Fatal Last Words

Seventy-six

‘I’m sorry,’ said Colin Mount. ‘Mum’s asleep; she had a bad night, so the doctor called again and gave her a pretty strong sedative. I could wake her if it’s really necessary, but I don’t know how much you’d get out of her. I can talk to you, though; I’m on compassionate leave from the station. They’ve been very good about it.’

‘Then let’s you and I have a chat first,’ Regan told him, ‘and hope we don’t have to bring your mother into it. Yesterday, she mentioned a project that your father was working on, something away from his usual thing. Can you tell me anything about it?’

The younger man exhaled loudly. ‘This is going to make me sound like a bloody awful agent, but I can’t. He was involved in it with Ainsley, though, that much I do know. It was a joint venture, and there may even have been a third person, but I do not know what they were doing. He never dropped any hints.’

‘None at all? Do you know what sort of research he was doing?’

Mount shook his head. ‘Not really. Occasionally I’d hear him on the phone to Ainsley, but I couldn’t decipher what they were saying. . not that I was trying to. My father often chose to keep me in the dark about his fiction as a plot developed, so why should this have been any different?’

‘Think hard, did you overhear anything at all?’

‘I heard names mentioned, foreign names, but you could quiz me all day and all night and I know that none of them will come back to me.’

‘OK, but if you do have a flashback recollection, I want you to let me know soonest, OK?’

‘Sure.’

‘Now,’ Regan continued, ‘your father was a retired diplomat.’

‘Yes. He spent quite a bit of his career abroad.’

‘Your mother mentioned Venezuela, and Berlin during the Cold War.’

‘Those were two of his more glamorous postings, yes, but others were more mundane. Neither Ireland nor Iceland were a barrel of fun and laughter.’

‘What about Yugoslavia? Was he ever there?’

‘Not on a posting, no. But when he came off the road, so to speak, he was an undersecretary in the section of the Foreign Office that kept an eye on the place. I was only a kid then, but I know it affected him very badly. There was some terrible stuff going on there, ethnic cleansing, real atrocities. He’d come home from the office some nights and wouldn’t say a word to my mother or me. If you’d known my father, you’d have understood how untypical that was, how worrying it was. Even if he hadn’t sold his first two books, I think he’d have taken the early retirement package when he did.’

‘I see. Colin, this project, could it have been related to Yugoslavia, or to what it became?’

Mount considered the question for a few moments. ‘If I said yes,’ he ventured ‘I’d only be. .’ he stopped in mid-sentence, ‘except, there was that visit to England. A couple of weeks ago he went away for the day, in the car. I asked him where he was going; all he said was that there was a man he needed to see. “About a dog?” I asked him. He smiled and said that was right. He didn’t say anything when I saw him next morning, but I did notice something on his desk. It was a photo pass, it said, “Visitor. HMP Brankholme”, wherever that is, and it had the date on it.’

‘Would it still be in his office?’

‘No. When he caught me looking at it, he picked it up, winked at me, and put it in the shredder.’

‘OK, that’s worth knowing. We’ll be able to check out who’s there. By the way, Brankholme’s in Darlington.’ He paused. ‘My last question,’ he said. ‘We’ve confirmed that your father was killed, as we thought, by a method lifted from one of his own books, a bullet or similar projectile planted in one of his cigars.’

‘He made it easy for whoever did it,’ the younger Mount sighed. ‘Everybody in the bloody world. . the literary world at any rate. . knew that he smoked nothing but those La Glorias.’

‘So it seems. But we know where the cigar that killed him was bought: a specialist shop in Edinburgh. It was one of a box of twenty-five, and we know that your father didn’t make the purchase himself.’

‘No, it was a present. He told me so when I saw it, down in the office.’

‘Did he mention the name Coben?’

The dead author’s son looked at him, blankly. ‘No, he said it was a gift from the Edinburgh Book Festival; a token of their thanks.’