Quintin Jardine: Skinner's festival

He felt his gun hand immobilised as an immensely strong forearm knocked it outwards and upwards. He felt his arm twisted and a hard hand clamping across his throat, setting his jaw at an angle. He felt no more after that, but he heard, crashing through his brain, a terrible thunder as the heel of Skinner's right hand slammed under his chin, driving it upwards, throwing his head backwards, and breaking his neck.

That thunderclap sound was the last living sensation of Ingemar Svart.

Skinner held the dead weight upright with one arm, as he hugged his daughter tight against him with the other. For a few moments, the three figures stood there in some terrible tableau, until Ingo's lifeless fingers loosened their grip on the belt around Alex's neck, and Skinner allowed his body to slip to the ground.

He felt Alex's long slender hands on his face, turning him towards her.

'Pops, Pops, are you all right?'

He blinked, and then smiled at her, as wide a smile of relief and happiness as she had ever seen. As they stood together, Sarah came to them and wrapped her trembling arms around them both.

As Bob embraced them, the women felt a violent trembling run through him, as sudden exhaustion, physical and emotional, OVCTtook him. But quickly he brought it under control.

It's all right now, girls. It's all right. It's all over.'

He led them across into the hangar and towards the plane.

'Now, you two sit in here, and look after the Queen's Sunday hat, while I get this lot sorted out.'

He held the door open as first Sarah and then Alex stepped up into the small craft. Then he turned to go to look for the fallei Arrow, and found, to his great delight, that the little soldier wav sitting upright. V 'Fookin marvellous these new flak jackets are. Give us a handup.' i Laughing with relief. Skinner pulled him to his feet. '

'Don't know what's so fookin' funny. Bob. Takes your fookin' breath away does a bullet in the chest!'

A few yards away Ariel lay on the ground. Most of her white top had been stained blood-red, but she was still moving. Skinner knelt beside her. As he did, he glanced across the landing strip, in the direction from which the shot had come. The moon had risen, and in its glow he could see Andy Martin coming slowly towards him, a rifle in his hand. His shoulders sagged as he walked like a man with no desire to reach his destination.

Skinner looked down at the woman. Her lips were bloodfrothed, and he saw that she was dying. 'Ingo?' she said faintly.

'No.'

He saw her eyes flood with tears.

'Ariel,' he asked, 'who is your buyer?' But he was not surprised when, with the last of her strength, she shook her head.

'Then who is Mr Black?'

'Not so clever after all, eh. Bob,' she whispered. 'Work it out for yourself.'

A final light of satisfaction shone in her hard eyes. Then it faded, and she was gone.

And in death she was Julia again, soft-eyed gentle Julia.

Skinner unfastened the ribbon which tied her pony-tail, and let her hair fall loose. Then he stood up, as Andy Martin came to his side and stood, looking down with reddened eyes at his lover's bodyTin sorry, Bob,' he said very quietly. 'She took me in, hook, line and sinker. I even brought her to your house, and put Sarah in danger.'

'Andy, Andy. She took me in, too. She was Crystal Tipps, remember. I believed her every bit as much. Christ, it was me who told you to take her to Sarah. Andy, man, never blame yourself again. What you did was the hardest thing you'll ever have to do

in your life, and because of that, it was the bravest, too. When I let my gun go, I knew I was putting all our lives in your hands, and I never doubted for one second that you'd come through.'

Then he add Adam Arrow took Andy Martin, now limp and exhausted, and led him away from the bodies of Ariel, who had also been his Julia, and of her brother with whom she had schemed, stolen, killed and finally died.

'Ah, but, lads,' said Andy as they walked away, in a voice full of almost unspeakable regret. 'When she was Julia, when she was good… I'll never find anyone again like the woman she pretended to be.'

Adam Arrow dug him gently in the side with an elbow.

'Sure you will, Andy. Sure you will. She were only an illusion, remember. She weren't real. There's plenty of women who are, though. Why for a start there's two in that plane over there. Mind you, one's spoken for, and the other – well 'er father's a bad fella' to cross!'

'So our Mr Black didn't exist after all.'

It was mid-afternoon, only one day and a half after the deaths of Ingemar and Ariel, and the end of all their plots, their projects and their schemes. Bob Skinner and Sir James Proud stood in the back garden of the bungalow at Fairyhouse Avenue. The blazing heat which had marked the first Festival days had gone, but there was still enough warmth in the sun for them to be in shirtsleeves.

Each held a drink in his hand: Proud Jimmy's a gin-and-tonic, Bob's the usual beer straight from the bottle.

'Well, Jimmy, you could say that in fact he did. He was – well, what would you call him? A trading identity, I suppose. Ariel and Ingo's joint trade name. And it really was their name, too. Shahor in Hebrew, which she wasn't, and Svart in Swedish, which he wasn't either. Both mean "Black". Interpol have finally tracked them down. Brother and sister they were indeed, but German by birth. And guess what? Their family name was Schwartz.

'Julia's story to Andy about her parents' marriage breaking up, and her being sent to Israel, that was a load of balls. Apparently the truth is that the teenage Schwartz kids joined a right-wing action group, one that went in for violent protests of various sorts.

The police never caught on to them, but their father found out about it and threw them out. After that happened, they seem to have decided that terrorism had a limited future, not to mention very poor profit margins, but that the sort of things they had learned could be put to good commercial use, given the right sort of customer – one prepared to put up whatever funding they would need to get what he was after.

'They must have known they were both very young to be credible as the leaders of the sort of operations they were offering to put together. So they seem to have invented "Mr Black" as a sort of authority, figure, a mystery man in the background, to keep their clients happy that they were dealing with someone really heavy-duty, and to keep even the hardest acts among the hired help well in line. When their bluff was called, they were tough enough – as anyone who crossed them found out.

'Interpol has been trying to get a handle on them for a while.

They reckon they've been in business for six or seven years. That would have made them early to mid-twenties when they started: in no small way. apparently. They stole a twenty-million-dollar stallion in the States. It's never been seen since, but some very quick two- and three-year-olds have started showing up in the Gulf States, and in Hong Kong! The Schwartzes disappeared around five years ago, and then Ingemar Svart and Julia Shahor showed up. Each had brand-new degrees – phoney of course, although they were both exceptionally talented. They followed different careers, well apart, but each, according to their passports, was able to do a lot of travelling. The stamps show that they were both in the vicinity of those jobs that Stewart told Adam Arrow about. They were a roaring success, until, eventually, they showed up here.'

Proud sipped his drink, the ice almost melted. 'Quite a pair.

Quite a story. I'm just glad you were able to stop them. So how are Sarah and Alex? Are they getting over it? How are you. for that matter?'

'The girls are OK. A bit shaky still. So are we all, but we're leaning on each other. We're a family. We'll be fine.'