Pray for the Dying (51 page)

She looked up as her mother returned carrying a tray, loaded with two tiny espresso cups, and a bottle of Perrier with a glass.

‘No ice,’ Sofia Deschamps declared as she placed them on a small table at the side of the couch. ‘I refuse to dilute the mineral with melted tap water, as so many do.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Skinner told her. ‘When my late wife and I were very young, we went on a camping holiday to the South of France. Everybody told us not to drink the water there, so we didn’t. But we had ice in everything, so everything tasted of chlorine.’

‘If that was the only side effect,’ she countered, ‘you were lucky.’

He winced. ‘It wasn’t; I was being delicate, that’s all.’

‘Your late wife,’ she repeated. ‘And earlier you mentioned your former wife.’

‘Three,’ he said, anticipating the question. ‘Three and still counting.’

‘Maman!’ Marina exclaimed, her tone sharp.

‘Ah yes.’ Her mother held up a hand. ‘I am sorry. That was indiscreet; we have seen this morning’s papers.’

‘No apology necessary,’ he assured her. ‘All it means is that our separation is public knowledge. It wasn’t the way I’d have chosen for it to be revealed, but these things happen. Have you ever been married, Miss Deschamps? Or am I making a false assumption? Have you reverted to your birth surname?’

‘No, you are correct. I have always chosen to avoid marriage. Antonia’s father, Anil, was a member of the Mauritian government of the day . . . you see, we have politicians in common. Marriage with him was never possible, since he had a wealthy wife, to whom he owed his position.

‘Marina’s father was an Australian, with business interests in Port St Louis. He spent part of the year there, the winter, usually, and the rest in Australia, or travelling in connection with his business. He was something of an entrepreneur.’ She pronounced the word with care, balancing each syllable.

‘We had a very nice apartment there, and a very pleasant life. Not that I was a kept woman,’ she was quick to add. ‘I had a very good job, in the Mauritian civil service, and I maintained my own household. He did not contribute, because I would not allow it, even though we were together for seventeen years. I had a good income. We are a wealthy country, you know; close to Africa and yet a little distant from it too.’

‘I know,’ Skinner replied. ‘Mauritius is one of the many places on my “To do” list.’

‘You will like it.’

‘Why did you leave?’ he asked her.

‘To be with my daughters. Marina’s father was very good to both my girls; he more or less adopted Antonia, and when she came to university age, he got her a place in Birmingham, where she did a degree in criminology.’

‘She first joined the police in Birmingham as well,’ Marina added. ‘She had a specialised degree and that got her fast-tracked. Well, you’ll have seen her career record, I’m sure. She never looked back.’

‘How about you?’ he put to her. ‘Were you ever tempted to join the force?’

‘That never really arose, not in the same way. My father died when I was sixteen. I was very upset, and any thought of university went out of my mind . . . not that I had Antonia’s IQ anyway. I stayed in Mauritius and went to college; I did a secretarial course and a personnel management qualification. I came to Britain eight years ago, when Antonia was senior enough to point me at a job with the Met support staff.’

She smiled. ‘That’s not as bad as it sounds; I had a very stringent interview, and I must have been vetted, for I was attached to SO15, the Counter-Terrorism Command, for a little while. But when Antonia became a chief constable . . . back to Birmingham again . . . things changed. She insisted that I go with her, to run what she always called her Private Office. The rest you must know.’

Skinner nodded. ‘I’ve been told. Ladies,’ he continued, ‘you’ll be aware that since Saturday evening, a full-scale murder investigation has been under way. I’m keeping in close touch with it, and I know that DI Mann, the senior investigating officer, will want to visit you fairly soon to interview you for the record. Meantime, is there anything you would like to ask me?’

‘Of course,’ Sofia exclaimed, ‘but why would he need to interview us?’

‘Detective Inspector Mann is a lady, Maman,’ her daughter murmured.

‘Then she, if you must. Why would she? What do we know? In any event, can this not be an interview? You’re her boss now, after all, as my dear Antonia was.’

‘Yes but she is in day-to-day charge.’ He paused. ‘If it makes you happy, I can go over some of the ground she’ll want to and report what you say to her. If she’s comfortable with that, fine. If not, she can come and visit you again. Okay?’

‘Yes,’ Marina Deschamps replied, at once. ‘But Maman is right. Why do you need witness statements from us?’

‘Because we’re now certain, beyond any doubt, that Chief Constable Field was the target. These men weren’t after my wife, or the First Minister. They were pros, hit men; they knew exactly who they were there to kill, and they did.’

‘
Oui
,’ Miss Deschamps whispered. ‘We saw my daughter’s body yesterday. They covered half her face with a sheet, but I made them take it off. We know what was done to her. So yes, I understand you now. What do you need to know?’

‘Her private life,’ Skinner said. ‘I can tell you that we’ll be going back through her entire career, looking at what she’s done, people she’s put away, enemies she may have made along the way who have the power and the contacts to put together an operation like this.’

‘Such an impersonal word: “operation”. You make it sound like a military thing.’

‘It was,’ he told her. ‘Smit and Botha were former soldiers, and Beram Cohen, the planner, had an intelligence background. They didn’t work cheap, and they weren’t the sort of men you can contract in a pub. The very fact that the principal, as we’ll call the person who ordered your daughter’s death, was able to contact Cohen, tells me that he is wealthy and well-connected.

‘I know about some of the successes that Toni had as a police officer and I’m aware that she may have upset some very nasty people in her time. Trust me, we will look at these, using outside agencies wherever we need to.’

‘Outside agencies?’

‘He means the British Security Service, Maman,’ Marina volunteered.

‘Not only them. The FBI, the American DEA; we’ll go anywhere we need to. But alongside that I need to know about any personal relationships your sister may have had. Unlikely as it may seem, did she ever have a romance that ended badly?’ He hesitated. ‘Did she have any personal weaknesses?’

‘Of course not!’ Sofia exclaimed.

‘I’m sure she didn’t,’ Skinner said, deflecting her sudden anger, although privately he counted naked ambition and ruthlessness towards colleagues as ranking fairly high on the weakness scale. ‘But the questions must be asked if we are to do our best for you in finding the person who had that done to her, what you saw yesterday. Marina, you understand that, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do. I knew my sister well enough. Personal weaknesses? Was she a gambler, closet drinker? No, she was tight with her money and she didn’t touch a drop. She didn’t mortgage beyond her means either; she was shrewd with the property she bought. For example, she picked up this pile at the bottom of the market, after making a big profit from her house in Edgbaston.’

She stopped and looked at her mother. ‘Personal relationships?’ she repeated. ‘Maman, cover your ears if you like, but this is the truth. I don’t think Toni ever had a romance in her life, certainly not in the years that I’ve lived with her in Britain.

‘Relationships, yes; she’s had six of them. Make no mistake, she was robustly heterosexual. But none of them were about love; all of them were about her career. I’m not saying that she bedded her way to the top, but every lover that she had was a man of power or influence, one way or another.’

‘Might any of them have been the sort of man to take it badly when she pulled the plug on him?’ the chief asked.

‘No, I would not put any of them in that category. Everyone she brought home . . . and she told me she never played away . . . was as cynical as she was.’

‘Were they cops?’

‘A couple were. There was a DAC . . . deputy assistant commissioner . . . in the Met, about five years ago, and an assistant chief from Birmingham before him. I’m sure that neither of those two were in a position to advance her career directly, but they knew people who were.

‘More recently, from what she told me, the men she’s been involved with have been . . . how do I put it? . . . opinion formers, movers and shakers outside the police force. There was a broadcast journalist, a civil service mandarin in the Justice Ministry, and another man she said was a very successful criminal lawyer.’

‘You’re telling me what they were but not who,’ Skinner pointed out. ‘Can you put names to any of them?’

Marina smiled. ‘No, because Antonia never did, and since we didn’t live together until she became the chief in Birmingham, I never saw any of them. “No names, no blames”, was what she always said, whenever I asked her. It used to annoy me, until I realised that given her background and mine . . .’ She broke off and looked at her mother. ‘I’m sorry, Maman,’ she said, ‘but this is the truth. She never had a proper father as such, far less than I did. We were secret daughters in a way, both of us, but her most of all.

‘Given that history, that upbringing, it was perfectly natural that Antonia should have woven a cloak of secrecy around her own personal life. And me? I am exactly the same. Most observers, looking at me, would say that my life is a mystery.’

Sofia nodded. Her eyes were sad. ‘I wish I could deny that,’ she sighed, ‘but it is true. That is my legacy to both of my daughters.’

Twenty-Four

‘Bingo,’ Skinner exclaimed, as he gazed at the photograph on his monitor. He turned to his exec. ‘It may say Byron Millbank on his driving licence, and that may not be a top-quality image, but I rarely forget a face . . . and never, when I’ve seen it dead. That is Beram Cohen, one-time Israeli paratrooper, then a Mossad operative until he was caught using a dodgy German passport while killing a Hamas official, most recently for hire as a facilitator of covert operations.

‘As you know, Lowell, he’s the guy who recruited Smit and Botha, procured their weapons through Freddy Welsh in Edinburgh, then went and died, inconveniently for them, of a brain haemorrhage a few days before the hit.’

‘Could we have stopped it if he hadn’t?’ Payne asked.

‘There would have been even less chance. The evidence we had would still have led us to Welsh, but no sooner; we probably wouldn’t have got to the hall as quickly as we did.

‘Even if we had been lucky and got the two South Africans, my guess is that Cohen would have been in the car and would have taken off. He’d have been on the motorway inside two minutes. He would have got clear, dumped the guy Brown’s body, so it would never have been linked to our investigation, and we’d have had no clue at all, nowhere to go.’

He scratched his chin. ‘Cohen dying might have been convenient for us, but as it turned out it wasn’t a life-saver. Speaking of Bazza Brown’s body,’ he continued, ‘lying a-mouldering in the boot of a Peugeot, and all that, I’d like an update on that side of the investigation.’ He checked his watch. ‘Mann’s press briefing should be over by now; ask her to come up, please.’

The DCI nodded and was about to leave when Skinner called after him. ‘By the way, Lowell, are we any nearer being able to open that bloody safe, or do we seriously have to explore the Barlinnie option? Toni’s sister gave me a number, but as she warned me, it had been changed. She did it weekly, apparently; there’s security,’ he grumbled, ‘then there’s fucking paranoia.’

Payne laughed. ‘It’s in hand, gaffer, but the Bar-L route may be quicker than waiting for the supplier to send a technician.’ He paused. ‘By the way, how did your visit go? How are the mother and sister?’

‘As bereft as you would imagine,’ the chief replied, ‘but they’re both very calm. I was impressed by Marina,’ he added. ‘She’s not a bit like her half-sister. Toni, it seems, was the love child of a Mauritian politico; she must have inherited the gene. Marina, on the other hand, struck me as one of nature’s civil servants, as her mother was.’

‘And her father? Is he still around?’

‘No, not for some years; he never was, not full-time. Sofia seems to have valued a degree of independence.’ Skinner pointed to the anteroom at the far end of his office, the place that Marina Field had filled. ‘Have you lined up any secretary candidates yet?’

‘Yes. Human Resources say they’ll give me a short list by midday.’

‘Then hold back on that for a while. We can call up a vetted typist when we need one. Marina says she wants to carry on in her job, working for me. I’ve stalled her on it, until I decide whether I want that.’

‘How long will you take to make up your mind?’

Skinner grinned. ‘Ideally, three months, by which time I’ll be out of here.’

Twenty-Five

‘It is for these reasons,’ Aileen de Marco concluded, reading from autocue screens in the conference room of the ugly Glasgow office block that housed her party’s headquarters, ‘that I am committing Scottish Labour to the unification of the country’s eight police forces into a single entity. The old system, with its lack of integration and properly shared intelligence and with its outdated artificial boundaries, bears heavy responsibility for the death of Antonia Field.

‘Not only do I endorse the proposal for unity, I urge the First Minister to enact it without further delay to enable the appointment of a police commissioner as soon as possible to oversee the merger and the smooth introduction of the new structure.’

‘Any questions, ladies and gentlemen?’ Alf Old invited, from his seat at the table on the right of the platform, then pointing as he chose from the hands that shot up, and from the babble of competing voices. ‘John Fox.’

‘Is this not a panic reaction, Ms de Marco,’ the BBC reporter asked, ‘after your narrow escape on Saturday?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘What would you say to those people, and there may be many of them, who think that it is?’

‘I’d tell them that they’re wrong. Scottish Labour took a corporate decision some time ago to support unification; we’re quite clear that it’s the way forward. On the other hand, the party in power seems less committed. Yes, I know the First Minister says that it’s the way forward, but there are people on his back benches who aren’t quite as keen.

‘We’ve been reading a lot this morning about the First Minister’s personal courage . . . and I have to say that I admire him for the way he displayed it on Saturday, when even the senior Strathclyde police officer on the scene collapsed under the strain.

‘What I’m saying today is that it’s time for him to bring that courage into the parliament chamber and join with us in getting important legislation on to the Scottish statute book.’

She paused, for only a second, but Marguerite Hatton seized on her silence.

‘Do you have anyone in mind for the position of police commissioner, Ms de Marco?’ she asked.

Aileen glared down at her from behind her lectern. ‘There will be a selection process,’ she replied, ‘but I won’t have anything to do with it.’

‘Would you endorse your husband’s candidacy?’

‘I repeat,’ she snapped, ‘I will not have anything to do with the selection process. I’m not First Minister, and even if I was, the appointment will be made by a body independent of government. The legislation will merge the existing police authorities into one and that will select the commissioner.’

‘Then my question still stands,’ the journalist countered. ‘Will you endorse your husband’s candidacy?’

‘I’m sorry, Ms Hatton,’ she maintained, ‘I’m not going there. I’m the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, and I’m sure that I’ll have political colleagues on the new authority, but it won’t be my place to influence them in favour of any candidate.’

‘Or against one,’ she challenged, ‘if you believed he was entirely wrong for the job?’

Aileen paused. ‘If I believed that strongly enough about someone,’ she replied, ‘I’d say so in parliament.’

‘So do you believe your husband would be the right man for the post, even though he’s an authoritarian bully?’

‘Now hold on a minute!’ Alf Old barked, from the platform. ‘This press conference isn’t about individuals. It’s about important Labour Party policy. However, I have to tell you that I’ve met the gentleman in question and I don’t recognise your description. Now that’s enough out of you, madam. Another questioner, please?’

Hatton ignored him. ‘But isn’t that why you and he have just announced your separation, Aileen?’ she shouted. ‘Isn’t that why you ran into the arms of another man after your terrifying ordeal on Saturday, because Bob wasn’t there for you?’

Aileen de Marco had known more than a few intense situations in her life, and she was proud of her ability to stay calm and controlled, whatever the pressure. And so, it was agreed later, her outburst was entirely atypical, which made it all the more shocking.

‘Bob’s never been there for me,’ she yelled. ‘Why the hell do you think I’m divorcing him, you stupid bloody woman?’