Roza nodded. ‘That thought had occurred to me,’ she gasped, ‘which is why . . .’ She drew her Glock from its holster and held it in the air.

  The threat, or rather the gesture, for that was all it really was, proved unnecessary. Their quarry had removed her rucksack, sat on the sloping ground and buried her face in her hands.

  ‘I hope you’ve got some energy left after that nice walk,’ Mann said as they reached her, ‘because unless our pilot can find a flat piece of ground big enough to land on, we’re going to have to walk all the way back to Núria.’

  That photo did her no justice at all, the Scot thought. She’s very attractive; half dead from exhaustion, but very attractive.

  And as for you, Dan Provan, her oxygen depleted mind declared as she thought of a call she would make in her first minute alone, arresting someone at nine thousand feet? You’ll never top that, sunshine.’

  Eighty-Seven

  ‘They have her, Bob,’ Manuel Mateu announced. ‘I thought I should let you know.’

  ‘Well done the two Ls,’ Skinner replied.

  ‘The two Ls?’

  ‘Lita and Lottie,’ he explained. ‘Where did they find her?’

  ‘A very short distance from France, in the mountains. It involved a helicopter, which is now flying them and their detainee back to Mossos headquarters in Sabadell. She’ll be detained there overnight and interviewed tomorrow. Teijero wanted to do it but I told him,“No chance.” Comissari Roza has earned this one, as has Chief Inspector Mann.’

  ‘And what about Merle Gower? Or have you sent her back to Washington to dig herself out of trouble.’

  ‘Far from it,’ Mateu laughed. ‘She’s my government’s honoured guest in a very fine hotel overlooking Las Ramblas. As long as she is in Spain, she’s a weapon I can use against the weasels in Madrid. You know me well enough to understand that I will never forget what they did to Catalunya. I’m not saying I want to bring this administration down, for the next one might be much worse, but I want to use the situation to screw as much out of them as I can.’

  ‘Don’t tell me anything else,’ Skinner pleaded. ‘As a quasi-journalist, I’m compromised as it is.’

  ‘If that’s so, I guess you’ll reject my informal information to sit in on the interview of Ms Geraldine Black tomorrow.’

  Skinner laughed. ‘Why would I do that? I pretty much know everything she’s going to say. As long as I’m free to pick Sarah up from the airport at three o’clock tomorrow, I’ll be there . . . with my cop’s hat on, only.’

  ‘But you’re not a cop any longer.’

  ‘You’re kidding, Manuel, aren’t you? With a foot in both camps, I’m even more effective.’

  ‘Jesus, you are too. You know everything she’s going to say, you claim. How can that be.’

  ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘an hour ago I had a call from my friend Sauce in Edinburgh. He was very chuffed with himself because his team had uncovered Geraldine Black’s real name. He told me what it is and I did a little digging myself. It wasn’t hard at all, such is the power of Wikipedia if you know how to analyse its source material. Now, I don’t just know who she is, I know what she is and how she fits in. I might be proved wrong tomorrow, but somehow I don’t think so.’

  Eighty-Eight

  The interview room in the Mossos headquarters might have been acquired from a film set. Bob Skinner had always been amused by the idea that there had to be a one-way mirror to protect observers from the malevolent eyes of suspects and from potential retribution. Why bother, he wondered, when video cameras had been around for years? They could have been watching in another part of the building. They could have been watching in Madrid. He wondered for a few moments whether faceless people were doing just that.

  His presence in the viewing gallery alongside Manuel Mateu, Merle Gower and Major Teijero brought to mind a similar situation, one that he had chosen to avoid. Years before, he had been invited by a lawmaker in Florida to witness an execution. ‘To show you how we handle things over here,’ the man had said.

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’ he had replied, containing his anger with an effort. ‘I’ve had no connection to the investigation and no connection to the victim.’

  ‘You’d be an official observer,’ he had been told. ‘We have those. There are people out there who’ve witnessed dozens of executions, as volunteers.’

  ‘I’d love to see their psych profiles,’ he had growled. ‘A man I know, and like, has a doctorate in that subject, but he’s not available because he’s currently doing life for murder. If he was American they’d probably be strapping him to a gurney by now, with the ghouls and the self-righteous salivating on the other side of a window.’

  That image was with him as the door of the interview room opened, but it vanished as soon as the woman formerly known as Geraldine Black stepped through it, ushered in by a Mossos lieutenant. She was dressed in a pale blue sleeveless dress with a high collar. Her golden hair shone and was perfectly arranged, as if by a stylist; she wore make-up but it was minimal, eye-liner and a pale lipstick that emphasised her tan. Her appearance was in stark contrast to that of the officers who awaited her, seated at the obligatory desk. Roza and Mann seemed crumpled in their uniforms; they had spent the night in the police headquarters, and looked the worse for it.

  The unconventional nature of the situation was emphasised by the seeming deference of the lieutenant as he ushered his charge to her chair, before retiring to a seat beside the door. As she arranged herself, calm and composed as she faced her inquisitors, Skinner realised that the dynamic had changed. Behind the blacked-out glass he leaned towards Gower seated next to him and whispered, ‘You’ve done a deal, haven’t you? He gave you access to her and you’ve carved it up. She talks, she walks and nothing ever happened.’

  She allowed him a tiny smile.

  ‘If that’s so, have you told Comissari Roza and DCI Mann?’

  Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head.

  Skinner smiled. ‘In that case,’ he murmured, ‘we could be in for some fun.’

  ‘Good morning.’ Lita Roza’s voice filled the room. ‘You look better for a night’s sleep. I hope you will agree that you have been well treated.’

  ‘For the tape? Yes, I have been.’

  ‘There is no tape, this interview is entirely informal. If it was otherwise you would have a lawyer present.’ She paused. ‘You know who we are; we told you when we met yesterday. Perhaps you can begin by telling us your name; your real name, the one on your birth certificate.’

  ‘Sure, I’m Ruby Goldstein, a citizen of the United States and I’m thirty-one years old.’

  ‘Ms Goldstein,’ the comissari continued, ‘you were apprehended yesterday trying to cross from Spain into France. A search of the room you occupied at the Vall de Núria hotel found the remains of a Singaporean passport, bearing your image, in the name Geraldine Black. There was also a half-melted bank card linked to an account in the name of Gilbert Land. The man who used that name was found, a few days ago, in a house in the district of La Garrotxa. He had been dead for some time.’

  For the first time a small flicker of doubt showed in Goldstein’s eyes.

  Lottie Mann read it and saw the same truth as Skinner. ‘You weren’t told that, were you, Ruby?’ she exclaimed. ‘You were told that we found the place empty when it was opened, and that the problem you were running from had gone away. That’s true, we did, but we weren’t the first to open that door. Listen, and believe me that whatever deal you’ve done with the woman on the other side of that window counts for nothing with us. You don’t leave this room, lady, not even to piss, until you’ve told us the whole story, all of it. Isn’t that right, Comissari Roza?’

  Her companion squared her shoulders. ‘Oh yes,’ she agreed. ‘You can tell us informally, or we can wrap this up and ship you out to the women’s wing in Barcelona Prison for a couple of days to let you brief the lawyer you will undoubtedly need. What’s it going to be? Does Lieutenant Prat put you in handcuffs or do you come to terms with the reality of your situation?”

  Ruby Goldstein stared at the mirror window. If she hoped to see Merle Gower it was in vain, for all that came back was her own alarmed reflection, emphasising her situation. ‘Where do I begin?’ she sighed as she conceded.

  ‘The beginning is always best.’

  ‘Okay. The man you thought was Gilbert Land; his real name was Russell Silver. He was a declared independent candidate for the presidency of the United States and he was attracting a lot of support.’ She stopped to look at the window once again.

  ‘Russell Silver was my father,’ she said. ‘He and my mother split when I was a small child, and she and I moved to Wisconsin. I grew up using her name; I didn’t even know what his was. She never spoke about him and I never saw him until, six years ago, she was watching TV news and a piece came up about a guy who was running as an independent candidate for the Governorship of Kansas, and making a decent fist of it. She pointed at the screen and said: “That’s your dad.” She was dying then; I suppose she thought that she had to tell me. I offered to bring them together, but she wouldn’t have it. I had enough going on in my life then . . . I was just coming out of a failed relationship . . . so I let it lie. When she passed away, I found records of all his alimony payments through the years. I had Mum’s executor contact his bank to stop them, but I never actually told him that she was dead. It would have felt like a betrayal. You see, by that time, I had discovered why she hated him.’

  ‘Why was that?’ Mann asked.

  ‘Because he was a crook,’ Goldstein snapped. ‘He had a reputation as this self-made millionaire real-estate dealer. The truth was, it was Mum who was wealthy. His business was based on her family money, but as he managed her affairs, she never knew until he’d blown a big chunk of it and my trustee started to get worried.’

  ‘When did you contact him?’ Roza asked.

  ‘Two years ago, after he’d emerged as a presidential candidate and had started to draw attention. I went to his campaign office one day and told him who I was. Not unnaturally, he shit himself. He assumed I’d come to expose him for what he’d done to Mum. I can’t deny it, I had that in mind, but when I met him . . . well, he was a charming guy, and at the beginning and end of the day he was my dad.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I joined his campaign team, but only after he’d persuaded me that nobody should know who I was, nobody at all. If it came out, he said, so would all the unpleasantness between him and my mother. His whole pitch, he said, was based on his personal integrity as the champion of the middle ground. He really did believe that he could win the presidency . . . and so did the people who were backing him with tens of millions of dollars in donations. That was then; as he gathered momentum, it was into the hundreds of millions.’

  ‘Who was in charge of the campaign apart from your father?’

  She looked directly at Mann. ‘David,’ she replied. ‘A very charismatic man called David Allen. He had come from Canadian politics, a different arena but one where the same principle applies . . . tell the majority what the majority wants to hear and make them believe you’ll deliver. And, believe me, he could do that.’ Her expression softened. ‘We had such momentum, and we had so much money in donations that we really did begin to believe. And so did the White House . . . not that we could win, but that we could take a decisive chunk of their vote. David heard very early that a VP offer might be on the table. And he saw the danger just as quickly, that scrutiny would expose Dad’s weaknesses.’

  ‘Who came up with the property plan?’ Roza asked. Goldstein frowned at her. ‘We know that’s what this was all about: laundering campaign money through property.’

  She nodded reluctantly. ‘David. Dad didn’t have the brains for that. David said we should siphon off as much cash as we could, and the safest way to do that was through property in proxy names.’

  ‘Land, for example.’

  ‘Yes. And Ayre. And me.’

  It was Roza’s turn to frown. ‘Excuse me?’ she murmured.

  ‘Jesus,’ Goldstein chuckled. ‘Never heard of the Black Sea? Geraldine Mediterranean would hardly have cut it, would it? I did suggest Saragossa, but David said that was too showy.’

  ‘When did you begin?’

  ‘Eighteen months ago, when David first had a very tentative approach from the White House, and when the President practically hugged Dad at the correspondents’ annual dinner and bigged him up in his speech. Even I wondered, “Why’s he doing that?” Way back then, David began to create the false identities, by stealing the names of the dead and getting passports in their names. Then we bought the properties. Scotland, because the land was relatively cheap and we could build quickly. Spain, because it was remote and Gilbert Land would be just another exile. Singapore, because there are so many opportunities there. Italy, because it’s corrupt. Dubai, because nobody would notice Gavin Ayre among all those golfers and millionaire sportsmen. Russia . . . yes, that was a mistake. And you know what? We did it under the noses of the Federal Election Commission, which spends so much time making a pretence of over-seeing the big parties that it can’t even see the rest. But when the White House interest firmed up and Vice President Silver’s name began to be aired on the cable news channels, we knew that involved a different level of scrutiny. So, David and I began to spend more time as our alter egos. He began to create a presence in Scotland, buying a horse, joining a golf club. I did the same in Singapore. We watched the properties being built, or adapted, and one time Geraldine Black visited with Gavin Ayre in his seaside palace. That’s when it happened.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘David and me. We’d worked very closely together, worked very hard, so hard that we never had time for anything else . . . until we had that down time together in his place. I had been to Spain to inspect and sign off on the work there. I knew that David was in East Lothian, so I decided to break my journey there on the way home. And that’s where we had sex. No big deal,’ she said, ‘we just had sex, like friends do these days. And that’s when I got pregnant.’

  Silence fell over the interview room; in the viewing gallery, Mateu gasped.

  ‘So?’ Roza asked.

  ‘So,’ Goldstein continued patiently, ‘some weeks later, Dad and I went to Spain. He panicked. He decided that the Secret Service scrutiny was about to reveal everything and that he would be busted. He wasn’t bright enough to realise that by that time the President couldn’t let that happen. It would have been hushed up more likely than not, but he didn’t get that. So Russell Silver got on an internal flight and Gilbert Land flew to Spain. As soon as I found out I . . . unmistakeably overdue by that time . . . went there to bring him back, to tell him he was blowing it. To tell him that he’d fucking done it and the vice president’s mansion would be his after the election, which jointly they would surely win, and to get his ass back home before they came looking for him. I found him in Riudaura, and that’s when he did the big reveal: the secret he’d been keeping from both David and me.’ She smiled, with incredible sadness that even drew a moment’s pity from Skinner.

  ‘Just as he hadn’t told David that I was his daughter, he hadn’t told me that David was his son; when he did, in that fucking place, he was telling me that I was pregnant by my own brother. I went crazy, I picked up a big pottery vase and hit him with it.’ For a few seconds the interview room and the gallery fell silent.

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ she insisted. ‘I didn’t even knock him off his feet. But a minute or so later, he collapsed. He fell forward, hit his head on a table, shuddered for a few seconds, and then he died. I didn’t kill him,’ she repeated. ‘Agent Gower told me last night that they’ve done an autopsy in the US and that’s how it happened. He died from natural causes, and that’s what it’ll say on the press statement that I’ll issue when I’m back in Washington . . . which I’ve been promised will be within forty-eight hours. There,’ she challenged. ‘Is that enough for you?’

  ‘Hell no,’ Mann replied. ‘You’ve missed the best part of the story: the bit where you disappeared and then turned up on a mountain top a couple of weeks later.’

  ‘I panicked,’ Goldstein replied, ‘like I told Agent Gower, I just panicked. I got in the car we’d put there and I drove south. In case anyone came looking for me I made cash withdrawals that suggested I was heading south, but actually I was going in the other direction. You worked it out. My plan was to leave Geraldine Black in Spain for good, cross untraceably into France and go on from there as Ruby Goldstein, back home to face the mystery of the missing candidate. As,’ she said heavily, ‘I still intend to do. You’ve seen enough of Agent Gower to know that none of this will ever be shared with the American public. If it is, the Republicans get back in for sure, and darkness falls. And that’s it, ladies, that’s all I’m saying. Now, Agent Gower, please get me out of here as agreed.’

  In the viewing gallery Manuel Mateu leaned forward. ‘Do it, Comissari Roza,’ he sighed, his order sounding in her earpiece.

  ‘No,’ Skinner boomed, his voice so loud that on the other side of the glass the three women and the lieutenant reacted. ‘Manuel, that can’t happen. Ms Goldstein’s a suspect in a homicide investigation in Scotland. You have to hold her for extradition by our courts.’

  The minister frowned, then sighed. ‘Bob, I can’t do that. There’s an agreement.’

  ‘Not with Chief Constable Neil McIlhenney, there isn’t. Not with the Lord Advocate in Edinburgh. And not with the chair of InterMedia, right here in this room, who has his own reason to be interested in the outcome. There’s no privilege here; you can’t gag me and you won’t. Lottie,’ he shouted, ‘you might not have the power of arrest in Spain, but you need to act as if you had. Minimum, you have to caution her.’