‘How are you going to do that? I’ve got nothing to gain, personally, by going public, but if you knew anything about Scots law and procedures, you’d realise that having begun the investigation I’m bound to report its findings to the procurator fiscal.’
‘Then it will have to be edited, otherwise. .’
He looked at her, and realised that she was a rarity, a politician who should not, rather than could not, be underestimated. He had read a description of Emily Repton as ‘a prime minister in waiting, but not for much longer’. Feeling the force of the certainty that radiated from her, he understood that assessment.
‘Otherwise?’ he repeated.
‘Show him, Sir Hubert,’ she murmured.
‘No,’ Skinner countered, ‘I don’t listen to him. You tell me.’
‘Very well.’ She reached out a hand; Lowery took a plastic folder from his pocket and passed it to her.
She selected a photograph and held it up. ‘You seem to have recovered well from the public break-up of your marriage, Chief Constable. This was taken early this morning, as you left the home of your former wife.’
‘So what?’ he laughed. ‘Our children are with her just now, and I wanted to see them.’
‘But you have joint custody; you’ll see them at the weekend.’
He snatched the image from her, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor. ‘Go on, then,’ he challenged her. ‘Leak it and see what follows. I’ll tell the Scottish media that it’s a Tory plot to discredit me. See those two words “Tory plot”? In Scotland they’re a flame to the touch paper. They’ll be on you like piranha. You’ve got to do better than that.’
‘I can. Your ex-wife is an American citizen. Now that you and she are no longer married, she’s here because she’s been given right to remain. That can be revoked.’
‘We’d see you in court if you tried that.’
‘It would have to be an American court; we’d have her removed inside twenty-four hours.’
‘And twenty-four hours after that I’m on a plane to New York and we remarry. Come on, Home Secretary, up your game. You still need to do better.’ And yet, as he spoke, he sensed that she could, and that her first two shots had been mere range-finders.
‘If you insist,’ she replied, and her voice told him that he had been right. ‘It might come as a surprise to you to learn that your present wife’s liaison with Mr Joey Morocco has been going on for years. It began before you met and it continued during your marriage.’
She took a series of photographs from the folder and handed them to him. He glanced through them; they showed Aileen and the actor at various locations: in a garden with Loch Lomond stretched out below them, on the balcony of her Glasgow flat, leaving a hotel in a street he did not recognise. None of them were explicit, but they displayed intimacy clearly enough.
He handed them back, and shrugged. ‘Sorry, no surprise,’ he said. ‘Nor is it my business any more either. By the way, after the Daily News photos you might be able to sell those to Hello! or OK! but nobody else is going to buy them.’
‘Probably not,’ Repton conceded, ‘but every newspaper in the country would run this, front page. The trouble with our modern celebrity culture is that it’s so damn predictable. Where there are actors, there are the inevitable parties, with the same inevitable temptations. Most politicians have the sense to steer clear of them, but not, it seems, Ms de Marco.’
She took the last two items from the folder and gave them to him. The photographs had been taken in a ladies’ toilet. There were three washbasins set into a flat surface, with a mirrored wall above.
The first picture showed two women, expensively clad, watching while a third, her face part-hidden by her hair, bent over a line of white powder, with a tube held to her nose. In the second, all three women were standing, their laughter, and their faces, reflected in the mirror.
He stared at it, then at Emily Repton with pure hatred in his eyes.
‘The original is in a place of safety,’ Sir Hubert Lowery barked. ‘Not here, though, just in case Mrs Dennis feels obliged to do a favour for an old friend. I don’t have to tell you. .’
Skinner moved with remarkable speed for a man in his early fifties. He moved half a pace forward and hit the Director General with a thunderous, hooking, left-handed punch that caught him on the right temple. The man’s legs turned to spaghetti and he was unconscious before he hit the floor.
‘I’ve wanted to do that,’ he murmured, ‘ever since I saw him blindside our outside half at Murrayfield.’
‘I did warn him,’ Amanda Dennis remarked. ‘I told him you’d want to hit somebody, and since he’d be the only man in the room. .’
‘He’ll be all right,’ the chief growled. ‘His skull’s too thick and his brain’s too small for there to be any lasting damage.’
He turned to Emily Repton. Her eyes told him she had enjoyed the show. ‘Spell it out,’ he told her.
She nodded. ‘Hard man, soft centre,’ she said. ‘Your marriage may be over, but I don’t believe you would wish to cause Ms de Marco the damage, the distress and the disgrace that would follow publication of those images. The fact that it was a one-off doesn’t matter. Her career would be gone, way beyond the U-bend, and so would her employable life. As indeed it will, if one single line in one single newspaper, or blog, should ever link my husband to Antonia Field and her child.
‘You can write your report to the procurer physical or whatever he’s called. It will say that your investigation has reached the conclusion that the balance of probability is that Chief Constable Field’s killing was ordered and funded by Mexican or Colombian drug cartels that she compromised during her time with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. There will be not the slightest hint of impropriety by the Security Service.’
She frowned. ‘I’m not going to ask if you agree. There is no alternative on the table; you will do what you’re told. Go back to Scotland, Mr Skinner, and be the big provincial copper in your little provincial pond. This is London; the power will always lie here. If you can’t live with that truth, you could always resign.’
Skinner stared down at her, unblinking, until the coldness in his eyes made her shiver and look away.
‘You really don’t know me, Home Secretary,’ he told her. ‘My report’s already dictated and that is more or less what it says. Even if my suspicions had been one hundred per cent right, there would have been no mileage for me in pulling this building down.’
He nodded towards Lowery, who was beginning to stir on the floor. ‘Getting rid of him will do nicely thanks, and I’ve shown you why that has to happen.’
‘Agreed,’ Repton said.
‘But you are right,’ he continued, ‘that I won’t see Aileen broken by you. Hell, woman, I know you and Lowery set her up. Any idiot, even me, could see that. She can’t hold her booze at the best of times, and I can tell from the photo she was rat-arsed when that all went off. I’m sure that if I could identify the two other women, I’d find that at least one was on Five’s payroll.
‘But that’s by the by; I’ll go along with your deal. Your husband’s safe. If you’re prepared to tolerate his adultery, that’s your business. I’ve never met the man, so he really means nothing to me. Plus, I have no practical need to remove him, since he isn’t in my sphere of influence.’
‘That’s pragmatic of you,’ she mocked, her tone heavy with sarcasm.
‘But you are,’ he snapped, as he picked up his case. ‘And you disgust me. You’re the embodiment of everything I loathe about politics and politicians. Frankly, I don’t want to be any part of any world in which someone like you operates, and there are only two things I can do about that. So I’ll go back to my provincial, sub-national pond, and I will work out which one it’s going to be.’
Fifty-Six
‘No thanks, Amanda, I’ll pass on that one personally. Maybe I’ll send Lowell Payne instead. I was impressed by the way he handled himself the other day, and it’s persuaded me that he’s the man to take over what was a vacancy as head of CTIS.