‘Then come with me, Chief Constable, and you shall.’ She stood; Skinner and Payne followed suit. ‘In your car? You have a car, I take it.’
‘Yes, but Superintendent Payne can take that. I’ll come with you, just in case the minder panics at the sight of strange vehicles. By the way, no nonsense up there, Marina. There are firearms in my car; that’s a practice your sister introduced.’
‘He isn’t that sort of minder, I promise. Rudolf is a driver and a pilot, that’s all.’ As she spoke, they heard the heavy engine sound of an aircraft. She looked up and pointed, towards a helicopter above them, gaining height. ‘In fact, that’s him.’
‘Hey!’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘Are you. .’
‘No. Papa is not with him. He’s still at the house. Come and meet him.’
The chief frowned, still cautious, weighing her up, not anxious to be taken twice. ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t you want to collect your mail?’
‘It can wait. Come on.’ She led him across the road to the waiting Range Rover.
With the police car following close behind, they drove out of Tobermory, taking a narrower road from the one they had used earlier, passing a campsite on the edge of the small town, then climbing for two or possibly three miles, although its twists and turns made it difficult to judge distance travelled.
She slowed as they approached a gate on the right, with an unequivocal sign beside it: ‘Private’. It was shut, but Marina pressed a button on a remote control and the barrier slid aside.
The surface of the estate road was gravel, but better than the one they had left. Their tyres crunched beneath them, early warning, Skinner thought, for anyone waiting.
The house itself was a grey mansion, large but not ostentatious. It reminded him of some of his neighbours on Gullane Hill, although the stone was different. She drew up at the front door, then waited until the second car stopped alongside and Payne climbed out to join them.
He was holding a pistol, in the manner of a man for whom it was a new experience. Skinner frowned and shook his head; he handed it back to Davie Cole.
‘This way,’ she said, leading them inside, walking briskly through a chandelier-lit hallway, and, ignoring a wide mahogany stairway, into a room on the far side of the house.
It was large, decorated with old-fashioned flock wallpaper. A bay window faced south over a sunlit garden, laid out in shrubs and fruit trees, with stone statuary among them. Soft music was playing, a female singer with a gentle voice; the chief guessed at Stacey Kent.
There was a smell about the room, a smell of disinfectant, a hospital smell, one that seemed fitting given the metal-framed bed that was positioned facing the window. Skinner saw an oxygen cylinder on the far side as they approached, and beside it, in a stand, a vital signs monitor.
All the lines on it were flat.
The man on the bed was old, but his face was unlined. He looked peaceful, with his eyes closed.
‘Papa died just over two hours ago,’ Marina murmured. ‘Rudolf has gone to Oban to fetch an undertaker, and to take Sister Evans to the station. She’s been with us for the last month. She did a great job; he was pain-free all the way to the end. The doctor from Oban was with him at the end. He was kind enough to stay overnight. He caught the first ferry back this morning.’
‘I suppose I should say I’m sorry for your loss,’ Skinner told her. ‘And I am, honestly, even if he was a billion-dollar fraudster, and you’re a sororicide. . if that’s a word. You are a first, Marina. I’ve come across plenty of conmen in my career. . although not on your dad’s scale, I admit. . but I’ve never met someone who’s killed her own sister.’
‘What are you going to do with me?’ she asked. Payne, standing on the other side of the bed, saw a hint of trepidation in her eyes, for the first time since their encounter in the café.
‘What do you think?’ the chief retorted. ‘I’m duty bound to arrest you and charge you with murder. You’ve admitted it, and even if you recant that, I know enough now to put a case together.’ And then he sighed. ‘That’s my duty, but the judge would be bound to knock out so much of my evidence on national security grounds that you would walk. Your problem would then be that you wouldn’t walk very far, before you were hit by a runaway lorry, or killed in a random mugging, or died of a peanut allergy that nobody knew you had, or just plain disappeared.’
Her trepidation turned to undisguised fear as she acknowledged the truth in what he said.
‘Who are you now?’
His question took her by surprise. ‘My new identity, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have a Jamaican passport, in the name of Marina Friedman. My father obtained it for me, in case we both needed to move on in a hurry.’
‘What was your next move? Your plan for life after Papa?’
‘His will is with his lawyer in Jersey. It names me as his sole heir. He told me to go there, with the death certificate and my passport, to claim my inheritance.’
‘That won’t be happening now,’ Skinner said.
‘No, I realise that. So, what will you do with me? Will you save the expense of your abortive prosecution by handing me straight over to Amanda Dennis?’
He took a breath and blew out his cheeks. ‘Like she would thank me for that,’ he exclaimed. ‘It would be better all round if I just shot you myself and buried you somewhere on this big island.’
She backed away, staring at him in sudden naked terror.
‘Hey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Calm down. Better all round, but I’m not one of them, Marina. Besides,’ he added, with a half smile and a nod in Payne’s direction, ‘there are witnesses, and your man Rudolf will be back from Oban soon. So,’ he told her, ‘here’s what you do. You take whatever you can pack quickly, and as much as you can in the way of cash and valuables, you get in that car and you drive it straight on to the ferry. When you get to Oban, keep on driving, in any direction you can and in any direction as long as it is out of the jurisdiction of any Scottish police force.’
‘But not Jersey, I take it.’
‘No; there’ll be nothing there by the time you get there. Whatever fortune your father’s left isn’t for you, it’s for the people he swindled, even if some of them will be dead themselves by now.’ He gazed at her. ‘This is what’s happened,’ he said. ‘Lowell and I arrived to arrest him, following my discovery of some papers in Toni’s safe. Sadly, we were too late. You were never here. When Rudolf gets back and asks, “Where’s Marina?” I will say, “Marina who?” That’s the outcome. We get Papa, you get lost. We will be fucking heroes, Lowell and me, in Australia most of all. As for you, you will be alive.’
She looked at him, still doubting, until he nodded, to reassure her.
‘You’re a resourceful lady. You’ll get by for a couple of years, and after that you can probably go back to Mauritius and become yourself again, because nobody will be looking for you. But don’t ever show up here again, for I will know about it. You’re getting away with murder, because that’s what suits everybody best. But don’t you ever forget it.’
PostScript
‘Why did you decide to quit as leader? Were there knives out for you because of the Joey incident?’
Aileen snorted across the lunch table in a restaurant next to Edinburgh Castle. They had gone there after finalising their divorce, in the Court of Session, further down the Royal Mile.
‘They wouldn’t have been nearly sharp enough. No, to be frank I resigned because we are going to get absolutely slaughtered at the next Holyrood election and I don’t want that on my CV. That twerp Felix Brahms will inherit it, now that I’ve endorsed him.’
‘Foresighted as ever,’ Bob chuckled.
‘Of course, and there’s this. I won’t be a candidate in Scotland next time. One of our guys in a safe seat on Tyneside is about to retire early on health grounds. I’ve called in some favours; it’s mine.’