added. ‘Trevor Christie’s ruined her life. Do you wonder that I decided he was going to pay for it?’

‘You had Hazel write out a statement,’ he said.

‘Yes, then we confronted him and told him to pay up or we’d go to the police.’

‘Why did you only ask for ten thousand?’

‘I had a pretty fair idea that was all he could get hold of, without it affecting his daughter. We didn’t see why she should suffer for his crime. I saw her once, from a distance. She’s a big, beefy lass, so unattractive I felt sorry for her.’ Haddock winced; Jackie Wright, his detective constable, had said much the same, and in that photo on the sideboard, Josey Christie’s mother Tilda, for all her cautious smile, had been no beauty.

‘But she has suffered,’ he said. ‘Mr Christie sold her mother’s jewellery to pay you off. The daughter found out that it had gone and he told her it had been stolen. She called the police and it’s all kicked off from there.’

‘And Trevor says it’s all lies, of course,’ she snapped.

‘Of course. He denies any involvement with Hazel.’

‘As he would. You’ve heard both sides. Who do you believe?’

Haddock looked back at her. ‘I’m not in a position to say. There’s no physical evidence either way. Anyway, my view isn’t the issue. The question is, who would the prosecution believe? The CID has a boss, remember, and that’s the Procurator Fiscal. At the moment, the only thing that can be proved is that you blackmailed ten grand from Trevor Christie.’

‘Eleven,’ she retorted. ‘He’s not getting the first thousand back.’

‘Maybe you should give him it all back, and it’ll stop here.’

‘Never.’