Quintin Jardine - Screen Savers

I hardly understood a word, but I knew what she was telling them. It was mid-afternoon and we had five hours before the flight which we had identified was due to take off; a KLM flight, bound for Jakarta through Singapore.

We would catch him at the gate, of course, but the sooner the better, so the customs team was being instructed to sweep the huge hub airport. The briefing was over, quickly, and the officers dispersed, leaving de Witt and me nothing to do but wait in that small office. I grew more excited, and more tense, by the minute; I’d have loved to have been out there looking myself, but it was too risky. We had one chance at this and if I was spotted first. .

‘Are you always as obsessive as this, Oz?’ the soldier asked me, idly. Like many Dutch people, his English was almost perfect. ‘You could have left the rest to us, you know, and gone back to England with your friends. I am not saying that this will be dangerous, but you never know.’

‘I’m obsessive,’ I replied, ‘when someone is obsessed with me. . and when someone thinks they can take the piss out of me and get away with it. As for going home, I have to know all the answers, and I have to hear them for myself.’

We sat there for almost an hour, almost telling each other our life stories. When I had finished mine, de Witt pursed his lips and nodded. ‘I understand you better now,’ he said. ‘I see why you have to be here.’

He had barely finished before the door opened and the commander reappeared. ‘We have a sighting,’ she said, in English, for my benefit, ‘in one of the restaurants on the upper level. Come on.’

We followed the woman out of the room, into the concourse. I know Schiphol Airport well — I travel through it often with the GWA team — so I had a fair idea of where we were headed. The place is so big that even at a brisk pace the walk took us almost ten minutes. Once or twice, air crew buzzed past us on wee motorised scooter things, and I wondered why the customs lady couldn’t have ordered up three of those. But we got there, eventually; to the place which I had guessed, a restaurant not far from the Casino, one level above the crowds.

A customs officer was waiting by the doorway; he spoke briefly to his boss. ‘Third table from the door,’ she told us, quietly, ‘in the centre of three ranks.’ I knew the layout; I’ve eaten in the place myself. Henke de Witt nodded and stepped inside, with me at his heels.

We were unnoticed, until we were no more than five yards from the table; then Stephen Donn looked up, directly into my eyes. ‘Hello,’ I said, treating him to my most self-satisfied smile. ‘I’ll bet you thought you’d cracked it. Wrong.’

He didn’t say a word. Instead he picked up a wicked looking, saw-edged steak knife and grabbed the arm of the woman at the next table. I guessed at the time that he planned to use her as a hostage to make yet another getaway; in fact, that’s still my guess, but I’ll never know for sure, for de Witt turned out to be quicker on the draw than Billy the Kid.

I know that he snatched it from his shoulder holster, but it happened so fast that it was as if the gun had just materialised in his hand. Before Donn could pull the woman in front of him, a nice round red hole appeared in the middle of his forehead. He stiffened for a second, then toppled backwards, dead as a doornail.

Across the table, closer to us, Mike Dylan pushed himself to his feet, half-turning towards us. Captain de Witt shot him too, through the side of the chest; he gasped and slumped to the ground. I dropped to my knees beside him as he lay, writhing, on the floor. As he looked up at me, I read a mix of shock and terror in his expression; I couldn’t do anything to comfort or reassure him, for we both knew that he was dying.

He grabbed my jacket. ‘Clever bastard. . right. . enough,’ he murmured, with a great effort. The words seemed to bubble out of him. Then he stared up, into my eyes. ‘Only personal with him, Oz. Just the money with me. . had to have my own. You understand. .’

Those were the last words my poor, daft pal Dylan said to me, before he drowned on his own blood.

‘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.