herself, of the victim’s age, it might be better if he attends. You saw how cut up Mr Skinner was after finding the body. I think he’d actually been crying.’
‘I’m sure he had,’ the DCI agreed. He paused, then asked, ‘Otherwise, how did you think he looked?’
‘Leaving aside his distress,’ Haddock replied, ‘I’d say he looks fitter than he has for a while, and more relaxed. Towards the end of his time in the job, he struck me as being wound up real tight.’
‘Me too. I wish he was still with us, though. I always liked it when he turned up at a scene. It felt safer with him around, somehow. Right now, carrying the CID ball for the whole of the city, I will tell you, Sauce, I feel exposed.’
‘Then report this up the line; spread the load.’
‘I have to do that. The new protocol says I have to call our area commander, the chief super. But that’s no great help. Mary Chambers is uniform now. I’m senior CID officer in the city. The buck stays mine.’
‘I know that, Sammy, but I was thinking higher than that. Why don’t you ring the DCC?’
Pye frowned. ‘I don’t want it to look as if I’m crying for help.’
‘It won’t. What do you think Mario McGuire would prefer? To read in the Evening bloody News about a child murder three miles from where he lives, or to hear it from you direct?’
The DCI sighed. ‘You’re right, of course. Thanks. You get on with setting up the scene. Have the uniforms establish a two-hundred-yard perimeter, and manage the flow of cars out of the area. You do that, and I’ll call him.’
Four
‘Somebody’s stolen my boat, Bob.’
Eden Higgins gazed from the window of his office on the Mound, surveying Princes Street, across the gardens. His head moved very slightly, as if he was following the progress of one of Edinburgh’s sleek new trams as it headed westwards on yet another expensive journey.
I was so badly shaken by the incident in the car park that I had come very close to calling off my lunch date. I was full of anger at what I had seen, and hugely frustrated also that I wouldn’t be involved in the search for the person who had killed that lovely, helpless child. No, never mind ‘involved’; I wanted to be in command of the whole damn show.
One of the jobs that I’d been offered by Clive Graham, Scotland’s First Minister, in an attempt to keep me in the service, was as head of a Major Incident Agency, a body that would operate not as part of but alongside the national police force. The idea was that I would form a team of elite detective officers that would provide an added investigative resource in the most serious crimes.
I’d turned it down, because it was a recipe for conflict with Andy Martin from day one, but right at that moment, I wished that I’d accepted.
More than anything else, as I left that shopping mall I wanted to drive back to Gullane, go into the primary school and give my daughter a hug, but that would have raised too many eyebrows, Seonaid’s among them.
Instead I went to my office in Fountainbridge, and turned on the journalistic instincts that I’d developed since I’d taken the InterMedia job. I went to see June Crampsey, and I told her what had happened and how the child’s body had come to be found, without saying that I was the one who’d done the finding.
The other details I omitted were the car’s registration number and its owner’s name and address. That was privileged information; plus I didn’t want her crime reporter getting in the way of the crucial early stages of a murder inquiry.
That done, I sat behind my desk for an hour, doing my best to pass the time usefully, until I was ready to take a taxi to my lunch date with Higgins, a blast from my past, to use his own words.
‘Your boat?’ I echoed, feeling an involuntary frown knot my eyebrows, and a sudden flash of anxiety grip my stomach.
He started to turn, as if to face me, then seemed to think better of it. Resuming his inspection of the grey February morning, he nodded. ‘Yes. It was taken from its mooring in the Gareloch.’
‘Run that past me again,’ I said. ‘We’ve just come through the worst spell of winter weather since God was a boy. Who in their right mind would steal