Fatal Last Words

Sixty-three

‘Bob,’ said Piers Frame, ‘I’ve told you. Military intelligence deny all knowledge of this man Coben.’

‘I’m sure they do, and I’m inclined to believe them, for once in my life. But he exists, Piers. Andy Martin’s not an excitable type, and he never makes a mistake over a name. If he says that’s what the guy called himself, you can bank on it.’

‘But he’s irrelevant now, isn’t he? The man Glover is sadly no longer with us, and therefore this Coben will have no interest in Martin.’

‘Unless he really didn’t take to being offered the window exit from his office, and decided that he’d exact some form of retribution. Or unless he decided simply to discredit him, as a precaution.’

‘Are you saying he has done?’

‘I’m saying that somebody has. It involves Martin, it involves my older daughter and I’ve been stuck right in the middle of it.’ He described the sending of the graphic and compromising photographs to the media, and their disruption of his press briefing.

‘I see,’ Frame murmured. ‘Yes, I can understand now why you’re following this line. However,’ he drawled, ‘hasn’t your interest in the fellow, and your pursuit of him, turned into a personal vendetta, old chap?’

‘Certainly,’ Skinner agreed. ‘I’m looking forward to spending a few minutes with the man in an interview room. But there is an overiding professional need to find him. The MoD spooks were watching Glover, in a routine way. This man goes to see Martin to warn him off, goes to the length of threatening his family, and yet you tell me he’s not a spook himself. If that’s so, it suggests to me that he was involved with Glover in another context, and puts him right at the top of the list in terms of murder suspects. Now, with the second death, if I can connect Henry Mount to Coben-’

‘Mount? Yes, I saw a note about that in a Foreign Office bulletin this morning. Are you telling me you can link a murder in Edinburgh with a suspected shooting in Melbourne?’

‘We have done. We know how he was killed, and if I’m right about this Coben, we probably know who did it.’

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘I want you to trawl through the entire intelligence community until you find something that connects with this man, or with the name. I want you to look under every one of the stones where these people hide, and get me a lead to him.’

Frame sighed. ‘All right, Bob, I’ll do that for you. If I refused you’d probably go over my head anyway, and get what you want. However, it does seem to me that if this person is behind your two killings, then he’s exposed himself rather recklessly with this stunt involving your daughter.’

‘You can say that again, Piers, because by doing that he’s got my keen personal attention. He may think that I’ll be flying a desk for the rest of my career, and that I’m no longer a threat. If he does, he’s got it wrong. . and if he looks at my record, he’ll find that when it comes to getting my man, even the fucking Mounties have nothing on me.’