Last Resort

by Quintin Jardine

But . . .

  But what?

  Who did kill Tommy Coyle?

  I still don’t know, in that I can’t put a name or a face to the person who strangled him, but I’m pretty damn close.

  I’d been prepared to let the whole thing lie. I hadn’t forgotten about Coyle, but far be it for me to butt into an official police investigation. The man had been killed, okay; so had Princess Diana, St Thomas à Becket, half a dozen prostitutes in Whitechapel, and JFK, but I couldn’t do a hell of a lot about them.

  Whatever I’d allowed Ben McNeish and Carrie to believe, I’d never accepted the notion that the security service was behind Coyle’s death. Such things look good on telly, but they don’t actually happen.

  Nor had I bought into an alternative theory, that an associate of the late James ‘Cobbler’ McGarrity might have done it. Nearly all of those guys are either as dead as he is, or they’re in care homes. Even if there is one still out there, he wouldn’t have the guile to pull off such a murder without being caught.

  Just for the fun of it, I did some thinking in one of my newly idle moments. As always, unless I’d caught the killer standing over the body with the murder weapon still in hand, I started with one word. Why?

  There are motiveless crimes, but Coyle’s wasn’t one of them. Just as Ana Kuzmina had done with Hector Sureda, he’d been tailed, or just as Carrie had done with me, twice. The flat in Portland Street had been kept under observation. When Coyle showed up there, he was followed inside, as Battaglia and Hector had been, with the same fatal outcome.

  Having read The Secret Policeman, I knew that it was a sound piece of work, a little suggestive, a little titillating, but even if advance copies of the text had wound up trending on the Internet, it wouldn’t have triggered a series of death threats to the author.

  No, the only thing that was dangerous about it lay at the very end. It was the part about Ignacio and his parentage, and over that, I could see only two people who might be moved to silence the author, taking out Coyle by mistake.

  I had an alibi, so that left only one.

  The mystery was one I wasn’t sure that I wanted to solve, but my curiosity has always been insatiable. I cleared a day in my diary, then drove to Edinburgh, to a big, posh art deco house at the foot of Blackford Hill.

  I’d been there before, almost twenty years in the past. Back then, Alafair Drysalter wouldn’t have let me in without her lawyer being present, but my retirement from the police service had been pretty well publicised, so she was more amused than alarmed when I turned up at her gate. She let me in without a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘What a . . . surprise,’ she exclaimed as she met me at the door. ‘I was going to say “pleasant”,’ she added, as we walked into a living room the size of an airport VIP lounge, ‘but let’s wait to see if it is. I haven’t got long; I’m playing bridge with the girls at lunchtime, so, what can I do for you? Are you selling double glazing to supplement the pension?’

  ‘Not yet, Alafair,’ I chuckled, ‘not yet. No, I was wondering about Mia.’

  ‘What about her? She doesn’t live here any more.’ She frowned, as a memory reasserted itself. ‘Wait a minute. This doesn’t have to do with that questionnaire, does it?’

  ‘What questionnaire?’ I asked, all innocence.

  ‘A thing that came through the post. There was a covering letter from a guy called Baillie. He said he was an author, researching a book, and wondered if I could help him with some information. The questions were all about you and those murders you investigated, when my brother was arrested. They asked about you, and they asked about Mia and they asked if you ever saw each other, away from her radio station.’

  ‘How were you supposed to get the answers to him?’

  ‘Stamped addressed envelope.’

  ‘Did you answer the questions?’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, with a trace of guilt showing. ‘Out of mischief, I confess. I hope it hasn’t caused any bother.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I told her.

  ‘There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could tell them anyway. I had no idea whether you and Mia were seeing each other back then. I was distant from all that.’

  I winked at her. ‘So you were.’ I knew why; she’d been having an affair with a business rival of her father, and it had started a very unfortunate chain of events. ‘But let’s not go there.’

  ‘No, let’s not,’ she chuckled.

  ‘Did you tell Mia about this?’ I continued.

  ‘Eventually. I never had a chance until the middle of last month . . . the last time I saw her, in fact.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘It was at a dinner she invited Derek and me to; a big charity fundraiser at a hotel up in Perthshire. Her radio station had a table. Very swish, the place was; real five star. The owner came across at one point; I got the impression that he and Mia knew each other quite well.

  ‘I told her that night; I took the questions and the covering letter and showed them to her. In fact I left them with her; she said she might write to the guy herself.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I murmured. There are a few swish hotels in Perthshire, but my antennae were picking up signs of an impending coincidence. ‘What was the place called?’

  ‘Black Shield Lodge.’

  A palpable hit. ‘I’ve been there,’ I told her. ‘I’ve even met the owner.’

  ‘That’s a coincidence,’ she remarked, without guile.

  ‘Isn’t it just.’

  I left her to her lunchtime bridge with the girls. Back in the car I called Trish, our children’s carer, to say that I’d be out for the rest of the day and into the evening. Then I drove to Dundee.

  Black Shield Lodge is every bit as posh as Alafair had said. It’s in the heart of the Perthshire countryside, it has its own golf course, its own spa and it doesn’t advertise because it has no need. People gravitate to it, and through it, to its owner, for a range of reasons.

  Some go because he’s a very successful businessman, a multimillionaire, and because, as a result, it’s necessary to be seen and known by him.

  Some go because they’re summoned; when he calls, they always go, because he has the reputation of being a man who doesn’t take refusal kindly.

  Some go because they’re groupies; not the run-of-the-mill sort who follow actors, talent show survivors, and footballers, but groupies nonetheless.

  I go when I choose to. That’s only ever happened twice.

  ‘This is a very unexpected invitation,’ Mia said as she approached my table in the middle of the great baronial hall that is its main dining room.

  ‘Come on,’ I replied, ‘we have a common interest. You kept my son from me for eighteen years, but now that I know about him, I plan to be a proper dad. If that means a civilised relationship with his mother, so be it.’

  ‘If only you’d felt that way when he was made.’

  ‘Hey,’ I retorted. ‘You never gave me a chance; you left the bloody country. You could have come back when you knew you were pregnant, but you didn’t.’

  ‘To what kind of welcome? I was running for my life, remember . . . at your suggestion.’

  ‘With Ignacio inside you, you’d have been safe back in Edinburgh.’ I held up a hand. ‘Enough, though; it’s history, all of it. We look forward now, agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’ She glanced around the room. ‘What made you choose the Lodge?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ I said, ‘and I know the owner. In fact, he’s joining us for lunch.’ I glanced over her shoulder. ‘Here he comes now.’

  Her eyes narrowed as they followed mine, and fell upon a tanned, silver-haired man, dressed in a blue suit with silk in the fabric.

  ‘Cameron,’ I called out as he reached us, stretching out a hand. ‘You know Mia Watson, I believe,’ I added as we shook.

  ‘We have met,’ Grandpa McCullough admitted. ‘This is a surprise, Mr Skinner. It’s unusual for me to be invited to lunch in my own restaurant.’
<
br />   ‘My pleasure, and let’s not be so formal.’

  ‘Whatever you say, Bob,’ he replied, cheerfully. ‘You’re a gentleman of leisure these days, I hear. Is fine dining going to be your pastime from now on?’

  ‘It might be,’ I conceded. ‘I’m a director of the InterMedia group now, the owner of the Saltire. I could make myself its food critic.’ I smiled. ‘The only problem with that could be that I upset a lot of people in my former career, and you never know who’s working in the kitchen.’

  McCullough laughed. ‘In that case, can I suggest that we all choose the same things today. The chef’s Cullen Skink is superb, and he tells me that the venison casserole comes from a deer that was shot on the estate, and hung to the point of perfection.’

  The head waiter was hovering, ready to be summoned. He took our orders, and then sent the sommelier across. I was driving, Mia was working later and McCullough said that he never drank alcohol before six in the evening, so he left disappointed, with ‘mineral water’ scribbled in his pad.

  ‘How’s my granddaughter?’ McCullough asked, out of the blue, halfway through the first course. Until then we’d been talking about the weather, radio and the parlous state of Scottish rugby.

  ‘The last I heard, she was fine,’ I answered. ‘She and young Haddock are very happy together. But why are you asking me?’

  ‘I don’t see her as much as I used to. As you know, I have a wildly exaggerated reputation, and she’s had to distance herself from me, because of the boy’s career. I’ve never met him, you know,’ he added, as if he was trying to assure me. ‘We’ve spoken on the phone a few times, but we’ve never been in the same room. Cheeky says he’s doing very well in the force.’

  ‘He is,’ I confirmed, ‘although we call it the service these days. Give him fifteen years and he’ll be an assistant chief constable, minimum.’

  ‘Do you still have that much influence?’ Mia’s quiet question cut in.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I admitted, ‘but I know that once you’ve lit the blue touchpaper on a rocket, the rest is pretty much inevitable. That’s how it is with young Sauce Haddock.’

  The chef hadn’t been kidding about Bambi’s mother. The casserole was perfect, as he’d promised; we paid it proper respect by enjoying it in silence. It wasn’t until the cheeseboard that Mia’s patience gave out.

  ‘How did you find out that we knew each other?’ she asked. ‘Have you been spying on me?’

  I said nothing; instead I looked across the table, at McCullough. He caught on and leaned towards her. ‘The police could probably tell you what brand of toilet paper I use,’ he said, speaking quietly even though the next occupied table was almost ten feet away. ‘Let’s have coffee somewhere else.’

  He rose from the table, nodded a signal to the maître d’ and led the way out of the dining room along a corridor and into a small lounge that overlooked one of the greens on the golf course. He dropped into a Chesterfield chair, and seemed to expand, to loosen off as if his real personality had been corseted until then.

  ‘You’re the mother of Bob’s son,’ he continued, as if he’d only paused for breath. ‘And you’ve been a very bad girl in your time. You haven’t exactly brought the kid up on the straight and narrow, otherwise he wouldn’t be in fucking Polmont right now. Of course he’s been checking up on you.’

  She turned on me. ‘You’ve been following me?’

  ‘He didn’t have to,’ McCullough laughed, amused by her indignation. ‘He might not have influence any more, but he still has friends. All he has to do is reach out . . . that’s the buzz phrase these days isn’t it, “reach out” – and he can find things out.’ He looked at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Isn’t that true, Bob?’

  I nodded, grateful to him for sparing me the need to admit that indeed I had followed her, a week before, from his house, where I’d seen her car parked in the driveway, to her radio studio for her evening show, and then back again when it was over.

  ‘How did you meet?’ I asked.

  ‘I own the station,’ McCullough explained. ‘Actually, my granddaughter does, although she doesn’t know it; with hindsight, naming her after me was a very smart thing to do, although I didn’t appreciate it at the time. But I’m the Cameron McCullough they pay attention to; I don’t appoint all the staff, but I like to know about the people who’re our public face. I interview all our potential presenters and if they’re not on my wavelength, they’re not on my airwaves.’

  He smiled. ‘Mia was a natural. I could tell the moment I cast an eye on her. She got the job, and I got to know her. Now we’re a couple. We don’t flaunt it . . . especially not around the station . . . but it’s no secret.’

  ‘I see,’ I murmured; actually I’d seen for a while. I don’t like to go into a room with people like them without knowing the whole story in advance.

  ‘Tell me then, Mia,’ I continued, ‘when you had that first call from Tommy Coyle on your programme, why did you call me and Alex, and not Cameron?’

  ‘She did call me,’ he said. ‘I told her to ring you. The threat was against Ignacio; there was nothing I could do to protect him in Polmont, but you could sort it, no problem, and you did.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me about the third call, though,’ I countered, my eyes still on Mia.

  ‘What third call?’

  ‘The one you made to Tommy Coyle, arranging to meet him in the Sheraton.’

  ‘How did . . .’ she gasped.

  ‘Because I’m some sort of fucking genius at what I do,’ I replied, blandly. ‘My daughter found out who and what Coyle was; she went to see him pretending to be an author. He bought her line, but he had to cut their meeting short because he had to rush off to see a client in the Sheraton Hotel.’

  I saw her flinch. ‘Every time I see that place,’ I went on, ‘every time it’s mentioned to me I have a memory flash. I go back to the nineties, to when we met, and to the first time we had coffee together, when I started to be attracted to you. The venue was your choice, and you chose the lobby in the Sheraton. It was your hangout, you explained, the place you could go where nobody would know you.

  ‘When I got home from Spain and started to think about the Coyle murder . . . I had a motive for doing that, because it was Alex who found him, otherwise I might not have been bothered . . . the Sheraton link was like a bell in a fire station.

  ‘So I retraced my daughter’s route to Coyle, and I discovered that Linton Baillie’s editor, a woman named Orpin, had another inquiry about him, just before Alex, from a Scottish-sounding woman who claimed to be a programme researcher. She said she wanted to set up a radio interview. Ms Orpin did what she did with Alex; she gave the caller Coyle’s number.’

  ‘So what?’ Mia snapped defiantly. I glanced at McCullough. He was leaning forward, frowning for the first time since we’d all met up.

  ‘When I was chief constable,’ I told her, ‘there was a very short chain between me and Special Branch. A lot of its job is keeping a lookout, and not only around mosques and ethnic restaurants, but at the other end of the scale, big and busy venues where people like you think they’ll blend in with the crowd, and where the security isn’t intrusive. Do I need to go on?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Okay, if you insist. I’ve been to see an old colleague, a man I put in his chair. I’ve seen the CCTV footage from the Sheraton and I’ve seen you, Mia, meeting with Tommy Coyle. Clearly it isn’t a friendly conversation. What did he want?’

  She looked at me, with dead eyes, and then she hissed, ‘What else? Money. Twenty thousand to keep the secret about Ignacio being your son.’

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘That I didn’t have that sort of cash. He said that he was sure you did, and that he’d call me in two days to arrange a handover.’

  ‘And the very same evening he was conveniently dead.’

  ‘Yes, and good riddance to him, but I didn’t do it.’

  I stared at her and took a deep breath before g
oing on. ‘I know that,’ I exclaimed, dismissively. ‘You’re not capable.’ I turned my attention to Cameron McCullough. ‘But you know a man who knows plenty of men who are. I looked at some more CCTV footage,’ I went on. ‘This lot was from a very obvious camera in the square outside the Sheraton. It shows Coyle leaving, on foot; then a man comes into shot, out of nowhere. He’s much too cute to show his face to the camera. He’s wearing a big heavy coat because it was a cold day, but,’ I smiled, ‘he should have worn a hat as well, for he has a very distinctive head of silver hair. He follows Coyle down Lothian Road, as far as a bus stop, and then they both get on the same bus, Coyle first.’

  ‘I thought you were retired,’ McCullough said. His tone gave no hint of what he was thinking.

  ‘I am,’ I replied, ‘otherwise I’d have gone to Lothian Buses and asked to see their CCTV. They have it on their vehicles, and it’s very difficult to hide from.’

  I leaned back in my chair. ‘But even if I could identify you, Cameron, it would prove nothing. You didn’t kill Coyle either; no way would you take a risk like that.’ I shook my head. ‘No, this is what I think happened. Late that evening someone went to Coyle’s place. He won’t be on any CCTV either.

  ‘Before he could do anything, Coyle came out. It could have been mission aborted at that point, if Tommy had got into a car, but he lost his licence nine months ago, so he took the bus, and once again he was followed. He got off in Slateford, and so did the man who was following him, but there will be no record of it, because the bus company’s system isn’t that good.

  ‘He went into Portland Street, where Linton Baillie had his flat. His pursuer watched him go into a stairway, and then he probably saw the lights go on in a first-floor flat and saw Coyle, drawing the curtains. The street was very quiet that night, so nobody saw the pursuer go into the building.

  ‘Coyle never heard him open the door, because he had the radio on by then and he was sitting in Linton Baillie’s comfy chair, waiting for his date to arrive, the would-be author that he thought would be an easy touch. No, he never heard a thing, ever again.’

  It was McCullough’s time to hold my gaze, as he whispered, ‘You really do believe you’re a fucking genius, don’t you?’