Finally, Boras broke eye contact with Skinner, as he bowed his head to him, briefly. ‘Remarkable, quite remarkable,’ he exclaimed. ‘Your picture is as clear as any my Zrinka ever painted, and just as imaginative. And, of course, you could not resist coming here to set it out for me. I am flattered, sir.’
Skinner let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a growl. ‘You know, that’s the first silly thing you’ve said. I’m not flattering you, man. I’m not even addressing you. All along I’ve been talking to whoever is monitoring this meeting, to whoever is looking and listening in.
‘I’m not sure who it is, but it’s not the
When he turned back to face Boras he saw a teeth-baring grimace on the man’s face. Instantly, it vanished, but the look that replaced it was thunderous.
‘You may think,’ Skinner told him, ‘that what I’ve just done was a bit risky. But it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter who’s watching us, I’m too high-profile to vanish off the face of the earth, and so is Mario. On top of that,’ he added, with a smile, ‘we’re both extremely dangerous. I came into this building with a purpose, and I still have it. So what I’m saying to the boys and girls in our audience is this.
‘I know that your man Boras is fireproof, but I want the man who killed Stevie, and I’m going to have him. The best thing you can all do is give him to me. The second best is stay out of my way while I find him.’ He pushed himself violently to his feet. ‘Come on, you two. We’re finished here.’ He drained his glass and looked down at the blue-suited figure, into his furious eyes. ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘but I’ve tasted better.’
Sixty-nine
It should have been the best day of Sammy Pye’s career. He had been sure that he would move up, one day, from being Mario McGuire’s sidekick, having followed him, as a sergeant, through two divisional commands and finally into the head of CID’s office.
For some time it had been a matter of when, not if, he would make detective inspector and occasionally he had let himself wonder where that might be. He had been a little hurt when McGuire had told him that he was moving Jack McGurk temporarily to Torphichen Place, with George Regan as acting DI, and it must have shown, for his boss had been moved to tell him in confidence that he was simply waiting for the Bandit Mackenzie situation to resolve itself, before sending him down to Leith.
The promised move had come about, but not in a way that anyone could have foreseen. Pye had felt uncomfortable from the moment he had settled in behind Stevie Steele’s old desk, as if there were two of them in the chair. The other three guys had done their best to make him feel welcome, but still the atmosphere had been awkward.
Finally, after Skinner and McGuire had visited and departed, Wilding had pulled his chair over towards him. ‘Listen, Sammy,’ he had said, ‘this is going to be a tough day for all of us, but it would be better for you if you moved into the DCI’s room. Stevie never did, because he didn’t want it to seem that he was jumping into Mackenzie’s shoes. But you never worked with the guy, so there’s no reason for you not to.’
Sometimes, Pye thought, as he looked through the Perspex wall, when he took off the ‘hail fellow, well met’ guise and turned serious, Ray Wilding was a pretty impressive bloke. He decided that it would be his practice to encourage him to do so more often.
His musing was interrupted when he saw Griff Montell rise from his chair, and head towards him. ‘Boss,’ said the South African, as he opened the door, ‘I’m into that disk that the fiscal’s office sent up, and there are some things on it you should see.’
‘Show me,’ Pye replied, rising to follow him back to his work station. A screen saver was active on the DC’s monitor; as soon as he touched the mouse it vanished and a folder headed ‘my documents’ appeared. ‘How does the calendar look?’ asked the inspector.
‘It has him in Edinburgh on the days of all three murders, but that’s not what I wanted to show you. Wait a minute.’ He clicked on a subfolder. It opened another series: Montell moved the cursor on to an icon marked ‘Les Girls’ and opened it. A strip of small images appeared. ‘Watch,’ he said, then hit the ‘view as a slideshow’ command. The screen went black for a second, and then was filled with a clear, sharp photograph of a woman, lying on her back on stony ground. ‘Stacey Gavin,’ the detective constable announced unnecessarily, as Pye had found himself gazing at her image on the wall, with the rest, for much of the morning since his arrival.
‘Jeez,’ he whispered.
The frame held for a few seconds until it was replaced by another, taken from a different angle, then by another, of Stacey’s pale face. The location moved, to a yellow beach, and another dead girl, the same sequence repeating until the naked form of Amy Noone was revealed. As they realised what was happening, Wilding and Singh stopped what they were doing and moved across the room to watch the display as it completed, then repeated, then ran again. There were no photographs of Harry Paul, only the three young women.
‘He loved them,’ said Pye, quietly. ‘Look at the way they’re photographed: it’s perfect, they’re beautiful. He killed them and yet he loved them. He loved them . . . and yet he killed them.’
Seventy
Bob Skinner did not believe for a second that his confrontation with Boras might have endangered himself or either of his companions but he did read anxiety in Stallings as she sat down to dine with him and McGuire in an Italian restaurant near Covent Garden, after she had dropped off her car in the park behind her office.
‘It’s okay, Becky,’ he assured her, as they scanned the menu. ‘Relax, have a couple of drinks with your meal, then get a car to take you home.’
‘You know, I think I might,’ she said. ‘That was a very scary scene, especially when you said that the room was under surveillance.’
‘It had to be. Why else would he have taken us there, rather than to the security of his office?’
‘If what Barker told us was true, why does he have that screened every day?’
‘Because it suits him. He operates a very high-level business; plus, he’s a very dodgy guy. He has to have somewhere he can function in absolute secrecy. But if he’s involved with the intelligence community, as I reckon he is, he has to accept a degree of surveillance. Boras knew damn well that a deputy chief constable doesn’t travel four hundred miles just to have a drink with him and tell him something that he and the rest of the country heard on telly the day before. That room’s his security blanket.’
‘You’re certain it was bugged?’
‘One hundred per cent.’ He took the device from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Did you see any cameras or mikes in Boras’s eyrie?’
‘No.’
He pointed to a corner of the restaurant, where a CCTV camera, mounted on a pivot on the ceiling, silently scanned the area. ‘Do you see that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then hold on to that box, and press the “activate” button.’
She did as he said, then yelped. ‘It’s vibrating.’
‘Just as it did in my pocket earlier on. Right now, it’s telling you about that camera up there.’
‘Couldn’t it be something else?’
He laughed. ‘I like healthy scepticism in a police officer. Yes, it could, if this place is bugged as well, but regardless of that, it’s picking up that camera.’
‘If you’re right, what’s going to happen?’
‘Maybe nothing; maybe they will just stand back and let me get on with it. If not, somebody will get in touch with me, very soon.’
‘Do you know who that will be?’
‘I suspect it may be someone I know, under orders to persuade me to be a good boy, but I’ll find that out in
