'Dead sure, ma'am. It was a wee paramedic lass that phoned me.'
'And how did the doctor react when you arrived?'
The middle-aged officer cocked an eyebrow. 'Ye mean was he pleased taste see me like?'
She nodded. 'That'l do.'
'Naw. He was just wantin' hame, like the ambulance crew were wantin' back taste the Royal.'
'Had you ever met him before?'
'Who? The deid fella, like?'
'No,' Rose said, patiently. 'The doctor.'
'Naw, naw, naw, naw, naw. Never in ma life. He was a new one on me, like.'
'Do you know many of the doctors up in Oxgangs, Charlie?'
'Ah thought Ah knew them a', ma'am, but like Ah said, no' this one.'
'Have you seen Amritraj since then?'
'No, ma'am.'
She leaned across her desk and pulled her in-tray towards her. 'The dead man, Essary,' she said. 'You'd remember him if I showed you a photograph, would you?'
'Oh aye, ma'am. Ah've got a good memory for faces… especial y if they're deid.'
She ripped off the second sheet of the Strathclyde memo, and slid it over to him. 'Is that him?'
Johnston picked it up and gazed at it for a few seconds. Then he nodded, slowly. 'He looks a bit better there, ma'am, a bit mair life about him, ken; but that's him a'right: no doubt about it.'
52
'I always meant to ask your father about this thing American men have with their dens,' Bob murmured, as he and Sarah looked around the converted cellar space beneath the mansion. It was a big room, with walls and ceiling panelled in pale beechwood, comfortably furnished, and geared to play rather than work.
'Simple; they express the part of them that never grew up. That was well over fifty per cent in some men I've met, I can tell you. In my father's case, probably about five, but he wasn't exempt, as this place shows.'
Like the rest of the house, the den bore the marks of a thorough sweep by the police and Bureau technicians. 'This photograph you remember,' asked Bob, 'he would have kept it here, would he, rather than in one of the public rooms?'
'Here, for certain,' she said, without a moment's hesitation. 'My dad wasn't showy; he met presidents and senators, and he had been one of those himself at state level, but he never talked about it unless he was asked, and he never displayed any photographs from those days. All those, and his few bits of memorabilia, were down here.'
Skinner laughed. 'I was in a guy's office once and you could hardly see the walls for pictures of him with the rich and famous. They were arranged in a sort of pecking order. The actors and pop stars were on the bottom rung, then politicians, then up one more to the royals, and right at the top of the ladder was him and the Pope.'
'Whom you'l be meeting yourself, quite soon.'
'Yes, but don't let's go into that. Where did Leo keep his photographs?'
'They were in albums. Let's see.' She pointed to a sideboard against one of the wal s. 'In there, I think.'
Sarah stepped across to the cabinet, knelt beside it and opened a door on its right. 'Yup. Here they are.' She reached in and withdrew a stack of red leather-bound volumes. She passed them to Bob, then reached into the small fridge in the corner, took out two bottles of Budweiser, uncapped them with a tool fixed to the wal and handed one to him.
'Wassup,' he muttered, as he sat in a rocking chair, the albums on his lap. He glanced at the covers and saw from their labels that they were in decade order, from the thirties on.
Laying the others on the floor he opened the 1960s volume and handed it to his wife. 'This is where it should be,' she muttered, sitting on a three-seater couch and wiping a line of foam, back-handed, from ' her top lip. He watched her as she looked at the first few pages, smiling at some photographs, passing others by quickly. She had reached only the seventh page, when she stopped and turned the album towards Bob.
'Look.'
Skinner had only known his father-in-law as an old man; even then he had been strikingly handsome. The photograph that his wife showed him filled a page of the book. Leo Grace smiled out at him, in his early thirties, with movie-star looks that made even the man by his side seem ordinary. The man by his side; Bob had been a child on the twenty-second of November, 1963, barely halfway through primary school, yet the memory of his parents' shock when the news-flash confirmed his death had remained vivid. The president must have been at least fifteen years older than Leo, a veteran of the war before his, yet an innocent looking at the two of them, razor-sharp in their evening dress, could have been forgiven for wondering which of the two was the leader.
'They seem to be fairly chummy,' he murmured.
'They were; it was Bobby whom Dad never liked. No, it was real y the other way round; the Attorney General didn't get on with him. My father didn't care about him one way or another. He never talked about it, though; that was the way Jack Wylie told it.'
'What else did Jack say?' he asked, as she turned back to the album.
'He reckoned that Bobby was jealous of Dad, and that he was afraid the New Yorkers would pick him for the senate vacancy when it came up.'
'I can see why they might have. But your father never ran, did he?'
'No. He decided against it.'
'Was he warned off?'
'You're kidding. If anyone had tried that he would have gone for it.
The truth, for it was one of the few things he did tell me, was that he felt it would have put the president in a difficult position, if he had run, having to choose whether to endorse his brother or his friend. So when the offer to join the firm was made, he decided to accept, thinking that he might give it a run when he was a little older, and a little richer.'
'He never did though. Did he tell you why?'
Sarah nodded. 'Yes, he did,' she answered. 'It was the assassination; the effect it had on him. He wasn't afraid,' she added, quickly. 'He wasn't afraid of anything after Korea; he said he left all his fear out there. The thing that horrified him was that when they shot the president, the first lady was in the car. She could have been hit rather than him; as well as him.
'Dad said that he'd only have gone into politics with the intention of making it to the top of the tree. But when he saw what happened in Dal as, he decided there and then that he could never put my mother in that position.' She stopped, as she realised that he was gazing at her with a faint, curious smile on his face.
'You said 'they', just now. Did you realise that?'
'Did I? Well if I did, that's what my father said; because I remember having that discussion with him, as clearly as if it was only an hour ago.
I was barely in my teens and President Reagan had just been shot.'
'Are you sure? Think again.'
She closed her eyes for a second or two. 'No. I don't need to think again. That's what he said.'
'He didn't say, 'When the president was shot'?'
'No, Goddammit. He said, 'When they shot the president.' But so what? It's a col oquialism, almost. Lots of Americans say that.'
'I suppose so,' he admitted, letting the matter drop as Sarah went back to the book.
She had not gone much further when she stopped, staring at the pages that lay open in front of her. 'Look here,' she exclaimed. He jumped from the rocking chair in a single easy movement, and sat on the arm of the couch, looking down at the album. He saw two photographs, one on each facing page. The image on the left showed Leo Grace and another, older man… Bob realised with a start that it was J. Edgar Hoover… with the vice
