There was no conversation as they sat, sipping and eating. The chief was relaxed in his chair, but his colleague noticed that it was drawn clear of the table, so that if necessary he had a clear route to the street.
And then, after ten minutes, a large white vehicle came into view, approaching from their left. It was halfway in shape between a coupé and an estate car. ‘How many white Range Rover Evoques would you expect in Mull?’ the chief murmured.
The car swung into an empty bay on the other side of the road. Its day lights dimmed as the driver switched off, then stepped out: not a man, Payne saw, but a woman, tall, in shorts and a light cotton top, with a blue and yellow motif.
Her hair was jet black, cut short and spiky. Although a third of her face was hidden behind wrap-round sunglasses, Oakley, he guessed, by the shape of them, the lovely honey-coloured tone of her skin was still apparent, and striking.
She was halfway across the road, heading for the post office, when Skinner put his right thumb and index finger in his mouth and gave a loud, shrill whistle. The woman, and everyone else in earshot, looked in his direction. But she alone froze in mid-stride.
She made a small move, as if to abort her errand and go back to the Range Rover, but the chief shook his head, then beckoned her towards them. She seemed to sag a little, then she obeyed, as if she was on an invisible lead and he was winding it in.
He stood as she drew near, reaching out with his right foot, gathering in a spare chair and pulling it to the table. ‘Have a seat,’ he said. He inclined his head towards Payne, never taking his eyes from hers. ‘Lowell, you didn’t get up to the command floor in the last chief’s time, so you probably don’t know her sister, Marina Deschamps, or Day Champs, as wee Dan Provan would say. Mind you,’ he added, ‘even if you did, you’d have had bother recognising her with the radical new hair and the designer shades. I probably wouldn’t have been sure myself if she hadn’t been driving her dad’s car.’
‘Her what?’ Payne exclaimed.
‘Her dad,’ he repeated. ‘Peter Friedman’s her father. There’s been a consistent feature in this investigation. Most of the players in it have had two names, making them hard to pin down. Byron Millbank was Beram Cohen, and vice versa when he had to be, Antonia Deschamps became Toni Field, in the cause of advancing her career like everything else she ever did, and even Basil Brown, gangster and MI5 grass, had to be called Bazza.’
‘So what about Peter Friedman?’ Marina asked, as she sat. ‘What was he?’
‘He used to be Harry Shelby.’
She removed the sunglasses, as if she was peeling them off her face, and stared at him, with eyes that were colder than he had ever imagined they could be. ‘How did you find out?’
‘MI5 erased the records of wee Lucille’s birth,’ he replied, ‘but they had no reason to wipe out yours. It wouldn’t have been that easy anyway, you being born before the computer era. When you steered me towards your conspiracy scenario, and I was stupid enough to embarrass myself, even endanger myself, by falling for it, you may have thought that I wouldn’t survive professionally, maybe even personally. You certainly didn’t envisage me coming after you, nor Five either, not after I’d handed them all Toni’s blackmail leverage. For that’s what your sister was, wasn’t she? Inside Supercop, there was a nasty little blackmailer. . as you well knew, for you were put alongside her to spy on her, and you found the evidence.’
‘I. .’ she began, protesting, but he raised a hand, to stop her.
‘I know you were, because Amanda Dennis told me so, and I know you did, because you left it for me, after you’d doctored it a wee bit. So come on, just nod your head, and admit it.’
She did.
‘God knows what Toni got out of the civil servant,’ Skinner continued, ‘or the TV guy, or the other cop, but she got advancement from Storey, and I know now that she got a house out of the Home Secretary and her husband, the one your mother lives in in London. Her father didn’t buy it, they did; they paid her off, and if that was known, the scandal would be compounded. That house was bought and paid for by Repton Industries, Emily Repton’s family business. You knew that, Marina, and you didn’t care a toss about it.
‘But when she pulled the same stroke on your father, that was different. Lottie Mann traced both transactions right to the source of the money. She found out that the house in Bothwell was paid for by Pam Limited, Peter Friedman’s investment company. Thanks to one single, unfortunate newspaper photo, Toni found out who Friedman really was. She contacted him and she sold him her silence, for five hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds, the cost of a nice big villa.’ Skinner frowned. ‘Or her silence for a while: and that was something you couldn’t tolerate, the idea that she could unmask him any time she chose, so. . you had your sister killed!’
‘Half-sister,’ she murmured. ‘So prove it.’
He shrugged. ‘I can’t, not to court standards. Anyway, not only did your fiction add up, that Repton had her removed, it still does, for you could claim that everything you did was on their orders.’
‘Do you really know it wasn’t?’ she challenged.
‘Oh yes, I do. And I can prove that.’
‘How?’
‘It was your old man that paid Cohen to do the job, not them.’
‘My God,’ she said, ‘you have been busy. You know that much?’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘In that case, tell me, Mr Skinner. . I can see you’re desperate to, you’re so pleased with yourself. . how did you find out who my father was?’
‘I’m not pleased with myself,’ he contradicted her. ‘But I’m dead chuffed for Dan Provan, the guy I mentioned earlier. He’s a walking anachronism of a detective sergeant, who’s been hiding in Strathclyde CID for years. You probably never saw him when you were there, just as your path and Lowell’s never crossed, but even if you had you wouldn’t have noticed him. That’s one of his strengths. The other is that he never forgets a criminal, if the crime is big enough to get his attention.’
He picked up his ever-present attaché case and spun the combination wheels to open it.
‘I was never just going to forget about you, Marina,’ he told her as he flicked the catches. ‘I don’t like being made to feel like an idiot. I take it personally. The first thing I did when I got back to Glasgow was send Provan to dig out your birth records from Mauritius. I wanted to build a complete picture of you and obviously I couldn’t rely on the things you had told me, or the hints you had dropped, since you’re as consummate a deceiver as your sister was.’
A flicker of a smile suggested she took that as a compliment.
‘Provan discovered that your father was listed as Hillary Shelby,’ he continued, taking a document from the Zero Halliburton and handing it to her. ‘See? Hillary not Harry, and there’s an Australian passport number. However, that surname niggled him, and the itch wouldn’t go away. And that’s where his special skills came into play. “Shelby,” he told himself. “I know that name from somewhere.” Dan isn’t of the IT generation,’ Skinner said, ‘but he went to the computer and ran a Google search.’ He grinned. ‘He called it “that Bugle thing” when he told me about it. He did try the full name first off, but got zilch, so then he entered simply Shelby, on its own. He came up with a car designer, an actor, and three different towns in America, then at the foot of the page, he got Harry Shelby, and it all came back to him, and that pub quiz mind of his.
‘Harry Shelby was an Australian financier, a real tycoon. . or typhoon, as Dan called him. He built a business empire of considerable size in Australia, South Africa and in Hong Kong from the early seventies on. He started in minerals, then moved into currency trading, and pretty soon he had become a national business icon, stand-out even in an era in Australian history when there were quite a few of those around.