Last Resort

by Quintin Jardine

  He stared at me. ‘You’ve been drinking Xavi’s Sangria,’ he murmured. ‘So has she, by the sound of it.’

  I glared back. ‘Imagine a man walking a greasy tightrope,’ I shot back at him, ‘in a high wind, over a lake of shit. You are that man, Ben, and I’m ready to shake the rope. You thought you were on a real winner, didn’t you? I’m a public figure in Scotland and beyond, a controversial cop with a bit of a past, and you thought you could cash in on me.’

  I took half a step towards him, and he flinched. ‘The bugger of it is, you almost did. You came very close to pulling it off; indeed you probably would have, but for me turning up here, and finally running into your snooper. Very close, but the cigar humidor stays closed. The Secret Policeman’s going to stay secret.’

  ‘Do you think you can stop it now?’ he asked, with a show of truculence.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘But I won’t have to. You’re going to abandon the project yourself, Linton, Ben, whoever you’d like to be.’

  Carrie’s face was a picture. If I’d ever doubted her claim that she’d never met her client in the flesh, it ended then. She stared at him. ‘You’re Linton Baillie?’ she shouted.

  Ben sat there, trapped, and in that moment silent.

  I nodded. ‘He is. Now ask him why he never told you.’

  He sighed. ‘I didn’t see the need, Carrie,’ he said, quietly. ‘I sourced you on the net and hired you by email to do the surveillance job on Mr Skinner. Then I got curious about you, so I followed you.’

  She looked ready to thump him. ‘Does that mean that when we first met, in the Bank Hotel bar, that was a set-up, was it?’

  ‘Not exactly. Yes, I’d followed you in, but you made the first approach, remember? It was you who asked me if I was waiting for someone.’

  ‘So bloody what?’

  ‘So you did,’ he exclaimed, ‘and I discovered I liked you. I could have said so long and left it at that, but I didn’t want to. Then when we started dating, I thought it was kind of cool, since I was doing as much of the Skinner surveillance as you were. We could work closely together without you realising it.’

  ‘And that way,’ I chipped in, ‘you could judge how accurate her reports were when she submitted them, since you’d been there for some of them.’

  ‘No!’ Ben protested. ‘That wasn’t it, not at all. I love you, Carrie, honest. It wasn’t meant to happen but it did.’

  ‘Then why keep secrets from me?’ she countered.

  ‘Linton was a secret from everybody. Not even Tommy Coyle knew who he really was.’

  ‘Who the hell is Tommy Coyle?’

  ‘Linton’s agent: my agent.’

  I didn’t want to drop my bombshell just then. Instead I said, ‘Let’s start from scratch, Ben. How did Linton Baillie begin?’

  ‘Casually, really. It goes back to when I was working in the bookshop. I was an assistant manager and that gave me access to detailed turnover figures. I could see which genres were doing best, and which were turkeys. Crime in general has always been good, but when I saw how many true crime books go off the shelves, it blew my mind. You must know that, surely, Mr Skinner.’

  ‘Why should I?’ I challenged him. ‘I’ve spent my life immersed in true crime. The last thing I want to do when I get home is read about it.’

  ‘Then you’re in the minority,’ Ben declared. ‘When I saw those sales figures I decided to have a go myself. I started in London: I did some research on the old East End villains, then found one whose son had become a priest. I traced him and wrote a book from his perspective. Donside bought it. They only gave me an advance of two grand, but it earned out inside a month.

  ‘They were hot to trot for another, but set in Scotland. I looked at the cast list of our organised crime, at who’d had a biography done and who hadn’t. I decided to pick one who was dead, as I’d done with the London book.’

  ‘To avoid the risk of your car blowing up when you switch on the ignition?’ I suggested.

  ‘More or less. Anyway, I chose James McGarrity, known as Jim the Cobbler, because he liked torturing people who upset him by crushing their feet with a device that he copied from one he’d seen in a museum.’

  ‘How did you do your research?’

  ‘Most of it I did online; the rest was through a questionnaire that I sent by post or email to retired cops who’d known him. They were only too keen to tell me stories, so it didn’t take me long. Writing the thing wasn’t hard. We’re not talking Booker Prize here, you understand.’

  I nodded my agreement. ‘How did you find Coyle?’ I asked.

  ‘Through the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. He was listed there.’

  ‘Did he know who you were? Did you meet him?’

  ‘I met him as Linton Baillie. I’d decided on that as a pen-name; I came up with it by blending the names of two pubs I know, simple as that. My London manuscript was finished by then; I showed it to him and he took me on. He did the deal with Donside very quickly, and the royalty money began to roll in, much more than I’d expected. To maintain my anonymity, I put it in an online bank account that I’d opened in Linton’s name, minus Coyle’s commission, of course.’ He showed a flicker of a smile. ‘Tommy’s a real shyster. He wanted twenty per cent, but I’d researched that too so I knew that fifteen is tops. We settled on twelve and a half.’

  ‘What about the flat?’

  He peered at me, his eyes narrowing. ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘Never mind. When did that happen?’

  ‘I inherited it from my father, just before I finished the London manuscript. He and I had been in touch for years, but my mother never knew.

  ‘Dad wanted it that way; he said she was better off thinking he was dead. He reckoned she’d been in love with Xavi since they met as teenagers. He was happy that it had worked out for her after he left, and that she should forget all about him.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He died at work. He’d a stroke at the wheel, in his cab, in Italy. He left everything he had to me: the flat, his lorry, an insurance policy, and some invested cash. That’s all in my own bank account,’ he added, ‘not in Linton’s.’

  ‘Coyle knew about the flat?’ The question was rhetorical, but Ben didn’t realise that.

  ‘I had to give him a correspondence address. He’s looking after it for me while I’m here.’

  ‘So where do you actually live, Ben?’ Carrie demanded.

  ‘You know,’ he protested. ‘In my stepfather’s place in Queensferry Street; you’ve been there. You’ve even got a toothbrush there, remember? That really is my home.’

  ‘Leave your domestic till later, the pair of you,’ I said, ‘and get on with it. The McGarrity book was a success, yes?’

  ‘Sure was. It was a bestseller in the genre, and Donside, my publisher, wanted another. I thought about it and came up with a synopsis about people who’ve died mysterious deaths that could have been linked to the security services: the man behind the Profumo affair, a couple of MPs whose deaths have never been properly explained, and so on. It was all supposition really; I was asking questions that I knew would never be answered.’

  ‘Did it ever occur to you that winding up MI5 might not be a good move? Did you never imagine yourself becoming one of those questions?’

  He frowned. ‘No, not at all. Look, it’s just a bit of fun.’

  ‘And me,’ I murmured, ‘am I just a bit of fun? Are my children there for the amusement of your readers? Is my career to be trivialised, and damned by innuendo?’

  His eyes hardened, as he showed me, for the first time, the real Linton Baillie, and the real Ben McNeish, the one that Xavi doesn’t like. ‘You’re a commodity, Mr Skinner,’ he said. ‘That’s all, a public figure, as you said yourself, for public consumption.’

  ‘Not when you put my son in danger,’ I retorted, matching his stare with one of my own, letting my anger come to the surface. ‘Not when your agent calls his mother and threatens t
o out him to the media.’

  Ben’s mouth dropped open. ‘Tommy did that?’

  ‘Yes he did.’

  ‘The stupid bastard!’ he exclaimed. ‘What the fuck did he think . . .’

  ‘He thought he could extort another few quid out of us, I guess. You should have given him his twenty per cent.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ He was rattled. ‘I had no knowledge of this, Mr Skinner, I promise.’

  ‘I believe you. I don’t see you being so stupid. But it doesn’t matter. He did it, Carrie got unlucky and I clocked her, and soon after that Mr Coyle got unlucky too. Now I know the whole story, I have a copy of your book on me, and I’m here to tell you that it will never see the light of day.’

  ‘That’s what you think!’ Ben retorted, angrily. ‘That book’s worth a small fortune; you’re a national name, Mr Skinner.’

  Carrie had been studying me, looking and listening; her anger towards her partner seemed to have dissipated. ‘Hold on a minute,’ she murmured. ‘How did this man Coyle get unlucky, like you said he did?’

  ‘He was sitting in Linton’s chair, in Linton’s apartment, on Thursday night, pretending to be your man here, in the hope of getting his leg over an aspiring young writer, when somebody slipped a ligature round his neck and throttled the life out of him.’

  Ben’s expressive face sagged, and went white, his pallor in contrast with his black beard.

  ‘You’re blown,’ I told him. ‘Coyle was killed, but in your place. You know what that means.’

  ‘Who killed him?’ he croaked.

  I spread my hands in a ‘search me’ gesture. ‘How the fuck would I know? Anyway, that’s the wrong question. You should be asking whether whoever it was meant to kill him, or did they mean to kill you?’

  I let him think about that for a while, vindictively enjoying his pain, his fear, and his confusion.

  ‘Looks as if you’ve really wakened the wrong bear,’ I continued. ‘It’s not like the security service to make a mistake like that, but as your book suggests, it’s not perfect. That said, it never gets it wrong second time around.’

  ‘Mr Skinner,’ Carrie whispered. ‘They wouldn’t . . . would they?’

  I pointed in the general direction of her boyfriend. ‘Ask him, he’s the fucking expert . . . or he thinks he is.’ I paused for a second. ‘But this is gospel,’ I went on. ‘I know these people. I’m practically one of them. Now I also know who Linton Baillie is, what he looks like, and where he really lives.’

  ‘No!’ Ben yelled.

  ‘No,’ I repeated. ‘I’ll keep you safe, if only for your mother’s sake. But here’s the deal. Whoever killed Coyle got Linton as well, effectively. He no longer exists. He’s closed for business.

  ‘Ben McNeish can go away from here and do something useful with his life; for example, he can grow up, develop a conscience and marry this nice lady, having promised never to lie to her again.

  ‘Your book would never have been published anyway,’ I added. ‘I’d have stopped it, without even having to go to court.’ I smiled. ‘But as added insurance, this is going in the sea.’

  I took his computer from the table, walked to the edge of the terrace and tossed it.

  The aerodynamic qualities of a lightweight laptop are quite remarkable. There was no outcrop of rock to break its fall as it floated outwards, then curved in a gentle arc before disappearing into the waters of the Mediterranean, with barely a splash.

  ‘The police recovered your back-up device from Portland Street,’ I told him. ‘They also found a copy of The Secret Policeman on Coyle’s computer. They’ve both been wiped, accidentally, of course. If you have another, I want it, now.’

  He looked up at me and shook his head. ‘I haven’t, honest.’

  ‘In that case, we’re done. One way or another, Linton Baillie is dead. Long live Ben McNeish . . . for as long as he’s careful.’

  ‘Do you want me to thank you?’ he whispered, bitterly.

  ‘Not for a second,’ I answered. ‘You should thank your mother. It’s only for her sake that I haven’t shaken you right off that fucking tightrope. Think about that book of yours, then look at me. Do you really think I’d have taken that without coming back at you as hard as I could?’

  I turned to leave. ‘If you’d like one last piece of advice,’ I said, ‘it’s this. Take this nice lady back home, and introduce her to your mother and Xavi. She’s gullible, but she’s okay.’

  Thirty-Two

  I left them there and drove back to L’Escala, then went online, looking for the first flight available. I found one that left that same day out of Barcelona to Prestwick Airport, and booked it on the spot.

  Alex picked me up, and drove me back to Edinburgh, to her place since I didn’t want to rouse my own household at one in the morning.

  We didn’t talk much on the road, because I slept most of the way . . . and until almost noon the next morning. The only thing of import she did tell me was that Jack McGurk had no leads to Tommy Coyle’s killer; that didn’t surprise me.

  She didn’t ask me why I’d gone rushing off to Madrid, nor has she since. That was fine by me, for it wasn’t something I was keen to discuss with anyone, especially not her. I couldn’t lie to her, and if she’d asked me the wrong question . . . well, it would have been tough to explain.

  Next day, when the kids came home from school, I was there for them. By the time Sarah came in from work, they were all fed and I had our dinner under way.

  I’d done several other things by then. For example, I’d spoken to Mitchell Laidlaw and asked him to expedite my redundancy package from the police service. I didn’t call Andy Martin. Instead, I allowed him to learn of my decision through formal channels. I knew it was for the best, and so would he.

  If I’d phoned him, one of two things would have happened. Either he’d have tried to persuade me to change my mind and I’d have dented his ego by turning him down, or he wouldn’t have, and made a big hole in mine.

  Worst case for both of us would have been if I had decided to stay on in a manufactured capacity . . . having an éminence gris in the background doesn’t work in football, and I’m sure it would be a disaster in the police service.

  I’d also got in touch with Amanda Dennis, to thank her for her back channel help with Battaglia, and to decline her informal offer of a job in Scotland with the security service. However I did tell her that I was prepared to accept consultancy assignments, on an occasional basis, and that since I’d already been vetted from here to hell and back, she could consider me an available resource.

  ‘That sounds like an even better option than having you officially on the strength,’ she said. ‘We all need our secrets, even me, and you’ll be a good one to keep.’

  I shared all this with Sarah, after dinner.

  ‘I’m glad,’ she confessed. ‘I know how tough it’s been to get to this decision, but it’s the right one. If you’d stayed you’d have been going against your own principles, and that’s not you. If your friend in Five keeps you busy, that’s good too, as long as she never gives you a gun.’

  She leaned against me, on the sofa. ‘I’m not a psychiatrist,’ she murmured. ‘I’m even better than that; I’m your best friend. So I can tell you now what I should probably have told you a few years ago, before we broke up. The police service has been killing you, Bob, slowly and steadily over the years. Every case you’ve tackled, every burden you’ve borne, has eaten away a piece of you, body and soul. You’ve taken everything personally, your responsibility to victims and their families, and to the people you’ve had under your command.

  ‘When you went to Spain you were in a state of emotional and physical exhaustion. I don’t know what you did over there apart from think, but whatever it was, it’s cured you. You look more relaxed than you have in years, and happier.’

  ‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I feel it, too.’

  ‘What did you do over there?’ Finally, she did get round to asking.

 
‘I helped some people to find a way forward. There was a trade-off, but it’s all worked out for the best.’ I smiled. ‘Oh yes, and one other thing.’ I told her about Xavi’s offer of a seat on the board.

  ‘That’s great,’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ve put your life on the line for a salary. It’s time you picked up some money for old rope. Accept,’ she insisted, ‘but hold out for five thousand a day. You’re worth it.’

  PS

  So there I was, plucked from the depths of depression and confusion by spending a few days away from the pressure cooker in which I’d confined myself. In that time I’d been able to practise my true vocation in a private capacity, with no paperwork, no reporting chain, no nothing; just me and an intellectual challenge . . . with a little of the physical thrown in.

  I’d loved it, and as Sarah said, it has restored me and made me whole again.

  I have a new perspective on life, and my priorities are clear and unfettered by the responsibility of public service. They are, in no particular order, my family, my family and my family.

  My older daughter’s new career will take up my time, in an amount equal to that of my younger daughter’s growing interest in the works of A. A. Milne, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, and Roald Dahl, and her eagerness to be able to read them for herself.

  I can observe and assist my younger sons’ growth in age, size, and personality, and I will engage myself with their half-brother by visiting him, very privately, courtesy of Kemp, in the institution, and helping him plan what he’ll do when he’s released. On the day that happens, it’ll be me who’s waiting outside the gate.

  I’ve already started work with InterMedia. (Xavi upped the day rate to four thousand without me having to ask.) The work is interesting, and I find that I’m contributing more than I thought I could, not only to the crime reportage of the group, but also to the training of young journalists in basic investigation techniques.

  Amanda Dennis hasn’t called me yet, but she will, of that I’m certain.