The judge looked mystified, but made no comment. ‘You’ll have what you want,’ he promised.
‘Thanks.’ The chief constable handed him a card. ‘My secure fax number is on there.’
He was still smiling as he walked back to his car, and as he reached for his mobile. He dialled as he slid behind the wheel.
‘Leith CID,’ a voice answered.
‘Sauce? Chief Constable here. I need you to get hold of your Serbian translator. I have further need of her services.’
Eighty-three
He was waiting at the top of the stone staircase as his guests were shown up from the vestibule at street level. ‘Randy, Denzel,’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s good to see you. A bit of bad news, though,’ he continued as he shook hands with the Book Festival director and her partner. ‘Aileen’s been caught up in some unbreakable government business, last-minute stuff, some European crisis, and it happened too late to call you and postpone.’
‘Oh, what a disappointment,’ said Chandler.
‘I’ve found a substitute, though,’ said Skinner as he showed them into the drawing room, with its view of Charlotte Square Gardens, and the tents and pavilions that covered it. ‘My friend Neil was in the vicinity, so I’ve co-opted him to fill the empty chair. You’ve probably met him: Superintendent McIlhenney.’ The big detective stood at the window; he nodded as the newcomers entered. ‘You’re doubly honoured, you know,’ their host laughed. ‘Any other Thursday, this guy and I would be running around at North Berwick sports centre, kicking a football with a crowd of like-minded idiots.’
‘Really?’ Randall Mosley exclaimed. ‘When Aileen told me that, I thought she was joking.’
‘Hell, no! There is life after forty, I promise.’
‘Yes,’ the director agreed, ‘but you tire more easily.’
‘I thought you were still short of the milestone,’ McIlhenney remarked as he handed each guest a glass of cava.
‘I’ve got Denzel’s word for it,’ she replied lightly.
‘So,’ Skinner continued, ‘how’s the Bookfest going? Are you getting back to normal after Sunday morning’s unfortunate events?’
She frowned. ‘There is no normal at the Festival,’ she told him. ‘That’s the big discovery I’ve made in my first year in the job.’
‘First of many, everybody hopes; I hear things around town, you know, all of them good, in your case.’
‘We’ll see. It’s a hell of a job, that is for certain. Poor Ainsley; what happened to him was tragic, but it fits under the unwritten law, that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. On the same morning that he was found, my Nobel candidate, my prize attraction, cancelled on me. I had to fill that hole, as well as the one left by Ainsley’s death. Now Fred Noble’s uncertain about participating because with Henry Mount being killed, he fears he may be next.’
‘You can relax on that score. He won’t be.’
She looked at him, curiosity in her eyes. ‘You can say that for certain?’
‘Sure.’ Skinner leaned against the fireplace set in the westward wall of the classic Georgian room. ‘He’s under round-the-clock protection, and everything that goes into his house is inspected by our people. Nobody’s going to get to him, directly as with Mr Glover, or indirectly as with Henry Mount.’ He glanced at Chandler. ‘You know their work, Denzel?’ he asked, then answered. ‘What am I thinking of? Of course you do. Your other half runs the Festival, and we’re talking about two of the city’s most distinguished writers. . no, three, adding in Fred Noble.’ He paused. ‘But you’d know them anyway, without that; you’re a student of literature, aren’t you?’
The man nodded, his eyes a little disconcerted. ‘Actually no, it was post-war European history.’
Skinner winked at him. ‘Confession,’ he said. ‘Aileen makes me read up on our guests when we’re having dinner parties, but I was a bit busy before this one so I must have got mixed up. Mind you, I’m sure I’m right about your knowledge of contemporary crime fiction. It’s de rigeur these days to be up with that stuff.’
‘Yes,’ Chandler admitted. ‘I confess I am an aficionado.’ He glanced at his partner. ‘As you said, it comes with the territory.’
‘So you’ll appreciate the irony in the way those two men died. Killed in ways that were drawn from their own stories.’
‘No!’ the man exclaimed. ‘Was that what happened?’
‘Yup. It’s a secret from the media, of course, but I can share it with you and Randy. Glover was killed with glucose, and Henry Mount by a bullet, planted in one of his cigars.’
‘That’s right,’ McIlhenney chuckled. ‘Now, or so my people tell me, Fred Noble won’t set foot outside his front door, not even to the Oxford, just in case he’s been hypnotised and told to chuck himself under a lorry, or whatever.’
‘You get the irony, Denzel,’ said Skinner, ‘don’t you? Glover and Mount, each. .’ he hesitated as if searching for words. ‘Oh, damn it, what’s the phrase? Shakespeare.’
‘Hoist by his own petard,’ said Chandler.
‘That’s it. Macbeth.’
‘Hamlet, actually.’
‘OK. Wrong play, wrong royal, wrong country, but you get the point. It takes a certain type of mind to conceive of something like that, and then to follow it through.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ the man agreed. ‘In your career, you can’t have come across too many like this fellow.’
‘Too right,’ Skinner conceded. ‘Bastard nearly got away with it too.’ He let the words hang in the air for a second, then turned to Randall Mosley. ‘Before you came to Scotland, you two were in Europe, weren’t you?’ he asked, smiling.
She nodded, as if the exchange had passed her by. ‘Yes, that’s right, I worked for the European Commission, in the culture section, on the contemporary literature side. Denzel was living in Brussels at the time; we met at a reception.’
‘And found you had a common interest?’
She laughed. ‘In sex, mainly. I fancied him from the first.’
‘You mean it wasn’t his pen that won you over,’ McIlhenney murmured, sipping his cava.
‘Not at first.’ She looked at him, wickedly. ‘I admit it; it was his sword.’
‘They say the pen is mightier,’ Chandler drawled in his lightly transatlantic accent, ‘but when you put it to the test. .’
The two detectives exchanged the briefest of glances. ‘What was your field when you were in Brussels?’ Skinner asked him. ‘Randy told one of our colleagues that you’re a ghost writer. Is that what you did then?’
‘In a manner of speaking. I did a couple of biographies, one of Tito and one of Karadzic. Didn’t make any money, though. That’s why I took to ghosting; it pays very well.’
‘Will the Lord Elmore book be a money-spinner, do you think?’
Chandler seemed to lean away from him; taken aback, literally, by the question. ‘It won’t be huge, but even if it doesn’t earn out the advance I’ll be happy enough.’
‘How do you think it would have dovetailed with the one that Glover and Mount were working on?’
The writer looked at him, blankly. ‘Not at all. Why should it? They did fiction.’
‘But not exclusively, as it turns out. They were planning a factual work on the atrocities committed by a Serbian general, Bogdan Tadic, known as the Cleanser. You must have heard of him, surely. Lord Elmore was one of the judges at his trial.’
‘Yes, I’ve heard of him; that episode won’t be in the book, though. Lord Elmore’s bound by confidentiality. Even if he wasn’t, he fears for the safety of the witnesses.’
‘With some justification. I don’t think Ainsley and Henry did though; they were driven by Henry’s outrage over what had happened, and the fact that it was being covered up. Tell me,’ he asked, ‘how did you hear about Claus’s book?’
‘Initially, through me,’ Randall Mosley told him. ‘I met Lady Elmore in Brussels, just as her term as an MEP was ending. She was on a literature committee. To tell you the truth, she’s the reason I’m in my job. She’s on the Book Festival board, and she supported my application.’