Tommy discovers you've taken part of the case in another direction without his authorisation..."
"I don't care about that," Barbara said brusquely, surprised to find that it was the perfect truth.
"You may be suspended. Or sent back to uniform. Even sacked."
"That isn't important right now. This is. I've spent the whole filthy day chasing spectres in East Anglia without a hope of any of it coming to any good. But we're onto something here, and I've no intention of letting it die simply because someone might put me in uniform again. Or sack me. Or anything else. So if we have to tell him, we tell him. Everything." She faced them squarely. "Shall we do it now?"
In spite of her decision, the others hesitated. "You don't want to think about it?" Lady Helen asked.
"I don't need to think about it," Barbara replied. Her words were harsh, and she didn't temper them as she continued. "Look, I saw Gowan die. He'd pulled a knife out of his back and crawled across the scullery floor, trying to get help. His skin looked like boiled meat. His nose was broken. His lips were split. I want to find who did that to a sixteen-year-old boy. And if it costs me my job to track the killer down, that's a very minor cost as far as I'm concerned. Who's coming with me?"
Loud voices in the hallway precluded an answer. The door swung open and Jeremy Vinney pushed past Cotter. He was breathless, red-faced. His trouser legs were soaked up to his knees, and his ungloved hands looked raw from the cold.
"Couldn't get a taxi," he panted. "Ended up running all the way from Sloane Square. Was afraid I might miss you." He stripped off his coat and threw it down on the couch. "Found out who the fellow in the photograph was. Had to let you know at once. Name's Willingate."
"Kenneth?"
"The same." Vinney bent with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. "Not all. Not who the bloke is that makes it so interesting. It's what he is." He flashed a quick smile. "Don't know what he was in 1963. But right now he's the head of MI5."
Chapter 13
THERE WASN'T a person in the room who did not understand the full range of implications behind Jeremy Vinney's words. MI5: Military Intelligence, section five. The counterintelligence agency of the British government. It was suddenly clear why Vinney had come bursting in upon them, certain of his welcome, completely assured that he bore information vital to the case. If he had been a suspect before, surely this new twist took him out of the running entirely. As if convinced of this, he went on.
"There's more. I was intrigued by our conversation this morning about the Profumo-Keeler case in 1963, so I went through the morgue to see if there was any article alluding to a possible connection between their situation and Geoffrey Rintoul's death. I thought that perhaps Rintoul had been involved with a call girl and was trotting back to London to see her the night he was killed."
"But Profumo and Keeler seem like such ancient history," Deborah remarked. "Surely that sort of scandal wouldn't affect a family's reputation now."
Lady Helen agreed, but her comments were obviously reluctant. "There's truth to that, Simon. Murder Joy. Destroy the scripts. Murder Gowan. All because Geoffrey Rintoul was seeing a call girl twenty-five years ago? How can one argue that as a credible motive?"
"It depends on the level of importance attached to the man's position," St. James replied. "Consider Profumo's case as an example. He was secretary of state for war, carrying on a relationship with Christine Keeler, a call girl who also just happened to be seeing a man called Yevgeni Ivanov."
"Who was attached to the Soviet embassy but was reportedly a Soviet intelligence agent," Vinney added and smoothly continued. "In an interview with the police on an entirely different matter, Christine Keeler volunteered the information that she had been asked to discover from John Profumo the date on which certain atomic secrets were to be passed to West Germany by the Americans."
"A lovely person," Lady Helen commented.
"This leaked to the press-as perhaps she intended-and things heated up for Profumo."
"And for the government as well," Havers said.
Vinney nodded his agreement. "The Labour party demanded that Profumo's relationship with Keeler be debated before the House of Commons while the Liberal party demanded the prime minister's resignation because of it."