Quintin Jardine - Stay of Execution

He had grabbed some badly needed sleep in McIlhenney’s spare bedroom, six hours of it before Neil had wakened him at eight, an hour later than he had asked. Once he was dressed he had called home. Sarah had gone, Trish had told him, off to an early job in Edinburgh, but he had spoken to Mark and James Andrew, promising both boys that his whole weekend would be theirs, doubting that their mother would want any of it.

He looked out of his window. The weather forecasters had been correct: the day was mild and sunny, out of place for November, but welcome for the events it would see.

The telephone rang to interrupt his brooding; his direct line, Sarah perhaps, calling to roast him. He picked it up with that expectation. ‘Hello, Bob.’ Aileen de Marco’s sunny voice shone some welcome light into his morning.

‘Hi, Minister,’ he replied. ‘Ready for the big event?’

‘My brother is. Forty-two years old and he’s like a kid. He phoned me ten minutes ago; I’ve never heard him so excited. Is everything okay?’

‘Work-wise or home-wise?’

‘Both, although the second’s none of my business.’

‘As it happens, things have been better on both fronts. The investigation of the New York policeman’s murder has taken a nasty turn that I can’t discuss over the phone. As for the other, Sarah and I are barely speaking now. Somehow we seem to have lost contact with each other.’

‘Can’t you just sit down and talk about it?’ asked Aileen, sympathetically.

His sigh was almost a moan. ‘That would involve both of us listening as well. I don’t know if either of us is capable of that any more. We may have hurt each other too much in the past year or so. We’ve both had crises in our lives, but hers was worse than mine, and I have to admit to getting my priorities wrong when it came to supporting her.’

‘How about just saying “sorry”? I don’t believe you’d ever deliberately hurt someone you love. Your wife must know that too, in her heart.’

She heard him hesitate. ‘It may go a little deeper than that,’ he told her.

‘You mean you. .’

‘No.’›

‘Ahh, you mean she. .’

‘We’ve neither of us been paragons, Aileen.’

‘Did she say anything when you got home on Wednesday night. . or yesterday morning, rather?’

‘I slept in the spare room. It seems that’s what I do these days.’

‘You could have slept with me.’

‘To tell you the God’s truth I wish I had.’

‘The bad part of me agrees with you. The good part reckons you did the right thing.’

‘No, we did,’ he chuckled, ‘or didn’t, as the case may be. Tabloids be damned, I couldn’t have a casual thing with you, Aileen.’

‘You couldn’t with anyone; you’re too serious a guy.’

‘A bit like you?’

‘I suppose. There’s something there, though, isn’t there? Between you and me?’

‘Don’t doubt it.’ He paused, then his tone turned brisk. ‘But I have to put it all aside for now. I’ve got a lot of thinking to do, love, and maybe a lot of decisions to make, but before any of that I have to focus on the present. My personal problems are irrelevant beside the task of getting our VIPs through today in one piece.’

‘Does that include me?’ she asked.

Suddenly he felt himself shudder. ‘I find it odd to think of you in that context, but you’re right; it does.’

‘Make sure you do, then. Will I see you at Murrayfield?’

‘I’ll be there. You concentrate on enjoying the day, and I’ll concentrate on making sure that you can. ’Bye.’

He put down the direct phone and buzzed McGurk on his intercom. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Give me ten minutes, son, then come on in. I want to do some brainstorming.’

He spun his chair down and turned to his computer. There had been no personal e-mails that morning, but he had left it switched on. He hit the search button on his keyboard and entered one word on the bar: ‘Congo’. He found himself offered a series of options, but they were all fairly recent history; even the CIA World Factbook, one of his favourite source websites, told him nothing about the events of forty years before. Finally he turned to Encarta, an encyclopedia that he had bought and installed but rarely used. The entry was comprehensive: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly the Republic of Zaïre, and before that, a Belgian colony. The names were from his boyhood, Tshombe, Lumumba and Kasavubu, although Mobutu had a more familiar ring. There had been independence, there had been chaos, there had been civil war, there had been assassinations; but there was little or no information about Belgian involvement.

He buzzed McGurk again. ‘Jack, before you come in, I want you to get someone on the blower for me: Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Winters of Belgian military security. Ask him to call me on my secure line.’

He went back to his computer and began keying names into the search engine. Moise Tshombe, the leader of the breakaway province of Katanga immediately after independence and later prime minister of the reunited country, had eventually fled, and had died, or been murdered, in jail in Algiers after being taken from a hijacked aircraft. Joseph Kasavubu had been a puppet president for the first five years of the country’s existence until Mobutu had decided to oust him. Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the new Congo, Marxist hero of the independence movement, had been betrayed, overthrown and eventually handed over to Tshombe and his enemies in Katanga, where he had been assassinated. Skinner was reading an account of his death with growing interest when his secure telephone rang.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Skinner?’ asked Pierre Winters, with an air of weary tolerance.

‘Auguste Malou was a young officer in the Congo in the early 1960s,’ he said.

Instantly, the Belgian was rattled. ‘Who told you that? Not Malou, I’ll bet.’

‘Why so sure? Is he still under active orders not to talk about it?’

‘You are still wasting your time and mine, sir. These are internal Belgian matters, and I will not discuss them. If you persist. .’

The DCC’s temper was triggered. ‘If I persist, pal, you’ll wish I hadn’t.’ Sheer instinct made him fire a name at Winters. ‘Patrice Lumumba,’ he barked.

The phone in Brussels was slammed down so fast that it was as if it had become red-hot in the lieutenant colonel’s hand. Skinner smiled in satisfaction. ‘Gotcha,’ he muttered. ‘But,’ he added aloud, ‘what the fuck does it have to do with this situation?’

He called McGurk into his office and poured them both coffee. ‘Brainstorming, boss?’ the sergeant asked.

‘Like you’ve never known it.’ He waved McGurk into the seat on the other side of his desk and checked his watch: it was nineteen minutes before ten. ‘The Pope arrives in Murrayfield in just under two hours,’ he said. ‘We’ve got two al Qaeda terrorists out there trying to crash the party. Willie Haggerty, Brian, Neil, and a small army are there trying to keep them out; their chances of getting through are about one in ten, but these are bright, resourceful and determined people. Let’s assume the worst, that they manage it. What are they going to do?’

‘Shoot the Pope? Or the Prime Minister? Or both?’

Skinner raised an eyebrow. ‘Funny that nobody ever talks about shooting Tommy Murtagh. Our First Minister would probably be very indignant if he realised that. No, Jack, if they were going to shoot anyone they’d have to use arrows. They won’t get a firearm in there, and they won’t get explosives in either.’

‘Could they have planted them at Sunday’s international?’

‘The place has been swept five times since then; if they’d planted a toothpick it would have been found.’