‘You can’t do that,’ he sneered. ‘This is Scotland.’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I countered. ‘This is the cellar of a police officer you’ve just murdered in the course of an act of terrorism. No rules apply here, and I’m an agent of the state. I can make you disappear. It will be the easiest thing in the world for a third cremated body to be recovered from your van.’
In such situations, there is only one imperative; you must make them believe you. I was getting there with Freddy Welsh, but I could still see scepticism in his eyes. So I shot him.
The bullet creased the back of his right hand, ricocheted off the floor and buried itself in the plastered wall. He screamed, from pain and fright, and crawled backwards, away from me, as I raised the rifle again and aimed at his knee.
‘Enough!’ he yelled. ‘I’ll talk to him.’ He paused. ‘If I do, what’s in it for me?’
‘I won’t kill you. That’s all that’s in it.’ I kicked one of the tea chests. ‘As for your arsenal here, what happens about that depends on the man outside. So my advice to you is, hold nothing back.’ I stepped across and opened the door.
Mr Skinner came back into the room. ‘I can leave again,’ he promised, ‘just as easily.’ Welsh nodded; he believed. ‘So tell me about it.’
‘Bass had no idea,’ the arms dealer began; he had pulled himself up to a sitting position, leaning against the wall. ‘As far as he was concerned, he was only going for the cigarettes.’
‘Why did you set it up that way?’
‘I didn’t. My Spanish suppliers did. It was part of the deal. These people, they’ll fence anything. They can source me specific weapons, usually stolen from the police or military, maybe even bought from them, for all I know. But it’s knock for knock, and sometimes they want me to take other stuff off their hands. Handy in a way; you were right about Kenny; he’d never have gone just for the guns.’
‘Guns plural?’
‘Yes.’
‘This place,’ Mr Skinner said. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘I built it for Jock, for free. The deal was that I got the use of this room.’
‘Did he know what it was for?’
Welsh stared at him. ‘Of course he bloody knew. Having built the fucking room, I had to rent it off him as well. The money went into a offshore bank account in Ella’s name.’
‘Did she know about it?’
He shrugged. ‘She must have known something went on here. How much Jock told her, I’ve no idea.’
‘That doesn’t matter now they’re both cinders,’ the chief constable said, roughly. ‘Go on, tell us about the operation.’
‘I was approached about five weeks ago,’ Welsh replied, ‘by an Israeli bloke called Beram Cohen. I knew him. I’d supplied him before with guaranteed clean handguns. Somebody was paying him to take out radicalised Muslims.’
I laughed. Welsh glared at me. ‘What’s so fucking funny?’ he snapped.
‘You are,’ I told him. ‘You supplied weapons to a guy like him, in his world, and yet until five minutes ago, you didn’t realise that makes you part of it yourself, as disposable as he was. If I was ordered to kill you, you’d go into a crematorium oven at night and nobody would be any the wiser.’
‘That’s what they should have done with Beram,’ he muttered.
‘Yes, what about that?’ the chief asked. ‘Tell me.’
‘I’d arranged for Beram to meet me in Edinburgh last Wednesday,’ he replied, ‘at my yard, not here. He was going to pay me for the weapons.’
‘What did they buy from you?’
‘One of the carbines that Bass brought from Spain,’ he explained. ‘The other two were handguns from my stock. Anyway, they turned up, the three of them. I wasn’t expecting Smit and Botha, but Beram said he’d brought them to drive because he had this bloody awful headache. He had the money in a backpack. He handed it over, and a minute later, he died. Just like that. He stiffened, then he fell over; he kicked a bit, then he was dead. His mates tried to resuscitate him, but it was no use.’
He frowned, as if he was seeing it all over again. ‘The three of us, we were all shocked, but those South Africans, they were,’ he struggled for words, ‘they were just beside themselves. Once we were all back in control, I offered them the money back, but they said no, that they had a commission and that they would go ahead. Beram wasn’t involved in the actual hit; he did the planning and took care of the escape.
‘I told them they’d need to get rid of the body. I suggested putting it in my truck, driving it out past North Berwick and tipping it into the sea. They went crazy at that; I thought they were going to kill me. They said that he was a fallen comrade and all that guff, and that he had to be treated with respect, not just stuck in a hole and forgotten about.
‘I said fair enough but I had nowhere to keep him. We could hardly take him to hospital, and they wouldn’t leave him somewhere and call the ambulance service. It was Botha who came up with the idea of doing what they did with him, burying him and then calling your lot. As it happened, I’d bought some bed linen for the house that day. I gave them a sheet to wrap him in; they stripped him and left me his clothes to burn, so they couldn’t be used to trace him. They said they didn’t want him identified for a couple of days. Smit asked me where they should take him. Given that he was dead, Mortonhall sounded like as good a place as any to me, so I suggested that.’
‘So it had nothing to do with setting a false trail for the police,’ Mr Skinner asked, ‘given that the operation’s in Glasgow?’
‘Is it?’ Welsh asked. ‘That’s news to me. I never want to know any detail about things like that. Anyway, no, it had nothing to do with that.’
‘So they went away,’ he continued, ‘and last night they came back here, to collect the gun. Is that what happened?’
He nodded. ‘Aye. And when I brought them round here, at one in the morning, who was standing upstairs, looking out the window but bloody Jock.’ He sighed.
‘You see, the arrangement was that every time I brought a client here to collect an order, Jock would always take Ella off somewhere for the night. He didn’t last night, though. There he was, as large as life, but not for much longer. He saw both the South Africans, and they saw him. They wanted to know who he was, and I had to tell them. I’d hoped they’d be okay about it, but when I gave them the weapon, the imported one, Botha took it. . he’s an animal, by the way. . and said he was going to test-fire it.’
Welsh looked away. ‘I knew what he was going to do,’ he muttered, ‘but all I could think about was that he was going to kill me as well. I heard three shots from upstairs, inside the house, then just after, three more. I’d brought my van with me, not the car. I guess you know by now what they made me help them do. When it was finished, they dropped me back at my yard. I stayed there all night, thinking, and most of today. Eventually it dawned on me that you’d be bound to identify Jock eventually, and that I had to clear this place out or I’d be in it up to my nuts. Enter you two,’ he took a deep breath, ‘and that’s the whole story.’
‘Not quite,’ the chief said. ‘What were the weapons?’
‘A Heckler and Koch MP3 carbine and two Glock pistols. There were six H and Ks in the box that Kenny Bass brought back from Valencia.’ He nodded towards the open box. ‘The other five are still there.’
Mr Skinner’s eyes widened. ‘Cohen ordered them specifically, by name?’
Welsh nodded.
‘Is that significant?’ I asked.
‘Too damn right,’ he retorted. ‘They’re police weapons.’ He glared at Welsh. ‘Lucky for you that I sent Maggie through there.’
‘What are you talking about?’ the man on the floor muttered.
‘I’ve sent my deputy to the concert hall with a warrant for the arrest of the target, on a made-up charge that only needs to hold for an hour or so. He’ll be halfway to Edinburgh by now.’
‘He?’ Welsh repeated. ‘When Smit picked up the carbine, he said, “This baby will take her out, no question.” I don’t know who you’ve picked up, but believe me. . the target’s a woman.’