‘Wow,’ Sarah murmured. ‘I know about Rangers and Celtic football clubs, of course, but I didn’t think it went that deep.’
‘It did, and for some it still does. Both those clubs condemn sectarianism but they still struggle to eradicate it among their supporters. I decided very early on that I didn’t want any kids of mine growing up in that environment, and Myra agreed. That’s what was behind our move.’
‘But now you’re back you like it?’
‘Hey, love, it’s been one day. My reservations about the size of the Strathclyde force are as strong as ever. What I’m saying is that I like the people I’ve met so far. Mann and Provan, they’re good cops and pure Glaswegian, both of them.’
‘What school did they go to?’
‘As for Lottie, I have no idea.’ He winked. ‘But the Celtic supporter’s lapel badge that wee Provan was wearing still offers something of a clue. He may miss their next game,’ he added, ‘if they don’t get these killings wrapped up soon.’
‘Yeah,’ Sarah said. ‘The body in the boot must have been a bit of a shaker.’
‘It was for Lowell, that’s for sure. He jumped out of his skin. Me too, to be honest, but I’ve gotten good at hiding it.’
‘Why was he there, the dead guy?’
‘I guess they didn’t want to leave him wherever he was killed. The provisional time of death was Friday evening some time; with the hit being planned for Saturday, they may not have wanted to muddy the waters by having him found.’
‘Meaning the police might have made a connection to them?’
He nodded. ‘It would have been a long shot, but that would have been the thinking.’
‘Mmm.’ She frowned. ‘But I didn’t mean why was he in the boot; I mean why were they involved with him at all?’
‘We all asked ourselves that one. It seems that the late Mr Brown was a reasonably heavy-duty Glasgow criminal, but I doubt very much that Mr Smit and Mr Botha met him to do a drug deal on the side.’
‘Are you still sure those are their real names?’
‘Oh yes, we know that. We can trace them all the way back to the South African armed forces. Lightbody and Mallett were aliases. It remains to be seen whether they actually lived under those names, one in New Zealand, one in Australia. We’ll need to wait for the passport offices and the police in those countries to open before we can follow them up.’ He checked his watch; quarter to nine. ‘New Zealand should be wide awake now, Australia in an hour or two. Anyway, whatever their fucking names, what were they doing with a Weegie hood?’
‘Yes, any theories?’
‘Only one, the obvious. Mr Brown must have been involved in the supply of the police uniforms and equipment, and they must have decided not to leave him behind as a witness.’
‘So why did they leave the arms dealer alive?’ Sarah wondered.
‘Because he’s part of that world, I’d guess, and was in as deep as they were. A small-timer they’d have seen as a weakness.’
Sarah refilled her cup from a cafetière. Bob, who had given up coffee at her suggestion, almost at her insistence, topped up his glass with mineral water.
‘But the tough questions are, why was he in the chain at all, and who introduced him? There we do not have a Scooby, as wee Provan would probably say.’
‘Good.’ She smiled. ‘Enough for tonight, Chief Constable. No more shop, just Bob and Sarah for a while. I’ve been thinking about what happened a couple of nights ago, you and me having a nice quiet dinner and ending up in bed together.’ She took his hand, studying it as she spoke. ‘I have to ask you this, Bob, because it’s been gnawing away at me, knowing from personal experience how unpredictable you are when it comes to women. Are you and the witch definitely a thing of the past? Is there any chance of a reconciliation?’
He sipped some water. ‘Given our history,’ he began, ‘I suppose I deserved that “unpredictability” crack. But you can take this to the bank: Aileen and I are through. Sit her across from you and she would give you the same answer. She’d probably add also that we’re not going to walk away as friends either. Each of us married a person without knowing them at all. Before too long we found we didn’t even like each other all that much.’
‘Do you think you know me now?’ she asked.
‘None of us can live inside someone else’s head, but if I don’t know what makes you tick by now . . .’ He leaned forward and looked deep into her eyes. ‘I always did like you; now I know more. I never stopped loving you either.’
‘But let’s not put it to the test by getting married again. Agreed?’
Bob nodded. ‘Agreed. But is that because you don’t trust me? If it is, I understand.’
‘Amazing as it may sound, I do trust you. No, it’s because right now, the way we are . . . I don’t think I’ve ever felt happier, and I don’t want to risk that.’
‘Fair enough. Now, with the kids upstairs in bed, can we do something old-fashioned, like watching television?’
She laughed. ‘How very couple-ish! Yeah, let’s.’
She was flicking through the channel choice when Bob’s work mobile sounded. ‘Bugger,’ he murmured. ‘I must give this Edinburgh phone back to Maggie and get a new one from Strathclyde. Chances are this is for her.’ He looked at the caller identification. ‘No, it’s not. Lowell,’ he said as he accepted the call, ‘what’s up? News from down under?’
As Sarah watched him, she saw his eyes widen, a frown wrinkle his forehead for a second then disappear. ‘You’re fucking kidding,’ he exclaimed. ‘So that’s what the bloody woman was leading up to. Don’t apologise, man, I know you had to tell me, but worry not; it won’t ruin my night. I just wish I could be a fly on a certain wall, that’s all.’
He ended the call as Sarah laid down the TV remote.
‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘What bloody woman? Aileen?’
‘As it happened, no,’ he told her, ‘another bloody woman, but not unconnected. What you asked me earlier on, whether there was a cat’s chance of the two of us staying together.’ He laughed. ‘If you doubted me at all, then, by Christ, you’re going to be a happy woman tomorrow morning.’
Eighteen
‘Are we all set for tomorrow, Alf?’
‘Yes, but I’ve brought it forward to eleven thirty. The phone’s never stopped ringing all day, and the place is going to be packed out. If you want to do follow-up interviews and get them on the midday news we’ll need to start a bit earlier than noon.’
‘Agreed,’ Aileen said. ‘And the announcement: do they have that ready?’
‘Yes,’ the party CEO replied. ‘I’ve just sent you a draft by email. If you clear it, I can tell the policy staff to go home for the night.’
‘I’ll do that right now.’
‘Thanks. I must go now, Aileen. For some reason the switchboard’s just lit up like a Christmas tree.’
She cradled the phone and turned to Joey Morocco, who was removing silver boxes from a brown paper bag. She smiled. ‘You must do this a lot,’ she remarked. ‘I heard you at the front door; you were on first-name terms with the delivery boy. “Thank you, Wen-Chong.” I take it that means we’re having Chinese.’
‘I see that being married to a detective’s rubbed off on you,’ he said. ‘Sure, first-name terms with him, with Jeev from the Asian up in Gibson Street, with Kemal from the kebab shop and with Jocky.’
‘Jocky? Who the hell’s he?’
‘Pizza. That’s the Italians for you; much more interbred with the indigenous population.’
She looked over his shoulder. ‘What have we got?’
‘Chicken, brack bean sauce,’ he replied, mimicking a Chinese accent, ‘plawn sweet and sowah, clispy duck and pancakes, and lice; flied of course.’
‘Sounds great. I just need five minutes on my laptop and I’ll be ready.’
She wakened her computer from the sleep state in which she had left it earlier in the evening, and searched her email inbox. It was full of messages from friends, an
xious, she guessed, for news of her safety, but Old’s was near the top and she found it with ease.
She opened the attachment, which was headed, ‘Draft Statement: Unified Police Force’, scanned it quickly, made a few changes to bring it into her delivery style, then sent it back with a covering note that read, ‘Final version clear for use.’
She had just clicked the ‘send’ button when a tone advised her that another message had hit the inbox, once again from Alf Old. Almost simultaneously, her mobile rang, and the screen showed that he was calling. She made a choice; the phone won.
‘Aileen.’ Even although he had only said her name, the chief executive, famed for his calmness, sounded rattled. ‘I’ve just sent you an email.’
‘I know, it just arrived. I haven’t opened it yet.’
‘Then you’d better do so.’
Not only rattled, she realised; he was angry also.
She opened the message. There was no text, only an attachment, headed ‘P1’, in PDF form. She clicked on it and an image appeared, as quickly as her ageing laptop would allow.
It was a newspaper front page, with the masthead of the Daily News, and beneath it a headline. ‘Road to Morocco: married Labour leader goes to ground.’ Most of it was taken up by a photograph, taken from a distance with a long lens, but the face was all too clearly hers, looking out of Joey Morocco’s bedroom window, with a curtain held across her, but not far enough to cover her right breast, which the newspaper had chosen to cover with a black rectangle.
‘Fuck!’ she screamed.
‘Exactly!’ Old barked. ‘What the hell were you thinking about, Aileen?’
‘It’s not what you think,’ she protested.
‘Then what the hell else is it? Anyway it doesn’t matter what I think, it’s what the readers of the Daily News think, them and the readers of every other paper that the photographer sells it on to, once they’ve had their exclusive. They’ve already given it to BBC, Sky and ITN, for use after ten, to sell even more papers tomorrow morning.’
‘Is it on the streets yet? Can we stop them?’
‘It will be any minute now, and no we can’t. We could go to the Court of Session and ask for an interdict preventing further publication. We might get it, we might not, probably not. Anyway, the damage is done.’
Her anger had risen up to match his. ‘But how did they get it?’ she asked. ‘How did they know I was here?’
‘They didn’t. I spoke to the editor of the Scottish version; he’s a mate and he was good enough to call me, and to send the page across. He said it was taken by a freelance photographer, a paparazzo, who stakes out Joey Morocco’s place periodically, just in case.
‘She saw a car parked across his driveway, with two guys in it who had Special Branch written all over them . . . her words . . . so she found a vantage point out of their sight and hung around, just in case. She got lucky; saw a face at the window and a bit more, snapped off as many shots as she could, then legged it.
‘It was only when she downloaded the photos on to her laptop in her car that she realised how lucky she was. She got straight on to the News. That’s her best payer, apparently.’
‘Bastards!’ she hissed, then chuckled, taking herself by surprise. ‘It’s the wee black sticker I really hate. It’s suggesting that my tits are too misshapen for a family newspaper: that they might put folk off their breakfast.’
‘Then cheer up,’ Old growled. ‘There’s another one inside, on page three, appropriately enough, with you looking over your shoulder, as if to make it crystal clear that there is somebody else in the room with you. There’s a lot more of you on show there, and they haven’t covered that up.’
‘Who wrote the story?’
‘Marguerite Hatton. She’s on their political staff. They flew her up from London overnight.’
‘That’s the bitch that gave Bob trouble earlier on at his press conference. She’ll rub his nose in it now.’
‘Or he will rub yours.’
‘I couldn’t care less about him. Why do you think I’m at Joey’s?’ As she spoke, she became aware of a figure in the doorway, holding a plate in each hand. ‘I’ve got some apologising to do to him.’
‘Well, do it on the way to the emergency exit. You have to get out of there, for a fucking army’s going to land on his doorstep as soon as the telly news breaks. Get your bodyguards to pull right up to his door, jump in their car and have them get you the hell out of there.’
‘To where, though?’ Joey had moved in behind her and was studying the image on the laptop. ‘It’ll be just as bad at my place.’
‘To Gullane?’ Old suggested. ‘Give yourself time to come up with a cover story? Maybe even do a happy families shot tomorrow.’
‘Not a fucking chance. I tell you, we’re history. Anyway, I’m going to be in Glasgow tomorrow.’
‘Eh?’ he exclaimed. ‘You’re not going ahead with the press conference, are you?’
She gasped. ‘Of course, man. We’ll never have a bigger crowd. I will not back down from this. It’s not going to kill me, any more than that guy did last night, so it can only make me stronger.’
‘Then go to my place. Nobody will think to look there. I’ll call Justine and tell her you’re coming.’
Nineteen
‘She’s done what?’ Sarah looked at him, astonished. ‘Let herself be photographed in a lover’s bedroom the morning after she’s come within an inch of her life?’
‘That’s what they’re going to say,’ Bob acknowledged.
‘She will argue, of course, that Morocco’s an old family friend and that his girlfriend was there too.’
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied. ‘She won’t lie her way out of it; too big a downside if she’s caught, as many a politician’s found out to their cost. She’ll front it up; I know her.’
‘And blacken your name in the process?’
He shook his head. ‘She’ll have a tough time doing that. She doesn’t realise it but I have more friends in the media than she has. Speaking of whom, I expect that some of them will be calling me in the next hour or so, on my mobile and at Gullane. I think it would be best if I go home, so that I’m there to answer them.’
‘Aww!’ she moaned. ‘I was looking forward to you staying.’
‘Me too, but if I do, there’s an outside chance that someone might doorstep me here in the morning. I don’t want you and the kids caught up in this, in any way.’
She stood with him as he rose to leave, picking up his jacket from the back of the sofa. ‘How do you feel about this?’ she asked. ‘Her being all over the tabloids.’
‘I’ve had some of that myself in my career,’ he answered, ‘and I didn’t like it. Am I embarrassed by it? Not a bit. People may talk about me behind my back, but none will to my face, so fuck ’em. Am I angry? No, because I don’t have a right to be. It could have been me looking out of your bedroom window and all over the papers in the morning.’
‘Are you sorry for her?’ she murmured.
‘Only if he’s a lousy fuck, and not worth it. She will win out of this. I don’t know how, but she will.’
She walked him to the door and hugged him there, looking up into his eyes. ‘So what do we do?’
‘Tomorrow we go to work, each of us, and Trish takes care of the kids as usual. I’m going to be as busy as the Devil’s apprentice all this week, so we’ll see each other when we can. With a bit of luck we’ll be able to keep the weekend free.’
She kissed him. ‘That’s a plan,’ she said. ‘Now be on with your way and answer those phone calls.’
The first came, on his work mobile . . . he had switched his personal phone off as he left Sarah’s . . . as he was turning on to the Edinburgh bypass. He had been expecting it.
‘Bob.’ The voice that filled the car through its speaker system was no longer aggressive, as it had been the last time he had heard it, but there was nothing fearful or tentative about it. ‘I have something to tell you.’
�
�No, you don’t,’ he replied, speaking louder than usual, to allow for road noise.
‘You’ve heard, then.’
‘Of course I have. The editor of the News called my people. I don’t know him but he said that he’d given you advance warning and was offering me the same courtesy. Of course, he also asked me for a comment.’
‘And did you give him one?’
Skinner laughed. ‘Shouldn’t I be asking you that question, in a different context? Not that I need to; from what I’ve been told the answer’s pretty fucking obvious. Oops, sorry, unfortunate choice of word. Bet you’re glad now I persuaded you to spend that time in the gym.’
‘Bob!’ she snapped. ‘Did you give the man a quote?’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he retorted. ‘Of course I didn’t. Nor will I to anyone else, and I’m bloody sure quite a few people will be asking over the next couple of hours. What about you?’
‘Nothing so far; they don’t know where I am now. But I’m seeing the press tomorrow morning.’
‘How about Joey? What’s he going to be saying?’
‘That I’m an old friend and that he offered me a place where I could recover from my ordeal in private.’
‘Is he going to refer to me?’
‘What would he say about you?’
‘Not about me: to me. Some people might expect him to say “Sorry”. That’s the big media word these days, isn’t it? People under the spotlight all have to utter the “S” word, whether they are or not.’
‘Do you expect that?’
‘Hell no. I’m sorry for him, if anything. He didn’t bargain for all this crap.’
‘Well,’ she said, beginning to sound exasperated, as if she thought he was playing with her, as he was to a degree, ‘what are you going to say?’
‘Tonight, nothing. Not a fucking word, about you or against you, or anything else. What time’s your press briefing tomorrow?’
‘Eleven thirty.’
‘In that case,’ he declared, ‘at ten o’clock, we’re going to issue a joint statement through Mitchell Laidlaw, my lawyer at Curle Anthony Jarvis. It will say something along these lines: on Thursday . . . or whenever, you pick the day . . . you and I agreed to separate permanently because of profound and irreconcilable differences that have developed between us. You draft it, let me see it and we’ll take it from there. You okay with that?’
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