Read Bob Skiinner 21 Grievous Angel for Free Online Page B

‘When Billy shot the Holmeses, there was a whisper from an informant that it was Bella who bought the gun and told him to do it. DCS Stein, the head of CID, put it to her himself. I was there at the time. She told him to either prove it or fuck off. Perry made one of his rare mistakes there. He should have told his brother to kill all three Spreckleys, not just Gavin. If he’d ever met Bella, maybe he would have.’

Two

    T he Watson family home was in a crumbling council estate on the south side of the city. It was one of the urban sores that Scottish Homes had been set up to eradicate, and it should have been high on its agenda, but wasn’t. The police station that had been built there a few years earlier might have been the work of an architect who’d seen Assault on Precinct 13 . Indeed that had probably been in the design brief.

    There were a few kids hanging out in the street as I parked in the gathering gloom, and I cursed myself for lack of foresight. I had two cars, a BMW 3 Series saloon that I used socially, and a battered, scratched six-year-old Land Rover Discovery that was my work car. Since Myra’s death I’d always gone for solid vehicles with good all-round protection. When I’d left home, because Alex was with me, I’d taken the Beamer, without thinking ahead. It was a nice car, gunmetal blue metallic, and it drew admiring glances, even in Gullane, where upmarket was the norm. Where we were, it was more likely to draw gunfire.

    We got out, and as I locked up I looked around; a few yards away a group of half a dozen boys and youths stood, some eyeing me up, a couple looking at the car and almost salivating as they did. ‘Just a minute,’ I said to Martin. I walked up to them. The oldest of them might have been sixteen, maybe a year or so younger, but he was a big lad. He was cocky with it, didn’t flinch as I approached, but looked at me as if he was thinking of having a go there and then.

    I held his gaze. ‘If you haven’t guessed,’ I began, ‘we are the polis. We’re going into that building, and we’ll probably be a while in there. You lads are appointed to watch my motor.’

    ‘What’s in it for us?’ the gang leader grunted. I felt a wee bit sorry for him. In his environment face was important and he was about to lose some, in front of his crew.

    ‘We’ll discuss that when the job’s done. But if, when we come out of there, I see one mark on my car, as much as one fingerprint on the windscreen, I will pick you out, yes you, son, personally, and I will knock seventeen different colours of shite out of you. There will be no point in doing it over then getting off your mark, because I will come back, and back, and back until I’ve found you. My name is Skinner, and I’m a man of my word.’

    I left them to consider my offer and rejoined Martin; he’d been watching from the other side of the road. ‘What was that about, sir?’ he asked.

    ‘Personnel management. Come on.’

    The houses in the street were all in tenement blocks, but Bella Watson’s house was ground floor, with a main door that opened out on to a narrow, untended garden, with beer cans, cigarette packets and other garbage littering what might have been a lawn with a little interest, imagination and effort. I’d been there twice; after her brother had re-enacted the OK Corral gunfight, and a year or so later to take Marlon in for questioning that I’d known would be pointless but had to be done.

    The door was painted grey, with a quarter panel of dappled obscure glass. The DC stepped in front of me and pressed the buzzer. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I chuckled. ‘She’ll think you’re the rent man. Fat chance of her answering then.’ I leaned forward and pounded the woodwork, hard, with the side of my closed right fist, once, twice, a third time. ‘Now she knows. Count to thirty, slowly.’

    ‘Why?’

    ‘To give her time to hide anything she doesn’t want us to see.’

    He had reached