‘The guy that Sarah autopsied last week?’
‘That’s the one. I’ll let Stevie talk you through it.’
The young inspector nodded and leaned back, half turning so that he faced both Skinner and Gower. Quickly, he talked them through the investigation and the twists and turns it had taken, although he skipped over Sarah’s misplaced enthusiasm when she had found the shoulder dislocation. ‘Whetstone was solidly in the frame, no doubt about it, until Monday,’ he said.
‘What happened on Monday?’ asked the DCC.
‘Aurelia Middlemass disappeared; so did her supposed husband. They left his car at the airport and caught an easyJet flight to London, then on to God knows where. As far as we’re concerned they vanished into thin air. So I set to work, looking into her background. That led me to a bank in Dubai, where her CV said she worked before coming to Edinburgh. What her CV didn’t say was that she was dead. The real Aurelia was killed in an accident, just before our version came to join the Scottish Farmers Bank.’
‘So all of a sudden your locked-up investigation’s stood on its head. She did it, and maybe killed Whetstone as well.’
Steele nodded. ‘Just so, sir. That led me to get in touch with the police in Dubai, but instead of getting someone from their Traffic department, I wound up speaking to a brigadier general, no less, who’s your opposite number.’
‘I must ask for a promotion,’ Skinner grunted.
‘That’s where I come in,’ said Merle Gower. ‘We, the US, that is, as opposed to the FBI, had a strong interest in that so-called accident. This was not because of Ms Middlemass, however; she was a South African national. You see, she was not alone in the vehicle, and she was not the only fatality. Her companion was a US citizen, Mr Wayne Morrison; an attaché on station at our embassy in the United Arab Emirates. They were a couple, and had been for a year or so.’
‘I take it he was CIA?’
She looked Skinner in the eye, answering him with her silence. ‘The vehicle was rigged; there was a bomb, concealed above the exhaust. It was detonated remotely by someone with a radio transmitter, who probably watched them and picked the moment. Morrison and Ms Middlemass were in the habit of going driving in the desert every weekend, the sort of routine that someone in his position should have known better than to establish.’
‘Suspects?’
‘We have one. He was attached to a technical college in Dubai as a research chemist. He had an Egyptian passport under the name of Anwar Baradi, but that was, of course, false. Eventually the CIA came up with another name for him, and a photograph, found in a house in Kabul, after the liberation. They believe that he’s an Algerian, called Hasid Bourgiba, but relations with that country are not exactly brilliant, so that hasn’t been verified. What we do know for sure was that he was a member of a terrorist group that wasn’t part of, but had links with, al Qaeda.’
‘How about the woman?’
‘Bourgiba had no known female associates in Dubai. However, there was a woman who disappeared on the very same day that he did. She lived in a rented apartment in the city, had a part-time job in a library, and her passport showed her as a Zimbabwean author, Polly Pride.’
‘Photographs?’
Merle Gower nodded. ‘I brought them.’
‘It’s her, boss,’ said Steele. ‘I’ve seen them and I’m absolutely certain. The Bourgiba photograph could be anyone. It’s years old and in it the guy has a real Taliban beard, but Superintendent Chambers is on her way out to Heriot-Watt with it now, to show it to the people in the chemistry department.’
The DCC frowned. ‘So connect me into this, please. Would two terrorist operatives go to all that bother just to set up a bank sting, albeit for a million? Is the network running short of money?’
‘Maybe,’ Gower murmured, ‘but. .’
‘They didn’t do it,’ Steele announced. He opened his briefcase, took out two clear plastic evidence envelopes. ‘These turned up this morning, out of the blue.’
Skinner read Ivor Whetstone’s letter to his son. When he was finished, he removed the bank book and flicked through it. ‘So it was him all along. The man was dying and he decided to look out for his lad. . and maybe set him a test too. If that was in his mind, he’d be glad to know that he passed.’
‘So why did they run off?’ Dan Pringle asked. ‘If they’d sat tight. .’
The big DCC’s blue eyes fixed him. ‘So why were they here in the first place, Dan? That’s the really big question.’
He looked up at the ceiling of his office once more, gazing at nothing as the seconds grew into minutes.
‘What is it, boss?’ Steele asked at last.
Skinner smiled. ‘It’s a tapestry, Stevie, starting to weave itself. I can’t make out all the pattern yet, but it’s forming.’
Suddenly he leaned forward, his shoulders hunching. ‘I’ve no idea why they did a runner, people,’ he exclaimed. ‘But I’ll bet you the million Whetstone nicked on this: they are coming back!’
He shot to his feet, pounding his big right fist into his left palm. ‘And you know what it means, don’t you?’ he continued, speaking to himself rather than to his companions. ‘The security briefing I’ve just attended is now out of date, hours before the ball starts rolling. We do now have a specific threat!’
78
Brian Mackie had never been more tense. The summons to the DCC’s office had come as a complete surprise to him, and the message that he had been given there, by Skinner, with a grim-faced Willie Haggerty looking on, had brought his worst dreams of the previous few weeks to the edge of reality.
New intelligence information. Not obtained from the security services, but as a by-product of a criminal investigation within Edinburgh itself. Two terrorist sleepers, moved to his city from an assassination in the Middle East, but hidden among the professional classes, not among the ethnic communities, where previous real or would-be terrorists had invariably been found.
Mackie shuddered as he thought of the implications of this new tactic, and as he watched the chartered Alitalia Airbus make its gentle approach to the runway at Edinburgh airport, escorted by two fighter jets, one on either side. As the Pope’s plane landed, they veered off and headed back to RAF Leuchars. The same procedure had been followed when the Prime Minister had arrived an hour earlier. Nobody had told the chief superintendent, but he had guessed that the two aircraft were there to intercept any ground-to-air missile that might have been launched.
He watched from his position on a viewing gallery on the roof that was off limits to the travelling public. He scanned to his left and right, checking that all the snipers were in position, then looked down at the airport’s concourse as the big jet taxied in. The reception committee was waiting, headed by the Lord Provost, both as the capital’s leading citizen and as its Lord Lieutenant, the personal representative of the Queen. After Lord Provost Maxwell there stood, in order, the Prime Minister, his familiar quiff blowing in the breeze, the much shorter figure of the red-haired Tommy Murtagh, MSP, Scotland’s First Minister and clear loser of the precedence argument between Holyrood and Whitehall, Sir James Proud, imperious as ever in his heavily adorned uniform, and last of the five, in richly embroidered vestments, Archbishop James Gainer.
Mackie had suggested moving the formal greeting indoors, but Skinner had decided against the idea since that would have meant explaining the last-minute change to the television crews and rota photographer who were being allowed to cover the first event of John the Twenty-fifth’s brief visit. Whatever story they had invented, media speculation would have been inevitable, and some of it might have been uncomfortably close to the truth. However, he had decreed that to minimise the period that the Pope spent in the open, there would be no wives in the line. This message had been conveyed to the protection officers, who had accepted it without argument, and possibly, in one case, with relish.