By All Means (Fiske and MacNee Mysteries Book 2) (31 page)

*

'Roskill refuses to see me.  I remember learning about the Praetorian Guard that protected Roman emperors.  Roskill's got one.  I think that the only way we'll get to speak to him is to tell his lawyer that we want to interview him under caution.'

'It may come to that, Vanessa, but let's be sure we've explored all other avenues before we play that card.'  Esslemont was as irritated as Fiske with the obstruction they faced, but his caution was a useful corrective to her aggression.   'Let's get MacIver in here again and press him on his links with Roskill.  We can start with his search history, move on to the bank transfers, and then hit him with our belief that Roskill is a beneficial owner of the nominee account in BVI.'

'Fine, sir.  But I don't want to delay too long.  Roskill's in London for board meetings and I'd like to talk to him before he leaves.  And it’s possible that MacIver will give us something that we can use as leverage.'

It was already late afternoon, and it was likely that MacIver's lawyer, who was a partner in a large Edinburgh firm, would be unable to get to Aberdeen until the following morning.

*

The security correspondent of Channel 4 News had an exclusive.  It aired at the top of the news at seven and was posted on the website immediately afterwards.

Reliable sources have told Channel 4 News that Scottish police investigating two murders and two terrorist attacks want to talk to former Prime Minister James Roskill.  

Last week, the Scottish political establishment was rocked by the news that the First Minister's closest political adviser, Paul MacIver, had been arrested in connection with the murders of American citizens Peter Keller at Grampian Royal Hospital in Aberdeen and Harvey Jamieson on the Vermont One oil platform in the North Sea.   There are believed to be links between these killings, which occurred on the same day just over two weeks ago, and the bomb attack at the Last Cairngorm leisure development in Aberdeenshire and the cyber attack on Mercury Fulfilment in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow.

Our sources say that the Roskill connection involves an account held in the British Virgin Islands, a tax haven noted for its secrecy, and for the provision of nominee directors to conceal the identity of bank account holders.  The precise nature of the connection is not known and Mr Roskill has refused a request to be interviewed.

This raises the possibility that the investigating officers will decide to interview the former Prime Minister under caution, which would be almost unprecedented for such a senior political figure.

The remainder of the report filled in the background to the case and named DCI Vanessa Fiske as the SIO, but gave no further details.

Vanessa's mobile rang at home just after seven. 

'Sorry to call you at home.'  Harry Conival's apologies were frequent but perfunctory and always elicited from Vanessa the reassurance that he shouldn't worry about it.

'Have you been watching the Channel 4 News?'  Vanessa said she hadn't.

'You're probably too late to catch it now, but you can get it at eight on Channel 4+1 or right now on the website.  They're claiming "reliable sources" for a story about you wanting to interview James Roskill.  My phone is already ringing off the hook. I need a brief.'

'Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!  You plug one leak and another springs up!  I have no idea where this came from so I think we should say that we have no comment to make on unsubstantiated rumours.'

'There you go again.  Too many words.  We should just leave it at "No comment".  They'll hate it and they'll be back, so you'll have to talk to me about it tomorrow.’

'I will, Harry, I will.  As it happens, this might not be entirely unhelpful, but you didn't hear me say that.'

*

‘Tell me about your relationship with James Roskill.’

Paul MacIver and his lawyer sat opposite Fiske and Esslemont in Interview Room 1 at NEC HQ.  Colin MacNee and the Chief Constable were watching through the one-way glass.

MacIver looked at his lawyer, who nodded.

‘I have never met Mr Roskill.’

‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’

‘Yes.’

‘There are many kinds of relationship,’ DCI Fiske said, ‘and most of them don’t involve face-to-face contact.  In the hope of making progress, let me accept, for the moment, that you have never met Mr Roskill face-to-face.  Have you been in contact with him in any other way?’

‘Such as?’   MacIver was feigning nonchalance, but he failed to convince.

‘Email?’

‘No comment.’

‘Telephone?’

‘No comment.’

‘Semaphore or Morse code?  Don’t answer that, I am being unforgivably facetious.  And you are being unbelievably unhelpful.’

‘Is there a question, Chief Inspector?’   This was the lawyer, speaking while resting a cautionary hand on his client’s arm.

‘My apologies.  I have a full analysis of the search history from your personal computer.  You have spent a lot of time consulting websites about Roskill.  Do you deny having done so?’

‘No.’

‘A straight answer!  I’m so glad this is being recorded. Now, will you tell us why you were so interested in Mr Roskill?’

‘He’s an interesting man, sometimes with interesting opinions about Scotland.’

‘Such as?’

‘I can’t think of an example offhand.’

Vanessa smiled.  ‘Let me see if I can jog your memory.  I spent a fascinating few hours looking at all the sites you had visited.  There was only one reference to Scottish politics.  Do you remember it?’

'No.'

'Roskill was speculating on the possible effects on the independence campaign of foreign investors pulling their money out of Scotland.  He seemed to think, on balance, that it would help the cause of independence.  Do you agree with him?'

'No comment.'

'There's a coded email exchange on your computer between

[email protected]
and
[email protected]
.
  What can you tell me about that?'

'No comment.'

'I believe that that you, Paul, are "Damascus" and that "Mike" is James Michael Roskill.  Am I right?

'No comment.'

'We've broken the code.  It wasn't very difficult.  Interesting though, because the first email in the series was sent from your laptop to "Mike"' and it appears to be following up from a face-to-face meeting.  Did you send that email?'

'No comment.'

Vanessa opened the file in front of her and brought out a clear plastic folder with some papers in it. 

'These are copies of the bank statements of the Scottish Freedom Club.  You are a signatory.  A substantial sum has been deposited to that account every month since April.  The money is transferred from an account held by a bank in the British Virgin Islands.  Who was sending the money?'

'No comment.'

'How would you react if I told you that we have reason to believe that the BVI account is controlled by Roskill?'

MacIver looked down at the table, apparently to mask his reaction and the fact that he had become very pale.  He looked at his lawyer, who leaned towards him and whispered in his ear.

'No comment.'

'What was Roskill buying from you for a two thousand pounds a month?'

'No comment.'

'I will be speaking to Mr Roskill very soon, but it would do your case no harm if you were to tell us what you know about these accounts.'

Again, MacIver broke eye contact with Vanessa and turned to his lawyer, who shook his head.

'No comment.'

'What about the £750 each that went from the SFC account to your friends Simon Mathieson and Andy MacIlwraith?  What was that for?'

'No comment.'

*

'He's met Roskill all right.  Did you see how he reacted when I said I knew that Roskill controlled that BVI account?'

Colin MacNee smiled, nodded and accepted the large whisky Vanessa had poured him from a bottle extracted from the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. Vanessa found a bottle of fizzy water in her bag.

'And the whole thing was pretty free of denials.' Colin said.  'He knows we've got him but he's smart enough to know that the case is circumstantial so he's relying on a jury basing its verdict on presumption of innocence and the defence pointing out the almost total absence of forensic evidence.'

'So let's see if we can beef it up a bit.  We'll have to interview Roskill under caution.  At the very least, he's looking at conspiracy to murder.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In Aberdeen, DCI Vanessa Fiske was on the telephone in DCS Esslemont's office.  The Chief Constable's Acting Staff Officer was also there, and the phone was on speaker.

‘Lord Cordingley, things have moved on since we spoke before, which is why I have not been in touch.  You know that your proposal that I should submit my questions to Mr Roskill in writing was completely unacceptable.   I have now decided, after discussions with senior colleagues, that I need to interview him under caution.  When would it be convenient to do so?  I am happy to come to London, and I should emphasise that the matter is urgent.'

Vanessa  was speaking in her most formal tone and had decided that she would not rise to whatever patronising shit Cordingley decided to throw at her.

'I still need to know the nature of your enquiries, Chief Inspector.'

'All I am obliged to tell you is that I believe that your client maybe able to help with my enquiries into several very serious crimes.'

'I'll need more than that before I advise my client to meet you.'

'I am not asking him to "meet" me.  I am telling him, through you, which is unsatisfactory in itself, that I need to interview him under caution.  If you are not prepared to facilitate that, I will ask my colleagues in the Metropolitan Police to arrest him so that he can be brought to Aberdeen.  That may still be necessary after I speak to him, but I would have thought that you would wish to avoid, for as long as possible, the consequences of a formal arrest.'

For a long moment, Cordingley said nothing.  'I will speak with Mr Roskill, as soon as I can, and I will telephone you.'

'Before close of play today,' Vanessa said, using a metaphor that Harry Conival had advised her against, because not much cricket was played in Aberdeen.  In London it was, though, and she had a memory of having seen a picture of Roskill holding court in the Members’ Enclosure at Lord’s.  And hadn’t he gone to a cricket match immediately after resigning as Prime  Minister?  Or maybe that was one of his predecessors.

She hung up, turned to Esslemont and exhaled deeply.  'I'll go tomorrow, sir.  Cordingley knows that if he tries to stall, this will go public.  Do you want to be present for the interview?'

The DCS knew that he should probably recognise the significance of interviewing a former prime minister under caution by being there, but he hated going to London.

'No.  Take MacNee with you.  I'll sit in if you have to bring Roskill here.'

*

In Saltcoats, the SOCOs were re-examining MacIlwraith's house.   Colin MacNee had asked for a further forensic search in the hope of finding some physical evidence that would link MacIlwraith to the Last Cairngorm bombing. He was convinced that his browsing history, and the fact that he had downloaded bomb-making instructions, would not be enough to secure a conviction on a conspiracy charge.  The PF had said as much. He needed physical evidence to buttress the circumstantial case, and he was certain that MacIlwraith would not have been smart enough, nor careful enough, to eliminate all evidence of bomb making.

'So how the fuck did you miss it first time round?'

Colin was angry and, uncharacteristically, he was showing it.  The most senior SOCO had phoned him to tell him that they had discovered, at the back of a desk drawer, a tenancy agreement for a light industrial unit - no bigger than a lock-up garage - on a trading estate not far from MacIlwraith's house.  He wanted to know if they should get help from Strathclyde Police to open the unit and search it.

'What do you think?'  Colin's tone was sarcastic and incredulous.  'I'll get in touch with Kilmarnock and get them to send round a couple of PCs and some bolt cutters.  Just make sure you do it right. Take as long as you need, within reason.'

*

In Glasgow, Dongle Donaldson was working with the cyber crime specialists of Strathclyde Police to see if any more evidence could be extracted from Simon Mathieson's computer equipment.  It had been very difficult to make the case against Mathieson in relation to the cyber attack of Mercury Fulfilment any less circumstantial. Mathieson’s laptop had been configured to control all his other devices and it could have been used to launch an attack, or to engage in other kinds of hacking.   But, as Dongle had expected, a direct link to Mercury Fulfilment had proved elusive.

‘When my boss asked me to investigate Mathieson’s search history, I only had access to his laptop and, unlike the other guy, he had been very careful not to leave a trail that would incriminate him.’   Dongle was thinking aloud over coffee in the canteen in Govan Police Station with two DIs from the high tech squad.  ‘Did he have any other devices that he might have used for surfing the net?’

‘There was a tablet with no history of being used for anything but email, and we checked that the emails were on the same account as the laptop.   He had a whole array of hard disks.  Any of them could have been hooked up to a keyboard and temporarily configured to get on the web.’

‘Did you check them?’

The two DIs looked at each other and then looked down at their coffees.  ‘Not all that carefully, if we’re honest.   We were focused on more sophisticated uses of the hardware.  We were looking for evidence of cyber crime more than anything.  And Andy Hanna wanted us to search for any financial information.’

Dongle decided that getting ripped into them would be counter-productive, and, in any case, they outranked him.  His special expertise gave him some leeway with his superiors, but it needed to be deployed carefully.

Dongle spent the rest of the day meticulously searching the various memory devices that had been found in Mathieson’s flat.  It was time-consuming and painstaking work, especially because he had to be sure that he was recovering stuff that Mathieson – no mean computer expert himself – didn’t want anybody to find.  He was good, but not as good as me, Dongle thought, as he prepared a report for DCI Fiske.

*

In Edinburgh, the First Minister was preparing for another appearance in Parliament and another grilling by the opposition.  Senior members of her party were openly speculating about how long she could remain in office.  The Justice Secretary had not spoken to her since he had dramatically left the Chamber as she answered questions after her previous statement.

In Glasgow, the editorial conference at the
Banner
had
discussed the position the paper should take on the First Minister's difficulties.  The editorial line had usually been supportive of the government in general and of the FM in particular. In common with other titles, however, it had recalled the abrupt resignation of one of her predecessors.  The first leader in the
Glasgow Banner
made uncomfortable reading in St Andrews House:

Just over ten years ago, a First Minister was forced to resign over a relatively minor, and as it turned out, technical, breach of the rules governing expenses payable to MSPs and MPs.  This newspaper called for his resignation because of the damage that was being done to the reputation of the Scottish Parliament.  We now have the unedifying spectacle of a First Minister who, because of a conspicuous failure to confirm that she instituted proper security checks on a potential employee, stands accused of not having done so.

Unless she can tell Parliament today that the checks were done, especially when she became First Minister, to ensure that Mr Paul MacIver, now on remand on very serious criminal charges, posed no security threat, she must go.   MacIver is widely known to have had connections with radical, even extremist, nationalists.   That in itself should have been enough to put the First Minister on her guard.

Let us be clear about the questions she must answer:

Did she request security checks when she was               considering the appointment of Paul MacIver as her special adviser when she was appointed as Finance Secretary?

Did she ensure that further checks were undertaken when she became First Minister?

Will she tell parliament who recommended MacIver to her?

Did she act on advice from the Security Services relayed to her by the Permanent Secretary to the Scottish Government that they considered it essential that MacIver be fully vetted?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, the First Minister’s position will be untenable. 

The First Minister looked up from reading the press cuttings.  The only other people in her room in St Andrews House were the Permanent Secretary and her Private Secretary.  They waited for her to speak.

‘Somebody is briefing the papers, especially the
Banner
.   How else would they know about advice from the security services or the question of who recommended Paul to me?’

Neither of the civil servants spoke.

‘Should I call the Cabinet before I make a statement?’

‘That is entirely a matter for you, First Minister.  I would simply advise that you would need to be clear about the purpose of such a meeting.’

What she needed was the kind of advice that she had paid Paul MacIver to provide.

‘Draft a statement.  Have it here within an hour.  Then I’ll decide how to proceed.’

*

In Wilmington, Delaware, the Board of Burtonhall had dispersed and, with the exception of the Chairman, Richard Seaton, the board members had been driven to Philadelphia International Airport, where the Burtonhall jet was waiting to take them to their connecting flights:  the Russian to New York for a flight to Moscow, via Paris, the American to Omaha, Nebraska, and Roskill to New York to catch the BA First Class Service to London City.

Seaton and Cy Packard, the CEO, were in Packard's office drinking Jack Daniels from the crystal glasses that Cy had been given when he left the CIA.

'James was uncharacteristically quiet today.'  Packard said.

Seaton sipped his Bourbon. 'I noticed that.  But I didn't know what to make of it.'

'Me either.  His whole attitude has been a little strange recently.  He was oddly reluctant to approach his old friend Carey to get the Scottish police to stop crawling over us.  And he claimed he didn't think there was any need for him to attend the Board meeting.  I had to lean on him pretty hard.  Almost called you in to persuade him.  I have a feeling, an instinct, the kind I used to get sometimes in the Company, that he's up to something.'

'But what?'

'I have no idea.  I may have to call in some favours and see what I can find.'

*

In London, Roskill was met by Cordingley at City Airport.  Roskill was surprised, and slightly concerned, to see his lawyer waiting for him after he cleared immigration via the VIP line.

'Edmund!  What a surprise!  I expected to see Vic.'

'He's outside with the car.  I had to speak to you immediately and privately.  Can we go somewhere quiet?  There's a VIP lounge here I take it?'

'You can say anything in front of Vic.  Let's just go to the car.'

'No, Mike.  This is serious, and delicate, and I don't propose to take any risks.'

Vic was Roskill's protection officer and he had been with him for years.  He had heard almost as many secrets as the Queen.  Something was up.

They found a quiet table in the lounge and poured some coffee.

'No point in telling you this any way but directly.  The Scottish police - Detective Chief Inspector Vanessa Fiske, formerly of the Met - wants to interview you under caution.  She'll probably be here tomorrow.  You can't refuse.'

'I fucking well can!  I am a former Prime Minister of the UK and I do not need to truckle to a minor fucking police officer!'

Foul language, pulling rank and insulting other public servants.  Cordingley had seen it before, and always when Roskill was unsure of his ground.

'No, you can't.  Because if you do, she'll send the boys in blue round from the Met and you'll be arrested and taken to Aberdeen.  And do you honestly believe that the press won't be alerted?   I really don't know whether we can keep a lid on this, but I'm sure we can't if you refuse to be interviewed.'