McCool’s supplementary was instant. ‘Are you saying somebody locked him in, after he was dead?’
‘No, I’m not, and I’m not answering your next question either.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re not as sharp as I thought, Mr McCool. I was assuming you’d ask me whether somebody locked him in while he was still alive.’
Ten
‘What is it between you and Bruce Anderson?’ Aileen asked as she cracked eggs into a bowl in the kitchen of their home in Gullane, the East Lothian coastal village where Bob had lived for more than half his life.
He shook his head. ‘It’s nothing; ancient history.’
‘Don’t give me that. Whenever his name’s mentioned, there’s a look comes into your eyes. Not so much someone walking on your grave, more the other way round. You were his security adviser, and then you quit. I know you told me you decided that you couldn’t do justice to both jobs, but what really happened?’
He leaned back against the door frame and gazed ahead, not at her, but at the wall opposite. ‘Let’s just say that I found out what sort of a man Dr Anderson really is.’
‘What sort is he?’ she teased.
‘You should know; he used to be a member of your party. In fact when you were a fast-rising young Glasgow councillor, he was its leader in Scotland.’
‘Yes, but I was very young then, I never got to meet him. . not to talk to at any rate; I got to shake his hand at our annual conference once, as if he was a visiting head of state.’
‘So what was the word, within your circles? There must have been talk about him. I know he wasn’t the expected choice for that job when Labour took power in Scotland.’
‘We didn’t trust him,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know why. Maybe it was his background: he was a GP in Barlanark before he was an MP and some of us thought that a truly committed socialist might have felt that he could have done more good there than trampling on his colleagues’ fingers as he climbed the ladder. But then he wasn’t a truly committed socialist, as it turned out.’
‘As he’s proved since then, by staying in your party but more or less aligning himself with the other team.’
‘And becoming one of my administration’s most vitriolic opponents.’
Bob smiled softly. ‘When I was a kid in Motherwell, I heard someone say, “The turned ones are the worst.” I was innocent then; I didn’t know a thing about sectarian bigotry, for I’d never been exposed to it. So I asked my dad what it meant; he looked at me, not angry but dead serious, and he said, “Son, I’d be obliged if you never use that phrase again.” So I never did. But I still found out what it meant. From my experience it’s only ever been true of politicians; present company very much excepted, of course,’ he added quickly.
‘Come on,’ Aileen protested. ‘Zealots are zealots, wherever they’re found.’
‘Ah, but Bruce isn’t a zealot,’ Bob countered. ‘Those old Judean boys had a powerful belief that drove them on. Anderson doesn’t; he’s motivated by his own ambition, and his own arrogance. OK, plenty of people are, whether they know it or not, but most of them have redeeming features to offset it. Anderson doesn’t; as far as I’m concerned, the man has no core values at all, he has no concept of loyalty and he’s a fucking liar.’
‘Mmmm.’ The start of a grin tickled the corners of his partner’s mouth, as she started to whisk the eggs. ‘But apart from that, he’s a decent guy. . isn’t he?’
Skinner’s nostrils flared. ‘He’s the man who walked away from power when his wife died; to care for his young daughter, or so he said. What he also did was collect a fucking enormous insurance policy, another packet from the criminal injuries compensation fund, and a fat advance for a book about his tragedy. Less than a year after she lost her mother, the kid was packed off to boarding school; next thing anyone knew, Bruce had a new high-Tory girlfriend, and half a dozen directorships including a seat on the board of a political consultancy.’
‘That doesn’t make him a liar, though. He still practises medicine, you know. He probably meant what he said when he resigned as Secretary of State, but people change with time.’
‘That wasn’t what I was talking about. As for his medical practice, it’s in a private clinic, giving health check-ups to punters who can afford it. No, Anderson betrayed me for reasons of sheer political expediency, and more than that, he lied about me to further his own ends.’
‘What? When?’ Aileen demanded, shocked.
‘When he was in office. He inherited me from the previous administration as his security adviser. At first it was fine; we had regular meetings and he acted upon every suggestion that I made. Then my personal life went pear-shaped, Sarah and I split up for a while. .’ He stopped in mid-sentence. ‘No, I’ve got to give up dressing that in soft colours. The black and white truth is that I left her, for reasons that didn’t stand scrutiny then, and of which I’m ashamed now. She went back to the States with James Andrew, who was then a toddler, and I got involved with someone else. We wound up in a particularly nasty tabloid newspaper that thankfully no longer exists. Come on, you probably remember it; the story went everywhere.’
She nodded, looking at the floor. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I do. But you got yourselves sorted out, though, you and Sarah.’
‘For a while, but really, it was the beginning of the end for us. The truth was we’d fallen out of love, if we were ever truly in it.’ He took a deep breath, and continued. ‘Anyway, that’s what happened in the interim. As you said, Anderson wasn’t popular in your party. He had opponents on the left, and one of them, the thoroughly nasty Councillor Agnes Maley, was an arch-enemy of mine. So Bruce threw me to her as an offering, simple as that. As I saw it, and I still do, I was the victim of an invasion of privacy. If the situation had been the outer way around, him in the tabloids and not me, I’d have gone out of my way to put the guy who did it out of business. But not Bruce; he’s a stranger to loyalty, as he’s consistently proved since then. He’s a fucking coward too. I had a big investigation under way in Edinburgh at the time, high-profile. He began by suggesting that maybe I needed to devote myself to it full time. I didn’t buy that. Then he said that he really needed a full-time security adviser. I thanked him very much and said I’d be honoured to accept. That threw him. Finally I called his bluff; I said that if he wanted me to resign, I wouldn’t, because I didn’t believe that grounds existed, and I made him fire me. If he’d the balls he’d have done that in the first place, instead of all that prevaricating and manoeuvring.’
‘No,’ Aileen murmured, as she threw some chopped bacon and mushrooms into the bowl, then poured the mix into a hot frying pan on the hob. ‘Not someone you’d like to watch your back, is he?’
‘It got worse than that, though. Remember Jock Govan?’
‘Sir John, of course; the old Strathclyde chief constable. He followed you into the adviser role, didn’t he?’
‘That’s right; before I had left it, at that. In our big confrontation, Anderson told me that Jock had already agreed to succeed me. I went back to my office and I called him, to rip him off a strip. He went ballistic; he said that the Right Honourable Secretary of State had spun him a yarn to the effect that I was insisting on resigning because of the publicity. Jock told Anderson that he thought I was mad, and he refused to accept the job until he had made one last attempt to persuade me to stay on. When I phoned him, he’d just had a call from Bruce, assuring him that he’d tried his best, but that I was adamant. He even added that I’d insisted it should be presented as a sacking, to get the lefties off his back.’
The First Minister whistled. ‘Talk about standards in public life,’ she exploded. ‘Next time that man attacks me or my administration I will nail his sorry arse to the wall.’
Bob held up a hand. ‘No. Please don’t do that. It would just dig up a lot of stuff that I’d prefer stayed buried, for your sake, more than mine. Muck thrown at me will splash you too. I won’t have that, as Anderson had better realise.’ He smiled suddenly, shattering the grimness that had invaded the kitchen. ‘Now let’s forget about the bastard. Are you going to let that omelette cook itself?’