us.’
The car left the airfield and turned once again towards the city centre, taking the Western Approach into Lothian Road, and winding through the Grassmarket, beneath the towering floodlit bulk of Edinburgh Castle, perched in splendour on its rock.
As McGuire drew the Granada to a stop outside the MacEwan Graduating Hall, Skinner turned to Feydassen. ‘On the evening of the visit, the President’s car will be led by motorcyclists, and will be followed by another carrying Mr Martin and three other officers. I will be in the President’s car. My colleagues and I will all be armed.’
‘You will use outside people, won’t you?’ asked Allingham.
‘Of course. The RAF regiment will be responsible, as usual, at Turnhouse. Both the Hall and the Hotel will be secured by a detachment from the Special Air Services.’
Feydassen smiled. ‘That is most satisfactory, Mr Skinner.’
Henry Wills greeted the party at the entrance to the debating hall. He explained how it would be set out on the night, indicating the areas to be reserved for press, television and radio.
‘As I told you,’ said Skinner, ‘every journalist and television technician will be approved by the Scottish Office people, and supervised by them. Their fixed locations make life easier for those of us on the security job.’
Twenty minutes later the group left for the hotel. They took a different route, taking the A71 to the city by- pass. McGuire drove smoothly through the Gogar roundabout, and three minutes later, drew up outside the Norton House Hotel, set in wooded countryside, more than half a mile back from the main road.
‘As you can see,’ said Martin, ‘this is a small hotel. There will be no other guests on the night. With only a few men, we can turn this place into a fortress.’
Feydassen looked at Skinner and Martin in appreciation. ‘Gentlemen I am reassured. As Mr Allingham said, you are very thorough. I am happy that my Embassy’s client will be in your safe hands.’
69
Skinner left Martin to dine with the visitors. McGuire drove him home to Stockbridge. Sarah was back into the full swing of her practice, and of her police work. When Skinner let himself in, he found her sprawled on the couch, still wearing a heavy tweed jacket, with a woollen scarf wound around her neck. The gas fire was still warming up.
‘Hi, love, busy day?’ He leaned over and kissed her neck, above the scarf.
Sarah nodded. ‘A real bugger, as you Scots say so eloquently. Began with a heroin overdose in Leith, and ended with a ten-year-old kid in Muirhouse coming home from school to find his mother with her head in the gas oven. Life as it is really lived, or died, as the case may be. How about you?’
Bob shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Oh, just humdrum stuff. Threatened one minute by a man I thought was a friend. Soft-soaped the next by someone I had down as an enemy. Just a typical day in the life of a hard-working polis!
‘Let me open a medicinal bottle of something and tell you the details.
They sat on the sofa, Sarah in the curve of Bob’s arm, Haydn’s Miracle Symphony on the CD player, and sipped smooth white wine. Yet, instead of unwinding as the music and the grape did their work, Bob grew more tense.
‘Hey, big boy, steady down! Is this Syrian job more tricky than you’re saying?’
‘No, don’t worry about that. Allingham’s had his card marked. If everyone does their bit it’ll be a dawdle. No, it’s the other thing.’
With mounting outrage, he told Sarah of his visit to Fulton.
‘He told me just to go along with the Yobatu story. Can you imagine that? I know that our man’s still out there; it’s bloody obvious, and yet he told me to lay off. I tell you, Sarah, it stinks.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘What do you think?’ He almost shouted at her for the first time in his life. ‘Sorry, love, I must learn to leave these things outside.’
‘No, I’m sorry, that was a silly question. But what will Fulton do? What can he do?’
He kissed her on the forehead, and some of the tension seemed to leave him. ‘He’ll huff and he’ll puff, but he can’t go public. He might try to lean on Proud Jimmy, to get him to order me to pack it in. He’d have to lean pretty hard, but it’s possible. He could use the Crown Office to try to stop me.
‘In theory he can’t do anything. Hughie Fulton is a non-person, the sort of guy that Le Carre and Len Deighton write about.’
Sarah looked at him, and he saw a hint of fright in her eyes. But quickly she turned it into a joke. ‘What, licensed to kill, do you mean?’
Bob looked at her, unsmiling. ‘Listen, Doctor, I’m licensed to kill if it comes to it. Far more so than Fulton. I carry a police warrant card and I’m a high-rated marksman, trained to take people down, like everyone on my Syrian team.
‘Fulton isn’t like that. I think he smells something that might embarrass his masters, and he’s trying to cover it up. Remember, the ex-Lord Advocate, the Foreign Office, and probably our own Secretary of State had Yobatu hustled out of the country on a stretcher; now he turns out to have been innocent, there may be no more to it than Hughie trying to save his bosses’ blushes. What makes me mad is that the man was one of the best policemen in Scotland. A real Blue Knight. Now he’s just an arse-licker!’
Sarah put a hand on his chest. ‘All right. Now forget him. Tell the Chief about your meeting and put it out of your mind. Just do it your way .. but don’t get obsessive.
‘Now, let’s discuss weddings!’
70
Mackie and McIlhenney sat in a plain Ford Transit van, watching a big red-brick villa on the edge of Cumbernauld’s Westerwood golf course.
Mackie had watched the couple leave the Harvand factory half-an-hour earlier, in a black Toyota Supra Turbo, and had followed them home. The curtains had been drawn at once, masking the light. Mackie had a feeling that they were in for a long night, until Maggie Rose and McGuire arrived at 6.00 a.m.
An hour later, their talk of football, and Scotland’s sad exit from the US World Cup Finals exhausted, Mcllhenney voiced a thought which had been in Mackie’s mind. ‘Why hasn’t the boss got us a phone-tap, sir? We might not get anything from it, but at least it’d give us something else to do.’
Mackie smiled. ‘Nice one, Neil, but I don’t think he’ll wear it. I’ll ask him, but I’m sure the answer will be that if we called in an engineer from Telecom, that’d be someone else who’ll know about the operation. Anyway, this is just a line of enquiry. If guys like you were given your head we’d be living in a police state in no time at all!’
In the dark, Mcllhenney smiled. ‘Aye, great, eh!’
Just after 11.00 p.m. the ground floor light went out. A few seconds later there was a sudden blaze of light from an upstairs room. Joy Harvey appeared, framed in the window as she drew the curtains.
‘Fine piece of woman that,’ said McIlhenney. ‘I wonder how that wee chap manages all on his own?’
‘From what I’ve heard, he’s had a bit of help over the years!’
71
The first full working week of the New Year drew to a close in unseasonally mild weather. Saturday morning came in a flood of sunshine, with a hint of warmth rather than the frost which normally accompanies cloudless January skies in Scotland.
For the stake-out team it was business as usual. The only break from routine came when Andrew Harvey left
