The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid Page B

movement like a sine wave of fat. ‘After listening to that twat Cagney yesterday, I needed to wash the bad taste out of my mouth. I’ve got better things to do with my Sunday morning than deal with this pile of crap.’ He scowled at a stack of folders piled on the table by Proctor’s hand. The loser’s hand that Cagney had dealt them had left him feeling bitter and insecure; unless he could see some light at the end of the tunnel that wasn’t an oncoming train, he felt he was staring at an undistinguished and premature end to a pretty low-key career.
    Proctor laid a slim hand on top of the pile. ‘No, you haven’t. Not if you want to keep your pension. Cagney’s got it in for the likes of us. He’s got a chip on his shoulder and he thinks the only thing us hard-working grunts are any use for is to make him look good.’
    Macanespie snorted. ‘He’s got his bloody Savile Row suits for that.’
    ‘And he wants the bosses to think those bloody Savile Row suits are where he belongs. So he needs results and if he doesn’t get them, he’ll have to hang somebody out to dry – and I sure as hell don’t want it to be me.’ Proctor flicked his laptop open and tapped it into life. ‘After WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, the one thing they’re all paranoid about is leaks. And let’s be honest, you can’t look at what’s been happening on our watch and not think somebody’s been taking the law into their own hands.’
    Macanespie burped again, glaring at the coffee carton as if it were somehow responsible for his own lack of finesse. He ran a hand over his ginger stubble and sighed. ‘And nobody gave a shit. Getting rid of that human sewage was doing the world a favour.’
    ‘You’d better not let Wilson Cagney hear you say that.’ Proctor frowned as he summoned up a spreadsheet. The fine black hairs on the backs of his bony fingers made them look like magnified insect legs as they scuttled across the keys. ‘You’re single, Alan. You’ve no kids. You might have nothing ahead of you but drinking yourself into an early grave, but I’ve got to think about Lorna and the girls.’
    There was a stony silence. Macanespie was motionless, his face revealing nothing of what was going on inside. Proctor had gone too far. For years, he and Macanespie had worked well together because they’d maintained a studied indifference to each other’s faults. It was like a marriage in a Catholic country before divorce had become legalised. They were stuck with each other and so they’d made the best of a bad job, pretending their mutual contempt didn’t exist, avoiding comment on the personal habits they despised. Proctor had never criticised Macanespie’s drinking or his disgusting departures from what the Welshman considered obligate personal hygiene. For his part, Macanespie had tolerated finicky behaviour that he reckoned was borderline OCD and never complained about Proctor’s perpetual displays of family photographs and endless tedious narratives about the brilliant, beautiful, erudite, talented paragons that were his daughters. That effective concordat had been blown out of the water by Wilson Cagney’s display of gunboat diplomacy. Now it seemed Proctor was happy to throw him under the bus, his sole justification the failure of Macanespie’s last relationship to go the distance. Probably, the Scotsman thought, he’d always been jealous because the fact that Macanespie hadn’t been married meant she hadn’t been able to take him to the cleaners after the split. Served her right. Macanespie had asked her to marry him more than once, but she’d always sidestepped the offer. So she walked out the door with no more than she walked in with. But Proctor, he was stuck with the prim and proper Lorna till death. Served him right, frankly.
    Macanespie cleared his throat. ‘Remind me. What are we looking at?’
    ‘Over the past eight years, there have been eleven instances of an ICTFY target being assassinated within