‘Who in God’s name do you think you are, Skinner! You preside over the assassination of a visiting head of state, and then you have the temerity to summon me to your presence!’
Skinner’s hand was rock steady as he took the gun from its holster and slammed it down on the desk. But inside he felt shaky. He knew that sooner or later, shock, loss of blood and brandy would get to him. This had to be done fast and hard.
‘Shut the fuck up, Fulton! I’ll tell you who I am, my non-existent friend. ’m your worst fucking nightmare come true. I’m the man who shot Liberty fucking Valance, that’s who I am!
‘You can fix things, so they tell me. Well you’d better fix this. In my cottage in Gullane you’ll find two stiffs. One of them is our pal Allingham — that’s Allingham of the FO. He was shot by the same gun that killed Al-Saddi, and you can guess who fired it, can’t you. The other stiff is your late colleague Maitland. You know all about Maitland, Hughie, don’t you. You should; I’ll bet you wake up screaming every time you dream of him.
‘Well you can forget him. The hitman got himself hit. Did you know that he was going to kill Sarah? Did you?’ Skinner roared the question at the big man, his right fist grasping the automatic, his finger curled round the trigger.
Fulton’s belligerence had vanished. He shook his head violently. ‘No, Bob. Honestly, I didn’t know that. You must believe me!’
‘God, man, you’d better pray that I do! For that’s what he said to me. He actually stood in my living room and told me that. As matter-of-fact as you like. And he thought that, having heard that promise, I’d let him walk out the front door. Fatal mistake, that was.
‘So your bogeyman’s dead. You’re safe from him. Now here’s the bad news. You’re not fucking safe from me, Hughie. For I know. I know the whole stinking story from beginning to end. I know that Maitland, the state executioner, killed all those people — and I know why. And, with all of that, I know that you were an accessory, after and maybe even before the fact of all those murders.
‘I know what the stakes were in the game, Fulton, and so I know it’s got to stay secret. But it stops here, and it stops now. I have proof that Maitland shot Al-Saddi. I have a copy of the document that Mortimer and Jameson died for. They’re both well secure, but if anything unexpected happens to me, they’ll both go public.
‘And one thing more. If anything, the slightest mischance, should befall my nearest and dearest — Sarah, Alex, Andy, any one of them — then you, fat man, are fucking dead! You’ve lost one bogeyman, Fulton, but you’ve found another. You’ve just as much reason to fear me as you had to fear Maitland. After all, which one of us is lying right now in my living room with a bullet in his head?
‘As far as the Day of Deliverance is concerned, you can mark that down as mission accomplished, in spades. The Syrian is dead, and your master have their Lee Oswald. They’ve even got a bonus. If they ever identify that second dead Arab, they’ll see why. Tell them to try looking in Iraq.’
Skinner picked up the Browning and waved it at the man before him, seeing him cringe backwards as he did so.
‘My most sincere advice to you, Hughie, is this: retire. Go away. Get the fuck out of the sewer you work in. I’d rather not see you again, because if I did, I’d start to think again of all those dead people. And the devil inside of me that wants to shoot you where you stand might just win the argument next time. So quit, Hughie. Piss off. But before you hang up your cloak and dagger, there’s just one more thing you have to do.
‘I’m going back to my cottage on Sunday. That’s tomorrow now. When I do, I want to find it clean and spotless. I want Allingham gone. I want his blood and shit off my sofa, and I want his brains off my wall. Maitland, too. I want his mess cleaned up. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it, Hughie, since he’s like you: he never existed anyway.
‘Spotless, man, spotless. I don’t want Sarah or Alex ever to find anything that might have been a bullet hole, or a bloodstain. I love that house. I’ll never forget what happened there tonight, but I don’t want anything left to remind me. Except for the shaky shelf in the kitchen. Leave that as it is, for luck!’
Skinner heaved himself to his feet, the gun still in his hand.
‘And now, my fat friend, as Fazal Mahmoud might well have said.. imshi!’
Epilogue
When Bob, leaning on a stick, limped into his cottage just after midday on Sunday 22 January, it was immaculate.
‘Have you had cleaners in here?’ Sarah asked him.
‘Yes. We both work hard enough. I fixed up some springcleaning through someone at the office.’
‘Well they did a good job, whoever they were. Could we get them for Edinburgh?’
Bob laughed a strange laugh. ‘You never know what people’ll turn their hands to when they retire. But I think this was a one-off.’
Sarah and Bob were married, under an awning in their garden in Gullane on the sunny afternoon of 21 April.
Sarah was given in marriage by her father. Alex and Andy were brides-maid and best man. Among the guests were Chief Constable and Mrs James Proud, Detective Inspector Brian Mackie, Detective Sergeant Maggie Rose and Mario McGuire, and Detective Constable Neil Mcllhenney.
Not one of them, not even Andy Martin, had ever asked Skinner what had happened on that explosive night — after he and Allingham had driven off in the dark towards Gullane.
Only Sarah knew of the weight that he was carrying. Long after his leg had begun to heal, she felt him toss and turn in the night. Occasionally he would awaken in a lather of sweat, and once or twice with a scream dying on his lips. But she never asked. She waited for the shrapnel buried in his soul to work its own way to the surface.
Three nights into their honeymoon, they sat over dinner, gazing at the stars above L’Escala. Until then, Bob had been bright, happy and never more attentive, but now Sarah sensed a tension in him, stretched to burst ing point.
‘Love, I think you should tell me now. I’m your wife, and if something makes you wake up trembling in the night, I want to know what it is.’
And so he told her. He told her the whole story of the night that he had finally discovered that there was a world where Skinner’s rules of honesty, fairness and mercy did not apply; the night when he had been forced to look into his own character and learn the depth of the ruthless streak that lay within him.
‘Do you know what Maitland said? He told me that I’d be a sensation in his line of work. And d’you know what? The fact that we’re sat here, and he’s buried in an unmarked hole in the ground somewhere, proves just how right he was. What sort of a guy am I, Sarah?
‘That was an awful man, a terrible creature. But he finished the job he was sent out to do. Al-Saddi died, and the Day of Deliverance went with him. There was a clear, warped logic to everything he did. All the victims — he saw them as casualties, necessary to his success. There are two million people alive in Israel who would agree, if they knew the story. But ask Iain Mac Vicar’s mother. What would she say?’
‘And you, Bob. Do you think you’re a casualty too? Is that what’s eating you?’
‘Probably. I got into this job because I believed that I knew the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, and I knew what I was. Now I don’t know that any more, not for sure. All I do know for sure is what I’m capable of.
‘Skinner’s Rules! I broke them along the way, and in the end I broke the biggest commandment of all. I was warned off, but ignored it because I never doubted that what I was doing was right. Then I found that I was in a place where right and wrong were immaterial, and where only results mattered. And the really terrible thing is, I survived there. I took Maitland on, on his own terms, on his own turf, and I won. That makes me just like him, doesn’t it?’
Sarah answered the question in his eyes, as she took his hand and entwined his fingers in hers.
‘Bob, if you had lost, and Maitland had come for me, and we were both in Dirleton Cemetery instead of sitting under that big full moon up there if that was how it had turned out, would Maitland have been sitting somewhere
