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Chapter 56

‘But why?’ Prim asked me; very unusually for her, she was in tears.

‘I told you, love, he said that he wanted money of his own. Mike always had fairly expensive tastes; for a Detective Inspector’s pay at any rate. He wouldn’t live on Susie’s wealth, but I guess being that close to it must have been too much for him. Then, I suppose, there was our dumb luck too. Whatever — envy, greed, call it what you like — it destroyed him.’

‘That’s not what I meant. Why did the Dutchman shoot him?’

I had asked Henke de Witt the same thing myself, rather more forcefully. It took three of the customs people to drag me off him, as Dylan lay dead at our feet. ‘Orders, he told me. From our side of the operation; someone, somewhere did not want a Special Branch officer in the dock in a kidnapping and extortion trial.’

I waited for the tears to stop and for her to regain her self-control. It was just after six next morning and we were in our room at the mansion; I had only just been flown back from Amsterdam after a real grilling by secret policemen from Glasgow and Holland, and by a very sinister guy who said he was from the Home Office, but smelled like MI5 to me. We lay on the bed, both fully clothed. Prim had waited up for me all night. As for me, I should have been tired but I wasn’t; I didn’t feel like sleep at all.

‘When did you begin to suspect Mike?’ she asked me, eventually.

I leaned back on the bed. ‘Not until very late in the day. I knew there was something wrong after a couple of things happened, but I couldn’t even let myself think of the possibility that it might be him.

‘The first time I should have twigged was when I saw the photo Joe Donn gave you — the original, I mean. It showed Stephen Donn and wee Myrtle at a Gantry office do, but the boy Dylan was in the picture too, right next to them. Yet Mike never said a word about having met him. I wondered about it for a bit, but not for long; everyone in the photo looked a bit pissed, and I decided that probably he had no idea that was Donn, or even any recollection of the thing.

‘Then after that, when I looked at the movie schedule, I should have begun to worry about him, but I didn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when Susie’s car was torched, Stephen Donn, or Stu Queen, was up in Aberdeen doing location shots on board the rig. He couldn’t have done it. So who could? At first I didn’t bother about it. I figured that when we found Donn we’d find his partner, whoever it was. As it turned out I was right.

‘When I finally did make myself think about it, I realised that Mike had to be the number-one suspect. He probably booby-trapped the car when they arrived: maybe you didn’t notice, but he was a minute or two behind Susie coming up the stairs. Later on, as they were leaving, with Susie pissed and rabbiting by the door, he triggered it, leaving himself a few seconds to step back out, ostensibly to fetch her.

‘Remember what happened afterwards?’ I asked Prim, but answered for her. ‘He put the frighteners on the fireman and the Chief Inspector, didn’t he. He took control of the investigation himself. . and then he hushed it up. All along the line, Dylan wasn’t hunting Stephen Donn. . he was protecting him! And the best of it was, all the way along he was taking the piss out of me, winding me up in fun like he always did.

‘The only positive thing he ever gave me was the lead to the Neames brothers. So what? They didn’t know anything anyway, so giving them to Liam and me didn’t do any harm, and helped convince us that our man Michael was really on the case. That was arrogant, but it wasn’t risky, not like some of the other things he did.

‘Know how I figured where he and Donn were headed?’ She gave the briefest shake of her head.

‘When I went to see Mike at Pitt Street that time, he came to the front desk to collect me, all bright and breezy, and he’s whistling a tune — a tune from South Pacific. Bali Hai, it’s called. When, finally, the scales fell away and I knew that he had to be Donn’s inside man, that scene flashed straight back into my mind.

‘Pure bloody Dylan that was; I can see him now counting his money and laughing to himself that he’d even told me where he was going, and dumb old Blackstone hadn’t a clue. Ah Mike,’ I called out, hearing the sadness in my own voice, ‘you always had to show off. You always had to try to be just that bit smarter than you really were. And you always had to try to be one up on me.

‘I told the Dutch authorities about my guess. They checked yesterday’s flights out of Schiphol, and they came upon two UK males, Mr Michael Auden and Mr Stuart Dee — another poet and another river; another bloody Dylan joke, I’ll bet — booked KLM to Singapore, then routed on to Bali.

‘That was their getaway destination all along, and the cheeky sod even dropped me a hint, never thinking I’d work it out.

‘He did it the day before yesterday, as well; when I called him to ask him to run those checks into abandoned production platforms — which of course he never did. The mad bugger practically told me, if I’d realised it at the time, to look at Dawn’s e-mail. “If he phones. .” he said, “if he uses the post. .”

‘The best of it is that he was right. I really am as dumb as he thought. I actually tipped him off that we had rumbled Donn when I asked him to do that. And later, I even mentioned the activating word for the account — code name “mother-in-law”, I told him. That’s how they were able to release the money without waiting for the deadline or for an e-mail from Miles. Mike knew your Mum’s first name. He met her that time we all had dinner in Glasgow.

‘Oh, love, I knew something was wrong, I knew there was someone else involved, but I never suspected it was Mike himself until we hit that platform and found that Donn had gone early. When I spilled the code, Dylan sent him an e-mail, then headed straight for Amsterdam, while his partner flew there in the Jet Ranger. The Dutch found it last night in a car park on the edge of the city.’

Prim was dry-eyed by now. ‘How did they get together?’ she asked.

‘Superintendent Hennessy — that’s Mike’s boss; he was one of the guys who interviewed me in Amsterdam — thinks that he recruited Donn as an informant; around the time of that do at Gantry’s, when the photo was taken. The guy had no record, but he did have shady connections in Scotland and in Holland. Interpol knew about him, apparently; they had him placed as one of the movers of big loads of Pakistani hashish from the Far East through Europe. The dates of those operations coincide with him working offshore in the area.

‘Dylan’s private notes in the office refer to him turning Donn. He didn’t have the brains to do that, of course: what really happened was that Donn turned him, completely in the end. When Mike ran for it, he took two genuine passports, made up from blanks that had been stolen from an office in Liverpool, but recovered by the Glasgow police in a raid.

‘We’ll never know for sure whose idea it was to kidnap Dawn for ransom, as part of the vendetta against me, but I’m pretty sure that Mike came up with it and Stephen did the planning. Getting himself on to the movie crew was a brilliant idea, and as it turned out, so fucking simple. He does some research, knocks down the Szabo guy, then turns up next morning at his agency looking for movie work, with special experience on oil rigs as an added attraction.’

I looked sideways at Primavera. ‘He was a really clever piece of work, was Stephen Donn, and like Myrtle Campbell said, vicious with it. I’m pretty certain that if the two of them had got to Bali, and had got to the money, not long afterwards Mike would have been found dead in a ditch.’

‘What about the money?’ Prim asked. ‘Is it gone for good?’

‘No. They’ll get it back. Governments are involved now; ours, the Dutch, the Swiss. Even as we speak, bankers are being leant on very hard. Your brother-in-law has some incredibly powerful friends, you know.’

‘I know that, my love, just as you’ve had an extremely dangerous enemy. That’s still the big unanswered question, isn’t it. Why the hell did Stephen Donn have such a hatred of you?’

I smiled at her; the sort of grin that leaves smugness way behind and climbs to the upper reaches of self-satisfaction. ‘Oh, I know that,’ I told her, as casually as I could.

‘I’ve been thinking about that from the very start; and I’ve had a wild idea about it. Thanks to a check that the MI5 man made for me tonight, I know for sure now. I’m not going to do anything about it though, not yet.

‘The real life Oz Blackstone movie isn’t over yet. There’s still one last scene to be shot.’ Primavera gasped with astonishment as I outlined the script.