Pray for the Dying

Sixty-Three

‘Pam Limited,’ Skinner repeated.

‘Yes,’ Mann confirmed. ‘I checked with the company registration office in Jersey. According to the articles, it stands for Personal Asset Management. Its most recent accounts show that it’s worth over two hundred and fifty million.’

‘Who owns it?’

‘According to the public record, its only shareholder is a man called Peter Friedman.’

‘And who the hell’s he?’ the chief asked, frowning, then muttering, ‘Although there’s something familiar about that name.’

‘Banjo ran a search on people called Friedman,’ she told him. ‘He came up with two singers, a journalist and an economist, although he’s dead. The only references he got to anyone called Peter Friedman were a few press stories. He showed them to me; they all related to donations to good causes, charities and the like.’

‘What, like Problem Solvers?’ Skinner retorted.

‘No, sir. Real ones, like Chest Heart and Stroke, Cancer UK, Children First, and Shelter. Only one of them gave any detail on him beyond his name and that was the Saltire, in a report on a charity fund-raiser dinner in the Royal Scottish Museum, in Edinburgh, six months ago. It described him as “a reclusive philanthropist”; nothing beyond that. If a wealthy man has that low a profile on the internet, then he really is reclusive.’

‘Sounds like it. Friedman, Friedman, Friedman,’ he repeated. ‘Where the fu-’ He slammed the palm of his hand on the table. ‘Got it!’ he shouted. ‘It was. .’ He stopped in mid-sentence as he remembered who were in which loop, and who were not.

‘I’ll take the mystery man from here, thanks,’ he told the DI. ‘I’ve got another task for you, Lottie, for you and you alone. Thanks to Dan, we have Sofia Deschamps’ address in Mauritius, but we don’t know exactly where she lives in London, beyond that it’s in Muswell Hill. She moved there very soon after Toni came back from her so-called sabbatical, to look after the child. Marina told me that Lucille’s grandfather, Toni’s dad, bought it for her. I took her word for that, like I swallowed everything else she fed me. She lied to me about other stuff, so maybe she lied about that too.

‘I want you to dig deep, get the address and look into the purchase transaction. When it was bought, and if it was indeed an outright purchase, no mortgage, then I want to know exactly where the cash came from. And while you’re at it, just for the hell of it, look into Toni’s house in Bothwell, asking the same questions. Remember, don’t involve the guys in this and report to me alone, as soon as you get a result. Use my mobile if you have to.’ He gave her a card, with the number.

‘I understand, sir,’ Mann said. ‘What do you expect to find?’

He smiled. ‘Who knows? Maybe it’s something to do with living at the seaside but I like flying kites.’

‘Maybe you can show me how,’ she replied. ‘I’m going to have to find new ways to amuse my Jakey, with his dad out the picture.’

As soon as she had gone, he picked up the phone and made a direct call.

‘Sal-tire,’ a male telephonist announced, the confident public voice of a confident newspaper.

‘June Crampsey, please. Tell her it’s Bob. She’ll know which one.’

‘There may be other men called Bob in my life,’ the editor said as she came on line.

‘But you still knew which one this is.’

‘It’s my phone; it goes all moist when you call. Why didn’t you use my direct line, or my mobile?’

‘Because my head’s full of stuff and I couldn’t remember either number.’

‘I thought you had slaves to get those for you.’

‘That’s Edinburgh. In Glasgow they’re all lashed to the oars and rowing like shit to keep the great ship off the rocks.’

‘Do I detect a continuing ambivalence towards Strathclyde?’ she teased.

‘It’s a lousy job, kid, but somebody’s got to do it. For now that’s me. June, I need your help.’

‘Shoot. You still have a credit balance in the favour ledger.’

‘Six months or so back, you ran a story about some charity dinner in the RSM. It mentioned a man named Peter Friedman, a recluse, your story called him.’

‘I remember that one.’

‘How much do you know about him?’

‘No more than was in the paper. He’s a very rich bloke who keeps himself to himself. We ran that dinner to honour people who gave decent sized bucks to good causes last year. The guests were all nominated by the charities and we sent the formal invitations. His address was a PO box in Tobermory.’

‘Tobermory?’ he repeated.

‘That’s what I said. He lives on the Isle of Mull. That qualifies as reclusive, doesn’t it?’

‘Hey, I’m from Motherwell. Everything north and west of Perth’s reclusive in my book. Your story: was there a photo with it?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘That’s why I remember it so well. I had a photographer in the hall, snapping groups; real dull stuff, but I felt we had to do it since it was our gig. Your man Friedman was in one of them and he made a fuss about it. First he tried to bribe the photographer, then he threatened him. When neither of those worked he sought me out and asked me, more politely, not to use it. I said I’d see what I could do, then I made bloody sure that it went in.’

‘Did you hear from him afterwards?’

‘No. Fact is, I doubt if he even saw it. The next day was the Saturday edition; most people just read that for the sport and the weekend section.’

‘Do you still have the photo in your library?’

‘Of course, everything’s in the bloody library. I’ll have somebody dig it out, crop him out of the group and email it to you. What’s your Strathclyde address?’

‘Thanks, but use my private address. I don’t want it on this network.’

‘Okay, but what’s this about, Bob? Why are you interested in him?’

‘His name came up in connection with another charity donation,’ Skinner replied, content that he was telling the truth. ‘I like to know about people with deep pockets; maybe our dependants’ support group can put the bite on him in the future. Thanks, June, you’re a pal. You and that other Bob must come to dinner some night.’

‘I’ll take you up on that, only his name’s Adrian. Now I’m wondering who the hostess will be. Cheers.’

He hung up, leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled in front of his face, gathering his thoughts and seeing images flow past his mind’s eye. He sat there until a trumpet sound on his phone told him that he had a personal email, and a glance confirmed that it was from June. He opened it, then viewed the attachment. As he did, possibilities became certainties.

The chief constable rose from his desk, left his office and his command floor, taking the stair down one level and walking round to a suite that overlooked Holland Street, and the group of buildings that once had housed one of Scotland’s oldest and most famous schools.

He keyed a number into a pad, then pushed open a door bearing a plaque that read ‘Counter-Terrorism Intelligence Section’. As he entered the long open room, a female officer looked up at him, first with a frown, then in surprise. She started to rise, but he waved her back down, and headed to the far end of the room.

A red light above Lowell Payne’s door said that he was in a meeting. Skinner knocked on it nonetheless, then waited, until it was opened by a glaring man with a moustache.

‘Aye?’ he snapped.

‘Intelligence section?’ he murmured, as Payne appeared behind the officer.

‘Chief.’

‘Sorry to interrupt, Detective Superintendent, but you know me. Everything I do has “urgent” stamped on it.’

‘Indeed. That’ll be all for now, DS Mavor,’ he said, almost pushing the other officer out of the room.

‘Sorry about that,’ he murmured once he and Skinner were alone. ‘He was somebody’s mistake, from the days when a guy might get dumped into Special Branch and forgotten about, because he was too rough-edged for the mainstream, or because he’d done somebody higher up a big favour in the witness box, and an SB job was his reward.’

‘Where do you want him sent?’

‘Anywhere that being rough-edged will be an advantage.’

‘I’ll ask Bridie. She’ll have an idea. Now, I have a question, best put to somebody who was here six months ago and who’d know pretty much everything that went on then.’

‘That would be DI Bulloch,’ Payne replied at once. ‘Sandra. You probably passed her on your way along here.’

‘I did. At least she knows who I am, which is a good start.’

‘I’ll get her in.’

‘Fine, but before you do, let me set the scene. When I got into Toni Field’s safe finally, and found those envelopes, there was another. It was marked “P. Friedman” and it was empty. It was stuck on to the back of another, and I reckon that was a mistake on Marina’s part.’

‘Marina’s?’

‘Oh yes. Marina knew that stuff would be there for me to find, in time, once I’d got past her stalling me by giving me the wrong code for the safe. But she didn’t intend me to find the Friedman envelope. She destroyed what was in it, but failed to notice that she’d left it in there. Now, let’s talk to the DI.’

Sandra Bulloch was a cool one, neither too pretty nor too plain to be memorable, but with legs that few men would fail to notice, and that she probably covered up, Skinner guessed, when she went operational.

‘Peter Friedman,’ she repeated. ‘Yes, sir, I remember him. It was Chief Constable Field’s second week here; she called Superintendent Johnson and me up to her office, and told us that there was a man she wanted put under full surveillance. His name, she said, was Peter Friedman and he lived on Mull.

‘I handled the job myself, with DS Mavor.’ A small flicker of distaste crossed her face, then vanished. ‘We found that he owned a big estate house up behind Tobermory, set in about forty acres of land. We photographed him from as close as we could get, we hacked his emails and we tapped his phones.

‘He lived alone, but he had a driver, a personal assistant type, who also flew the helicopter that appeared to be his means of getting off the island. He left the estate once a day, that was all, to go down to Tobermory, in his white Range Rover Evoque, to collect his mail from the post office, and to have a coffee and a scone in the old church building next door that somebody’s made into a shop and a café.

‘He had no visitors and he never took or made a phone call that wasn’t about his investments. Nor did he file any emails; they were all deleted after study. I assume that if he wanted to keep something he’d print it.

‘The only thing we intercepted that was of any interest,’ Bulloch said, ‘was an email from a consultant oncologist, with a report attached. It didn’t make good reading. It confirmed that Friedman had a squamous cell lung carcinoma, in other words lung cancer, that it was inoperable, and that no form of therapy was going to do him any good. It gave him somewhere between nine months and two years to live.’

‘Ouch,’ Skinner whispered. ‘Did you report all of this back to Toni, to Chief Constable Field?’

‘Of course, sir. We gave her a file with everything in it. She kept it and she ordered us to destroy any copies.’

‘Which you did?’

Bulloch stared at him, as if outraged. ‘Absolutely,’ she insisted.

‘Did she ever tell you why she wanted this man targeted?’

‘No, and we didn’t ask. Sometimes the chief constable knows things that we don’t need to. For example, why you’re here now, asking questions about the same man.’

He laughed. ‘Nice one, Sandra. You’re right; I’m not going to tell you either.’

His mobile sounded as she was leaving the room. The caller was Lottie Mann, with not one result, but two. He listened carefully to her, said, ‘Thanks. I’ll be in touch,’ then ended the call.

‘Lowell,’ he asked, ‘has our tap on Sofia Deschamps produced anything?’

‘Nothing, Chief. Only a call from Mauritius, a bloke we think was Chief Constable Field’s dad, going by his distress if nothing else. Nothing from Marina, though. In fact, when she was talking to the man, she said, “Now I’ve lost both my daughters, and I won’t get either one back.” I suppose that doesn’t rule out her knowing where the other one is, but from the tone of her voice on the recording, I don’t believe she does.’

‘That’s all right, I do. Pretty soon, I expect that everything will become clear. I’m tired of this business, Lowell,’ Skinner sighed, ‘tired of the entire Deschamps family and their devious lives. Tomorrow, the two of us will go on a trip. I’d like to meet this guy Friedman. Can you put me up at your place tonight? Otherwise it’ll be an even earlier start for Davie.’