She looked at him, bewildered. ‘But still, how did Stevie know he was here? There was the phone call.’
‘He called you from inside the flat, on a mobile. They can pinpoint these things to within a few feet.’ As he spoke, Alex heard a noise; she turned to see two uniformed officers as they came into the room. Behind them, through the entrance hall she saw her front door lying open, its frame shattered.
‘I think I’d better give you a spare key,’ she said, ‘just in case you ever have to do this again.’
Eighty-six
‘You should have told us about that dead cat right away,’ said Mario McGuire.
‘I know,’ Alex replied hoarsely, ‘but when I agreed to let my dad put the phone tap back in place, I thought that was enough. I thought that the cat was just an ugly, perverted stunt.’
‘No, it was a marker: it meant “You’re next.” If Neil or I had known about it we’d have moved you right out of there and put an officer in your place.’
‘Who? Griff in a wig?’ She began to laugh, but stopped abruptly, wincing from the pain in her throat.
‘We might have been a bit more subtle than that. All kidding aside, the fact that DC Montell just happens to live next door to you was an enormous stroke of luck. We’d never have known either, if he hadn’t happened to mention it to Stevie Steele. He noticed your name on the letterbox and, like any good copper, wondered if there was any link to the DCC.’
She smiled. ‘The sod played his part well. He acted all surprised when I told him who my father is.’
‘Good for him,’ said Neil McIlhenney. ‘When we set up the surveillance Stevie took him off normal duties and told him to stay at home for a few days, keeping an eye on you. We guessed you’d have thrown a moody if we’d told you that you had a bodyguard, so we kept it to ourselves.’
‘If you’d told me it was that particular bodyguard,’ Alex croaked, ‘I might not have minded.’ She pulled herself up against the pillows, and reached for the glass by the side of her bed. When she had been examined after the attack, the police doctor had insisted on hospitalisation: McIlhenney had arranged for her to be admitted to the very discreet Murrayfield Hospital rather than the Royal Infirmary, where the media would have been able to identify her without difficulty. He had been doubly careful: as extra insurance of privacy, she had been admitted as ‘Mrs Louise McIlhenney’. She had spent most of the previous twenty-four hours asleep, and still felt woollen-headed from the sedative that the admitting doctor had insisted on giving her.
‘Suppose you had moved me out,’ she asked, ‘what would you have got him for? Nuisance calls and housebreaking, that’s all. The way it worked out, you’ve got him for attempted murder, and for hitting Griff’s knuckles with his head, if you want to throw that in as well.’
‘Actually,’ McGuire told her, ‘we think we’ve got him for a hell of a lot more than that. However, we don’t need to go into it now. This is an unofficial visit from two friends: the formal stuff can wait until tomorrow, or even later, when you’re rested and ready for it.’
‘I’m ready for it now,’ she insisted. ‘I’d rather know than wonder about it.’
The detective looked at Sarah, who was standing by the window of the small room. ‘What do you reckon, Doc?’
‘I reckon she’s okay,’ she replied. ‘When you arrived we were debating whether she should stay here for another night or come home to Gullane with me.’
‘Well, if you’re sure, Alex . . .’
‘I’m sure, Mario: get bloody well on with it! What else has he done?’
‘Relax, then, and try to stay calm as I’m telling you. Once we had him charged and locked up at Fettes, we ran a check with the National Criminal Intelligence Service: it’s automatic now in a case like this. We discovered that there are three unsolved murders down south, two in London and one in Birmingham, each bearing striking similarities to the attack on you. The victims were all women in their twenties. They were all murdered in their homes, and in each case they had been receiving nuisance phone calls, although only one of them had reported the fact to the police. The investigating officers found out about the others from their friends. There were also a couple of incidents where dead animals were found near the victim’s home.’ McGuire paused. ‘Do you want me to stop?’
‘No; carry on.’
‘Very well. In each case, the police are looking for a man who was in the victim’s life but has disappeared. The names he used are Barry Richards, William Dell and Bernd Schmidt, but we know from DNA that they’re all the same man. All three identities were borrowed for the purpose, from real and wholly innocent people, just as your attacker borrowed Guy Luscomb’s name and professional background. When you were attacked, the real Mr Luscomb was at home in Suffolk with his wife and two children. The man we’re holding is called Willis Gannett; a series of comparisons are being done even as we speak, but we’ve no doubt that what we have from Gannett will be a match for the other three cases.’
As the reality of what had happened to her hit her for the first time, Alex stared straight ahead, looking in the direction of the picture on the wall opposite, then at Sarah, but not focusing on either.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ McIlhenney asked anxiously.
She nodded uncomfortably. ‘Why me?’ she whispered.
‘You seem to fit the physical and social type he goes after,’ he told her. ‘Attractive, young, single, white, professional and successful: two of the other victims were solicitors and the third was a doctor.’
‘Has he confessed?’
‘We haven’t put the other cases to him yet. That won’t happen until we’ve got the DNA match, and when it does it’ll be done by the investigators in each case. But he’s told us everything about the attack on you.’
‘Did you give him any option?’
‘We offered him the choice of being interviewed by your dad when he gets back. He didn’t fancy that. In fact it made his memory crystal clear. He didn’t chuck the cat across the river, Alex; he planted it on your balcony. When you invited him to your flat, he watched you set the alarm as you left, and cancel it when you got back. Next morning when you were in the shower, he stole your spare keys . . . for future reference, hide them, don’t leave them somewhere obvious . . . had them copied, and put them back. He made all the calls from Edinburgh, and when you and Gina were in together last weekend, he was watching you from the other side of the river.’
‘But he went back to London. I phoned him there.’
‘No, he didn’t. Your call was diverted automatically on to his mobile. He moved out of the George, that was all, and into Jury’s Inn, where he registered under his own name.’
‘So he had access to my place all that time?’
‘Yup. First to return the keys, then to plant the cat. He really doesn’t like cats, by the way; that seems to be part of his ritual.’
She shuddered. ‘I’m going to look a real idiot in court, when all this comes out in evidence.’
‘It may not get to court,’ said McGuire. ‘The English murder charges will take priority; he’ll get three life terms, probably with a full life tariff. The Lord Advocate may well decide to let your case remain open . . . unless you insist on prosecution, that is.’
‘I’ll have to think about that. My dad may insist on it, though. Does he know yet?’
‘He knows there’s been an arrest,’ McIlhenney replied. ‘I called him on his mobile. But I didn’t give him any of the detail, or any of the other stuff. That can wait till he gets back, by which time I hope to hell we’ll have turned Mr Gannett over to the people from Scotland Yard, and he’s well out of his reach.’
‘Forgive me, Neil, but the way I feel, I’d like my father to have some time with him.’ Her face twisted into an unattractive grin. ‘About thirty seconds would be enough: that’s all he’s good for.’
Eighty-seven
He had thought that there would be elation, but as the weekend had played itself out, he
had found that the opposite was true. As in many of life’s facets, the thrill was in the chase, not in its sad, squalid conclusion. For all his colleagues’ congratulations, ultimately, he asked himself, what had he done? He had discovered three unknown, decades-old crimes, and in the process he had disturbed two graves. But that was all: he was no closer to the perpetrator than he had been when he started on his silly, selfish quest.
‘Supercop my arse,’ he whispered, as he gazed out of his window on to the frost-covered sports field outside.
The ringing telephone broke into his thoughts with the insistent sharpness of a dentist’s drill. He picked it up. ‘ACC Allan, Strathclyde, sir,’ Crossley advised him. ‘And Detective Superintendent McIlhenney’s on his way up.’
‘Put Max through, then send Neil in when I’m finished.’ He waited for a few seconds.
‘Jimmy? How goes it? Anything new on your skeleton?’
‘I’m just waiting for word. I’ll let you know when I get it.’
‘Thanks, but in the meantime, I’ve got something to tell you. One of my very thorough detective officers may have found Ethel Ward, or Bothwell.’
‘Have you, indeed? Where?’
‘Bristol.’
‘Eh? How the hell did she get there?’
‘By train. Fifty years ago, about six weeks after the last sighting of Mrs Bothwell, the remains of a naked woman, cut into pieces and wrapped in sacking, were found in a pile of coal, which had just been unloaded at a depot down there. It was part of a consignment that started from Lanarkshire and picked up more trucks in South Yorkshire. They couldn’t be certain where the body originated; details were passed to the old county constabulary up here, and to Leeds. There were press appeals, but the head was too badly crushed for an artist’s impression, never mind photograph, so she was never identified. After a while, the police buried her in a local cemetery. She’s still there, waiting to be dug up. Your friend Bert Ward is going to give us a DNA sample for comparison. If it’s close, it’s her.’
‘Good for you, Max, and well done to your officer. Keep me informed.’
‘Will do. Cheers, Jimmy.’
He replaced the phone in its cradle, with the strange, flat feeling inside him intensified rather than dissipated. This has been pure self-indulgence for me, he thought, but for these poor women it was pure tragedy.
There was a quiet knock on his door. ‘Come,’ he called out, and McIlhenney stepped into the room. He was carrying a bound folder in his right hand.
‘Is that it, Neil?’ Proud asked urgently.
‘Yes, sir. The pathologist and his team finished an hour ago; the ink’s barely dry.’
‘What are the findings? Have they established a cause of death?’
‘They’re saying multiple stab wounds, Chief. They’re also saying that there is no doubt that the remains are around forty years old, and that the victim was aged over thirty.’
‘And Annabelle Gentle was only twenty-nine. So Bothwell killed Montserrat and ran off with her.’ Proud sighed. ‘Damn it, I was hoping that Trudi Friend would be spared that. I’d rather we’d dug up her mother’s body than find that she’s a murderer.’
A strange smile spread over McIlhenney’s face. ‘Well, sir, that’s the question. What the hell is she?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that the autopsy has established that the remains in the garden are those of a man. It looks as if we’ve found Claude Bothwell after all.’
Eighty-eight
‘You had always been close to your stepson, hadn’t you?’
Titus Armstead looked straight at the camera, unblinking. As he watched the monitor screen, listening to himself ask the question, Skinner was reminded of a television series called Northern Exposure, and an actor who played a retired astronaut. ‘From the time his father was killed. Josh Archer and I met in Germany when we were both involved in NATO intelligence, and we became friends.’
‘That would have been the early seventies?’
‘Yes. Towards the end of the Nixon era.’
‘You met Ormond Hassett there around the same time, didn’t you?’
‘We were in the same theatre of operations, yes.’
‘Close colleagues?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you say the three of you were ideologically compatible?’
‘Hell, yes: we were all soldiers in the front line against Communism, spies in uniform. There were no liberals in our outfit.’
‘After Germany, where did you go?’
‘Ormond and I headed in the same direction. I was hauled back to Langley, to CIA headquarters, and he was posted to the embassy in Washington.’
‘And Archer?’
‘He stayed on in Germany for a while, but we kept in pretty close touch.’
‘How close?’
‘Very. Josh was a good source of information.’
‘Are you saying that he was on your payroll?’
Armstead nodded at the camera. ‘Yes.’
‘Explain this to our viewers,’ Skinner continued, ‘and remember that I’ve got the gun. Why would a CIA operative want to recruit British intelligence officers as agents?’
‘Simple. Back then we couldn’t always rely on our allies to share and share alike. We were in the business of knowing everything, so we took steps to make sure that we did.’
‘That’ll go down well in London; scare the shit out of a few people too, I imagine. But let’s move on a few years, to 1982. Hassett’s an MP, an aide to the defence secretary, and he and Archer show up in Washington to make sure that your team are on-side over the Falklands operation.’
‘Yeah, and Josh told me he was going to fight. I told him he was crazy, that there would be a load of casualties down there. Ormond could have gotten him a desk to ride, but he was set on action; dead set, the way it turned out. He knew what he was getting into, though: last time I saw him, he asked me to keep an eye on his family, if things did go the other way.’
‘And you did?’
‘I kept my word, yes. Whenever I was in England I went to see them up in Bakewell, just to make sure they were all right. After a few years, once the kids were grown and on their way in life, I asked Joan to marry me and she agreed.’
‘You kept an eye on your stepson’s career too.’
‘I made sure he was all right, but I needn’t have worried. He was a better soldier than his pop ever was, a real little terror. When he moved into intelligence and assumed a new identity, I knew about it and I took him under my wing even more. A few times we took care of things for each other.’
‘So you weren’t surprised when he approached you with a proposition?’
Armstead’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Ah, no, you got that wrong. Moses didn’t approach me. Ormond Hassett did. He came over here to this very house. He sat in that chair where you’re sitting and he told me that there were people in London who were scared shitless about the future of their country. They saw it heading into a federal Europe, a super-grouping in which the role and purpose of the British Monarchy would become irrelevant, until it ceased to exist and Britain became, as he put it, the sort of mongrel state we’re seeing in France, Spain, and even the United States. He said that the thing that scared them most was the fact that those standing in succession to the throne appeared to be in favour of the idea.’
‘And his solution?’
‘To take one of them out.’
‘How?’
‘That was what Ormond asked me. After I told him he was crazy, I told him that the most vulnerable point of attack was the student prince, but that anything that happened to him had to be seen very clearly to have happened from outside. That’s where Pete Bassam’s Albanian gang came into the picture. Kidnapping’s a national sport with these guys; the idea was, they grab him from his university, they hold him for ransom, but somewhere along the line he gets killed.’
‘What did Hassett say to that?’
‘That I was a fucking geni
us. He said that it was so simple it was beautiful. The way he saw it, not only would it take one of the problems . . . maybe the main problem . . . out of the equation, but in the scandal that followed the British government would be thrown out of office and replaced by a right-wing, anti-European, Conservative administration, with a commitment to withdraw from the EU and rescind the commitment to the Treaty of Rome.’
‘With Ormond Hassett as one of its leading lights?’
‘He didn’t say that, but that’s what he meant.’
‘You know what, Titus?’ Skinner heard himself chuckle. ‘I think he’d have been right.’
Armstead said nothing: he simply looked at the camera and smiled.
‘So when did Adam Arrow, Moses, come into it?’ his interrogator continued.
‘When I brought him in. Ormond didn’t recruit him, I did. I visited him on the boat in London and I told him about our discussion. If he had told me I was a mad old man even to consider such a thing I’d have forgotten all about it, but he didn’t. He said that he shared Ormond’s fears, and came on board. I knew we needed him, you see. I knew we needed extra insurance on the inside, within the British military, and someone to run the mercenary pick-up team at sea. With his okay, I told Ormond we were green for go, then I gave Moses Bassam’s location and young Hassett was sent to activate him. The operation was under way.’
‘Why did you give him the gun?’
‘To take out young Hassett after the game; Moses thought he was a weakling, and that we couldn’t trust him.’
‘So where did Rudolph Sewell fit in?’
For the first time, Armstead’s eyes left the camera lens and moved to the man beside it. ‘Who the fuck is Rudolph Sewell?’ he asked.
Skinner reached across and switched off the DVD player. ‘Imagine that,’ he said to Sir Evelyn Grey. ‘As serious a player in the spooking game as Titus Armstead is, yet he’s never heard of your head of counter-terrorism. But that’s not all he didn’t know: Moses and the Hassetts never told him about the fall-back plan, to try to wriggle out by blaming it all on Sewell if things went wrong. No wonder Miles was sent to kill him; too bad Moses was right and he wasn’t up to the job, eh?’
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