Lethal Intent
( Bob Skinner - 15 )
Quintin Jardine
Quintin Jardine
Lethal Intent
President George Walker Bush
If I had invented Camp Delta or Camp X-Ray, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then attempted to pass them off as fiction, I'd have been condemned for breaking the bounds of credibility, and probably for insulting the entire American nation by suggesting such an outrage: but he did it for real, so I'm okay.
One
Along Princes Street and George Street, the festive lights shone. It had been a good year, memorable in fact, even when measured by the high standards of Edinburgh, which had seen many glorious passages in the centuries of its evolution into a historic and cultural European capital. As always, it was ending with the season of goodwill, but none of that spirit had found its way into the main drawing room of Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland.
She glared at its occupant across the table. He looked blandly back at her, his moustache twitching slightly. Like his hair it was an unusual shade of red, and it was rumoured that he dyed both. He liked to keep his distance; if they had been eye to eye she would have looked down on him, and he was sensitive about his height.
'You can't do that!' the Justice Minister exclaimed, her voice raised in protest.
He smiled, then glanced around the Georgian room, as if he had barely heard her. 'You're one hundred per cent wrong there,' he chuckled, eventually, 'as you'll find out tomorrow.'
'What about the Lord Advocate?' Aileen de Marco demanded. 'What does he have to say?'
'Milton concurs with my view. He's already instructed the prison service to make the necessary arrangements.'
'The Lord Advocate can't instruct the prison service.'
'He can on my authority.'
She leaned across the oval table, staring at him until he was forced to make eye contact. 'And just what authority is that, Tommy, may I ask? You are the First Minister of the Scottish Executive, but you're a member of the Cabinet, just like me.'
'Not quite like you. I appointed you, remember? And you should remember: it was only a few weeks ago. I don't need to tell you that I can fire you just as easily.'
She let out a short bitter laugh. 'Better… and bigger… men than you have tried to threaten me, Mr Murtagh, only to find that they were wasting their time. On what grounds would you fire me? Because I object to you riding rough-shod over the Scottish judicial process? You try and argue that one out with me in public and see how far you get. Come off it, First Minister. You're just a wee dog jumping because the big dog's barked.'
Thomas Murtagh stiffened and his eyes grew frosty. 'Maybe you haven't noticed but we're all in the same party, whether it's London or Westminster.'
'That wasn't the dog I was talking about, Tommy: the one you mean jumped just as high as you when his master called. I'll ask you straight out, are you going to show yourself worthy of your post by calling a Cabinet meeting to discuss this, then abiding by its majority view?'
'I've already made my decision,' he replied, curtly. 'I only invited you here out of courtesy, so you didn't learn about it second-hand.'
'Indeed.' She made no attempt to disguise the sarcasm in her tone. 'And here was me thinking that you invited your Justice Minister to meet you so that you could consult her on this unprecedented and quite improper request from Downing Street. I should have known better.'
She picked up her bag from the table. 'Call the Cabinet, Tommy. If you don't I'll have to consider my position.'
'I'm already considering it for you. I don't know if I can have a senior minister who's so openly hostile to me.'
De Marco laughed. 'If that's your criterion for appointment you're going to be lonely in this big room.' She headed for the door.
'Sleep on it, Aileen,' he called after her, with more than a hint of a threat in his tone. 'Maybe you should save me the embarrassment of admitting that I made a mistake when I gave you a seat at the top table, and save yourself the indignity of being told that you weren't up to the job after all. Yes, sleep on it'
She looked over her shoulder with her hand on the door knob. 'I might not get too much sleep, Tommy,' she retorted. 'I may be too busy making phone calls.' As she swept from the room she saw a frown cross his face.
Two
The snow was as deep as he had ever known it, falling so hard that it obscured the bulbs of towering sodium street-lamps above, diffusing and merging their beams into a single glow in the night sky, overarching everything like a sinister orange cloud.
'Should we be trying this?' he asked, as she turned left at the roundabout and headed up the hill. He thought it was Drumbrae but, oddly, he found that he was not sure. She said nothing in reply, nor did she glance his way. Instead she peered into the blizzard ahead, her knuckles white as she grasped the wheel, her face seeming to reflect the weird light outside.
The incline was slight at first, and the car took it with only a little difficulty. 'Where are the road gritters?' he heard himself mutter.
'This is Sunday night in Edinburgh,' she hissed. 'There are no gritters.'
'Then should we be doing this?' he repeated.
'Shut up!' Her voice became a strange, insistent croak. 'You have to know.'
She drove on, hunched forward in the driving seat, as the slope became more severe. Still the car made steady forward progress, as she kept it in the highest gear possible. But soon they came to the real hill, rearing up before them at an impossible angle. The snow was fresh, crisp and unmarked, forcing upon him the knowledge that not only were they alone but that no vehicle had come this way in some time.
She pressed on, but gravity began to take its toll. They were maybe halfway up the incline, he reckoned, when the wheels began to spin beneath them and they lost what little forward momentum they had left.
'Go on,' he urged, 'we've got this far.'
'We're too heavy,' she snapped. 'You'll have to get out and walk up. Get back in at the top.'
'You're daft!'
'Just do it!' The words came out as a raw scream. He had thought that he was a stranger to fear, but a wave of panic swept over him and he jumped out of the car.
At first he found it difficult to balance on the pavement: he reckoned that the snow had to be at least eight or nine inches deep. He took a step forward and then another, inching up towards the crest.
Yet the hilltop seemed no nearer.
Each pace grew shorter, each footfall more tentative, each movement threatening his precarious hold on the vertical and threatening to send him tumbling backwards into the growing blizzard. His breathing grew heavier, and he felt his heart beat faster in his chest.
'No bloody use,' he gasped, and risked a look over his shoulder, through the snow, for the car. But there was no car: it had gone. He looked for the tyre-tracks: there were none. Even the light had changed: the orange glow of the lamps had turned dull and bluish grey. He gazed around him: if they had started to climb Drumbrae, he was somewhere else now, somewhere alien, somewhere wholly malignant.
He stared and he knew that what he felt had gone beyond panic, transcended fear and crossed the threshold of pure terror. He turned back to face the hill. It looked like Everest before him, but he sensed that there was no way back, only forward. He thrust upwards into the blizzard, gulping in mouthfuls of air and snow. Each step grew more laboured, until he was practically powerless to move.
Yet even standing still, his chest heaved as he forced the cold air into his lungs. The hill had no summit, he realised: it would go on for ever, or at least until it had drawn from him everything that he had. He slumped to his knees, then fell on to his face, his breathing still impossibly heavy.
Three
Robert Morgan Skinner had never been keen on fishing. In his childhood his father had tried to instil into him his own love of the pastime, but his attempts, whether they were on the upper reaches of the River Clyde, or from a boat on their occasional family sorties to the Western Isles of Scotland, had all ended in failure.
The young Bob had been deterred by two things. Although he never said as much to his teacher, his instincts told him that ramming a hook into the mouth of any living creature and heaving it, struggling, from its natural environment might be morally questionable. More off-putting than that, though, he was bored stiff by the long periods of inactivity that angling asks of its devotees.
Eventually Bill Skinner had given the job up as hopeless and instead had concentrated on his son's golf, with much more satisfactory results. A few lessons from the club professional had set the boy up with a smooth, rhythmic swing, and the hours that he was prepared to spend on the practice ground had instilled in him the patience that had been lacking on the riverbank. His handicap had moved into single figures by the age of fourteen and for the rest of his father's life he had given him shots every time they played.
Bob smiled as he recalled their last round together: he had hit irons off every tee so that they could be close together all the way round, and so that the game would be as competitive as they both liked it. When he had been left with a four-foot putt for the match on the last green he had misread the line, and the ball had horseshoed out.
'You missed that on purpose,' Bill Skinner had said.
'You're bloody joking,' he had replied. 'There was a fiver on that putt; I need all the fivers I can get right now.'
So what, he wondered, would his dad have thought if he could have seen him sitting on the back of a cruiser in the Gulf of Mexico, strapped into a chair with a damn great marlin rod in his hand?
'Concentrate!' his wife urged him. For a second he thought that his father's ghost had spoken.
The creature on the end of the line tugged hard, and he had to use all his strength to prevent the rod being ripped from his hands and its socket set firmly in the deck. 'Let him run,' said their guide. 'This is a strong boy: there's fight left in him yet. Give him some more line.'
Bob did as he said, until the skipper put a hand on his shoulder. 'Okay, enough. He's gone as far as we want. Start to put pressure on him now; start to reel him in.'
The struggle lasted for almost an hour, but gradually, Bob's strength overcame that of the fish. Finally, as he drew it nearer the boat, it broke the surface in a great leap, trying to shake itself free of the line. It seemed to hang in the air for a second, a magnificent blue-white creature, its great dorsal fin and long sword in profile, and then dived back beneath the waves.
'Let it go,' said Skinner. 'Cut the line.'
He glanced to his right, and saw the skipper's grin, white teeth gleaming in his black face. 'You sure?' he drawled. 'This is one big motherfu- fish that you got there.'
'Yeah, and I can't kill him. Cut the line.'
'You're in the chair.' The man produced an enormous clasp knife from his pocket, opened it, reached out to take hold of the bow-taut line, and sliced through it. There was an audible 'twang' as the pressure was released from the rod; Bob felt it quiver in his hands.
'You're a good guy, boss,' said the captain. 'I wish more of my clients would do that, but all most of them want is their picture taken with a monster of the deep so they can boast to their beer buddies back in Boise, Idaho, or Middletown, Wherever.'
Sarah Grace Skinner shook her head. 'I don't get it. What's the point of all this? What's the point of fishing if it isn't to catch fish?'
Her husband pointed out across the waves. 'I caught him, didn't I? I just chose not to kill him, that's all.'
'That makes you feel better, does it?'
'As a matter of fact it does.'
She looked at him wryly, as the skipper took the rod and went to store it with the others. 'When did you become so sensitive?'
'When I was about fifteen, and I gave up boxing.'
Her expression changed to one of pure surprise. 'You never told me you boxed.'
'You never asked. And you hate boxing, so why should I bring it up?'
'What made you quit? Afraid of having your good looks spoiled?'
'There was nobody around who could do that,' he shot back. 'No, it was more the other way round. Junior boxers aren't supposed to be able to do much damage. I could. Most of my fights ended early: the referees were good, and got in quick. So they moved me up a grade, let me fight older kids. In three fights I broke two ribs and a nose… all other people's. Finally the guy who ran the club put me in with a senior; I think he meant it to teach me a lesson.'
'And did it?'
'It sure did. The guy caught me a good one in the first round, but not good enough. The red mist came down and I ripped back at him, just one punch: knocked him unconscious. It took them five minutes to bring him round and it was another ten before he could stand up. They kept him in Law Hospital overnight as a precaution. I tell you, Sarah, I've never been as scared in my life, before or since. I knew the lad I hurt: he was a decent bloke, with a nice girlfriend and a good job. He hadn't meant me any harm, yet I could have killed him.'
He glanced down at his hands: they were bunched into fists, still clutching the marlin rod. 'So I took my gloves off,' he said, 'and I never put them back on again to hit another man. I joined a martial-arts club instead.'
'What's the difference?' Sarah challenged. 'That's even deadlier.'
'In theory it might be, but in practice it's not. What I did was largely non-contact, but more than that, it taught me mental discipline and self-control, how to sublimate my aggression. I admit that I don't always manage to do that, but over the piece it's served me well. Our kids will all study judo and karate, if I've any say in it, just as my Alexis did.'
'Wait a minute,' she protested. 'It may do our younger son some good, but Seonaid's only two! And as for Mark, he's a thinker, not a fighter.'
'Thinking is a big part of what it's about. Plus, he's the sort of quiet kid who can get picked on… and our daughter won't always be two.'
'I see,' Sarah mused, 'so it was mental discipline that allowed you to let that fish go, was it?'
He grinned. 'No. I just couldn't see us eating him on our own.'
She laughed in spite of herself. 'What about the hook?' she asked. 'It was hardly humane to leave that in his mouth, was it?'
'He'll get rid of it now the tension's off,' said the skipper, as he returned, with everything tidied away. He looked at her. 'What say, lady? You wanna try the chair?'
She shook her head. 'I don't think so. I'm tired out just watching that. Take us back to Key West, please. The sun's on the way down, and I'd like to get there before dark.'
The captain nodded, and climbed up to the high cockpit. A few seconds later the cruiser's big twin engines roared into life.
The journey back to the dock took almost an hour; they let it pass without conversation, content to watch the ocean, and then, as it came into view, the island chain that formed the southernmost tip of the state of Florida.
On the quayside, as Bob gave the skipper a fifty-dollar tip, Sarah headed for their rental car. She was behind the wheel when he joined her, and the convertible's roof was packed away. 'Straight back to the hotel?' she asked.
'Might as well. We've done the Dry Tortugas National Park, we've taken the Sunset Cruise, we've swum with dolphins, and we've ridden the Old Town Trolley. I reckon we've seen all the sights.'
'There's one more I'd like to see,' said Sarah, casually.
'What's that?'
'I'd like to see you smile as if you meant it. I'd like you to look happy that you came out here to join me.'
'Didn't I look happy last night?'
> She shrugged her shoulders. 'I couldn't tell in the dark. But I doubt if you looked ecstatic'
'You seemed pleased with yourself.'
'I like fucking,' she retorted. 'But that's all it was, and you know it. I enjoy making love a lot more, and you haven't made love to me in a while.'
He shot her a sudden piercing glance. 'Not like he did, you mean?'
Sarah started the Sebring convertible, slammed the lever into drive and roared out of the car park.
'Sorry!' Bob exclaimed, his voice raised over the engine.
'If I believed you really were…' she broke off, easing down her speed '… I'd ignore your question. But I don't, so I'll answer it. You're right: not like Ron did. There's been no real tenderness between us for longer than I can remember and, Bob, that's something I need. I have to feel that you care for me when we're vertical as well as horizontal, and I haven't, not for a while.'
'So you went looking for that tenderness somewhere else.'
'No!' she protested. 'It found me.'
'And if I really believed that…'
Four
Neil McIlhenney sat bolt upright. The room was cool, yet he was perspiring, and breathing hard. He felt his heart thumping, seeming to play a rapid, but thankfully steady tattoo against his ribcage.
Louise stirred beside him, but did not waken. He slipped out of bed and went into their bathroom, feeling his way in the darkness and not switching on the light until the door had closed behind him. He stared at his naked self in the mirror, then rubbed the stubble on his chin, as if he was reassuring himself that he was still in the world, that he could still experience ordinary sensations.
As he looked, he saw that his arms and shoulders were glistening, and that the hair on his chest and belly had spun itself into damp curls, black but heavily grey-flecked. He picked up a towel and dried himself off, then brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth with cold water. When he felt sufficiently composed, he yanked the cord to turn off the mirror's illumination and opened the door once more.
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