'Dropped me in it there, mate, haven't you. Don't tell me you weren't on the point of chipping into my briefing with a homily about gun-toting motorcycle messengers in Charlotte Square. Christ, if I hadn't been looking at you at the time! There are things you need to break to the wife in private – if you choose to break them at all.
Now I've got no choice!'
Martin wore a guilty look that was rarely seen. 'Sorry, boss. I just didn't think.'
Skinner considered his point made. 'It's OK, son. I chose to bring Sarah into the team, so it's half my fault for putting you in the situation, anyway. There's another side to it, though, and a good reason not to tell the team about my wee bit of excitation.
These Apache Couriers are all over town. I'd hate to think of what might happen if next week one of them even looked sideways at one of our team while reaching into his jacket. Bang, bang. Dead courier. 'Oh, you were only getting a hankie out were you. Sorry about that. Just a wee mistake.' No, thank you very much! Not even Proud Jimmy would see the funny side of that one.'
They had reached Skinner's office in the Command Suite.
'Come on in, Andy, and I'll let you halfway in on a state secret. I told you I've already accessed available files on the MI5 computer from my other office, and come up blank?'
Martin nodded. •Well, not all the stuffs on computer. With all these hackers and folk like that, and viruses and so on, the plain fact is that information technology doesn't have the security you need at the very top level – or at the bottom level, depending on how you see these things. There are files still kept on paper, in London, behind a very thick door with a very long combination and a very loud alarm. I'm going to use my secure phone to brief the MIS analysts to look at them all, and prepare me a list of people to be considered. It probably won't be a long list, but I'll bet they'll 'ave some entries for us. This will all be stuff I probably haven't n myself. I'll have picked up bits of it now and then, just wee scraps of information, but the total picture is gathered together by ion teams in Head Office.'
He sat down in a chair at the side of his desk and pulled his scrambled telephone to him.
'While I do this, Andy, could you access your SB stuff through my terminal, and run another list for me. Journalists – anyone you've got on file, either here or in branches in the rest of the country. Look at their special interests and their known associates. I fancy we'll want to talk to one or two of them, too, when the moment comes.'
That not a bit of a risk, leaning on journalists?' asked Martin.
'Who said anything about leaning on them? We'll just say we're consulting them; it'll make them feel important. The hack is not yet born who is so hairy-backed and anti-establishment that he doesn't want the polis owing him a favour. You do that, while I make this call. Then we'll get off to the George to scare the shit out of the Festival directors.'
11
The George is not the most imposing of Edinburgh's first-division hotels, but it is one of the best. It is situated on the street from which it takes its name, and its narrow entrance affords clients a greater degree of privacy than its massive rivals at either end of Princes Street. It is possible to slip virtually unobserved into the George, while entry through the wide doors of the Caledonian or the Balmoral, past their liveried and effusive keepers, is always something of a performance.
Skinner and Martin arrived at the hotel in the BMW just after 5:00 pm, finding a parking place with unusual ease, as the Saturday shopping crush had eased off. Martin, who enjoyed special relationships with every hotel manager in the city centre, had asked for a private room for their meeting. He carried a briefcase as they walked into the hotel. Six of the seven Festival directors were waiting for them. Only Trevor Golley of the Book Festival had been unavailable. None of the six had been told in advance that the others would be present. As the two policemen entered the room, the low buzz of conversation stopped, and half a dozen faces turned towards them.
Skinner broke the ice. 'Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I must thank you for coming along here at such short notice, and in response to such a mysterious invitation. We appreciate how busy you must be just now, so we won't keep you long.'
Three large Thermos jugs lay on three occasional tables in the centre of the room.
'Everyone all right for coffee, before we begin?' An assortment of grunts and nods came from around the room. 'Right, if you'll each find a seat, I'll explain what all this is about.'
The long room had no windows. It was furnished with three deep and comfortable two-seater sofas and two armchairs. The policemen each took a chair, leaving the sofas for their guests. As the directors sat down. Skinner saw that they seemed to sort themselves unconsciously into natural pairings.
Harriet Nelson, in her second year as director for the 'Official'
Festival, sat on the left-hand sofa, alongside Colonel Archie McPhee, organiser of the Military Tattoo. Even seated, Harriet Nelson was an imposing woman: tall, heavy featured and with a flaming red hair. She had won her spurs in the arts in her late I twenties, as one of the very few leading female orchestral conductors, and had wielded her baton in concert halls around the world for almost two decades. Her appointment as director of the Edinburgh International Festival had been announced by the governing committee as a major coup, which indeed it was.
Colonel McPhee, the Military Tattoo director, was in his own way as imposing as his neighbour on the sofa. Before his retirement from active service, five years earlier, he had been a battalion commander in the Parachute Regiment, and had seen bloody combat in the Falklands. He was in his early fifties, with close-cropped, receding hair, a sharp nose and piercing, perceptive eyes. He was dressed in light slacks and a short-sleeved green shin, an outfit which emphasised an impression of total physical fitness.
The director of the Film Festival, Julia Shahor, sat directly facing Skinner and Martin, next to the one person of the six whom Skinner had not met before, whom he knew therefore to be Ray Starkey. head of the television event. Julia Shahor's shock of very black hair exploded in a natural Afro, framing a small, pale but unforgettably attractive face. She wore a voluminous white robe which covered her from neck to ankles. She was a small woman, the youngest of the six directors by at least seven or eight years, Skinner guessed. She had come to the Film Festival ten months earlier, on a one-year contract, and like Harriet Nelson she had been regarded as a catch for Edinburgh. She was still in her twenties, but already she had built a brilliant career as a screenwriter. It was said that her ambition was to emulate one of her predecessors by using the Festival as the springboard for a career as a movie director in America.
Ray Starkey wore large, yellow-framed spectacles, with lenses which made his eyes seem huge. He was very fat, and dressed incongruously in a pale blue Armani suit, with a grey shirt, yellow braces, and a tie which seemed to have been hand-painted, badly, that same afternoon. Skinner knew that Starkey had come to run the television event after having been a casualty of the 1991 commercial television licence auctions. He had been programme controller with one of the losing franchise-holders and had waited in vain for a year for one of the winners to offer him a contract, before being invited to take up the Festival post.
Finally, seated together on the sofa to the right of the two policemen, were David Leroy, the director of the Fringe, and Jay Hands, his counterpart at the Jazz Festival.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe enjoys a reputation as one of the great showcases for new-wave theatre and new performing talent.
Many artists now world-famous had made their first impressions upon public consciousness at Edinburgh Fringe productions.
David Leroy's appearance was completely at odds with the avantgarde style of his Festival. While many of his performers found kaftans and sandals de rigueur, the Fringe director could have been taken for a successful big-firm chartered accountant. Even on an August Saturday he wore a blue Austin Reed suit, black Loake shoes, a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, and an Edinburgh Academy Old Boys' tie.
However, Jay Hands, the longest-serving of all the directors, was much more in tune with the image of the grizzled jazzman.
Even seated, he seemed round-shouldered. He was in his late fifties, tall and lean, with a sallow complexion
