Fatal Last Words

Ten

‘What is it between you and Bruce Anderson?’ Aileen asked as she cracked eggs into a bowl in the kitchen of their home in Gullane, the East Lothian coastal village where Bob had lived for more than half his life.

He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing; ancient history.’

‘Don’t give me that. Whenever his name’s mentioned, there’s a look comes into your eyes. Not so much someone walking on your grave, more the other way round. You were his security adviser, and then you quit. I know you told me you decided that you couldn’t do justice to both jobs, but what really happened?’

He leaned back against the door frame and gazed ahead, not at her, but at the wall opposite. ‘Let’s just say that I found out what sort of a man Dr Anderson really is.’

‘What sort is he?’ she teased.

‘You should know; he used to be a member of your party. In fact when you were a fast-rising young Glasgow councillor, he was its leader in Scotland.’

‘Yes, but I was very young then, I never got to meet him. . not to talk to at any rate; I got to shake his hand at our annual conference once, as if he was a visiting head of state.’

‘So what was the word, within your circles? There must have been talk about him. I know he wasn’t the expected choice for that job when Labour took power in Scotland.’

‘We didn’t trust him,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe it was his background: he was a GP in Barlanark before he was an MP and some of us thought that a truly committed socialist might have felt that he could have done more good there than trampling on his colleagues’ fingers as he climbed the ladder. But then he wasn’t a truly committed socialist, as it turned out.’

‘As he’s proved since then, by staying in your party but more or less aligning himself with the other team.’

‘And becoming one of my administration’s most vitriolic opponents.’

Bob smiled softly. ‘When I was a kid in Motherwell, I heard someone say, “The turned ones are the worst.” I was innocent then; I didn’t know a thing about sectarian bigotry, for I’d never been exposed to it. So I asked my dad what it meant; he looked at me, not angry but dead serious, and he said, “Son, I’d be obliged if you never use that phrase again.” So I never did. But I still found out what it meant. From my experience it’s only ever been true of politicians; present company very much excepted, of course,’ he added quickly.

‘Come on,’ Aileen protested. ‘Zealots are zealots, wherever they’re found.’

‘Ah, but Bruce isn’t a zealot,’ Bob countered. ‘Those old Judean boys had a powerful belief that drove them on. Anderson doesn’t; he’s motivated by his own ambition, and his own arrogance. OK, plenty of people are, whether they know it or not, but most of them have redeeming features to offset it. Anderson doesn’t; as far as I’m concerned, the man has no core values at all, he has no concept of loyalty and he’s a fucking liar.’

‘Mmmm.’ The start of a grin tickled the corners of his partner’s mouth, as she started to whisk the eggs. ‘But apart from that, he’s a decent guy. . isn’t he?’

Skinner’s nostrils flared. ‘He’s the man who walked away from power when his wife died; to care for his young daughter, or so he said. What he also did was collect a fucking enormous insurance policy, another packet from the criminal injuries compensation fund, and a fat advance for a book about his tragedy. Less than a year after she lost her mother, the kid was packed off to boarding school; next thing anyone knew, Bruce had a new high-Tory girlfriend, and half a dozen directorships including a seat on the board of a political consultancy.’

‘That doesn’t make him a liar, though. He still practises medicine, you know. He probably meant what he said when he resigned as Secretary of State, but people change with time.’

‘That wasn’t what I was talking about. As for his medical practice, it’s in a private clinic, giving health check-ups to punters who can afford it. No, Anderson betrayed me for reasons of sheer political expediency, and more than that, he lied about me to further his own ends.’

‘What? When?’ Aileen demanded, shocked.

‘When he was in office. He inherited me from the previous administration as his security adviser. At first it was fine; we had regular meetings and he acted upon every suggestion that I made. Then my personal life went pear-shaped, Sarah and I split up for a while. .’ He stopped in mid-sentence. ‘No, I’ve got to give up dressing that in soft colours. The black and white truth is that I left her, for reasons that didn’t stand scrutiny then, and of which I’m ashamed now. She went back to the States with James Andrew, who was then a toddler, and I got involved with someone else. We wound up in a particularly nasty tabloid newspaper that thankfully no longer exists. Come on, you probably remember it; the story went everywhere.’

She nodded, looking at the floor. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I do. But you got yourselves sorted out, though, you and Sarah.’

‘For a while, but really, it was the beginning of the end for us. The truth was we’d fallen out of love, if we were ever truly in it.’ He took a deep breath, and continued. ‘Anyway, that’s what happened in the interim. As you said, Anderson wasn’t popular in your party. He had opponents on the left, and one of them, the thoroughly nasty Councillor Agnes Maley, was an arch-enemy of mine. So Bruce threw me to her as an offering, simple as that. As I saw it, and I still do, I was the victim of an invasion of privacy. If the situation had been the outer way around, him in the tabloids and not me, I’d have gone out of my way to put the guy who did it out of business. But not Bruce; he’s a stranger to loyalty, as he’s consistently proved since then. He’s a fucking coward too. I had a big investigation under way in Edinburgh at the time, high-profile. He began by suggesting that maybe I needed to devote myself to it full time. I didn’t buy that. Then he said that he really needed a full-time security adviser. I thanked him very much and said I’d be honoured to accept. That threw him. Finally I called his bluff; I said that if he wanted me to resign, I wouldn’t, because I didn’t believe that grounds existed, and I made him fire me. If he’d the balls he’d have done that in the first place, instead of all that prevaricating and manoeuvring.’

‘No,’ Aileen murmured, as she threw some chopped bacon and mushrooms into the bowl, then poured the mix into a hot frying pan on the hob. ‘Not someone you’d like to watch your back, is he?’

‘It got worse than that, though. Remember Jock Govan?’

‘Sir John, of course; the old Strathclyde chief constable. He followed you into the adviser role, didn’t he?’

‘That’s right; before I had left it, at that. In our big confrontation, Anderson told me that Jock had already agreed to succeed me. I went back to my office and I called him, to rip him off a strip. He went ballistic; he said that the Right Honourable Secretary of State had spun him a yarn to the effect that I was insisting on resigning because of the publicity. Jock told Anderson that he thought I was mad, and he refused to accept the job until he had made one last attempt to persuade me to stay on. When I phoned him, he’d just had a call from Bruce, assuring him that he’d tried his best, but that I was adamant. He even added that I’d insisted it should be presented as a sacking, to get the lefties off his back.’

The First Minister whistled. ‘Talk about standards in public life,’ she exploded. ‘Next time that man attacks me or my administration I will nail his sorry arse to the wall.’

Bob held up a hand. ‘No. Please don’t do that. It would just dig up a lot of stuff that I’d prefer stayed buried, for your sake, more than mine. Muck thrown at me will splash you too. I won’t have that, as Anderson had better realise.’ He smiled suddenly, shattering the grimness that had invaded the kitchen. ‘Now let’s forget about the bastard. Are you going to let that omelette cook itself?’

‘No,’ Aileen replied, ‘I’m not, I’m just mixing it. I’m lousy at omelettes.’ She smiled up at him cheerfully. ‘You’re much better at them than I am, big fella, so you get on with it while I juice some oranges.’

She stepped away from the cooker and handed him a long spatula as he moved in to take her place. At first he was focused entirely on his task, and over a minute went past before he raised his eyes to look out of the kitchen window.

‘Bloody hell!’ he barked. ‘They’re here now!’

‘Oh,’ said Aileen quietly. ‘I wondered how you’d react when you saw them.’

Bob’s eyes were fixed on the scene below. The car park that served Gullane’s broad, sandy beach seemed to have been turned into a holiday camp overnight. He did a quick count and determined that twenty-one caravans, some approaching the maximum length that could be towed legally, were parked there. Each had at least one car alongside, and several vans and pick-ups were lined up beyond.

‘Just what I need,’ he moaned. ‘Tinkers.’

‘Bob,’ she reproved him gently, ‘you’re being politically incorrect You’re supposed to call them travelling people; they’ve got the status of an ethnic group, even though technically our courts have never recognised them as one.’

‘They’re recognised everywhere as a fucking nuisance,’ he fumed, ‘and that’s for sure. I’ve got no objection to them camping on authorised public caravan sites for travellers, but that down there is not one of those. It’s a car park for families who want to enjoy a day on the beach. You know as well as I do what’s going to happen: parents and kids will be scared off. Look at them: half of them have got dog kennels outside their vans, and those will not be for wee dogs. These characters don’t keep pets, they keep bodyguards. Christ, I can see three Alsatians tethered down there. . and a bloody Rottweiler.’ He flipped the omelette over in the pan, cursing quietly as he broke it in the process. ‘As soon as we’re done here, I’m going to give them the message.’

‘No, you’re not,’ said Aileen quietly.

‘I bloody am,’ he insisted.

She shook her head and took the pan from him. ‘Think about this,’ she told him as she divided its contents into unequal portions and laid them on two plates, then carried them over to the breakfast bar, where cutlery and two stools waited. ‘Where have they come from? Do you know?’

‘I’ve been hearing stories about them from Brian Mackie for the last few months,’ he told her. ‘Assuming it’s the same group, they’ve come from the beach park at Dunbar. It took three weeks to move them out of there. The council had to get an interdict from the Sheriff Court before we could act. Before that they were at Longniddry, same story, and before that Yellowcraigs.’

‘Why did it take three weeks?’ she asked. ‘And why the need for an interdict in the first place?’

‘You must know as well as I do,’ Bob replied, ‘that the law on the subject’s completely upside down. There’s an Act that says they can’t do things like that down there, but we can’t just enforce it, in case we infringe their human bloody rights, or we subject them to racially aggravated harassment. It’s bollocks, a ridiculous situation. You should give priority in Parliament to sorting it out and giving us the power to act quickly against them.’

‘I’ll do that after I make the A1 a motorway,’ she chuckled. ‘But seriously, if ACPOS ask us, we’ll look at it. But that’s as may be. When they were at Yellowcraigs, or Longniddry or Dunbar, did the deputy chief constable turn up in person and tell them to move on?’

‘No,’ he sighed.

‘And if you do it now, do you imagine these people are so other-worldly that none of them will think of getting on the phone to the tabloids and complaining that Bob Skinner’s threatened them because they’re spoiling the view from his kitchen window? Then how long will it be before there are stories that you did it because I told you to?’

‘OK.’ He held up a hand, and a forkful of omelette. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I’m still not having it, not for our sake, but for the sake of the kids who’re going to be put off using the beach and for the local dog-walkers who’re going to be scared off by that pack of wolves tethered down there. I can sort them out in other ways.’

‘Such as?’

‘Vehicle inspections. I can send officers to check the tax, MOT and insurance status of every one of their cars.’

‘Big deal.’

‘One at a time. On the hour every hour. Starting at two in the morning.’›

Aileen gasped. ‘Bob, these folk have children.’

‘So they won’t hang around long.’

‘And if someone happens to tell them who lives up the hill? No, you’re going to have to do this by the book.’

He bolted down the last of his breakfast and swung himself off his stool. ‘In that case, the book says that the first thing we do is ask them, nicely, to move to a designated traveller site. You don’t mind if I do that myself, do you?’

‘You think you’re capable of nicely?’

A broad smile creased his face. ‘When I put my mind to it, I am. I’ll be so polite they’ll bend over backwards to please me.’

‘And if they don’t?’

‘Then they’ll wish they had.’