Pray for the Dying (32 page)

‘So what?’ he laughed. ‘Our children are with her just now, and I wanted to see them.’

‘But you have joint custody; you’ll see them at the weekend.’

He snatched the image from her, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor. ‘Go on, then,’ he challenged her. ‘Leak it and see what follows. I’ll tell the Scottish media that it’s a Tory plot to discredit me. See those two words “Tory plot”? In Scotland they’re a flame to the touch paper. They’ll be on you like piranha. You’ve got to do better than that.’

‘I can. Your ex-wife is an American citizen. Now that you and she are no longer married, she’s here because she’s been given right to remain. That can be revoked.’

‘We’d see you in court if you tried that.’

‘It would have to be an American court; we’d have her removed inside twenty-four hours.’

‘And twenty-four hours after that I’m on a plane to New York and we remarry. Come on, Home Secretary, up your game. You still need to do better.’ And yet, as he spoke, he sensed that she could, and that her first two shots had been mere range-finders.

‘If you insist,’ she replied, and her voice told him that he had been right. ‘It might come as a surprise to you to learn that your present wife’s liaison with Mr Joey Morocco has been going on for years. It began before you met and it continued during your marriage.’

She took a series of photographs from the folder and handed them to him. He glanced through them; they showed Aileen and the actor at various locations: in a garden with Loch Lomond stretched out below them, on the balcony of her Glasgow flat, leaving a hotel in a street he did not recognise. None of them were explicit, but they displayed intimacy clearly enough.

He handed them back, and shrugged. ‘Sorry, no surprise,’ he said. ‘Nor is it my business any more either. By the way, after the
Daily News
photos you might be able to sell those to
Hello!
or
OK!
but nobody else is going to buy them.’

‘Probably not,’ Repton conceded, ‘but every newspaper in the country would run this, front page. The trouble with our modern celebrity culture is that it’s so damn predictable. Where there are actors, there are the inevitable parties, with the same inevitable temptations. Most politicians have the sense to steer clear of them, but not, it seems, Ms de Marco.’

She took the last two items from the folder and gave them to him. The photographs had been taken in a ladies’ toilet. There were three washbasins set into a flat surface, with a mirrored wall above.

The first picture showed two women, expensively clad, watching while a third, her face part-hidden by her hair, bent over a line of white powder, with a tube held to her nose. In the second, all three women were standing, their laughter, and their faces, reflected in the mirror.

He stared at it, then at Emily Repton with pure hatred in his eyes.

‘The original is in a place of safety,’ Sir Hubert Lowery barked. ‘Not here, though, just in case Mrs Dennis feels obliged to do a favour for an old friend. I don’t have to tell you . . .’

Skinner moved with remarkable speed for a man in his early fifties. He moved half a pace forward and hit the Director General with a thunderous, hooking, left-handed punch that caught him on the right temple. The man’s legs turned to spaghetti and he was unconscious before he hit the floor.

‘I’ve wanted to do that,’ he murmured, ‘ever since I saw him blindside our outside half at Murrayfield.’

‘I did warn him,’ Amanda Dennis remarked. ‘I told him you’d want to hit somebody, and since he’d be the only man in the room . . .’

‘He’ll be all right,’ the chief growled. ‘His skull’s too thick and his brain’s too small for there to be any lasting damage.’

He turned to Emily Repton. Her eyes told him she had enjoyed the show. ‘Spell it out,’ he told her.

She nodded. ‘Hard man, soft centre,’ she said. ‘Your marriage may be over, but I don’t believe you would wish to cause Ms de Marco the damage, the distress and the disgrace that would follow publication of those images. The fact that it was a one-off doesn’t matter. Her career would be gone, way beyond the U-bend, and so would her employable life. As indeed it will, if one single line in one single newspaper, or blog, should ever link my husband to Antonia Field and her child.

‘You can write your report to the procurer physical or whatever he’s called. It will say that your investigation has reached the conclusion that the balance of probability is that Chief Constable Field’s killing was ordered and funded by Mexican or Colombian drug cartels that she compromised during her time with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. There will be not the slightest hint of impropriety by the Security Service.’

She frowned. ‘I’m not going to ask if you agree. There is no alternative on the table; you will do what you’re told. Go back to Scotland, Mr Skinner, and be the big provincial copper in your little provincial pond. This is London; the power will always lie here. If you can’t live with that truth, you could always resign.’

Skinner stared down at her, unblinking, until the coldness in his eyes made her shiver and look away.

‘You really don’t know me, Home Secretary,’ he told her. ‘My report’s already dictated and that is more or less what it says. Even if my suspicions had been one hundred per cent right, there would have been no mileage for me in pulling this building down.’

He nodded towards Lowery, who was beginning to stir on the floor. ‘Getting rid of him will do nicely thanks, and I’ve shown you why that has to happen.’

‘Agreed,’ Repton said.

‘But you are right,’ he continued, ‘that I won’t see Aileen broken by you. Hell, woman, I know you and Lowery set her up. Any idiot, even me, could see that. She can’t hold her booze at the best of times, and I can tell from the photo she was rat-arsed when that all went off. I’m sure that if I could identify the two other women, I’d find that at least one was on Five’s payroll.

‘But that’s by the by; I’ll go along with your deal. Your husband’s safe. If you’re prepared to tolerate his adultery, that’s your business. I’ve never met the man, so he really means nothing to me. Plus, I have no practical need to remove him, since he isn’t in my sphere of influence.’

‘That’s pragmatic of you,’ she mocked, her tone heavy with sarcasm.

‘But you are,’ he snapped, as he picked up his case. ‘And you disgust me. You’re the embodiment of everything I loathe about politics and politicians. Frankly, I don’t want to be any part of any world in which someone like you operates, and there are only two things I can do about that. So I’ll go back to my provincial, sub-national pond, and I will work out which one it’s going to be.’

Fifty-Six

‘No thanks, Amanda, I’ll pass on that one personally. Maybe I’ll send Lowell Payne instead. I was impressed by the way he handled himself the other day, and it’s persuaded me that he’s the man to take over what was a vacancy as head of CTIS.

‘He’s in post already. It wouldn’t be right of me to come, when I might not be a police officer for much longer. You take care now, and watch your back as long as that woman’s standing behind you.’

He ended the call and slipped his mobile into the big canvas bag that lay by his side.

‘What was that about?’ Sarah asked. They were sitting on a travelling rug on the beach at Gullane, watching their two sons trying to persuade Seonaid that the seawater was as warm as they said.

‘Amanda Dennis,’ he said. ‘She’s having a two-day review of the Field fiasco in London, on Monday and Tuesday. It’s a natural response: what went wrong and how to prevent any recurrence. She said she’s ordered Houseman and his entire Glasgow team down there, and asked if I wanted to attend.’

‘Were you serious in what you said to her?’

‘About Lowell? Sure. He never wavered in there and he turned out to be very good at reading people. He’s a natural for the job, and it gives me grounds to give him an acting promotion, without anyone calling it nepotism. Mind you,’ he chuckled, ‘Jean wouldn’t be too pleased if I send him off to London again so soon, so I don’t think I’ll pass on the invite.’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t mean were you sure about Lowell. I was talking about the last part. Do you really mean that?’

‘I think I do,’ he said. ‘I am edging myself towards walking away from the Strathclyde job and leaving the police service altogether, as soon as I can. All the way back from London I argued the toss with myself, and I still am arguing. It’s doing my head in. I never wanted to destroy the Security Service itself, only to sort any people that might have crossed the line. I’m a realist, I understand how the world has to work at times. But given what I knew, or thought I knew, I had some questions that needed answers.

‘As it was, I got it wrong, although not all of it: the Home Secretary did misuse her position by having Lowery delete the Mauritian birth record. Now I’m being blackmailed by Emily Repton herself, to save her husband’s reputation and both their careers. You should have heard her, and seen her. That woman is fucking evil.’

‘She threatened me? Really?’

‘Yes, but we both knew that was crap; that was just her way of telling me how far she could reach into my life. I’ve taken legal advice since. Your passport may be American, but your children are British. There isn’t a judge in Scotland who’d allow your deportation.’

‘But her threat against Aileen? Is that for real?’

Bob nodded. ‘Oh yes. She went with Morocco to a party in Glasgow, after the premiere of a movie he was in. They’d been watching the pair of them for long enough to be fairly sure she would go, especially since I was at a security conference that MI5 had set up.

‘While Joey was away schmoozing the press, Hubert Lowery’s two women got her shit-faced, possibly with a little chemical assistance, then set up the cocaine scene in the toilets. I know all this because Amanda made Lowery tell her as he was clearing his desk.’

‘How did she make him cough that up?’

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘She threatened to tell me where he lives. That was enough.’

‘Can Amanda do anything about it, now she’s in the top job?’

‘Not with Emily Reptile as Home Secretary.’

‘If you had been right, and Toni Field had been killed on Repton’s orders, what would you have done?’

‘As much as I could, although that might not have been a lot, since so many of the players are dead and so much of it is deniable.’

‘Are you really satisfied that isn’t what happened?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I got taken. As Mandy suggested, I did send a car to pick up Marina, as soon as I got out of there. She’d gone, right enough. Sofia thought she was just shopping . . . or so she said . . .  but she hasn’t been seen since. Amanda was right. The woman made me look like an idiot. Hell, I am an idiot! She fed me little hints to steer me in the direction she wanted, towards them and away from her.

‘That last scene, her identifying Clyde Houseman as Toni’s mystery lover, that was the final piece of the con. I bought it, like an absolute sucker, and went charging off down to London, to commit professional suicide.’

‘It wasn’t suicide,’ Sarah insisted. ‘You don’t need to do anything so drastic as quit.’ She paused. ‘Don’t go off on me for asking this, but could this depression from which speaking as a doctor, you are clearly suffering, be related to the fact that you feel humiliated, embarrassed, and maybe even a little unmanned by what this Marina woman did to you?’

‘Why should I take the hump?’ he asked. ‘It’s a fair question. But the answer’s no. At the time, sure, I had a red face. Now, I see it the same as a golf game. Marina was good, and so was I. But where I shot a birdie, she had an eagle. When that happens out there on Gullane Number One, you don’t give up the game. You say to the other guy, “Good shot,” and then you stuff him at the next hole. If I leave the force, it’ll be because I can’t go after Repton from within it. But whatever happens, I’m going to find Marina Deschamps.’

She looked at him, a little afraid of the answer to the question she was about to pose. ‘When you find her, what will you do?’

‘I could eliminate her,’ he told her. ‘As long as I don’t do it in the middle of Piccadilly Circus at rush hour, I really don’t believe anyone would want to know. Too many guilty secrets.’ He stopped, then laughed at the alarm on her face. ‘I could,’ he repeated, ‘but don’t worry, I won’t. There is an alternative.’

He jumped up from the rug. ‘Come on, let’s go and paddle with the kids. The water can’t be that cold.’

‘Okay.’ She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet, then laughed, as his phone sounded. ‘I thought you were going to leave that at home,’ she said.

‘Force of habit. I’ll ignore it.’

‘Hell no,’ she retorted, fishing it out of their beach bag. ‘You’ll fret if you do that.’ She handed it to him. ‘It’s Mario.’

‘Ah, that’s different.’ He took it from her and accepted the call. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Has Paula had the baby?’

‘She has indeed,’ the new father replied. ‘Wee Eamon put in an appearance about half an hour ago. Like shelling peas, the midwife said, although not within Paula’s hearing.’

‘Big fella, that is absolutely great, I am so pleased for you both.’

‘In that case, you’re going to be even more pleased. About two hours ago a bloke walked into the St Leonards office with a bag that he found when he was sorting old clothes from one of those public recycling points. It was mixed up among them all, and there was a laptop inside it, wrapped in a shirt with a Selfridges label on it. The battery was flat, but the desk staff found a charger and plugged it in. When they switched it on, it said “Byron’s MacBook”. I reckon we’ve found your man Cohen’s missing computer.’

Looking at Bob, Sarah saw his face light up, saw all his gloom and pessimism evaporate, and she knew that whatever he had been told, it had been a tipping point in his life.

‘Mario,’ she heard him exclaim, ‘that’s brilliant. It means the show’s back on the road. I’d like it in Glasgow in my office, by Monday morning.’ She thought he was about to end the call, but he went on, as if an afterthought had come to him just in time.

‘One other thing,’ he added. ‘I want to see wee Ramsey again, but not in my office. Find him and tell him I’ll be shopping in Fort Kinnaird at noon tomorrow and that I’ll fancy a hot dog from the stall by the crossing. There’ll be one in it for him as well if he turns up.’