‘How long will that be?’

  ‘The blue flashing lights on the driveway will give you a clue.’ He smiled. ‘You’d better warn your husband, in case he thinks they’re for him. Thanks, kid,’ he added, ‘you’ve done good.’

  ‘I may remind you of that one day. Good luck.’

  ‘Won’t need it,’ he told her, cheerfully.

  He led his companions inside and through to the living room, where two people sat. Chaz Baker looked up at him in bemused surprise as he entered, his expression changing as he saw the two detectives. Lita Baker sat opposite him, clear eyed and curious.

  ‘Bob,’ Baker exclaimed, rising half out of his seat, less than steadily, then thinking better of it and collapsing back down. ‘What a surprise! It’s good to see you. And ’s good of you boys too, to come and join the celebrations, all things considered.’

  ‘They’re not here to celebrate, Chaz,’ the newcomer replied. ‘They’ve come to arrest your wife for murdering your half-sister, and attempting to pervert the course of justice, by trying to stitch you up for it.’

  Lita Baker jumped to her feet. ‘You’re mad,’ she squealed, and turned to her husband. ‘Chaz! Tell them to get out of here.’

  ‘Nobody’s going anywhere, Dr Baker,’ Skinner said, ‘least of all you,’ as she headed for the door, only to see Haddock step across to block it. ‘Now sit back down please, while I tell this poor sucker what happened. There are a couple of blanks you can fill in if you want, but otherwise, my best advice is that you stay silent until you have a lawyer beside you.’

  Chaz Baker blinked three times, then squeezed his eyes shut, hard, as if he was trying to regain a semblance of sobriety. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he mumbled. ‘Alex said Rogozin killed Annie. Alex knows . . .’

  ‘That’s what we all thought at first, that he and he alone was the murderer, to stop her blowing the whistle on his sexual predation and his blackmail. But that didn’t fit, couldn’t fit, because of one question that couldn’t be answered.’

  He broke off, gazing at Lita Baker. ‘Chaz received a text, supposedly from Annette, summoning him to King Robert Village. It was sent by her killer, after she had been beaten and abducted from the penthouse, taken down the fire stair to the apartment below, and killed, brutally, with Chaz’s belt, the first piece of incriminating evidence. The second was the training top, smeared with blood that was to be dumped in the Merrytown laundry basket.’

  He stopped and pointed a finger at the befuddled manager. ‘Problem,’ he said. ‘Yes, at that time of day he was bound to have come straight from the training ground, but . . . and here’s the crucial question.’

  He glanced across at Pye and Haddock. ‘How could Rogozin, a lone murderer, have known with certainty that Chaz would be caught on CCTV wearing an identical training top to the one that was smeared with Annette’s blood and put in the bin? And that had to be verified,’ he emphasised, ‘or the whole frame-up would be blown. But Rogozin, if it had been him sitting in the apartment below with Annie’s body, he couldn’t have left the apartment, so he couldn’t have seen him.’

  The detective sergeant nodded, signalling acknowledgement. ‘So there had to be two people involved,’ he murmured.

  ‘Exactly, Sauce; and Jimmy Pike obliged straightaway by identifying himself as one of them, through his carelessness in leaving a print when he wedged the penthouse fire door open, after nipping up to borrow a cup of sugar, or whatever he used as a pretext.’

  ‘Jimmy Pike?’ Chaz Baker screeched from his chair. ‘Jimmy fucking Pike?’

  ‘That’s the boy,’ Skinner confirmed. ‘As for the other . . . Who? There could only be one person. Why? Sorry, chum, but take those three words you’ve just used “Jimmy fucking Pike” and rearrange them.’

  He took a few steps across the room and eased himself into a spare white leather chair, facing the couple. Lita’s eyes blazed back at him, endorsing his belief in his solution.

  ‘Even people who don’t like me . . . and there are many of them, including me sometimes . . . will admit that I’m a pretty good detective.’ He nodded towards the Menu. ‘So are those guys, even if they haven’t caught up with me yet.

  ‘My old mentor, Alf Stein, used to say that the best detectives can look at a jigsaw, with its bits all scattered and spread out, but without the image on the box that shows them what it’s supposed to look like, and yet can put the whole picture together in their minds.’

  He laughed. ‘I’ve never cracked that myself, but Alf could do it, sometimes even though some of the key pieces were missing. I’m not in his class, so I try to do it the other way around: I look for isolated bits of jigsaw, facts, or pieces of physical evidence, and I work from there. When I do, I’m old fashioned. I begin with motive.’

  He reached out and took a champagne bottle from a bucket, picked up a discarded flute, then thought better of it and replaced them both. ‘Better not; driving.’

  He looked up at the detective duo. ‘I know that motive isn’t the be all and end all any more, but most times I really do need one, and especially in a case like this, a lurid domestic, which is exactly what it is.’

  ‘Domestic?’ Pye frowned, still sceptical.

  ‘Obviously,’ Skinner replied, firmly. ‘I was wrong about Rogozin, initially, because I overlooked an important piece of the jigsaw, but I’m right about Jimmy Pike. We’re agreed on that, yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ the DCI conceded.

  ‘Good. So, what possible motive could he have for killing Annette, or for framing his boss? He’s got no beef against her, and Chaz gives him a starting slot in the team, week in, week out. Answer, none. Therefore . . .’ He looked at Haddock, eyebrows raised.

  The sergeant read the question correctly and replied. ‘Therefore the motive . . . if there is one; okay, Chief, there must be . . . has to lie with his partner in crime.’

  ‘Precisely. Nice turn of phrase, Sauce, for so does Pike. So, who else might have one? And what links the two victims of this crime? Oh yes, Chaz was a victim, just as much as Annie; the plan was for him to lose his life too, in a different way.

  ‘The link? Annie and Chaz were having a relationship of sorts, meeting regularly, and privately. They thought it was secret. That’s a laugh: nine times out of ten when a guy thinks he has a secret from his wife, he’s wrong; she’s twigged.’

  He looked at Lita Baker, sharply. ‘And you twigged, Lita, didn’t you?’ He held her gaze, unblinking, until she looked away.

  ‘Exactly,’ he murmured. ‘You found out about it: how doesn’t matter. A piece of carelessness on Chaz’s part, probably, but when you did, you seized on an obvious conclusion, one that was tragically wide of the mark. You assumed that they were lovers. You’re a proud and vengeful woman, Dr Baker; you weren’t having that. Were you?’ He smiled. ‘Come on, give me something.’

  ‘Okay,’ she hissed. ‘No comment, or fuck off; you choose.’

  Her husband’s face crumpled; he sagged even deeper into his chair.

  ‘I’ll stick with “no comment” for now, thanks,’ Skinner replied. ‘As well as being proud and vengeful, you’re also a hypocrite, because you had a secret too. His name was Jimmy Pike.’

  He grinned again. ‘Going back to domestic intrigue, I’ve observed over a long career that when a woman thinks she has a secret from her husband, nine out of ten times she’s right; he hasn’t a clue, maybe because his ego wouldn’t allow it.

  ‘Look at me,’ he chuckled ‘I’m a classic case. My ex-wife was shagging an actor, and the tabloids knew about it before I did; as it transpired, they told me about it. You and Pike? Poor old Chaz had no idea about it, until this very moment. I imagine it started in France; I might even make a wild guess that the idea of bringing Jimmy to Merrytown was planted in Chaz’s head by you.’

  ‘You have no proof,’ she protested. ‘No proof of any of this,’ but the way that Baker’s eyes turned to his wife, narrowing as they did, told Skinner that his wild guess had been on the mark.

  ‘Sorry, Doctor,’ he countered. ‘There’s proof of all of it; I checked it personally. The manager of the Garrick Casino in Glasgow, and the head waiter in its restaurant, have both identified you as a visitor with Jimmy Pike on at least two occasions. The waiter, Mario, described you as intimate with each other. On each occasion, the doorman remembers Pike asking him to order a taxi to take you both to the Crowne Plaza Hotel.

  ‘And the concierge in King Robert Village, he places you in his office, Lita, just after the time of the murder, dropping off, literally, the apartment key that you had borrowed without him realising it earlier in the day. You needed access, didn’t you, so you could jam the fire door open, like I thought Rogozin had done.

  ‘That would have been enough,’ he said, ‘but you signed off on it earlier on today. Jimmy Pike knew that the charges against Chaz were being dropped before that news was made public, and there was only one person who could have told him, as your phone records will prove. You’re cooked, madam, done to a turn.’

  ‘There’s even more than that,’ Pye said, from across the room, as he caught up with the plot. ‘Our people found DNA samples in a bedroom in the apartment, ample evidence of sexual activity. We’ve been wondering about that, but not any more. Normally it would have been serviced after use, but nobody knew you’d been there.’

  ‘Nice plan,’ Skinner continued, with a sigh. ‘You and Jimmy, who has no objection to a bit of violence, kill your husband’s lover and set him on the road to a thirty-year tariff life sentence.

  ‘Only you actually murdered his sister, overreached yourselves, and underestimated the people who investigated your crime, and took on Chaz’s defence. Sammy,’ he called out, ‘it’s time to get the polis.’

  Seventy-Six

  ‘Do you know what that man said to me?’ Tank Bridges asked the detectives as he faced them across the table in the interview room. ‘I spoke to him straight after the Motherwell game, and I told him that since Chaz wasn’t likely to come back, the squad was going to need more than a bloke to take the training sessions, it was going to need someone with manager authority. I said that I got all my coaching badges, that I was proper qualified, so there was no need to look outside the club.’

  His nostrils flared. ‘He looked at me like I was havin’ a laugh, then he said that he would look for a proper manager, not someone who came across like an ape on telly. Soon as he’d found him, he said, I was out.’

  ‘That’s football, isn’t it?’ Dan Provan suggested.

  ‘He called me an ape, mate,’ Bridges repeated. ‘He said I was a bleedin’ monkey. That’s not football, that’s an insult. I’ve been sacked before, four times, but it’s always been done with respect, and given me some dignity to take with me. That’s all people like me ask for.’

  He drank some water from the glass in front of him, then glanced at Alex Skinner, who was seated on his right, having been summoned from Edinburgh. She nodded, then murmured, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I’d have banjoed him there and then,’ Bridges continued, ‘but the boardroom was full. Mr McCullough was there and I didn’t want to embarrass him, so when he turned his back on me I just stood there and took it. It never went away though; what he said stayed with me all night and through the next day, until I decided that it had to be put right.

  ‘It was a no-brainer where he’d be on a Sunday night; I’m a member of the Garrick and I’d seen him there, so that’s where I headed. But I didn’t go in; I knew some of the lads would be there and didn’t want to cause a ruck in front of them, so I waited outside. Must have waited for a couple of hours; I was ready to give up when he walked out.’

  ‘And you confronted him?’ Mann asked.

  ‘Not quite like that; I was waiting on the path down to the river, and I called to him. “Dimitri, come down here, we’ve got something to sort out.” And he did. We went right down on to the walkway, and I began to wonder if I’d done the right thing, for he was in a mood like I’d never seen on him before. The moon was bright, shining on his face; it made him look full of hell.’

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bridges replied. ‘I told him he owed me an apology for what he’d said in the boardroom, I said that as far as I was concerned he could stick his football club up his arse, but he was going to apologise.’

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘He came for me, like a nutter, straight for my throat. I grabbed him, and I swung him round and shoved him away, hard. His foot slipped and he smashed the back of his head on this concrete post that’s part of the river fence. He made this noise and he went down.’

  ‘Did he move at all?’ Provan murmured.

  ‘Nah, not a twitch; that was it. I didn’t know he was dead, not right away, but when I shook him I realised from the way he just flopped about that he was, for certain. After that, I didn’t think; I just lifted him up and heaved him over the barrier, into the river, splash.’ He sighed. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is the whole story.’

  Mann looked at him. ‘That was a statement,’ she said, ‘that you make of your own free will, without any promises or inducements?’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ his lawyer replied. ‘Now, Detective Inspector, can we cut to the chase? Mr Bridges will plead guilty to a charge of culpable homicide, if the Crown will not contest the mitigating circumstances. Are you up for that?’

  The DI glanced at her colleague. ‘Dan, this is yours more than mine. What do you say?’

  ‘I say yes,’ Provan decreed, ‘because I’m tired, I want this done with and you’re due me a cheap dinner.’

  Seventy-Seven

  ‘It’s locked up?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘They both are,’ Bob replied. ‘Jimmy Pike is saying it was all her idea, and she’s saying nothing, on the advice of Frances Birtles, her lawyer.’

  ‘What are Sammy and Sauce saying?’

  ‘Nothing to me. DCI Pye insisted that they would both go back to Edinburgh in the car with Lita Baker. Maggie called me, though, to thank me for my help in closing the investigation, although she did mutter something about me exceeding my remit as Alex’s investigator.’

  ‘You have to admit,’ she said, ‘that was a bit of a stunt you pulled, driving them all the way up to Perthshire without telling them why.’

  He shrugged, and sank some Corona. ‘They’re detectives; they probably figured it out. Sauce would have for sure.’

  ‘You rate him above Sammy?’

  ‘Sammy rates him above Sammy, which is part of his problem. Maggie should split them up, let Sauce spread his wings. I’ve told her as much.’

  She squeezed his arm. ‘So Pye shouted at you,’ she chuckled. ‘Don’t take it to heart. You did say he apologised.’

  ‘So what?’ Bob grumbled. ‘If he’d listened to me it would all have been sorted even quicker.’

  ‘When did you begin to suspect her?’

  ‘The first niggle was when Cameron McCullough told me that he didn’t just mention Alex to Lita when she asked him to recommend a lawyer for Chaz. When I pressed him on it, he said that he gave her three names, Frances Birtles, Susannah Himes, known as the Barracuda, and Alex, who was really only there as a courtesy. He listed them one to three, in order of preference. Lita chose the third on the list, the least experienced, the one who’d only just joined the criminal bar.

  ‘She didn’t do that to give her husband the best chance of an acquittal; she chose Alex because she hoped it would secure his conviction. She’s now retained Frankie Bristles for her own defence, which sort of proves my point.’

  ‘And the second?’

  ‘It wasn’t really a niggle; I thought there was something not quite right about her, that’s all. As soon as Pike came into play, it was all so fucking obvious.’

  ‘And Rogozin?’

  ‘Oh, I was wrong about him, I admit it; until I saw the flaw with the planted training top.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Sarah said. ‘Did you have an idea who killed him?’

  ‘No, not a clue,’ he admitted, ‘nor did I care. If it had turned out to be Grandpa McCullough I wouldn’t have been surprised, but it wasn’t. It’s worked out nicely for him, though. He’ll take over as chairman, Mia will join the board and together they’ll vote through the sale of the training complex.’

  ‘What?’

  He grinned. ‘Angela Renwick told me last Saturday; South Lanarkshire Council have granted outline planning consent to a building company for three hundred houses on the site; a hundred-million-pound project. The Saltire will run the story this weekend. The builder’s called Garrick Construction, plc, and it’s wholly owned by Cameron McCullough.’

  ‘You mean he’s going to sell the land to his own company?’

  ‘Yes, for three million. He’s also going to sell Paco Fonter to a Chinese club that’s willing to pay twelve million for him. I imagine that Merrytown will pay a bloody big dividend to its only shareholder this year.’

  Her mouth gaped open. ‘Does that mean this football thing has been a business deal all along for Grandpa?’

  ‘Yes, and Rogozin was a front all along, although I doubt he realised it.’

  ‘Bloody hellfire,’ she whispered as she snuggled against him on the sofa.

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And you,’ she continued quietly, ‘what do you do next? Will you go back, like they want?’

  ‘Possibly,’ he conceded, ‘but as I said to Alex, in my own time and on my own terms, when I can figure out what they are, although that may depend on something else. Meantime, I have other priorities. First and foremost, I would like you and me to remarry before our new child arrives, because she should be on the same footing as the others . . . and for one other reason, because I love you with all my heart. What say?’

  She drew his face down to hers and kissed him. ‘I say yes,’ she murmured, ‘on both counts.’

  ‘Thank you, my darling. Sooner rather than later, then.’

  She nodded. ‘Your other priorities, what are they?’