Quintin Jardine - Stay of Execution

Still he made sure. ‘Those two?’ he asked, still smiling.

The old man was trembling, but he gave a tiny nod.

‘Neil,’ Skinner murmured, ‘show.’

The inspector’s hand slipped inside his jacket, and reappeared holding a pistol.

‘Even if you don’t speak English,’ the DCC exclaimed, as they stepped up to the pair, ‘you’ll understand gun, I take it. Face down, arms stretched out.’ One of them understood exactly; he did as he had been told. The other looked around wildly, then leaped at Skinner. He jumped into a short right-handed punch to the temple, and dropped like a stone.

The big policeman looked round towards the entrance. The Belgians and the pipers were staring at the scene, many of them open-mouthed. ‘Panic over,’ he shouted. ‘You guys near the door: there are two soldiers outside. Tell them they can come in.’ He turned back to Malou. The old man seemed to have shrunk into his uniform, his hands were covering his face, and his shoulders were heaving.

Skinner stepped close and put his hands on his shoulders. ‘I know what you did,’ he said, ‘and why. They gave you a choice; your old friend or all your family. I don’t blame you, and neither will he.’

‘But my children,’ Malou wailed, as forty thousand young voices cheered the arrival of Pope John the Twenty-fifth in the great Murrayfield bowl, ‘they’re as good as dead. You’ve killed them.’

‘Have patience, Colonel. And have faith too. Nobody’s going to die today.’

‘What the hell is going on, Bob?’ Major Legge’s voice boomed over his shoulder.

Skinner smiled and pointed to the discarded drums of the two men on the ground. ‘Your guys have swept this place every day for a week. There’s not a chance of anyone getting any modern high explosive in here. But what about the old-fashioned stuff, if you could get enough in?’ He glanced at the musketeer platoon, and their antique weapons. ‘What makes those things go bang?’

‘Gunpowder?’ Legge exclaimed. ‘They were planning to use gunpowder?’ He took a big red knife from his pocket, knelt beside the side-drum, slashed a great X across its skin, then peeled it apart. It was full of a black, sulphurous material. ‘They were planning to use gunpowder!’

‘That’s right. And we more or less helped them bring it in. I would empty those pretty quickly if I were you. I reckon you’ll find a couple of incendiary triggers inside, ready to be detonated remotely whenever the Pope and the Prime Minister were close enough to the carriers.’

‘Stand back, then,’ said the soldier, ‘and don’t light any matches.’ He upended the side-drum, and lifted it up, pouring the black powder on to the ground. He repeated the process with the much larger bass drum, then sifted through the residue with his gloved hands until he emerged, triumphantly, with two small packages wrapped in brown paper. ‘I wish they were all that simple,’ he exclaimed. He handed them to his assistant. ‘Take these away and do something to them, Corporal,’ he ordered, ‘then get one of the lads in here with a water-based fire extinguisher to damp this lot down. It’s useless when it’s wet,’ he explained. ‘The drums are waterproof, of course, which makes it such a bloody good idea.’

‘Enough to do the job?’ asked Skinner.

‘That amount? Anyone within yards, old boy. This was a real suicide mission, no mistake.’

As he spoke, the DCC’s cell phone sounded. Legge winced. ‘Take it away from the powder, please, Bob. Just in case.’

Skinner walked to the other end of the tent before he answered the call. ‘This is Winters,’ said a voice in his ear. ‘The children and their mother are safe; the terrorists who held them prisoner are dead. Three of them. How about your end?’

‘I’ve got three live ones; there are still two to go.’

‘How is Malou?’

‘Terrified. I’ll put him out of his misery in a moment.’

He thanked Winters, then called Willie Haggerty. ‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘In the command centre.’

‘Brian?’

‘He’s outside. Where are you?’

‘In the band marquee.’

‘Where are the fucking bands?’ the Glaswegian demanded. ‘The Pope’s here. They should be marching in.’

‘Relax. They will be. I want two armed officers here now to take two prisoners into custody. They’ve to cuff them, strip them, and put them with the other bloke. But quietly, Willie. The threat’s over, but I want the other two.’

He turned to the pipe-major; the man was highly agitated. ‘Okay,’ he told him quietly. ‘Line them up, and march them in.’

‘Sah,’ the man barked, with huge relief.

‘But one thing,’ Skinner added. ‘None of your guys saw anything in here. You’re all military; anyone who leaks anything about this will be court-martialled and that is a promise you can rely on.’

He walked to the back of the tent. McIlhenney stood, motionless, his gun on the two men on the ground. The thirty-four remaining bandsmen and musketeers stood in bewildered groups, while their leader sat disconsolately on the remains of the booby-trapped side-drum. He looked up as Skinner approached. ‘What now?’ he asked, weakly.

‘Your daughter and her children are safe, Colonel.’ He saw the old man’s face light up, and the tears spring to his eyes once more. ‘So go and do what you were invited here to do. You can tell me the whole story afterwards, but now, you go and play for Father Gibb.’

He left Malou to organise his men; they were stunned, but they were stolid and they would play and march as best they could. He returned to McIlhenney and waited until the armed escorts arrived to take the prisoners away, watching as two soldiers turned the black pile on the ground to sludge. ‘So what. .’ the DI began, but he was interrupted as Skinner’s phone sounded again.

‘Boss?’ It was Mario McGuire and he sounded anxious. ‘Am I on time?’

‘So far.’

‘It’s taken a while, but I’ve got a result. First, no newspaper, website or broadcast station anywhere reported the fact that Colin Mawhinney was staying in the Malmaison. Second, I’ve been through the list of all the journalists that Alan Royston’s accredited for this visit. As you can imagine, there’s quite a bunch with the telly people and everything, but there are two of them who stand out; a photographer called Geoffrey Bailey, and a news reporter called Verena Cookson. They’re listed as working out of the London office of a news agency with its head office in Venezuela. That’s an accommodation address, but the thing that makes them really different is that three years ago Bailey and Cookson were working for a South African newspaper on a story in Angola when they stepped not just on one landmine but on a cluster of three strapped together. If that’s them, they’ve been reassembled.’

‘Photographs?’

‘He’s bearded with glasses, and I can place him. He was the photographer at the press briefing who asked Colin at the beginning where he was staying. You couldn’t tell her from Eve, though. . or maybe even from Adam. She looks weird: she’s got short silver jaggy hair, no eyebrows at all, wears blue glasses, has studs through both nostrils and her bottom lip, and three or four rings in each ear.’

‘In other words she doesn’t look a bit like a corporate banker?’

‘Not like any I’ve ever seen.’

‘Thank you, Superintendent. Your late friend Colin owes you one.’

Skinner clicked an end to the call, then found the media-relations manager’s number in his phonebook. ‘Alan, it’s Bob Skinner. Where are the press at this moment?’

‘Telly’s on the fixed platform, up in the stand, with two free cameras out on the ground. The photographers are in rows just to the side of the tunnel and the reporters are behind them. I can see them now.’