Fatal Last Words

Twenty

‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ asked Mario McGuire.

‘By my reckoning it’ll be about half past ten at night where you are,’ Neil McIlhenney replied calmly.

‘Exactly. We’ve not long finished dinner, we’re sitting under a space heater in an open-air bar, with drinks in our hands, looking across Sydney Harbour at the bridge, and at the moonlight on the water, and it’s bloody magnificent even if we are both half asleep, practically falling off our stools. We haven’t got to grips with the jet lag yet. Paula says hello, though.’

‘And hello back to her. What’s the weather like in Aussie-land?’

‘It’s OK, considering that in our climate terms it’s the middle of February. It’s dry, it’s sunny and it’s quite warm during the day; cold at night, though, hence the space heater.’

‘How much longer are the pair of you spending in Sydney?’

‘Three more days after this, then we’re going up the Gold Coast on Thursday. It’ll be warmer there, I’m told, even though it’s still their winter. How’s it back home?’

‘Sunny and warm. I had planned to take the kids to the beach this afternoon. I might still do that.’

‘What’s holding you back?’ asked the head of CID. ‘You’re allowed Sundays off, aren’t you?’

‘That’s a nice concept, but at the moment I’m sitting in an effing Mongolian tent at the Book Festival, waiting for Andy Martin to arrive and tell me something that’s supposed to be for my ears only.’

‘Oh yes? Suddenly, I get the impression that this isn’t a social call. What’s up? Why are you at the Book Festival, and what the hell has our pal the Tayside DCC got to do with it?’

‘I can’t answer your last question yet, but as for your first, somebody’s won the Festival some extra publicity by bumping off a crime writer. And to give the media a bonus, this one happens to be an MSP as well. You asked me to let you know if any heavy stuff happened; I reckon you might hear about this on the BBC World Service telly, so best you get it from me first.’

‘You said an MSP as well as an author. It’s not Ainsley Glover, is it?’

‘That’s the guy.’

‘Aw shit,’ McGuire moaned. ‘I’m a big fan of his; I’ve read all his books. I met him once, at a signing. I asked him if his Strachan character was based on Willie Haggerty. He didn’t admit it, but he didn’t deny it either.’

‘That’s a laugh,’ said McIlhenney. ‘I know people who think he was based on you, and that Glover only put him in Glasgow to cover it up.’

‘That’s bollocks. You and I were both plods when he wrote the first book, so it couldn’t have been me.’

‘I know that, but other folk don’t. I’m only telling you what’s been said to me.’

‘But Walter Strachan’s a rough so-and-so; he bends the rules and he’s ugly with it.’

‘Like I said. .’

‘You’re pulling my chain, you bastard,’ McGuire growled.

‘A wee bit,’ McIlhenney laughed. ‘But come on, Mario, you were flattered; admit it.’

‘Not in the slightest.’ The holidaying detective paused. ‘What happened to the poor sod?’ He listened as his colleague explained how and where Glover’s body had been found and ran through the sequence of events that had culminated in Professor Hutchinson’s eventual findings. ‘It’s just as well you got him to do the PM,’ he said, when McIlhenney was finished. ‘Another pathologist might not have been as thorough.’

‘I agree, but as it is, old Joe’s a bit embarrassed that it took two examinations before he got the whole picture.’

‘He did get it, though, in the end, like he always does. Who’s in the frame?’

‘We’re not looking hard at anyone at the moment; we’ve a bit to go before we get there. Mr Glover seems to have been a guy with no enemies. . bar one.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘Dr Bruce Anderson; apparently he had a grudge against the guy. He had a verbal go at him at the Festival party last night, just before Glover was killed.’

‘Did he indeed? I can see the headlines being written right now. “Ex Secretary of State banged up for murder.” The red-tops will go pure crazy. Mind you, I can think of one man who’d just love it if that happened.’

‘Aye, me too. But I can’t see it. This killing was very carefully planned; it was absolutely not spur of the moment. My thinking is that if Anderson had set it up, he’d hardly have drawn attention to his feud with Glover just before he bumped him off.’

‘On the other hand, perhaps he would, knowing that your conclusion’s the one simple polis like us are likely to draw.’

‘In that case, Sammy can put that to him when he interviews him.’ He glanced over his shoulder at Pye, who was studying the list of party guests that Randall Mosley had provided.

‘Sammy?’

‘Yes, he’s lead investigator on this one. With Stevie Steele gone, he’s pretty much our top DI,’ he said quietly, not wanting his assessment to be overheard by its subject. ‘I’ve brought him and Ray up from Leith. Alice Cowan too; she and Wilding have gone back out to see Glover’s daughter, to take a formal statement from her.’

‘Does she know her dad was murdered?’

‘She will if she heard me on the radio. If not, she still thinks that he died from a heart attack. They’ve gone to fill in the blanks.’

‘Fine,’ said McGuire. He hesitated for a second, before continuing. ‘Neil, bringing Sammy in, that’s a good shout, but are you sure you want to put him in with Anderson?’

The detective superintendent sighed. ‘Maybe not. I suppose I should take the lead on that one, or sit in at least. Bugger it; and there was me looking forward to getting the sand between my toes this afternoon.’ He looked up as the door of the yurt opened and Andy Martin stepped inside. ‘Got to go now,’ he said. ‘Sleep tight.’

‘With luck. Keep me informed, chum.’

McIlhenney snapped his phone shut and rose to his feet.

‘Hello, Andy,’ he said, extending his hand to the newcomer. ‘Good to see you, although I’m sorry your Sunday’s screwed up too.’ As they shook, he thought for an instant that something flashed in the other man’s eyes, something he could not read, but it was so fleeting that he decided almost as quickly that he had been mistaken. ‘You’re sure we couldn’t have done this over the phone?’ he asked, moving on.

‘Not unless it was secure.’ The reply was abrupt, renewing McIlhenney’s curiosity; his own eyes must have betrayed him, for Martin’s face softened at once. ‘Sorry, Neil. I didn’t mean to snap. You’re right, this day is not turning out as I’d have liked. I should have laid off the whoopee juice last night and gone straight home after the dinner.’

The big superintendent smiled sympathetically. ‘So let’s get this done,’ he said, ‘and then you can get home.’

Martin looked around the tent. He nodded briefly to Pye, who replied, ‘Afternoon, sir.’

The DCC glanced at his watch. ‘Don’t remind me of the fact. Sammy, can you give us a minute?’

‘No, he won’t.’ McIlhenney’s intervention took the senior officer by surprise. ‘I’m sorry, Andy,’ he went on, ‘but DI Pye is leading this inquiry. If what you’ve got to say is relevant to it then he’s going to hear it. I’m not cutting him out of anything.’

‘I told you, this is highly sensitive,’ said Martin, his voice suddenly formal and commanding.

Pye looked at the two men. He had known them both for years, as his career had progressed. Martin had brought him into CID, and he had worked with McIlhenney in Special Branch. He had never known them to be at odds, yet there they were staring each other down.

‘Look, boss,’ he said to the superintendent, ‘I’ll step outside. I don’t mind.’

‘You’ll stand your ground,’ McIlhenney snapped. ‘DCC Martin’s warrant card was issued by the Tayside force, not this one. He’s come here because he has information that he thinks may be relevant to your investigation and you are fucking well going to hear it.’

‘I’ve got a long memory, my friend,’ Martin murmured, ‘and you know how good it is.’

‘In that case you’ll have DCC Skinner’s phone number stored in there. You call him and tell him what we’ve got going on here and see whose side he comes down on. But you’d better tell him that now you’ve kicked this game off, you’re not leaving here till it’s played out.’

‘Don’t threaten me.’

‘Sorry, sir; not a threat, but a promise.’

‘Gentlemen!’ Pye exclaimed, feeling totally out of his depth. He was ignored, by them both, and found himself wondering what he would do if Martin headed for the door.

And so a huge sigh of relief escaped from within him when instead he shrugged and said, ‘Have it your way, but Bob will hear of this. . and so will you, down the line.’

‘You mean if you come back as deputy when he moves up? You think none of us have seen that one coming? Well, I don’t give a shit about down the line, because I’m right and you bloody well know it.’ He looked at the inspector. ‘Sammy, do you have a notebook?’

‘No notes, Neil,’ Martin interjected, ‘and no tape.’

McIlhenney frowned. ‘OK, I’ll give you that much. Tell us your story and maybe we can all be friends again.’

‘Maybe.’ Martin pointed to a table at the back of the yurt; Randall Mosley had left behind a kettle, half a dozen mugs, a carton of milk and a jar of Nescafé. ‘Any chance of a coffee? The last one I had went cold, and the one before that. .’ he paused, ‘it was way back.’

‘Help yourself.’

‘You?’

The superintendent nodded; the DI shook his head. They waited and watched the kettle as it boiled, and as their visitor filled two mugs, handing one to McIlhenney as if it was a peace offering.

The trio took seats at the small table near the entrance, Pye securing the door with a bolt.

‘Right,’ said Martin briskly and almost cheerfully, as if the confrontation had never happened. ‘I believe it’s possible that the security services were involved in Ainsley Glover’s death.’

‘What?’ McIlhenney gasped. ‘Have you been reading one of his books?’

‘I can understand that reaction, but hear me out. I’ve never mentioned this before, probably because I was slightly embarrassed by the fact, being a serving police officer, but Ainsley Glover was a distant relation of mine. I know that he’s always been regarded as very much an Edinburgh toff, and mostly he was. His father was Professor of Medical Law at the university, but his mother was from Glasgow, and she was my mother’s cousin. She was older than my mum, just as Ainsley was older than me, so they were never that close, but they’d meet up at family events. The first time I ever came across Ainsley was at his sister’s wedding. I was about fourteen at the time, and so he’d have been late twenties. He was a nice bloke, distinctive-looking even then, chubby, and with that fly-away hair of his. His wife, Joyce, she was about the same size as him that night; she was pregnant with their first kid.’

‘I know he was widowed,’ said McIlhenney. ‘What happened to her?’

‘She died of viral meningitis, in her thirties. I believe that’s when Ainsley started to write, as a form of therapy.’

‘What was his profession before that?’

‘He was an accountant at the beginning, but he did some part-time lecturing as well. After Joyce died, he concentrated on that, and became head of the accountancy school at Heriot-Watt. I didn’t see him again for a few years after the wedding, not until I was at university myself, and playing first-team rugby. We had a game at Goldenacre one Saturday; I was getting a bit of a reputation by then, and he turned up with his kids. He hung around afterwards, and said hello when I came out. I won’t say he was a regular attender, but he was in the stand on the odd occasion after that, at Edinburgh games, usually on his own. He knew fuck all about the game, but that’s true of quite a few people who call themselves rugby followers. After I joined the police, moved through here and started playing for the Accies, I didn’t have to jump straight on the bus home when the game was finished. If I saw him there, we’d have a couple of pints in the clubhouse afterwards. At least I would; Ainsley had to keep off the beer, not so much for his weight but because of his condition. Did you know that, by the way? That he was diabetic?’

‘Yes,’ McIlhenney confirmed casually, ‘we knew that.’

‘Fine. Anyway that was the extent of it. I stopped playing regularly because of the job, and so I stopped seeing Ainsley socially, until I got to the age when I found myself going to funerals as often as weddings. I saw him at his mother’s send-off, but there wasn’t much said between us that day. The only other time. . that’s right,’ he exclaimed, his eyes glazing for a second as if he was examining a mental picture, ‘was when I met him by accident in the Café Royal bar, about fifteen years ago. He was with Joyce and another couple; it must have been just before she died. I had just made CID, and I was with Bob; he was a DCI then on the drugs squad. Ainsley came over, I introduced them. . and that’s when Inspector Walter Strachan was born.’

‘You are joking!’ the superintendent gasped.

‘No way am I joking; Strachan is based on Bob Skinner. He doesn’t look like him, but that’s deliberate. If you think about it, though, the basic connection’s obvious: they’re both hard bastards from the west of Scotland. I went to one of Ainsley’s events in the Edinburgh Bookshop about ten years ago, once he had a few books out there. When he read from his latest, it was Bob’s voice he was using for Strachan. I asked him about it when he was done and I had him in a quiet corner. He owned up to it. The popular belief is that it was Haggerty, and he didn’t discourage that, but it wasn’t.’

‘Does Bob know?’

Martin shook his head. ‘I promised Ainsley I’d never tell him. . and I want the same undertaking from you guys, even though the poor bloke’s dead.’

‘You’ve got it. That night in the Bookshop, was that the last time you saw him?’

‘All but two. I saw him at another funeral, then I had a call from him a few months ago, middle of April. He asked if he could come to see me. I was taken by surprise, not just by the call, but because he didn’t sound himself. Now the truth is, I didn’t fancy him turning up at the office in Dundee, for the same reason that I never spoke of our relationship before now. I was a bit embarrassed by it, and I reckoned it might get me a bit of ribbing from colleagues, if they knew I was related to Inspector Strachan. Ainsley said he’d rather not come to the house, so we wound up meeting for lunch in Rufflets Hotel, just outside St Andrews; that’s about as discreet as you can get.’

‘I know,’ McIlhenney admitted. ‘Lou took me there for a weekend break, when she found out she was pregnant.’

‘Right, you get the picture. This was midweek, so we had the dining room to ourselves, apart from two elderly American couples who were sat well away from us. I should tell you that although I kept quiet about it, I’d been following Ainsley’s career over the years, pleased for him as his reputation grew, so I knew what he was up to. I knew about the politics as well, that he’d set himself the objective of getting Trident out of Scotland. I read an interview with him in the Saltire, where he said that he reckoned he had a far more realistic chance of achieving that than any of the rabble-rousers or any. . and here I’m paraphrasing as accurately as I can. . of the born-again disarmers who thought that blocking the public highway was a sensible form of protestation.’

‘Guess who he was talking about there?’ said Pye.

‘Bruce Anderson,’ Martin countered. ‘I’d guessed that even before he told me. I’d only ever heard Ainsley speak kindly of people before, so it was bit of a shock to the system, hearing him describe the guy as an arrogant self-promoting bullshitter. That’s what he did, though. He said that normally he wouldn’t be bothered with him, only he expected to be fighting him for a seat in the Scottish Parliament pretty soon.’

‘It didn’t work out that way, though,’ McIlhenney pointed out.

‘No, it didn’t. The local Labour Party in Dunbartonshire insisted on one of theirs fighting the seat with the Trident base in it, so did the Nationalists, and that made it easy for Ainsley. He was afraid he’d have lost to Anderson.’ Martin paused. ‘But that wasn’t all he was afraid of. We were on the dessert by the time he got round to it, and even then I could sense that he was hesitant. Finally he took a deep breath and asked, “Andy, does your remit cover Special Branch?” I had to think about that one, but then I realised that he wasn’t the sort of guy to ask something like that out of the blue, unless he was pretty damn sure of the answer. So I told him that it did, and that quite a bit of my job involved overseeing covert surveillance on potential security risks. “Of which I may be one, it seems.” That’s what he said next. I could have cut him off at that point, but I didn’t. Instead I asked him what made him think that, trying to take him seriously. Christ, Neil, you know that if a tenth of the people who reckon they’re being watched actually were, there would be no unemployment, all the jobless would be in MI5, and on overtime at that. Plus, the guy was a crime writer, with all sorts of plots and sub-plots going on in his head. He was pretty rational, though. He took a letter from his pocket and handed it to me. I didn’t recognise the stamp; it was from his publisher in Prague, he said. He’d slit it open with a blade, but he asked me to look at the flap. I did; it wasn’t quite square on, as if it had been peeled back very gently, so as not to tear it, and then put back in place. He said that’s how it had arrived and told me that he’d taken it to a lady friend of his at Heriot-Watt, in the chemical engineering department, and had asked her to look at it. She tested it, and reported back that she had found two different sorts of adhesive. And she’d done more, she’d lifted three different thumbprints from the letter inside. One would have been his, the second his publisher’s, but the third? I asked him whether it could have been a secretary, but he said no, that the Czechs had a very small office, with part-time helpers, and they did their own mail.’

‘Hold on,’ McIlhenney exclaimed. ‘This guy lived in Edinburgh. If he was under surveillance. . Dottie Shannon and Tarvil Singh might keep an eye on him, but it wouldn’t extend to opening his mail.’

Martin held up a hand. ‘I’ll get there, Neil. That letter was a month old when Ainsley gave it to me. Since then he’d been having all his mail examined in the same way, and half of it appeared to have been opened, everything but the junk and the official mail.’

‘What did he want you to do about it?’

‘He didn’t ask me to do anything about it. He just gave me an envelope; he said it contained a list of names, and he wanted me to keep a copy, in case anything ever happened to him. I’ve got it in the safe in my office.’

‘But did you look into the surveillance? Did you speak to our people, or to Bob?’

‘That’s what I should have done,’ the DCC admitted, ‘but I didn’t. Instead I decided to keep it in the family; I looked into it myself. I spent a couple of nights watching Ainsley’s place, but from a distance; it didn’t take me long to spot them, and to know that they weren’t from any Special Branch units I know. They were using at least three vehicles. I took the numbers, ran the plates, and guess what? All of them were phoney; they all went back to cars that had been written off in insurance claims. That’s when I started to take my distant cousin’s predicament more seriously.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Pye muttered. He was visibly shaken. ‘They were operating on our patch, behind our backs?’

‘Yes. Now you’re going to ask me again whether I alerted anybody at Fettes at that point, and the answer’s still no. The next thing I did was lean on an old source in BT. After a bit of heavy persuasion, he did some digging and told me that there was a tap on Ainsley’s phone, but that nobody was saying who had authorised it. There was only one place to go after that. I have my own contacts within the security services, from my time there and from my present position. I used them. I went to a section head I know, only two levels below Amanda Dennis, told him what I had and said that, one, the guy was a relation, two, he was on to them, and three, he was high-profile. He called me back within an hour and swore to me, as one officer to another, that it had nothing to do with them, or MI6 either.’

‘And you believed him?’

‘Yes, I did, and for sure once I had a call from Amanda Dennis herself a bit later on, confirming what I’d been told.’

‘And you reckon now that they were lying?’

‘Maybe, but not necessarily. At the time, I started looking in another direction. I was beginning to think that maybe there was something criminal going on. I was at the stage where I was going to talk to Bob, but before I got there, I decided to have another go at my BT source. So I went to see him and I told him that I wanted to know who had set up that phone tap and no fucking messing. I gave him two days to get back to me or he was getting burned.’

‘And did he?’

‘No, but somebody else did. Turned up in my bloody office, he did, and told my secretary that no, he didn’t have an appointment but he had come from London on a matter of shared interest, and he hoped that I would have the time to meet him. He introduced himself as Mr Coben, but if that’s his real name, then I’m Dorothy L. Sayers. He didn’t mess about. He told me very politely that he was from the intelligence community, and that I was stepping on something outside my remit. He said that, yes, Ainsley Glover was on their watch list, and that he would remain so. With Scotland entering a phase of, as he put it, electoral instability, there was great concern internationally about the security of the deterrent. If he had simply been one of those protesters he detested, like Anderson, they wouldn’t have been so worried about him, but it was his links to other countries, through his work, that had marked him out, and that the situation was being monitored internationally. So would I please back off and let them do their job. At that moment in time, Coben said — and do his words come back to haunt me now — he wasn’t in any jeopardy. On the other hand, I had a career, a wife and child to think about, and I would do well to keep all three in mind.’

‘Jesus, Andy,’ McIlhenney gasped. ‘How did you react to that?’

‘In my mind, I picked him out of his chair and stuck the head on him. I was so steaming mad inside I almost did that very thing, but in the end I kept it to telling him to get the fuck out of my office. All he did was smile, tell me, “Take my message to heart, sir,” and walk out.’

‘And did you? Take his message to heart?’

Martin nodded. ‘Oh yes, I did. What else was I to do? If it had just been the spooks, I’d probably have taken it to ACPOS, but the military, they’re not subject to the normal rules. So I told Ainsley that there had been a pilferer on the Royal Mail and that they’d been dealt with, guessing that the watchers would be more careful with his letters in future.’ He sighed. ‘And that was that,’ he said. ‘I hadn’t thought much about it since then; not till this morning.’

The superintendent leaned back in his chair. ‘And what about us? You’re suggesting that someone on our own side, national team, that is, might have had Glover killed. What are we supposed to do about that? How are we supposed to investigate it?’

‘I wish I could tell you.’

‘Never mind us, are you going to tell the boss now? Are we? Jesus, is there any question? Now that you’ve told us this story, we have to pass it on to him, even if you don’t.’

The Tayside deputy chief constable ran his thick fingers through his hair. ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ he said, ‘and I have a problem with it, a big one at that. It’s why I’ve said nothing about this to anyone, until now. If you or I do tell him, what’s he going to do? Keep it to himself, or tell Aileen? He may feel that he has to. If he does that. . I know her, and she won’t sit still for it. Lads, these people operate on a need-to-know basis. I don’t believe for a minute that Ainsley’s surveillance was signed off by ministers. But Aileen’s a minister, First Minister at that, and although defence isn’t in her remit, Scotland as a whole is. Even if Coben’s team had nothing to do with the murder, she will go straight to Downing Street, and the consequences. . they could be unthinkable.’