Never Go Back (28 page)

Even Donna agreed Harry had to do it. This was a chance to end the uncertainty: to nail the one among the original fifteen members of Operation Clean Sheet guilty of murder — in the past and the present; to look him in the face and to know he would pay for what he had done — then and now. This was a chance Harry had realized at once he was bound to take.

So it was that Tuesday morning found him sharing the cramped rear of an unmarked white Transit van parked on the western side of Blythswood Square, Glasgow, with a battery of electronic surveillance equipment and an overweight, shaven-headed technical expert overly fond of Danish pastries called Dylan.

‘Sure you don’t want one?’ Dylan enquired, wafting a cinnamon-scented bagful in Harry’s direction.

‘Sure, thanks.’

‘Have you had any breakfast?’

‘Just coffee. It was, er… an early start.’

That was something of an understatement. Accommodated overnight in the Milngavie Travel Inn on the northern outskirts of the city, Harry had been woken at dawn by one of Knox’s junior officers and transported to Strathclyde Police HQ for final briefing and microphone-fitting. Handily, Blythswood Square lay close by. In the quadrangle at its centre, trees and bushes shaded a circular path round a flower-bedded lawn, with benches spaced at intervals. The square was overlooked by elegant Georgian buildings mostly occupied by the offices of solicitors, recruitment consultants and financial advisers. One of those offices had been temporarily converted into Knox’s observation post. Policemen in white-collar-worker disguise were on patrol around the square as eight o’clock approached, while Dylan shuffled a pack of CCTV images on his monitor screen and chomped remorselessly through his supply of Danishes. ‘You should still have had breakfast,’ he said, inadvertently spitting a pastry flake onto Harry’s shoulder. ‘It’s the most important meal of the day.’

‘I had a fry-up yesterday morning. Plus porridge.’

‘I bet your day went all the better for it.’

‘Oh, definitely. Found some poor bloke shot dead in his garage. Got taken prisoner by his killer. Narrowly avoided a similar fate myself. Witnessed a couple more fatal shootings. Assisted the local constabulary with their enquiries. Hung around hospital corridors waiting for news of a critically ill friend. Volunteered to take part in a police stake-out. Then … I got an early night. It was a breeze.’

‘You’re a dry one, aren’t you?’ Dylan grinned, which was not a pretty sight. ‘How’s the friend?’

‘Still critical.’

‘Not so bad, then.’

‘As what?’

‘As dead.’ Dylan swallowed the final mouthful of his latest Danish and squinted at the screen with sudden intensity. ‘Hold up… No, I don’t think so. Too young. And… he’s moving on.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Seven to eight. Won’t be long now. Where are they treating him, then?’

‘Who?’

‘Your friend.’

‘Western General. Here in Glasgow.’

‘Oh dear. Western General.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘My uncle went in there a few months back for a hip replacement. Caught some super-bug the minute his bum touched the mattress. He’s in the cemetery now. A real waste.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘Don’t be. He was a miserable old sod.’

‘I thought you just said what a waste it was.’

‘Aye. Of a brand-new artificial hip.’ Dylan squinted at the screen again. ‘Hold up. I think… we might be in business. Take a look.’ He made as much room for Harry as his bulk allowed, which in the confines of the van was not a lot.

A blurred and flickering black-and-white picture of the centre of the square, captured from a camera mounted on one of the surrounding buildings, presented itself to Harry’s view. A couple of people were moving across the square, using it as a short-cut to their places of work, but there were two stationary figures, one seated on a bench, reading a newspaper, the other bending over something at the side of the path. The picture was far too fuzzy for any details of clothing or appearance to emerge. But it was only a few minutes short of eight o’clock. Harry supposed they both had to be candidates.

Not so, according to Dylan. ‘Forget the stooper. He’s a down-and-out doing the rounds of the bins. See?’ The bending man straightened up and shuffled away, revealing the bin that had been the object of his attentions. ‘Clock the guy on the bench.’

‘He’s just reading a paper.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Plus I don’t recognize him.’

‘You’d be hard put to recognize your own mother on one of these. I’ve told ‘em we need to upgrade the technology for this kind of work, but the only upgrades they’re interested in are to Chief Super and beyond. Cheapskates, the lot of them.’

‘Can’t you try some of the other cameras?’

‘It won’t help.’ Views of the same scene from several different but equally distant and unilluminating angles flashed across the screen. ‘See what I mean?’

Harry peered more closely at the blurred figure on the bench. He had lain awake for an hour or more in his Travel Inn bed the night before, trying to decide who Frank’s paymaster was. The process of elimination led in only one direction every time. Of those still alive, Babcock was as good as dead in an Australian nursing home and had never been capable of killing anything larger than a wasp anyway. Nor had Fripp and Gregson. That left Judd, Tancred and Wiseman. But Judd was out of the country and Wiseman had nearly died in the car crash that had killed Lloyd. Logically, it had to be Tancred.

But was it Tancred he could see on the screen, sitting idly on the bench, newspaper open before him, clothes a smear of pale grey, head a smudge of a darker shade? It might be. It could be. It should be. But was it?

‘It’s eight on the button,’ said Dylan. ‘And he’s not moving. QED, he’s waiting.’

‘I can’t say for sure if I know him.’

‘No choice, then. You’d better take a closer look.’

‘Yes. I suppose so.’

Dylan switched on the van’s link to the observation post and spoke into a microphone. ‘No ID on Bench Man from here, people, so our boy’s going for a stroll in the park. Pin back your ears and prise open your eyelids. It’s movie time.’

—«»—«»—«»—

It was nearly over, Harry told himself as he clambered from the van and Dylan pulled the doors gently shut behind him. The end was close. Donna’s flight would be landing at Glasgow Airport in a quarter of an hour or so. They would soon be together again. When they had parted twelve days ago, Operation Clean Sheet had been no more than an obscure and forgotten episode in Harry’s misspent and undistinguished youth. In many ways, he wished it still was. But wishing was not the same as forgetting. It lacked the power to deceive. Reality was the chill, bright, gusty morning through which he walked, waiting for the traffic to thin, before he crossed the road and entered the park.

Ahead he saw the figure on the bench. Knox had insisted he wear a baseball cap to strengthen his chances of reaching the subject before being recognized. As it was, the man he was heading towards was not looking in his direction at all, but was studying his newspaper with apparent concentration, his face masked by its open pages, the crown of a trilby or the like visible above them. He was dressed in a light mac, dark suit and gleamingly polished black shoes. There was a briefcase beside him, propped against his thigh. The newspaper’s pinkish colour revealed it to be the Financial Times. All in all, the man looked like a dapper, slightly old-fashioned banker or stockbroker.

Then, when Harry was about halfway along the path towards him, the man turned to another page, folding the paper briefly shut as he did so. Still he did not notice Harry, but in that instant there could be no mistaking who he was.

‘My God,’ Harry murmured, wondering if the hidden microphone would catch his words. ‘It’s you.’

‘Hello, Magister,’ said Harry, stopping in front of Wiseman and pulling off the cap. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’

Wiseman looked up. His eyes widened. His face lost most of its colour. For a moment, he seemed wholly incapable of assimilating the message his senses were transmitting to his brain: that Harry Barnett was not lying dead, apparently by his own hand, on a launch off the coast of Haskurlay in the farther reaches of the Outer Hebrides, but was standing a few feet from him in the genteel surroundings of Blythswood Square, Glasgow.

‘How are your shares doing?’

‘Wha… What?’

‘Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.’ Harry sat down on the bench next to Wiseman, the briefcase between them. ‘The pay-off’s in the case, is it? Cash only in this line of business, I assume. How much, as a matter of interest? How much does it cost to have your old buddies knocked off one by one?’

‘I…’

‘Don’t know what I’m talking about? Can’t imagine what I mean? You’ll be adding insult to injury if you try denying everything, Magister. And it won’t get you off the hook anyway. You’re here because you got a message from Frank telling you to be. Only the message wasn’t from Frank. It was from the police. They have the square surrounded. You’ll be arrested if you try to leave.’ Harry had agreed with Knox that, just in case the subject was armed, which both of them were confident he would not be, the hopelessness of his situation should be made clear to him at the outset. ‘So, stay awhile and tell me… why in God’s name you did it.’

Wiseman closed his newspaper with exaggerated care and flattened it across his knees. ‘Who’s… Frank?’ he asked.

‘Your hired hit man. Maybe you knew him by another name. I don’t suppose either of them was genuine.’

‘Was?’

‘He’s dead. Like I’d be, if the plan he cooked up on your behalf hadn’t gone pear-shaped.’

Wiseman glanced about him, as if expecting to see a policeman behind every bush. Then he turned and stared at Harry, fear of retribution and a conceited man’s rage struggling almost visibly for mastery of his thoughts. ‘You can’t… prove anything,’ he said through gritted teeth.

‘I’m not going to try. But the police will. And I reckon they’ll succeed. You being here is the crunch. How do you account for that if it’s not in response to Frank’s message? And if the briefcase is full of money, what’s it for if not to pay off him and his accomplice? Who’s also dead, in case you’re interested.’

‘Accomplice?’

‘Mark Howlett. Obviously an alias, but—’

‘Mark?’

‘Yes. Mark.’

‘He’s dead?’

‘Very dead.’

‘What… did he look like?’

‘Look like? What the hell does that matter?’

‘What did he look like?’

Wiseman seemed determined to have an answer, so Harry gave him one. ‘Young. Shortish. Fattish. Brown hair overdue for a wash. Bit of a beard. John Lennon specs. Sweated a lot.’

In the same instant that horror gripped Wiseman’s features, Harry saw the resemblance for the first time: the shape of the nose, the set of the jaw, the cold gleam of the eyes. He saw it, but for the moment could not bring himself to believe it. ‘Was he…’

‘My son. Marcus. No wonder he hasn’t responded to my messages.’ Wiseman lowered his head. ‘Who killed him?’

‘Frank. You got yourself a double-crosser there, I’m afraid.’

‘And who killed Frank?’

‘Ailsa Redpath fired the actual shots. But it could just as easily have been me. It was him or us.’

‘Dear God.’ Wiseman raised a hand to his face. ‘Oh dear God.’

‘It’s your fault, though. All your fault. For hiring a man like Frank. For letting your son work with him. What were you—’

‘I didn’t hire him? Wiseman lowered his hand and stared bleakly at Harry. The news of his son’s death had shocked him out of his earlier defiance. ‘And I had no idea Marcus was involved in the actual…’ He made a fist of the hand he had lowered and tightened it until the knuckles were white, then slowly relaxed it. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry?’

‘It was never meant to come to this. And now… I’ve lost more than was originally at stake. A lot more. Everything, in fact. Everything that matters.’

‘What do you want? My condolences?’

‘You don’t understand. It was…’ Wiseman sighed. ‘Askew forced my hand.’

‘How? By showing you Maynard’s statement and asking you to admit what you’d done fifty years ago?’

‘Yes. All right. That is what happened. Though now… it hardly seems to matter.’ A shake of the head; a long blink; a shudder. ‘My poor boy.’ Wiseman looked away, gazing past Harry into the middle distance, his focus blurring. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Askew showed you the statement and gave you a few days to reconcile yourself to being identified as the Munros’ murderer. Yes?’

‘Yes. Maynard had named me as the one who killed them. Askew insisted their relatives had a right to know the truth. He wanted me to make a clean breast of it. He wanted all of us to make a clean breast of it. But especially me.’

‘Do you remember shooting them?’

‘Not exactly. But it fits with… flashbacks I’ve suffered from for years.’

‘And you decided you weren’t willing to let the truth come out?’

‘There was no reason why it had to. It wasn’t as if it was really my fault. God knows what the side-effects were of that drug they used on us. I wasn’t responsible for my actions. None of us were. I tried to make Askew understand that. But I was wasting my breath. He was on some born-again ethical high: we had to acknowledge what we’d done, etcetera, etcetera. Even if it meant, in my case, pleading guilty to double murder.’

‘So you hired Frank to take Askew out?’

‘I told you: I didn’t hire Frank. What I did was warn Marcus I was about to be publicly disgraced — and worse. It was he who… suggested a solution to the problem. He used to be a roadie for a rock band. They took a couple of bodyguards round with them. Marcus reckoned one of the bodyguards could… put him on to somebody. I’ve had to help the boy out of a lot of trouble over the years. He saw this as his chance to… repay me.’

‘You let him hire Frank?’

‘Yes. And when I met Askew for the second time, the night before he travelled up to Kilveen, I told him I’d do what he wanted. We agreed to put it to the rest of you at the end of the reunion. But Frank had already assured me Askew would never make it to Kilveen, let alone the end of the reunion.’

‘What about the auction in Geneva you were supposed to be attending?’

‘I flew to Aberdeen from London, not Geneva. There was an auction. But I didn’t go. I knew Frank intended to make his move against Askew on the train and I didn’t want to be there when he did. I also knew Askew couldn’t put the lie to my cover story without admitting we’d met the night before, which he’d promised to keep secret until the time came for us all to face the truth. My absence must have worried him, though. He must have guessed somehow what we had in mind for him. That’s why he sent you the disk with Maynard’s statement on it. I was certain he’d have it on him when Frank struck. But he didn’t. It wasn’t in his bag either. If only we’d got hold of the disk then, I’d have been completely in the clear.’

‘Leaving Barry and me to carry the can.’

‘Chipchase was the obvious fall guy. Dodging the reunion only made it look worse for him. You were inevitably suspect as his former partner. But there was never likely to be enough to pin Askew’s murder on either of you, assuming it was even officially recognized as a murder. You’d never have been charged, let alone convicted. It would all have… fizzled out. Still, the missing disk was a loose end I couldn’t afford to leave dangling. Worse, once we’d all got together at Kilveen, Lloyd started to… remember things. I began to wonder if Askew had turned the disk over to him.’

‘So you took him out too.’

‘It was Marcus’s idea. I think by then… he was beginning to enjoy himself. I lured Lloyd out to Braemar. Frank searched his room after the rest of you had gone, but drew a blank. On the way back from Braemar, I pulled off the road into a deserted picnic area in the woods. Frank was waiting. He knocked Lloyd out. We searched him, but there was still no sign of the disk. Then Frank tampered with the car’s steering, helped me stage the crash in the river and made sure Lloyd was dead. He also posed as the passing motorist who gave me a hand. We made it look like I could easily have died as well, so no-one was ever going to think I was party to sabotaging the car. But… we still didn’t have the disk.’

‘Is that why you had Dangerfield killed? Because you thought Askew might have sent it to him?’

‘I know nothing about Dangerfield’s death.’

‘Pull the other one.’

‘It’s true. My guess is that the Secret Service used him to arrange the reunion as a check on the long-term effectiveness of MRQS. When the police started a murder inquiry that could have led them close to the truth about Operation Clean Sheet, it must have been decided he was a liability.’

There was no reason left for Wiseman to lie. Harry sensed, indeed, that his ‘guess’ was all too accurate. But he had no intention of saying so with Knox and his crew listening in. ‘When did you realize Askew had sent the disk to me?’

‘When I considered who he was most likely to trust out of those lucky enough to be left behind at Kilveen while the rest of us went slowly mad on Haskurlay.’

‘And who were they?’

‘You, Chipchase, Fripp, Gregson and Judd. We swapped you and Chipchase for Tancred and me in the doctored version of Maynard’s statement. Well, Marcus did the swapping, actually. And the rest of the doctoring. He knows — knew — his way round a computer far better than I do.’

‘Why you and Tancred?’

‘Because he’s the only other member of the Haskurlay party still alive, unless you count Babcock. With Tancred off the list, it made it look as if you’d been rubbing them out one by one. I went out shooting rabbits alone that morning, according to Maynard. So, I was obviously in no position to deny shooting Hamish and Andrew Munro. There never was a pact of silence with anyone.’

‘Why did you set fire to Askew’s flat?’

‘Frank broke in and found the disk. The fire was to destroy any hidden copies or other incriminating evidence. But there still remained the copy I felt more and more certain you had.’

‘So then we got the arson treatment too.’

‘The disk was more of a target than you or Chipchase. But we couldn’t be sure it was destroyed in the fire. Besides, if you’d already read the statement…’ Wiseman gave a heavy, regretful sigh. ‘All you had to do was tolerate the police breathing down your necks for a while. They’d have given up eventually. Or the Secret Service would have called them off. But that was too easy, wasn’t it? That was just too sensible. Instead, you decided to go after the truth in your own particular bull-headed, bloody-minded way. No wonder you and Chipchase used to be business partners. You’re a well-matched pair — of fools.’

‘Perhaps you should have explained it all to us, Magister. Then we’d have known the parts we were supposed to play. Simple, really. I’ll make sure Barry appreciates that. If he ever regains consciousness.’

‘So Frank got one of you, did he?’

‘You could say so.’

‘Good.’

Harry’s instinct was to land a punch on Wiseman’s grimly smiling face at that moment. He had turned on the bench and raised his arm to strike before the thinking portion of his brain intervened. There was more to be told yet. Wiseman would have to be humoured. For just a little longer.

‘What a forbearing fellow you are, Ossie.’ The smile faded.

‘How much did you know about the plan to kill us along with Ailsa Redpath and Murdo Munro?’

‘Everything. Except Marcus’s active involvement. He told me Frank had brought in a man he’d worked with before to help him manage the thing. But the plan was Marcus’s. I can only suppose he wanted to see it carried out… in the flesh. Then he’d have been able to… surprise me with his versatility.’

‘Four more murders, Magister. Didn’t that trouble your conscience?’

‘It should trouble yours, not mine. It was a fall-back in case you contacted Ailsa Redpath. If you did, we reckoned that meant you’d read the statement and were determined to root out the truth. Leaving us no choice.’

‘Bullshit. You had the choice of facing up to what you’d done. Or at least of not making it any worse.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

‘You’d never have gone to prison for what you did on Haskurlay. There were extenuating circumstances galore.’

‘Not for killing Askew, there weren’t.’

‘No. Not for that.’

‘And one thing does tend to lead to another. I like to finish what I start.’

‘Well, congratulations. It’s finished now.’

‘Is it?’

‘Even if we’d all been killed as planned, you’d still have lost Marcus. Frank shot him in cold blood. He had his own plan. And your wellbeing wasn’t part of it. He’d have come here today and taken your money and walked away and let you learn later that he’d murdered your son along with us.’

‘Yes. He would have. I suppose that’s the kind of risk you run when you deal with such people. Marcus wasn’t… a good judge of others. He wasn’t… a lot of things. But he was my son. Do you have children, Ossie?’

‘A daughter.’

‘No son?’

‘I had a son. He died.’

‘You know how I feel, then.’

‘No. I don’t. I don’t have the remotest clue how you feel. I’m not sure you have feelings that the rest of us would recognize as normal at all.’

‘I’m a respected man. Widely admired. Envied, even. Why should I have to give all that up at the say-so of a pipsqueak like Askew? Do you seriously think any of you spineless bastards would have stood by me if he’d had his way and—’ Wiseman broke off and looked up at the sky. Grief had sapped his anger. It was a frail and transitory thing now. The sigh that followed was almost a moan. ‘You’re right. It’s finished. More conclusively than you seem to imagine.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean: what happens now?’

‘They arrest you.’

‘And then? Will I be charged? Tried? Convicted? Imprisoned?’

‘Of course. As you should be.’

‘“As I should be.”’ Wiseman chuckled mirthlessly. ‘Naivety in a young man is excusable. In one of your age it’s pitiful. I take it this conversation is being recorded?’