Dead And Buried

Fifty-six

When Skinner and Shannon returned from Bakewell a note was waiting on the DCC’s desk. ‘Come and see me: AD.’

Dennis was behind her desk when they answered her summons. ‘How did you get on?’ she asked.

‘As well as can be expected,’ Skinner replied. ‘Moses told her he was a copper, but Esther had no idea what he really did. His continuing existence seems to have been kept within the family; apart from her, all the rest of them thought he was a civil servant.’

‘We’re not going to have a media problem, are we?’

‘I don’t see it, not if they get his body back for burial.’

‘We can’t authorise that, Bob: that’s a Ministry of Defence decision.’

‘Amanda, I don’t care whose decision it is. It’s got to happen, and that’s an end of it. We’ll need a cover story as well, to explain his death. If you’re sensitive about it, leave it with me and I’ll make arrangements.’

‘If you think you can,’ she said, ‘but you may not find it as easy as you think. Those MoD people can get hung up on secrecy.’

‘Eventually we all take orders.’ As if to make his point, he continued, ‘Now, what have you got for me on Ormond Hassett MP?’

‘Him?’ She frowned up at him. ‘He’s not the bumbling grain merchant that we thought. He graduated from Cambridge forty-one years ago, and won a rugby blue in the process. From there he joined the army, Royal Green Jackets; he did two tours in Ireland, then served in Germany for five years but there’s no record of what he was doing. That probably means he was watching the Russians.

‘Aged thirty-one, he was given a posting to the Washington Embassy as military attaché and spent two years there. That was followed by a year in Whitehall, before he resigned his commission and went into the family business. He didn’t stay there long, though: he was elected to Parliament in the Conservative victory of 1979. He had a three-year spell as Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of State for Defence. Towards the end of his stint he wound up back in Washington, as the leader of a back-bench group lobbying American support for the Falklands war. There’s a curious coincidence here, although probably no more than that: the adjutant to that party was Major Joshua Archer, second battalion, the Parachute Regiment.’

‘Coincidence is a far rarer occurrence than people think,’ Skinner retorted.

‘Maybe; but there could have been little future contact between them, since Archer was killed a few weeks later.’

‘Did they know each other before?’

‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out. If I compare their service records, it might tell me something.’

‘What happened to Hassett after the Falklands?’

‘He resigned as PPS after the 1983 election because he wasn’t given a ministerial appointment. There was some curiosity about that: received wisdom among the parliamentary lobby correspondents was that the Prime Minister of the day thought that he was too right wing.’

‘Jesus, that’s quite a statement.’

‘Indeed! It didn’t stop him getting on to the Defence Select Committee, though, or later from becoming one of the first members of the Intelligence and Security Committee. He sat on that until 1997. After that he seems to have confined himself to agricultural matters, until finally the most recent leader of Her Majesty’s opposition gave him a job as a shadow spokesman.’

Skinner smiled. ‘What the hell do they think we are? Hicks from the sticks, it seems. Did that man Frame really expect us to believe that a man like that wouldn’t know his son was a spook? And what about the question beyond that: if he knew that, did he know what he was up to? Amanda,’ he asked, ‘is there any way you can access Piers Frame’s service record? I’d like to see whether he’s crossed Hassett’s path before.’

‘Only the Director General of Six could authorise that, Bob.’

‘Then maybe we’ll have to ask him.’