‘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.’