The chief superintendent stayed silent throughout, but when Skinner was finished, he asked, ‘Am I right in thinking that you’ve run all these checks on your planner, this man Cohen, alias Byron Millbank, without any reference to my outfit?’
‘You’re spot on, chum. I chose not to involve the Met until I absolutely had to, and that time is now. Make no mistake, this is a Strathclyde operation, but I am going to need to interview people in London, and I will need assistance. I propose to phone your commissioner and ask for it, but what I do not want is for the job to be handed to anyone who might have been personally acquainted with Toni Field. I know she had an affair with a DAC, but I don’t have a name.’
‘Couldn’t you ask the Security Service for help? I know you’re well in with them.’
‘I could but I don’t want to. Their paws are all over Beram Cohen’s false identity.’
‘Forgive me for asking the obvious, but couldn’t Beram Cohen be the false name? They told you about him, after all.’
‘No, because there’s no trace of Millbank any further back than half a dozen years.’
‘Right, box ticked. So, boss. . listen to me; old habits and all that. . cut to the chase. Why are you calling me? As if I can’t guess.’
‘I’ll spell it out anyway,’ Skinner told him. ‘When I call my esteemed colleague, I want to ask him to lend me someone I know and who knows the way I work. But I don’t want you press-ganged. Do you want to take this on, and can you?’
‘Of course I want to,’ McIlhenney replied. ‘Can I, though? I’m heading up a covert policing team down here. I have officers operating under cover, deep and dangerous in some cases. I don’t run them all directly, but I have to be available for them, and their handlers, at all times.’
‘Not a problem. All I’m talking about here is partnering one of my guys in knocking on a few doors. Millbank was a family man, so there’s a wife to be told. He had a legitimate job, so that will have to be looked at. I need to know whether there was any overlap between his life and that of Beram Cohen, and if there was, to see where it takes us.’
‘Who will you give me? You can’t know anyone through there yet, apart from the assistant chiefs.’
‘Wrong, I do. I’m going to send my exec down. He’s a DCI and his name is Lowell Payne.’
‘That’s familiar. Isn’t he. .’
‘Alex’s uncle, but our family link is irrelevant. He’s been involved in this operation almost from the start. He’s the obvious choice.’
‘In which case,’ McIlhenney exclaimed, ‘I’ll look forward to meeting him.’
Thirty
Anger writhed within Assistant Chief Constable Michael Thomas like a snake trapped in a jar. He had seen enough of Bob Skinner, and the way he dominated ACPOS meetings, to know that he did not like the man.
He was ruthless, he was inflexible, he was politically connected and in Thomas’s mind he had an agenda: Skinner was out to mould the Scottish police service in his own image, planting his clones and protégés in key roles until they came to dominate it.
He had done it with the stolid Willie Haggerty in Dumfries and Galloway, with quick-witted Andy Martin in the Serious Crimes and Drug Enforcement Agency, and most recently in Tayside, with Brian Mackie, ‘The Automaton’, as some of his colleagues had nicknamed him.
When Antonia Field had been appointed chief constable of Strathclyde and he had taken her measure, he had been immensely pleased. Finally there was someone on the scene with the rank, the gravitas and the balls to tackle his enemy head on. The truth, that he was afraid to do so himself, had never crossed his mind.
She had identified him from the beginning as her one true supporter among the command ranks in Pitt Street, and he had demonstrated that at every opportunity. She had been in post for less than a month when she took him to dinner, and laid out her vision of the future.
‘Unification is coming, Michael,’ she began. ‘My sources among the movers and shakers tell me that the Scottish government is going to create a single police force, as soon as it deems the moment to be right. I will make no bones about it; I want to be its first chief.
‘As head of Strathclyde I should be the obvious choice, but we both know there’s a big obstacle in my way. I need allies if I’m going to overcome him, and in particular I need you. You’re the only forward-thinking policeman in the place. Theakston, Allan, Gorman, they’re all old-school thinkers; they’re not going to be around long. Back me and you’ll be my deputy inside a year, and again when the new service comes into play. Are you up for that?’
‘Of course, Toni, of course.’
After dinner she had taken him to bed, to seal their alliance, she said, although there were times later, after he felt the rough edge of her tongue, as everyone did, when he wondered whether it had been to give her an even greater hold over him, insurance against his ambition growing as great as hers. It had been a one-off and when it was over she had more or less patted him on the bum and sent him home to his wife. There had been no hint of intimacy from then on; he wondered whether there was a new guy in the background, but that was one secret she did not share with him.
For all that, she had been as good as her word and he had been almost there: DCC Theakston gone to enforced early retirement, and Max Allan with his sixty-fifth birthday and compulsory departure only four months in the future. Within a few weeks he would have been deputy. And beyond that?
She had been right about the new force. It had come up in ACPOS, and while Skinner had won the first battle, by a hair’s breadth, the next round would be theirs, and the First Minister would be able to claim chief officer support as he moved the legislation. The enemy would be marginalised and unable to go forward as a candidate for commissioner, having fought so hard and publicly against the creation of the job.
Toni had promised him that she had no ambition to grow old, or even middle-aged, in Scotland. She was bound for London, back to the Met when its commissioner fell out with the Mayor, as all of them seemed to do. ‘I have levers, Michael, and I will use them, when the time comes. When I go, the floor will be yours.’
Three shots, inside two seconds, that was all it had taken to put the skids under his entire career. He had been doing a spot of evening fishing with his son near Hazelbank when the call had come through. ‘An incident reported at the concert hall, sir,’ the divisional commander had told him. ‘A shooting, with one reported casualty.’
He had known that Toni would be at the hall that night. . for the previous fortnight she had been full of her ‘date’ with the First Minister. . and so he had almost stayed on the river, but a moment’s reflection had convinced him that the smart thing would be to tear himself away and rush to the scene. He had arrived to discover that Toni was the reported casualty, and that Max Allan was another, having suffered some sort of collapse, suspected heart attack, they were saying. Her body was still there, with crime scene technicians working all around it in their paper suits and bootees. He had tried to take charge of the shambles, and that was when DCI Lowell bloody Payne had told him about Skinner being there.
He hadn’t believed the man, until Dom Hanlon had told him Skinner had taken command, and that he would have to live with it, even though the guy had no semblance of authority. Outrageous, bloody outrageous. Then next day, to cap it all, they’d gone and appointed him acting chief.
That was when the grief had set in, for his own foiled prospects as much as for his fallen leader. He knew where he stood with Skinner, a fact confirmed when he had chosen Bridie Gorman, whom Toni had sidelined almost completely, as acting deputy. He had been considering resignation, quite seriously, when he had been called to the chief constable’s office, urgently. Twenty-four bloody hours and suddenly it was urgent.