My assistant walked all round the table, slowly, pausing several times to lean in and look more closely at a detail. ‘The body on the right,’ he began when he was ready, ‘the one that was against the side panel of the van, is smaller than the other and may not have been fully clothed. It is barefoot, whereas the other was wearing shoes.’
‘Man and woman?’
‘I would say so,’ he replied, in his clipped subcontinental accent. He had come to us, just after my arrival, with a BSc in Pathology from the University of Western Australia. Normally we’d have looked for a medical qualification as well, but he’d been quite a find. ‘The bodies appeared to have been tied together with some kind of synthetic rope. I believe this was done post mortem, since in addition to the gunshot exit wound which you identified, correctly in my opinion, on the larger body, the smaller, let’s call it the female, exhibits three more exit wounds, on the back. One of these has completely shattered the spine, but given their size and position I would say that any one of them would have been fatal.’
‘So, for the record,’ I said for Montell’s benefit, ‘we are looking at victims of a double homicide. We’re agreed on that, yes?’
‘Absolutely. There is no other possibility.’
‘Okay, let’s try to separate them. Is the rope still intact?’
‘I believe that it has melted into the bodies, being synthetic; it is wound round them three times, so yes, it may still be holding them together. I’ll take care of that.’ He picked up a scalpel, leaned over the mass, and chose a spot to cut the binding. As he did so the remains separated slightly, but not completely as I had hoped they would.
‘Hey, Griff,’ I called out. ‘Would you like to come and give us a hand here?’
‘Not on your life, Sarah,’ he replied sincerely; there’s a mike in the gallery, and speakers in the autopsy room. I could kid with him; I knew him from his time as Alex’s neighbour, and the rest.
Roshan and I decided on the obvious, since it would be easier to move the smaller of the bodies on to the gurney. Luckily they came apart easily when we applied a little pressure. As we rolled the burnt cadaver on to the trolley, it was evident that Roshan’s assumptions about its gender had been correct.
‘Their killers made a mistake,’ I said, for the microphone once again, ‘if they were trying to prevent or hamper identification. They should have untied the bodies before setting them alight. Their being pressed together means that the trunk of each is still recognisably human, and that some of the front of their clothing has survived the fire.’
Hers had been a dressing gown, secured at the waist by a sash. It had fallen open at the chest and three entry wounds were apparent, on a group between her breasts.
‘This is professional,’ I pronounced, speaking once again to the DC.
‘What makes you say so?’ he asked.
‘It’s a cluster; three shots close together. I’ve seen pro hits before. With impulsive, inexpert shootings the wounds are all over the place, and quite often the whole magazine is emptied. Not this one; three taps centre of the chest, quick fire. All done before she’d even hit the ground.’
‘What about the other one?’
Roshan had turned the male cadaver so that it was lying on its back. I walked around and examined it, then told him what I saw. ‘These are head shots, but the same; a cluster of three, middle of the forehead. No wonder the back of the skull’s missing. You’ll find that at the murder scene.’
‘Wherever the hell that is,’ Montell replied, gloomily.
‘Let’s see if we can help. First step, identify the bodies; bar codes on clothing can help you do that. Roshan, will you take his off, please.’
I stood back and watched as he did what I’d asked. It was easy, since most of each garment had been destroyed; that which was left, simply peeled off, revealing mottled, discoloured, part-roasted flesh. He left the dead man’s feet untouched; they’d have come off if he’d tried to remove his shoes, since they were welded to the flesh. When he was finished, he picked up the remnants of what had been the victim’s trousers. ‘There is something in these, Sarah, in a pocket.’
‘Let’s see what it is.’
He found a pair of scissors and cut through cloth. A slim wallet, black leather, fell into his hands. He passed it to me. I opened it, and smiled.
‘You see, Griff?’ I laughed. ‘You never know your luck. What we have here is a photographic driving licence, intact.’ I took it from its slot in the wallet. ‘I can’t match the face to the one on the table, not without a very expensive reconstruction, but I don’t imagine that he’d be carrying anyone else’s.’ I read the name on the plastic, aloud.
I glanced up at the viewing gallery. ‘Did you hear. .?’ I began, then stopped, when I saw that Montell was staring at me as if I’d just told him that the guy on the table, whoever the hell he might have been, had started breathing again.
Clyde Houseman, senior regional field officer, MI5
I didn’t know what to expect when I walked into Mr Skinner’s house. For all of fifteen years, I’d been carrying a mental picture of the man around in my head, a guy who must have been, when we met, not very far beyond the age I’ve reached now, a man brimming with self-confidence and with body language that tended to downplay rather than assert how dangerous he was.
By that time, my street gang had rolled a few guys who thought they were tough and found out they weren’t, but he was something else. When I tried my hard man act with him, he gave me a look that made my testicles try to retract into my body. What he also did was engage a self-awareness that had never been there before. In that moment, although I didn’t realise it or articulate it until some time later, he made me see what I was and what I would become unless I did something radical about my life.
I’d always known I was intelligent, but all my life I’d been conditioned to be embarrassed by the fact. When he gave me that card, he threw that into reverse; he made me embarrassed by what I was.
When I say I didn’t know what to expect at our second meeting, I mean two things. First, I didn’t know whether he would remember me. He didn’t, not until I gave him the card. In a way that pleased me, in that it showed me, if I still needed it, how far I’ve come, and how much I’ve changed from that schemie thug. Second, I didn’t know what he might have become, whether he was still the guy who’d made that impact or whether he’d been softened and diminished by age.
He didn’t look soft, that’s for sure. The guy is fifty plus but physically he still looks harder than me. That day he was wearing shorts, a sleeveless linen shirt and thong-style sandals; his skin was brown and shining and his muscles were sharply defined. There was sand in his hair and clinging to his clothing; it made me think of Afghanistan, and of him as a marine from Hell.
And yet he was different; there was an edginess that wasn’t part of my vision of the man. Maybe it was there before and I’d been too young to recognise it, but I didn’t think so. The thirty-something Skinner had been encased in an aura of absolute certainty. The older version seemed to have lost that; I looked at him and I saw a man with problems that he wasn’t sure he could solve.
I’d come expecting to be asked for my life story, and I was happy to lay it out for him. I owed that to him, that and more. The deputy director had told me his security clearance was higher than mine, so I had no problem telling him about my present employment, or about her view of our colleagues in Strathclyde. She had told me I should never be less than frank with him.
He didn’t bat an eyelid through any of it, not even when I described my SBS missions in Afghanistan. He asked me very few questions and none of them were personal. He didn’t want to know about the family I’d left behind, not that there was much of it left, only my mother. I didn’t think of her at all when I was in the Marines, and I listed no next of kin. I’d said no goodbyes when I left. When I joined Five I waited a few months then ran a check on her, with my line manager’s tacit approval. She’s still in Edinburg
h, still drawing benefit, still pulling down convictions for nicking from supermarkets. It seems that she only ever steals food and drink, never clothes. My father never made it out of Peterhead; a friend of the taxi driver he murdered was sent up there and took full revenge by caving his head in with a dumbbell one day in the prison gym. Nobody saw a thing apart from one warder, and it takes two witnesses to convict.
Once my personal history was behind us we got down to business.
‘So, Clyde,’ he asked, when the time came, ‘why are you so keen to talk to me today, other than to give me back that card?’
I tried not to sound too eager, or too pleased with myself. ‘The image you sent to Amanda last night,’ I replied, ‘the body that was buried for you to find, we know who he was.’
He smiled. ‘I thought you might,’ he murmured. ‘What was he? Mossad?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, he was a paratrooper first, then Israeli secret service. Not any more, though. He was kicked out.’
‘That must be damn near a first for Mossad. What was he caught doing that was bad enough to get him the sack?’
I smiled at his sharpness. ‘Using a fake German passport on the assassination of a Hamas official. The German government kicked up such a fuss that he had to be cut loose. His name is Beram Cohen, but he’s used a few others.’
‘Let me guess,’ Skinner said. ‘He went freelance.’
‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘His name’s come up in connection with a couple of operations. It didn’t make the press, but last year around two dozen Somali pirates were taken out, in groups of two and three. It put quite a dent in their activities and made those waters a lot safer for a while. The operation was funded by the American State Department and Beram Cohen planned it. That’s what he did; he was a facilitator. He used mercenaries, mainly Russians, but a couple of South Africans as well, all of then skilled, all ex-regulars, like him.’
‘The sort of people who wouldn’t leave a fallen comrade behind?’
‘Exactly,’ I agreed. ‘Like the two men you told the DD about, his companions in the restaurant.’
‘The guys he ate with just before he died.’
‘Yes. The prints you sent to us meant nothing, but I’m interested in what the restaurant owner said about them speaking in a language he couldn’t identify. My guess is that if it had been a European language, Russian for example, he’d have been able to take a guess at that.’
‘In Glasgow he might have assumed it was Polish.’
‘True. The fact that he hadn’t a clue makes me wonder if it those men might have been the South Africans he used on the Somali job.’
‘Do you have names for them?’ Skinner asked.
‘Francois Smit and Gerry Botha,’ I told him. ‘Smit’s a sniper, Botha just a general killer. They’re old school. They go back to the apartheid days, but there are no files on them, because they made sure that they were destroyed before the regime changed. We only know about them because the Americans wanted a list of the people Cohen was using on the op, to make sure they were all acceptable, and so that anyone who talked could be silenced.’
‘I see,’ the chief constable murmured. ‘So what we have here is a planner and two hit men. Suddenly, out of the blue, Cohen, the planner, ups and dies from entirely natural causes. Smit and Botha have a problem. They could have stripped the body and chucked it in your namesake river, but their military ethics wouldn’t let them do that.’
‘Yes,’ I chipped in, ‘or they could have taken him out on to the Fenwick moors, buried him there and sent us rough co-ordinates, but I guess they didn’t know the terrain.’
‘So they brought him through to Edinburgh, dug a shallow grave in a city location and told us where to find him. But why Edinburgh?’
‘So that you’d be searching for them through here,’ I suggested, ‘while all the time they were back in Glasgow.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but not necessarily.’ His eyes were gleaming. There was something going on behind them. ‘But doing what in Glasgow, Clyde? That’s the question. You’ve got. . or you had. . the planner, you’ve got a sniper, and you’ve got his minder. Who’s the target?’
I frowned. ‘We don’t know for sure,’ I confessed, ‘but there is one possibility, and that’s why the DD has hit the red button. There is a man called Theo Fabrizzi. .’
‘A classical pianist,’ Skinner said. ‘I know. He’s playing in Glasgow tonight at a charity event in the Royal Concert Hall.’
‘You know about that?’
‘I was invited; turned it down. My wife’s going though. Never pass up a photo op, that’s her motto.’ I couldn’t miss the bitterness in his voice, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it. ‘What’s with Fabrizzi?’ he asked. ‘An Italian musician? Is he Mafia?’
‘He isn’t Italian. Despite the name, he’s Lebanese, and covertly he is a significant financial backer of Hezbollah. He’s a sworn enemy of Israel. If they still had a death list, which they say they don’t, you’d be liable to find his name on there somewhere.’
‘Hold on,’ the chief interrupted. ‘You told me that Beram Cohen was kicked out of Mossad.’
‘I said they cut him loose, that’s all. As a freelance, it might actually have been more convenient for the government in Tel Aviv. Fact is, with him involved, it makes Fabrizzi the likely target. With Smit here, the hit could be anywhere. All he needs is a vantage point, and the right weapon. The record distance for a kill shot in Afghanistan is almost two and a half kilometres; Smit’s in that class. ’
He leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head, fingers intertwined, and he yawned. ‘Sorry, Clyde,’ he chuckled. ‘Late night, early morning, and I’ve been warned off stimulants. If the threat is a sniper,’ he continued, ‘what’s the problem? Take the target out of the firing line.’
‘This is where it gets difficult, sir,’ I said. ‘We can’t, because he won’t let us. I saw him early this morning and suggested that he pulls out of tonight’s concert and lets us get him out of the country. He told me no way, that he’d rather be a martyr than back down to an Israeli threat. But there’s this too; the Home Secretary’s been briefed. She’s ordered that these people, regardless of who might have commissioned them, are to be treated as terrorists. They are to be caught, not frightened off, so that, if the Israelis have commissioned this we can hand them their heads on a plate. Her words, according to the DD.’
He leaned forward again, took two more drinks from his small office fridge, and gave me my second Irn Bru of the day. ‘You have told Strathclyde, I assume, regardless of what Amanda thinks of their security.’
‘No, sir,’ I told him.
‘But you must!’
‘We’ve been ordered not to, by the Home Secretary herself. This is a secret operation, she says, and that means no police, apart from you, since you brought us Beram Cohen in the first place. Terrorism isn’t a devolved function of the Scottish parliament. She’s in charge, sir. It’s her baby and she gives us our orders.’
‘So who’s looking after Fabrizzi?’ he demanded. ‘The guy might be willing to risk his own life but he still has to be protected.’
‘We’re doing that; the security service.’
‘We, being how many?’
‘I have a detail of three on it.’ Mr Skinner gasped. ‘With respect, sir,’ I said, ‘I’d rather have three of mine than ten of Strathclyde’s.’
‘That reminds me of the apocryphal story about the guy who left his Bentley in your old street, and reckoned it was safe since he’d left his Rottweiler in the back seat. The flaw in his thinking was that the dog couldn’t put out fires. Your guys may be good, but the sniper just needs to have one clear sight of Fabrizzi, and he’s up in flames.’ He paused. ‘All of this puts you in the shit, Clyde, doesn’t it?’
We’d come to it. He was right. I’d been tasked not just with stopping an assassination, but with catching the shooters, and I hadn’t a clue where to begin. Not one.
Skinner smiled. He push
ed himself from his chair and stretched himself to his full six feet and a couple, running his fingers through his hair and sending the sand flying from it.
‘In which case,’ he laughed, ‘the two of us are in it together. But don’t you worry, son, because your Uncle Bob has the inkling of an idea.’
No doubt about it, that man moves in mysterious ways.
Lowell Payne
I’d done my homework on McGuire before I ever met him; I had him marked as a rich kid, maybe a black sheep, a lad who didn’t need the money but had joined the police force for a laugh and a fight at the weekend without the risk of being locked up for it, then had found that he was good at it.
It didn’t take me long to realise that I’d taken him too lightly. Yes, he does have a tendency to flippancy, and a light touch when dealing with subordinates, but anyone who marks him down as a soft touch is likely to wake up regretting that mistake. Mario is one of nature’s nice guys, but I could tell that he also has a formidable temper and no visible tolerance level for fools.
He and Bob’s ex seemed to get on very well. I had heard of her, from Alex, and I knew that she was back in town. At first I thought she’d be keeping her distance from the police community, but that would have been pretty much impossible, given her job. From my brief observation of her, I have to say that I like her. She’s sexy, beautiful and stacked, but that has nothing to do with it.
I judge people by their eyes; I believe they tell the story of what’s behind them and hers appealed to me. I read them as intelligent, kind, and warm, those of someone who at that moment was enjoying life very much. I found myself wondering how she and Bob had split up; she seemed like a good match for him. When I met him first, at Jean’s dad’s funeral, he was with a DI from his force; that was quite serious for a while, but I never thought it would last, because their eye signals weren’t quite right.
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