State Secrets

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Is it all forgotten now?’ I asked.

  The little man pursed his lips. ‘What do you think?’ he murmured. ‘If someone suggested, quite improperly and without a shred of proof, that you as a chief police officer used your access to sensitive files on individuals to brief against their interests and in your own, would you forget it?’

  McIlhenney laughed. ‘Chancellor,’ he exclaimed, ‘if that happened, that man there would carry a grudge to the other person’s grave.’

  ‘Exactly, Commander; and believe me, Emily has an equally good memory, and an appetite for retribution.’

  ‘Could she have been planning to move against them?’ I asked.

  ‘She is,’ Ellis retorted, ‘but in her own time. This parliament has another three years to run, and three years is a hell of a long time for anyone to survive as Home Secretary without dropping the ball, particularly if he’s also saddled with the title of Deputy Prime Minister. All she has to do is wait, and a year or so down the line she’ll have an excuse to demote him.’

  ‘If she recovers,’ I pointed out.

  He winced. ‘True. If she recovers. Let us pray she does.’ He paused for a second or two, then said, ‘I’m guessing that you saw her, Mr Skinner. What’s your view?’

  I had to think about that one. ‘When we went in there,’ I answered, when I had done so, ‘into her room, we were told that she was dead. You’re looking at two guys who have seen more murder scenes than either of us cares to remember. And neither of us doubted that she was, until a very small reaction showed otherwise. That’s all I can tell you, factually. Beyond that the only view I’ll put on the record is that if she does come back to office, it won’t be for a while. During that time the country will need to be governed, and it will be down to you people to . . . how do I put this . . . make arrangements to the satisfaction of the monarch. From what I hear, Mr Kramer has made a start on that already.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ellis agreed, ‘I hear that also; from the horse’s mouth in fact. He called me in to see him this morning and told me he would chair Cabinet in Emily’s absence.’

  ‘Did he also tell you that he’s planning to reschedule the Spitfire announcement?’

  ‘Yes, he did; I have no problem with that. As for his position, in the unique circumstances in which we find ourselves, that will require at the very least to be endorsed by Cabinet, although I suspect it will take more than that.’

  ‘Why?’ Neil asked. ‘If he’s the Deputy Prime Minister, isn’t that automatic?’

  ‘No, Commander, it isn’t because he wasn’t elected to that position, he was appointed to it by Emily Repton. In her extended absence, it’s my view that Cabinet should choose the acting Prime Minister. I may as well tell you that I advised the Cabinet Secretary, just before you arrived, that it should be the first item on the agenda for today’s meeting.’

  I drained my mug, and reached for a refill. ‘Will it choose Kramer?’

  ‘That will be a close-run thing. Monty Radley will support him, and so will Transport and DEFRA; Justice will be for, and the rest will split evenly.’

  ‘Who will oppose him?’

  For the first time, I saw a hint of steel in the little man. ‘The person with the best chance of winning the vote.’

  ‘And that will be?’

  ‘One of two people: Nick Wheeler, the Defence Secretary, if he can overcome his reluctance, or me.’ He peered at me, his eyes trying to read what was in mine. ‘Do you see Roland Kramer as a suspect?’ he asked, quietly.

  ‘No,’ I replied at once. ‘I wouldn’t shy away from the possibility, if it existed, but he didn’t have the opportunity. He returned to the palace from Central Hall just as Dr Satchell found Ms Repton . . . the victim, as we’d call her normally.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘No.’

  The Chancellor looked at Neil. ‘You, Commander? Do you have any views or are you sticking to the party line?’

  McIlhenney grinned. ‘Not at all,’ he shot back. ‘I’m actually the ranking police officer here. Bob didn’t just ask for me because he wanted a mate to back him up, He did it because he knew that whatever the Home Secretary thinks he has the power to do, he can’t legally exclude the police from a major criminal investigation.’

  The truth is that had never occurred to me, but he piled it on. ‘Effectively he was protecting Mr Kramer from himself, because this will come out and people . . . by that I mean the Opposition parties, and the media, when they find out they’ve been misled . . . will demand to know the whole story, step by step.’

  ‘Put that way,’ Ellis said, ‘the government should be thanking you both.’

  ‘Noted,’ Neil said. ‘As for the party line, there isn’t one but I agree with Mr Skinner on this. Mr Kramer didn’t do it, because he couldn’t have. Mr Radley didn’t do it because we know Ms Repton was active after he left her room.’

  I nodded agreement. ‘I don’t know if you’re fearing some sort of conspiracy here, Chancellor, but I’d have trouble believing there was one, because it wasn’t that sort of crime. It was sudden, it was violent, it was committed with the most unusual of weapons: not a knife, a letter-opener. It penetrated the skull by sheer chance; nine times out of ten it would have skidded off, but the angle was exactly right. That doesn’t say premeditation to me. It says spur of the moment anger, someone picking up the first thing to hand and lashing out.’

  ‘I see.’ He frowned; his forehead wrinkled. ‘If it wasn’t Monty, and it wasn’t Roland, who was in her room and did have the opportunity?’

  ‘That’s the bugger of it; we can’t find anyone who was. Nor, to be completely frank, despite the obvious ambition and manipulation of the Kramers, can we find any reason for it either. Can I ask you about Spitfire, Chancellor?’ I asked, switching tack.

  ‘You can try, but I won’t volunteer anything about it.’

  ‘You don’t need to. As I said, I know what it is, thanks to Mr Kramer. I know also that it was discussed and agreed in conditions of great secrecy, that only the most senior Cabinet ministers know the totality of it, and that it was to be announced yesterday. Part of our brief is to determine whether knowledge of the project has spread outside that core group. At this moment in time we can find no indication that it has.’

  Ellis’s eyes narrowed just a little. ‘Is this where you ask whether I’ve been careless and shared the secret with my family? If so, the answer is no. The very limited documentation on the subject has very rarely left this room, let alone this building, and I assure you there has been no discussion round the dinner table with James, my son, or Shafat, his partner.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ I said, ‘but it wasn’t what I was going to ask. My question is, were you all agreed on the switch from Trident to the new delivery system, or was it a majority decision?’

  ‘We are all completely behind it. The Balliol project, as it was called initially, was begun by the previous Prime Minister, George Locheil, in conditions of absolute secrecy. Within Cabinet, only three people knew about it: the PM, myself, as the Defence Secretary of the day, and Roland Kramer as Chancellor. Also, Mr Hamblin, the Cabinet Secretary,’ he added. ‘He knew too.’

  ‘What about the money? Didn’t that leave a trail?’

  ‘Smuggled out of the Trident budget; if the thing hadn’t worked, it would have been hidden as an overspend. But it did. When Emily moved into Downing Street and formed her administration, Hamblin was able to brief her about the full potential of Spitfire. She imposed the same secrecy level as her predecessor, but brought Monty Radley and Nick Wheeler into the group that would decide what to do with it.’

  ‘Were you agreed from the start?’

  ‘Absolutely. As soon as John Balliol showed us what it could do, we knew we had to adopt it. Look,’ he said, ‘we know the Russians will make a terrible noise, but that will
be all. They know we have no aggressive intentions towards them, although if they rein in their recent truculence that will be nice. The North Koreans, on the other hand, will stay silent, because they will realise . . . at least the saner part of their high command will . . . that it has been adopted with them in mind.’

  I nodded agreement. ‘Let’s go back to the circle of knowledge. You’ve already added someone to it, the former PM.’

  ‘George Locheil was never briefed on the completion of the project. When that time came, the government was being torn apart by the EU referendum. Norman Hamblin was effectively running the country with the leadership wholly occupied elsewhere. He sensed that the PM would go if the result went badly for him, and decided to sit on it until everything became clear. So no; Locheil knows the theory of the Balliol propulsion system, but only insofar as it was seen as a drone with global range. He doesn’t know what it became. Besides, he’s gone now, lecturing in the US, last I heard.’

  ‘What about Balliol’s team?’ McIlhenney asked. ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘There are a dozen working on the laser propulsion side of it, and twice that number on design and construction of the vehicles. They have no interface with the nuclear scientists, the bomb-shrinkers, I call them. The Balliol team all live on the Aldermaston complex and are under constant surveillance by MoD intelligence. Nick Wheeler knows what they had for breakfast. You can’t find any leaks, Mr Skinner, because there aren’t any.’

  He stood. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I must ask you to excuse me. We have rather an important meeting in less than three hours.’

  Twenty-Three

  There was something about Dr Michaela Satchell, maybe nothing more than the way her hair was cut, but it reminded me of a young springer spaniel Alex and I encountered on Gullane Bents, on a Friday evening many years ago. She’d lost her owner, or vice versa, and was panicking; then she saw us and latched herself on to us with a mix of hope and gratitude in her eyes. Alex was nine at the time; she wanted to keep her, but I said we couldn’t do that.

  ‘We have to do something,’ she insisted. She was right; it was autumn and the sun was low on the western horizon. There are foxes in the grassland, looking for rabbits and other small furry things; if we’d left her she’d have been in trouble.

  She had slipped her collar, and it was long before dogs were microchipped, so there was only one thing to be done. We took her home, and next morning I put a notice in the post office window. Gullane being the village that it is, she was back with her owner within three hours. As she left, she gave me that same look; if a dog can say ‘Thanks’, she did.

  Mickey Satchell had lost her owner too, and she was panicking. I could see that as she walked through our office door, in answer to Norman Hamblin’s politely framed order that she call on us.

  ‘Mr Skinner,’ she began.

  ‘Dr Satchell,’ I said, cutting across her, ‘before we go any further, my apologies for barking at you yesterday.’ That springer spaniel was still in my head. ‘We were all under pressure yesterday, you most of all.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied. ‘Apology accepted, but it was nothing to what I said to myself later on. Have you seen Emily?’ she asked. ‘Her doctors wouldn’t let me in.’

  ‘What about her protection officers? Couldn’t they help?’

  She looked across at Neil as he spoke. ‘They weren’t inclined to,’ she said. ‘They blame me, sort of. They take the view that when she’s in the Commons she’s in my care.’

  ‘That’s hardly fair,’ I observed.

  ‘I agree, but I can understand them feeling that way. I’m supposed to control access to the Prime Minister in parliament. Anyone who wants to see her over there has to come through me. In Downing Street, the Civil Service looks after her; in the Commons and on party business, I do.’

  ‘Anyone?’ I repeated. ‘Even senior colleagues?’

  ‘Not all,’ she admitted. ‘The Foreign Secretary, for example, he makes his own rules. The Chancellor and the Home Secretary have offices in the same corridor; they’re always calling in on each other. Have you seen Emily?’ she asked again.

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘We’ve been fully occupied trying to find out what happened to her. That’s why we needed to speak to you again; we need to go over the sequence of events yesterday morning. Before you discovered her, injured and unconscious, when was the last time you saw her?’

  ‘Just before ten. She usually arrives from Downing Street between quarter to and ten to; I always check in with her to see what she wants and what she needs. When I got there, Grover . . . Grover Bryant; you know who he is?’ I nodded. ‘He was just leaving. He’d come over with her in the car, made her coffee and got her settled in.’

  ‘How long did you stay with her?’ Neil asked.

  ‘No more than five minutes. She was working on a very important statement she was due to deliver in the House yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘That would be the defence announcement that everyone was anticipating?’

  Mickey Satchell looked at me, with a look of caution that hadn’t been there before. ‘Yes,’ she murmured.

  ‘Are you aware of its content?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I know no more about it than any other backbencher. Emily trusts me, but I’m not party to everything that goes on in Cabinet.’

  ‘Neither’s the Cabinet,’ I muttered quietly, carrying on before she had time to react. ‘Did you have a sense that this announcement was out of the ordinary?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It was all kept very close. Most of the stuff that goes to ministers is in green folders; the most sensitive stuff is in red folders. This thing doesn’t appear to have a folder at all. If it does, then I certainly haven’t seen it, although I have noticed the last few days that Emily’s been keeping her Red Boxes locked all the time. Usually, if it’s just the two of us in her office, she’ll leave them lying open.’

  ‘This might seem like a loaded copper’s question, Dr Satchell, but answer it anyway, please. Did you resent the obvious truth that Ms Repton was keeping you completely in the dark?’

  She frowned. ‘No, of course not; I know my place. My job’s a stepping stone, that’s all. Some of my backbench colleagues would kill to be in my . . .’ She broke off as she realised that her turn of phrase wasn’t the best, in the circumstances. ‘That’s to say, it’s a privilege to be chosen as the PM’s parliamentary aide, and it’s a marker that you have a front-bench future.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I acknowledged. ‘In the last week or so, have you been asked about the content of the announcement?’

  ‘God yes!’ she exclaimed. ‘Everyone and his uncle’s been bending my ear looking for hints. It’s actually been a relief not to know what’s in it. That means I can’t be accused if there is a leak.’

  ‘Can you recall anyone in particular who’s asked you about it?’

  ‘It would be quicker to tell you who hasn’t. My phone died of exhaustion on Sunday evening: I’ve had calls from lobby correspondents, defence correspondents, sketch writers, parliamentary colleagues who want to know in case their constituencies are involved, and my opposite numbers on the Labour and SNP benches demanding that their leaders are briefed in advance. Latterly I was reduced to saying, “I am from Barcelona. I know nothing!” in a Spanish accent like the waiter in Fawlty Towers.’

  ‘Was anyone particularly pushy?’

  ‘The Labour woman Aileen de Marco; she was. She refused to believe I had no knowledge of the content. She left me feeling quite inadequate.’

  McIlhenney laughed.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ Satchell asked, crossly.

  ‘I think he’s suggesting she had the same effect on me when I was married to her,’ I volunteered.

  She drew me a long, appraising look. ‘I can understand that,’ she murmured.
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br />   I assumed she was insulting me, but I let it pass. ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Nobody who stands out.’

  ‘Fair enough. So, yesterday morning, you saw Ms Repton around ten, and left her at five past; the next time you saw her was . . . ?’

  ‘When I found her body . . . sorry, what I thought was her body. Honestly, Mr Skinner, I couldn’t find a pulse. It can happen, with some kinds of injury, and in comatose patients; the heart rate drops way down. I should have tried for longer, but I didn’t, I panicked, and reached the wrong conclusion.’

  ‘Did she have any appointments in that hour? Was anyone booked in to see her?’

  ‘Not that I know of, but that isn’t definitive. She could have called someone, anyone, and asked them to drop in. I’m not keen on her doing that, for I like to have a record of all of her meetings to guard against her being misquoted. Usually she filters her callers through me, but not always.’

  I nodded; my assistants used to make the same complaint about me, but there were times when I didn’t want them to know what I was up to. ‘One last question,’ I said. ‘In the brief period of time that you spent with the Prime Minister yesterday, how did she seem?’

  ‘Tense. Emily is a very calm, controlled person, but yesterday she was on edge. I put it down to this mysterious statement, but maybe it was more than that. I can only guess.’

  I smiled. ‘I’m sure she’ll tell us when she wakes up,’ I said, trying to reassure her.

  Her eyes dropped for a second, then found mine. The lost puppy look was back. ‘Thanks for the optimism, Mr Skinner, but I’m a doctor. I may have screwed up yesterday, but normally I’m pretty competent. If nobody else has said this to you, I will now: she isn’t going to wake up, not any time soon.’

  Twenty-Four