Skinner's Trail Read Free

murmur since he was tidied up.'
    `Terrific. When can I come to see him?'
    `You can come today, if you like.' He glanced at Sarah for confirmation, and saw her nod vigorously. 'They're in the posh parent ward, so visiting hours aren't a problem. Come this evening if you like.
    `Fine. I should be clear by then.'
    `Okay. Where are you just now? You sounded a bit grumpy when you answered.'
    `Looking at stiffs still gets me that way. I'm at a murder scene.
    Skinner frowned. Since his promotion at the beginning of April, following a three-month secondment to the Los Angeles Police Department, Andy Martin had been in command of the force's Drugs and Vice Squad, two formerly separate units combined by Skinner into a single department because of the strong link between narcotics and prostitution, and the AIDS - related dangers which this trend had created.
    `What are you doing at a murder?'
    `Ah, boss, this isn't any old murder. The stiff here's a celebrity.' Martin paused, and Skinner's eyebrows rose. 'But you don't want to know about this just now, do you?'
    `Come on, boy. Who've you got there?'
    `Well, if you insist. Tell Sarah you forced it out of me, though. The guest of honour here is only Mr Tony Manson, that's all.'
    Skinner's surprise expressed itself in a low, drawn-out whistle. 'Terrible Tony! Murdered? There's no doubt it was murder?'
    `If it wasn't, he's made a bloody good job of hiding the suicide weapon.'
    `Where are you?'
    `At his place, out in Barnton. I'll show you the pictures tomorrow.'
    `Trinity? Oh yes, I remember. I knocked that house over a few years back, when I was doing your job. Found bugger all, of course.' Skinner paused. He glanced over at the bed. 'Listen, Andy. Stuff the pictures! Keep him on ice. This one I've got to see for myself. Sarah and wee Jazz will probably go for a sleep soon. I'll be down then.'
    Two
    The dead ones bothered him so much more now.
    Before . . . well, before it had been part of the job. He had been called in and there they were: carcasses, no more than that. It didn't matter whether they had been men, women or children. At the moment of his first contact, they were all just victims, and Skinner had been able to deal with them on that basis, however bloody the remains, however cruel the killing.
    Oh, he had been righteously angered on many occasions. There had been a child killer a decade ago; Bob had seen to it, with a word to an assistant governor, that the man's first night as a convicted prisoner had been spent in open association with the rest. His next three weeks had been spent in hospital, and all the years since then in segregation. Yet, on the whole, Skinner had coped dispassionately with the nasty side of the job. It was, after all, an essential part of leadership. It had helped him take the fast track to his present exalted position as Assistant Chief Constable and head of criminal investigation in Scotland's capital, a city whose cruel streak is never shown to the tourists but which lurks there, nonetheless.
    Yet Bob Skinner, like the great majority, had reached his forties without ever having seen another human being actually die, without looking into a person's face as the last breath was drawn. Now he had been there, done that. In fact, he had done more — much more. Now, every time he was called to a murder scene, the centre of attraction was more than just a victim. Skinner found himself stepping into that person's mind, thinking their thoughts, forming a picture of that last moment, not as an observer but as a participant experiencing the rage and terror of the life as it was stolen.
    `Theft. That's what murder is .' As he opened the heavy brassbound front door, flanked on either side by a row of four granite curling stones, Skinner recalled a sombre speech made to a police-force dinner party by a senior judge. 'The most serious theft of all: the theft of life, of time, of years unfulfilled. And for what? Once it's stolen, it can't be used. It has no resale