‘I know he was widowed,’ said McIlhenney. ‘What happened to her?’
‘She died of viral meningitis, in her thirties. I believe that’s when Ainsley started to write, as a form of therapy.’
‘What was his profession before that?’
‘He was an accountant at the beginning, but he did some part-time lecturing as well. After Joyce died, he concentrated on that, and became head of the accountancy school at Heriot-Watt. I didn’t see him again for a few years after the wedding, not until I was at university myself, and playing first-team rugby. We had a game at Goldenacre one Saturday; I was getting a bit of a reputation by then, and he turned up with his kids. He hung around afterwards, and said hello when I came out. I won’t say he was a regular attender, but he was in the stand on the odd occasion after that, at Edinburgh games, usually on his own. He knew fuck all about the game, but that’s true of quite a few people who call themselves rugby followers. After I joined the police, moved through here and started playing for the Accies, I didn’t have to jump straight on the bus home when the game was finished. If I saw him there, we’d have a couple of pints in the clubhouse afterwards. At least I would; Ainsley had to keep off the beer, not so much for his weight but because of his condition. Did you know that, by the way? That he was diabetic?’
‘Yes,’ McIlhenney confirmed casually, ‘we knew that.’
‘Fine. Anyway that was the extent of it. I stopped playing regularly because of the job, and so I stopped seeing Ainsley socially, until I got to the age when I found myself going to funerals as often as weddings. I saw him at his mother’s send-off, but there wasn’t much said between us that day. The only other time . . . that’s right,’ he exclaimed, his eyes glazing for a second as if he was examining a mental picture, ‘was when I met him by accident in the Café Royal bar, about fifteen years ago. He was with Joyce and another couple; it must have been just before she died. I had just made CID, and I was with Bob; he was a DCI then on the drugs squad. Ainsley came over, I introduced them . . . and that’s when Inspector Walter Strachan was born.’
‘You are joking!’ the superintendent gasped.
‘No way am I joking; Strachan is based on Bob Skinner. He doesn’t look like him, but that’s deliberate. If you think about it, though, the basic connection’s obvious: they’re both hard bastards from the west of Scotland. I went to one of Ainsley’s events in the Edinburgh Bookshop about ten years ago, once he had a few books out there. When he read from his latest, it was Bob’s voice he was using for Strachan. I asked him about it when he was done and I had him in a quiet corner. He owned up to it. The popular belief is that it was Haggerty, and he didn’t discourage that, but it wasn’t.’
‘Does Bob know?’
Martin shook his head. ‘I promised Ainsley I’d never tell him . . . and I want the same undertaking from you guys, even though the poor bloke’s dead.’
‘You’ve got it. That night in the Bookshop, was that the last time you saw him?’
‘All but two. I saw him at another funeral, then I had a call from him a few months ago, middle of April. He asked if he could come to see me. I was taken by surprise, not just by the call, but because he didn’t sound himself. Now the truth is, I didn’t fancy him turning up at the office in Dundee, for the same reason that I never spoke of our relationship before now. I was a bit embarrassed by it, and I reckoned it might get me a bit of ribbing from colleagues, if they knew I was related to Inspector Strachan. Ainsley said he’d rather not come to the house, so we wound up meeting for lunch in Rufflets Hotel, just outside St Andrews; that’s about as discreet as you can get.’
‘I know,’ McIlhenney admitted. ‘Lou took me there for a weekend break, when she found out she was pregnant.’
‘Right, you get the picture. This was midweek, so we had the dining room to ourselves, apart from two elderly American couples who were sat well away from us. I should tell you that although I kept quiet about it, I’d been following Ainsley’s career over the years, pleased for him as his reputation grew, so I knew what he was up to. I knew about the politics as well, that he’d set himself the objective of getting Trident out of Scotland. I read an interview with him in the Saltire, where he said that he reckoned he had a far more realistic chance of achieving that than any of the rabble-rousers or any . . . and here I’m paraphrasing as accurately as I can . . . of the born-again disarmers who thought that blocking the public highway was a sensible form of protestation.’
‘Guess who he was talking about there?’ said Pye.
‘Bruce Anderson,’ Martin countered. ‘I’d guessed that even before he told me. I’d only ever heard Ainsley speak kindly of people before, so it was bit of a shock to the system, hearing him describe the guy as an arrogant self-promoting bullshitter. That’s what he did, though. He said that normally he wouldn’t be bothered with him, only he expected to be fighting him for a seat in the Scottish Parliament pretty soon.’
‘It didn’t work out that way, though,’ McIlhenney pointed out.
‘No, it didn’t. The local Labour Party in Dunbartonshire insisted on one of theirs fighting the seat with the Trident base in it, so did the Nationalists, and that made it easy for Ainsley. He was afraid he’d have lost to Anderson.’ Martin paused. ‘But that wasn’t all he was afraid of. We were on the dessert by the time he got round to it, and even then I could sense that he was hesitant. Finally he took a deep breath and asked, “Andy, does your remit cover Special Branch?” I had to think about that one, but then I realised that he wasn’t the sort of guy to ask something like that out of the blue, unless he was pretty damn sure of the answer. So I told him that it did, and that quite a bit of my job involved overseeing covert surveillance on potential security risks. “Of which I may be one, it seems.” That’s what he said next. I could have cut him off at that point, but I didn’t. Instead I asked him what made him think that, trying to take him seriously. Christ, Neil, you know that if a tenth of the people who reckon they’re being watched actually were, there would be no unemployment, all the jobless would be in MI5, and on overtime at that. Plus, the guy was a crime writer, with all sorts of plots and sub-plots going on in his head. He was pretty rational, though. He took a letter from his pocket and handed it to me. I didn’t recognise the stamp; it was from his publisher in Prague, he said. He’d slit it open with a blade, but he asked me to look at the flap. I did; it wasn’t quite square on, as if it had been peeled back very gently, so as not to tear it, and then put back in place. He said that’s how it had arrived and told me that he’d taken it to a lady friend of his at Heriot-Watt, in the chemical engineering department, and had asked her to look at it. She tested it, and reported back that she had found two different sorts of adhesive. And she’d done more, she’d lifted three different thumbprints from the letter inside. One would have been his, the second his publisher’s, but the third? I asked him whether it could have been a secretary, but he said no, that the Czechs had a very small office, with part-time helpers, and they did their own mail.’
‘Hold on,’ McIlhenney exclaimed. ‘This guy lived in Edinburgh. If he was under surveillance . . . Dottie Shannon and Tarvil Singh might keep an eye on him, but it wouldn’t extend to opening his mail.’
Martin held up a hand. ‘I’ll get there, Neil. That letter was a month old when Ainsley gave it to me. Since then he’d been having all his mail examined in the same way, and half of it appeared to have been opened, everything but the junk and the official mail.’
‘What did he want you to do about it?’
‘He didn’t ask me to do anything about it. He just gave me an envelope; he said it contained a list of names, and he wanted me to keep a copy, in case anything ever happened to him. I’ve got it in the safe in my office.’
‘But did you look into the surveillance? Did you speak to our people, or to Bob?’
‘That’s what I should have done,’ the DCC admitted, ‘but I didn’t. Instead I decided to keep it in the family; I looked into it myself. I
spent a couple of nights watching Ainsley’s place, but from a distance; it didn’t take me long to spot them, and to know that they weren’t from any Special Branch units I know. They were using at least three vehicles. I took the numbers, ran the plates, and guess what? All of them were phoney; they all went back to cars that had been written off in insurance claims. That’s when I started to take my distant cousin’s predicament more seriously.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Pye muttered. He was visibly shaken. ‘They were operating on our patch, behind our backs?’
‘Yes. Now you’re going to ask me again whether I alerted anybody at Fettes at that point, and the answer’s still no. The next thing I did was lean on an old source in BT. After a bit of heavy persuasion, he did some digging and told me that there was a tap on Ainsley’s phone, but that nobody was saying who had authorised it. There was only one place to go after that. I have my own contacts within the security services, from my time there and from my present position. I used them. I went to a section head I know, only two levels below Amanda Dennis, told him what I had and said that, one, the guy was a relation, two, he was on to them, and three, he was high-profile. He called me back within an hour and swore to me, as one officer to another, that it had nothing to do with them, or MI6 either.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘Yes, I did, and for sure once I had a call from Amanda Dennis herself a bit later on, confirming what I’d been told.’
‘And you reckon now that they were lying?’
‘Maybe, but not necessarily. At the time, I started looking in another direction. I was beginning to think that maybe there was something criminal going on. I was at the stage where I was going to talk to Bob, but before I got there, I decided to have another go at my BT source. So I went to see him and I told him that I wanted to know who had set up that phone tap and no fucking messing. I gave him two days to get back to me or he was getting burned.’
‘And did he?’
‘No, but somebody else did. Turned up in my bloody office, he did, and told my secretary that no, he didn’t have an appointment but he had come from London on a matter of shared interest, and he hoped that I would have the time to meet him. He introduced himself as Mr Coben, but if that’s his real name, then I’m Dorothy L. Sayers. He didn’t mess about. He told me very politely that he was from the intelligence community, and that I was stepping on something outside my remit. He said that, yes, Ainsley Glover was on their watch list, and that he would remain so. With Scotland entering a phase of, as he put it, electoral instability, there was great concern internationally about the security of the deterrent. If he had simply been one of those protesters he detested, like Anderson, they wouldn’t have been so worried about him, but it was his links to other countries, through his work, that had marked him out, and that the situation was being monitored internationally. So would I please back off and let them do their job. At that moment in time, Coben said - and do his words come back to haunt me now - he wasn’t in any jeopardy. On the other hand, I had a career, a wife and child to think about, and I would do well to keep all three in mind.’
‘Jesus, Andy,’ McIlhenney gasped. ‘How did you react to that?’
‘In my mind, I picked him out of his chair and stuck the head on him. I was so steaming mad inside I almost did that very thing, but in the end I kept it to telling him to get the fuck out of my office. All he did was smile, tell me, “Take my message to heart, sir,” and walk out.’
‘And did you? Take his message to heart?’
Martin nodded. ‘Oh yes, I did. What else was I to do? If it had just been the spooks, I’d probably have taken it to ACPOS, but the military, they’re not subject to the normal rules. So I told Ainsley that there had been a pilferer on the Royal Mail and that they’d been dealt with, guessing that the watchers would be more careful with his letters in future.’ He sighed. ‘And that was that,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought much about it since then; not till this morning.’
The superintendent leaned back in his chair. ‘And what about us? You’re suggesting that someone on our own side, national team, that is, might have had Glover killed. What are we supposed to do about that? How are we supposed to investigate it?’
‘I wish I could tell you.’
‘Never mind us, are you going to tell the boss now? Are we? Jesus, is there any question? Now that you’ve told us this story, we have to pass it on to him, even if you don’t.’
The Tayside deputy chief constable ran his thick fingers through his hair. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said, ‘and I have a problem with it, a big one at that. It’s why I’ve said nothing about this to anyone, until now. If you or I do tell him, what’s he going to do? Keep it to himself, or tell Aileen? He may feel that he has to. If he does that . . . I know her, and she won’t sit still for it. Lads, these people operate on a need-to-know basis. I don’t believe for a minute that Ainsley’s surveillance was signed off by ministers. But Aileen’s a minister, First Minister at that, and although defence isn’t in her remit, Scotland as a whole is. Even if Coben’s team had nothing to do with the murder, she will go straight to Downing Street, and the consequences . . . they could be unthinkable.’
Twenty-one
‘Come in, Sergeant,’ said Carol Glover, ‘but forgive me for hoping this will be your last visit.’ She stepped aside to let Ray Wilding and DC Alice Cowan pass into the hall of her first-floor tenement flat. She had changed, from the T-shirt and jeans she had worn at their earlier meetings, into a black blouse and a dark grey skirt.
‘I quite understand that,’ the DS assured her. ‘I wish I could guarantee that it will, but in the new circumstances—’
‘New circumstances?’ she exclaimed.
‘You haven’t been listening to the radio or had any calls from the media?’
‘No, I haven’t, and my number’s ex-directory, so it’ll take them a while to trace me. Are you telling me that my father’s death wasn’t caused by a heart attack? Did he overdose on insulin? Is that why you wanted those ampoules earlier?’
‘Can we sit down and talk about this?’
‘Of course, sorry; go on through into the living room.’
They preceded her, and as they entered they saw two young men standing in front of the hearth. One was short, dark and chubby, the other taller, slim, square-shouldered and fair-haired. Their only common feature was a day-old stubble. The smaller of the two was red-eyed; his companion was pale, and frowned as he approached the detectives.
‘I’m Ed Collins,’ he told them, ‘Carol’s fiancé. This is her brother, Wilkie.’
Wilding introduced himself, and Cowan. ‘I’m sorry about your loss,’ he said awkwardly. He had never been confident when dealing with the bereaved, always afraid to go beyond the most basic courtesies.
‘It’s unreal,’ Wilkie Glover muttered, looking at Cowan, younger, closer to him in age, rather than the sergeant, as if he hoped to find more comfort in her. ‘I saw my dad yesterday morning, and he was fine. Some bloody doctor I’m going to make if I couldn’t see the signs.’
‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ the DC told him. ‘There was nothing you could have noticed.’
‘Things seem to have moved on,’ his sister explained as she offered the visitors places on a low white sofa, then moved beside her brother to face them, both still standing.
‘Listen,’ Collins volunteered, ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’ll go and get us a takeaway for lunch. A couple of pizzas maybe. What do you fancy?’
‘No,’ Carol insisted. ‘I want you here.’ He shrugged, and took a seat at a table by the window. She looked down at Wilding. ‘So tell us. What happened to my dad?’
‘When I came to collect your father’s insulin supplies,’ he began, ‘I told you that there were some more tests we needed to run. They’re now more or less complete. A short time ago we announced that his death is now the subject of a full-scale investigation. Mr Glover was killed by fatally high levels of glucose in his
bloodstream—’
‘Hold on,’ Wilkie interrupted. ‘I’ve just been studying that area. Like I said, I saw him yesterday and he was showing no signs of hyperglycaemia.’
‘He wouldn’t have been,’ Wilding replied quietly. ‘He was drugged, immobilised and then injected with massive quantities of the stuff.’
As both siblings stared down at him, he saw their faces go from pale to chalk-white. He rose from the couch. ‘I think it’s you two who need the seat,’ he said.
Carol looked towards her fiancé. ‘Ed,’ she gasped, ‘did you hear that?’
‘I sure did.’ He moved towards her, and put his arms around her, then eased her on to the space that the DS had vacated.
‘We came to take a statement from you, Miss Glover, and we’ll need one from your brother since he’s here. They’re not formal, but even so, the book says they should be done separately, I’m afraid. Do you have another room where we could interview you?’
‘There’s the kitchen.’
‘You don’t need to do that,’ Collins declared, looking at the officers. ‘Wilkie and I will go and get those pizzas, OK?’
‘Fair enough,’ the sergeant agreed.
‘How long should we be gone?’
‘Fifteen minutes will do fine.’
‘It’ll take us that long anyway.’ He nodded to Wilkie and headed for the door.
‘What do you want to ask me?’ said Carol as it closed. ‘I can’t think of anything that I can tell you that would help.’
‘Let’s take it in stages,’ Alice Cowan murmured. ‘Let’s begin with the last time you saw your dad.’
‘Yesterday morning, like my brother; we were all here. The flat Wilkie’s in just now is pretty crappy, so he’s here quite a lot. I’ve told him he can have my spare room, but he says it would cramp my style . . . although I think he really means Ed’s.’
‘You’re a close family, would you say?’
19 - Fatal Last Words Page 10