'I didn't have a firm plan, before I'd spoken to Mr McDonald, but I do now. If everything is as he said, it'll work.'
'And if it isn't. ..'
'Then, Everard, I will simply wait, for as long as it takes.'
'For what?'
'For a clear shot. Then I'll just kill the fucker.'
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It was 7.45 a.m. as they left the Land Rover in the smal copse beside the track which Donald McDonald had shown them the night before.
On the slow drive from the castle, where they had spent the night, and breakfasted with Bal iol, Andy had asked Bob about Pamela, and about their split.
'Later, man, later. I'l tell you and Alex together. But for now we have to concentrate completely on what's to be done here.'
There were no estate workers about as they made their way north, up the climbing, winding track, towards the Gul y. Nor would there be any. On Balliol's orders, McDonald would direct them all to work on the south side of Loch Mhor.
The two policemen were clad in the green trousers and pul overs which the Army had provided for them. Pouches hung on their belts, and each carried a short stubby assault carbine. Skinner's weapon was fitted on top with a cumbersome, awkward-looking device, with an eyepiece.
Even in the early morning cool, they were both sweating as, after a thirty-five-minute trek, they reached the slope which, as their map showed them, led up to King's Gul y. As the factor had described it they could see that, near the top, the grass gave way abruptly to wavy green ferns.
Skinner waved to Martin to stop just at the point where the bracken began, the two of them sitting down, heavily, at the edge of the open grass.
'Okay, Andy,' he said. 'Once we've got our breath back, we'l get into position. You're clear on the plan?'
Martin nodded. He wore a dark green beret to hide his blond hair, and his powerful shoulders bulged in the tight battledress pul over. 'I take up position to the north, behind the house, no closer than one hundred yards away.'
'Right. With your two-way radio on receive. Listen and do as you hear me say. It'll take you longer to get in position than me. I'l wait fifteen minutes before I move in.'
Martin nodded, and snaked off eastward, keeping below the ridge of King's Gul y. Skinner sat on the grass and waited, hefting his carbine, testing and re-testing the device on top. At last, with a final 268
check of his watch he moved off, up towards the crest of the slope, diving into the thick bracken before it opened out into the bowl of the Gully.
He snaked forward slowly and careful y on his belly, taking care so that any disturbance of the thick ferns would look like no more than morning breeze. After a few yards he stopped, and peered through a gap in the undergrowth. He saw the cottage, exactly where the map had promised, and exactly as Donald McDonald had described it. At the side stood a silvery grey car, a hatchback, with a slightly bulbous rear.
He changed course, wriggling to the left of his original approach, parallel with the front of the cottage, careful not to go too close. At last he was in his chosen position, around one hundred yards away from the cottage, directly facing the front door and the wide green-framed window. He smiled. The window stil had no curtain or blind.
From the pouch on the left side of his belt, he took out his two-way radio. 'Ready to go, Andy,' he said quietly, into its microphone.
Next, from the same pouch, he took his mobile phone and laid it on the ground in front of him. Final y he removed a smal headset, with earpiece and mouthpiece, which he put on before plugging its lead into a socket in the phone casing.
Taking a deep breath he switched on his phone, then pressed the short code for the telephone number which he had programmed in the night before: the number which Donald McDonald had given him, the number of the King's Gul y cottage.
The mobile's display lit up, green amidst the bracken. Skinner pressed 'Send', then hefted his carbine up to his shoulder, looking through his very special telescopic sight, and training it on the window beside the black-painted front door of the house.
He heard the ringing in his ear, once, twice, a third time. On the fourth ring a tall, slim, fair-haired figure stepped into the hall, from the left. He was wearing glasses. Framed in the window, Skinner saw him pick up the telephone.
'Good morning, Mr Heuer,' he said calmly and evenly, before the man could speak himself. 'Please don't move a muscle, other than to look down at your shirt. Just left of centre, where you heart is.'
Through the sight, he saw the man look down slowly at a smal red dot on his shirt, a dot which was not printed on, yet which stayed rock-steady.
'That's good,' said Skinner. 'I think you might know what that dot is. Nod if you do.' Very slowly, Peter Gilbert Heuer nodded his head.
'That's right, it's the trace from a laser sight, mounted in this case on an H K carbine, not very far away. I am very, very good with an H K. My name's Bob Skinner, by the way. It's my turn to phone you now.
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'As I'm sure you've worked out by now, Mr Heuer, if you drop the phone, or make any attempt to move from the spot on which you're standing right now, that nice wee red dot will turn all of a sudden into a black hole and you will be dead.
'Now.' His voice became rock-hard. 'Where are the children?'
'They are in the kitchen.' Heuer's voice was still flat and calm, but no longer assertive.
'Are they alive?'
'Yes.'
'And they are alone? There is no-one else in the house?'
'No-one.'
'If there is, you're dead, whatever else happens. You know that, Heuer, do you?'
For the first time, the voice was less than calm. 'There is no-one.
I swear.'
Skinner raised his voice, so that it would be picked up by the radio lying in front of him. 'Okay, Andy. Kids in the kitchen. Kick the back door in. Go. Go. Go. Fire two shots when you're clear.'
He held the sight on Heuer. 'If there's any unpleasant surprise waiting in there for my mate,' he said, 'I'll shoot your eyes out. Are you religious?' he asked suddenly, almost conversationally.
'No.' The voice was flat and calm once more.
'I'd give it some thought right now, if I were you. There are a few ghosts waiting for you on the other side. I asked about you, Peter, and now I know what your obsession is.'
He paused, studying Heuer's face through the sight, seeing it twitch, and watching his eyes shift around as he peered through the window into the sunlight.
'You're a contractor,' he pronounced at last. 'Or you were, until you cocked it up. You did wet jobs in the intelligence community.
You were an assassin, Peter, back then, when our paths first crossed.
'You didn't go into the Polish Consulate that night to steal the silver, did you? You went in to kil the Consul and his wife. Those were your orders. Our people were going to plant documents to make it look as if the Pole had been working for East Germany, and that the Stasi had killed him.
'The whole idea was to create a big stooshie within the Warsaw Pact, and give Solidarity a big shove forward.'
The red dot wavered on Heuer's white shirt, as a sudden tremor went through him. 'Careful,' cal ed Skinner, and it steadied immediately. 'I told you, not as much as a twitch, boy.'
He paused. 'But you made an arse of it, Peter. You didn't do your homework. You missed the second alarm. Or by your way of it, you weren't told about it.
'For you decided that you'd been set up. You expected your 270
paymasters to have you released on some technicality. But they felt that would be too risky, and that you'd have to do time for your mistake. Natural y, being a psychopathic type, you took it personally.
'But what I want to know is why you took it out on me, you cunt.
I was only a poor innocent copper doing my job when I gave evidence at your trial.'
In the sight, he saw Heuer look out of the window, his eyes searching the bracken. 'No you were not,' he said. 'You were p
art of the plot. It was your evidence more than any other which had me convicted, and you lied in the witness box, Skinner. There never was a second alarm. There was a last-minute change of plan; someone at the top took cold feet.
'My own people tipped you off. By then, it was the only way they could stop me. So they did, and then they left me to rot.'
Skinner laughed into the phone. 'How long did it take you to work that story out, Peter? Careful now,' he warned as Heuer reacted to his taunt.
'There was no plot to get you. Your mission was meant to succeed, but you fucked it up. Of course there was a second alarm. It was even visible too. A small line-of-sight transmitter on the roof, aimed directly into our communication tower at headquarters. It looked like a radio aerial, and that's what you thought it was.
'You can't accept the idea that you're fallible, can you, Heuer?
You never could. That's why you were kicked out of the Army. They let you off then, when you departed from an operational plan in Argentina in 1982 and had two of your men killed. They let you resign, because the op was secret and they couldn't have a court martial. And because you had a special talent for killing people, they passed you on to the intelligence community.
'How many people did you kil for our side, and for the Americans?
A couple of dozen, was it?'
As Skinner paused, two shots rang out around the Gul y. He smiled.
'Free and clear,' he said. 'Mission accomplished. You've cocked it up again, Peter. You'l probably blame the RAF this time.
'Face it, at last, man,' he went on. 'You got yourself caught in the Polish Consul's house, before you had killed him, fortunately. You were nicked by three carloads of our people. A dozen of them. There was no way, with that number of witnesses, that anyone could get you out of it.
'For fuck's sake, you were even paid when you were inside, even though you'd botched the job. To keep you loyal, they thought.'
His voice hardened. 'You've been planning this for years, haven't you? You did your time, five years with parole, and even took on a couple of jobs when you came out four years ago. Yet al the time 271
you were planning to make your bosses pay big-time for the years you did inside.'
Unexpectedly, Skinner chuckled, startling Heuer, making the red dot jump. 'They are not pleased with you this time, not at all. Do you know, they even asked me to kil you. They don't want any of this coming out in a trial, you see, so they asked me to do you in, very quietly, resisting arrest sort of thing.
'What d'you think of that?' he said, a shocked tone in his voice.
'Asking me, a policeman, to kil you. That's how much they want you dead.' He paused. 'No, Peter, no,' he said sharply. 'Don't move yet. Not til Andy and the kids are well clear. And keep the phone pressed to your ear.'
Through his own earpiece, he could hear Heuer's breathing, no longer even, but heavy and ragged, making the red dot seem to ripple on his shirt as he watched.
'Imagine, thinking that I'd do that,' he went on. 'Even though you terrified two kids out of their wits, and did things that may well scar them emotionally for life. I mean, did you hear Mark's voice when he learned from the radio that his mum was dead? And what about Tanya, after you blew her mum's brains out right in front of her?
'As for Leona, would you have raped and kil ed her, if she hadn't been someone you knew I was fond of? You were watching her house that Friday night, Peter, weren't you?
'Come on, I want an answer. You were watching, and you saw the bedroom light go on, isn't that right?'
'Yes!' cried Heuer.
The detective drew in a deep breath. 'Boy,' he said. 'You must be thinking that al your Christmas days have come at once, right now.
You must be thanking your luckiest star that it's a straight, idealistic, career copper like me holding this gun, and not someone like my mate Adam Arrow, who'd kil you in an instant.
'Nod once if I'm right.'
Slowly, the man in the gun-sight nodded.
Behind the carbine, Bob Skinner's face took on a cold, terrible expression as the memory of Leona McGrath's abused, battered, throttled corpse appeared in his mind's eye. 'Wrong, Peter,' he whispered. 'Sometimes life hands you a luxury you can afford.' The red dot swept upwards to the centre of Heuer's forehead.
'Say hel o to Ross for me.' He squeezed the trigger.
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Martin and the two children were waiting at the foot of the hil south of the Gully as Skinner reappeared over its crest, after pressing Heuer's pistol into his hand, and squeezing off one shot into the wall beside the window just as Arrow had told him to do.
Mark came running towards him. 'Uncle Bob! Uncle Bob!' he cried out. 'I told Tanya that it'd be al right. I told her that you'd come to get us.'
Skinner swept him up in his arms, and carried him off back down the hil towards Andy and the white-faced, shocked little girl. 'And you were right, weren't you? Just like you always are.'
'Tanya's awful frightened. Uncle Bob.'
' She's had every right to be. So have you, although I don't suppose you were.'
'Well . . .' Mark began. 'What about the man, Mr Gilbert?' he asked. 'He won't come back, wil he?'
'No, son. Mr Gilbert's dead. I told him not to do anything sil y, but he did and I had to shoot him.'
'You mean he went back into the kitchen for his gun?' Skinner winced inwardly as he was reminded of the child's astonishing memory for detail.
'Yes, that's just the way it was.'
'What'l happen now?'
'Some Army people will come up to take him away.' In fact, he had begun the clean-up process with a phone cal to Adam Arrow, from the cottage.
And then Mark asked the inevitable question, the one which his remarkable young mind had al owed him to block out until then.
'Uncle Bob . . .' he began. 'What it said on the radio about my mummy. That wasn't true, was it?'
Skinner hugged the boy to him. 'Let's sit down over here, Wee Man,' he said, 'and let's have a chat.'
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'Mitch, does your firm handle property sales?'
'No,' said Laidlaw. 'But I can recommend good people. Why?'
'I'm selling the Gullane cottage,' said Skinner.
'You hardly need do that, Bob,' the portly lawyer beamed, 'since the Secretary of State has said that his office would fund your defence costs. He was pretty magnanimous in his statement exonerating you, after the line he took at the start.'
'He was told to be,' said Skinner.
The lawyer shot him a curious look. 'Fine by me,' he said. 'It means I can now add your daughter's time to the fee note with a clear conscience.'
The policeman laughed.
'I was surprised by what he said in the rest of the statement,'
Laidlaw went on, 'that the al egations had proved to be spurious and that there would be no further enquiries.'
'He was told to say that too,' said Skinner, in a way which invited no further discussion of the matter.
'Stil , Mitch,' he went on, quickly, 'despite the outcome, it was pretty hairy while it lasted. Al your input and support was much appreciated, and I thank you for it.'
'Don't mention it. It's good to see you looking so relaxed after it all, and after yesterday's events. You've had no reaction to . ..' The rest of the question was unnecessary.
Skinner glanced at him. 'To having to shoot Heuer?' He shook his head. 'No. It's a part of the job. Not an everyday part, thank goodness, but part nonetheless. Heuer made his choice when he killed Leona.
Up the crematorium chimney's the best place for him.'
'Was he killed outright?' asked the solicitor, slightly awed by a side of his friend that he had never seen.
'Oh yes. When your brains are al over the wal behind you, everything else tends to stop working.'
Laidlaw shuddered. 'How were the children, afterwards?' he asked.
The policeman grimaced. 'WeeTanya's completely withdrawn. It'll take her a
long time to recover I think, if she ever does. I don't envy Bruce Anderson his job as a father. I think he may even resign his office to look after her.
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'As for Mark, he's a remarkable and resilient wee boy. But he's still only that: a wee boy, orphaned by violence.'
'What'l happen to him?'
'He's with his grandparents just now, but they're retired. He'll need a different long-term solution. Still, I'm sure that one will be found.'
Laidlaw nodded. 'Let's hope so. Anyway, back to your house: you're serious?'
'Yes. I just fancy a change, somewhere I can build a new set of memories. I plan to sell the Edinburgh house too, and buy another place in Gul ane.' .,,.,
'Ah so we won't be losing you from the Thursday night footbal club.' '
'Shit no. That's my religion.'
'That's good. But after yesterday, I won't be kicking you again, that's for sure.'
Skinner laughed as he rose to his feet. 'Is my daughter available, by the way?' he asked.
Laidlaw shook his head. 'No, she cal ed in and asked for the day off. She said that you and she and Andy had had a stressful time last night, unwinding. I told her I quite understood, and that I'd see her on Monday.
'She did ask me to give you a message, though. She said that a delivery service had been trying to reach you, about a package that's en route to you. She's told them you'll receive it at Fairyhouse Avenue
at midday.'
Skinner frowned as he headed for the door of the lawyer's office.
'Delivery service?' he mused, aloud. 'Wonder what the hell that's about? The way my luck's been going lately, this one really will be a bomb.'
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The package was explosive in its own way, but it was no bomb. It had arrived before he reached the bungalow.
He smelled fresh coffee in the kitchen as he stepped through the back door. He caught the fragrance of a familiar perfume as he stepped into the hall. He heard the rustle of movement as he turned into the living room.
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