05 - Skinner's Ordeal by Quintin Jardine

Author:Quintin Jardine [Quintin Jardine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group Ltd
Published: 2012-02-08T05:59:40+00:00

50

‘All rise.’

The Court Officer’s stentorian voice boomed out, as the red-robed Judge pushed himself out of his chair. As one, accused, counsel, clerks and the few spectators in the public gallery obeyed his command. Among the last group was Neil McIlhenney, seated in the back row and out of sight of the defence benches to all but a very tall barrister on tiptoe.

He and Donaldson had shared the duty during the day, one in the gallery, one in the unmarked car which they had borrowed from the Ministry of Defence pool. Periodically, they had called Edinburgh to check on Skinner’s condition.

McIlhenney had sat through the opening stages of Ariadne Tucker’s final speech to the jury ... the one which she had been preparing on her husband’s last night alive ... and had been professionally impressed. Without, admittedly, having had the benefit of any of the evidence, he would have been prepared to acquit her client, an Anglo-Greek businessman accused of twenty-seven different swindles involving commercial and residential property and high value motor cars.

She had still been going strong at three-thirty, at which point the thoughtful Judge, who had begun the day with kind words to the recently bereaved senior for the defence, had decided, again in deference to the strain under which he imagined her to be suffering, that he would call a halt and send everyone home early; everyone, that was, save the accused.

‘Thank Christ for that!’ McIlhenney had muttered under his breath. As a young white-gloved Constable flanking a prisoner in the dock in the High Court in Edinburgh, he had once fallen asleep halfway through a prosecution summing-up. The incident had come close to ending his career and the memory of it would live with him for ever.

As the jury filed out, the heavily built Sergeant glanced idly around the public gallery. There were four people in the front row, three middle-aged women and a younger man, all peering down into the well of the court. As the policeman looked on, one of the women, fat, swarthy and fifty-something with hair dyed black, waved down at the accused and blew him a kiss.

In the row behind, a Japanese couple stood to attention, holding on to Harrods carriers; sightseeing in the Old Bairrey, McIlhenney guessed. Suddenly, to his astonishment, the man plunged into his bag, took out a small video camcorder and began to film the court, unobserved by any of the attendants.

He looked around the rest of the gallery as he turned to leave. Three people were filing out - court groupies, he assumed - but in the back row a tall man stood in a brown Army uniform, gazing down into the court as if making eye contact with someone. McIlhenney thought back. He was fairly certain that the man had not been in court when he and Donaldson had last changed shift, and equally sure that he had not seen him enter. A good copper to the last, he took, as routine, a mental snapshot of the man’s face and filed it away.

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