Quintin Jardine - Fatal Last Words

Pye looked at him. ‘Think carefully, now. When you were with Mr Glover, did he seem in any distress? Did he complain of anything? Shortness of breath, for example.’

‘Did he hell, as like. He was at full volume, triumphant after his run-in with Anderson. He must have had a fair bit to drink in the course of the evening, maybe more than he should have. He was slurring his words, and maybe he was a wee bit unsteady on his pins.’ McCool frowned. ‘Now that I think about it, when he told me where he was going, he did say that it wasn’t before time, as he was starting to feel a bit hyper. Poor guy. The confrontation with Anderson must have got to him more than he knew, aye, and maybe the drink too. What a bastard, eh?’

‘Are you speaking of Anderson?’

‘Not this time, Inspector, not specifically. I meant life in general. We’re on a high, and then it kicks the feet from under us. Tough on Ainsley: this time he didn’t survive the fall. I suppose it’s a lesson to all us middle-aged guys.’ He exhaled heavily; then his expression changed, subtly. ‘All that said, this is something I have to be interested in, professionally.’

‘I appreciate that,’ Pye told him. ‘Give me a minute.’ He took out his mobile and called Wilding’s number. ‘Ray, where are you?’ he asked as the detective sergeant answered.

‘We’ve just got to the mortuary.’ he replied quietly. ‘Miss Glover’s just about to make the formal identification.’

‘OK, thanks. When I’m done here, I’ll join you there. We’d better both witness the post-mortem for form’s sake.’ He turned back to the reporter. ‘What are you going to do with this?’

‘For myself, nothing,’ McCool told him. ‘I work for an evening paper and today’s Sunday, so I don’t have an edition. But I should let the news desk on our sister daily know about it.’

‘Ten minutes,’ said the detective. ‘Call them in ten minutes. By that time I’ll have rung my boss and been in touch with our press officer.’

‘You know anything about next of kin? Ainsley had two kids, hadn’t he?’

‘Yes, but that’s as much as I’m telling you. I know you have to contact them, but you’re on your own with that.’

‘Give me something else, man, some sort of edge on the rest. Who found the body?’

Pye considered the question; eventually he decided that he had no reason not to answer it. ‘Randy Mosley did, when she and the security manager unlocked the yurt.’

McCool’s supplementary was instant. ‘Are you saying somebody locked him in, after he was dead?’

‘No, I’m not, and I’m not answering your next question either.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You’re not as sharp as I thought, Mr McCool. I was assuming you’d ask me whether somebody locked him in while he was still alive.’

‘ What is it between you and Bruce Anderson?’ Aileen asked as she cracked eggs into a bowl in the kitchen of their home in Gullane, the East Lothian coastal village where Bob had lived for more than half his life.

He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing; ancient history.’

‘Don’t give me that. Whenever his name’s mentioned, there’s a look comes into your eyes. Not so much someone walking on your grave, more the other way round. You were his security adviser, and then you quit. I know you told me you decided that you couldn’t do justice to both jobs, but what really happened?’

He leaned back against the door frame and gazed ahead, not at her, but at the wall opposite. ‘Let’s just say that I found out what sort of a man Dr Anderson really is.’

‘What sort is he?’ she teased.

‘You should know; he used to be a member of your party. In fact when you were a fast-rising young Glasgow councillor, he was its leader in Scotland.’

‘Yes, but I was very young then, I never got to meet him. . not to talk to at any rate; I got to shake his hand at our annual conference once, as if he was a visiting head of state.’

‘So what was the word, within your circles? There must have been talk about him. I know he wasn’t the expected choice for that job when Labour took power in Scotland.’

‘We didn’t trust him,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe it was his background: he was a GP in Barlanark before he was an MP and some of us thought that a truly committed socialist might have felt that he could have done more good there than trampling on his colleagues’ fingers as he climbed the ladder. But then he wasn’t a truly committed socialist, as it turned out.’

‘As he’s proved since then, by staying in your party but more or less aligning himself with the other team.’

‘And becoming one of my administration’s most vitriolic opponents.’

Bob smiled softly. ‘When I was a kid in Motherwell, I heard someone say, “The turned ones are the worst.” I was innocent then; I didn’t know a thing about sectarian bigotry, for I’d never been exposed to it. So I asked my dad what it meant; he looked at me, not angry but dead serious, and he said, “Son, I’d be obliged if you never use that phrase again.” So I never did. But I still found out what it meant. From my experience it’s only ever been true of politicians; present company very much excepted, of course,’ he added quickly.

‘Come on,’ Aileen protested. ‘Zealots are zealots, wherever they’re found.’

‘Ah, but Bruce isn’t a zealot,’ Bob countered. ‘Those old Judean boys had a powerful belief that drove them on. Anderson doesn’t; he’s motivated by his own ambition, and his own arrogance. OK, plenty of people are, whether they know it or not, but most of them have redeeming features to offset it. Anderson doesn’t; as far as I’m concerned, the man has no core values at all, he has no concept of loyalty and he’s a fucking liar.’

‘Mmmm.’ The start of a grin tickled the corners of his partner’s mouth, as she started to whisk the eggs. ‘But apart from that, he’s a decent guy. . isn’t he?’

Skinner’s nostrils flared. ‘He’s the man who walked away from power when his wife died; to care for his young daughter, or so he said. What he also did was collect a fucking enormous insurance policy, another packet from the criminal injuries compensation fund, and a fat advance for a book about his tragedy. Less than a year after she lost her mother, the kid was packed off to boarding school; next thing anyone knew, Bruce had a new high-Tory girlfriend, and half a dozen directorships including a seat on the board of a political consultancy.’

‘That doesn’t make him a liar, though. He still practises medicine, you know. He probably meant what he said when he resigned as Secretary of State, but people change with time.’

‘That wasn’t what I was talking about. As for his medical practice, it’s in a private clinic, giving health check-ups to punters who can afford it. No, Anderson betrayed me for reasons of sheer political expediency, and more than that, he lied about me to further his own ends.’

‘What? When?’ Aileen demanded, shocked.

‘When he was in office. He inherited me from the previous administration as his security adviser. At first it was fine; we had regular meetings and he acted upon every suggestion that I made. Then my personal life went pear-shaped, Sarah and I split up for a while. .’ He stopped in mid-sentence. ‘No, I’ve got to give up dressing that in soft colours. The black and white truth is that I left her, for reasons that didn’t stand scrutiny then, and of which I’m ashamed now. She went back to the States with James Andrew, who was then a toddler, and I got involved with someone else. We wound up in a particularly nasty tabloid newspaper that thankfully no longer exists. Come on, you probably remember it; the story went everywhere.’