Roshan had turned the male cadaver so that it was lying on its back. I walked around and examined it, then told him what I saw. ‘These are head shots, but the same; a cluster of three, middle of the forehead. No wonder the back of the skull’s missing. You’ll find that at the murder scene.’
‘Wherever the hell that is,’ Montell replied, gloomily.
‘Let’s see if we can help. First step, identify the bodies; bar codes on clothing can help you do that. Roshan, will you take his off, please.’
I stood back and watched as he did what I’d asked. It was easy, since most of each garment had been destroyed; that which was left, simply peeled off, revealing mottled, discoloured, part-roasted flesh. He left the dead man’s feet untouched; they’d have come off if he’d tried to remove his shoes, since they were welded to the flesh. When he was finished, he picked up the remnants of what had been the victim’s trousers. ‘There is something in these, Sarah, in a pocket.’
‘Let’s see what it is.’
He found a pair of scissors and cut through cloth. A slim wallet, black leather, fell into his hands. He passed it to me. I opened it, and smiled.
‘You see, Griff?’ I laughed. ‘You never know your luck. What we have here is a photographic driving licence, intact.’ I took it from its slot in the wallet. ‘I can’t match the face to the one on the table, not without a very expensive reconstruction, but I don’t imagine that he’d be carrying anyone else’s.’ I read the name on the plastic, aloud.
I glanced up at the viewing gallery. ‘Did you hear. .?’ I began, then stopped, when I saw that Montell was staring at me as if I’d just told him that the guy on the table, whoever the hell he might have been, had started breathing again.
Clyde Houseman, senior regional field officer, MI5
I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into Mr Skinner’s house. For all of fifteen years, I’d been carrying a mental picture of the man around in my head, a guy who must have been, when we met, not very far beyond the age I’ve reached now, a man brimming with self-confidence and with body language that tended to downplay rather than assert how dangerous he was.
By that time, my street gang had rolled a few guys who thought they were tough and found out they weren’t, but he was something else. When I tried my hard man act with him, he gave me a look that made my testicles try to retract into my body. What he also did was engage a self-awareness that had never been there before. In that moment, although I didn’t realise it or articulate it until some time later, he made me see what I was and what I would become unless I did something radical about my life.
I’d always known I was intelligent, but all my life I’d been conditioned to be embarrassed by the fact. When he gave me that card, he threw that into reverse; he made me embarrassed by what I was.
When I say I didn’t know what to expect at our second meeting, I mean two things. First, I didn’t know whether he would remember me. He didn’t, not until I gave him the card. In a way that pleased me, in that it showed me, if I still needed it, how far I’ve come, and how much I’ve changed from that schemie thug. Second, I didn’t know what he might have become, whether he was still the guy who’d made that impact or whether he’d been softened and diminished by age.
He didn’t look soft, that’s for sure. The guy is fifty plus but physically he still looks harder than me. That day he was wearing shorts, a sleeveless linen shirt and thong-style sandals; his skin was brown and shining and his muscles were sharply defined. There was sand in his hair and clinging to his clothing; it made me think of Afghanistan, and of him as a marine from Hell.
And yet he was different; there was an edginess that wasn’t part of my vision of the man. Maybe it was there before and I’d been too young to recognise it, but I didn’t think so. The thirty-something Skinner had been encased in an aura of absolute certainty. The older version seemed to have lost that; I looked at him and I saw a man with problems that he wasn’t sure he could solve.
I’d come expecting to be asked for my life story, and I was happy to lay it out for him. I owed that to him, that and more. The deputy director had told me his security clearance was higher than mine, so I had no problem telling him about my present employment, or about her view of our colleagues in Strathclyde. She had told me I should never be less than frank with him.
He didn’t bat an eyelid through any of it, not even when I described my SBS missions in Afghanistan. He asked me very few questions and none of them were personal. He didn’t want to know about the family I’d left behind, not that there was much of it left, only my mother. I didn’t think of her at all when I was in the Marines, and I listed no next of kin. I’d said no goodbyes when I left. When I joined Five I waited a few months then ran a check on her, with my line manager’s tacit approval. She’s still in Edinburgh, still drawing benefit, still pulling down convictions for nicking from supermarkets. It seems that she only ever steals food and drink, never clothes. My father never made it out of Peterhead; a friend of the taxi driver he murdered was sent up there and took full revenge by caving his head in with a dumbbell one day in the prison gym. Nobody saw a thing apart from one warder, and it takes two witnesses to convict.
Once my personal history was behind us we got down to business.
‘So, Clyde,’ he asked, when the time came, ‘why are you so keen to talk to me today, other than to give me back that card?’
I tried not to sound too eager, or too pleased with myself. ‘The image you sent to Amanda last night,’ I replied, ‘the body that was buried for you to find, we know who he was.’
He smiled. ‘I thought you might,’ he murmured. ‘What was he? Mossad?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, he was a paratrooper first, then Israeli secret service. Not any more, though. He was kicked out.’
‘That must be damn near a first for Mossad. What was he caught doing that was bad enough to get him the sack?’
I smiled at his sharpness. ‘Using a fake German passport on the assassination of a Hamas official. The German government kicked up such a fuss that he had to be cut loose. His name is Beram Cohen, but he’s used a few others.’
‘Let me guess,’ Skinner said. ‘He went freelance.’
‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘His name’s come up in connection with a couple of operations. It didn’t make the press, but last year around two dozen Somali pirates were taken out, in groups of two and three. It put quite a dent in their activities and made those waters a lot safer for a while. The operation was funded by the American State Department and Beram Cohen planned it. That’s what he did; he was a facilitator. He used mercenaries, mainly Russians, but a couple of South Africans as well, all of then skilled, all ex-regulars, like him.’
‘The sort of people who wouldn’t leave a fallen comrade behind?’
‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘Like the two men you told the DD about, his companions in the restaurant.’
‘The guys he ate with just before he died.’
‘Yes. The prints you sent to us meant nothing, but I’m interested in what the restaurant owner said about them speaking in a language he couldn’t identify. My guess is that if it had been a European language, Russian for example, he’d have been able to take a guess at that.’
‘In Glasgow he might have assumed it was Polish.’
‘True. The fact that he hadn’t a clue makes me wonder if it those men might have been the South Africans he used on the Somali job.’
‘Do you have names for them?’ Skinner asked.
‘Francois Smit and Gerry Botha,’ I told him. ‘Smit’s a sniper, Botha just a general killer. They’re old school. They go back to the apartheid days, but there are no files on them, because they made sure that they were destroyed before the regime changed. We only know about them because the Americans wanted a list of the people Cohen was using on the op, to make sure they were all acceptable, and so that anyone who talked could be silenced.’