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  For a moment I thought we were going to walk right up to him, but Amanda veered off left, then right, into another corridor that ran alongside the chamber, under the public gallery, by my reckoning. It was busy but nobody seemed to be in a hurry, and nobody took much notice of us. We made another right turn, then a left, then climbed another flight of stairs, at the top of which we faced a closed door, at which a dark-suited man stood guard. He had a small gold badge in his lapel. In my world and in that of my escort, that was a signal that he was armed.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he murmured, nodded, then opened the door for us.

  Still silent, Amanda led me through, into yet another of the corridors of which the Palace of Westminster seemed to have been constructed.

  Finally, she stopped, at a heavy oak door that was guarded by another dark suit, another gold lapel badge.

  ‘Bob,’ she murmured, not out of breath in the slightest despite the pace of our trek, ‘what you’re going to see, you may never be able to talk about. It can’t go into the memoirs that you will inevitably write one day when you’re too old to keep piling up material. I’ve brought you this far, but I can’t take you any further other than on that understanding.’

  I should have been apprehensive. I might even have been trembling with excitement. But I wasn’t; I was curious, that’s all, and I’d have promised her anything to find out what was on the other side of that door.

  ‘There’s lots can’t go in my memoirs, Amanda,’ I replied. ‘We both know that. But before we go any further, tell me one thing. On what basis am I going in there?’

  She smiled, for the first time since we had met at the Peers’ Entrance. ‘I thought you’d ask me that.’

  She reached into the pocket of her grey jacket and showed me a piece of white plastic, like the Lords pass that I still carried, only laminated.

  I looked at it, saw my image, and beside it my name, my full name, Robert Morgan Skinner, QPM. Below that, but above the Security Service crest, was a title, ‘Consultant Director’. I whistled. ‘Indeed?’ I murmured. ‘Funny that I can’t remember ever attending an interview.’

  She ignored the comment. ‘As of now,’ she said, ‘you are an acting member of Her Majesty’s Security Service. You told me that if I ever needed you, I’d know where you were. I do, I did, and I’ve found you.’ She handed me the badge of temporary office. ‘This has been ready and waiting for you for a while.’

  I nodded. ‘If that’s how it has to be, okay; but I warn you, as soon as this, this . . . thing is over, you’ll be getting it back.’

  ‘Whatever you want.’ She nodded to the suit, who opened the door and stood aside to let us pass, without, I noticed, glancing inside himself.

  I followed Amanda into the room; it was a spacious office furnished traditionally, with pieces that might have been almost as old as the building itself. There was a low central table with a heavy pedestal base, with four worn leather seats set around it. I noted a four-drawer filing cabinet against one wall, and a side table on the one opposite, laden with an array of drinks: sherry, cognac, malt whisky. The only modern items in the room other than a television and a computer were a small fridge that sat beside the filing cabinet, with an electric kettle on top. There was a door beside the filing cabinet. It was ajar, open far enough to let me see a basin and a shower curtain. There was a square window, with heavy green drapes, undrawn, but it was shaded with a white blast curtain that made the room completely private, allowing no prying eyes or lenses. The low winter sun cast astragal shadows upon it.

  I took in all that before turning my eyes and my attention to the desk. Delaying the moment? Maybe, I can’t say for sure.

  In common with the rest of the furniture, it was antique. It had known many famous users, and a couple better described as notorious. That’s how I might have classed the current occupant of its big brown chair, but it’s possible that I was biased, because there was history between Emily Repton and me.

  Whatever that might have been, it was irrelevant. It was clear that the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury had emptied her last Red Box. A slim steel blade with a round wooden handle had been driven deep into her brain and she looked quite, quite dead.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ I whispered, forgetting for the moment that there was another lady present and that she was alive.

  ‘Exactly what I said,’ Amanda murmured, letting me off the hook.

  ‘Who found her?’

  ‘Her PPS . . . Parliamentary Private Secretary,’ she added, although I understood the acronym. ‘Michaela Satchell’s her name; Member of Parliament for the South Downs.’

  ‘Big woman, is she?’

  ‘No, she’s petite actually. Small, young and pretty. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m wondering whether she has the strength to ram a knife that deep into someone’s head.’

  ‘I would say not,’ she ventured. ‘But it isn’t a knife; it’s Emily’s letter-opener. Sheffield steel, a gift from a constituent, she told me. I asked about it when I saw it on her desk, when she was Home Secretary, and I was acting DG, before Hubert Lowery was appointed . . .’

  ‘Because he’d been to Eton with her predecessor’s uncle,’ I grunted, cutting her off. Lowery was a nasty, unscrupulous piece of work, and rather dim witted with it, which made him even more dangerous, in a perverse way. I like to think that I played a part in his downfall.

  ‘Something like that,’ she conceded. ‘The letter-opener,’ she continued. ‘The blade’s about six inches long.’

  I leaned across the desk and peered at it. ‘And at least four of those inches are buried in her brain. Was it pointed, can you recall?’

  ‘Not sharply, no. And the blade could open a letter but not cut anything more solid than butter.’

  ‘Then we probably can discount Ms Satchell, although I’ll reserve judgement on that until I’ve seen her. Where is she now?’

  ‘She’s with the Home Secretary in his office, just along the corridor, with a guard on the door. By the way, it’s Dr Satchell: medical.’

  I straightened up and looked at her. ‘Why am I here, Amanda?’ I asked. ‘And when are the police coming? This should be a job for the Met, for the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection crew, that used to be SO17. They’re responsible for parliamentary policing, as I understand it.’

  ‘On a day-to-day basis, yes, but they do it under contract, through a service agreement with the House authorities. The assassination of a prime minister is a national security matter, and as such my service can pull rank on them. There are special issues here, Bob. Our first priority must be to determine whether any of those have been a factor in Repton’s murder.’

  ‘And my role?’

  ‘We want you to conduct an investigation; a quick, short-term investigation, not only to identify the assassin, but to determine, if possible, who sent him.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s twice you’ve used that term; by accepted definition, as you know, an assassin is someone who murders an important person for political or religious reasons. So who’s your prime suspect? ISIS? Al Qaeda? . . . Merlin Brady?’

  ‘The list could be longer than that. We’re going to be briefed by the Cabinet Secretary; he’ll explain. While we’re waiting for him . . .’ She looked at me, earnestly, her tension showing in the lines around her brown eyes. ‘I want to keep the PM’s death a secret for forty-eight hours, Bob. I think I can; Emily was in West Africa recently at an African Union summit. I’m going to release a fable that she contracted a virus there and that she’s in quarantine at an unknown location. That should hold for a couple of days, and that will be your window.’

  That’s not a window, I thought. That’s a mineshaft.

  ‘Amanda,’ I said, ‘that isn’t legal.’

  ‘It isn’t necessarily illegal,’ she countered. ‘Frankly, I don’t
care. In these circumstances I’ll worry about all that after the event. Whatever happens, the buck will stop with me; as my subordinate within the service you’ll be absolved from any responsibility.’

  ‘That “only obeying orders” argument didn’t hold up at Nuremberg,’ I pointed out, but her expression was set firm and I didn’t protest further.

  ‘I’m going to need a second person,’ I told her, ‘someone I know and trust. How about Clyde Houseman, your man in Glasgow?’

  ‘He’s on an op at the moment,’ she replied. ‘Plus, Clyde isn’t an investigator.’

  ‘Then I want Neil McIlhenney. He’s a close friend of mine, he worked under me in Edinburgh and now he’s a commander in the Metropolitan Police, running undercover officers.’

  ‘I know who he is,’ she said, ‘but I’m not keen to involve the police at any level, not yet.’

  ‘In that case, I need you,’ I told her, ‘and you’re otherwise engaged. There’s nobody else. I will not work on the basis you’ve outlined with someone I don’t know.’

  She capitulated, with a smile of resignation. ‘Okay, you can have McIlhenney, if that’s possible. I’ll speak to the Met Commissioner, Sir Feargal Aherne, and tell him you’re looking into an internal situation I have and need top-level non-service back-up.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I know Feargal from when he was in Northern Ireland. Tell him I need Neil here inside an hour; there’s no time to watch the grass grow. Make your call, and chase up the Cabinet Secretary too, if you need to.’

  She did, moving to the far corner of the room and leaving me with the body of the woman who had taken tea with the monarch on a weekly basis since her appointment a few months before.

  Three

  I never expected to make commander rank.

  For the first ten years of my police service, becoming Detective Inspector Neil McIlhenney was the height of my ambition. I was a conscientious cop, a touch old school, to be honest, when it came to sorting out the occasional troublemaker who didn’t take the uniform seriously enough. I had a kindred spirit there, in the solid shape of my great mate, from childhood to this day, Mario McGuire.

  He was known as the ‘posh kid’ among our schoolmates. His Irish dad was a successful building contractor and his Scottish-Italian mum was a member of the Viareggio family, who were among the best-known merchants in the city. The boy Mario could have gone in either direction, career-wise, but he didn’t; instead he joined me in applying for the police force. We were in the same graduation class from the Tulliallan training college, and were paired up on the beat in our first posting.

  Being big lads, they sent us to a part of the city where our size was more of an asset than our diplomatic skills. It didn’t take us long to forge a reputation. We didn’t win the respect of the local youth; we put the fear of God in them, and in their dads too, when we had to.

  We were pretty much inseparable, on and off duty; we enjoyed our work and we enjoyed our play, although my social life changed on the night in a disco when I met Olive Smith, looked into her eyes and was hooked. Less than a year later we were married, and Lauren was on the way. I’m a bit vague about which happened first.

  Mario stayed free and single, although he did come to spend more time at our house and less in the pub. He had a woman problem, of a sort; his feisty cousin, Paula Viareggio, was in love with him, and made no secret of it. Both sides of their family were small c conservative, and might not have approved of such a relationship, but that didn’t matter to Paula. Mario? He was in denial, simple as that, or maybe it just didn’t dawn on him. It took years and his short-lived marriage to another detective, Maggie Rose, before finally it did, and the inevitable happened.

  By the time they settled down, Olive was dead, killed by her smoking habit, but I won’t dwell on that.

  My friend was the first to catch the eye of Bob Skinner. He happened to be in the right place at the right time, and was pulled in to help the Serious Crimes squad sort out a potential gang war. I came into the gaffer’s circle not long after that, and my life began to change.

  Even with my family responsibilities, my hopes for myself had been limited. I hadn’t even taken the sergeant’s exams when I entered the big man’s orbit, and I had let myself go a bit physically. That couldn’t last: it wasn’t allowed to. The ACC, as he was then, didn’t preach, or hector, or bully anyone. I don’t know if it was deliberate, something he worked on, because even now I’ve never thought to ask him, but he made you want to do better for him. Once you had, he made you want to do better still.

  With that constant self-improvement came rewards, interesting career developments . . . the stint I did in Special Branch prepared me for the job I do now in the Met . . . and regular promotions.

  McGuire was always a step ahead of me in that score. I’ve always thought he was a shade brighter than me, although he’s always insisted it’s the other way around. Whatever, he took each step up the ladder before I did, until he got very close to the top.

  That doesn’t mean that when I chose to move to London I did it to get out of his shadow. No, I did it because I’d promised Louise, the second Mrs McIlhenney, that I’d do everything I could to help her go back to the career she’d put on hold to marry me and have our child. She’s an actress, a decorated one . . . we have a few garish gongs on our mantelpiece . . . and I was as keen as the rest of her fan base to see her return to work.

  The job with the Metropolitan Police Service, heading a unit of deep-cover officers without going into the field myself, could have been created with me in mind. It carried chief superintendent rank, and with Bob Skinner as one of my referees, I passed the interview.

  I’m still surprised by how much I like London, and the pleasure I get from seeing Lou on stage can only add to that.

  Last year I made commander. (I don’t know whether that’s me caught up with Mario at last, for rank equivalents have become muddled by the creation of the national Scottish service, from which I’m profoundly happy to have escaped. He’s the deputy chief up there now, with Maggie, his ex-wife, as chief constable.) My section gets results, and I get regular pats on the back from my boss, Assistant Commissioner Dina Winterton.

  What I do not get, as a matter of routine, is a ‘drop everything’ summons to the Commissioner’s office, but that’s what happened that Monday, out of the blue. It was the first time I had been to the inner sanctum of our new headquarters building; I confess I only found it after a couple of wrong turns.

  When I got there, I was ushered straight into Sir Feargal Aherne’s presence. I had met him only twice since his appointment; like everyone else, I’d done my best not to tower over him. If Bob Skinner is the ‘Big Man’, as he always has been to most of us, then Sir Feargal’s the ‘Wee Man’, for sure. There was a time when he’d have failed the height requirement by several inches.

  Behind his vast oak desk he looked even smaller. Maybe he sensed it, for he stood as I entered and moved round to greet me, hand outstretched; a good sign, I reckoned, for a handshake is never a precursor to a bollocking.

  ‘Commander,’ he said, ‘thank you for coming up on such short notice.’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ I replied. I was aware of a tension about him, an air of uncertainty. It transmitted itself to me. Had something unspeakable happened to one of my field officers? I haven’t lost one yet, but it’s a daily risk for most of them. ‘Where’s the fire?’ I asked, as lightly as I could.

  A corner of his mouth flickered, in what might have been a tiny smile. ‘In the House of Commons, it seems,’ he murmured. ‘I’ve just had a call from a former colleague, Mrs Dennis, the DG of the Security Service.’

  That was something of a revelation; there were rumours in the senior ranks that the biography released at the time of Sir Feargal’s appointment might have been incomplete, and his casual admission confirmed it. I knew that Amand
a Dennis was a career MI5 operative, and so he must have served there at some point.

  He turned and took a couple of steps to a window, looking out at the dull grey Thames, beyond the Victoria Embankment. I followed.

  ‘She told me that she has a situation. That’s all she said, and I didn’t press her for more. It’s under immediate and very discreet investigation. I don’t know what it is. Mrs Dennis didn’t volunteer and I didn’t ask, but it must either be very delicate or very serious, most probably both, for Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection are not involved.’

  ‘They’re not?’ My eyebrows rose, and I felt a surprising flicker of outrage at PaPD, part of the Met, my force, being sidelined by MI5 on its own turf.

  ‘For the moment, no. The person in charge is a secondee, someone she’s drafted in because of his special experience.’

  I almost laughed, but I cut it off short. ‘Bob Skinner,’ I said.

  The Commissioner turned and stared up at me. ‘Was that a guess?’

  ‘Not really. I know he’s in town, and I know why. I’m due to have breakfast with him tomorrow, although we haven’t agreed a venue yet. I think he’s expecting me to invite him in here.’

  ‘Then please do so. I haven’t seen Mr Skinner in quite some time. But you may not have time for breakfast. He has asked for your assistance in his investigation. Are you able to take that on board?’

  I thought about it. I had a guy in place in a very sensitive investigation, more sophisticated than most. He was due to make contact with his handler on the following morning, and I needed to be contactable if a policy decision had to be made. But hell, I could take my phone, and I wasn’t going to be far away if I had to drop out and meet them.

  ‘I can do it,’ I declared. ‘I’ll tell Gilly Beevor . . .’ Detective Superintendent Gillian Beevor is my deputy in the unit ‘. . . that the nanny’s sick and Lou has a matinee performance. I can be with them in ten minutes, fifteen tops. Where do I find him?’