a yacht in all that? Are you sure it didn’t just sink?’
‘No, no; it’s been missing for a while, since early last October. The police have been looking for it ever since, but now it seems they’ve given it up as a bad job. I had a visit from a senior bod a couple of weeks ago. She gave me the pro forma chat about priorities, budgets and all that crap,’ he snapped, his tone full of anger, ‘then she told me that they’ve closed the active investigation.’
‘That’s too bad,’ I responded. I understood his frustration and did my best to sound sympathetic, although it was a judgement call that I’d probably have backed, if it had been referred to me . . . as it might have been, for I was in my last few days as Strathclyde chief constable.
‘What about your insurers?’ I asked.
Finally he did step away from the window, limping over to a tub chair at the coffee table where I was seated, and slumping into it. ‘My bloody insurers?’ he moaned. ‘Given the value of the vessel, I’d have expected them to employ their own investigators, but no, they said that there is no recognised independent expert in pursuing this type of theft, so they elected to leave it in the hands of the police.
‘However, they did appoint a maritime lawyer to look into the circumstances of the theft. He looked at the boathouse, interviewed me and then reported back to the insurance company.
‘On the basis of what he said, they’ve now offered me a fraction of its value in settlement, only one million against the insured value of five million sterling. They’re claiming negligence on my part, saying that the alarm system wasn’t adequate. I could fight them, of course, and my legal advice is that I’d get some sort of a result, but that’s not the point! I want the damn thing back!’
‘Look,’ I began, then paused, trying to work out how best to explain to him that if the investigation had been thorough and the combined police and marine services, nationally and possibly internationally as well, hadn’t been able to find his missing vessel, then he’d better get ready to sue that insurance company.
I was about to tell him as much, when a memory broke in and overrode everything.
‘Hold on!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve seen it. I know where it was taken!’
Five
Yes, there is indeed history between Eden Higgins and me. It stretches back twenty years or so, to the days when I was the newly promoted Detective Superintendent Skinner, heading up Edinburgh’s Serious Crimes Unit, to the years when I was a single parent, widowed and doing my best to raise my adolescent daughter Alexis on my own.
That said, I wasn’t always alone: between Myra’s death and my meeting Sarah, my second wife, there were a few ladies in my life, and of those the most serious was Alison Higgins. She was a cop like me, a detective sergeant, then detective inspector, and she matched me in most ways, not least in ambition.
We were a natural couple; we liked each other, we were good together, vertically and horizontally, and our tastes were similar. Alex approved of her too; that was a prerequisite of any relationship, and Alison passed that test from the start. Although we never formally lived together, she was the only woman who had clothes hanging in my wardrobe, and whose toothbrush stood alongside mine in the mug, until Sarah came into my life.
She didn’t talk about her family much, not at the beginning. Looking back, I recognise that may have been because in those days, I never talked about mine. I was still hurting too much over Myra, and my childhood was an absolute no-go area. Thus, it was a complete surprise when she invited Alex and me to go sailing with her one weekend, on her brother’s yacht.
Anyone who watched commercial television in those days had to be aware of Dene Furnishing; it was one of the nation’s biggest retailers, with a huge turnover and an advertising budget to match. When Myra and I set up house as a very young couple, most of our furniture came from its Bathgate store; indeed, I still have some of it.
I knew all about Dene, but I had no idea that it was owned and had been built, from the ground up, by Eden Higgins, Alison’s older brother. She’d mentioned him to me, but only vaguely. On the other hand, he