State Secrets

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘The incoming call on Emily’s mobile that you told me about yesterday, the one from the pay-as-you-go card bought in Clapham. Has the originating phone been used since?’

  ‘No, nor will it be. We’ve made every effort to trace the buyer, but it’s not going to happen. Why? What’s your thinking, Bob?’

  ‘My thinking is that Kramer’s involved; a pound to a pinch of pigshit that if you did find the buyer of those SIM cards in Clapham, he’d look a hell of a lot like Daffyd Evans. But why? Why did Balliol suddenly turn up in the Commons, and in her office? And why has Wheeler gone missing? I need to find him, Amanda, I really do . . . that’s assuming he’s still alive.’

  ‘If he isn’t, that would be rather extreme.’

  ‘Yes,’ I concurred, ‘but if he turns up suffocated in a suitcase that he might or might not have locked himself into, you heard it here first.

  ‘The Balliol information, please,’ I continued, ‘and Wheeler’s protection people, soon as you can . . . Director General.’

  I sensed her smile at my use of her formal title. ‘You’re getting a buzz from this, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘You like this life.’

  ‘I am too Goddamn old for this life,’ I insisted, ‘and I want to get back to my real one.’

  ‘You and your wife? Feargal’s probably still chortling over her doing the autopsy.’

  ‘He better not laugh too loud. If this all goes tits up and Kramer settles into the big chair, nobody will be out of his reach.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, grimly. ‘And I’ll be first in line for the axe.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I countered. ‘Second maybe, but I know who’ll be first.’

  Thirty-One

  It didn’t take long for the first part of my prophecy to be proved correct.

  ‘Cabinet Secretary,’ I began, as my call to Hamblin was connected.

  ‘That won’t be me by this time next week,’ he responded, solemnly. ‘The head of the Civil Service has been instructed by the newly appointed Cabinet Office Minister to provide her with a list of suitable replacements.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘The newly ennobled Lady Kramer; she’ll be introduced to the House of Lords tomorrow.’

  Is he crazy? I thought. What will the media do to her if it comes out that she’s been fucking the Leader of the Opposition? Unless . . . Kramer really doesn’t know about them.

  For a moment I thought about sharing my knowledge with Hamblin, but decided very quickly against it. I’d made a promise to Merlin, but apart from that . . . he was too honourable ever to use it, but if Siuriña Kramer ever suspected that he knew about her, he might be at risk of a sudden unpredictable misfortune.

  ‘That’s too bad,’ I said, instead. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ he replied. ‘I’ll be bought off with the customary peerage which I will use to secure some non-political directorships. They’ll be lucrative and they’ll have the added benefit of keeping me out of my sister’s clutches for as long as possible.’

  ‘But for now, you’re still in post?’

  ‘Yes. Between you and me, my colleague said he would take as long as I wished to compile his list, but I asked him not to delay: I want to be out of here. Until then, though, I am still in charge. Do you need my help?’

  ‘If you’re able. I have a picture of the last hour and a quarter of Emily Repton’s life leading up to her sustaining her fatal injury. It’s not complete but I’m getting there. Now I’d like to be able to look back a little further. Is it possible for you to access the phone records of Number Ten, and to check whether she made any calls from there before she left for the House in the morning, and in the twenty-four hours before that?’

  ‘I can do that,’ he said, ‘but on whose authority is the request being made? For the record, you understand.’

  ‘Would it cover you if Sir Feargal Aherne called you himself to ask for your cooperation?’

  ‘Let’s assume that he just did,’ he said, decisively. ‘Miss Fortescue can be trusted.’

  ‘Miss Fortescue?’

  ‘The guardian of my outer office; most people lack the courage to ask for her name.’

  ‘Me among them,’ I chuckled. ‘She is pretty formidable.’

  ‘She’ll be leaving with me. Her pension is maximised, and she doesn’t like the make-up of the new Cabinet. I did point out that as a civil servant that has nothing to do with her, given our political neutrality. Her reply was that her dislike isn’t political, it’s personal.’

  I had barely hung up the phone I’d been using when my mobile sounded. I checked the screen; it showed ‘Number withheld’, but in my world many are.

  ‘Mr Skinner?’ a male voice asked.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘My name is Sergeant David Donaldson,’ he continued. ‘I’m one of the Defence Secretary’s protection team. I’ve been told that I should speak to you, but I wasn’t told why.’

  ‘Then let me explain, Sergeant. I need to speak to Mr Wheeler, but I’m having trouble finding him.’

  ‘Are you aware that Mr Wheeler has been replaced as Defence Secretary, sir? My colleagues and I are attached to the job, not the individual, so he isn’t my responsibility any longer.’

  ‘I know that, but he was in post the last time anyone clapped eyes on him. I’ve been trying to find him for the last twenty-four hours and I’m drawing a blank. When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘When he stood us down, the night before last. He has a flat in Smith Square; our squad maintain . . . maintained, I should say now . . . a constant presence while he’s there, two officers, one resting, one on watch. Unless he tells, told us, to go away.’

  ‘Did he do that very often?’ I asked.

  ‘Latterly it was quite a common occurrence,’ Donaldson replied. ‘He has a new lady friend, and she’s very . . .’

  ‘Shy?’ I suggested.

  ‘You could say that. Discreet might be a better word. I’ve never seen her,’ he admitted. ‘I know who she is because I read the bloody gossip columns, but we were always gone by the time she arrived.’

  ‘How did you feel about that, professionally?’

  ‘Truth be told, uneasy. But Mr Wheeler is a very persuasive guy, and when persuasion didn’t work, he was the boss. He told us to go, we went.’

  ‘And that’s what happened the night before last?’

  ‘Yes,’ the sergeant said.

  ‘What time?’ I asked.

  ‘Just after twelve thirty. There was a phone call, on the half hour. He took it and then he came out and stood us down.’

  ‘When do . . . did you usually pick him up after you’d been sent away?’

  ‘That would depend on him. Yesterday he told us that he wasn’t going into the House until a couple of hours before the PM’s defence statement. We were supposed to pick him up at one, but . . .’ he paused. ‘That got cancelled. My colleague, Sarfraz, had a text from him mid-morning; it said that he was going away for a couple of days of what he called “private reflection”, and that he’d call us when he needed us.’

  As he spoke, Sergeant Donaldson sounded more and more hesitant and less and less confident.

  ‘Yes, okay, we were worried,’ he admitted, anticipating my question, ‘but it’s happened before. Nick never believed he was a target for anyone; constant security was tedious for him. He’s been known to do that sort of thing before, to bugger off for two or three days at a time when there’s a sniff of the other, so when he sent that text to Sarfraz it didn’t ring any alarm bells. Now, of course, our boss is Mrs Crichton and he’s history.’

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ I said.

  ‘Are you saying we should have taken it seriously?’ the protection officer asked, anxiously.

  ‘I’m makin
g no judgement,’ I replied, ‘but others might. You and your mate might want to do what you can to check the origin of Sarfraz’s message just to make sure it came from Mr Wheeler’s phone.’

  ‘We will, sir. Thanks for the warning. I hope he is all right, but knowing him, I’m pretty sure he’s under a duvet somewhere with Her Royal what’s-it.’

  It would have been nice to think so, but I didn’t, not for a moment. That possibility had been explored and discounted. Nick Wheeler had disappeared, and who had benefited from his absence? Roland Kramer had, in that he’d been given a free run to the leadership, but that alone didn’t answer the big question. Why?

  I was still thinking about that when Amanda called me back. ‘My people think they’ve found Balliol’s base,’ she told me cheerfully. ‘He owns a cottage on the edge of a village called Silchester, not far from the Aldermaston establishment. His name is on all the utility bills including the telephone. We checked activity on the line yesterday morning. Calls were on divert to his mobile; there was one, at nine fifty-five from a mobile number. It was another one-off, a pay-as-you-go, but one of the batch from the Clapham purchase. Are you pleased with that, Bob?’

  ‘More than. Thanks. We’ll take it from here.’

  I sat silent for a while, as Neil caught up with his day job, reading reports from a couple of his undercover officers. As he did that I was thinking about the game that had begun the day before, only to reach a tragic and momentous conclusion that afternoon. I thought about all the moves and all the players and most of all about the man who had emerged on top of the pile.

  In the end, according to Hamblin’s source, Leslie Ellis, the Chancellor, had backed off from challenging Kramer. Had he seen that the numbers were stacked against him or had he been bought off? With what? A title? The Chancellor of the Exchequer is effectively the Deputy Prime Minister; whatever Emily Repton had called Kramer, while she was alive Ellis had been her de facto number two, in terms of the power that was vested in his office. Kramer might have hung the ribbon round his neck, but it had changed nothing.

  And Wheeler’s disappearance? What the hell was that about? There’s a danger in my job of becoming too conspiratorial, of letting your imagination run riot, chasing after it, and losing yourself. Forcing myself back to the path of realism, I decided that Sergeant Donaldson was right, and that in the words of the song that’s the embarrassing ringtone to my phone, the one I really will change soon, there’s always a woman to blame.

  I turned to Neil, as he put the last of the reports away in a box file. ‘Fancy a drive to the country, Commander?’ I asked him.

  Before he could answer, my attention was captured by the television mounted on his wall. The BBC News channel was switched on, but the sound was muted as Roland Kramer came into shot, at the podium from which we had seen Grover Bryant make his exit a few hours before, above the caption ‘New Prime Minister’.

  I grabbed the remote and hit the mute button to restore the sound that we had silenced earlier.

  ‘. . . not a moment for which I ever wished, but it falls upon me to take up the burden left by my late and lamented predecessor. Consequently, I have to tell you now that my first act in the House of Commons as Prime Minister will be to make the announcement which she was scheduled to make yesterday before the chain of events that ended her life, events for which no satisfactory explanation may ever be found. I will not anticipate what I will say tomorrow, other than to forecast that it will take the United Kingdom and indeed the world into a great new era. Thank you.’

  He turned and walked away, and as he did, the seed, of a glimmer, of a whisper, of the faintest notion, began to form itself in my mind.

  ‘I wonder,’ I whispered.

  Thirty-Two

  When I’d finished briefing Neil on John Balliol’s likely location, and he had gone to take care of his part of our investigation, a wave of tiredness washed over me. It didn’t hang around for long, but there was no denying its presence. You’ll be aware that I don’t admit to the effects of advancing years, just as McIlhenney ignores the restrictions and implications of his diabetes, but they exist for both of us, no question.

  I like to relax with exercise, so I decided that I would walk to the Savoy, it being not far from the Met’s new headquarters if you head along the Embankment. On the way I munched on a chocolate bar that I’d bought in the canteen, an old-fashioned lump of Cadbury’s that the Americans haven’t ruined yet, and I thought about seeing Sarah and about how much I love her. She and I have endured some tough times over the years, but we’re still around and from now on, God help anyone who tries to get between us.

  I thought also about the surprise I was going to spring on her, and wondered how she’d react. The one thing I knew for sure was that she wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the importance of the task. I hadn’t asked for her just because she’s my wife, but because I really do believe she’s the best in the slicing and dicing business.

  When I’d booked the hotel the clerk had asked for a contact number. I wasn’t about to give them my mobile so I gave her the Security Service public number and said that if necessary I could be reached through the Director General’s office. When I registered, the people at the desk made a big fuss of me so I guessed that they’d checked me out. I didn’t mind that at all; it was my way of warning Amanda that the bill was coming her way!

  I hadn’t asked for anything fancy, but they gave me a suite, with a view of the river, a big step up from my serviceable but small room in the hotel above a pub. The place was so swish that I felt shabby, and as for my travel-weary clothes, I took care of the latter by using the butler service to have my suit pressed and almost everything else I had worn laundered, and having them procure me a new white shirt from their favoured shop in Jermyn Street, immediate delivery.

  As for myself, I soaked in the jacuzzi-style bath for twenty minutes, and took a restorative half-hour catnap. I even had a brief dream; it featured Emily Repton, alive and nasty, as she had been on our first encounter, Roland Kramer, trapped fearfully in a corner by something unseen, Nicholas Wheeler, a face I know only from the media, and bizarrely, Everard Balliol, leering at me as I missed a putt on the golf course on his Highland estate.

  He was the one who disturbed me most of all. I awoke with a question in my mind that had nothing to do with the Repton investigation. I’d read of his murder and been unmoved. Everard had been a bully and a tyrant, a man I’d judged to be capable of anything; in short, a dangerous geezer. In my experience people like that are also very careful.

  Would Everard really have allowed himself to fall victim to an opportunistic attack by a member of his own staff? The guy I’d met would not, I judged. So what had really happened to him?

  But that was for another day. I rose, shaved, dressed in my new shirt, a blue silk tie, my valeted suit and my shiny, polished shoes and went off to King’s Cross Station in an Addison Lee car, to meet my wife.

  Happily the train was on time, and the night wasn’t too cold. I swept her into the taxi, but didn’t tell her our destination. She didn’t twig to it until the driver turned off the Strand. She stared at me as he pulled up at the hotel entrance.

  ‘Here?’ she exclaimed. ‘You bring me here and you didn’t warn me? I’d have . . . my hair’s a mess, look at how I’m dressed.’ Then she smiled. ‘But what the hell? I only have three outfits I can get into anyway, and I can do something with my hair.’

  ‘You don’t need to do any of that stuff,’ I assured her. ‘In fact you can dine stark naked if you want. We’re eating in our suite; you’ll like the view. Come on.’

  Her case was small and had four wheels, but a porter commandeered it as soon as we stepped into the foyer. It was unnecessary, but what the hell, it was just another fiver, small beer in that place, I guess.

  ‘This is lovely,’ she declared, as she stepped into our accommodation. The lights were
low, the curtains were undrawn and the Thames flowed before us, beyond the trees.

  ‘This is the Winston Churchill Suite,’ I told her. ‘Before you ask, there isn’t even a hint of cigar smoke.’

  She looked around. ‘They could fit his whole family in here,’ she murmured. ‘Bob, you are a darling man, but are you ever going to tell me what this is about?’

  ‘Let’s eat first. Get naked if you want, but you might prefer to wait until the waiters have left.’

  She compromised by wrapping herself in one of the hotel’s soft white bathrobes. I wonder how many of those hang in wardrobes around the world.

  I had ordered a light supper, given the hour, with sparkling water. Obviously Sarah wasn’t drinking wine so far into her pregnancy . . . in fact she stopped on the day she did the test . . . and I show solidarity with her, in her presence. It was even less of a hardship than usual; I wanted to keep a clear head.

  Finally when we were done, and had seen enough of the passing marine traffic, it was time to come clean.

  ‘So,’ she asked, ‘what is this all about? Are you preparing me for news I don’t want to hear that you’re going to accept this job offer of Aileen’s?’

  ‘It isn’t her offer,’ I pointed out. ‘It comes from Merlin Brady, the leader of her party.’

  ‘The left-winger everybody says isn’t electable?’

  ‘He probably isn’t,’ I admitted, ‘but I’ve met him and I like him. He’s a sincere guy; hopelessly naive, but sincere. His isn’t the only offer, as it happens; I discovered yesterday that our cunning First Minister’s been plotting to get me in there as a cross-bencher, in the hope that I’ll back his objectives.’

  ‘You are in demand,’ she murmured, tugging the robe closer around her. ‘Come on, man, out with it, which one are you going to take?’

  I smiled into her eyes. ‘I’m not going to take anything that you don’t want me to; you know that.’

  ‘That isn’t an answer,’ she pointed out. ‘You’re tempted, aren’t you?’