Pray for the Dying

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘What about my husband? Do you want his head too?’

  ‘Nah. I imagine you’ll cut his balls off as soon as you get him home for landing you in all this. I wouldn’t wish any more on the guy.’

  ‘I see.’ She frowned and pursed her lips, calling up an image from the past as she stood in her pale blue suit, with every blonde hair in place. ‘The first of those is doable, because you’re right: Sir Hubert isn’t up to the job, and Mrs Dennis is. The second, no, not a chance.’

  ‘No? You don’t think I’d bring you down?’

  ‘I don’t think you can. Okay, my husband had an affair with someone he met in the course of his work at the Bar and, unknown to him, fathered her child. I’ll survive that . . . and it’s all you have on me.’

  Her mirthless smile was that of an approaching shark, and all of a sudden Skinner felt that the ground beneath his feet was a little less solid.

  ‘Explain, Amanda,’ she said.

  ‘We didn’t do it, Bob.’ His friend looked at him with sympathy in her eyes, and he found himself hating it. ‘When you asked to see me, I was afraid this was how it would develop. The thing is, we knew about the child, and we knew of Toni Field’s ambitions, which were, granted, without limits, but we felt they were pretty much contained.

  ‘We knew what the sabbatical had been about, even before she went on it. After we deleted the Mauritian birth record, we felt she had nothing to use against us, or against the Home Secretary, so we simply parked her in Scotland, with Brian Storey’s assistance. I can see now why he was so keen to help.’ She grinned, but only for a second.

  ‘We made her your problem, Bob, not ours. No, we didn’t know about the photos, but if we had, I’d have been relying on you or someone like you to find them, as you did. As for the birth certificate, well, we thought that had been dealt with.

  ‘Oh sure, she still had her career planned in her head, Scotland, and then the Met as Storey’s successor, but in reality, she’d never have got another job in England. Toni Field was a boil, that was all, and we thought we had lanced her, so there was no need to bump her off.’

  ‘So why did you plant Clyde with her?’ he asked. ‘To check whether she had any more damaging secrets?’

  ‘Bob, we never did! There was no liaison, there was no Don Sturgeon. Clyde never met the woman, I promise you.’

  Skinner gaped at her as he experienced something for the first time in his life: the feeling of being a complete fool, dupe, idiot.

  ‘This is bluff,’ he exclaimed. ‘Repton’s laid down the party line for you.’ But as he did, he thought of his own ruse with Houseman, and knew that she was right.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ She rose, walked across to her desk, and produced a paper, from a drawer. ‘This is a printout of the data we removed from the Mauritian files. It shows, along with everything else, the name and nationality of the person who registered the birth, and it even carries her signature.’

  She handed it to him.

  ‘Marina Deschamps,’ he read, his voice sounding dry and strange.

  ‘Exactly. She’s how we came to know about the child, and who her father was. The same Marina who told you she didn’t know any of her sister’s lovers by name. Marina, who invented Toni’s relationship with Clyde Houseman. Marina, who it is now clear to me had her half-sister killed.’ She smiled at him once more, but with sadness in her eyes. ‘My dear, I’m sorry, but you’ve been played. The scenario you have in your head, about the Home Secretary having Toni assassinated, to keep her husband’s dark secret and to spare the government from possible collapse in the ensuing scandal, it’s plausible, I’ll admit, but it seems that Marina put it there. But don’t feel too bad about it,’ she added. ‘She was an expert. She used to be one of us.’

  ‘She what?’ he spluttered.

  ‘She worked here for five years, in MI5, with a pretty high security clearance. When she applied, she was with the Met, and Brian Storey recommended her for the job.’

  ‘Doesn’t that tell you something?’ he challenged her. ‘Given that Toni had Storey by the balls?’

  ‘With hindsight it does. But he may have done it to get himself a little protection from her. Marina left here when Toni took the job in Birmingham. That was our idea originally; we wanted to keep a continuing eye on her and she agreed to do it. She sold it to her sister, so well that she thought it was her own wheeze. Marina’s been keeping an eye on her all along.’

  ‘Did Toni ever know she was a spook?’ Payne asked, as his boss sat silent, contemplating what he had been told.

  ‘No, never.’ Dennis gave a soft chuckle. ‘Believe it or not, she also thought Marina worked in a flower shop, of sorts, after she left the Met. I can and will check, but I’m certain that while she was here she would have been in a position to know about Beram Cohen, and his second identity, and that she’d have known about poor old Bazza too.’

  She looked at Skinner. ‘You do believe me, Bob, don’t you? If you don’t, there’s an easy way to test me. Call her, at home. Send a car to pick her up, under some pretext or other. She won’t be there, I promise you.’

  He glared back at her. ‘Then tell me why,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me why she did it.’

  ‘If I knew,’ Amanda replied, ‘I would tell you, without hesitation. But I don’t. I don’t have a clue. All I can suggest is that you find her and ask her. However, if you do, and knowing you I imagine that you might, you must hand her over to us. None of the stuff that we’ve talked about here could ever come out in open court.’

  ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he growled. ‘It won’t.’ He started to rise, Payne following.

  ‘Hold on just a moment,’ the Home Secretary said. ‘We’re not done yet, not quite. There is still the matter of your continuing silence on this business. I’m not letting you leave without that being secured.’

  ‘How are you going to do that? I’ve got nothing to gain, personally, by going public, but if you knew anything about Scots law and procedures, you’d realise that having begun the investigation I’m bound to report its findings to the procurator fiscal.’

  ‘Then it will have to be edited, otherwise . . .’

  He looked at her, and realised that she was a rarity, a politician who should not, rather than could not, be underestimated. He had read a description of Emily Repton as ‘a prime minister in waiting, but not for much longer’. Feeling the force of the certainty that radiated from her, he understood that assessment.

  ‘Otherwise?’ he repeated.

  ‘Show him, Sir Hubert,’ she murmured.

  ‘No,’ Skinner countered, ‘I don’t listen to him. You tell me.’

  ‘Very well.’ She reached out a hand; Lowery took a plastic folder from his pocket and passed it to her.

  She selected a photograph and held it up. ‘You seem to have recovered well from the public break-up of your marriage, Chief Constable. This was taken early this morning, as you left the home of your former wife.’

  ‘So what?’ he laughed. ‘Our children are with her just now, and I wanted to see them.’

  ‘But you have joint custody; you’ll see them at the weekend.’

  He snatched the image from her, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor. ‘Go on, then,’ he challenged her. ‘Leak it and see what follows. I’ll tell the Scottish media that it’s a Tory plot to discredit me. See those two words “Tory plot”? In Scotland they’re a flame to the touch paper. They’ll be on you like piranha. You’ve got to do better than that.’

  ‘I can. Your ex-wife is an American citizen. Now that you and she are no longer married, she’s here because she’s been given right to remain. That can be revoked.’

  ‘We’d see you in court if you tried that.’

  ‘It would have to be an American court; we’d have her removed inside twenty-four hours.’

  ‘And twenty-four hours after that I’m on a plane to New York and we remarry. Come on, Home Secretary, up your game. You still need to do better.’ And yet, as he spok
e, he sensed that she could, and that her first two shots had been mere range-finders.

  ‘If you insist,’ she replied, and her voice told him that he had been right. ‘It might come as a surprise to you to learn that your present wife’s liaison with Mr Joey Morocco has been going on for years. It began before you met and it continued during your marriage.’

  She took a series of photographs from the folder and handed them to him. He glanced through them; they showed Aileen and the actor at various locations: in a garden with Loch Lomond stretched out below them, on the balcony of her Glasgow flat, leaving a hotel in a street he did not recognise. None of them were explicit, but they displayed intimacy clearly enough.

  He handed them back, and shrugged. ‘Sorry, no surprise,’ he said. ‘Nor is it my business any more either. By the way, after the Daily News photos you might be able to sell those to Hello! or OK! but nobody else is going to buy them.’

  ‘Probably not,’ Repton conceded, ‘but every newspaper in the country would run this, front page. The trouble with our modern celebrity culture is that it’s so damn predictable. Where there are actors, there are the inevitable parties, with the same inevitable temptations. Most politicians have the sense to steer clear of them, but not, it seems, Ms de Marco.’

  She took the last two items from the folder and gave them to him. The photographs had been taken in a ladies’ toilet. There were three washbasins set into a flat surface, with a mirrored wall above.

  The first picture showed two women, expensively clad, watching while a third, her face part-hidden by her hair, bent over a line of white powder, with a tube held to her nose. In the second, all three women were standing, their laughter, and their faces, reflected in the mirror.

  He stared at it, then at Emily Repton with pure hatred in his eyes.

  ‘The original is in a place of safety,’ Sir Hubert Lowery barked. ‘Not here, though, just in case Mrs Dennis feels obliged to do a favour for an old friend. I don’t have to tell you . . .’

  Skinner moved with remarkable speed for a man in his early fifties. He moved half a pace forward and hit the Director General with a thunderous, hooking, left-handed punch that caught him on the right temple. The man’s legs turned to spaghetti and he was unconscious before he hit the floor.

  ‘I’ve wanted to do that,’ he murmured, ‘ever since I saw him blindside our outside half at Murrayfield.’

  ‘I did warn him,’ Amanda Dennis remarked. ‘I told him you’d want to hit somebody, and since he’d be the only man in the room . . .’

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ the chief growled. ‘His skull’s too thick and his brain’s too small for there to be any lasting damage.’

  He turned to Emily Repton. Her eyes told him she had enjoyed the show. ‘Spell it out,’ he told her.

  She nodded. ‘Hard man, soft centre,’ she said. ‘Your marriage may be over, but I don’t believe you would wish to cause Ms de Marco the damage, the distress and the disgrace that would follow publication of those images. The fact that it was a one-off doesn’t matter. Her career would be gone, way beyond the U-bend, and so would her employable life. As indeed it will, if one single line in one single newspaper, or blog, should ever link my husband to Antonia Field and her child.

  ‘You can write your report to the procurer physical or whatever he’s called. It will say that your investigation has reached the conclusion that the balance of probability is that Chief Constable Field’s killing was ordered and funded by Mexican or Colombian drug cartels that she compromised during her time with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. There will be not the slightest hint of impropriety by the Security Service.’

  She frowned. ‘I’m not going to ask if you agree. There is no alternative on the table; you will do what you’re told. Go back to Scotland, Mr Skinner, and be the big provincial copper in your little provincial pond. This is London; the power will always lie here. If you can’t live with that truth, you could always resign.’

  Skinner stared down at her, unblinking, until the coldness in his eyes made her shiver and look away.

  ‘You really don’t know me, Home Secretary,’ he told her. ‘My report’s already dictated and that is more or less what it says. Even if my suspicions had been one hundred per cent right, there would have been no mileage for me in pulling this building down.’

  He nodded towards Lowery, who was beginning to stir on the floor. ‘Getting rid of him will do nicely thanks, and I’ve shown you why that has to happen.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Repton said.

  ‘But you are right,’ he continued, ‘that I won’t see Aileen broken by you. Hell, woman, I know you and Lowery set her up. Any idiot, even me, could see that. She can’t hold her booze at the best of times, and I can tell from the photo she was rat-arsed when that all went off. I’m sure that if I could identify the two other women, I’d find that at least one was on Five’s payroll.

  ‘But that’s by the by; I’ll go along with your deal. Your husband’s safe. If you’re prepared to tolerate his adultery, that’s your business. I’ve never met the man, so he really means nothing to me. Plus, I have no practical need to remove him, since he isn’t in my sphere of influence.’

  ‘That’s pragmatic of you,’ she mocked, her tone heavy with sarcasm.

  ‘But you are,’ he snapped, as he picked up his case. ‘And you disgust me. You’re the embodiment of everything I loathe about politics and politicians. Frankly, I don’t want to be any part of any world in which someone like you operates, and there are only two things I can do about that. So I’ll go back to my provincial, sub-national pond, and I will work out which one it’s going to be.’

  Fifty-Six

  ‘No thanks, Amanda, I’ll pass on that one personally. Maybe I’ll send Lowell Payne instead. I was impressed by the way he handled himself the other day, and it’s persuaded me that he’s the man to take over what was a vacancy as head of CTIS.

  ‘He’s in post already. It wouldn’t be right of me to come, when I might not be a police officer for much longer. You take care now, and watch your back as long as that woman’s standing behind you.’

  He ended the call and slipped his mobile into the big canvas bag that lay by his side.

  ‘What was that about?’ Sarah asked. They were sitting on a travelling rug on the beach at Gullane, watching their two sons trying to persuade Seonaid that the seawater was as warm as they said.

  ‘Amanda Dennis,’ he said. ‘She’s having a two-day review of the Field fiasco in London, on Monday and Tuesday. It’s a natural response: what went wrong and how to prevent any recurrence. She said she’s ordered Houseman and his entire Glasgow team down there, and asked if I wanted to attend.’

  ‘Were you serious in what you said to her?’

  ‘About Lowell? Sure. He never wavered in there and he turned out to be very good at reading people. He’s a natural for the job, and it gives me grounds to give him an acting promotion, without anyone calling it nepotism. Mind you,’ he chuckled, ‘Jean wouldn’t be too pleased if I send him off to London again so soon, so I don’t think I’ll pass on the invite.’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t mean were you sure about Lowell. I was talking about the last part. Do you really mean that?’

  ‘I think I do,’ he said. ‘I am edging myself towards walking away from the Strathclyde job and leaving the police service altogether, as soon as I can. All the way back from London I argued the toss with myself, and I still am arguing. It’s doing my head in. I never wanted to destroy the Security Service itself, only to sort any people that might have crossed the line. I’m a realist, I understand how the world has to work at times. But given what I knew, or thought I knew, I had some questions that needed answers.

  ‘As it was, I got it wrong, although not all of it: the Home Secretary did misuse her position by having Lowery delete the Mauritian birth record. Now I’m being blackmailed by Emily Repton herself, to save her husband’s reputation and both their careers. You should have heard her, a
nd seen her. That woman is fucking evil.’

  ‘She threatened me? Really?’

  ‘Yes, but we both knew that was crap; that was just her way of telling me how far she could reach into my life. I’ve taken legal advice since. Your passport may be American, but your children are British. There isn’t a judge in Scotland who’d allow your deportation.’

  ‘But her threat against Aileen? Is that for real?’

  Bob nodded. ‘Oh yes. She went with Morocco to a party in Glasgow, after the premiere of a movie he was in. They’d been watching the pair of them for long enough to be fairly sure she would go, especially since I was at a security conference that MI5 had set up.

  ‘While Joey was away schmoozing the press, Hubert Lowery’s two women got her shit-faced, possibly with a little chemical assistance, then set up the cocaine scene in the toilets. I know all this because Amanda made Lowery tell her as he was clearing his desk.’

  ‘How did she make him cough that up?’

  He gave a bitter laugh. ‘She threatened to tell me where he lives. That was enough.’

  ‘Can Amanda do anything about it, now she’s in the top job?’

  ‘Not with Emily Reptile as Home Secretary.’

  ‘If you had been right, and Toni Field had been killed on Repton’s orders, what would you have done?’

  ‘As much as I could, although that might not have been a lot, since so many of the players are dead and so much of it is deniable.’

  ‘Are you really satisfied that isn’t what happened?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I’m sure. I got taken. As Mandy suggested, I did send a car to pick up Marina, as soon as I got out of there. She’d gone, right enough. Sofia thought she was just shopping . . . or so she said . . . but she hasn’t been seen since. Amanda was right. The woman made me look like an idiot. Hell, I am an idiot! She fed me little hints to steer me in the direction she wanted, towards them and away from her.

  ‘That last scene, her identifying Clyde Houseman as Toni’s mystery lover, that was the final piece of the con. I bought it, like an absolute sucker, and went charging off down to London, to commit professional suicide.’