17 - Death's Door by Quintin Jardine

Author:Quintin Jardine [Quintin Jardine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group Ltd
Published: 2012-02-10T05:08:18+00:00

Forty-five

Stevie Steele nodded his way past the officers on duty at the public entrance to the Fettes police headquarters, and headed straight for the Special Branch suite. Once he had entertained hopes that he might succeed Neil McIlhenney in that office, but the job had gone to Inspector Dorothy Shannon.

His brief disappointment had been ended by his wife, who had persuaded him that he was too gregarious to spend his working life in a regime that was of necessity secretive, and that he would be much happier in mainstream CID, where the breadth of his thinking and his innate popularity with colleagues would be an asset.

He had wondered for a while whether he might not have been considered tough enough for the job, but Maggie had disabused him of that notion very quickly. ‘They might like you within the ranks, my love,’ she had told him, ‘but they know you’re up there with Mario and Neil as someone not to be messed with.’

As he headed for Shannon’s office, he had an inkling of why people might feel that way about him.

He opened the door of the SB suite and marched in. Alice Cowan, the inspector’s sidekick and general watchdog, was at her post as usual. ‘Is she in?’ he asked, nodding towards the inner office door and barely breaking his stride.

‘Yes,’ Cowan replied, ‘but you . . .’ He ignored her, thrusting open the inner office door and stepping inside.

Dottie Shannon was standing beside a corner table, scanning that morning’s Times. ‘Alice, why don’t you ever . . .?’ She looked round impatiently as she spoke, her admonitory question ending abruptly. ‘Oh, DI Steele,’ she said. ‘It’s you, is it?’

‘Reporting as ordered, Detective Inspector Shannon.’

‘Now, Stevie . . .’

He stared back at her, his eyes like ice. ‘Don’t Stevie me,’ he growled. ‘What the fuck do you think you were up to barging into my office in the middle of the bloody night and haranguing one of my officers? That was out of order of itself, but to instruct him to have me come to see you . . . Inspector, you have let your new job go to your head.’

‘And so have you, by the sound of things, Acting DCI. Or are you still holding a grudge?’

Steele gasped, then laughed out loud. ‘Don’t be bloody stupid, Dottie; I washed you out of my hair the day I chucked you. I never had a grudge to hold. If you remember, you and I had a thing that I thought was serious; then I found out you were banging George Regan on the side. So I pulled the plug on you.’

‘Very sensitive, weren’t you?’ she retorted. ‘We were both free and single.’

‘Which is more than George was. Apart from being my mate, he’s married, and I like Jen very much.’

‘So much that you threatened to tell her about George and me.’

‘Wrong. I’d never hurt her like that. All I did was tell George that you were a slag and, if he

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