‘I’ve met bigger zealots than him,’ I retorted. ‘The last one was a Russian; he’d have had Daffyd running for cover. But speaking of Kramer,’ I continued, ‘I need to see his wife. How do I do that?’
‘Get yourself along to Conservative Party headquarters. She’s pretty much full time as chair. Would you like me to arrange a meeting through her office?’
‘Thank you, no,’ I said. ‘I’d rather it was a cold call; I don’t want to give her any preparation time.’ I waved the card that was my badge of rank. ‘I imagine this will get me through the door.’
‘I imagine it will. Will you advise the Home Secretary?’
‘No way.’
‘He will not be pleased,’ Hamblin warned, ‘when he finds out that you’ve interviewed his wife without his approval.’
‘Good.’
‘Were you always insubordinate, Mr Skinner?’
‘I’ve never had to be. My senior officers, when I had any, always knew that I was right.’
‘Mmmm.’ The Cabinet Secretary frowned. ‘In the unlikely event that Mrs Kramer confesses to the attack on the Prime Minister, what will you do?’
I hadn’t thought about that, but I didn’t really have to. ‘I’ll call in Neil McIlhenney and let him take it from there.’
He shuddered.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘one more thing before I head for the Tory HQ. You’ve got a leak in your office; someone’s feeding information to Grover Bryant.’
‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but I choose to leave her in place. Some of the information she passes on isn’t factually correct. In any event,’ he added, ‘Mr Bryant may not be around here for much longer, unless the Prime Minister makes a miraculous recovery.’
I left him nurturing that thought and headed for the exit. As I walked I consulted an app on my phone; it showed me exactly where the Conservative Central Office was located, a ten-minute walk away.
I had just turned into Parliament Square when Jimmy Buffett sang his song in my pocket. As I took it out, I found myself hoping it would be Sarah, offering me a reminder of what sanity and stability were like in the midst of the madness, but it wasn’t. It was Neil.
‘Bob,’ he exclaimed, ‘daft as this sounds I can actually see you.’
‘Where are you?’ I asked, stopping in my tracks.
‘Look across the square to the gate into the Commons.’
I did, and saw him standing beside one of the armed officers on guard duty. ‘Gotcha. Come across and join me.’
‘Fine,’ he said, ‘as long as we’re going for a sandwich or something similar. I never told you, but I was diagnosed with mild type two diabetes a few months ago, and I need to refuel.’
I glanced around, looking for a Greggs sign, even a Starbucks, but seeing none. ‘Where can we do that around here?’
‘No worries. I’ll show you. Stay where you are.’
I ended the call and watched him as he made his way across the junction, waiting twice for the signs to turn green. As he approached I studied him, looking for any signs of physical change. He might have been a little less chunky than before, but he looked none the worse for that.
‘Are you on insulin?’ I asked, as soon as he reached me. ‘Do you need to go somewhere to inject?’
‘Hell no,’ he laughed. ‘I told you, Bob, it’s mild. My last medical showed raised sugar levels, and diabetes turned out to be the cause. I control it by diet, for now, and hopefully that will always be enough, but I can’t take liberties. Come on.’
I fell into step beside him as we headed for the north side of Parliament Square, then past the Supreme Court and the Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre, towards a massive stone building. High above the entrance the words ‘Methodist Central Hall’ were displayed in gold lettering; I realised that was where the Home Secretary had addressed his prison governors that morning, and said so.
‘Yes,’ my friend agreed, ‘but there are public facilities too.’
He led the way into a spacious entrance area. ‘There must be more Methodists than I realised,’ I murmured as I looked around.
We turned off to the right, then down a flight of stairs into a big, well-illuminated, self-service cafeteria. It was busy, but there were plenty of available tables. We loaded a tray with sandwiches, wraps and sparkling water, then commandeered one of them.
‘This is good,’ I said. ‘I never knew it existed.’
‘Neither do most of the tourists,’ Neil observed, ‘which is a blessing. When I was in the old Met building just round the corner, I came here quite often. Even now we’ve moved, I still do. I meet my undercover people here if they develop a pressing need to report in.’
‘Here, rather than in New Scotland Yard?’
‘Yes, and you know why.’
I did indeed. The officers who were reporting to him were in so deep that even in a city as populous as London, they could not risk being spotted walking into the Met HQ, or any other police building. He might even have been implying that they would not have been safe inside. Corruption exists, and the larger the force, the likelier it is to go undetected.
‘So,’ I said, after a mouthful of tuna mayonnaise sandwich, ‘did you get anything useful over there?’
‘I hope not,’ he replied. ‘I’ve got the Chancellor leaving at ten past nine, the PM logged in at nine forty-five, with the official spokesman, a guy named Bryant . . . who will need to be interviewed . . . and Kramer leaving as they arrived, then coming back at exactly ten fifty-nine.’
‘Don’t worry about Bryant,’ I told him. ‘He came looking for us; he’s under control for now, although he could still become a problem. Ten fifty-nine, you say Kramer got back. How sure are you of that time?’
‘Pretty sure. It was recorded by a PC who seemed to understand that record-keeping has to be accurate if it’s to be any good.’
‘If his watch squares with the timer on the CCTV footage it puts Kramer outside the building when Repton was attacked.’ I frowned. ‘I suppose I’m happy about that,’ I grumbled.
Neil laughed. ‘Were you hoping it was him?’
‘It would have been good for my memoirs.’
‘Hold on. The next one could be even better.’
‘You mean there was somebody else? There are only three offices in that corridor and only three people who can access them through that gate: you’ve just placed them all within the timeframe of the attack.’
‘Maybe so, but there was one other person admitted. The sergeant in charge got a bit shifty about it, but he realised he had no choice but to cough up. The person he identified was admitted at ten twenty-eight according to the PC’s log and was in there for approximately twenty-three minutes before he left by the same doorway. They let him in because he said he had a meeting with the Prime Minister, and because the sergeant didn’t have the bottle to make him go the proper way.’
‘So who was he, your mystery man?’
‘Merlin Brady.’
The remainder of the tuna mayonnaise stopped halfway on its journey to my mouth. Filling leaked out as my fingers tightened on it.
‘Merlin fucking Brady?’ I gasped. ‘The leader of the fucking Opposition? You’re telling me that he blagged his way into Repton’s office corridor, then left again, appearing agitated, a few minutes before Mickey Satchell found her on her desk with a blade sticking out of her scone?’
‘That’s what happened,’ McIlhenney confirmed. ‘Sergeant Fowler, on his own, might have got the timing wrong but not PC Rasani-Hastings. I’m in no doubt.’
‘What time exactly was he logged out?’ I asked.
‘Ten fifty-two.’
I did some sums in my head. Based on the times of the phone calls that Emily had made to Wheeler, Brady had left within the timeframe for the attack.
‘
Then I think we should search the cellars as well,’ I declared. ‘It’s coming up on November the Fifth and you never know, we might find one of Guy Fawkes’s descendants hiding in there with a few barrels of gunpowder.’
‘What are we going to do? Do we need to go to Kramer with this?’
‘Let me think about that,’ I said. ‘I was heading somewhere when you called, and I still need to go there. First things first. Let’s tackle Mrs Kramer in her lair.’
Fourteen
In all the time I worked for Bob Skinner in Edinburgh, I never aspired to match him, not in any way. None of us did, not me, not Mario, not Maggie Rose, not Brian Mackie, not the late, lamented Stevie Steele, not Sammy Pye, and not even young Sauce Haddock . . . although one day he might. The Big Man was our leader, and the thing that drove us all was a desire to live up to his expectations of us.
We didn’t always succeed; when we failed, as sometimes we did, he never held it against any of us, but took the blame upon himself, as a failure in his guidance. Looking back, I can see that his gift was his ability to spot people whose talent was not tainted by personal ambition, then to nurture it. And as it’s turned out, all of us, even me who never dreamed of it, attained senior ranks.
But hold on, I’m wrong; there was one who was always striving to catch up with Bob; but the fact that I forgot to include him in that list of his protégés says it all.
Andy Martin was the first of us to be taken under his wing, and for a while he was the closest to him. Later he was even closer to Alex, Bob’s daughter. That relationship drove a wedge between them for a while, but eventually the big man accepted it.
Andy rose fast, but he was never content with anything; there was a cold, cruel streak in him and an excess of self-esteem that Bob never saw. Andy had his eye on the prize from the beginning, and I’m sure that he only ever saw the boss as a stepping stone. He proved it, in fact, when he leapt into the vacuum created by Bob’s refusal to countenance applying for the chief’s job in the national police force, the creation of which he had failed to prevent.
Sir Andrew accepted the knighthood that his mentor had declined, but that was all he had to take with him when he proved to be an absolute disaster as a leader. I was gone by that time, but I was a witness from four hundred miles away as he alienated all of the people on whose shoulders he had climbed, and came close to inflicting terminal damage on the fledgling service before he was quietly eased out of the door.
Bob was a witness too, but he stayed silent; he would have helped Andy, I’m sure, but he was never asked to do so. In fact he was kept at a distance. Most foolish of all, Alex was alienated too, and that probably sealed his fate. I don’t imagine that Bob engineered the newspaper stories that triggered his fall, but I do believe that if he’d intervened and backed him publicly he might have saved him.
All that was running through my mind as I concentrated on finishing my carefully selected chicken salad wrap in the Central Hall cafeteria, on the most bizarre day I could recall from a police career that has never been what anyone would call normal. I looked at my old boss as I held my water bottle to my lips, feeling a mix of pleasure and pride to be working for him again.
I say ‘for’ rather than ‘with’, because that’s how it’s always been, and because I recognised that I was only there beside him because he’d had the power to insist upon it.
‘So, gaffer,’ I said, ‘do we just walk in there cold, and demand to see the chairlady?’
‘Less of the “gaffer”, Commander,’ he grunted, wiping his lips with a paper napkin. ‘Pretty much so, yes.’
He produced a laminated card from an inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to me. It was smaller than a police warrant card, but it bore the crest of the Security Service, a crown over a circle of stars and portcullises surrounding a heraldic lion, his name and the title ‘Consultant Director’. It bore his photograph also, and a gold chip that I guessed had biometric information that would match his passport. Amanda Dennis hadn’t knocked that up at a moment’s notice. I knew she had tried to recruit him; she must have been waiting for the day.
‘That ought to get some attention,’ I agreed.
‘She’ll see us, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘When we get in there I’m going to try to assess whether she was expecting us.’
‘Do you think Kramer will have told her what’s happened?’
‘That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t know. This isn’t a normal couple we’re dealing with. She’s the chair of the governing party and at the moment he’s its acting leader. How much does he tell her? Hamblin says she doesn’t attend Cabinet any longer, so does he keep the secret stuff away from the dinner table or does he share it?’
‘When Louise is in rehearsal she’ll share her script with me,’ I volunteered. ‘We run through them at home.’
He grinned. ‘Reading the lines in Macbeth hardly equates with discussing the nuclear deterrent.’
‘The Scottish play,’ I corrected him. ‘You never call it by its name . . .’
‘I know, but only in a theatre.’
‘This building is a theatre of sorts. There are performances in here from time to time. Trust me, it’s a serious thespian superstition.’
‘If that’s so, since I have said “Macbeth”, what do I have to do to placate the evil spirits?’ he asked.
‘Turn around three times and spit over your left shoulder, I believe. That usually cuts it, Lou says.’
He stood. ‘In that case they can bring it on; I can be a fucking evil spirit myself. Come on,’ he said, ‘screw your courage to the sticking place. From what we saw in that TV footage we may be paying a call on Lady Macbeth herself.’
I stayed where I was, for something was troubling me. ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said.
‘Problem? Do you need to eat more?’ he added, a little anxiously.
You have to be diabetic to understand it properly. Mild cases can be managed quite simply, and so far I’ve been able to do that, more or less. ‘No, I’m fine,’ I assured him. ‘It’s got nothing to do with that. I’m wondering whether we should go in there without letting Kramer know first. Didn’t you say he told you to keep him informed every step of the way?’
‘He did indeed,’ Bob laughed, ‘and that’s an instruction I intend to ignore. Siuriña Kramer showed up where she shouldn’t have been, and I’m going to treat her like any other suspect. If the Home Secretary has a problem with that once he finds out, he can bloody well fire me . . . and I don’t think he’s going to do that.’
‘He might fire me,’ I countered.
‘Not a prayer. He doesn’t have that level of control over the Met, not any longer. And if he tried,’ he added, ‘I think he’d have to fire that wee Commissioner of yours as well.’
He was in such high humour, as we left the building, it was clear that he was enjoying being back in the saddle. He seemed to know where he was going, for he led the way down Tothill Street then turned into Matthew Parker Street, where the Tory lair is situated. (Like the majority of Scots, I’ve never voted for them; I don’t know for sure but I doubt that Bob has either.)
The reception area had a guardian, a man in a black suit that might have been a uniform of sorts, but he didn’t have any obvious deterrent value. I was surprised by the lack of obvious security, until I realised that the mirror behind him was probably more than that, and that we were being observed by more than the TV camera set in the ceiling.
‘Yes, gentlemen,’ he said, rising, and walking round to greet us. His lapel badge bore the name Gwynn Edwards. ‘How can I assist you?’
Bob produced his credentials. ‘I realise this is a little unorthodox,’ he replied, quietly, ‘but we need to see Mrs Kramer. It’s a matter of some urgency.’
‘I’m not sure she’s in the building, sir,’ Mr Edwards murmured, with a soft Welsh lilt. ‘Let me
find out.’
‘If she isn’t, then please tell me where she is. This isn’t going to wait.’
The man moved back to his desk, picked up the phone that sat there and punched in four digits. He kept his back to us, but my hearing is sharp enough for me to pick up the odd word: ‘Shirley’, ‘Five’, ‘rid of’, the last with a question in the tone. I thought I saw a small shrug as he replaced it in its cradle.
He turned back to us. ‘In fact the chairman is in, gentlemen, and she does have a minute or two free. Her office is on the first floor. I’ll buzz you through, then just take the stairs. You’ll be met by her secretary.’ He pointed to a double door behind him, to his right, then stretched an arm across and under his desk. He must have pressed a button, for we heard a loud, continuous buzz. We followed his instructions; there was a loud click as the door closed behind us.
The dark-haired, middle-aged woman who greeted us at the top of the stairs wore no badge on her white blouse, but she identified herself as soon as we had reached her level.
‘Shirley Oxford,’ she said, hand outstretched towards Bob. We were side by side, she didn’t know either of us, and neither of us was displaying ID but she locked straight on to him. ‘I’m Mrs Kramer’s chef d’equipe.’
The big man beamed. ‘Indeed?’ he exclaimed. ‘I thought we were leaving Europe. Sorry,’ he added quickly. ‘I shouldn’t be flippant. I’m Bob Skinner and this is Neil McIlhenney.’
Shirley didn’t appear to be riled by his wisecrack. She smiled. ‘You may have a point about the title,’ she murmured. ‘It may be passé.’ I liked her counter. ‘Siuriña introduced it when she became chairman,’ she explained. ‘She said she wanted the office to have a cosmopolitan feel, combined with greater authority. Before that I was the chairman’s secretary, plain and simple. To be honest, I still am to most people in here. Now,’ she continued, ‘do you really have to see her? She does delegate to me quite extensively.’
‘I’m sure she does,’ Bob conceded, ‘but this time she can’t. It’s a security matter and we have to discuss it with her, in person.’
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