Quintin Jardine - Fatal Last Words

‘No, I’ll have you charged with attempted bribery. Now what is it that you want? What’s this information that you have for me?’

‘I won’t give it to you over the phone, or in any environment where I can be recorded. I’m a sitting target here.’

‘Be sure you stay close to the window,’ said Skinner, drily.

‘They don’t let me do that. I need to see you, Mr Skinner, to tell you what I know. If you have me brought up to Edinburgh, I’ll tell you there.’

‘There’s no chance of that.’

‘I thought not. Then you come to me, you and that gorilla of a colleague who thumped me in Monaco.’

‘You’re kidding. You really don’t want to meet DCS McGuire again. Anyway, he’s away just now.’

‘Then someone else.’

‘Are you trying to work a plea bargain? If you are, talk to the Crown Prosecution Service, not me.’

‘No, I’m not. Maybe I’m just looking for some credit, when it counts.’

‘Like when it comes to sentencing?’

‘No comment.’

‘You’ll get nothing from me.’

Boras sighed. ‘OK, if you come to me, I’ll take you on trust.’

‘I repeat, why should I? What have you got for me?’

‘This morning,’ Boras replied, ‘when they woke me at the usual ungodly hour, they gave me my usual newspapers. In the Daily Mail , I saw a photograph, three actually, of a man you are looking for, someone calling himself Hugo Playfair.’

‘Yes?’ said Skinner, feeling the hair on the back of his neck start to prickle.

‘I know who he is.’

‘ What do you think, Sarge?’ Sauce Haddock asked. ‘Will things be much different now that Mr Skinner’s chief constable?’

‘In theory, no,’ Ray Wilding replied, ‘not for us, at any rate. The word that’s filtered down from Neil McIlhenney is that he’s going to keep hands-on with CID, just like he did before. But there are bound to be changes. There’ll be somebody new in the command corridor, for openers.’

‘Someone from outside?’

‘You’d assume so, especially with the big man’s being promoted internally, but I wouldn’t put money on that. He’s loyal to his own, and it’ll take a good candidate to beat Brian Mackie for the deputy job. If that happens-’

‘Mr McGuire for ACC?’

‘Wait and see, lad; I don’t expect anyone will give us a vote.’

‘What about Andy Martin?’ Alice Cowan called out across the CID room.

Wilding stared at her. ‘Are you pulling my chain?’

‘No,’ she replied innocently. ‘Why not him?’

‘If you don’t know, I’m not going to be the one to tell you. Let’s just say that Judas bloody Iscariot’s got more chance.’

Cowan turned to Haddock. ‘Sauce, what have I missed?’ she demanded, but the young DC was saved by the ringing of his phone.

He snatched it up. ‘Yes?’

‘DC Haddock, Leith? Communications Centre. I have a call for you, foreign, from Belgrade.’

His heart jumped in his chest. ‘Put it through.’ He heard a click. ‘This is DC Harold Haddock,’ he said.

‘I received email,’ a woman replied, ‘from you, yes?’

‘Yes. Are you Vsna?’

‘That’s my name, Vsna Vukic. You tell me the man who email me before is dead?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

‘How?’

‘Murdered.’

‘Shit! Then I shouldn’t be speaking to you.’

‘I won’t take long.’

‘He ask me about some people, give me names, Andelić, Nikolić, asked me if I knew them.’

‘Why did he ask you?’

‘I am journalist in Sarajevo. Someone we both know sent him to me, a lady in America.’

‘Did he say anything else to you?’

‘When I reply to his mail I ask why he want to know anyway. He send me another. It said, “It’s about the cleaner.” That’s all I need to know. I delete his mails, just like I’m going to delete yours now. Don’t send me no more. I going to close that address.’

‘But. .’ There was a sound, louder than a click, the sound of a phone hitting its cradle, hard. And then the dialling tone.

‘That’s a load of help,’ he sighed. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘ Where’s Neil?’ asked Mario McGuire ‘When I called Fettes they said that he and the chief went off somewhere in a hurry, and that I was to call you instead. Where the hell’s he gone, and what’s he doing with Proud Jimmy?’

‘You are indeed out of touch, boss,’ Sammy Pye told him. ‘Sir James is gone. The new chief constable took up the post yesterday.’

‘Big Bob?’

‘Of course.’

‘Acting chief?’

‘No, permanent. For once in this place, nothing leaked in advance of it happening.’

‘In that case, I won’t be too hard on McIlhenney for not tipping me off, especially since it’s the result we all wanted. Now, where are they off to?’

‘I don’t know. All he told me is that it has nothing to do with our investigation.’

‘Investigations, plural. There’s no longer any serious doubt that Glover and Mount were killed by the same person.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Sammy, I’m the fucking head of CID. If I tell you something as gospel, you’re not supposed to ask me if I’m sure, even if I am giving you information from the other side of the planet.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ said the DI, chastened.

‘That’s OK,’ McGuire chuckled. ‘I’m taking the piss because I’m pleased with myself. You have no idea the buzz you get from swanning into somebody else’s territory and clearing up his crime for him. His boss was so pleased she even picked up my hotel tab in Melbourne.’

‘Paula’s premise held up, about how he was killed?’

‘One hundred per cent. They’ve done the post-mortem and confirmed it. There were powder burns on his fingers and lips, and tobacco in his mouth. His uvula was missing, shot off, and there was an exit wound behind where it used to be. They’ve actually found the bullet. They dug it out of a window frame behind where he was standing. After it went through the top of his spine and into the wood, it was flat as a pancake.’

‘So it’s our investigation, officially,’ said Pye.

‘We pretty much knew that as soon as George discovered his computer had been stolen, but yes, it’s ours, Inspector.’

‘And like with Glover, we’ve got bugger-all forensic evidence.’

‘Ah but,’ exclaimed McGuire, in a voice so exultant that Pye could almost see him beam, ‘we do, my son, we do.’ Without pausing he launched into a step-by-step description of the discovery of the cigar box, ‘You should see the MCG from that room, mate; some view,’ and of his photographing the bar code. ‘Those images will be in McIlhenney’s mailbox right now. He must have gone off in such a rush he didn’t have time to open it.’

‘I’ll see if I can access it,’ the DI volunteered.

‘No need. We’ve cracked that too, thanks to my old grandad, dead these twenty years and more. Paula’s IT traced the bar code. That very box was stocked by the Viareggio deli just off St Andrews Square. It’s six thirty in the evening here in Sydney, so they’ll be open by now. These babies are very rare items; that lot cost going on for two hundred quid the set, and even in Edinburgh they don’t turn over many of them. If we discount the bizarre notion that Henry Mount decided to kill himself by doctoring one of his own Havanas, that means that someone either tampered with the thing after he’d bought it, or they bought it for him. You need to get somebody up to that shop to pinpoint the sale, and get the credit card details, and you need to reinterview Mount’s family.’