Dead And Buried

surface. It contained a pistol, which the DCC recognised as a Sig Sauer P229, a serious, special weapon, an extra clip of ammunition and a zipper-sealed clear plastic envelope, which held . . . photographs.

‘What’s this?’ Shannon murmured.

‘The gun’s probably a back-up,’ Skinner replied. ‘These?’ He opened the envelope and let the snapshots it contained spill on to the counter: as they sorted through them they saw a man in uniform, alone, and with a woman, two children, another younger woman, alone in some, but in others with a stocky smiling young man. ‘This is a life, a life left behind.’

He was about to replace them when something caught his eye: a slip of paper, folded and mixed up among them. He picked it up, opened it, and read. ‘ “This is your man,” ’ he murmured. ‘ “Peter Bassam, Turkish Delight, Elbe Street, Edinburgh. He’s mine from way back; you can trust him.” It’s signed “T”, that’s all. So who the hell are you, T; who the hell are you?’

‘Peter Bassam?’ Shannon exclaimed.

‘Yup.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Good question. It brings us back to this: if you think of agencies with the need and the capacity to run intelligence operatives in the Balkans, and you take out our SIS, the list’s a pretty short one.’

He pocketed the gun, ammunition, photographs and note. ‘Come on, Dottie,’ he said. ‘We’re out of here.’

Darkness had fallen as they stepped outside, and as Skinner secured the lock. He was about to switch off the power to the boat when he saw what was beside it, mounted on a pole. ‘Shit,’ he growled, ‘a mailbox. How did I miss that?’

It took him less than ten seconds to open it with his lock-pick. There were two items of mail inside. He took them out and peered at them in the dim light of a nearby standard. One was junk addressed to ‘The Householder’; the other bore the name ‘Moses Archer’.

Forty

It took the chief constable very little time to learn two things that Ethel Margaret Bothwell, nee Ward, and Primrose Jardine, never legally Bothwell, had in common, apart from their connection with the mysterious teacher. Records showed that they were both still alive and, like him, they had both opted out of the social-security system.

Jack McGurk’s research had been thorough. He had produced background summaries on Bothwell and his ‘wives’, containing all the information he had gleaned from the records.

Proud read through them carefully.

Claude Bothwell, born Perth 1930, only son of Herbert John Bothwell, clerk, and Lorna Grimes or Bothwell, school teacher, both deceased. One uncle on mother’s side, married, no issue, deceased; therefore Bothwell has no surviving family in Perth. He married Ethel Margaret Ward, spinster, of Thorny Grove, Wishaw, born Wishaw 1921, daughter of William Ward, industrialist, and Margaret Meek Marshall. No siblings. Mr Ward was a significant shareholder in a steel mill nationalised by the Labour government in 1951; he and Mrs Ward drowned in a boating accident in France in 1952, leaving an estate valued at ?98,000, net of estate duty, according to the will lodged in Hamilton Sheriff Court. Bothwell’s marriage to Ethel Ward took place a year later in Motherwell registry office. His address at the time of the marriage was given as 34B Caledonian Drive, Wishaw. A check of the Register of Sasines showed that he was not the owner of that property, so my guess is that he was a tenant and that he moved into Thorny Grove with his wife following the marriage. The property was sold in 1956 for ?21,500, a considerable sum at that time.

In 1957 Claude Bothwell married, apparently bigamously, Primrose Jardine, nurse, born 1932, of 223 Stevenson Street, Scotstoun, Glasgow, the only child of the late Hugh Jardine, welder, and the late Agnes Bell or Jardine. Mr Jardine was killed in an air raid on Clydebank in 1941; Mrs Jardine died of tuberculosis in 1954. Bothwell’s address on the second marriage certificate, 14 Dundyvan Drive, Broomhill, Glasgow, matches that shown on the SSTA records. A check of the Register shows that the property was owned by Albert Ernest Pickard, who was at that time Glasgow’s second biggest landlord, after the City Corporation. It was sold following Mr Pickard’s death in 1964 to Mr Arnold Solomons, who still lives there.

Bothwell’s third marriage to Montserrat Rivera Jiminez, daughter of Jaime Rivera and Pilar Jiminez, of Torroella de Montgri, Gerona, Spain, took place in October 1961. Both parties listed their address as 3 Newgate Street, Kirkliston, again a rented property which passed into the ownership of the Lark Housing Association in 1962. It still belongs to them; their records show that Mr and Mrs Bothwell gave up their tenancy in 1964. Unfortunately, that is the address on the SSTA files, so we do not know where they were living at the time of their disappearance.

‘Quite a trail,’ Proud murmured. ‘Where did Bob say he would start? At the place they were last seen, as I recall.’ He scratched his chin. ‘Fine, but after forty years, who’s still going to be around to talk to me?’ As he gazed at the notes, he frowned, then picked up his phone and dialled McGurk. ‘Jack, a question: when the Ward parents’ will was lodged in the Sheriff Court, who did it? Did you ask that?’

‘I didn’t have to: they volunteered it. I didn’t include it in the summary because I didn’t think it was relevant any more. It was a firm called Hill and White.’

‘Thanks.’

James Proud was a latecomer to the age of information technology; he had acknowledged it grudgingly but, with Gerry Crossley as his tutor, he was learning. He switched on his computer, pulled up the website of the Law Society of Scotland and opened its directory. He entered ‘Hill and White’, then pressed ‘search’, but there was no return. He was about to give up, when he saw a window headed ‘Any Location’. He opened it, selected ‘Wishaw’, and found himself looking at a list of sixteen firms. He went through them one by one: last on the alphabetical list he spotted ‘Woodburn Hill and White, 17 Church Road, Wishaw.’ He looked for a website, but found none, only the names of two solicitors, neither of which was, or bore any resemblance to, Woodburn, Hill or White.

‘Not promising,’ he murmured, ‘but it’s a place to start.’

Forty-one

Alex checked her time sheet at the end of the day: it did not look good. Curle Anthony and Jarvis billed by the quarter-hour and staff below partner level were expected to charge out virtually all of their working day. Her meeting with McIlhenney and Steele had overrun and she had been caught in a traffic jam on the way to her next client appointment, with Paula Viareggio, to finalise the transformation of the family trust into a limited company. Paula had been good about it, and had even taken her to lunch, but that had dragged on too. As a result she found herself looking at an hour and three-quarters of her day that had fallen into the sort of black hole that Mitchell Laidlaw, her boss, did not like to see.

She was finalising the record when she realised that he was standing behind her looking over her shoulder. ‘Sorry,’ she said, lamely, glancing up at him. ‘Today was a succession of disasters.’

‘Alex,’ he replied, ‘I keep separate lists of all the days when the members of my department bill out, on one hand, less than their allocation, and on the other, more than one hundred per cent of their standard hours by working late. You’re at the foot of one list and the top of another, and I won’t insult you by asking you to guess which is which. You’re my best fee-earner, so I’m not going to worry about that.’

‘That’s a relief,’ she exclaimed. ‘I enjoy my lifestyle.’ She began to clear her desk. ‘Did you want something in particular, Mitch?’ she asked.

‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘I just called by to ask how you were doing.’

‘I’m fine,’ she told him. ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘No reason, no reason.’ Suddenly, the firm’s chairman looked unusually flustered.