Private Investigations - Quintin Jardine Page 0,1

anything into that?’

‘No, you should not,’ she replied, still with a smile in her voice. ‘As if . . .’

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We have an extra room in Gullane.’

‘Which we could need this year,’ she countered, ‘when Ignacio comes out of the young offenders place.’

She had a point. Ignacio is the teenage son I never knew about until we met last year in Spain, by which time his reckless mother, Mia, had allowed his life to become seriously fucked up; he was going to need a secure roof over his head, and I did not want it to be hers. She was about to marry a man named Cameron ‘Grandpa’ McCullough, a millionaire Dundee businessman, whose legitimate enterprises had been built with cash laundered from serious organised crime. Better coppers than I had tried to put Grandpa in jail, but none had ever succeeded.

Initially, I had decided not to visit Ignacio in prison; my reasoning was that he’d be endangered if he was revealed as the offspring of a very senior cop. However, a few months into his sentence, I realised that we could waste no more time bonding, and a cooperative governor had allowed us private meetings, away from the open hall where routine visits took place.

‘He and I will discuss that next week,’ I told Sarah, ‘but you have a point. See you tonight.’

I ended the call, and turned on the engine, letting it warm up for a few seconds. With my foot on the brake, I slipped the lever from P for Park, into R for Reverse, then checked my mirrors, all three of them, and the screen that shows the view from my car’s reversing camera.

Satisfied that all was clear I began to reverse out of my space, slowly. I had travelled no more than a yard when, on the edge of my vision, I saw it coming, a red car travelling towards me at a speed that was way too high for a shopping mall park.

I braked, instantly, but it was too late; the idiot, a man in a hoodie, I registered, caught the nearside corner of my rear bumper, bounced off it sideways, into the middle of the narrow carriageway and stopped, just in time to avoid hitting a Grand Cherokee that was coming in the other direction.

The law is imperfect; whatever the constitution may declare, there are occasions where there is indeed an assumption of guilt, and that situation was one of them. I’d driven with due care and attention, yet I was well aware that insurance companies, and all too often the courts, take the view that the reversing driver is in the wrong, automatically. When I was a chief constable, I instructed my traffic officers that every incident should be approached with an open mind, but those damn insurers paid no attention.

My car, a nice silver Mercedes, was less than six weeks old, yet there it was with damage to its rear end, thanks to some clown who didn’t know the difference between a shopping centre car park and Brands fucking Hatch . . . and chances were, the bloody insurers were going to pin the blame on me!

Worst of all, the bag on the passenger seat had hit the gear lever, bursting it open and smashing Sarah’s precious lemon drizzle cake. That lit my fuse; I’d been a happy family man, joking with the love of my life, only to become, in the space of a few seconds, an explosion waiting to happen.

I popped my seat belt and stepped out, ready to do battle with the stock car driver in the red car; it was a BMW, I noticed, with a few years on the clock. I was ready for whatever story the bloke came up with, ready for a confrontation, ready to blow him out.

I waited for him to climb out and face me. To my surprise, he didn’t; instead he began to move forward, blasting his horn at the Grand Cherokee that was blocking the roadway, as if the sound could push it backwards. The big jeep didn’t move. Its lady owner sat behind her steering wheel, looking bewildered and a little frightened.

Giving her a wave and a sign that I hoped she would read as ‘Stay where you are’, I moved towards the Beamer. Its driver, seeing no way forward, started to reverse, but got no further than a couple of yards before slamming hard into a Mini that had come to a halt behind him.