Quintin Jardine: Skinner's ghosts

'My splitting up with you was a tremendous bonus for her. She's a wonderful actress, is Pamela. She played it so well, so properly.

She was there to lend me a shoulder to moan on, yet she refused to sleep with me before you and I were legally separated. She was in the final act of setting me up when it al went sour for her. She told me she wanted to get married. That's how confident she was.' His face was twisted with anger.

Sarah looked at him, almost fearful y. 'What have you done with her?' she asked. 'Alex said that al you told them was that she had left.'

'I haven't done anything with her,' he answered bitterly, 'or to her.

I could hardly have her arrested and charged, in al the circumstances.

With the national security interests that would have been involved, a trial would have been unthinkable.

'So instead, I signed the hundred thousand back into her name, I drove her to the airport to catch her plane, and I told her to get as far away from me and mine as she could. I promised her also that I would let my contacts in MI6 and the CIA know that Ross Masters had a sister who is aware of the work he did for them.'

'And have you? Wil you?'

'No, but she believes that I wil. And that wil keep her on the move, and wil keep her mouth shut, for the rest of her life. She'll disappear like her brother, I guess. Like him, she'l find a new identity.'

'This man Heuer,' Sarah broke in. 'Didn't he kil Leona McGrath, and the Secretary of State's wife? Wasn't he the man you shot yesterday, when you rescued the children?'

Bob nodded. 'Yes, but Pam had no idea about that until Andy and I made the connection.

'She only used him as a courier to set me up with the bank in Guernsey. She swore blind that she didn't know he was planning the kil ings or the kidnapping. Eventually, she made me believe her.'

'And if you hadn't accepted it?'

He looked at the wall, suddenly cold as ice. 'I'd have handed her over to Adam Arrow,' he whispered, and she knew that he meant it.

'Anyway,' he said, softening in an instant, 'Heuer's dead and Pam's gone for good. Both of my persecutors are dealt with.'

Bob leaned back wearily on the couch beside his wife and drew her to him, to lay her head on his shoulder. 'I feel as if I've been haunted for the last few months, Sarah, my love, visited by all my ghosts and horrors from my past. God wil ing, now they're al 280 exorcised, and the demons, the misunderstanding and the anger, which drove us apart are gone as wel.'

She drew his head down and kissed him, for the first time in months, long and slow.

'Yes,' she said, 'they're gone. So if you've any more secrets to reveal, now's the time to do it. Nothing you say wil be taken down, or held against you.'

He took a deep breath. 'Well,' he began. 'About Leona McGrath.. .'

She put her fingers to his lips. 'It's okay, I know. Alex told me that. I half-guessed at the time too. Although we were barely speaking, I remember that when you got home late that night, I thought that it was the first time I had ever seen you with a guilty look on your face.

'Poor woman,' Sarah sighed. 'No grudges borne. And, oh, her poor little boy.'

He looked her in the eye, so close to her that he was almost squinting. 'Speaking of Mark,' he murmured, 'I know this is a biggie, but how would you and Jazz feel about adopting an older brother?'

'I think we'd feel okay,' she replied, without a moment's hesitation.

She leaned back and gazed at him for a moment. 'You know, Ross Masters didn't have a clue about the real you,' she said, smiling.

'Oh no? Which of us is dead?'

'And which of you was on the side of right, as almost invariably, my darling, you are?'

She was silent, contemplative, for a few seconds. 'One thing I learned from Ross, though,' she added, at last.

'What's that?'

'He told Pam that he and she were "soulmates",' she said. 'Until this moment, I've never real y considered, far less understood, the meaning of the term.'

She looked up at him, and saw a glistening in his eyes. 'Oh Sarah,' he sighed, with the relief of someone who has stepped into a chasm in the dark, only to have his foot land safely upon a bridge, 'then maybe you'l know just how glad I am that you're back.'

'Cuts both ways, honey,' she drawled in her finest American, beginning to unbutton his shirt. 'Now let's give each other our very, very best. For today. Skinner's ghosts aren't all that's gonna get laid.'