‘In that case, don’t go crossing the street on your own,’ Amanda told him. ‘At the best of times, you’re the most accident-prone man I’ve ever known.’
‘Maybe Fred isn’t next in line,’ June Connelly murmured. ‘Maybe this person was only after Ainsley and Henry.’
‘But why?’ Wilding asked. ‘As I understand it, of the three of them, Mr Noble’s the biggest seller. If you’re going to start knocking off Edinburgh crime writers, surely he’d be at the top of the list.’
‘Or maybe it’s one of my readers,’ the dark figure brooded as he nursed his whisky in the depths of his armchair, ‘thinking that he’s doing me a favour by taking out the opposition.’
‘Or maybe it’s you yourself, Fred,’ said the woman opposite, mischievously. ‘That’s the question these gentlemen are being too delicate to ask.’ She glanced at them. ‘Isn’t it?’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘When Mr Glover was murdered, Mr Noble was appearing live on the BBC2 Edinburgh Festival review programme. Even at that time of night, I reckon he has a few witnesses to his alibi.’
‘Then perhaps it has to do with the project,’ Connelly persisted, her voice thick. Wilding found himself wondering how big a share of the bottle of malt she had consumed.
‘Hey, that’s a point,’ Noble agreed.
The DI looked at them surprised. ‘What project?’
‘Ainsley and Henry had a joint thing going,’ the agent told him. ‘I have no idea what it was, only that it was contemporary, non-fiction. I asked Ainsley what it was about, more than once, but he’d only smile and mutter, “Due course, due course,” in his most infuriating tone.’
‘But just the two of them?’
‘They approached me,’ Noble confessed. ‘In January, I think it was. They said that there was something they wanted to do together and that it would involve a lot of investigation. They felt that it wouldn’t be right not to offer me the chance to join them. . Henry did say they reckoned they’d need a third person anyway. . but I said to them that I was going to be way too busy this year to think about taking on anything else.’
‘Did they tell you what it was about?’
‘I wouldn’t let them. I told them that if I didn’t know, there was no chance of me getting too comfy at a writers’ festival somewhere and blabbing about it.’ He looked at Pye. ‘So what do you reckon? Am I off the hook?’
‘It’s a line of inquiry,’ the young inspector conceded, ‘and we’ll follow it up; but off the hook? No. Those officers will still be at your door, front and back, until this investigation is over.’
Sixty-three
‘Bob,’ said Piers Frame, ‘I’ve told you. Military intelligence deny all knowledge of this man Coben.’
‘I’m sure they do, and I’m inclined to believe them, for once in my life. But he exists, Piers. Andy Martin’s not an excitable type, and he never makes a mistake over a name. If he says that’s what the guy called himself, you can bank on it.’
‘But he’s irrelevant now, isn’t he? The man Glover is sadly no longer with us, and therefore this Coben will have no interest in Martin.’
‘Unless he really didn’t take to being offered the window exit from his office, and decided that he’d exact some form of retribution. Or unless he decided simply to discredit him, as a precaution.’
‘Are you saying he has done?’
‘I’m saying that somebody has. It involves Martin, it involves my older daughter and I’ve been stuck right in the middle of it.’ He described the sending of the graphic and compromising photographs to the media, and their disruption of his press briefing.
‘I see,’ Frame murmured. ‘Yes, I can understand now why you’re following this line. However,’ he drawled, ‘hasn’t your interest in the fellow, and your pursuit of him, turned into a personal vendetta, old chap?’
‘Certainly,’ Skinner agreed. ‘I’m looking forward to spending a few minutes with the man in an interview room. But there is an overiding professional need to find him. The MoD spooks were watching Glover, in a routine way. This man goes to see Martin to warn him off, goes to the length of threatening his family, and yet you tell me he’s not a spook himself. If that’s so, it suggests to me that he was involved with Glover in another context, and puts him right at the top of the list in terms of murder suspects. Now, with the second death, if I can connect Henry Mount to Coben-’
‘Mount? Yes, I saw a note about that in a Foreign Office bulletin this morning. Are you telling me you can link a murder in Edinburgh with a suspected shooting in Melbourne?’
‘We have done. We know how he was killed, and if I’m right about this Coben, we probably know who did it.’
‘So what do you want from me?’
‘I want you to trawl through the entire intelligence community until you find something that connects with this man, or with the name. I want you to look under every one of the stones where these people hide, and get me a lead to him.’
Frame sighed. ‘All right, Bob, I’ll do that for you. If I refused you’d probably go over my head anyway, and get what you want. However, it does seem to me that if this person is behind your two killings, then he’s exposed himself rather recklessly with this stunt involving your daughter.’
‘You can say that again, Piers, because by doing that he’s got my keen personal attention. He may think that I’ll be flying a desk for the rest of my career, and that I’m no longer a threat. If he does, he’s got it wrong. . and if he looks at my record, he’ll find that when it comes to getting my man, even the fucking Mounties have nothing on me.’
Sixty-four
‘I didn’t go too far, did I, boss,’ Pye asked, ‘offering Fred Noble round-the-clock protection? When I told him I was authorised to offer it, I knew I might be stretching it a bit.’
‘As far as I’m concerned, Sammy,’ Neil McIlhenney replied, smiling across his desk, ‘that warrant card in your pocket gives you all the authority you need. It was a matter for your judgement and it was the right call. His wife was bound to have asked for it anyway, and we couldn’t have refused. How’s Noble taking it?’
‘I don’t think that his own situation’s really dawned on him yet. He’s lost two good friends; that’s all he’s thinking about. When we left, he and Glover’s agent-cum-ladyfriend were looking at the bottom of two whisky glasses and thinking about changing the view. Mrs Noble’s a diamond, though; she’ll keep them on line.’
‘What if he decides to go to the off-licence to restock; or, worse, what if he decides to go to the Oxford, where these writers seem to hang out?’
‘Then his protection officers will insist on going with him, in full uniform. It won’t come to that, though. His wife won’t let him over the door.’
‘What about this project you mentioned? Neither he nor Connelly had a clue about it, you say?’
‘No. I pressed them, but Noble was adamant that neither of the dead men had dropped a clue. Connelly said that she’d only really have been interested when they had something ready to sell. She also said that the buggers were so carried away with the thing that they’d never considered who was going to sell it for them, as in which of their agents.’
‘Or if it would sell at all, I suppose.’
‘Oh no,’ said Pye firmly. ‘They’d considered that all right. Glover told Mrs Connelly that if it worked out, it would be the biggest thing that he and Mount had ever done in sales terms, and that it would make them both international names.’
‘Indeed,’ McIlhenney exclaimed. ‘It’s done that already, if it’s the reason why they’re fucking dead. What’s our next objective?’ he asked.
‘We have two, sir, haven’t we? We need to ask Mrs Mount what she knows about the project.’
‘Her son may be a better source, from what George Regan said; Mount seems to have kept secrets from his wife. . his continuing cigar habit, for one. Mario should be sound asleep right now, but tomorrow morning, his time, he’ll be looking to see what useful traces the late Henry might have left behind him. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear from him. What’s your second step?’