Pray for the Dying

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘So what about Peter Friedman?’ Marina asked, as she sat. ‘What was he?’

  ‘He used to be Harry Shelby.’

  She removed the sunglasses, as if she was peeling them off her face, and stared at him, with eyes that were colder than he had ever imagined they could be. ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘MI5 erased the records of wee Lucille’s birth,’ he replied, ‘but they had no reason to wipe out yours. It wouldn’t have been that easy anyway, you being born before the computer era. When you steered me towards your conspiracy scenario, and I was stupid enough to embarrass myself, even endanger myself, by falling for it, you may have thought that I wouldn’t survive professionally, maybe even personally. You certainly didn’t envisage me coming after you, nor Five either, not after I’d handed them all Toni’s blackmail leverage. For that’s what your sister was, wasn’t she? Inside Supercop, there was a nasty little blackmailer . . . as you well knew, for you were put alongside her to spy on her, and you found the evidence.’

  ‘I . . .’ she began, protesting, but he raised a hand, to stop her.

  ‘I know you were, because Amanda Dennis told me so, and I know you did, because you left it for me, after you’d doctored it a wee bit. So come on, just nod your head, and admit it.’

  She did.

  ‘God knows what Toni got out of the civil servant,’ Skinner continued, ‘or the TV guy, or the other cop, but she got advancement from Storey, and I know now that she got a house out of the Home Secretary and her husband, the one your mother lives in in London. Her father didn’t buy it, they did; they paid her off, and if that was known, the scandal would be compounded. That house was bought and paid for by Repton Industries, Emily Repton’s family business. You knew that, Marina, and you didn’t care a toss about it.

  ‘But when she pulled the same stroke on your father, that was different. Lottie Mann traced both transactions right to the source of the money. She found out that the house in Bothwell was paid for by Pam Limited, Peter Friedman’s investment company. Thanks to one single, unfortunate newspaper photo, Toni found out who Friedman really was. She contacted him and she sold him her silence, for five hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds, the cost of a nice big villa.’ Skinner frowned. ‘Or her silence for a while: and that was something you couldn’t tolerate, the idea that she could unmask him any time she chose, so . . . you had your sister killed!’

  ‘Half-sister,’ she murmured. ‘So prove it.’

  He shrugged. ‘I can’t, not to court standards. Anyway, not only did your fiction add up, that Repton had her removed, it still does, for you could claim that everything you did was on their orders.’

  ‘Do you really know it wasn’t?’ she challenged.

  ‘Oh yes, I do. And I can prove that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘It was your old man that paid Cohen to do the job, not them.’

  ‘My God,’ she said, ‘you have been busy. You know that much?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘In that case, tell me, Mr Skinner . . . I can see you’re desperate to, you’re so pleased with yourself . . . how did you find out who my father was?’

  ‘I’m not pleased with myself,’ he contradicted her. ‘But I’m dead chuffed for Dan Provan, the guy I mentioned earlier. He’s a walking anachronism of a detective sergeant, who’s been hiding in Strathclyde CID for years. You probably never saw him when you were there, just as your path and Lowell’s never crossed, but even if you had you wouldn’t have noticed him. That’s one of his strengths. The other is that he never forgets a criminal, if the crime is big enough to get his attention.’

  He picked up his ever-present attaché case and spun the combination wheels to open it.

  ‘I was never just going to forget about you, Marina,’ he told her as he flicked the catches. ‘I don’t like being made to feel like an idiot. I take it personally. The first thing I did when I got back to Glasgow was send Provan to dig out your birth records from Mauritius. I wanted to build a complete picture of you and obviously I couldn’t rely on the things you had told me, or the hints you had dropped, since you’re as consummate a deceiver as your sister was.’

  A flicker of a smile suggested she took that as a compliment.

  ‘Provan discovered that your father was listed as Hillary Shelby,’ he continued, taking a document from the Zero Halliburton and handing it to her. ‘See? Hillary not Harry, and there’s an Australian passport number. However, that surname niggled him, and the itch wouldn’t go away. And that’s where his special skills came into play. “Shelby,” he told himself. “I know that name from somewhere.” Dan isn’t of the IT generation,’ Skinner said, ‘but he went to the computer and ran a Google search.’ He grinned. ‘He called it “that Bugle thing” when he told me about it. He did try the full name first off, but got zilch, so then he entered simply Shelby, on its own. He came up with a car designer, an actor, and three different towns in America, then at the foot of the page, he got Harry Shelby, and it all came back to him, and that pub quiz mind of his.

  ‘Harry Shelby was an Australian financier, a real tycoon . . . or typhoon, as Dan called him. He built a business empire of considerable size in Australia, South Africa and in Hong Kong from the early seventies on. He started in minerals, then moved into currency trading, and pretty soon he had become a national business icon, stand-out even in an era in Australian history when there were quite a few of those around.

  ‘In nineteen ninety-six, he was awarded a knighthood, in the Birthday Honours list. He was scheduled to be invested in Canberra, by the High Commissioner. Everything was set up, but the day before, Harry Shelby vanished, off the face of the earth. He was never seen again, and he never left a penny behind him, or rather a cent.’

  ‘I remember that,’ Payne exclaimed. ‘It was big news for a week or so, internationally.’

  ‘I confess that it passed me by,’ the chief said. ‘But nineteen ninety-six was a busy year for me; my mind was full of other stuff, on my own doorstep. Anyway,’ he carried on, ‘you can imagine that after Shelby disappeared, his whole life was dug up. It didn’t take the investigators long to find out that in fact he ran out of business steam in the mid-eighties, after a series of bad currency deals that he managed to cover up. Everything he’d done after that had been a huge Ponzi scheme, paying investors with their own money, as he drew more and more in with the promise of attractive profits that were evidently being delivered. If Harry Shelby hadn’t had such a big reputation, chances are he’d have been caught, but because he was such a hero he got away with it.’

  He stopped to sip his tea, only to find that it had gone cold.

  ‘Why did he run?’ he asked, then answered. ‘It may have been because he knew that all Ponzi fraudsters are caught eventually, unless they shut up shop before it’s too late.’ He paused. ‘However, Provan happened upon another theory, one that the Australian authorities . . . Dan checked this with the Australian Embassy . . . believe to this day, possibly because it suits them so to do. They think, indeed they’re pretty well sure, that a couple of his biggest investors were Americans, Mafia figures, using his investment scheme to launder money. The scenario is, they caught on to the swindle, so they dealt with it the old-fashioned way. They made Shelby and his money disappear at the same time. On the day that he did, Australian air traffic control traced an unregistered flight out of Canberra heading for Tasmania. The investigators had a tip that Shelby was on it, until they dropped him out halfway there over the ocean.’ He gazed at Marina. ‘But we know that’s not true, don’t we?’

  She stared back at him, silent. He took a photograph from the case, held it up for Payne to see, then passed it to her.

  ‘That’s Harry Shelby, aged about forty.’

  He produced a second. ‘That’s Peter Friedman, photographed, to his annoyance, at a charity dinner last winter. He’s over thirty years older, but I’ve had the images run through a recognition program, and it confirms they’re one and the sam
e man.’

  He went back into the attaché and took out a third image. ‘And that’s you,’ he said, ‘from your HR file in Pitt Street. You can’t hide from it, Marina. You are your father’s double.’

  She picked up his mug, and drank his cold tea in a single gulp. ‘And proud of it,’ she whispered.

  ‘It was the newspaper photograph that did it, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Antonia was in her first month in Glasgow when it appeared. She read every newspaper, every day, to familiarise herself with the place, and she saw that. She used CTIS to trace him, then one day, just as you have, she turned up here, alone. When he got over the shock, he assumed that she had come to arrest him, but no. I mean, why would she have done that? There would have been nothing in it for her.

  ‘Your assumption was correct; she did to him what she had done to Lawton and his wife. She showed him the brochure for the house and told him that she wanted it. She told him to forget about trying to vanish again, as she would know about it the moment his helicopter took off, or he boarded the ferry. But in truth she knew that there was no point in him running. He was dying, and even then the house was being turned into a hospice, a place for him to be as peaceful as he could be in his last days. So he bought the Bothwell place for her.’ Her eyes flashed. ‘He told me she should have chosen a bigger one.’

  ‘Why did he go to the damn dinner? That doesn’t sound like typical behaviour.’

  ‘He was in Edinburgh, seeing an oncologist for tests,’ she explained. ‘It was that day, and he had a feeling the news wasn’t going to be the best, so he went, in the hope it might cheer him up. As it turned out it did the opposite.’

  ‘Does your mother know any of this?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘None,’ Marina insisted. ‘Maman is not a stupid woman. She had a good job in the civil service, but she was looked after by men for much of her life, first Anil, and then Papa. She’s naive in some ways, so when Antonia told her that she had done well in property in Britain, she believed her.’

  ‘How did Sofia meet your father?’

  ‘He was part of an Australian business delegation to the island, in nineteen eighty, after her thing with Anil was over. Maman was in charge of official government hospitality. That’s when it began.

  ‘I was born two years later, and for all my childhood he spent as much time as he could with us. He was as good to Antonia as he was to me. That’s what made her behaviour all the more despicable. You were right. She was just a nasty little blackmailer.’

  ‘When did you get back in touch with him?’

  ‘I was never out of touch. Gifts would arrive, and letters, never traceable, only ever signed “Papa”. The theory is wrong, incidentally, about the Mafia. They were his partners in the Ponzi business, not his victims. They all made lots of money and when the time came to close it down, they helped him get away, and they planted the idea that they had killed him. In fact he lived in the West Indies for six years, as Peter Friedman. He moved to Mull ten years ago, around the same time as I came to Britain. It was then he told me his new name.’

  ‘Whose idea was it for you to join MI5?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘A shrewd question, because I think you know the answer. Papa suggested it. The idea was that if the Australians started looking for him again, in Millbank I would be well placed to hear about it. By that time I was in a security department within the Met, so when I applied, it seemed a natural step, and I was accepted. Brian Storey was my boss then, and he endorsed me. Antonia never knew, though, not ever. The service, as it does, gave me a front as an importer for a chain of florists.’

  ‘That sounds like an Amanda Dennis touch.’

  ‘It was. She’s a good teacher.’

  ‘You were a good student, Marina. You could have been Amanda yourself, if you’d stayed the course, instead of letting them move you out to spy on your sister.’

  ‘But if I had stayed, I wouldn’t have been able to deal with her when the need arose.’

  ‘By telling your father how to get rid of her? No, I don’t suppose you would.’

  ‘Papa never knew,’ she said.

  Both police officers stared at her.

  ‘It’s true, I swear,’ she exclaimed. ‘If I had told him he would have forbidden it, absolutely. All he ever did was make a donation of three hundred thousand pounds to a charity I told him about. He was a sucker for charities, especially those involved with cancer research; I told him it helped patients with difficult personal circumstances. I approached Cohen, using a contact email address I’d picked up in the service. I gave him the commission and he named his price. No conscience, that man, only a cash register. I also gave him Brown as a resource on the ground in Glasgow. I’m sorry they had to kill him, but not too sorry, as he was a traitor to his own kind. No, the decision was mine, and the orders were mine. Knowing what Antonia was, and what she might have become, I don’t regret them. I’m sorry for Maman, and for Anil, and for Lucille, of course, but they will bring her up as if she was their own. Maman is still young and fit enough to see it through.’

  ‘But what about Papa?’ Skinner murmured. ‘He isn’t, is he?’

  ‘Yes, Papa,’ she sighed. ‘I suppose you have come to take him away, as Antonia did not.’

  ‘We haven’t come to ask for a raffle prize for the policeman’s ball, that’s for sure. As for taking him away, we’ll see about that. But I would like to meet him.’

  ‘Then come with me, Chief Constable, and you shall.’ She stood; Skinner and Payne followed suit. ‘In your car? You have a car, I take it.’

  ‘Yes, but Superintendent Payne can take that. I’ll come with you, just in case the minder panics at the sight of strange vehicles. By the way, no nonsense up there, Marina. There are firearms in my car; that’s a practice your sister introduced.’

  ‘He isn’t that sort of minder, I promise. Rudolf is a driver and a pilot, that’s all.’ As she spoke, they heard the heavy engine sound of an aircraft. She looked up and pointed, towards a helicopter above them, gaining height. ‘In fact, that’s him.’

  ‘Hey!’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘Are you . . .’

  ‘No. Papa is not with him. He’s still at the house. Come and meet him.’

  The chief frowned, still cautious, weighing her up, not anxious to be taken twice. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t you want to collect your mail?’

  ‘It can wait. Come on.’ She led him across the road to the waiting Range Rover.

  With the police car following close behind, they drove out of Tobermory, taking a narrower road from the one they had used earlier, passing a campsite on the edge of the small town, then climbing for two or possibly three miles, although its twists and turns made it difficult to judge distance travelled.

  She slowed as they approached a gate on the right, with an unequivocal sign beside it: ‘Private’. It was shut, but Marina pressed a button on a remote control and the barrier slid aside.

  The surface of the estate road was gravel, but better than the one they had left. Their tyres crunched beneath them, early warning, Skinner thought, for anyone waiting.

  The house itself was a grey mansion, large but not ostentatious. It reminded him of some of his neighbours on Gullane Hill, although the stone was different. She drew up at the front door, then waited until the second car stopped alongside and Payne climbed out to join them.

  He was holding a pistol, in the manner of a man for whom it was a new experience. Skinner frowned and shook his head; he handed it back to Davie Cole.

  ‘This way,’ she said, leading them inside, walking briskly through a chandelier-lit hallway, and, ignoring a wide mahogany stairway, into a room on the far side of the house.

  It was large, decorated with old-fashioned flock wallpaper. A bay window faced south over a sunlit garden, laid out in shrubs and fruit trees, with stone statuary among them. Soft music was playing, a female singer with a gentle voice; the chief guessed at Stacey Kent.

  There was a smell abo
ut the room, a smell of disinfectant, a hospital smell, one that seemed fitting given the metal-framed bed that was positioned facing the window. Skinner saw an oxygen cylinder on the far side as they approached, and beside it, in a stand, a vital signs monitor.

  All the lines on it were flat.

  The man on the bed was old, but his face was unlined. He looked peaceful, with his eyes closed.

  ‘Papa died just over two hours ago,’ Marina murmured. ‘Rudolf has gone to Oban to fetch an undertaker, and to take Sister Evans to the station. She’s been with us for the last month. She did a great job; he was pain-free all the way to the end. The doctor from Oban was with him at the end. He was kind enough to stay overnight. He caught the first ferry back this morning.’

  ‘I suppose I should say I’m sorry for your loss,’ Skinner told her. ‘And I am, honestly, even if he was a billion-dollar fraudster, and you’re a sororicide . . . if that’s a word. You are a first, Marina. I’ve come across plenty of conmen in my career . . . although not on your dad’s scale, I admit . . . but I’ve never met someone who’s killed her own sister.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked. Payne, standing on the other side of the bed, saw a hint of trepidation in her eyes, for the first time since their encounter in the café.

  ‘What do you think?’ the chief retorted. ‘I’m duty bound to arrest you and charge you with murder. You’ve admitted it, and even if you recant that, I know enough now to put a case together.’ And then he sighed. ‘That’s my duty, but the judge would be bound to knock out so much of my evidence on national security grounds that you would walk. Your problem would then be that you wouldn’t walk very far, before you were hit by a runaway lorry, or killed in a random mugging, or died of a peanut allergy that nobody knew you had, or just plain disappeared.’