A Hint of Death (A Bob Skinner Short Story) (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF Page B

seriously?’
    ‘Yes.’ The reply came from Bob Skinner. ‘I believe you did. When you thought about it you began to worry that having Sauce on your side might not be enough.’
    ‘You’ll never prove it,’ he snapped, ‘not in a million years.’
    ‘I’m not even going to try,’ Skinner said, ‘for I don’t believe that you actually ordered Josey to silence your accuser, not specifically. You’re too smart for that. However, you knew how furious she was, you knew of her history of violence and you did point her in the right direction.’
    ‘How do you work that out?’
    ‘Simples, like those meerkats say. Until you told Josey about her in your twisted little tale, no way had she ever heard of Hazel McVie. Yet she went straight to her house and beat her to death. There are a couple of dozen McVies in the Edinburgh phone directory, and there’ll be a few more of them that are ex-directory, I’m sure. How did she know which one to pick?’
    Christie’s eyes were impassive. ‘That of itself does not make me an accessory to murder.’
    ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Skinner agreed, ‘not as the prosecution could establish to the satisfaction of a jury. But all three of us in this room know that the thought, and probably even the hope, was in your mind.’
    ‘No one has ever known what was in my mind,’ the teacher whispered.
    Haddock shuddered as he gazed into the coldest eyes he had ever seen, and at a man who, he realised, had always been a stranger to him. He longed to leave there, to put his nightmare day off as far behind him as he could, to go back to the comfort of his girl and his safe, ordered life.
    ‘They’re going to have a good idea pretty soon, though,’ Skinner replied. ‘I don’t have any formal locus in this business. I’m no longer head of Sauce’s force and I’m only here at his request. But I do have friends, Christie. Once I’ve spoken to them and used my influence, this is what I’m confident will happen.
    ‘Josey’s charge will be reduced to culpable homicide, on a plea bargain. There will be no trial, but the Advocate Depute, the prosecutor, will make a statement to the court before sentence is passed. That statement will be full and frank, and will take in everything that Detective Sergeant Haddock has learned today. In that situation, in criminal court proceedings, there can be no defamation; you will be hung out to dry, in detail, in public, and you will have no comeback.
    ‘You can’t be charged with what you did to Hazel when she was a pupil in your care. You can’t be charged with causing her death. But you will be convicted nonetheless, on both counts, by the modern supreme court of public notoriety. End of career, end of comfortable existence, end of your life, as you’ve known it.
    ‘If I were you I’d probably look out my sharpest kitchen knife and run a bath. That was the grand Roman way out, wasn’t it?’
    He turned to Haddock. ‘Come on, lad, let’s leave him to it.’
    In the street outside, sitting in Skinner’s car, some minutes passed before either man could speak. It was Haddock who broke the silence.
    ‘Do you think he will, sir?’
    ‘Top himself? No, I don’t see that. What would he put in his suicide note? He doesn’t do guilt, and there isn’t another woman left in his life that he can blame.’

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One
    W hen the call came, the one that put me back in place as a functioning human being, I was, not to put too fine a point on it, really screwed up inside my head.
    I had begun a year that seemed to be full of promise, but if I’d been granted foresight of what most of those promises actually were, I’d probably have stayed in bed on the first of January and waited out the next twelve months.
    I’d have been on my own, though; even then I should have