Game Over

‘Don’t mind me,’ said McLaren. ‘I never know what he’s talking about anyway.’

Slider ignored the exchange. ‘You could all get into trouble for working on it unofficially.’

‘We’re all grown-ups here,’ Atherton said. ‘We can stand a few rapped knuckles.’

Everyone nodded.

‘All right,’ Slider said, warmed by the response. He was not facing Bates alone after all. The posse was riding for the gulch hard on his heels. ‘Thank you for that. We’ll do what we can. But listen – this has to be kept among ourselves. No-one outside our firm must know. And I’m afraid we have to keep Mr Porson out of the loop, for his own sake. Hollis, you’ll office manage the Stonax case; Atherton, you’ll be c-in-c on Bates. Everyone, report anything you get on Bates either to Atherton or me direct.’

‘Had we better have a code name?’ Mackay asked. ‘In case anyone overhears us talking about him?’

‘Yeah, let’s call him The Needle,’ McLaren suggested.

‘Duh!’ said Hart. ‘That’s his nickname anyway, dumbo. Everyone knows it.’

‘Maurice, you have to stop pushing the Q-tip when you feel resistance,’ Atherton advised kindly.

‘Let’s call him Roberts,’ Mackay intervened. ‘After Roberts radios, because he’s an electronics whiz.’

‘This is not Bletchley Park,’ Slider said. ‘Forget code names. Just don’t let anyone overhear you talking about him.’

Swilley had missed the last few exchanges because her phone had rung. She was writing rapid notes as she listened. When she replaced the receiver, she said, ‘Boss, that was the mobile dump. The call you got from Bates was made from a mobile. It was a pay as you go, and the location was King Street, Hammersmith.’

‘So he was following me,’ Slider said. ‘Who’s it registered to?’

Swilley made a face. ‘Paid for by cash. That’s the trouble with those things.’

‘Still, we’ve got the number, and we can trace the signal, can’t we?’ Fathom said.

‘If he turns it on. It’s off at the moment,’ said Swilley.

‘But SOCA will do the same thing, won’t they?’ Atherton said. ‘The mobile trace unit will report to them. How do we get them to give us the information without SOCA knowing?’

Swilley looked at Slider. ‘There’s this guy at the unit – Mick Hutton – he’s a sort of friend of mine.’ She almost blushed. An ex-lover, everyone thought. ‘From way back,’ she added as though she’d heard the thought.

‘Would he do it for you without telling anyone?’

‘Yeah, he’d do that for me, if I asked him.’

Slider thought for a moment. Maybe nothing would come of it anyway, but he’d feel better about trusting the Bates inquiry to his own people than waiting for a lofty SO department to get itself moving. If his own firm did nail Bates and there were questions about how they found him – so be it. He’d face that when and if it happened.

‘Do it,’ he said.

A couple of phone calls located Candida Scott-Chatton at her office, the headquarters of the Countryside Protection Trust in Queen’s Gate Place – handily round the corner from her house, Swilley thought. She spoke to the woman’s secretary, who said her name was Shawna Weedon, and who told her that Scott-Chatton knew about Stonax’s death. ‘It’s on all the newscasts. It’s terrible. He was such a nice man. He used to come in a lot and he was always so friendly and polite. I really liked him.’

‘I’ll come round straight away and talk to her,’ Swilley said.

The office was on the ground floor of one of those splendid white-stuccoed Kensington houses, so the inside spaces were lofty and grand, with plenty of what was known to viewers of house makeover programmes as ‘original feachers’. There were two rooms, and the rear one was labelled Reception and Enquiries. It had the massive marble fireplace with an oil painting over it of a man with a funny hat and a red coat holding a horse, and was furnished with dark blue carpet, a visitor’s sofa, and a coffee table on which were spread various appropriate magazines, such as Country Life, The Lady, Horse and Hound, and the Trust’s own glossy quarterly, cutely entitled Countryside Matters.

It also contained the desk of the secretary. Shawna Weedon greeted Swilley with a sort of self-conscious fluttering, and at once buzzed the intercom to her boss, invited Swilley to take a seat, and then got on ostentatiously with typing something on to the computer. Swilley stood, to make the point that her time was valuable, but she was not kept waiting more than a couple of minutes before the communicating door to the front room was opened and Candida Scott-Chatton invited her in with a, ‘Do come through, won’t you?’ as though it were a social visit.

The front room was even more splendid and spacious than the waiting-room, with a more elaborate fireplace, a lot more paintings on the walls, antique furniture, and a blue and white Chinese carpet over the same dark-blue wall-to-wall as the other room. There was a highly polished antique partners’ desk on which the computer looked the only out-of-place thing in the room, and there were huge flower arrangements in probably priceless vases, on a side table, on the hearth in front of the fireplace, and on a torchere stand in a corner. It was, Swilley thought with loathing, like something out of a National Trust stately home. She liked everything modern and minimalist; and besides, she had an old-fashioned chippiness about people with double-barrelled names.

Candida Scott-Chatton was tall, blonde and classically beautiful, exquisitely dressed in what Swilley would have liked to bet was a Chanel or Prada suit – something expensive and exclusive, anyway – with pearls at neck and ears. No hair of her smooth bob was out of place, and her make-up was so perfect that it gave her a kind of expressionless immobility, as if, having got herself to this state of perfection, she didn’t want to do anything else with her face for fear of spoiling it.

Swilley shook her hand (thin, extremely cold, with long fingers made longer by polished nails so perfect Swilley guessed they were false) and looked into her eyes. The blue eyes that looked back were as cold as a highland spring.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you at a time like this,’ Swilley said. ‘I gather you’ve heard what happened to Mr Stonax. You must be very upset.’

‘I’m devastated,’ said Candida Scott-Chatton. She didn’t meet Swilley’s eyes and her voice was rather high and strained, but it seemed to Swilley more like nervousness than grief. ‘Of course, we live in dangerous times and we all know something like that could happen to any of us, any time. But somehow you never expect it to happen to you, or to someone you know.’

She doesn’t care a jot, Swilley thought.

Perhaps something of the thought showed in her face, because Scott-Chatton turned away abruptly, went behind her desk, and with her back turned took out a handkerchief and seemed to attend to her nose and eyes with it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a muffled sort of voice. ‘Will you give me a moment?’

‘Take your time,’ said Swilley, unmoving and unmoved.

When Scott-Chatton turned back her eyes did seem a little moist, but Swilley, determined to yield nothing, told herself that that was easy enough to fake.

‘Won’t you sit down?’ Scott-Chatton gestured to a leather upholstered upright chair by the desk, and Swilley sat. ‘I’m not sure that there’s anything much I can tell you, though I’m willing to help in any way I can. On the news they seemed to be saying it was a burglary that went wrong. Is that true?’

‘That’s what it looks like,’ Swilley said. ‘How well did you know Mr Stonax?’

‘We’ve been friends for some years. He was always interested in environmental and countryside issues, and of course he was environment correspondent at the BBC at one time, so we tended to meet in a professional way quite often.’

‘But you were more than friends, weren’t you?’

She seemed taken aback. She paused too long for the answer, whatever it was going to be, to look unstudied. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said faintly, uncertainly.

‘I think you do,’ Swilley said, interested that she should want to deny the connection. She wasn’t married – Swilley had checked that in Who’s Who. ‘I should mention that we’ve spoken to his daughter.’

Was it relief that flickered through her eyes? She said now, in a calm voice, as if she had never prevaricated, ‘We’ve been lovers for about two years, if that’s what you mean.’

What else? Swilley thought. There was something here she didn’t understand. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘Oh – it would be last week. We went out to dinner. Wednesday evening, I think? Or Tuesday? No,