Dead And Buried

‘Jimmy? How goes it? Anything new on your skeleton?’

‘I’m just waiting for word. I’ll let you know when I get it.’

‘Thanks, but in the meantime, I’ve got something to tell you. One of my very thorough detective officers may have found Ethel Ward, or Bothwell.’

‘Have you, indeed? Where?’

‘Bristol.’

‘Eh? How the hell did she get there?’

‘By train. Fifty years ago, about six weeks after the last sighting of Mrs Bothwell, the remains of a naked woman, cut into pieces and wrapped in sacking, were found in a pile of coal, which had just been unloaded at a depot down there. It was part of a consignment that started from Lanarkshire and picked up more trucks in South Yorkshire. They couldn’t be certain where the body originated; details were passed to the old county constabulary up here, and to Leeds. There were press appeals, but the head was too badly crushed for an artist’s impression, never mind photograph, so she was never identified. After a while, the police buried her in a local cemetery. She’s still there, waiting to be dug up. Your friend Bert Ward is going to give us a DNA sample for comparison. If it’s close, it’s her.’

‘Good for you, Max, and well done to your officer. Keep me informed.’

‘Will do. Cheers, Jimmy.’

He replaced the phone in its cradle, with the strange, flat feeling inside him intensified rather than dissipated. This has been pure self-indulgence for me, he thought, but for these poor women it was pure tragedy.

There was a quiet knock on his door. ‘Come,’ he called out, and McIlhenney stepped into the room. He was carrying a bound folder in his right hand.

‘Is that it, Neil?’ Proud asked urgently.

‘Yes, sir. The pathologist and his team finished an hour ago; the ink’s barely dry.’

‘What are the findings? Have they established a cause of death?’

‘They’re saying multiple stab wounds, Chief. They’re also saying that there is no doubt that the remains are around forty years old, and that the victim was aged over thirty.’

‘And Annabelle Gentle was only twenty-nine. So Bothwell killed Montserrat and ran off with her.’ Proud sighed. ‘Damn it, I was hoping that Trudi Friend would be spared that. I’d rather we’d dug up her mother’s body than find that she’s a murderer.’

A strange smile spread over McIlhenney’s face. ‘Well, sir, that’s the question. What the hell is she?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean that the autopsy has established that the remains in the garden are those of a man. It looks as if we’ve found Claude Bothwell after all.’

Eighty-eight

‘You had always been close to your stepson, hadn’t you?’

Titus Armstead looked straight at the camera, unblinking. As he watched the monitor screen, listening to himself ask the question, Skinner was reminded of a television series called Northern Exposure, and an actor who played a retired astronaut. ‘From the time his father was killed. Josh Archer and I met in Germany when we were both involved in NATO intelligence, and we became friends.’

‘That would have been the early seventies?’

‘Yes. Towards the end of the Nixon era.’

‘You met Ormond Hassett there around the same time, didn’t you?’

‘We were in the same theatre of operations, yes.’

‘Close colleagues?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you say the three of you were ideologically compatible?’

‘Hell, yes: we were all soldiers in the front line against Communism, spies in uniform. There were no liberals in our outfit.’

‘After Germany, where did you go?’

‘Ormond and I headed in the same direction. I was hauled back to Langley, to CIA headquarters, and he was posted to the embassy in Washington.’

‘And Archer?’

‘He stayed on in Germany for a while, but we kept in pretty close touch.’

‘How close?’

‘Very. Josh was a good source of information.’

‘Are you saying that he was on your payroll?’

Armstead nodded at the camera. ‘Yes.’

‘Explain this to our viewers,’ Skinner continued, ‘and remember that I’ve got the gun. Why would a CIA operative want to recruit British intelligence officers as agents?’

‘Simple. Back then we couldn’t always rely on our allies to share and share alike. We were in the business of knowing everything, so we took steps to make sure that we did.’

‘That’ll go down well in London; scare the shit out of a few people too, I imagine. But let’s move on a few years, to 1982. Hassett’s an MP, an aide to the defence secretary, and he and Archer show up in Washington to make sure that your team are on-side over the Falklands operation.’

‘Yeah, and Josh told me he was going to fight. I told him he was crazy, that there would be a load of casualties down there. Ormond could have gotten him a desk to ride, but he was set on action; dead set, the way it turned out. He knew what he was getting into, though: last time I saw him, he asked me to keep an eye on his family, if things did go the other way.’

‘And you did?’

‘I kept my word, yes. Whenever I was in England I went to see them up in Bakewell, just to make sure they were all right. After a few years, once the kids were grown and on their way in life, I asked Joan to marry me and she agreed.’

‘You kept an eye on your stepson’s career too.’

‘I made sure he was all right, but I needn’t have worried. He was a better soldier than his pop ever was, a real little terror. When he moved into intelligence and assumed a new identity, I knew about it and I took him under my wing even more. A few times we took care of things for each other.’

‘So you weren’t surprised when he approached you with a proposition?’

Armstead’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Ah, no, you got that wrong. Moses didn’t approach me. Ormond Hassett did. He came over here to this very house. He sat in that chair where you’re sitting and he told me that there were people in London who were scared shitless about the future of their country. They saw it heading into a federal Europe, a super-grouping in which the role and purpose of the British Monarchy would become irrelevant, until it ceased to exist and Britain became, as he put it, the sort of mongrel state we’re seeing in France, Spain, and even the United States. He said that the thing that scared them most was the fact that those standing in succession to the throne appeared to be in favour of the idea.’

‘And his solution?’

‘To take one of them out.’

‘How?’

‘That was what Ormond asked me. After I told him he was crazy, I told him that the most vulnerable point of attack was the student prince, but that anything that happened to him had to be seen very clearly to have happened from outside. That’s where Pete Bassam’s Albanian gang came into the picture. Kidnapping’s a national sport with these guys; the idea was, they grab him from his university, they hold him for ransom, but somewhere along the line he gets killed.’

‘What did Hassett say to that?’

‘That I was a fucking genius. He said that it was so simple it was beautiful. The way he saw it, not only would it take one of the problems . . . maybe the main problem . . . out of the equation, but in the scandal that