07 - Skinner's Ghosts

by Quintin Jardine

  He reached into the pocket of his soft brown leather jacket and took out a folded piece of paper. ‘This is it.’ He began to read.

  ‘My darling Polly

  ‘You’re reading this, so I’m dead. You can be sure of that, and you can be sure also that my end will have been unrecorded. The work I have been doing lately has been so secret and potentially calamitous for those who commissioned me, that if I fail or die in the act, it will be as if I have disappeared from the face of the earth. My real identity died a while back, as you know, in a genuine helicopter crash in Oman, in which Ross Masters was listed among the dead, burned to ashes in the process.

  ‘Yesterday I met a man. His name is Bob Skinner, and he works in Edinburgh. I do not expect to die on this assignment, but if I do, then I know within myself and with a great certainty that it will be Bob Skinner who will kill me. He is a career policeman, but he has a certain quality too, one which only people like me can see in others. He may not even know it himself, but Mr Skinner is a killer, just like me. He is tenacious, he is very good, and it is possible that before this commission is complete, he and I will have a confrontation. Should that not happen I will have been in touch as usual. But should Skinner get too close, then one of us will not survive, and you may have to read this letter.

  ‘Polly, as you know, I don’t fear death. But I am proud, as you are, and I am vengeful, as you are also. Take all the money in this box, most of my savings from my career as a contractor. I would like you to use some of it, at least, to ensure that Skinner accounts for my death in a meaningful way. Don’t have him killed, though, unless you have no other choice. He does not fear death either, and in any event, you would have to be certain of success, or he would be very dangerous.

  ‘You’ve always been a creative girl. Use your talents, and this money, to even my score with my executioner. Take Skinner’s life from him, not in an instant, but in a way that will hurt him for as long as he breathes. But be careful, touch none of his, or he will hunt you down. Hurt him alone.

  ‘There is a man who will help you. He is an acquaintance of mine, in the same line of work, and he has met Skinner also. His name is Peter Gilbert Heuer, and he is very bitter. He can be contacted by placing a personal ad in the Northern Echo on any Tuesday, under a Box Number, simply asking PGH to respond. Peter, with you and only three other people, knows my real name: ask him for it, to confirm his identity.

  ‘Do this for me, Polly, as best you can. I leave you my heart and my undying love, for you and I are soulmates.

  ‘Goodbye, Ross’

  Bob folded the letter, put it back in his pocket, and looked again at his wife.

  ‘So Polly, or Pamela, rather, took the money, took her marketing degree and experience, and joined the police, my force naturally, as a late entrant. Once there she took the service options which would bring her closest to me. She even had an affair with the Force Press Officer, who knows me better than most, as part of her preparation.

  ‘When the time was right she contacted Heuer. When he heard that it was me she was after, he was only too willing to help her.

  ‘She had her plan all along, and it worked better than she had ever dared to hope. Had it not been for a couple of mistakes that she made, I could have been convicted. As a minimum, if things had worked out, I’d have had to leave the force under a very big cloud.

  ‘My splitting up with you was a tremendous bonus for her. She’s a wonderful actress, is Pamela. She played it so well, so properly. She was there to lend me a shoulder to moan on, yet she refused to sleep with me before you and I were legally separated. She was in the final act of setting me up when it all went sour for her. She told me she wanted to get married. That’s how confident she was.’ His face was twisted with anger.

  Sarah looked at him, almost fearfully. ‘What have you done with her?’ she asked. ‘Alex said that all you told them was that she had left.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything with her,’ he answered bitterly, ‘or to her. I could hardly have her arrested and charged, in all the circumstances. With the national security interests that would have been involved, a trial would have been unthinkable.

  ‘So instead, I signed the hundred thousand back into her name, I drove her to the airport to catch her plane, and I told her to get as far away from me and mine as she could. I promised her also that I would let my contacts in MI6 and the CIA know that Ross Masters had a sister who is aware of the work he did for them.’

  ‘And have you? Will you?’

  ‘No, but she believes that I will. And that will keep her on the move, and will keep her mouth shut, for the rest of her life. She’ll disappear like her brother, I guess. Like him, she’ll find a new identity.’

  ‘This man Heuer,’ Sarah broke in. ‘Didn’t he kill Leona McGrath, and the Secretary of State’s wife? Wasn’t he the man you shot yesterday, when you rescued the children?’

  Bob nodded. ‘Yes, but Pam had no idea about that until Andy and I made the connection.

  ‘She only used him as a courier to set me up with the bank in Guernsey. She swore blind that she didn’t know he was planning the killings or the kidnapping. Eventually, she made me believe her.’

  ‘And if you hadn’t accepted it?’

  He looked at the wall, suddenly cold as ice. ‘I’d have handed her over to Adam Arrow,’ he whispered, and she knew that he meant it.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, softening in an instant, ‘Heuer’s dead and Pam’s gone for good. Both of my persecutors are dealt with.’

  Bob leaned back wearily on the couch beside his wife and drew her to him, to lay her head on his shoulder. ‘I feel as if I’ve been haunted for the last few months, Sarah, my love, visited by all my ghosts and horrors from my past. God willing, now they’re all exorcised, and the demons, the misunderstanding and the anger, which drove us apart are gone as well.’

  She drew his head down and kissed him, for the first time in months, long and slow.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they’re gone. So if you’ve any more secrets to reveal, now’s the time to do it. Nothing you say will be taken down, or held against you.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘Well,’ he began. ‘About Leona McGrath . . .’

  She put her fingers to his lips. ‘It’s okay, I know. Alex told me that. I half-guessed at the time too. Although we were barely speaking, I remember that when you got home late that night, I thought that it was the first time I had ever seen you with a guilty look on your face.

  ‘Poor woman,’ Sarah sighed. ‘No grudges borne. And, oh, her poor little boy.’

  He looked her in the eye, so close to her that he was almost squinting. ‘Speaking of Mark,’ he murmured, ‘I know this is a biggie, but how would you and Jazz feel about adopting an older brother?’

  ‘I think we’d feel okay,’ she replied, without a moment’s hesitation. She leaned back and gazed at him for a moment. ‘You know, Ross Masters didn’t have a clue about the real you,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Oh no? Which of us is dead?’

  ‘And which of you was on the side of right, as almost invariably, my darling, you are?’

  She was silent, contemplative, for a few seconds. ‘One thing I learned from Ross, though,’ she added, at last.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘He told Pam that he and she were “soulmates”,’ she said. ‘Until this moment, I’ve never really considered, far less understood, the meaning of the term.’

  She looked up at him, and saw a glistening in his eyes. ‘Oh Sarah,’ he sighed, with the relief of someone who has stepped into a chasm in the dark, only to have his foot land safely upon a bridge, ‘then maybe you’ll know just how glad I am that you’re back.’

  ‘Cuts both ways, honey,’ she drawled in her finest American, beginning to unbutton his shirt. ‘Now let’s give each other our very, very best. For today, Skinner’s ghosts aren’t all that’s gonna get laid.’

  inner's Ghosts