Quintin Jardine - Stay of Execution

She paused, for maybe half a second. ‘Well, since it’s on your way. .’ She stood up and slipped on her jacket. ‘Wait for me downstairs, while I sign the bill and pay a visit.’

‘Where are we going?’ he asked her, as she eased herself into the passenger seat.

‘We’re heading towards Portobello. Lena’s place is just off King’s Road.’

‘Fine.’

Skinner was not given to mixing conversation and driving: he found it too easy to concentrate on neither. As they drew away he switched on his CD player, and let Maria Callas fill the car. Aileen de Marco sighed. ‘Ohhh! I just love her.’

‘Unfortunately Onassis didn’t. So she got fat and died. Silly woman.’

‘Are you always such a cynic?’ she asked.

‘No, I just find it astonishing that someone who gave the world so much more than he ever did should have wound up pining away after he dumped her.’

‘Thank God!’ she exclaimed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Thank God that you don’t understand everything.’

He let the music take over and drove east. Lena McElhone’s flat was in a modern block in a quiet side-street. He pulled up at the front door and turned down the volume on the great diva. ‘Thanks for dinner,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ she replied, ‘for making me realise how much I’ve got to learn, and for helping me shed my political blinkers.’

‘Hah! That’s what I’m doing, is it?’

‘Absolutely. You’re contributing to the better governance of Scotland.’

He shuddered. ‘That’s a horrible Harold Wilson word; you’re from another era. I prefer “administration” myself. It implies more regard for the people.’

‘Why, you’re a closet socialist, Mr Skinner!’

‘Aren’t we all, if we care about people?’

She looked at him. ‘Bob, the coffee was lousy back at the club. Would you like another?’

He glanced at the car clock. It showed ten thirty-six, and he always kept it fast. ‘Yeah, okay. If Lena’s not in her curlers, that is.’

‘Lena’s on a management course in Sunningdale.’

She jumped out of the car and opened the block’s main entrance door with a key. The flat was on the ground floor, to the right; the heating had been on, for it was warm and comfortable. ‘Living room’s there,’ said Aileen, pointing to a door off the hall. ‘Make yourself at home, and I’ll brew up.’

Skinner settled on to the larger of the two couches and leaned back, gazing up at the ceiling, feeling tired, and wondering vaguely what he was doing there. From nowhere, he thought of his children and felt a pang of longing, for peace, quiet and a life undisturbed.

‘Hey,’ her voice came quietly. He realised that he had been dozing.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was meditating.’

‘Do you always meditate with your mouth hanging very slightly open?’ she asked as she laid a mug before him on the glass coffee-table, and settled down beside him on the couch.

‘That means I’m really getting into it.’

‘You don’t let much out, do you, Bob?’

‘Not as a rule,’ he admitted. ‘Discussing my politics with a politician is a real first. Even my wife thinks I could go into the polling station, close my eyes, and my hand would still put the cross in the Tory box.’

‘If we’re into confessions, I’ll give you one. I voted Tory once myself. It didn’t count, mind you. It was in a mock election at school in ’eighty-three.’

‘Everybody voted Tory in ’eighty-three. Would you like to confess something else now?’

She peered at him, over the top of her mug. ‘What?’

‘How did you know that this was on my way home?’

A faint pink flush came to her cheeks. ‘I told you I had access to the secrets,’ she murmured. ‘My department has a file on you; I read it. I know that you live in Gullane, East Lothian, your middle name’s Morgan, you’ve a two-one arts degree in philosophy and politics from Glasgow University, and you hold the Queen’s Police Medal. You had a cardiac incident earlier this year in America. You had a pacemaker implanted as a precaution against a recurrence and you are now one hundred per cent fit. You’ve been married twice; your first wife was killed when you were twenty-eight, your second wife is American, a consultant pathologist. You have one daughter by your first marriage, one of each by your second, and an adopted son. Your adult daughter is an associate with Curle, Anthony and Jarvis, Mitchell Laidlaw’s firm. . but he told me that, it’s not on your file.’

‘Just as bloody well,’ Bob growled.

‘I could also take you through every step of your career, culminating in your rejection of the command of the Scottish Drugs Enforcement Agency, the reasons for this set out in your letter to the former justice minister.’

‘Is there anything you don’t know about me?’ he asked her, when she had finished.

The pale blue eyes seemed to sparkle with her smile. ‘I suspect there’s still a hell of a lot that I don’t know. In fact, I suspect that the really interesting things about you aren’t on that file. Sure it told me where you come from, where you’ve been, how you’ve risen through the police and all that stuff. But it doesn’t tell me why you have so many enemies.’

He frowned. ‘Do I?’

‘You know you do. There are people in my party. . not in the controlling wing, I hasten to say. . and in parties to the left of mine who are dead scared of you. They’d love to see you discredited, brought down, sent packing off to Gullane, or better still taken off the scene altogether.’

‘That’s not news to me,’ he said. ‘They’ve tried to get rid of me from my job already, a couple of times in fact.’

‘You gave them the opportunity, as I understand it.’

‘Maybe. And maybe they’d have succeeded in having me fired too, but they’d neither the brains nor the balls.’

‘That’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’d heard that Agnes Maley had both and you saw her off.’

Skinner laughed, softly. ‘Ah, Black Agnes. She gave it a good try, but she’s history.’

‘Mmm. I heard she annoyed you so much you made a movie with her in the starring role.’

Skinner’s grin vanished as quickly as it had appeared. ‘Your boss,’ he said. ‘Mr Tommy Murtagh, the First Miniature. He’s got a loose tongue; because he’s one of only half a dozen people who know about that, and I can vouch for the silence of all the rest. I didn’t make that movie, as it happens, but, luckily, I have more friends than I have enemies. Just in case you’re harbouring any illusions about me, if I had known about it in advance I wouldn’t have stopped it. The only regret I have about Agnes is that I couldn’t do more to her.’

Aileen saw his eyes go harder as he looked towards her, saw the warmth in them turn to ice. ‘You can be scary, you know,’ she murmured.

‘Only to people who need scaring; like Agnes Maley.’

‘You may think that, but it’s not true; you scared me.’

He frowned. ‘When did I do that?’ The moment was gone; she saw only concern in him.

‘Just now, when you looked at me; it was as if you let me see right down inside you. Did you do that on purpose?’

‘No, not knowingly at any rate. If I did, I apologise, but maybe, subconsciously, I wanted to warn you.’

‘Warn me about what?’

‘Never mind.’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘Warn me not to exceed my ministerial brief, you mean? If you did, it didn’t work. I like danger,’ she said quietly, ‘and you, Mr Skinner, are a very dangerous man. But the really scary thing about you is the way that it comes out of nowhere. Just there, when I mentioned Agnes, you went from sunshine to darkness in an instant. That’s not in your file.’