"Oh, don't be fucking silly," Skinner retorted. "I wouldn't have brought it up if I didn't know for certain. Before I came here, I spoke to a man called Angus dAbo, in Birnam. I showed him your photograph…" he tapped the envelope '… and he identified you right away as the man who came into his local with Michael a few days before he died. Mike got completely trousered and you carted him off.
Before I spoke to dAbo I faxed the same photo to Brother Aidan at Oak
Lodge. He clocked you too, old as he is. He identified you as the man my brother called Skipper, the man who took him away from his home and never brought him back." The DCC grinned; he was taking a deadly enjoyment from the account.
"Skipper was your nickname in the army, Mr. Candela," he said, then saw the man's eyes narrow. "Yes, I've got your service file in here too; I had it sent up to me by secure fax this morning. I've got Michael's as well, of course. They tell me that the two of you served together in Honduras; you were a company commander in the Scots Guards, and he was a lieutenant in the Sappers. When you went out on patrol, he and his guys would often go with you, in case something needed blowing up."
The policeman paused; a corner of his mouth flicked upwards, a strange gesture. When he spoke again there was a catch in his voice. "There was so much I never knew about my brother, Candela, because I never asked. I did as my father wanted and I left him to live out the rest of his life away from me; at first because I couldn't trust myself near him, then eventually because I didn't see the point of reminding him of the old hatred between us. Rodney Windows… in case you don't know him either, he's one of your partners in Candela and Finch… sent me reports on him every year, but that was all I ever knew about him.
"When I read his army file this morning, though, I found out a hell of a lot. For example, he was some sort of a fucking genius at demolition. You guys were on special ops down there, weren't you? He wasn't there just to clear fallen palm trees in the jungle. You were setting traps for the insurgents, booby-trapping their supply dumps, setting remote devices in their villages, all sorts of brutal stuff that never got reported anywhere. Mike was so good at it that for a while your CO and his turned a blind eye to his drinking. Until the fire-fight incident, that is."
Skinner held up the Jiffy bag and took a single step towards the other man. "It really is all in here, Candela; everything, including the answer to something that's always niggled me. When my father eventually told me about Michael's discharge from the army; he said that he was spared prosecution for manslaughter because of my dad's own military record. If he told me that, then that's what he believed, but as a policeman I always doubted it. And I was right. The two guys who were killed were shot by his weapon, all right, but there was no evidence of him actually firing it. More than that, some of his guys, the other Royal Engineer lads with the unit, testified that when you ambushed those rebels and the fire-fight happened he was so cross-eyed drunk that he couldn't have fired anything. They said that he wasn't even there; he was flat on his back at your camp in the jungle."
The policeman took another step towards Candela. "Then there's this; the two guys who were killed had duties with the quartermaster's unit.
There had been major stock discrepancies from that unit in the days leading up to the incident. You had orders to arrest those two guys and hold them for military police questioning as soon as you got back from that mission. And those orders were confidential; only you knew about them. No one could prove anything about you either, of course.
The engagement happened in the dark, and friendly fire incidents do happen. But still…"
He paused." So you resigned your commission, revived the law degree you'd put on ice, and went into the family firm, a year ahead of schedule. Mike resigned his too, and came back to Mother well to become a piss-artist, until finally he got out of control, I tried to batter his brains out, and he had to be put away.
"And you knew about that, of course. My father set up the trust that looked after him through your firm, rather than use his own. He did it for the sake of confidentiality, but it backfired on him. You found out, and naturally, you didn't forget."
He tossed the envelope on to a chair. "All information is useful, isn't it, Candela? It's my stock in trade; I take pieces of information and use them to build models; of events, scenes, crimes. My officers down in Edinburgh, and one in particular, has done a bloody good job on you over the last week. He worked out that the fire in the
Academy was a scam, and from there it was a short step to Tubau Gordon.
Once he got in there, and he looked at the circumstances of that fire, at where and when it was started, your name jumped out at him. When he was told about the thirty-million-pound loss that's been uncovered since, your motive, and your guilt, became self-evident."
Skinner smiled. "That's as far as he could go, though, poor lad; that's all the information he had, so the model he could build with it only shows how fucking clever you've been. Giving us the girl might have been risky, only it wasn't, because of the way you set her up.
It's funny, setting up Andrea was much the same as you did in the jungle… when you used someone else's weapon and left him to take the blame."
For a moment Candela relaxed, but only until Skinner took another step towards him. "Ah, but I've got more knowledge, though. I can build the model a bit higher. Looking at the timings involved, I know that when you realised that you had lost the biggest and most exciting gamble of your life, and that you were about to be exposed, arrested, disgraced and all that stuff, you thought of my poor brother. After all these years, maybe he'd prove useful again. So you checked that he was still in Oak Lodge, and you got in touch with him.
"I can almost hear the conversation, you know. At some point you established that Mike still had his skills… I knew that myself from something Aidan told me… and then you invited him to your place in the country. Once he was here, you told him what you wanted him to do."
Skinner sighed. "I hope he didn't agree just like that; I'd prefer to believe that he didn't. So how did you force him, I wonder? Did you really beat him with a hammer? Was it you who put those marks on his body, not some drunken fall? Or did you torture him by filling him full of drink and then depriving him of it, until he did what you wanted, and built you a device to trigger the fire in the painting, and another one for the computer, undetectable because everyone, even the experts, would think it was part of it?"
He saw Candela's eyes narrow, very slightly. "Yes, that was it, wasn't it." He nodded. "Know what I think Mike did? I reckon he made a device that would blow out the fuses of the computer and cause a big power surge that would start a massive electrical fire, then he showed you where to install it within the computer, and how to set it as a timer. The security records show that you went into Tubau Gordon on
Thursday evening, less than two days before the fire. I suppose you did it then. It worked, too; I've seen the reports. The heat was so intense that there was nothing identifiable left; a nuclear explosion couldn't have done more. Score one for Michael."
He stared at Candela; his pretence of amiability was gone. "So?" he hissed. "How did my brother die?"
"He had a heart attack," said the lawyer 'simple as that. We had dinner here, he got drunk as usual, and he fell down dead. Naturally, I didn't want him found here, so I gave him to the river, at the foot of the garden." He gave the policeman a look of pure contempt.
"And that's all I'm telling you."
"You don't have to tell me any more. I know everything now."
"And much good may it do you, Mr. Skinner. You still don't have a case you can take to court. There's no forensic evidence, Michael's dead, and you cannot prove, nor will you ever, that I was responsible for one penny of that loss."