Fatal Last Words

Eighty-three

He was waiting at the top of the stone staircase as his guests were shown up from the vestibule at street level. ‘Randy, Denzel,’ he exclaimed, ‘it’s good to see you. A bit of bad news, though,’ he continued as he shook hands with the Book Festival director and her partner. ‘Aileen’s been caught up in some unbreakable government business, last-minute stuff, some European crisis, and it happened too late to call you and postpone.’

‘Oh, what a disappointment,’ said Chandler.

‘I’ve found a substitute, though,’ said Skinner as he showed them into the drawing room, with its view of Charlotte Square Gardens, and the tents and pavilions that covered it. ‘My friend Neil was in the vicinity, so I’ve co-opted him to fill the empty chair. You’ve probably met him: Superintendent McIlhenney.’ The big detective stood at the window; he nodded as the newcomers entered. ‘You’re doubly honoured, you know,’ their host laughed. ‘Any other Thursday, this guy and I would be running around at North Berwick sports centre, kicking a football with a crowd of like-minded idiots.’

‘Really?’ Randall Mosley exclaimed. ‘When Aileen told me that, I thought she was joking.’

‘Hell, no! There is life after forty, I promise.’

‘Yes,’ the director agreed, ‘but you tire more easily.’

‘I thought you were still short of the milestone,’ McIlhenney remarked as he handed each guest a glass of cava.

‘I’ve got Denzel’s word for it,’ she replied lightly.

‘So,’ Skinner continued, ‘how’s the Bookfest going? Are you getting back to normal after Sunday morning’s unfortunate events?’

She frowned. ‘There is no normal at the Festival,’ she told him. ‘That’s the big discovery I’ve made in my first year in the job.’

‘First of many, everybody hopes; I hear things around town, you know, all of them good, in your case.’

‘We’ll see. It’s a hell of a job, that is for certain. Poor Ainsley; what happened to him was tragic, but it fits under the unwritten law, that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. On the same morning that he was found, my Nobel candidate, my prize attraction, cancelled on me. I had to fill that hole, as well as the one left by Ainsley’s death. Now Fred Noble’s uncertain about participating because with Henry Mount being killed, he fears he may be next.’

‘You can relax on that score. He won’t be.’

She looked at him, curiosity in her eyes. ‘You can say that for certain?’

‘Sure.’ Skinner leaned against the fireplace set in the westward wall of the classic Georgian room. ‘He’s under round-the-clock protection, and everything that goes into his house is inspected by our people. Nobody’s going to get to him, directly as with Mr Glover, or indirectly as with Henry Mount.’ He glanced at Chandler. ‘You know their work, Denzel?’ he asked, then answered. ‘What am I thinking of? Of course you do. Your other half runs the Festival, and we’re talking about two of the city’s most distinguished writers. . no, three, adding in Fred Noble.’ He paused. ‘But you’d know them anyway, without that; you’re a student of literature, aren’t you?’

The man nodded, his eyes a little disconcerted. ‘Actually no, it was post-war European history.’

Skinner winked at him. ‘Confession,’ he said. ‘Aileen makes me read up on our guests when we’re having dinner parties, but I was a bit busy before this one so I must have got mixed up. Mind you, I’m sure I’m right about your knowledge of contemporary crime fiction. It’s de rigeur these days to be up with that stuff.’

‘Yes,’ Chandler admitted. ‘I confess I am an aficionado.’ He glanced at his partner. ‘As you said, it comes with the territory.’

‘So you’ll appreciate the irony in the way those two men died. Killed in ways that were drawn from their own stories.’

‘No!’ the man exclaimed. ‘Was that what happened?’

‘Yup. It’s a secret from the media, of course, but I can share it with you and Randy. Glover was killed with glucose, and Henry Mount by a bullet, planted in one of his cigars.’

‘That’s right,’ McIlhenney chuckled. ‘Now, or so my people tell me, Fred Noble won’t set foot outside his front door, not even to the Oxford, just in case he’s been hypnotised and told to chuck himself under a lorry, or whatever.’

‘You get the irony, Denzel,’ said Skinner, ‘don’t you? Glover and Mount, each. .’ he hesitated as if searching for words. ‘Oh, damn it, what’s the phrase? Shakespeare.’

‘Hoist by his own petard,’ said Chandler.

‘That’s it. Macbeth.’

‘Hamlet, actually.’

‘OK. Wrong play, wrong royal, wrong country, but you get the point. It takes a certain type of mind to conceive of something like that, and then to follow it through.’

‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ the man agreed. ‘In your career, you can’t have come across too many like this fellow.’

‘Too right,’ Skinner conceded. ‘Bastard nearly got away with it too.’ He let the words hang in the air for a second, then turned to Randall Mosley. ‘Before you came to Scotland, you two were in Europe, weren’t you?’ he asked, smiling.

She nodded, as if the exchange had passed her by. ‘Yes, that’s right, I worked for the European Commission, in the culture section, on the contemporary literature side. Denzel was living in Brussels at the time; we met at a reception.’

‘And found you had a common interest?’

She laughed. ‘In sex, mainly. I fancied him from the first.’

‘You mean it wasn’t his pen that won you over,’ McIlhenney murmured, sipping his cava.

‘Not at first.’ She looked at him, wickedly. ‘I admit it; it was his sword.’

‘They say the pen is mightier,’ Chandler drawled in his lightly transatlantic accent, ‘but when you put it to the test. .’

The two detectives exchanged the briefest of glances. ‘What was your field when you were in Brussels?’ Skinner asked him. ‘Randy told one of our colleagues that you’re a ghost writer. Is that what you did then?’

‘In a manner of speaking. I did a couple of biographies, one of Tito and one of Karadzic. Didn’t make any money, though. That’s why I took to ghosting; it pays very well.’

‘Will the Lord Elmore book be a money-spinner, do you think?’

Chandler seemed to lean away from him; taken aback, literally, by the question. ‘It won’t be huge, but even if it doesn’t earn out the advance I’ll be happy enough.’

‘How do you think it would have dovetailed with the one that Glover and Mount were working on?’

The writer looked at him, blankly. ‘Not at all. Why should it? They did fiction.’

‘But not exclusively, as it turns out. They were planning a factual work on the atrocities committed by a Serbian general, Bogdan Tadic, known as the Cleanser. You must have heard of him, surely. Lord Elmore was one of the judges at his trial.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard of him; that episode won’t be in the book, though. Lord Elmore’s bound by confidentiality. Even if he wasn’t, he fears for the safety of the witnesses.’

‘With some justification. I don’t think Ainsley and Henry did though; they were driven by Henry’s outrage over what had happened, and the fact that it was being covered up. Tell me,’ he asked, ‘how did you hear about Claus’s book?’

‘Initially, through me,’ Randall Mosley told him. ‘I met Lady Elmore in Brussels, just as her term as an MEP was ending. She was on a literature committee. To tell you the truth, she’s the reason I’m in my job. She’s on the Book Festival board, and she supported my application.’

‘Why did you think of applying in the first place?’

‘I can’t recall for sure. We both felt it was time we moved on, Leona mentioned the job. . I suppose it was a joint decision that I go for it.’

‘I see. One more question, Denzel. . I’m sorry if this is beginning to sound like an interrogation. . do you believe that Frankie Coben is dead?’

‘What?’ Chandler gasped.

‘Come on,’ Skinner persisted, ‘you know about Tadic, you must know about Coben, the general’s associate, almost his alter ego. The Cleanser was an animal, practically a fucking cannibal. Coben was very different, Serbian mother, North American father, had a university education then put it to use killing Muslims and gypsies.’

‘No,’ Chandler exclaimed, ‘I don’t. This really is an interrogation. What are you suggesting?’

‘I’m suggesting nothing,’ said Skinner easily. ‘I’m telling you what we know: Frankie Coben was reported killed in a missile strike seven years ago. Only that report was wrong. I’ve been into your background, Denzel; I can’t find anything about you that’s more than six years old, before the time you showed up in Brussels.’ He turned to Mosley. ‘Randy, care to fill in the blanks?’ She stared at him, eyes wide open, but said nothing. ‘Denzel, where were you before that?’ he persisted.

‘I was drunk,’ he said, his voice a whisper. ‘I was alcoholic from the age of twenty-five to thirty-three. I bummed my way around Europe then I straightened out.’

‘That’s funny; those were the years when Coben was killing people in the Balkans. And now he’s killing them again. We know that he’s in Edinburgh. We know that he killed Glover, personally. We know that he used an associate to buy a box of cigars, that he altered one, very cleverly, and then had that box sent to Henry Mount, as a gift from the Edinburgh Book Festival. We know that before he came to this city he killed two of the three witnesses in General Tadic’s first trial, and that he came here to find out the whereabouts of the third, through the person most likely to know, Lord Elmore. Coben’s arrogant, unbelievably so; he devised provocative, boastful ways to kill, ways that said, “Look how clever I am.” He even had his associate use his name, as if to proclaim his presence. Interesting, isn’t it, Denzel?’

Chandler’s eyes were crazed as he backed away from him; he glanced at the door, only to see McIlhenney’s massive frame leaning against it.

‘But then there was a twist,’ Skinner continued. ‘Out of the blue, just as it became known that you were doing the Elmore book, Coben learned from Ainsley Glover that he was also interested in the Tadic case, and that he and Henry Mount were as keen as he was to find the witnesses. So what did Coben do? He became the third person in their project, probably feeding them scraps to encourage them to cooperate with him, and he waited until they came up with the information he was after: the whereabouts of the last and vital witness, right on our own doorstep. When he had that,’ the chief constable said, slowly, ‘Henry and Ainsley had become witnesses too, along with his associate, Ed Collins, Ainsley’s daughter’s greedy grasping creep of a boyfriend. So they went, in a way designed to make us simple plods think that we had a serial killer preying on crime writers, even down to the clue left beside Collins’ body, after he’d killed him.’ He snatched a pen from his pocket and tossed it to Chandler; he caught it, in a reflex action. ‘Is that yours?’ he asked.

The cornered man stared at it. ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

‘Sure it is; I knew that already. You stayed in that hotel two months ago, on a trip to The Hague with Lord Elmore, and like everyone does, you brought the pen from your room home as a souvenir.’ He fell silent, staring coldly at Chandler as he stood, dumbly helpless. ‘You brought it home,’ he repeated, ‘and stuck it in a mug on your desk with all the others.’ And then he glanced to his side, at Mosley, herself seemingly transfixed. ‘Esam li dobro shvatio, Frankie?’ he said.

‘Jesi,’ she replied. And then her mouth dropped open. And then she gasped. And then she launched herself at the door.

She kicked out at McIlhenney, expertly, but he was faster, much faster, than she had expected. He blocked her strike, swept her feet from under her, then followed her down, pinning her to the floor. ‘Help me secure her, boss,’ he said. ‘This lady’s dangerous and we don’t want to wind up missing any vital parts.’

‘Absolutely.’ Skinner seized her by both arms, lifted her into the air, then lowered her into a chair. The superintendent fastened her wrists, tightly, to its legs with white plastic restraints. ‘I used that language trick on a guy a few months ago,’ he told her. ‘It worked just as well this time.’

‘What did you say to her?’ McIlhenney asked.

‘Do I understand it properly? Did I get it right? And she forgot herself and said, “Yes.” Or maybe she knew by then that I had.’

‘What, wha. .’ Denzel Chandler gasped, behind them.

As he straightened, the chief constable took three sheets of paper from within his jacket and handed them to him. ‘Your client got these for me: Lord Elmore. Faxed copies of the personal file of Francesca Coben, showing next of kin, and her Serbian military identity card, complete with photograph. She’s changed a lot, but her skin tone’s still the same; and so is her DNA, which we can compare with that of her father, Garland Mosley, a black American soldier who knocked up her Serbian mother, Mira Coben, on a leave in Germany back in the sixties, and who’s still alive, in a retirement home in Dayton, Ohio.’

‘I never knew,’ the man protested. ‘I never knew any of this.’

‘You will have to convince us,’ Skinner told him. ‘We need to question you further, to be sure. But you’re part of the way there, because it’s pretty clear that she was prepared to let you take the hit, to let us go on believing you were Coben, until you were on your way to the nick, and she was out of here, on her way to being long gone. That’s why I gave you that going-over, when I knew it was her. But I confess that I didn’t until I saw those papers. I really did think it was you.’ He glanced at her. ‘Sure, her background is like yours; she goes back seven years, and then there’s no trace of Randall Mosley, but the blockers for me were, one, that she found Ainsley’s body and, two, that message he sent, that last email.’ He took the wireless device from his pocket. ‘It said, “randy yurt dying”, just those three words, and he sent it to her. So, I had to tell myself, she couldn’t have done it, because Glover saw his killer, and he sent her his plea for help. Understand?’

‘I understand nothing any more,’ Chandler sighed.

‘Well, now I do.’ He waved the device in the air. ‘I had a look at the email directory stored in here. The next entry after “Mosley, Randall” is “Mount, Henry”. It wasn’t a plea for help, it was a warning to his pal, only the poor sod pressed the wrong button, and he sent it to Randy by mistake. She must have crapped herself when she found it in her mailbox next morning. Her first instinct must have been to delete it, but no, she really is clever. She realised that the original, and its destination, would still be on Glover’s machine. If she’d made that one, tiny, understandable mistake, she’d have been blown there and then, but she didn’t. Instead, she left it there, she went along to the yurt, with a witness, Richards, and they discovered the body. Ainsley would have appreciated that, professionally, and so would Henry. When was the last time you read a murder mystery, Denzel, where the perpetrator actually discovers the body, right at the start? No wonder it’s taken us this long to get to her.’ He nodded to McIlhenney, then watched as the superintendent twisted Coben’s antique chair around to face him. ‘Mr Chandler, you’ll need to come with us for further questioning. Francesca Coben, also known as Randall Mosley, I am arresting you for the murders of Ainsley Glover, Henry Mount, Edward Collins, and Mirko Andelič, also known as Asmir Musta-’

‘What?’ Her half-scream, half-laugh, interrupted him. ‘Are you telling me that Mirko is dead?’

‘You know I am,’ he told her. ‘You killed him on Sunday evening, at around about eleven.’

‘Oh no, I didn’t,’ she declared. ‘I was in Lord and Lady Elmore’s house with Denzel until ten forty-five on Sunday. We went there for drinks after our last event. Ask my poor dupe, he’ll confirm it.’

The police officers looked at Chandler; he nodded confirmation.

‘See,’ she said. ‘I didn’t kill him, but I bless the man who did. The last witness is dead, Tadic is free, my general is free, my lover is free. Now it’s his turn to get me out of jail.’