‘Bob!’ Dennis exclaimed.
He grinned. ‘No worries, Amanda. He doesn’t have the balls.’
‘Probably not,’ the Home Secretary said, ‘but I do. Let me see these.’ She snatched up the photographs. ‘The idiot!’ she snapped as she examined them. ‘Bad enough to get involved with that scheming little bitch, but to let himself be photographed on the job, it’s beyond belief, it really is. Are these the only copies?’
‘I’d say so,’ Skinner replied, sitting once again. ‘Toni was too smart to leave unnecessary prints lying around. Plus, she thought she was untouchable.’ He took a memory card from the breast pocket of his jacket and tossed it on to the table. ‘I found that among the envelopes. The originals are on it.’
Emily Repton picked it up, and the birth certificate. She walked across to the deputy director’s desk and fed the photographs into the shredder that stood beside it. The memory card followed it. She was about to insert the birth certificate when Payne called out, ‘Hey, don’t do that! The child’s going to need it.’
The Home Secretary gave him a long look. ‘What child?’ she murmured. The shredder hummed once again. ‘Why did you give those up so easily?’ she asked the chief constable.
‘Because I’m a realist. I’ve been in this building before. I know what it’s about, and I know that there are certain things that are best kept below decks, as Barnacle Hubert the Sailor here might say. But they’re kept in my head too, and in DCI Payne’s.’
‘Sometimes it can be a lot harder to get out of here than to get in,’ Repton pointed out.
‘Not in this case,’ Skinner told her. ‘We’re being collected in about half an hour from the front of Thames House by Chief Superintendent McIlhenney, of the Met. If we’re any more than five minutes late, he will leave, and will come back, with friends.’
She smiled. ‘See, Sir Hubert. I said you were underestimating this man. What’s your price, our friend from the north?’
He pointed at Lowery. ‘He goes. Amanda becomes Director General, as she should have been all along. Then you go.’
‘What about my husband? Do you want his head too?’
‘Nah. I imagine you’ll cut his balls off as soon as you get him home for landing you in all this. I wouldn’t wish any more on the guy.’
‘I see.’ She frowned and pursed her lips, calling up an image from the past as she stood in her pale blue suit, with every blonde hair in place. ‘The first of those is doable, because you’re right: Sir Hubert isn’t up to the job, and Mrs Dennis is. The second, no, not a chance.’
‘No? You don’t think I’d bring you down?’
‘I don’t think you can. Okay, my husband had an affair with someone he met in the course of his work at the Bar and, unknown to him, fathered her child. I’ll survive that. . and it’s all you have on me.’
Her mirthless smile was that of an approaching shark, and all of a sudden Skinner felt that the ground beneath his feet was a little less solid.
‘Explain, Amanda,’ she said.
‘We didn’t do it, Bob.’ His friend looked at him with sympathy in her eyes, and he found himself hating it. ‘When you asked to see me, I was afraid this was how it would develop. The thing is, we knew about the child, and we knew of Toni Field’s ambitions, which were, granted, without limits, but we felt they were pretty much contained.
‘We knew what the sabbatical had been about, even before she went on it. After we deleted the Mauritian birth record, we felt she had nothing to use against us, or against the Home Secretary, so we simply parked her in Scotland, with Brian Storey’s assistance. I can see now why he was so keen to help.’ She grinned, but only for a second.
‘We made her your problem, Bob, not ours. No, we didn’t know about the photos, but if we had, I’d have been relying on you or someone like you to find them, as you did. As for the birth certificate, well, we thought that had been dealt with.
‘Oh sure, she still had her career planned in her head, Scotland, and then the Met as Storey’s successor, but in reality, she’d never have got another job in England. Toni Field was a boil, that was all, and we thought we had lanced her, so there was no need to bump her off.’
‘So why did you plant Clyde with her?’ he asked. ‘To check whether she had any more damaging secrets?’
‘Bob, we never did! There was no liaison, there was no Don Sturgeon. Clyde never met the woman, I promise you.’
Skinner gaped at her as he experienced something for the first time in his life: the feeling of being a complete fool, dupe, idiot.
‘This is bluff,’ he exclaimed. ‘Repton’s laid down the party line for you.’ But as he did, he thought of his own ruse with Houseman, and knew that she was right.
‘I’m afraid not.’ She rose, walked across to her desk, and produced a paper, from a drawer. ‘This is a printout of the data we removed from the Mauritian files. It shows, along with everything else, the name and nationality of the person who registered the birth, and it even carries her signature.’
She handed it to him.
‘Marina Deschamps,’ he read, his voice sounding dry and strange.
‘Exactly. She’s how we came to know about the child, and who her father was. The same Marina who told you she didn’t know any of her sister’s lovers by name. Marina, who invented Toni’s relationship with Clyde Houseman. Marina, who it is now clear to me had her half-sister killed.’ She smiled at him once more, but with sadness in her eyes. ‘My dear, I’m sorry, but you’ve been played. The scenario you have in your head, about the Home Secretary having Toni assassinated, to keep her husband’s dark secret and to spare the government from possible collapse in the ensuing scandal, it’s plausible, I’ll admit, but it seems that Marina put it there. But don’t feel too bad about it,’ she added. ‘She was an expert. She used to be one of us.’
‘She what?’ he spluttered.
‘She worked here for five years, in MI5, with a pretty high security clearance. When she applied, she was with the Met, and Brian Storey recommended her for the job.’
‘Doesn’t that tell you something?’ he challenged her. ‘Given that Toni had Storey by the balls?’
‘With hindsight it does. But he may have done it to get himself a little protection from her. Marina left here when Toni took the job in Birmingham. That was our idea originally; we wanted to keep a continuing eye on her and she agreed to do it. She sold it to her sister, so well that she thought it was her own wheeze. Marina’s been keeping an eye on her all along.’
‘Did Toni ever know she was a spook?’ Payne asked, as his boss sat silent, contemplating what he had been told.
‘No, never.’ Dennis gave a soft chuckle. ‘Believe it or not, she also thought Marina worked in a flower shop, of sorts, after she left the Met. I can and will check, but I’m certain that while she was here she would have been in a position to know about Beram Cohen, and his second identity, and that she’d have known about poor old Bazza too.’
She looked at Skinner. ‘You do believe me, Bob, don’t you? If you don’t, there’s an easy way to test me. Call her, at home. Send a car to pick her up, under some pretext or other. She won’t be there, I promise you.’
He glared back at her. ‘Then tell me why,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me why she did it.’
‘If I knew,’ Amanda replied, ‘I would tell you, without hesitation. But I don’t. I don’t have a clue. All I can suggest is that you find her and ask her. However, if you do, and knowing you I imagine that you might, you must hand her over to us. None of the stuff that we’ve talked about here could ever come out in open court.’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he growled. ‘It won’t.’ He started to rise, Payne following.
‘Hold on just a moment,’ the Home Secretary said. ‘We’re not done yet, not quite. There is still the matter of your continuing silence on this business. I’m not letting you leave without that being secured.’