State Secrets

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘They met without Emily Repton?’

  ‘Yes, and I can only assume that they did it away from Westminster so that she wouldn’t find out about it, and maybe also to keep Norman Hamblin in the dark.’

  ‘A secret within a secret?’

  ‘Yes. I really do need to gather these people in now; Balliol at the very least.’

  ‘Then I have some good news for you,’ Amanda exclaimed. ‘We have grounds. The CSI team has put him in the room. They found a right palm print on the back of the toilet seat; the right index finger matches the print that Balliol uses to access the development lab at Aldermaston.’

  If she hadn’t been on the end of a mobile phone connection, I’d have hugged her. ‘Lovely,’ I whispered. ‘How did you get hold of that?’

  ‘I have a colleague in the Ministry of Defence. Sometimes interdepartmental cooperation works, Bob. Now tell me, how do you want to go about this?’

  ‘As quietly as we can,’ I replied. ‘Ideally Neil and I would go in there, arrest Balliol, and take him somewhere, probably back to Westminster since that’s where the crime took place, for questioning.’

  ‘What stops it from being ideal?’ she asked.

  ‘Those Koreans,’ I replied. I smiled. ‘Okay, there are only three of them as far as Neil can tell. He and I aren’t so old that we can’t handle them, but a uniformed presence might deter any . . . unpleasantness.’

  ‘That would raise the visibility of the operation,’ Amanda pointed out.

  ‘I think we’re past the point of discretion,’ I countered. ‘We have grounds to arrest Balliol on suspicion of murder, without the need for a warrant. I’ll ask Neil to get some officers from the local force to attend, complete with lights and sirens.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ she said. ‘What will you do about James Ellis?’

  ‘If he’s still there when we go in? Nothing, unless he gets in the way. We’ve got no grounds to detain him.’

  ‘How will you get Balliol back to London?’

  ‘In the car you’re going to send for me. You can do that, can’t you?’

  ‘No problem.’

  As she spoke, my phone buzzed, telling me that another caller was trying to reach me. I asked her to wait while I checked the screen. It was the Commissioner, calling, I supposed, from his car en route to Cambridge with Sarah.

  I put Amanda on hold, and took his call. ‘Bob,’ he began. His voice was a little raised; he sounded excited. ‘My people have located Wheeler’s car. It’s stationary, in the grounds of Greystone Cottage.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I exclaimed. ‘Wait a second, Feargal; I have Amanda Dennis on hold, and I’m going to try to make this a three-way call.’

  I fiddled with my mobile, and managed to pull it off. When we could all hear each other, I asked the Commissioner to repeat his message.

  ‘Nicholas Wheeler’s with Balliol?’ Amanda murmured. ‘Let me line this up in my head. Emily spent the night with him. She left before eight to walk back to Downing Street and he went AWOL. Three hours later, Balliol was shown into her office and tried to kill her. Now we discover that Wheeler went to his place.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That call she had from the untraceable mobile: we thought it had to be from Kramer, but could it have been Wheeler who made it?’

  ‘In these new circumstances, that might be a reasonable assumption,’ Sir Feargal observed. ‘What are the consequences?’

  ‘Amanda and I are agreed that it’s time to arrest Balliol; that’s what we were discussing. I’d say that if we find Wheeler there we take him too.’

  ‘Do you have grounds?’

  ‘Has that always worried you in the past?’ I challenged him. ‘I’ve arrested people in my time just because they were out of place.’

  ‘Touché,’ he conceded. ‘Bob, given your shady authority in this matter, I think you can pretty much do what you like. You should call in any support you feel you need, either from the local force or from the Met; this is no time to be getting prissy about territorial boundaries. But do it fast; as soon as the professor has completed her examination and established the cause of death, I will have no alternative but to go public with it.’

  ‘Understood. Sarah,’ I asked, ‘can you hear this?’

  ‘Yes,’ she called out.

  ‘Then do us a favour, honey. I know you’re always meticulous during an autopsy, but double-check everything this time.’

  ‘You mean go as slow as I can get away with?’

  ‘You said it, not me.’

  I disconnected the Commissioner from the conference call and went back to Amanda. ‘How soon can you send your car?’ I asked. ‘I need to get down there now.’

  ‘If you’re ready, I’ll give the order now. Do you want the driver to be armed? I’m thinking about the unpredictability of Balliol’s Korean entourage.’

  ‘Not unless I am too. I always feel safer when I’m the one holding the firearm.’

  ‘That will be arranged,’ she said. ‘Twenty minutes at the outside. It’ll be a black Range Rover. Big enough for you, McIlhenney and two detainees.’

  ‘Good enough. I’ll call Neil now while you make arrangements for the uniforms. I heard what Feargal said about using the Met, but it’ll be quicker if we rely on the locals for the show of force.’

  I let her go to do her thing and called Neil. I updated him on the Wheeler development, and promised that I’d be with him as soon as possible . . . with his sandwiches and boiled sweets straight from the Savoy. I was about to tell him about the uniformed presence when he cut in.

  ‘Hold on, Bob,’ he murmured, quietly, ‘there’s action here: someone else arriving. I’ve got eyes on him now. Bloody hell!’ I heard him whisper. ‘Is that who . . .’

  ‘Who?’ I hissed, impatiently.

  ‘I’ve only seen the man once,’ he replied, ‘on Monday morning in the House of Commons, but I’m pretty sure it’s Kramer’s bloke, Daffyd Evans.’

  ‘What’s he . . .’ I began, then stopped, for I knew I wasn’t going to come up with an innocent explanation. If it was Evans, and Neil wouldn’t have made the identification without being more than ‘pretty sure’, it added a darker shade to the situation.

  ‘Wait for me,’ I ordered. ‘Do nothing else until I get there, but leave your phone on and make sure it’s charged. I may use it to pinpoint you when we arrive.’

  I called Amanda back at once and told her of the new arrival. ‘That changes things,’ she declared, instantly. ‘It’ll be two cars, for I’m coming myself, with support. Daffyd will definitely be armed; therefore we will be too. He may have Downing Street protection, but in these circumstances I’m going to regard him as one of mine who’s gone rogue.’

  Thirty-Seven

  She called off the blues and twos. The arrival of Evans was a direct link to the new Prime Minister, and made discretion mandatory. Amanda insisted on it. Not only would the arrival of a noisy contingent of the local Mr Plod have spooked everyone in the house, she declared, it would have introduced unscreened witnesses to a situation that of necessity had to be contained.

  As a former police officer I might have taken issue with her, but I didn’t. The vast majority of the women and men I’d known, worked with, and commanded were honourable people who would keep their mouths shut when required, without question, but if there was ever someone I wasn’t sure of I never took a risk. If we’d called in uniforms from that location, I wouldn’t have known any of them.

  Two cars, black Range Rovers with a menacing look about them, arrived at the hotel; the back door of the first opened and I slid in alongside Amanda, seated directly behind her driver. The rear car, I’d noted, also had two occupants.

  ‘Everybody armed?’ I asked as we moved off.

  She nodded, and opened a box-like compartment on the floor of th
e vehicle; it contained three identical handguns and three magazines. I took one out and studied it; a Browning Hi Power, tried and trusted. I knew the weapon, having fired it on the range more often than I care to remember, and in action that I’ll never forget.

  ‘If Evans tries to leave before we get there,’ she said, ‘I’d like McIlhenney to intercept him at the gateway.’

  ‘Not going to happen,’ I replied, firmly. ‘Neil’s unarmed, he’s had little or no sleep, and he’s not in the best of shape. I’m not putting him at risk. If Evans leaves, we let him go. I’ll find him myself, later, if necessary. But if he doesn’t leave,’ I added, ‘how do we handle him?’

  ‘That will depend on how he handles us. If he behaves himself, we’ll take him back to Thames House for interview.’

  ‘And Balliol, Wheeler if he’s there, James Ellis?’

  She bounced it back at me. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘We should separate Balliol from the others; he has to be cautioned formally at the scene by Neil, then he should go to a police office . . . the Met HQ or Westminster Police Station, whichever Feargal says . . . for interview and charge. Wheeler and Ellis go to Thames House with Evans.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll go with that. This situation is not the norm for me; it makes me all the more pleased that you agreed to come in on it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I was given a choice,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Come on,’ she chided me, ‘you could have walked away at any time; you didn’t want to, that’s the truth of it.’

  She took a tablet from her bag, one of those big Apple Pro jobs that don’t make sense to me when for the same money you can buy a proper laptop. ‘Take a look at these images,’ she said. ‘You haven’t met any of these people, so you should have sight of them before we get there.’

  She fired up the device and opened a folder containing three images; each was of a man, all in the same age bracket.

  ‘James Ellis,’ she began. Having met the father recently, I looked for signs of him in his son. They were there, but only around the eyes and ears. He had a more prominent nose and while his fair hair was starting to recede, he had a long way to go before he caught up with the Chancellor. Also he looked to be much taller. Les was a smaller bloke, about Sarah’s height without her heels.

  ‘What does he do, exactly?’ I asked. ‘PR you said, but what does that mean?’

  ‘He’s the founder and sole director of a public and media relations company. At least that’s what it calls itself on its corporate literature; it also has a lobbying division that it doesn’t advertise overtly, and that’s where James is most active.’

  ‘Who are his clients?’

  ‘Multinationals, but none in the financial sector; that would have the potential to compromise his father.’

  I looked at the second face, one I’d seen before on news bulletins and once in a vacuous celebrity magazine that I’d picked up in the hairdresser’s, in the absence of anything more sensible, for example a golf magazine, or a brochure for a yoga retreat in Wales, or a flyer for a cruise to the Antarctic, or even the Daily Star.

  Nick Wheeler was an exceptionally good-looking guy, no question about that. Aged thirty-four and yet he didn’t have anything like a wrinkle on him, not even laugh lines around his eyes.

  ‘Does he have a grotesquely ugly portrait in his attic?’ I asked. ‘Like Wilde’s Dorian Gray?’

  ‘No,’ Amanda assured me. ‘He is as he looks; a charismatic young man, and brilliant with it. He chaired his family catering firm, briefly, after his grandfather died, but sold it when he was elected to parliament. There has never been a breath of scandal about him, never.’

  ‘There will be, if his relationship with Emily gets out. His grandfather,’ I repeated. ‘What about his parents?’

  ‘They died when Nick was eight, in what appeared to be a suicide pact. The autopsy revealed that his father had inoperable metastasised lung cancer and that his mother was in the early stages of motor neurone disease. They’d have been in a race to the grave, but decided to cut it short. Nick was raised by his grandfather, also named Nicholas. They were very close.’

  ‘How did they do it? Mum and dad?’

  ‘With a heavy dose of sedatives and carbon monoxide; they locked themselves in the garage while Nick was with his grandparents and turned on the Jaguar’s engine. It didn’t take long.’

  ‘Jaguar you said?’

  ‘Yup, a Mark Ten. The very same car that the tracker placed at Greystone Cottage.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I exclaimed. ‘If I’d been Grandad Wheeler I’d have tipped it into a crusher, there and then.’

  ‘He didn’t, though. He kept it as a weird kind of memorial to them and left it to young Nicholas.’

  ‘That reminds me of Dali, the artist. When Gala, his wife, died he put her body in his Cadillac and drove it to her mansion. Her tomb’s in the cellar and the Caddy’s still there, or was the last time I visited, in the garage as part of the exhibition for the tourists.’

  ‘Nick takes it a stage further.’

  I whistled. ‘Driving around in your parents’ coffin: I can’t get my head round that.’

  I turned to the third image. John Balliol was the antithesis of Wheeler, dark haired, pale skinned, pinched features; he was smiling but it was narrow, suspicious, as if he was searching the camera lens and the person behind it for ulterior motives. No, I’d never met him before nor heard of him before the previous Monday, and yet I did feel that I knew him.

  His father, the billionaire Everard, and I had crossed paths a couple of times, and his memory lingered with me. He was a far different character from the image offered by his son in that photograph, big, outgoing, ebullient, challenging, aggressive, dominating, egomaniacal, the sort of guy you hope will never run for prime minister, or president, or any office to which a beguiled, hypnotised populace might be reckless enough to elect him. I am no psychiatrist but I have met some crazy people in my time; I had always reckoned that Everard was borderline at best, well over the border at worst.

  Peering into his son’s eyes on that tablet screen, I thought I saw something I recognised.

  When we were out of London and halfway to Silchester, I called Neil. I was concerned when he picked up the call. He sounded dog tired, and that is unusual. In fact, it was a first.

  ‘How are you doing, mate?’ I asked.

  ‘Okay,’ he replied, ‘but the sooner you get me a sugar hit, the better.’

  ‘It won’t be long,’ I promised. ‘Has anything happened since we spoke last?’

  ‘No, it’s as it was; no new arrivals, no departures.’

  ‘Good. If Evans leaves I need you to photograph his departure. Video it if your camera will do that, but make sure he’s clearly identifiable. Whatever happens, in half an hour I want you to leave your position and meet us at the entrance to the grounds. We join up there.’

  ‘And do what?’

  ‘Lift everybody inside.’

  ‘Including James Ellis?’

  ‘Absolutely; we can’t get round that one, Neil. I don’t see it compromising your man, though.’

  ‘Let’s hope not. I value him as an officer and I like him as a bloke.’

  Amanda and I didn’t speak much for the rest of the journey. The Security Service will never admit to having an armoury, so I wasn’t prepared to take those fictional weapons on trust. I checked all three of them carefully, but they seemed to have been well looked after and properly oiled. I inserted the magazines and put them back in their container.

  The Range Rover’s satnav found Greystone Cottage easily. McIlhenney was waiting for us at the gate as we drew up. I opened the door of our vehicle and he slid in beside us. He didn’t look too bad; a shade pale, made more noticeable by his black polo neck and jacket, but he’d managed to shave, spruce
himself up, with facial wipes, I guessed, and squirt on some deodorant.

  I gave him the bag of food that I’d brought. He went straight for the boiled sweets. ‘Soor Plooms,’ he exclaimed when he saw the packet. ‘Where the hell did you find these?’

  He ripped it open, took out two of the green boilings and jammed them into his mouth, sucking as hard as he could, trying to draw sugar into his system.

  As I was helping restore Neil’s levels, Amanda had summoned the two men from the second car. ‘Quiet but firm,’ she instructed. ‘No weapons displayed, but keep them handy. I think you all know Daffyd Evans, our former colleague. He may have gone over to the other team, and he’s the reason we’re here in support rather than the police.’ She paused.

  ‘That said, I want to play it by the book as far as we can. We’re here primarily to arrest John Balliol, the owner of this place, on suspicion of murder. Commander McIlhenney should have the lead in that; we’ll just round up the dross, including Mr Evans. Understood?’

  The three men nodded; so did Neil, who was still working on the sweets.

  We re-formed our small convoy and headed up the driveway that led to the so-called cottage. James Ellis’s BMW and Evans’s car were blocking half of the turning circle, but that didn’t bother our drivers. They drew the Range Rovers up side by side at the end of the approach road so that nothing could leave.

  As they did so I took the pistols from their box and gave one to Amanda. She put hers in her bag; I chose a clip-on holster from the box and put it behind my back, as I always did on armed duty. My reasoning is that if the weapon goes off by accident it’s better to shoot yourself in the arse than the other option.

  The driver armed himself too, and we stepped out, walking three abreast towards the small mansion, with Neil and me in front, flanking Amanda.

  We hadn’t reached the third of the steps up to the portico before the front door opened and three black-clad orientals stepped out. They weren’t wearing badges saying ‘Korean’ but I knew that’s what they were.