Pray for the Dying

Fifty-Five

‘It’s bloody warm in this city,’ Lowell Payne remarked, as they stood on the pavement outside Thames House.

‘It can be in the summer,’ Skinner conceded. ‘I have this theory that all big cities generate their own heat. Mind you, it can be cold here too. I remember, oh, must be twenty years ago now, standing here on Millbank one evening in February, with a wind whistling up the Thames that felt as if it had come all the way from Siberia. That’s still the coldest I’ve ever been in my life.’

‘Are we going to get a chilly reception in here, d’ you think?’

‘No, I don’t, but things may cool down quite a bit once we get going.’

‘Who are we meeting?’

‘I’m not absolutely certain. As things stand, our appointment is with Amanda Dennis, the deputy director of the service. Whether she has anyone with her, that may depend on whether she guesses why we’re here.’

‘What’s my role?’

‘You’re a witness,’ Skinner told him. ‘Did you do what I suggested?’

‘Tell Jean, you mean?’ Payne frowned. ‘No, I didn’t, I’m sorry. You’ve known her for longer than I have, so I shouldn’t have to tell you that if I just happened to mention casually that you and I were off to a top-level meeting with MI5 but I couldn’t tell her what it was about, she’d have gone into full worry mode, and not slept a wink. Did you tell Sarah?’

‘Of course. Sarah gave up worrying about me years ago.’

‘Did you tell her what the meeting’s about?’

‘No, and she didn’t ask. She’s used to me moving in mysterious ways. She calls me God, sometimes.’

The DCI grinned and shook his head. ‘What is it with you two?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Honestly?’

‘Always. I’d expect nothing else.’

‘I think that Aileen getting caught out with Joey Morocco came in very handy for both of you.’

‘What does Jean think?’ Bob asked.

‘There’s nothing for her to think about,’ Lowell told him, ‘as far as you and Sarah are concerned, not yet, but she’ll be fine. They didn’t know it at the time, but I heard her and Alex compare notes one day. Neither of them were too keen on Aileen.’

‘I know that now.’

‘I’ve got nothing against her, mind, but on the two occasions that I’ve met Sarah, I thought that she was a sensational woman and that the two of you together just filled the whole room.’

‘Maybe we did at that, Lowell. We lost our way for a while, that was all. I hope we’ve found it again.’

‘What’s made the difference?’

‘I’ve stopped living in the past. Recently, somebody very close to me told me that for the last twenty and a bit years, since Myra was killed in that bloody car, I’ve been in denial, that I’ve never accepted it, never moved on. I’ve come to accept that’s true. It drove Sarah and me apart, and with Aileen. . I made myself see Myra in her, when in fact they couldn’t be more different. Myra was wild, self-indulgent and she lived her life on the spur of the moment. She was also promiscuous, as Jean may have told you, more than I ever was, even when I was single.

‘Aileen, on the other hand, is one of the most calculating people I have ever known. I don’t mean that unkindly, not any more, but everything she does is to a plan, and everyone around her must conform to it, even me.

‘She supports police unification for two reasons. One, she does believe in it, but two, she thought that it would make me leave the force and help her achieve her real ambitions, which don’t lie in Scotland, but down here, in Westminster.

‘I’m sure she’ll get there, but not with my help. As for me, as was said to me, my soul’s been broken, but Sarah’s helping me fix it, and I feel more at peace with myself than I have in years.’ He checked his watch. ‘And I’ll be even more so when we’ve done our business here. Are you all set?’

‘Yes, I’m ready.’

‘Good. Come on then, I like to be bang on time when I visit this place.’

They entered the headquarters of the Security Service through a modest door to the right of the building’s great archway, and stepped up to a reception desk that might have belonged to any civil service department. Skinner announced them to one of the uniformed staff. When he told the man that he had an appointment with Mrs Dennis, there was a subtle change in his attitude. He checked a screen that the police officers could not see, then nodded.

‘Yes, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘I’ll let the DD know you’re here and she’ll send someone down to collect you.’ He made a quick phone call, then filled in two slips, which he inserted in plastic cases and handed them over, one to each. ‘These must be surrendered on leaving. Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll check you in through our electronic security. It’s just like an airport, really.’

‘I know,’ Skinner said. ‘But I have a pacemaker so you’ll have to pat me down.’

‘That won’t be necessary, Rashid,’ a woman called out.

The chief constable looked over towards a line of lift doors and saw Amanda Dennis approach. ‘Oh, but it will,’ he insisted. ‘I’m not having your lot plant a gun on me when we get upstairs then say I carried it in.’

She laughed. ‘Damn it! There goes Plan A.’

The deputy director of MI5 was not what Lowell Payne had been expecting. In his mind he had pictured Dame Judi Dench, or someone like her. Instead he saw someone who was around fifty, with dark, well-cut hair and sparkling eyes that had none of the chilly aloofness that were a feature of her film and television equivalents.

‘Hi, Mandy,’ Skinner greeted her when the security search was over and he and Payne had retrieved their bags from x-ray. ‘Good to see you; this is DCI Payne, Lowell, my sidekick, but you’ll know that by now.’ He kissed her on the cheek. ‘You’re looking better than ever. Still finding time for the toy boy?’

She winked. ‘Shows, does it?’

‘Does he still think you work in a flower shop?’

‘No, it closed down. Now he thinks I’m a proof-reader in a law firm.’ She grinned. ‘Actually he knows exactly what I do. He’s a bright enough chap to read the parliamentary reports where my name crops up occasionally. You know how it is, Bob. It’s the junior ranks who have to be anonymous. Thanks to John bloody Major, the rest of us can’t.’

‘I know,’ he sympathised, as they stepped into a lift. ‘The Don Sturgeons of this world have to be protected, but you and Hubert can walk around with targets on your backs.’

‘Who on earth is Don Sturgeon?’ she remarked, but did not wait for an answer. ‘As for Hubert, why do you want to see me? He’s the director, not me.’

‘He’s also a prat, a Home Office toady dropped in here because the Prime Minister of the day decided the place needed some new blood, after that wee scandal you and I uncovered a couple of years back. He may have been the transfusion, but you’re still the heartbeat.’

The elevator stopped and they stepped out, then along a corridor. Mrs Dennis unlocked her office door and followed them into the room. It was oak-panelled and grandly furnished, in contrast to the utilitarian style of the reception area.

‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘We’ll use the conference table, but before we start, Bob, I assume you’d like coffee.’

He held up a hand. ‘No thanks, Amanda, I’ve signed the coffee pledge, and Lowell here had a Starbucks on the way up from Victoria. By the way,’ he added, ‘he was propositioned by a whore, sorry, that’s non-PC, by a sex worker in his hotel last night. Very English, could even have been public school. Three hundred quid. Isn’t that right, Lowell?’

‘Yes indeed, Chief. She said it was her way of paying off her mortgage.’

‘Unluckily for her, he’s a Jock, and a tight-fisted bastard like all of us. She wasn’t one of yours, was she?’

‘She could have been,’ the deputy director replied. ‘About a third of the women in this place fit that description. But if she was, she wasn’t on duty. We tend to use Russian girls, or Polish. That’s what our targets expect, and let’s face it, chaps,’ she winked, ‘have you ever met a posh English girl who really knew how to fuck?’

Skinner laughed out loud. ‘As a matter if fact I have, but you probably know about her. Likely she’s on my file.’

‘Come on, Bob,’ she chided him. ‘We don’t keep files on senior police officers.’

‘Of course you bloody do, Amanda. You keep files on everyone, apart from the odd militant Islamist who slips through the net and blows up a London bus. For example, you kept a file on Beram Cohen. I know that, because you sent my young friend Clyde Houseman through to see me last Saturday, to tell me who he was. What I didn’t understand at the time was why MI5 should know about Cohen. He wasn’t Islamic, he was Jewish. He wasn’t an internal security threat to us. No, he was an Israeli secret service operative who got compromised and had to vanish.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘and we helped, as you know by now. We did a favour via our friends in MI6, for their friends in Mossad, and took him on board.’

‘You turned him into Byron Millbank?’

She frowned and the change seemed to add a couple of years to her age in the time it took. ‘What a bloody stupid name! I was livid when I heard about it, but when it was done I wasn’t involved. I was running our serious crime division then.’

‘I imagine it flagged up with you as soon as my people ran a DVLA check on him.’

‘Yes, that’s how it happened.’

‘And as soon as it did, you broke into the Rondar offices and removed his computer.’

‘We did, as a precaution, although it turned out to be unnecessary. He seems to have kept his two identities absolutely separate.’

‘But you knew he still functioned as Beram?’

‘I did, and a very few others. Six advised us of a couple of operations he had undertaken for them and for the Americans. There was the one in Somalia, for example; that’s how we knew of the connection between him, Smit and Botha. As soon as you came looking for him, trying to identify his body, I knew that something was up.’

‘And you knew who the target was, but you didn’t tell me,’ Skinner said. ‘Because MI5 wanted her dead.’

She stared back at him. ‘Of course not,’ she protested. ‘Why the hell are you saying that?’

Lowell Payne had been following the exchange, fascinated; he had sat in on, or led, hundreds of interviews during his career, and he realised what Skinner was doing. As Dennis spoke, he detected a very subtle shift in her posture, as if she had slipped, very slightly, on to the defensive.

‘Because I believe it’s true,’ the chief replied. ‘Twenty-four hours ago, I was simply curious about the chain of events, mostly because of Basil “Bazza” Brown. As you said earlier, Mandy, you used to run the serious crimes operation in this place. Inevitably that would involve you in suborning criminals up and down the country and turning them into informants, either through blackmail or bribery.

‘When we found Bazza’s body in the boot of Smit and Botha’s supposed getaway car. . rented by Byron Millbank. . and we checked him out through NCIS, they’d never heard of him. Now, Bazza might not quite have been one half of the Kray Twins, but he was a person of significant interest to Strathclyde CID and the Scottish Serious Crimes and Drugs Agency. So it just wasn’t feasible that he wouldn’t be on the national criminal database, unless he had been taken off it, and the only organisation I can think of with the clout to do that, is yours. Come on, he was an MI5 asset, wasn’t he? Give me that much.’

She sighed, then smiled. ‘I should have known,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, he was. I turned him myself.’

‘Thought so. By the way, was Michael Thomas involved in any way, my ACC?’

‘Yes, I had to involve him at one point, on pain of disgrace if he breathed a word. Why?’

‘It answers a question, that’s all. And gets him off a nasty hook.’ He paused, straightening in his seat. ‘Okay,’ he went on, ‘so you must see where I’m coming from. I’ve uncovered an operation in Scotland, planned by a man who is known to MI5. Then right in the middle, I find a key equipment supplier, eliminated to keep him quiet, and I discover that he was also known to you. At the very least that was going to start me wondering. You’ve got to concede that, chum.’

‘Yes, okay, I do. But answer me this. If we were behind it, why did I send Clyde Houseman through to see you, to tell you who Cohen was? Surely I’d have kept quiet about it all.’

‘No,’ Skinner murmured. ‘You wouldn’t have taken that chance. If you had you’d have been betting that I wouldn’t have found out about the operation on my own, without your help, and you know me too well for that. So you sent Clyde with his order, and with his personal connection to me to cloud my judgement.

‘I bought into him, but now I’ve come to believe that his job was to make sure that the hit went ahead; not to help me, but to get in my way, and to keep me from getting to the concert hall on time, by any means necessary.’

‘And I gave him orders to shoot you if he had to? Come on, old love,’ she protested.

‘No,’ he conceded, ‘just to fuck me about, to make sure we were chasing the wrong hare. It worked too. We didn’t find out that the target was female until it was too late. Even then, when we did, I still assumed that it was political, as Clyde had said, and that meant that it had to be Aileen, my wife.’

‘Bob,’ Dennis murmured. ‘This is all very flight of fancy. What on earth has brought it about?’

‘Two things. First, you told me that official MI5 policy has been to steer clear of cooperation with the Strathclyde Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Section because you didn’t trust Toni Field. But in fact I find out that you’ve had her under very close supervision, through Clyde Houseman, or Don Sturgeon, the identity he used to. . how to say it. . penetrate her.’

Amanda smiled and raised an eyebrow.

‘Second,’ Skinner continued, ‘I’ve solved a mystery.’

‘It seems to me that you’ve created one, but go on.’

‘Toni Field’s secret child, Lucille.’

‘Her what?’ Dennis exclaimed.

‘Come on, Mandy, Clyde must have told you she had a kid. The scar was a clear giveaway, as we found at her autopsy. As soon as I heard about it, I found myself wondering why. Why did she have to hide the fact, take a sabbatical and fuck off to Mauritius to have the baby under her old name?

‘A child wouldn’t have been a roadblock in her career, not these days, and not even as a single parent, for Toni’s mother’s hale and hearty and still young enough to help raise her, as she is doing.

‘So I started wondering who Daddy was, and I started to consider five people that Marina, her sister, told me about, five men in her life before they came to Scotland. The only problem was, Marina didn’t know them by name, only nickname.’

‘How inconvenient.’ Her tone was teasing, but Payne, the shrewd observer, detected tension beneath it.

‘Yeah. But somebody must have known one of them, somebody with the resources to hack into the Mauritian general registry and remove all records of the birth. If it hadn’t been for the hospital patient log, we’d never have been able to prove it happened at all. Nice one, my dear. Tell me, did you have to send someone to Mauritius or were you able to do it without leaving this building?’ He looked at her, inquiring, but she was silent.

‘Yup,’ he chuckled. ‘This week, it’s been a whole series of dead ends, until I found out about Mr Sturgeon and until a specialist thief of my acquaintance finally managed to get into Toni’s safe, in what’s now my office.’ He picked up his attaché case and opened it. ‘When I did, I found these.’ He removed two envelopes and placed them on the table.

Amanda Dennis frowned and pulled her chair in a little. She reached out for the envelopes, but Skinner drew them back. ‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘There were three others, but their subjects were of no relevance to this, so I’ve destroyed them. These two, though, they tell a story.’

He removed the contents of the envelope marked ‘Bullshit’ and passed them across.

As the deputy director studied them, her eyebrows rose and her eyes widened. ‘Bloody hell!’ she murmured.

‘I wondered if you knew about him,’ Skinner remarked. ‘Now, I gather that you didn’t. I expect you’ll find that when Toni was appointed to both West Midlands and Strathclyde, Sir Brian Storey gave her glowing testimonials, both times. I don’t like the man, so if you use these to bring him down, it won’t bother me.’

He picked up ‘Howling Mad’ and reached inside. ‘These, on the other hand, are a whole different matter.’ He withdrew several photographs. ‘I didn’t know who this bloke was at first,’ he said, as he handed them across, ‘the one she’s fucking, but I do now. Once he was Murdoch Lawton, QC, a real star of the English Bar. In fact he was such a big name that the Prime Minister gave him a title, Lord Forgrave, and brought him into the Cabinet as Justice Secretary.

‘There he sits at the table alongside his wife, Emily Repton, MP, the Home Secretary, the woman who controls this organisation, and to whom you and Hubert Lowery answer.’

She stared at the images. Even to Payne, that most skilled reader of expressions, she was inscrutable.

‘Those are bad enough,’ the chief constable told her, ‘even without this.’ He took Lucille Deschamps’ birth certificate from the envelope and laid it down. ‘You knew about it of course, since MI5 removed the original registration. Lawton knocked her up, fathered her child.’ He sighed, with real regret.

‘So now you see, my friend, how I’m drawn to the possibility that Toni Field was murdered by this organisation, to prevent her from advancing herself even further than she had already by blackmailing the woman at its head, and her husband.

‘Amanda, I don’t actually believe that you’d be party to that, which is why I’ve brought this to you and not to Lowery, who’d probably have the Queen shot if he was ordered to.’

Amanda Dennis leaned back, linked her fingers behind her head and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Oh dear, Bob,’ she sighed. ‘If only you hadn’t.’

As she spoke, a door at the far end of the room swung open and two people came into the room, one large, the other small, almost petite. Skinner had met the man before, at a secret security conference the previous autumn, not long after his appointment as Director of MI5, but not the woman. Nonetheless, he knew who she was, from television and the press.

Dennis stood; Payne followed her lead instinctively, but Skinner stayed in his seat. ‘Home Secretary,’ he exclaimed, ‘Hubert. Been eavesdropping, have we?’

‘No!’ the director snapped. ‘We’ve been monitoring a conversation that borders on seditious. To accuse us of organising a murder. .’

‘Go back and listen to the recording that you’ve undoubtedly made,’ the chief constable said. ‘You’ll find no such accusation. I’m investigating a crime, and my line of inquiry has led me here. You people may think you’re off limits, but not to me.’

As Sir Hubert Lowery’s massive frame leaned over him, the chief recalled a day when, as a very new uniformed constable, he had policed a Calcutta Cup rugby international at Murrayfield Stadium, in which the man had played in the second row of the scrum, for England.

‘Skinner,’ the former lock hissed, ‘you’re notorious as a close-to-the-wind sailor, but this time you’ve hit the rocks.’

He pushed himself to his feet. ‘Get your bad analogies and your bad breath out of my face, you fat bastard,’ he murmured, ‘or you will need some serious dental work.’

Lowery leaned away, but only a little. Skinner put a hand on his chest and pushed, hard enough to send him staggering back a pace or two. ‘You were never any use on your own,’ he said. ‘You always needed the rest of the pack to back you up.’

‘Bob!’ Dennis exclaimed.

He grinned. ‘No worries, Amanda. He doesn’t have the balls.’

‘Probably not,’ the Home Secretary said, ‘but I do. Let me see these.’ She snatched up the photographs. ‘The idiot!’ she snapped as she examined them. ‘Bad enough to get involved with that scheming little bitch, but to let himself be photographed on the job, it’s beyond belief, it really is. Are these the only copies?’

‘I’d say so,’ Skinner replied, sitting once again. ‘Toni was too smart to leave unnecessary prints lying around. Plus, she thought she was untouchable.’ He took a memory card from the breast pocket of his jacket and tossed it on to the table. ‘I found that among the envelopes. The originals are on it.’

Emily Repton picked it up, and the birth certificate. She walked across to the deputy director’s desk and fed the photographs into the shredder that stood beside it. The memory card followed it. She was about to insert the birth certificate when Payne called out, ‘Hey, don’t do that! The child’s going to need it.’

The Home Secretary gave him a long look. ‘What child?’ she murmured. The shredder hummed once again. ‘Why did you give those up so easily?’ she asked the chief constable.

‘Because I’m a realist. I’ve been in this building before. I know what it’s about, and I know that there are certain things that are best kept below decks, as Barnacle Hubert the Sailor here might say. But they’re kept in my head too, and in DCI Payne’s.’

‘Sometimes it can be a lot harder to get out of here than to get in,’ Repton pointed out.

‘Not in this case,’ Skinner told her. ‘We’re being collected in about half an hour from the front of Thames House by Chief Superintendent McIlhenney, of the Met. If we’re any more than five minutes late, he will leave, and will come back, with friends.’

She smiled. ‘See, Sir Hubert. I said you were underestimating this man. What’s your price, our friend from the north?’

He pointed at Lowery. ‘He goes. Amanda becomes Director General, as she should have been all along. Then you go.’

‘What about my husband? Do you want his head too?’

‘Nah. I imagine you’ll cut his balls off as soon as you get him home for landing you in all this. I wouldn’t wish any more on the guy.’

‘I see.’ She frowned and pursed her lips, calling up an image from the past as she stood in her pale blue suit, with every blonde hair in place. ‘The first of those is doable, because you’re right: Sir Hubert isn’t up to the job, and Mrs Dennis is. The second, no, not a chance.’

‘No? You don’t think I’d bring you down?’

‘I don’t think you can. Okay, my husband had an affair with someone he met in the course of his work at the Bar and, unknown to him, fathered her child. I’ll survive that. . and it’s all you have on me.’

Her mirthless smile was that of an approaching shark, and all of a sudden Skinner felt that the ground beneath his feet was a little less solid.

‘Explain, Amanda,’ she said.

‘We didn’t do it, Bob.’ His friend looked at him with sympathy in her eyes, and he found himself hating it. ‘When you asked to see me, I was afraid this was how it would develop. The thing is, we knew about the child, and we knew of Toni Field’s ambitions, which were, granted, without limits, but we felt they were pretty much contained.

‘We knew what the sabbatical had been about, even before she went on it. After we deleted the Mauritian birth record, we felt she had nothing to use against us, or against the Home Secretary, so we simply parked her in Scotland, with Brian Storey’s assistance. I can see now why he was so keen to help.’ She grinned, but only for a second.

‘We made her your problem, Bob, not ours. No, we didn’t know about the photos, but if we had, I’d have been relying on you or someone like you to find them, as you did. As for the birth certificate, well, we thought that had been dealt with.

‘Oh sure, she still had her career planned in her head, Scotland, and then the Met as Storey’s successor, but in reality, she’d never have got another job in England. Toni Field was a boil, that was all, and we thought we had lanced her, so there was no need to bump her off.’

‘So why did you plant Clyde with her?’ he asked. ‘To check whether she had any more damaging secrets?’

‘Bob, we never did! There was no liaison, there was no Don Sturgeon. Clyde never met the woman, I promise you.’

Skinner gaped at her as he experienced something for the first time in his life: the feeling of being a complete fool, dupe, idiot.

‘This is bluff,’ he exclaimed. ‘Repton’s laid down the party line for you.’ But as he did, he thought of his own ruse with Houseman, and knew that she was right.

‘I’m afraid not.’ She rose, walked across to her desk, and produced a paper, from a drawer. ‘This is a printout of the data we removed from the Mauritian files. It shows, along with everything else, the name and nationality of the person who registered the birth, and it even carries her signature.’

She handed it to him.

‘Marina Deschamps,’ he read, his voice sounding dry and strange.

‘Exactly. She’s how we came to know about the child, and who her father was. The same Marina who told you she didn’t know any of her sister’s lovers by name. Marina, who invented Toni’s relationship with Clyde Houseman. Marina, who it is now clear to me had her half-sister killed.’ She smiled at him once more, but with sadness in her eyes. ‘My dear, I’m sorry, but you’ve been played. The scenario you have in your head, about the Home Secretary having Toni assassinated, to keep her husband’s dark secret and to spare the government from possible collapse in the ensuing scandal, it’s plausible, I’ll admit, but it seems that Marina put it there. But don’t feel too bad about it,’ she added. ‘She was an expert. She used to be one of us.’

‘She what?’ he spluttered.

‘She worked here for five years, in MI5, with a pretty high security clearance. When she applied, she was with the Met, and Brian Storey recommended her for the job.’

‘Doesn’t that tell you something?’ he challenged her. ‘Given that Toni had Storey by the balls?’

‘With hindsight it does. But he may have done it to get himself a little protection from her. Marina left here when Toni took the job in Birmingham. That was our idea originally; we wanted to keep a continuing eye on her and she agreed to do it. She sold it to her sister, so well that she thought it was her own wheeze. Marina’s been keeping an eye on her all along.’

‘Did Toni ever know she was a spook?’ Payne asked, as his boss sat silent, contemplating what he had been told.

‘No, never.’ Dennis gave a soft chuckle. ‘Believe it or not, she also thought Marina worked in a flower shop, of sorts, after she left the Met. I can and will check, but I’m certain that while she was here she would have been in a position to know about Beram Cohen, and his second identity, and that she’d have known about poor old Bazza too.’

She looked at Skinner. ‘You do believe me, Bob, don’t you? If you don’t, there’s an easy way to test me. Call her, at home. Send a car to pick her up, under some pretext or other. She won’t be there, I promise you.’

He glared back at her. ‘Then tell me why,’ he demanded. ‘Tell me why she did it.’

‘If I knew,’ Amanda replied, ‘I would tell you, without hesitation. But I don’t. I don’t have a clue. All I can suggest is that you find her and ask her. However, if you do, and knowing you I imagine that you might, you must hand her over to us. None of the stuff that we’ve talked about here could ever come out in open court.’

‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he growled. ‘It won’t.’ He started to rise, Payne following.

‘Hold on just a moment,’ the Home Secretary said. ‘We’re not done yet, not quite. There is still the matter of your continuing silence on this business. I’m not letting you leave without that being secured.’

‘How are you going to do that? I’ve got nothing to gain, personally, by going public, but if you knew anything about Scots law and procedures, you’d realise that having begun the investigation I’m bound to report its findings to the procurator fiscal.’

‘Then it will have to be edited, otherwise. .’

He looked at her, and realised that she was a rarity, a politician who should not, rather than could not, be underestimated. He had read a description of Emily Repton as ‘a prime minister in waiting, but not for much longer’. Feeling the force of the certainty that radiated from her, he understood that assessment.

‘Otherwise?’ he repeated.

‘Show him, Sir Hubert,’ she murmured.

‘No,’ Skinner countered, ‘I don’t listen to him. You tell me.’

‘Very well.’ She reached out a hand; Lowery took a plastic folder from his pocket and passed it to her.

She selected a photograph and held it up. ‘You seem to have recovered well from the public break-up of your marriage, Chief Constable. This was taken early this morning, as you left the home of your former wife.’

‘So what?’ he laughed. ‘Our children are with her just now, and I wanted to see them.’

‘But you have joint custody; you’ll see them at the weekend.’

He snatched the image from her, crumpled it, and threw it on the floor. ‘Go on, then,’ he challenged her. ‘Leak it and see what follows. I’ll tell the Scottish media that it’s a Tory plot to discredit me. See those two words “Tory plot”? In Scotland they’re a flame to the touch paper. They’ll be on you like piranha. You’ve got to do better than that.’

‘I can. Your ex-wife is an American citizen. Now that you and she are no longer married, she’s here because she’s been given right to remain. That can be revoked.’

‘We’d see you in court if you tried that.’

‘It would have to be an American court; we’d have her removed inside twenty-four hours.’

‘And twenty-four hours after that I’m on a plane to New York and we remarry. Come on, Home Secretary, up your game. You still need to do better.’ And yet, as he spoke, he sensed that she could, and that her first two shots had been mere range-finders.

‘If you insist,’ she replied, and her voice told him that he had been right. ‘It might come as a surprise to you to learn that your present wife’s liaison with Mr Joey Morocco has been going on for years. It began before you met and it continued during your marriage.’

She took a series of photographs from the folder and handed them to him. He glanced through them; they showed Aileen and the actor at various locations: in a garden with Loch Lomond stretched out below them, on the balcony of her Glasgow flat, leaving a hotel in a street he did not recognise. None of them were explicit, but they displayed intimacy clearly enough.

He handed them back, and shrugged. ‘Sorry, no surprise,’ he said. ‘Nor is it my business any more either. By the way, after the Daily News photos you might be able to sell those to Hello! or OK! but nobody else is going to buy them.’

‘Probably not,’ Repton conceded, ‘but every newspaper in the country would run this, front page. The trouble with our modern celebrity culture is that it’s so damn predictable. Where there are actors, there are the inevitable parties, with the same inevitable temptations. Most politicians have the sense to steer clear of them, but not, it seems, Ms de Marco.’

She took the last two items from the folder and gave them to him. The photographs had been taken in a ladies’ toilet. There were three washbasins set into a flat surface, with a mirrored wall above.

The first picture showed two women, expensively clad, watching while a third, her face part-hidden by her hair, bent over a line of white powder, with a tube held to her nose. In the second, all three women were standing, their laughter, and their faces, reflected in the mirror.

He stared at it, then at Emily Repton with pure hatred in his eyes.

‘The original is in a place of safety,’ Sir Hubert Lowery barked. ‘Not here, though, just in case Mrs Dennis feels obliged to do a favour for an old friend. I don’t have to tell you. .’

Skinner moved with remarkable speed for a man in his early fifties. He moved half a pace forward and hit the Director General with a thunderous, hooking, left-handed punch that caught him on the right temple. The man’s legs turned to spaghetti and he was unconscious before he hit the floor.

‘I’ve wanted to do that,’ he murmured, ‘ever since I saw him blindside our outside half at Murrayfield.’

‘I did warn him,’ Amanda Dennis remarked. ‘I told him you’d want to hit somebody, and since he’d be the only man in the room. .’

‘He’ll be all right,’ the chief growled. ‘His skull’s too thick and his brain’s too small for there to be any lasting damage.’

He turned to Emily Repton. Her eyes told him she had enjoyed the show. ‘Spell it out,’ he told her.

She nodded. ‘Hard man, soft centre,’ she said. ‘Your marriage may be over, but I don’t believe you would wish to cause Ms de Marco the damage, the distress and the disgrace that would follow publication of those images. The fact that it was a one-off doesn’t matter. Her career would be gone, way beyond the U-bend, and so would her employable life. As indeed it will, if one single line in one single newspaper, or blog, should ever link my husband to Antonia Field and her child.

‘You can write your report to the procurer physical or whatever he’s called. It will say that your investigation has reached the conclusion that the balance of probability is that Chief Constable Field’s killing was ordered and funded by Mexican or Colombian drug cartels that she compromised during her time with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. There will be not the slightest hint of impropriety by the Security Service.’

She frowned. ‘I’m not going to ask if you agree. There is no alternative on the table; you will do what you’re told. Go back to Scotland, Mr Skinner, and be the big provincial copper in your little provincial pond. This is London; the power will always lie here. If you can’t live with that truth, you could always resign.’

Skinner stared down at her, unblinking, until the coldness in his eyes made her shiver and look away.

‘You really don’t know me, Home Secretary,’ he told her. ‘My report’s already dictated and that is more or less what it says. Even if my suspicions had been one hundred per cent right, there would have been no mileage for me in pulling this building down.’

He nodded towards Lowery, who was beginning to stir on the floor. ‘Getting rid of him will do nicely thanks, and I’ve shown you why that has to happen.’

‘Agreed,’ Repton said.

‘But you are right,’ he continued, ‘that I won’t see Aileen broken by you. Hell, woman, I know you and Lowery set her up. Any idiot, even me, could see that. She can’t hold her booze at the best of times, and I can tell from the photo she was rat-arsed when that all went off. I’m sure that if I could identify the two other women, I’d find that at least one was on Five’s payroll.

‘But that’s by the by; I’ll go along with your deal. Your husband’s safe. If you’re prepared to tolerate his adultery, that’s your business. I’ve never met the man, so he really means nothing to me. Plus, I have no practical need to remove him, since he isn’t in my sphere of influence.’

‘That’s pragmatic of you,’ she mocked, her tone heavy with sarcasm.

‘But you are,’ he snapped, as he picked up his case. ‘And you disgust me. You’re the embodiment of everything I loathe about politics and politicians. Frankly, I don’t want to be any part of any world in which someone like you operates, and there are only two things I can do about that. So I’ll go back to my provincial, sub-national pond, and I will work out which one it’s going to be.’