‘I’m sure she’ll get there, but not with my help. As for me, as was said to me, my soul’s been broken, but Sarah’s helping me fix it, and I feel more at peace with myself than I have in years.’ He checked his watch. ‘And I’ll be even more so when we’ve done our business here. Are you all set?’
‘Yes, I’m ready.’
‘Good. Come on then, I like to be bang on time when I visit this place.’
They entered the headquarters of the Security Service through a modest door to the right of the building’s great archway, and stepped up to a reception desk that might have belonged to any civil service department. Skinner announced them to one of the uniformed staff. When he told the man that he had an appointment with Mrs Dennis, there was a subtle change in his attitude. He checked a screen that the police officers could not see, then nodded.
‘Yes, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘I’ll let the DD know you’re here and she’ll send someone down to collect you.’ He made a quick phone call, then filled in two slips, which he inserted in plastic cases and handed them over, one to each. ‘These must be surrendered on leaving. Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll check you in through our electronic security. It’s just like an airport, really.’
‘I know,’ Skinner said. ‘But I have a pacemaker so you’ll have to pat me down.’
‘That won’t be necessary, Rashid,’ a woman called out.
The chief constable looked over towards a line of lift doors and saw Amanda Dennis approach. ‘Oh, but it will,’ he insisted. ‘I’m not having your lot plant a gun on me when we get upstairs then say I carried it in.’
She laughed. ‘Damn it! There goes Plan A.’
The deputy director of MI5 was not what Lowell Payne had been expecting. In his mind he had pictured Dame Judi Dench, or someone like her. Instead he saw someone who was around fifty, with dark, well-cut hair and sparkling eyes that had none of the chilly aloofness that were a feature of her film and television equivalents.
‘Hi, Mandy,’ Skinner greeted her when the security search was over and he and Payne had retrieved their bags from x-ray. ‘Good to see you; this is DCI Payne, Lowell, my sidekick, but you’ll know that by now.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘You’re looking better than ever. Still finding time for the toy boy?’
She winked. ‘Shows, does it?’
‘Does he still think you work in a flower shop?’
‘No, it closed down. Now he thinks I’m a proof-reader in a law firm.’ She grinned. ‘Actually he knows exactly what I do. He’s a bright enough chap to read the parliamentary reports where my name crops up occasionally. You know how it is, Bob. It’s the junior ranks who have to be anonymous. Thanks to John bloody Major, the rest of us can’t.’
‘I know,’ he sympathised, as they stepped into a lift. ‘The Don Sturgeons of this world have to be protected, but you and Hubert can walk around with targets on your backs.’
‘Who on earth is Don Sturgeon?’ she remarked, but did not wait for an answer. ‘As for Hubert, why do you want to see me? He’s the director, not me.’
‘He’s also a prat, a Home Office toady dropped in here because the Prime Minister of the day decided the place needed some new blood, after that wee scandal you and I uncovered a couple of years back. He may have been the transfusion, but you’re still the heartbeat.’
The elevator stopped and they stepped out, then along a corridor. Mrs Dennis unlocked her office door and followed them into the room. It was oak-panelled and grandly furnished, in contrast to the utilitarian style of the reception area.
‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘We’ll use the conference table, but before we start, Bob, I assume you’d like coffee.’
He held up a hand. ‘No thanks, Amanda, I’ve signed the coffee pledge, and Lowell here had a Starbucks on the way up from Victoria. By the way,’ he added, ‘he was propositioned by a whore, sorry, that’s non-PC, by a sex worker in his hotel last night. Very English, could even have been public school. Three hundred quid. Isn’t that right, Lowell?’
‘Yes indeed, Chief. She said it was her way of paying off her mortgage.’
‘Unluckily for her, he’s a Jock, and a tight-fisted bastard like all of us. She wasn’t one of yours, was she?’
‘She could have been,’ the deputy director replied. ‘About a third of the women in this place fit that description. But if she was, she wasn’t on duty. We tend to use Russian girls, or Polish. That’s what our targets expect, and let’s face it, chaps,’ she winked, ‘have you ever met a posh English girl who really knew how to fuck?’
Skinner laughed out loud. ‘As a matter if fact I have, but you probably know about her. Likely she’s on my file.’
‘Come on, Bob,’ she chided him. ‘We don’t keep files on senior police officers.’
‘Of course you bloody do, Amanda. You keep files on everyone, apart from the odd militant Islamist who slips through the net and blows up a London bus. For example, you kept a file on Beram Cohen. I know that, because you sent my young friend Clyde Houseman through to see me last Saturday, to tell me who he was. What I didn’t understand at the time was why MI5 should know about Cohen. He wasn’t Islamic, he was Jewish. He wasn’t an internal security threat to us. No, he was an Israeli secret service operative who got compromised and had to vanish.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘and we helped, as you know by now. We did a favour via our friends in MI6, for their friends in Mossad, and took him on board.’
‘You turned him into Byron Millbank?’
She frowned and the change seemed to add a couple of years to her age in the time it took. ‘What a bloody stupid name! I was livid when I heard about it, but when it was done I wasn’t involved. I was running our serious crime division then.’
‘I imagine it flagged up with you as soon as my people ran a DVLA check on him.’
‘Yes, that’s how it happened.’
‘And as soon as it did, you broke into the Rondar offices and removed his computer.’
‘We did, as a precaution, although it turned out to be unnecessary. He seems to have kept his two identities absolutely separate.’
‘But you knew he still functioned as Beram?’
‘I did, and a very few others. Six advised us of a couple of operations he had undertaken for them and for the Americans. There was the one in Somalia, for example; that’s how we knew of the connection between him, Smit and Botha. As soon as you came looking for him, trying to identify his body, I knew that something was up.’
‘And you knew who the target was, but you didn’t tell me,’ Skinner said. ‘Because MI5 wanted her dead.’
She stared back at him. ‘Of course not,’ she protested. ‘Why the hell are you saying that?’
Lowell Payne had been following the exchange, fascinated; he had sat in on, or led, hundreds of interviews during his career, and he realised what Skinner was doing. As Dennis spoke, he detected a very subtle shift in her posture, as if she had slipped, very slightly, on to the defensive.
‘Because I believe it’s true,’ the chief replied. ‘Twenty-four hours ago, I was simply curious about the chain of events, mostly because of Basil “Bazza” Brown. As you said earlier, Mandy, you used to run the serious crimes operation in this place. Inevitably that would involve you in suborning criminals up and down the country and turning them into informants, either through blackmail or bribery.
‘When we found Bazza’s body in the boot of Smit and Botha’s supposed getaway car. . rented by Byron Millbank. . and we checked him out through NCIS, they’d never heard of him. Now, Bazza might not quite have been one half of the Kray Twins, but he was a person of significant interest to Strathclyde CID and the Scottish Serious Crimes and Drugs Agency. So it just wasn’t feasible that he wouldn’t be on the national criminal database, unless he had been taken off it, and the only organisation I can think of with the clout to do that, is yours. Come on, he was an MI5 asset, wasn’t he? Give me that much.’
She sighed, then smiled. ‘I should have known,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, he was. I turned him myself.’