‘Thought so. By the way, was Michael Thomas involved in any way, my ACC?’
‘Yes, I had to involve him at one point, on pain of disgrace if he breathed a word. Why?’
‘It answers a question, that’s all. And gets him off a nasty hook.’ He paused, straightening in his seat. ‘Okay,’ he went on, ‘so you must see where I’m coming from. I’ve uncovered an operation in Scotland, planned by a man who is known to MI5. Then right in the middle, I find a key equipment supplier, eliminated to keep him quiet, and I discover that he was also known to you. At the very least that was going to start me wondering. You’ve got to concede that, chum.’
‘Yes, okay, I do. But answer me this. If we were behind it, why did I send Clyde Houseman through to see you, to tell you who Cohen was? Surely I’d have kept quiet about it all.’
‘No,’ Skinner murmured. ‘You wouldn’t have taken that chance. If you had you’d have been betting that I wouldn’t have found out about the operation on my own, without your help, and you know me too well for that. So you sent Clyde with his order, and with his personal connection to me to cloud my judgement.
‘I bought into him, but now I’ve come to believe that his job was to make sure that the hit went ahead; not to help me, but to get in my way, and to keep me from getting to the concert hall on time, by any means necessary.’
‘And I gave him orders to shoot you if he had to? Come on, old love,’ she protested.
‘No,’ he conceded, ‘just to fuck me about, to make sure we were chasing the wrong hare. It worked too. We didn’t find out that the target was female until it was too late. Even then, when we did, I still assumed that it was political, as Clyde had said, and that meant that it had to be Aileen, my wife.’
‘Bob,’ Dennis murmured. ‘This is all very flight of fancy. What on earth has brought it about?’
‘Two things. First, you told me that official MI5 policy has been to steer clear of cooperation with the Strathclyde Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Section because you didn’t trust Toni Field. But in fact I find out that you’ve had her under very close supervision, through Clyde Houseman, or Don Sturgeon, the identity he used to. . how to say it. . penetrate her.’
Amanda smiled and raised an eyebrow.
‘Second,’ Skinner continued, ‘I’ve solved a mystery.’
‘It seems to me that you’ve created one, but go on.’
‘Toni Field’s secret child, Lucille.’
‘Her what?’ Dennis exclaimed.
‘Come on, Mandy, Clyde must have told you she had a kid. The scar was a clear giveaway, as we found at her autopsy. As soon as I heard about it, I found myself wondering why. Why did she have to hide the fact, take a sabbatical and fuck off to Mauritius to have the baby under her old name?
‘A child wouldn’t have been a roadblock in her career, not these days, and not even as a single parent, for Toni’s mother’s hale and hearty and still young enough to help raise her, as she is doing.
‘So I started wondering who Daddy was, and I started to consider five people that Marina, her sister, told me about, five men in her life before they came to Scotland. The only problem was, Marina didn’t know them by name, only nickname.’
‘How inconvenient.’ Her tone was teasing, but Payne, the shrewd observer, detected tension beneath it.
‘Yeah. But somebody must have known one of them, somebody with the resources to hack into the Mauritian general registry and remove all records of the birth. If it hadn’t been for the hospital patient log, we’d never have been able to prove it happened at all. Nice one, my dear. Tell me, did you have to send someone to Mauritius or were you able to do it without leaving this building?’ He looked at her, inquiring, but she was silent.
‘Yup,’ he chuckled. ‘This week, it’s been a whole series of dead ends, until I found out about Mr Sturgeon and until a specialist thief of my acquaintance finally managed to get into Toni’s safe, in what’s now my office.’ He picked up his attaché case and opened it. ‘When I did, I found these.’ He removed two envelopes and placed them on the table.
Amanda Dennis frowned and pulled her chair in a little. She reached out for the envelopes, but Skinner drew them back. ‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘There were three others, but their subjects were of no relevance to this, so I’ve destroyed them. These two, though, they tell a story.’
He removed the contents of the envelope marked ‘Bullshit’ and passed them across.
As the deputy director studied them, her eyebrows rose and her eyes widened. ‘Bloody hell!’ she murmured.
‘I wondered if you knew about him,’ Skinner remarked. ‘Now, I gather that you didn’t. I expect you’ll find that when Toni was appointed to both West Midlands and Strathclyde, Sir Brian Storey gave her glowing testimonials, both times. I don’t like the man, so if you use these to bring him down, it won’t bother me.’
He picked up ‘Howling Mad’ and reached inside. ‘These, on the other hand, are a whole different matter.’ He withdrew several photographs. ‘I didn’t know who this bloke was at first,’ he said, as he handed them across, ‘the one she’s fucking, but I do now. Once he was Murdoch Lawton, QC, a real star of the English Bar. In fact he was such a big name that the Prime Minister gave him a title, Lord Forgrave, and brought him into the Cabinet as Justice Secretary.
‘There he sits at the table alongside his wife, Emily Repton, MP, the Home Secretary, the woman who controls this organisation, and to whom you and Hubert Lowery answer.’
She stared at the images. Even to Payne, that most skilled reader of expressions, she was inscrutable.
‘Those are bad enough,’ the chief constable told her, ‘even without this.’ He took Lucille Deschamps’ birth certificate from the envelope and laid it down. ‘You knew about it of course, since MI5 removed the original registration. Lawton knocked her up, fathered her child.’ He sighed, with real regret.
‘So now you see, my friend, how I’m drawn to the possibility that Toni Field was murdered by this organisation, to prevent her from advancing herself even further than she had already by blackmailing the woman at its head, and her husband.
‘Amanda, I don’t actually believe that you’d be party to that, which is why I’ve brought this to you and not to Lowery, who’d probably have the Queen shot if he was ordered to.’
Amanda Dennis leaned back, linked her fingers behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Oh dear, Bob,’ she sighed. ‘If only you hadn’t.’
As she spoke, a door at the far end of the room swung open and two people came into the room, one large, the other small, almost petite. Skinner had met the man before, at a secret security conference the previous autumn, not long after his appointment as Director of MI5, but not the woman. Nonetheless, he knew who she was, from television and the press.
Dennis stood; Payne followed her lead instinctively, but Skinner stayed in his seat. ‘Home Secretary,’ he exclaimed, ‘Hubert. Been eavesdropping, have we?’
‘No!’ the director snapped. ‘We’ve been monitoring a conversation that borders on seditious. To accuse us of organising a murder. .’
‘Go back and listen to the recording that you’ve undoubtedly made,’ the chief constable said. ‘You’ll find no such accusation. I’m investigating a crime, and my line of inquiry has led me here. You people may think you’re off limits, but not to me.’
As Sir Hubert Lowery’s massive frame leaned over him, the chief recalled a day when, as a very new uniformed constable, he had policed a Calcutta Cup rugby international at Murrayfield Stadium, in which the man had played in the second row of the scrum, for England.
‘Skinner,’ the former lock hissed, ‘you’re notorious as a close-to-the-wind sailor, but this time you’ve hit the rocks.’
He pushed himself to his feet. ‘Get your bad analogies and your bad breath out of my face, you fat bastard,’ he murmured, ‘or you will need some serious dental work.’
Lowery leaned away, but only a little. Skinner put a hand on his chest and pushed, hard enough to send him staggering back a pace or two. ‘You were never any use on your own,’ he said. ‘You always needed the rest of the pack to back you up.’