Quintin Jardine: Lethal Intent

Along Princes Street and George Street, the festive lights shone. It had been a good year, memorable in fact, even when measured by the high standards of Edinburgh, which had seen many glorious passages in the centuries of its evolution into a historic and cultural European capital. As always, it was ending with the season of goodwill, but none of that spirit had found its way into the main drawing room of Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland.

She glared at its occupant across the table. He looked blandly back at her, his moustache twitching slightly. Like his hair it was an unusual shade of red, and it was rumoured that he dyed both. He liked to keep his distance; if they had been eye to eye she would have looked down on him, and he was sensitive about his height.

'You can't do that!' the Justice Minister exclaimed, her voice raised in protest.

He smiled, then glanced around the Georgian room, as if he had barely heard her. 'You're one hundred per cent wrong there,' he chuckled, eventually, 'as you'll find out tomorrow.'

'What about the Lord Advocate?' Aileen de Marco demanded. 'What does he have to say?'

'Milton concurs with my view. He's already instructed the prison service to make the necessary arrangements.'

'The Lord Advocate can't instruct the prison service.'

'He can on my authority.'

She leaned across the oval table, staring at him until he was forced to make eye contact. 'And just what authority is that, Tommy, may I ask? You are the First Minister of the Scottish Executive, but you're a member of the Cabinet, just like me.'

'Not quite like you. I appointed you, remember? And you should remember: it was only a few weeks ago. I don't need to tell you that I can fire you just as easily.'

She let out a short bitter laugh. 'Better… and bigger… men than you have tried to threaten me, Mr Murtagh, only to find that they were wasting their time. On what grounds would you fire me? Because I object to you riding rough-shod over the Scottish judicial process? You try and argue that one out with me in public and see how far you get. Come off it, First Minister. You're just a wee dog jumping because the big dog's barked.'

Thomas Murtagh stiffened and his eyes grew frosty. 'Maybe you haven't noticed but we're all in the same party, whether it's London or Westminster.'

'That wasn't the dog I was talking about, Tommy: the one you mean jumped just as high as you when his master called. I'll ask you straight out, are you going to show yourself worthy of your post by calling a Cabinet meeting to discuss this, then abiding by its majority view?'

'I've already made my decision,' he replied, curtly. 'I only invited you here out of courtesy, so you didn't learn about it second-hand.'

'Indeed.' She made no attempt to disguise the sarcasm in her tone. 'And here was me thinking that you invited your Justice Minister to meet you so that you could consult her on this unprecedented and quite improper request from Downing Street. I should have known better.'

She picked up her bag from the table. 'Call the Cabinet, Tommy. If you don't I'll have to consider my position.'

'I'm already considering it for you. I don't know if I can have a senior minister who's so openly hostile to me.'

De Marco laughed. 'If that's your criterion for appointment you're going to be lonely in this big room.' She headed for the door.

'Sleep on it, Aileen,' he called after her, with more than a hint of a threat in his tone. 'Maybe you should save me the embarrassment of admitting that I made a mistake when I gave you a seat at the top table, and save yourself the indignity of being told that you weren't up to the job after all. Yes, sleep on it'

She looked over her shoulder with her hand on the door knob. 'I might not get too much sleep, Tommy,' she retorted. 'I may be too busy making phone calls.' As she swept from the room she saw a frown cross his face.

The snow was as deep as he had ever known it, falling so hard that it obscured the bulbs of towering sodium street-lamps above, diffusing and merging their beams into a single glow in the night sky, overarching everything like a sinister orange cloud.

'Should we be trying this?' he asked, as she turned left at the roundabout and headed up the hill. He thought it was Drumbrae but, oddly, he found that he was not sure. She said nothing in reply, nor did she glance his way. Instead she peered into the blizzard ahead, her knuckles white as she grasped the wheel, her face seeming to reflect the weird light outside.

The incline was slight at first, and the car took it with only a little difficulty. 'Where are the road gritters?' he heard himself mutter.

'This is Sunday night in Edinburgh,' she hissed. 'There are no gritters.'

'Then should we be doing this?' he repeated.

'Shut up!' Her voice became a strange, insistent croak. 'You have to know.'

She drove on, hunched forward in the driving seat, as the slope became more severe. Still the car made steady forward progress, as she kept it in the highest gear possible. But soon they came to the real hill, rearing up before them at an impossible angle. The snow was fresh, crisp and unmarked, forcing upon him the knowledge that not only were they alone but that no vehicle had come this way in some time.

She pressed on, but gravity began to take its toll. They were maybe halfway up the incline, he reckoned, when the wheels began to spin beneath them and they lost what little forward momentum they had left.

'Go on,' he urged, 'we've got this far.'

'We're too heavy,' she snapped. 'You'll have to get out and walk up. Get back in at the top.'

'You're daft!'

'Just do it!' The words came out as a raw scream. He had thought that he was a stranger to fear, but a wave of panic swept over him and he jumped out of the car.

At first he found it difficult to balance on the pavement: he reckoned that the snow had to be at least eight or nine inches deep. He took a step forward and then another, inching up towards the crest.

Yet the hilltop seemed no nearer.

Each pace grew shorter, each footfall more tentative, each movement threatening his precarious hold on the vertical and threatening to send him tumbling backwards into the growing blizzard. His breathing grew heavier, and he felt his heart beat faster in his chest.

'No bloody use,' he gasped, and risked a look over his shoulder, through the snow, for the car. But there was no car: it had gone. He looked for the tyre-tracks: there were none. Even the light had changed: the orange glow of the lamps had turned dull and bluish grey. He gazed around him: if they had started to climb Drumbrae, he was somewhere else now, somewhere alien, somewhere wholly malignant.

He stared and he knew that what he felt had gone beyond panic, transcended fear and crossed the threshold of pure terror. He turned back to face the hill. It looked like Everest before him, but he sensed that there was no way back, only forward. He thrust upwards into the blizzard, gulping in mouthfuls of air and snow. Each step grew more laboured, until he was practically powerless to move.

Yet even standing still, his chest heaved as he forced the cold air into his lungs. The hill had no summit, he realised: it would go on for ever, or at least until it had drawn from him everything that he had. He slumped to his knees, then fell on to his face, his breathing still impossibly heavy.