‘That’s your job, I think.’
‘Who killed him?’
He almost told her, but he bit it back. ‘He was killed in a fire-fight,’ was all he said.
‘I see. What happened to his body?’
‘Nothing yet; it’s still in a mortuary.’
‘Can we have him back, back here where he’s from, so we can look after him?’
‘I’ll arrange that.’
‘If it’s all so secret will you be able to?’
‘I know people who can. We’ll give you what they call a legend, a story to explain his death, a car crash in Australia, something like that. You’ll have to bury him as Moses Archer.’
She looked at him and smiled. ‘What else would I do, Bob? I never knew Adam Arrow, only my lovely little brother.’
Fifty-five
As McIlhenney drove inside the cordon that had been set up around the building, a plastic coffin was being slid into a dark blue mortuary wagon. The scene had been played out before in the Wild West; it never failed to draw a crowd. The superintendent looked around as he stepped out of his car, seeking out familiar faces, and seeing a few, older and more leathery, but probably no wiser for all the time that had passed since he and McGuire, in their uniform days, had forged their reputation as hard men by cracking their heads together.
‘Gary Starr’s board man?’ he asked Wilding, as he came towards him from the stairway door.
‘Yes, killed with a single shot to the head. There’s no exit wound, so Arthur Dorward reckons it was probably a hollow-point bullet.’
‘Initial thoughts?’
‘He knew his killer, and didn’t suspect him. There’s not much of a lock, but there’s a spy-hole in the door and a chain and a bolt on the inside. In this place, if you’ve got those you use them, so I reckon that Ming let the guy in.’
‘Neighbours?’
‘I’ve interviewed everybody on the stair, including the local cannabis supplier. Wise monkeys, the lot of them; saw nothing, heard nothing, couldn’t tell me anything.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘I did, with PC Drake. We came to pick him up. He called me this morning to tell me he could identify the bloke with the missing finger.’
‘Christ,’ McIlhenney exclaimed. ‘I wonder if he told anyone else?’
‘That’s been on my mind too, sir. Could the guy have found out somehow?’
‘Did he tell you anything about him when he called?’
‘He said that he’s involved in the management of a club. He was going to take me there.’ Wilding paused. ‘Sir,’ he asked, unable to hold back the question any longer, ‘why are you here and not DCI Mackenzie?’
‘Bandit’s on holiday; he’s taking ten days off.’ The sergeant looked at the ground. ‘He’s on holiday, Ray,’ McIlhenney repeated. ‘It was booked in before he was transferred. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir, I understand.’
‘Let’s go down to Queen Charlotte Street: I want to review where we are in this whole business.’
‘Are you setting up the mobile HQ?’
‘Here? We’d need to put a guard on it. We won’t get anything out of this place other than any forensic traces that Arthur’s lot turn up. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.’
Fifty-six
When Skinner and Shannon returned from Bakewell a note was waiting on the DCC’s desk. ‘Come and see me: AD.’
Dennis was behind her desk when they answered her summons. ‘How did you get on?’ she asked.
‘As well as can be expected,’ Skinner replied. ‘Moses told her he was a copper, but Esther had no idea what he really did. His continuing existence seems to have been kept within the family; apart from her, all the rest of them thought he was a civil servant.’
‘We’re not going to have a media problem, are we?’
‘I don’t see it, not if they get his body back for burial.’
‘We can’t authorise that, Bob: that’s a Ministry of Defence decision.’
‘Amanda, I don’t care whose decision it is. It’s got to happen, and that’s an end of it. We’ll need a cover story as well, to explain his death. If you’re sensitive about it, leave it with me and I’ll make arrangements.’
‘If you think you can,’ she said, ‘but you may not find it as easy as you think. Those MoD people can get hung up on secrecy.’
‘Eventually we all take orders.’ As if to make his point, he continued, ‘Now, what have you got for me on Ormond Hassett MP?’
‘Him?’ She frowned up at him. ‘He’s not the bumbling grain merchant that we thought. He graduated from Cambridge forty-one years ago, and won a rugby blue in the process. From there he joined the army, Royal Green Jackets; he did two tours in Ireland, then served in Germany for five years but there’s no record of what he was doing. That probably means he was watching the Russians.
‘Aged thirty-one, he was given a posting to the Washington Embassy as military attaché and spent two years there. That was followed by a year in Whitehall, before he resigned his commission and went into the family business. He didn’t stay there long, though: he was elected to Parliament in the Conservative victory of 1979. He had a three-year spell as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of State for Defence. Towards the end of his stint he wound up back in Washington, as the leader of a back-bench group lobbying American support for the Falklands war. There’s a curious coincidence here, although probably no more than that: the adjutant to that party was Major Joshua Archer, second battalion, the Parachute Regiment.’
‘Coincidence is a far rarer occurrence than people think,’ Skinner retorted.
‘Maybe; but there could have been little future contact between them, since Archer was killed a few weeks later.’
‘Did they know each other before?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out. If I compare their service records, it might tell me something.’
‘What happened to Hassett after the Falklands?’
‘He resigned as PPS after the 1983 election because he wasn’t given a ministerial appointment. There was some curiosity about that: received wisdom among the parliamentary lobby correspondents was that the Prime Minister of the day thought that he was too right wing.’
‘Jesus, that’s quite a statement.’
‘Indeed! It didn’t stop him getting on to the Defence Select Committee, though, or later from becoming one of the first members of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He sat on that until 1997. After that he seems to have confined himself to agricultural matters, until finally the most recent leader of Her Majesty’s opposition gave him a job as a shadow spokesman.’
Skinner smiled. ‘What the hell do they think we are? Hicks from the sticks, it seems. Did that man Frame really expect us to believe that a man like that wouldn’t know his son was a spook? And what about the question beyond that: if he knew that, did he know what he was up to? Amanda,’ he asked, ‘is there any way you can access Piers Frame’s service record? I’d like to see whether he’s crossed Hassett’s path before.’
‘Only the Director General of Six could authorise that, Bob.’
‘Then maybe we’ll have to ask him.’
Fifty-seven
‘I know about the drugs find, Ray,’ said Neil McIlhenney, seated in the chief inspector’s room in the Leith police office. The sergeant’s face reddened. ‘It’s all right, I’m not coming after you for it: I know you better than that. DCI Mackenzie put his foot in it, but that knowledge goes no further than you, me and Mario. The SDEA want his head on a pole, but they’re not having it; they’re not even getting his name.’
‘What about the chief, or the DCC, if they go to either of them?’
‘The chief knows: he’ll tell them where to go if necessary. The DCC’s frying other fish just now.’
‘So what happened in Pamplona?’
‘The local police went crashing into the middle of a Guardia Civil stake-out; they were working with the SDEA, following up a lead that came out of Dundee six months ago. They’d been watching the place all that time. They even had photographs of your man Ming dropping off the A Class, but they didn’t know who he was.’