Stevie nudged her with his shoulder. ‘You can, you know. Trust me, I mean.’
She kissed him. ‘I wouldn’t be here if I had any doubt about that, love.’
‘Say that again?’
‘What?’
‘That word you just said.’
‘Love?’
‘That’s the one. Did you mean it or was it just a casual familiarity, like?’
She put her head on his shoulder. He looked down at her, feeling the dampness of her russet-coloured hair through his T-SHIRT. ‘I think I did. But what I feel most of all is comfort in a way I never have till now. It’s taken me completely by surprise, and I can’t tell you how good it feels, how good you make me feel.’
‘You ready to tell me your story yet?’
‘No,’ she whispered, ‘the time’s not right. Let me enjoy this.’
‘Whatever it is,’ he told her, ‘you needn’t be afraid. There is nothing you could tell me about you that would make the slightest difference to the way I feel about you.’
‘What? Not even my sex change?’
‘They’ve made a bloody good job of it,’ he murmured into her hair, ‘that’s all I can say, sir.’
She exploded into a laughter that was more natural and spontaneous than he had ever heard from her. He felt her shaking against him and he joined her in it, hugging her to him as Ry Cooder played a tender tune.
‘I love your house, Stevie,’ said Maggie, when they were both still once more. ‘It’s got real character.’
‘Yeah, hasn’t it? It’s just a house, though: it’s what happens within its walls that’s really important.’
‘I agree.’ She kissed him again. ‘I wish we could take tomorrow off work.’
‘Me too; of all the bloody days, though. You making your debut as the big boss of Torphichen Place, and me being sized up by Mary Chambers.’
‘Mary’s already sized you up; she asked me about you on Friday.’
‘What did you tell her?’
She shrugged. ‘Aw, you know, that you were a solid, dependable plodder; a real Sunday Post reader who thinks that there truly is a Francis Gay.’
‘But there is,’ he protested. ‘He rides shotgun on Santa’s sleigh.’
‘That’s good. Mary’ll be pleased to hear that, her being gay as well. If you really want to know what I told her, I said that she should let you run things for as long as it takes for her to get to know all the troops and to familiarise herself with the territory. That’s what she plans to do.’
‘Nice to know. I’ve had a word with Regan, by the way. I’ve told him that the first time I hear a gay joke in the office he’ll be singing soprano. Actually,’ he continued, ‘I’ve got an outing planned for her tomorrow. I forgot to tell you, but I had a call earlier from Mrs Whetstone. She wants me to go and talk to her son tomorrow; explain to him personally what’s happened. I thought I should take the new boss along, just in case there’s any follow-up from the fiscal’s office.’
Maggie patted his chest. ‘Good thinking, Stevie boy,’ she said. ‘If there are any more waves to be made in that investigation, I wouldn’t want them to splash on my new uniform.’ She slid a hand under his shirt. ‘And talking about making waves,’ she murmured, ‘how long have we got till that curry’s ready?’
He grinned and slid an arm round her. ‘As long as we need, love. As long as we need.’
41
‘Sarah, this is excellent,’ Dan Pringle mumbled, as he finished the last of his steak pie in the Skinners’ dining room. ‘It’s good of you.’
‘It’s good of Alex,’ she replied. ‘She made it while her father and I were out creating mayhem.’
An hour earlier, the DCC and the head of CID had left DI Arthur Dorward’s meticulous crime-scene officers poring over Major Tubbs’s guest bathroom, and headed for Skinner’s home.
They had briefed Sarah as soon as they had arrived. A toothbrush and a tube of combined tartar control and whitening-formula toothpaste had already been bagged and were on their way by car to the Howdenhall lab. No trace of a receipt had been found among Bartholemy Lebeau’s effects, but the manufacturer had established from an examination of the tube’s bar-code that it was part of a batch dispatched a week earlier to a pharmacist outlet in Newcastle.
‘But that’s terrible,’ she had exclaimed. ‘There could be little time-bombs ticking all over that area, just waiting to explode.’
‘Seven of them to be exact. That consignment was opened and put on the shelves on Friday; they’ve made eight sales since then. But that’s just the tip of it. Potentially, your bombs could be all over Britain. The rest of the batch has been pulled, and the shop’s checking its till records to see if any of the customers used cards and can be traced. The manufacturer’s implemented recall procedures for all shipments made up to seven days before the Tyneside lot and since. When they get them back they’ll start to test for contamination, but if it’s been done at random that’ll be a massive job. As that begins, we’re making public announcements on all television and radio news bulletins nationally. It’ll scare people, but it can’t be avoided. By the way, when did we last buy toothpaste?’
‘Six weeks ago. I bought two big pump dispensers, one for us and one for the kids.’ She shuddered. ‘Brings it close to home, doesn’t it?’
‘No, love. It brings it right inside the house.’
Sarah was still grim-faced as they finished their meal. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, guys. Right now all over the country there could be people doing what we’ve just done, then going to brush their teeth and. . Poof! It’s horrible.’
‘I know,’ Bob agreed. ‘But maybe if it was going to happen it would have happened already. If there had been a mass contamination, I’d have expected more than one incident by now.’
‘Maybe there have been,’ his wife pointed out. ‘Lebeau’s death was taken for a heart-attack at first, remember.’
‘True, but you spotted the real cause within twenty-four hours. The worst case is that this is part of a national emergency; the best. . although not for Lebeau, I’ll grant you. . is that it’s a one-off.’
‘So, while the manufacturer and the retailers are doing their things, where do you go?’
‘Tomorrow I go back to the office to bring the chief fully up to date, and to field calls from Tyneside and any other forces with information. Dan and his team go back to Haddington. We need to talk to more of those marching Belgians.’
42
It was solitary, in comparison to that of most of his fellow officers, and it was of necessity secretive; in addition to that Neil McIlhenney’s job was one of the most stressful in the modern force. Heads of Special Branch at regional level were not especially high-ranking; his soon-to-be-formalised step up to detective chief inspector was as high as he would go in the post. However, the responsibilities they carried were awesome.
The quirks of history had conspired to make it so. The first great SB target had been the insidious spread of Communism, even if it was more imaginary than real across Britain. As it faded, it was replaced as top priority by the Irish threat, much more significant and, in England at least, much more deadly. Even if the bombers had never targeted Scotland there were historic undercurrents that required continuous vigilance from the country’s secret policemen.
Ireland had not gone away. . privately, McIlhenney and Skinner doubted that it ever would. . but it had been overtaken by another danger. Outside the corridors of the CIA and MI6 headquarters, the threat posed by the fundamentalists of al Qaeda had been underrated, even after several incidents and a punitive strike against them by the Americans. But September Eleven had changed all that.
No single event, McIlhenney mused, as he drew his car to a halt outside the Malmaison Hotel, not even the assassinations of the Kennedys, or those of Sadat, King, three Gandhis, or Lennon had reached out and touched personally so many people. It was a particularly bitter truth for him that morning, as he was going to collect one of those on whom it had inflicted the greatest loss.