‘She won’t get my damn vote!’ Sarah exclaimed.

  ‘Nor mine, I promise. Anyway, we might not vote there: at least I might not. Now we’ve taken the decision to move the family base out here for a few years, there’s a case for only voting in local council elections.’

  ‘I can see that.’ She looked up at him, as the last of the sun died behind the hills. ‘Have you told Alex we’re going?’

  He nodded. ‘We had that discussion this afternoon. She said she’s pleased for us. She added that it’ll be good not to have me tripping over her career every so often.’

  ‘And she and Dominick? Are they going to live happily ever after, do you think?’

  Bob Skinner sighed. ‘Fuck me, I hope so.’

  One Hundred and Eleven

  ‘Vall de Núria,’ Dan Provan read from the laptop screen. ‘Yes, I fancy that. When do you want to go? The website says it’s all year round. How about the school October week?’

  ‘Nah,’ Lottie said. ‘That’s too near winter; that high up in the mountains it might snow. That would make hiking difficult, and you’ll never get me on a ski slope. No, I’m thinking of next summer; the weather will be beautiful, but not too hot at eight thousand feet, and by that time Jakey will be a year older and able to come with us on all of the hikes.’

  ‘Even up the peak and into France?’

  ‘Maybe; it would be good to try it without a helicopter.’ She frowned. ‘That was one fit wumman that Lita and I chased up there. On foot we’d never have got near her. In fact, if she’d had just a wee bit of energy left and went on in a different direction, we’d just have watched her disappear.’

  ‘Was it all worth it in the end?’ Dan asked. ‘All that effort to bring her back?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Lottie admitted. ‘Pure fuckin’ politics is what it was in the end, but we weren’t to know that at the time . . . even if Skinner bein’ kidnapped by the Secret Service might have given us a clue.’ She laughed. ‘Those poor sorry bastards. Did I tell you he’s moved to Spain, by the way?’ she added.

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘A mix of business and family reasons, Sauce said to me when he told me that they’d folded the Ayre investigation. That was hardly surprising given that Ruby Goldstein was their chief suspect and I saw her on Sky News two weeks ago announcing her poor father’s death.’

  Provan leaned back in his chair. ‘Lottie, my love,’ he said. ‘I never liked the idea of some things in the job being above my pay grade, but the fact is, sometimes they are, even for you. Move on, and focus on breaking in this new DS of yours. What’s his name again?’

  ‘I told you. Another John, to follow his predecessor, Cotter. This one’s called Stirling, same as the city. But he’s from Perth, to confuse me further.’

  ‘That’s right. Do you want me to talk to him and explain the realities of life with DCI Charlotte Mann?’

  ‘Hell no! Let him find out for himself.’

  Fifteen minutes later she was helping her partner in the kitchen when they were interrupted by her ring tone. ‘Stirling’, the screen read. She sighed and then, against her better judgement, accepted.

  ‘John?’ she began, forcing herself to sound patient.

  ‘Boss.’ The DS sounded appropriately nervous. ‘I know you’re off, and normally I wouldn’t bother you, but I’ve just had a call from CID in North Ayrshire. They’re standing beside a camper van in a new housing development in Irvine. It’s got a wheel clamp on it and it’s been there for a while. The neighbours reported it because they said it was starting to smell bloody awful. According to the CID at the scene, they’re absolutely right. It smells like death, they say.’

  Acknowledgements

  To the real AJ.

  To my friend Dave, who makes a brief appearance disguised as a swan and with a career change.

  To the proprietors of various East Lothian hostelries, who receive friendly mentions.

  To the lovely Frida Teixidor Hoverstad, who makes great tomato toast, and is a queen with oysters too.

  To her brother-in-law, my friend Nicola.

  To my grandkids, Mia and Rex, for continuing to motivate me.

  Welcome back, Spike Thomson.

  To Anne, for introducing me to new cultures, and for showing me a way forward.

  Skinner’s Elves

  By Quintin Jardine

  A Bob Skinner Christmas Story

  ’Twas the night before the Night Before Christmas, 2041 . . .

  For all my father’s distinguished career in the police service, and in several situations beyond it that he has always been reluctant to discuss, even with me, he has never been a devious man. Invariably what you see is how it is; I doubt that he has ever nursed a hidden motive. No, James Andrew, there can be no doubt; the word ‘ulterior’ isn’t in his vocabulary.

  He was never the type of detective who laid traps for the unwary. He achieved his clear-up rate, and it was formidable, by observing, asking, analysing, and eliminating until he was left with only one possible solution, and no mere suspects, only those he knew for sure, and could prove, were guilty.

  In short, he’s never surprised me. Or he hadn’t, not until last Christmas, when he came back from the land of the dead.

  None of my siblings would challenge that view, and I have a number of those, five to be precise. There’s my beloved half-sister Alex, Alexis to give her the name on her birth certificate; she’s a King’s Counsel, President of the Scottish Society of Solicitor Advocates, and number one name on the emergency call list of those our father spent half his life locking up. She’s twenty-two years older than I am . . . I thought she was my aunt until I was four years old . . . from another mother who died in a mangled car when Alex was four herself, leaving her to be brought up by Dad, with occasional visits from a succession of ladies, most of whose names she no longer even tries to recall.

  One she does remember is Mia Watson, or Mia Sparkles if you prefer, the professional name she still uses on her occasional foray into oldies’ commercial radio. Mia and Dad were ships that passed in the night, just one night, so Alex told me, but they passed sufficiently close by for him to dock, and leave her with my half-brother Ignacio, a secret that Mia kept until he was going on twenty and in the sort of trouble that not even Alex could make disappear completely.

  When Ignacio did come into my life he was twice my age, and I was privately resentful of anyone who upset the equilibrium that Dad and Mum had worked so hard to maintain . . . not always successfully, I must admit, as witness a brief and unhappy stay in the US, Mum’s home nation. (My late mother, Professor Sarah Grace, was a forensic pathologist. Her stated ambition was to perform her own autopsy, a feat she achieved, effectively, with the aid of state-of-the-art scanning, allied to the 3D printing of an exact replica of the inoperable brain tumour that killed her the year before last, one day before my thirty-first birthday.)

  Mum was a great woman; she treated Ignacio as if he were her own, ignoring my undisguised resentment, and was every bit as proud as Mia, and every bit as fearful, when he was chosen as chief scientific officer on the international mission to develop Stage Two of the Martian Colony. He’s been there for two years now, and there is no word on when, if ever, he’ll be back. Dad never mentions him, but he knows exactly where Mars is in the dark sky, and on a fine night in the summer, those walking on Gullane Bents may hear one half of a conversation as they pass our garden.

  My sister Seonaid took Mum’s death personally. She’s a medical research scientist, whose obsession is to develop a process by which the brain can heal itself and regrow cancerous or degenerated tissue, as can be done now by all other major organs. The project was her obsession before Mum’s diagnosis. She almost went crazy trying to find the missing pieces of the puzzle in time to save her, but they eluded her, as they still do. It was all that I, Dawn, my youngest sibling, and Dad could do to keep her together as Mum’s illness progressed to its inevitable conclusion. He and I couldn’t have managed it on our own. Dawn is special; she’s a healer. Not the conventional kind, but holistic, working one-on-one with those who are emotionally damaged or deprived. Her technique with the autistic and with Asperger’s sufferers is so moving that when BBC screened a documentary on her in the summer, there wasn’t a dry eye in our house, or, I’m sure, in many others. She’s only failed with one patient as far as I know; I’ll get to him shortly.

  With such a record of fecundity, it would be reasonable to imagine my father being knee-deep in grandchildren, but that’s not exactly the case. If it wasn’t for me and for my adoptive brother Mark, he wouldn’t have any. Mark is what they used to call a geek. He is the least physically co-ordinated person I know. When we were kids he was crap at football, worse at golf, and he flat out wasn’t allowed to play rugby. But sit him in front of a games console and he is a killer. That’s how he met Luisa, fourteen years ago at a geeks’ convention in Tokyo. Yes, she was one too, still is; it was love at first sight, a marriage made in virtual reality and in a combination of two unique talents. Mark had been working on the principles of holographic gaming, but was growing frustrated because no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get the blood to look realistic. Luisa showed him how; then she told him that he was wasting his talent, and that not everything had to be interactive and voice-controlled. Instead of games, between them they started to make movies, 3D hologram dramas, comedies, romances, you name it, with stars who cost nothing at all, for they were self-generated within the family. That’s right, they used us as the models for their heroes, heroines and villains. They took the old-fashioned graphic novel and used it as the basis for their own art form. They’ve gone beyond virtual reality, contained within a headset, and developed a lifelike experience that can be enjoyed by groups of people. Holo-halls are popping up around the world, and their beauty is that they require little or no set-up investment.

  Mind you, they’d still be dirt poor without me. Technically they may be creative geniuses, but they are completely lacking in imagination and in commercial know-how. I fill both those gaps: I write the screenplays, I run the sales platform, and I promote the product, globally and beyond. The Lunar City, which has grown exponentially over the last ten years, after a hesitant first decade, is one of our biggest markets. It’s quite a place, half of it on the surface and half in a network of caverns that the Japanese discovered back in the Teens; Priti and I were blown away when we visited it two years ago.

  Priti? My wife, and our musical director, when she’s not being a reconstructive orthopaedic surgeon. She and I met in hospital, once she’d put me back together again . . . with a little added value . . . after an unfortunate outcome to a mission in Montenegro. I got rather too close to an old-fashioned RPG in an old-fashioned combat situation, one of the very few these days that brings opposing forces into the same kill zone.

  ‘It’s always the fucking Balkans,’ Dad growled, as I emerged from the anaesthetic. ‘It always will be the fucking Balkans. They tore the EU apart like they’ve torn themselves apart for centuries.’

  ‘Tore me apart too,’ I whispered, remembering my last sight of the remnants of my right leg.

  He nodded. ‘Yes, but you’re back together. Your surgeon completed all the neural connections to your prosthesis in one go, and married the real bone to the synthetic one.’

  Behind him, Mum nodded. ‘It had to be done in a hurry, while the nerves could still be linked; there were only three available and they took the best match. You won’t have a limp, but you will have one foot larger than the other for the rest of your life, which, thanks to Ms Makela here,’ she glanced to her left at a tall brown-skinned woman in a blue uniform ‘will run its full course.’

  ‘But not in the military,’ Dad said.

  ‘No?’ I frowned. ‘One of my company has a prosthetic arm. Don’t write me off yet.’

  ‘Not in the military,’ he repeated. For a second I thought I saw tears in his eyes, but I was still well zonked, so I could have been mistaken. Whatever, I knew there was no point in arguing. Even if I had defied him and reported back for army duty, my father has powerful friends, not least among them my one-time stepmother, who was Prime Minister for twelve years. I had no doubt that if I did try to return I would fail the inevitable medical. And so I sat quiet and lived with it when they promoted me to Major, gave me a medal and, a couple of months into my leave of absence, discharged me.

  That happened four years ago. For a few weeks after my surgery I had no idea how I was going to spend the rest of my life. Dad, always looking for a return on his investments, offered to find me something with InterMedia, the group of which he’s been a director since he left the police service, where I could use the degree in business studies that he insisted I take before I joined the army. I declined as gracefully as I could, telling him that I wanted to make my own way. His mind must have blanked that out, for in the next breath he offered to have a word with Chief Constable Harold Haddock, his one-time protégé, and ease my path into the national police force. I laughed out loud at that one; no way was I going to spend a career failing to live up to his legend.

  Instead, after a few weeks of therapy and mobility work, I went home on leave to await the inevitable, back to Gullane where I’d grown up. I moved into the apartment above the garage that had been created when Ignacio joined the family; yes, a twenty-eight-year-old war veteran occupying a space designed for a teenager. Happily it was big enough for two, because in the first months I had a regular weekend visitor, until she secured a move to an orthopaedic reconstruction unit in Edinburgh and moved in permanently. My surgeon had taken a keen interest in my rehab, as I had in her, to the extent that after three weeks she had to recuse herself from my care. We found that we had shared interests; music, art, crime novels, the theatre, fine dining, travel, and sex, of course.

  It was Priti who ordered me to write; she wanted to make a case study of me, and it would be a hell of a lot easier, she said, if I drafted something out myself. I took her rather too literally. I began with an account of the first day of my basic training, and three weeks later I presented her with a full narrative of my service career, ending on the day I walked out of hospital in Birmingham. My draft was no use for her purposes, but she enjoyed it so much that I changed all of the names and most of the locations, since many of my company’s operations had been officially deniable, then self-published it as an e-book on every available platform, under a nom-de-plume, Jazz Morgan, a combination of the childhood moniker that’s followed me ever since, and Dad’s middle name.

  It made me a small fortune and nobody in the Ministry of Defence caught on that I had danced around the Official Secrets Act, not then, not ever. That surprises me as I dedicated it to Priti, but the people who run our armed services have never been famed for their joined-up thinking.

  I didn’t even mention my work to my siblings, but the name was a dead giveaway to Mark when he spotted it while trawling on Amazon. He’s a tight sod, so he made me send him and Luisa a freebie. They read it. Mark winced all the way through, but Luisa’s eyes just got wider and wider, she told me, as she saw its possibilities . . . and holo-theatre was born.

  My story was their first production, from the start to its gory conclusion. I did the script, and found screen-writing to be no great hassle; my story was full of dialogue and taking it further wasn’t difficult. The music was a bonus; Priti’s played the sitar since she was twelve, and had written several original pieces for that twangy instrument. One of them was perfect as the theme, re-scored and played on a synthesiser.

  Three years after that successful launch, and on the back of nine feature productions that followed, we decided to mark the event by gathering the family together . . . apart from Ignacio, obviously . . . for Christmas in Dad’s house in L’Escala in Spain. In truth it was more than that; we were all still mourning Mum, Dad deepest of all, so deeply that we were afraid he would follow her, way before his time.

  I say ‘we decided’ but there was no discussion involved. Alex decreed, and that meant it was a done deal. Okay, Dad put up a token protest, but he hasn’t been able to overrule her since shortly after her thirteenth birthday. The clincher for my brother and I, and our partners, was the fact that it would bring our two children together. That happens rarely since Mark, Luisa and Roland, who is four, are in London, while Priti and I and our two-year-old, Alexandra, moved from living near Alex in Edinburgh to take over the Gullane house after Mum’s death, at Dad’s insistence. He refused to go in there, declaring it haunted. Instead he moved into the apartment, indifferent to my hope that eventually he might occupy a small bungalow that would be built on another part of the plot.

  The Spanish house isn’t big enough for us all but, so that Dad would always be close to his grandchildren, Mark and I rented a villa three doors down, with the same view across the bay, for our sisters. Those three are all single, although only Alex is resolutely so. She has never had a relationship that’s lasted longer than three years, although her first, with one of Dad’s detective crew, was an on-off-on-again and finally off-for-good affair that occupied half of her twenties, and left her handicapped, maybe even crippled, emotionally. Seonaid has no such hang-ups, and plenty of boyfriends, but declares herself too busy to share her life. Dawn is gay, but waiting for the right woman to come along.

  The rental property was no more than a dormitory. Yes, we set up a small fibre-optic tree against the chance of visits by Roland, who took a keen interest in Christmas, and Alexandra, who was beginning to catch on that presents and a fat bloke with a beard and a red suit were involved, but the focus of the gathering was at Dad’s place. Auntie Alex would have taken charge of everything, but for once Dad surprised us by stirring from his melancholic apathy.