‘That gives a complete picture of the House of Commons. Each one of those screens has a feed from a different camera; they’re interlinked and they have night-vision capability. Trust me, suppose a mouse came out during the night looking for cheese in the cafeteria, we’d catch it in the act. There’s only one corridor that isn’t covered: the one where the senior ministers’ offices are located.’
‘Does that include the stairway that leads down to the private entrance, or does that have a camera?’
‘No. It used to, that and the corridor, but around fifteen years ago, at the time of the Iraq war, the prime minister of the day got a bit sensitive and had the coverage removed. He also put his own protection people on the private entrance. These days it’s staffed by parliamentary police officers, but nobody’s ever got round to putting the cameras back.’
‘I see. How do we get to talk to your manager? Are you okay with that?’
‘I will be,’ he replied, with a smile, ‘when you tell me what exactly you guys are doing.’
‘We’re investigating the murder of Emily Repton.’
His eyes widened, the creases around them deepened. ‘Fuck!’ he murmured. ‘I’ll get him across here.’ He returned to his office; I watched from the doorway as he picked up one of the three phones on his desk and punched in a number. ‘Joe,’ I heard him say, ‘spare me a few minutes, please. Yes, I know it’s going to be hell on earth this afternoon, but I need to see you. Now, please.’
He hung up. ‘Not happy, but he’ll be here.’
I nodded. A few minutes to kill, so I decided to catch up with something else that was on my mind. I called Norman Hamblin from my mobile; Cerberus put me through at once.
‘How goes?’ I asked.
‘Speedily,’ he said. ‘The new PM is reshaping his Cabinet already. As expected, Ellis is the Deputy PM, staying as Chancellor. Michael Darkley, one of his cronies, is the new Foreign Secretary, called in from the back benches. Radley has resigned, to the surprise of many people. I don’t know who the new Home Secretary is yet.’
‘What about the Defence Secretary, Wheeler?’ I asked.
‘The former Defence Secretary,’ Hamblin countered. ‘He’s being replaced by Bernice Crichton, another Kramer acolyte; the problem is that I can’t find him to break the news.’
‘He’s still missing?’
‘I don’t know if he’s ever been officially missing, Mr Skinner, but if you’re suggesting that his absence is disturbing, I agree with you.’
Twenty-Nine
The man who burst into Rudy Muttiah’s office was his polar opposite. He was short, fat and whey faced; where the Security Director’s suit was Savile Row, his looked as if it might have come off a rack at the ‘final reductions’ sale at the very last BHS store to close its doors.
As for his voice, it was an impatient south London whine. ‘I hope this is urgent, Mr Muttiah,’ he began. ‘Of all days,’ he moaned. ‘We’re expecting a new Cabinet any minute and the place will just light up.’
‘Live with it,’ big Rudy replied, curtly. ‘These gentlemen need to speak with you.’ He glanced at Bob. ‘This is Joe Coffrey, CCTV manager. Use this office for your chat, guys,’ he added. ‘I need to step downstairs anyway.’
It occurred to me that he didn’t want to be within earshot of our interview with the TV man, even through a thick wooden door.
‘Thanks,’ Bob said. Then he smiled. ‘We won’t make a mess, I promise.’
‘What is this?’ Coffrey exclaimed as he looked up at us. His eyes sought mine, as if he felt in need of a friend and hoped I might be one. I looked down at him, with the same stony expression that big McGuire and I used to sow the first seeds of fear in the so-called hard men we encountered on the streets of Edinburgh twenty-odd years ago. It was probably unnecessary, but I didn’t like the guy.
He gave up on me as a bad job and turned back to Bob, to find that his smile had vanished too.
‘What is it?’ the wee man repeated, then finally asked a very obvious question. ‘And who are you?’
The twitch of my friend’s eyebrow was almost imperceptible but I saw it and understood that he wanted me to take the lead. ‘I’m Commander McIlhenney, Metropolitan Police.’ I showed him my warrant card, holding it up and making sure that he read it. ‘My colleague is attached to the Security Service. We’re the people for whom you copied a section of CCTV footage yesterday.’
He gulped.
‘Before we begin,’ I paused, giving him time to think ‘Begin what?’ ‘is there anything you’d like to say to us, anything you’d like to volunteer?’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as, might you have made a mistake with the timeframe of the section you supplied?’
‘But he couldn’t have,’ Bob interrupted. ‘We checked the time on screen at the beginning and the end, remember.’
I nodded. ‘Right enough, so we did. That makes it all the more difficult to explain.’
‘Explain what?’ Coffrey squeaked. Rudy Muttiah liked his office cool, but he was sweating.
‘I think you should sit down,’ Bob said to him. ‘In fact, I insist on it.’ He pulled up the only guest chair in the room and put a hand on his shoulder, pressing him down.
‘We have a problem with your tape extract,’ I continued. ‘We know that two other people walked along that corridor yesterday, en route to the Prime Minister . . . sorry, the late Prime Minister’s office, but there isn’t a sign of them on your footage. So explain to us, Mr Coffrey, how that could have happened. Before you say anything,’ I added, ‘you need to realise that this is a very serious matter, the most serious that either of us have ever encountered in our long careers.’
‘He means tell us the fucking truth,’ Bob murmured. ‘We know the tape was doctored, and neither of us believes for a minute that you just did it off your own bat. Who told you to do it?’
Something happened then that wasn’t an edifying sight, or sound, or any other sort of sensory experience. It had never happened to me with a witness before, and when I asked him afterwards, Bob admitted that it was a new one for him too.
Joe Coffrey pissed his pants.
‘He told me I had to do it,’ he wailed. ‘He’ll come for me now you know, and he’ll find my family. He’ll never believe I didn’t tell you.’
‘In which case,’ Bob said, gently, ‘you’ve nothing to lose by telling us now. You have a lot to gain, in fact,’ he added. ‘Once you’ve shared it with us we’ll be on your side. Take a look at us. Do you think we can’t take care of the guy who scared you?’
The sad wee fat man looked up at him; his eyes were as moist as his trousers, but I could see relief in them as he shook his head, slowly.
‘Come on then,’ Bob continued. ‘What happened?’
‘He came into my office about half past twelve,’ Coffrey began. ‘He didn’t tell me his name, just showed me a badge. He said very soon I was going to be asked for footage of a section of corridor in the Commons building covering an hour or so that morning. He said that there were a couple of people on it who his boss didn’t want to be seen, and so he wanted me to erase them; he wanted me to tamper with the recording.’ His voice rose, as if the notion was outrageous. ‘I told him I couldn’t do that. I said I had a duty to my employer and to Mr Muttiah to keep the record intact. I asked him who his boss was and why he thought he could give me such orders.’
He shuddered. ‘He said I didn’t need to know that. Then he said that my first duty was to myself and to my family. I have a picture of my kids on my desk; he took out a gun and he tapped it against the glass. “If you don’t do as I say,” he told me, “first it’ll be them, and then it’ll be you.” And he meant it, he meant it!’
He looked up at me, searching for sympathy; I let him see a little.
‘No,’ Bob replied, �
��he made you believe that he meant it, and that was all he needed to do. The badge he showed you: could you read a name on it?’
‘There wasn’t time. I saw it for less than a second.’
My friend took out his Security Service warrant and showed it to Coffrey. ‘Did it have that crest on it? Can you remember that much?’
He nodded. ‘Yes it did, I remember that much.’
‘Can you describe the man?’
‘Not really; he was leaning really close to me and his eyes were all I could see. He had a dark suit on, but so do most men in that place.’
‘How about his accent?’
‘Not London; West Country possibly. I’m rubbish with regional accents.’
‘Could it have been Welsh?’
‘It could have been anything but Scottish or Scouse; them I do know.’
I could tell from Bob’s frown that he had someone in mind.
‘When you doctored the record,’ I said, moving on, ‘did you do it on the copy or on the original tape?’
‘On the original,’ Coffrey replied. ‘He made me do that; he was watching me all the time.’
‘With a gun to your head?’
‘No, he’d put it away by then, but I’d got the message.’
‘So the original is gone for good.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘We know one of the people on that section; we believe the other was a man.’
‘That’s right. But I’d never seen him before. He was a stranger in the palace; I can tell you that categorically. If he’d been here before, I’d have seen him and I’d have remembered.’
Bob held up a hand. ‘Do you have him on any other cameras?’
‘Sorry, no. We did but the man made me delete them all, even the one that looks at St Stephen’s Entrance.’
‘Bugger,’ Bob grunted. ‘So we have no visual. Can you describe him?’
‘Oh yes. He was wearing a light-coloured suit, beautifully tailored, with a Nehru collar rather than lapels; it was a sheer material, so light it shone like silver. He was with Dr Satchell, so a height comparison lets me estimate that he was around six feet tall.’ He glanced at me. ‘About the same height as you, Commander, and a bit shorter than you, sir. What else? Black patent shoes, hand-made for sure.’
‘He was wearing a suit,’ I said, ‘but no overcoat? It was a bit parky yesterday morning.’
‘He did have a scarf on,’ Coffrey volunteered. ‘I forgot to mention that. A big thick woollen one, predominantly black, with red and cream ribbons and a crest. I couldn’t see the detail, but there was blue in it. It belongs to one of the Oxford colleges, but I can’t recall which one.’
‘I can.’ I looked at Bob, whose face was wreathed in a smile that was positively beatific. ‘I played on a private golf course once, a while ago now. The guy who owned it had that crest in every one of the flags. The blue you describe is on the left-hand side and it’s background to a silver lion rampant. I know the college you can’t recall. It’s Balliol.’
Thirty
‘A few years ago,’ I told Neil, after the unfortunate Mr Coffrey had limped damply back to his office, ‘around the time I had that bit of bother with someone trying to set me up on a corruption charge, the thing that you and McGuire helped me out with, Andy Martin and I had to sort out something, a child kidnap case. It took us to a Highland estate belonging to Everard Balliol, John Balliol’s father; in fact, he helped us out with the conclusion. The detail of that never made the papers.’
My friend had the sense not to press me to share it with him. ‘Everard was a Texan, an industrialist who started in oil, then just proliferated, into everything that was upcoming and sexy. He was a genuine billionaire, not just a millionaire with bullshit and a PR machine. He claimed descent from the King of Scotland whose name he bore, and he backed that up by buying as much of the damn country as he could. He was also as crazy as the proverbial bedbug. When I saw the first Men in Black movie, where the guy turns into a giant cockroach at the end, it made me think of him.’
‘What happened to him?’ Neil asked.
‘He was murdered for a few dollars and a pile of jewellery by one of the Korean bodyguards he kept around him. I read about it at the time, then I thought no more about it. I didn’t realise he had a son . . . for he was as gay as he was crazy. I’m sure the Koreans did more than guard his body . . . but I Googled him in my hotel last night before I met Amanda and sure enough, he married a country singer in his mid-thirties, had a kid with her, then sent her back to Nashville and, presumably, the boy to boarding school.’
‘And it’s him who brought the Spitfire propulsion system to our government, the son?’
‘In exchange for another billion or so and a passport, that’s right.’
‘Which left him happy as Larry, presumably.’
‘That’s right,’ I continued, ‘and the announcement was good to go. So why did Emily Repton call him in to see her a few hours before she was due to stand up and make it? But did she?’ I pondered aloud. ‘Or was he wished upon her? If so, by whom?’
‘Reasonable questions all,’ McIlhenney commented. ‘Do you have any answers?’
‘To the last one, yes, that’s fucking obvious: by the person who wanted the tape erased. And the way I see it, that can only be one man: Roland Kramer. The guy who leaned on poor wee Joe Coffrey: Security Service badge, dark suit, armed in the House of Commons, and likes to wave his weapon about; that can only be one of two men, the pair who were on guard yesterday morning, and I’d put your last penny on it being Kramer’s minder, the fella he called Daffyd.’
‘Wouldn’t Coffrey have known him?’
‘Why should he?’ I countered. ‘He’s never under CCTV surveillance, only in the corridor.’
‘And we’re going to prove all that exactly how?’
‘I’ll get it out of him,’ I promised, ‘don’t you worry about that. Coffrey will identify him, with Amanda and me in the room to shore up his courage. But before we go there, I want to nail down the sequence of events that led to Balliol being in her room.’
Neil stared at me. ‘What have we got here?’
‘You know as well as I do. We have the Prime Minister being fatally wounded in her room by the billionaire who is about to hand our nation the world’s deadliest nuclear strike force. And we have the Home Secretary, her inevitable successor, sending an armed man to cover it up by threatening the family of the only man who could prove that Balliol was there.’
He whistled. ‘As big McGuire would say: fuck me!’
‘I wish he was here. I could use another pair of heavy hands. Yes,’ I added, ‘I know we can call in Met officers if we need them, but we don’t have time to bring them up to speed. We’ve got to do this on our own. Pretty soon, mate, we’ve got to split up, but before then, I have a couple of calls to make, as soon as we’re back in your office.’
The first of those was to Amanda Dennis, to update her on what we had discovered. I thought about calling Feargal Aherne too, but decided that he was better off not knowing of my suspicions until I was able to prove them.
‘I want your man Daffyd,’ I told her, once I had finished. ‘I plan to reintroduce him to the man Coffrey.’
‘I want Mr Daffyd Evans too,’ she said. ‘The stunt with the gun in Kramer’s Commons room was not acceptable from a Security Service employee. However, there are two problems with that. One is that I can’t find him; he isn’t picking up calls to his mobile, or answering the home number that we have on file for him. The other, even more frustrating, is that when my assistant called Kramer’s private office to ask for their help in locating him, she was told that he doesn’t work for me any more.’
‘How can that be?’ I asked.
‘He’s been transferred to the Downing Street staff, effective immediately
, reporting directly to the new Prime Minister. If Mr Coffrey’s story is true . . . as I’m sure it is . . . the means of proving it is out of our reach. The tracks have been covered.’
‘What if I intercept him somewhere, in a public place, with Coffrey?’
‘I wouldn’t do that. You’d be putting the man at risk . . . and yourself too, possibly.’
Frustrating, but she had a point. Kramer had reached the top of the pyramid of power. If I was correct, and he was complicit in the attack on Emily Repton, he would go to extremes to protect himself.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘forget Daffyd Evans for now. We don’t need him anyway; we have another route to the truth. Where can I find John Balliol?’
‘You’ll need to be careful with him too,’ she warned.
‘I plan to be,’ I promised. ‘I’ll take him when the time is right, and that will be when your forensic team can give me evidence that puts him definitely in that room. Until I have that I want to put eyes on him, that’s all.’
‘I hope I can help you with both of those. The physical evidence is less certain without a comparator but I can probably locate him for you. Balliol’s essential to the national security; that puts him under the protection of my, of our, service, and by implication our surveillance. He owns considerable property, but since the Spitfire project began he’s spent most of his time in the Aldermaston complex.’
‘If he’s living within it that’ll be a problem.’
‘Then let’s hope he isn’t,’ Amanda murmured. ‘I’ll get back to you. Anything else?’
‘Lots,’ I retorted. ‘First there’s Nicholas Wheeler, the soon-to-be former Defence Secretary, if he isn’t already. I need to speak to him, but nobody can find him, not even Hamblin.’
‘When was he seen last?’
‘Sunday, as far as I know.’
‘The obvious place to start is with his protection officers; they’re not under my control, but I can arrange for one of them to call you. Next?’
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