‘I know about some of the successes that Toni had as a police officer and I’m aware that she may have upset some very nasty people in her time. Trust me, we will look at these, using outside agencies wherever we need to.’
‘Outside agencies?’
‘He means the British Security Service, Maman,’ Marina volunteered.
‘Not only them. The FBI, the American DEA; we’ll go anywhere we need to. But alongside that I need to know about any personal relationships your sister may have had. Unlikely as it may seem, did she ever have a romance that ended badly?’ He hesitated. ‘Did she have any personal weaknesses?’
‘Of course not!’ Sofia exclaimed.
‘I’m sure she didn’t,’ Skinner said, deflecting her sudden anger, although privately he counted naked ambition and ruthlessness towards colleagues as ranking fairly high on the weakness scale. ‘But the questions must be asked if we are to do our best for you in finding the person who had that done to her, what you saw yesterday. Marina, you understand that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do. I knew my sister well enough. Personal weaknesses? Was she a gambler, closet drinker? No, she was tight with her money and she didn’t touch a drop. She didn’t mortgage beyond her means either; she was shrewd with the property she bought. For example, she picked up this pile at the bottom of the market, after making a big profit from her house in Edgbaston.’
She stopped and looked at her mother. ‘Personal relationships?’ she repeated. ‘Maman, cover your ears if you like, but this is the truth. I don’t think Toni ever had a romance in her life, certainly not in the years that I’ve lived with her in Britain.
‘Relationships, yes; she’s had six of them. Make no mistake, she was robustly heterosexual. But none of them were about love; all of them were about her career. I’m not saying that she bedded her way to the top, but every lover that she had was a man of power or influence, one way or another.’
‘Might any of them have been the sort of man to take it badly when she pulled the plug on him?’ the chief asked.
‘No, I would not put any of them in that category. Everyone she brought home. . and she told me she never played away. . was as cynical as she was.’
‘Were they cops?’
‘A couple were. There was a DAC. . deputy assistant commissioner. . in the Met, about five years ago, and an assistant chief from Birmingham before him. I’m sure that neither of those two were in a position to advance her career directly, but they knew people who were.
‘More recently, from what she told me, the men she’s been involved with have been. . how do I put it?. . opinion formers, movers and shakers outside the police force. There was a broadcast journalist, a civil service mandarin in the Justice Ministry, and another man she said was a very successful criminal lawyer.’
‘You’re telling me what they were but not who,’ Skinner pointed out. ‘Can you put names to any of them?’
Marina smiled. ‘No, because Antonia never did, and since we didn’t live together until she became the chief in Birmingham, I never saw any of them. “No names, no blames”, was what she always said, whenever I asked her. It used to annoy me, until I realised that given her background and mine. .’ She broke off and looked at her mother. ‘I’m sorry, Maman,’ she said, ‘but this is the truth. She never had a proper father as such, far less than I did. We were secret daughters in a way, both of us, but her most of all.
‘Given that history, that upbringing, it was perfectly natural that Antonia should have woven a cloak of secrecy around her own personal life. And me? I am exactly the same. Most observers, looking at me, would say that my life is a mystery.’
Sofia nodded. Her eyes were sad. ‘I wish I could deny that,’ she sighed, ‘but it is true. That is my legacy to both of my daughters.’
Twenty-Four
‘Bingo,’ Skinner exclaimed, as he gazed at the photograph on his monitor. He turned to his exec. ‘It may say Byron Millbank on his driving licence, and that may not be a top-quality image, but I rarely forget a face. . and never, when I’ve seen it dead. That is Beram Cohen, one-time Israeli paratrooper, then a Mossad operative until he was caught using a dodgy German passport while killing a Hamas official, most recently for hire as a facilitator of covert operations.
‘As you know, Lowell, he’s the guy who recruited Smit and Botha, procured their weapons through Freddy Welsh in Edinburgh, then went and died, inconveniently for them, of a brain haemorrhage a few days before the hit.’
‘Could we have stopped it if he hadn’t?’ Payne asked.
‘There would have been even less chance. The evidence we had would still have led us to Welsh, but no sooner; we probably wouldn’t have got to the hall as quickly as we did.
‘Even if we had been lucky and got the two South Africans, my guess is that Cohen would have been in the car and would have taken off. He’d have been on the motorway inside two minutes. He would have got clear, dumped the guy Brown’s body, so it would never have been linked to our investigation, and we’d have had no clue at all, nowhere to go.’
He scratched his chin. ‘Cohen dying might have been convenient for us, but as it turned out it wasn’t a life-saver. Speaking of Bazza Brown’s body,’ he continued, ‘lying a-mouldering in the boot of a Peugeot, and all that, I’d like an update on that side of the investigation.’ He checked his watch. ‘Mann’s press briefing should be over by now; ask her to come up, please.’
The DCI nodded and was about to leave when Skinner called after him. ‘By the way, Lowell, are we any nearer being able to open that bloody safe, or do we seriously have to explore the Barlinnie option? Toni’s sister gave me a number, but as she warned me, it had been changed. She did it weekly, apparently; there’s security,’ he grumbled, ‘then there’s fucking paranoia.’
Payne laughed. ‘It’s in hand, gaffer, but the Bar-L route may be quicker than waiting for the supplier to send a technician.’ He paused. ‘By the way, how did your visit go? How are the mother and sister?’
‘As bereft as you would imagine,’ the chief replied, ‘but they’re both very calm. I was impressed by Marina,’ he added. ‘She’s not a bit like her half-sister. Toni, it seems, was the love child of a Mauritian politico; she must have inherited the gene. Marina, on the other hand, struck me as one of nature’s civil servants, as her mother was.’
‘And her father? Is he still around?’
‘No, not for some years; he never was, not full-time. Sofia seems to have valued a degree of independence.’ Skinner pointed to the anteroom at the far end of his office, the place that Marina Field had filled. ‘Have you lined up any secretary candidates yet?’
‘Yes. Human Resources say they’ll give me a short list by midday.’
‘Then hold back on that for a while. We can call up a vetted typist when we need one. Marina says she wants to carry on in her job, working for me. I’ve stalled her on it, until I decide whether I want that.’
‘How long will you take to make up your mind?’
Skinner grinned. ‘Ideally, three months, by which time I’ll be out of here.’
Twenty-Five
‘It is for these reasons,’ Aileen de Marco concluded, reading from autocue screens in the conference room of the ugly Glasgow office block that housed her party’s headquarters, ‘that I am committing Scottish Labour to the unification of the country’s eight police forces into a single entity. The old system, with its lack of integration and properly shared intelligence and with its outdated artificial boundaries, bears heavy responsibility for the death of Antonia Field.
‘Not only do I endorse the proposal for unity, I urge the First Minister to enact it without further delay to enable the appointment of a police commissioner as soon as possible to oversee the merger and the smooth introduction of the new structure.’