But she did neither of those things. Instead her anger overcame her nervousness, and she marched to the door and threw it open.
Her husband stood on the step, with a key in his hand, wavering towards the Yale lock that was no longer within reach. She snatched it from him.
‘Gimme,’ he protested.
‘No danger. You’ll not be needing it any longer.’ She grabbed him by one of the lapels of his sports jacket and pulled him indoors.
‘Aw thanks, love,’ he sighed, misunderstanding her.
‘Thanks for nothing,’ she replied. ‘You won’t be staying. You’re as drunk as a monkey and I’m not putting on a show for the neighbours, that’s all.’
‘Ach Lottie, gie’s a break. I’m goin’ tae the fucking jail, is that not enough for you?’
‘That’s the last thing I want, you pathetic twat,’ she hissed. ‘What do you think that’s going to do for your son at the school? Every kid in the place will be pointing fingers at him and calling him names. The only thing that’ll save him from being bullied is that all of them know me. As for your slapper, though, that McGlashan, they can stick her in Cornton Vale for as long as they like.’
‘Leave Christine out of this,’ Scott snarled, lurching towards her.
‘I’d leave her out of the human race,’ she retorted, her voice filled with scorn. ‘And you take one more step towards me,’ she added, ‘and it won’t be a police car that’ll come for you, it’ll be an ambulance. It was you that brought her into it. I hope you’re happy that you’ve ruined her life as well as your own. If I didn’t feel the contempt for her that any woman would feel, and that any good police officer would feel five times over, I could actually find it in my heart to be sorry for the poor cow. Do you have the faintest idea how cruel you’ve been in even asking her to do what she did, far less in talking her into it?
‘I know you and she were at it before we met, and I suspect that you always have been, behind my big stupid plodding back. That can only mean that the daft bitch actually feels something for you. And that you’ve let her down just as badly as you’ve betrayed and shamed Jakey and me.’
She took him by the arm, as if she was arresting him and began to push him towards the door. ‘Now go,’ she ordered, ‘and don’t you ever come back here.’
‘Lottie,’ he pleaded, ‘gie’s a break.’
‘Certainly. Which arm would you prefer?’
‘Ah’ve got nowhere else tae go!’
‘No? Why don’t you just go to her place?’
‘Aye, that’ll be right. Her husband’s lookin’ for me as it is.’
‘Her what? Well, I’ll tell you what, you go down to the riverside and find yourself a nice bench to sleep on, so that if he comes here, I can tell him where to find you.’ She opened the front door and thrust him outside. ‘As soon as I get inside,’ she warned him, ‘I’m going to phone the station. If you’re seen within a mile of this house for the rest of the night, you’ll be lifted. But I won’t tell them to arrest you. Oh no, I’ll have them drive you to Christine McGlashan’s house, drop you there and ring the doorbell. You think I wouldn’t do that, you snivelling bastard?’ she challenged.
He shook his head.
‘Aye, damn right I would. You know, Scott, what I feel right now, looking at you? I feel ashamed that I let you father my son. Well, I tell you this. There is no way that I will let you pass your weakness on to him. It might hurt him for a bit, but you’re never going to see him again.’
With that, Charlotte Mann slammed the door on her husband, walked quietly into her living room, slumped into an armchair, and wept as she had never wept before.
Fifty-Five
‘It’s bloody warm in this city,’ Lowell Payne remarked, as they stood on the pavement outside Thames House.
‘It can be in the summer,’ Skinner conceded. ‘I have this theory that all big cities generate their own heat. Mind you, it can be cold here too. I remember, oh, must be twenty years ago now, standing here on Millbank one evening in February, with a wind whistling up the Thames that felt as if it had come all the way from Siberia. That’s still the coldest I’ve ever been in my life.’
‘Are we going to get a chilly reception in here, d’ you think?’
‘No, I don’t, but things may cool down quite a bit once we get going.’
‘Who are we meeting?’
‘I’m not absolutely certain. As things stand, our appointment is with Amanda Dennis, the deputy director of the service. Whether she has anyone with her, that may depend on whether she guesses why we’re here.’
‘What’s my role?’
‘You’re a witness,’ Skinner told him. ‘Did you do what I suggested?’
‘Tell Jean, you mean?’ Payne frowned. ‘No, I didn’t, I’m sorry. You’ve known her for longer than I have, so I shouldn’t have to tell you that if I just happened to mention casually that you and I were off to a top-level meeting with MI5 but I couldn’t tell her what it was about, she’d have gone into full worry mode, and not slept a wink. Did you tell Sarah?’
‘Of course. Sarah gave up worrying about me years ago.’
‘Did you tell her what the meeting’s about?’
‘No, and she didn’t ask. She’s used to me moving in mysterious ways. She calls me God, sometimes.’
The DCI grinned and shook his head. ‘What is it with you two?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Always. I’d expect nothing else.’
‘I think that Aileen getting caught out with Joey Morocco came in very handy for both of you.’
‘What does Jean think?’ Bob asked.
‘There’s nothing for her to think about,’ Lowell told him, ‘as far as you and Sarah are concerned, not yet, but she’ll be fine. They didn’t know it at the time, but I heard her and Alex compare notes one day. Neither of them were too keen on Aileen.’
‘I know that now.’
‘I’ve got nothing against her, mind, but on the two occasions that I’ve met Sarah, I thought that she was a sensational woman and that the two of you together just filled the whole room.’
‘Maybe we did at that, Lowell. We lost our way for a while, that was all. I hope we’ve found it again.’
‘What’s made the difference?’
‘I’ve stopped living in the past. Recently, somebody very close to me told me that for the last twenty and a bit years, since Myra was killed in that bloody car, I’ve been in denial, that I’ve never accepted it, never moved on. I’ve come to accept that’s true. It drove Sarah and me apart, and with Aileen . . . I made myself see Myra in her, when in fact they couldn’t be more different. Myra was wild, self-indulgent and she lived her life on the spur of the moment. She was also promiscuous, as Jean may have told you, more than I ever was, even when I was single.
‘Aileen, on the other hand, is one of the most calculating people I have ever known. I don’t mean that unkindly, not any more, but everything she does is to a plan, and everyone around her must conform to it, even me.
‘She supports police unification for two reasons. One, she does believe in it, but two, she thought that it would make me leave the force and help her achieve her real ambitions, which don’t lie in Scotland, but down here, in Westminster.
‘I’m sure she’ll get there, but not with my help. As for me, as was said to me, my soul’s been broken, but Sarah’s helping me fix it, and I feel more at peace with myself than I have in years.’ He checked his watch. ‘And I’ll be even more so when we’ve done our business here. Are you all set?’
‘Yes, I’m ready.’
‘Good. Come on then, I like to be bang on time when I visit this place.’
They entered the headquarters of the Security Service through a modest door to the right of the building’s great archway, and stepped up to a reception desk that might have belonged to any civil service department. Skinner announced them to one of the uniformed staff. When he told the man that he had an appoint
ment with Mrs Dennis, there was a subtle change in his attitude. He checked a screen that the police officers could not see, then nodded.
‘Yes, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘I’ll let the DD know you’re here and she’ll send someone down to collect you.’ He made a quick phone call, then filled in two slips, which he inserted in plastic cases and handed them over, one to each. ‘These must be surrendered on leaving. Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll check you in through our electronic security. It’s just like an airport, really.’
‘I know,’ Skinner said. ‘But I have a pacemaker so you’ll have to pat me down.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Rashid,’ a woman called out.
The chief constable looked over towards a line of lift doors and saw Amanda Dennis approach. ‘Oh, but it will,’ he insisted. ‘I’m not having your lot plant a gun on me when we get upstairs then say I carried it in.’
She laughed. ‘Damn it! There goes Plan A.’
The deputy director of MI5 was not what Lowell Payne had been expecting. In his mind he had pictured Dame Judi Dench, or someone like her. Instead he saw someone who was around fifty, with dark, well-cut hair and sparkling eyes that had none of the chilly aloofness that were a feature of her film and television equivalents.
‘Hi, Mandy,’ Skinner greeted her when the security search was over and he and Payne had retrieved their bags from x-ray. ‘Good to see you; this is DCI Payne, Lowell, my sidekick, but you’ll know that by now.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘You’re looking better than ever. Still finding time for the toy boy?’
She winked. ‘Shows, does it?’
‘Does he still think you work in a flower shop?’
‘No, it closed down. Now he thinks I’m a proof-reader in a law firm.’ She grinned. ‘Actually he knows exactly what I do. He’s a bright enough chap to read the parliamentary reports where my name crops up occasionally. You know how it is, Bob. It’s the junior ranks who have to be anonymous. Thanks to John bloody Major, the rest of us can’t.’
‘I know,’ he sympathised, as they stepped into a lift. ‘The Don Sturgeons of this world have to be protected, but you and Hubert can walk around with targets on your backs.’
‘Who on earth is Don Sturgeon?’ she remarked, but did not wait for an answer. ‘As for Hubert, why do you want to see me? He’s the director, not me.’
‘He’s also a prat, a Home Office toady dropped in here because the Prime Minister of the day decided the place needed some new blood, after that wee scandal you and I uncovered a couple of years back. He may have been the transfusion, but you’re still the heartbeat.’
The elevator stopped and they stepped out, then along a corridor. Mrs Dennis unlocked her office door and followed them into the room. It was oak-panelled and grandly furnished, in contrast to the utilitarian style of the reception area.
‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘We’ll use the conference table, but before we start, Bob, I assume you’d like coffee.’
He held up a hand. ‘No thanks, Amanda, I’ve signed the coffee pledge, and Lowell here had a Starbucks on the way up from Victoria. By the way,’ he added, ‘he was propositioned by a whore, sorry, that’s non-PC, by a sex worker in his hotel last night. Very English, could even have been public school. Three hundred quid. Isn’t that right, Lowell?’
‘Yes indeed, Chief. She said it was her way of paying off her mortgage.’
‘Unluckily for her, he’s a Jock, and a tight-fisted bastard like all of us. She wasn’t one of yours, was she?’
‘She could have been,’ the deputy director replied. ‘About a third of the women in this place fit that description. But if she was, she wasn’t on duty. We tend to use Russian girls, or Polish. That’s what our targets expect, and let’s face it, chaps,’ she winked, ‘have you ever met a posh English girl who really knew how to fuck?’
Skinner laughed out loud. ‘As a matter if fact I have, but you probably know about her. Likely she’s on my file.’
‘Come on, Bob,’ she chided him. ‘We don’t keep files on senior police officers.’
‘Of course you bloody do, Amanda. You keep files on everyone, apart from the odd militant Islamist who slips through the net and blows up a London bus. For example, you kept a file on Beram Cohen. I know that, because you sent my young friend Clyde Houseman through to see me last Saturday, to tell me who he was. What I didn’t understand at the time was why MI5 should know about Cohen. He wasn’t Islamic, he was Jewish. He wasn’t an internal security threat to us. No, he was an Israeli secret service operative who got compromised and had to vanish.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘and we helped, as you know by now. We did a favour via our friends in MI6, for their friends in Mossad, and took him on board.’
‘You turned him into Byron Millbank?’
She frowned and the change seemed to add a couple of years to her age in the time it took. ‘What a bloody stupid name! I was livid when I heard about it, but when it was done I wasn’t involved. I was running our serious crime division then.’
‘I imagine it flagged up with you as soon as my people ran a DVLA check on him.’
‘Yes, that’s how it happened.’
‘And as soon as it did, you broke into the Rondar offices and removed his computer.’
‘We did, as a precaution, although it turned out to be unnecessary. He seems to have kept his two identities absolutely separate.’
‘But you knew he still functioned as Beram?’
‘I did, and a very few others. Six advised us of a couple of operations he had undertaken for them and for the Americans. There was the one in Somalia, for example; that’s how we knew of the connection between him, Smit and Botha. As soon as you came looking for him, trying to identify his body, I knew that something was up.’
‘And you knew who the target was, but you didn’t tell me,’ Skinner said. ‘Because MI5 wanted her dead.’
She stared back at him. ‘Of course not,’ she protested. ‘Why the hell are you saying that?’
Lowell Payne had been following the exchange, fascinated; he had sat in on, or led, hundreds of interviews during his career, and he realised what Skinner was doing. As Dennis spoke, he detected a very subtle shift in her posture, as if she had slipped, very slightly, on to the defensive.
‘Because I believe it’s true,’ the chief replied. ‘Twenty-four hours ago, I was simply curious about the chain of events, mostly because of Basil “Bazza” Brown. As you said earlier, Mandy, you used to run the serious crimes operation in this place. Inevitably that would involve you in suborning criminals up and down the country and turning them into informants, either through blackmail or bribery.
‘When we found Bazza’s body in the boot of Smit and Botha’s supposed getaway car . . . rented by Byron Millbank . . . and we checked him out through NCIS, they’d never heard of him. Now, Bazza might not quite have been one half of the Kray Twins, but he was a person of significant interest to Strathclyde CID and the Scottish Serious Crimes and Drugs Agency. So it just wasn’t feasible that he wouldn’t be on the national criminal database, unless he had been taken off it, and the only organisation I can think of with the clout to do that, is yours. Come on, he was an MI5 asset, wasn’t he? Give me that much.’
She sighed, then smiled. ‘I should have known,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, he was. I turned him myself.’
‘Thought so. By the way, was Michael Thomas involved in any way, my ACC?’
‘Yes, I had to involve him at one point, on pain of disgrace if he breathed a word. Why?’
‘It answers a question, that’s all. And gets him off a nasty hook.’ He paused, straightening in his seat. ‘Okay,’ he went on, ‘so you must see where I’m coming from. I’ve uncovered an operation in Scotland, planned by a man who is known to MI5. Then right in the middle, I find a key equipment supplier, eliminated to keep him quiet, and I discover that he was also known to you. At the very least that was going to start me wondering. You’ve got to concede that, chum.’
‘Yes, okay, I do. But answer me this. If we were behind it, why did I send Clyde Houseman through to see you, to tell you who Cohen was? Surely I’d have kept quiet about it all.’
‘No,’ Skinner murmured. ‘You wouldn’t have taken that chance. If you had you’d have been betting that I wouldn’t have found out about the operation on my own, without your help, and you know me too well for that. So you sent Clyde with his order, and with his personal connection to me to cloud my judgement.
‘I bought into him, but now I’ve come to believe that his job was to make sure that the hit went ahead; not to help me, but to get in my way, and to keep me from getting to the concert hall on time, by any means necessary.’
‘And I gave him orders to shoot you if he had to? Come on, old love,’ she protested.
‘No,’ he conceded, ‘just to fuck me about, to make sure we were chasing the wrong hare. It worked too. We didn’t find out that the target was female until it was too late. Even then, when we did, I still assumed that it was political, as Clyde had said, and that meant that it had to be Aileen, my wife.’
‘Bob,’ Dennis murmured. ‘This is all very flight of fancy. What on earth has brought it about?’
‘Two things. First, you told me that official MI5 policy has been to steer clear of cooperation with the Strathclyde Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Section because you didn’t trust Toni Field. But in fact I find out that you’ve had her under very close supervision, through Clyde Houseman, or Don Sturgeon, the identity he used to . . . how to say it . . . penetrate her.’
Amanda smiled and raised an eyebrow.
‘Second,’ Skinner continued, ‘I’ve solved a mystery.’
‘It seems to me that you’ve created one, but go on.’
‘Toni Field’s secret child, Lucille.’
‘Her what?’ Dennis exclaimed.
‘Come on, Mandy, Clyde must have told you she had a kid. The scar was a clear giveaway, as we found at her autopsy. As soon as I heard about it, I found myself wondering why. Why did she have to hide the fact, take a sabbatical and fuck off to Mauritius to have the baby under her old name?
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