by Nick Louth
With a homing instinct for filth that Gillard had long admired, Hoskins burst into the Khazi before the video had finished. The DCI felt the need to explain why he was apparently watching cheap porn, but he knew that the overweight detective wouldn’t judge him, at least so long as he got to see it too.
‘Oh, that is so bad,’ Hoskins said shaking his head. ‘Imagine getting two gorgeous girls in your room and not being able to get it up.’
‘And it being on film for all the world to see,’ Gillard said.
‘And that’s Talin, is it?’
‘Yep, ten years ago, before he dyed his hair blond. All set up by Volkov, apparently.’
‘I’m surprised they could ever be friends again after that,’ Hoskins said.
‘Maybe they weren’t.’
Hoskins shrugged and pulled his notebook out. ‘There’s a freelance journalist who wants to speak to you, name of Daniel Levin, coming to Redhill police station at four this afternoon.’
Gillard groaned. ‘I’m flying to Geneva at six thirty, and I’ve got to go home first for luggage and passport.’
‘That’s why Michelle booked him for you at Redhill. Just a quick half hour before your Gatwick flight, just down the road. He’ll only speak to you.’
‘Carl, I simply don’t have time to speak to the press, you know that.’
‘You might find time for this one, sir. Claims he knows who killed Volkov.’
Chapter Eleven
Gillard arrived five minutes early at Redhill police station, having grabbed his luggage and passport from home. That left no time for more than a cursory Google search on Daniel Levin. It showed that he had been a writer at an independent news magazine in Moscow before coming to live in the UK. In high-profile cases there are always time wasters, and he was trusting Carl Hoskins’ judgement that this wasn’t going to be one of them.
Gillard just happened to be peering between the slats of the interview room blinds when a bent man, wearing a trilby and using two walking sticks, emerged from a small camper van in the disabled parking space and made his way slowly up the ramp to the front door of the station. The desk sergeant came to open the door and help him in. Luckily, Gillard had been offered the comforts of the rape suite, the only ground floor interview room and just a few steps from the front desk. The duty sergeant offered his help, but the man shook his head. Gillard opened the door and watched the man laboriously manoeuvre himself in. Daniel Levin took more than a minute to travel the five yards into the rape suite, and his twisted face and frequent moans of pain showed that every step exacted a price. Only when he was seated, on the only hard chair in the room, and had doffed his hat did Gillard see that this emaciated man was probably younger than he was. The thinning white hair and pallid complexion spoke of a difficult life.
‘Mr Gillard,’ Levin began in firm but accented English. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me at such short notice. I have unique information which I think will be helpful.’
‘I hope so. First, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?’
‘Of course. I worked for Ria Novosti in my youth, and then joined Pavel Friedman’s independent TV station Kal21 in 2008. I was a business correspondent and covered the rise in the fortunes of Alexander Volkov during those years. His was a gilded career, aided by an alliance with my employer, and his marriage to Yelena Yalinsky.’ His dark watchful eyes flicked up. ‘I’m sure I’ve no need to tell you anything about her.’
‘She was there when the shooting took place.’
‘Of course she was. Understand her, and you understand everything.’ His thin lips twisted into a semblance of a smile. ‘But she did not kill him.’
‘Who did, then?’
He looked around as if he could be overheard, and then looked accusingly at the big old-fashioned police tape recorder. ‘Let me explain. To you, I’m sure, people like Volkov and Talin are just rich Russians, with more money than sense. But it is not that simple. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin allowed whole industries to fall into the hands of a few favoured allies. These oligarchs, people like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich and of course my friend Boris Berezovsky, were the first wave of Russian plutocrats, from the late 1990s. They benefited from patronage, cheap loans, and in some cases the subversion of the privatisation process. After the fall of Yeltsin in 1999, the KGB effectively took over the Kremlin. You know who I’m talking about. These well-connected intelligence officers were jealous of the wealth that the young upstarts had illicitly amassed. The KGB, its successor the FSB, and the military intelligence people at GRU, had everything they needed to take back what had been stolen from the Russian people. After all, these were experts who had cut their teeth in the Cold War; with blackmail, extortion, disinformation and the subversion of Western democracies.’
Levin felt in his pocket and pulled out a hip flask. ‘Do you mind? It is the most effective painkiller known to man. I should know, I have tried them all.’ He unscrewed the top and took a quick swig, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘How does this fit in with Volkov and the killing?’ Gillard glanced at his watch, thinking about his approaching flight check-in time.
‘Patience, please, you need the context. To understand Volkov’s life you need to understand his best childhood friend. It is him I’m going to tell you about.’
‘If he so significant, perhaps I should interview him myself,’ Gillard said.
‘Are you planning a séance?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Pavel Friedman is dead.’
‘Ah yes, he died of cancer in 2008.’ He’d remembered that Natasha Fein had mentioned him.
‘Yes, he did. But he was murdered.’ Levin stared hard at Gillard.
‘I don’t see how cancer could—’
‘Patience, please. Now, the Kremlin could see how much Russian wealth was flowing abroad. To Zürich, to Vienna, to Cyprus and of course to London. They needed to act to show these oligarchs that money alone is not power, at least not a power to match the state. They made an example of Khodorkovsky, jailing him for failing to pay taxes, pour encourager les autres, as the French say. Abramovich was clever and saw which way the wind was blowing. He made sure he stayed on the right side of the Kremlin. But Boris Berezovsky, ah Boris. He came to London and thought he was safe.’ Levin shook his head.
‘Yes, I know the background.’ He glanced at his watch again.
‘Volkov, Talin and Pavel Friedman were part of the second wave of oligarchs. They drew their power from within the intelligence structure. Volkov and Friedman grew up in Perm, in Siberia, which I assure you is the most windswept, nondescript middle-of-nowhere place you have never heard of. Friedman, the third of five children, grew up in poverty and spent his childhood selling apples grown on his father’s smallholding to passing traffic. He quickly realised that he could make more money by buying apples from remote cottages and storing them to sell in the winter when prices were higher. By the age of twelve he had learned which varieties would store well and had offloaded the selling to his younger siblings. He didn’t make much money, but he had learned a valuable lesson in economics.’
Gillard was getting quite fidgety now, but Levin was just getting going.
‘You see, these two Russian boys understood early on what you had to do. Friedman because he was a genius and Jewish, which meant he was an outsider, and Volkov because his father spent twenty years in the gulag for publishing a critical pamphlet about Brezhnev. Latch on to power, and ride with it. And if you were born in Perm in 1964, then you joined the Komsomol, which is the youth league of the Communist Party. That way, when they went to Moscow to university, they already had a powerbase.’ Levin pulled a blister pack of pills from his pocket and popped two, washing them down with liquor from his hip flask.
‘Volkov studied geology at Moscow State University, while Friedman, a Jew like me, was not allowed to apply. He went instead to the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology, also in Moscow, but
they stayed good friends and met up for drinks and meals. It was at one of those meals when Volkov first spotted Yelena. She was already being courted by Maxim Talin, one of Volkov’s classmates. Volkov was captivated by her beauty, but it was Friedman who pointed out how wealthy she must be, as the daughter of the finance minister of Kazakhstan, which of course was then part of the Soviet Union.’
Levin laughed. ‘Friedman pointed out that Kazakhstan was the Klondike of copper. “Just you wait and see. You need roads, and you need money, but there is huge potential. She could be your key to unlock it. Go for her!” That is how far-sighted he was. Decades ahead of the game.’
‘If so, how did Friedman come to be murdered?’
‘He was too successful. With Volkov’s marriage to Yelena, their company, Kazakh Metals, was able to get a licence to expand and modernise the copper mines at Karabulak. The attraction wasn’t just new deposits, but the hundred million tonnes of tailings heaped up during the mine’s first expansion in the 1880s.’
‘You mean slag heaps?’
‘Not exactly. The process to extract copper in the 1880s was pretty rudimentary and left lots of ore still in the rock. Friedman had developed a technique to use ammonium chloride solution to get an additional six per cent yield of copper. It worked particularly well on alkaline deposits, like those at Karabulak. What you must understand is that it’s much cheaper and faster to reprocess existing deposits than to dig new ones. Your resource is already lying in front of you.’
‘So that’s how they made the money?’
‘Yes. From there, Friedman drove an international expansion, setting up a bank in Cyprus which purchased refined copper from Kazakh Metals at the subsidised domestic price which was used to sell to Russian industry, and then selling it abroad at the international dollar price, which was three times as high and earned precious foreign exchange. The mining company made very little at these prices, but the bank made a fortune. The mine paid taxes to Kazakhstan on what little it earned, while the bank didn’t have to pay any meaningful tax in Cyprus. That sleight of hand ensured that Friedman and Volkov became billionaires.’
‘You’re saying Friedman was the brains behind the operation?’
‘Yes. He really only needed Volkov for the connection with Yelena. Of course, she had a substantial shareholding in the mineral part of the business, from broking the deal to buy the deposits, which meant she was earning a lot too, though she was in effect a sleeping partner. Anyway, that’s where Volkov’s money came from. He rode to riches on the coattails of Friedman’s insight.’
‘Where did it go wrong?’
Levin shrugged. ‘They got on the wrong side of a very powerful man within the Kremlin. A very clever man, who wanted to own Kazakh Minerals for himself. From about 2005, Pavel Friedman knew his life was in danger. New forces in the Kremlin were rising, and they were jealous. Look at Litvinenko, poisoned with radioactive polonium in 2007. Perepilichny, assassinated in 2012, found with poisonous gelsemium leaves in his stomach just a couple of days after meeting a glamorous Ukrainian model in Paris. A cover-up by Surrey Police, yes, you guys. They didn’t even interview her. Then of course my good friend Boris Berezovsky, supposedly hung himself in his own bathroom in 2013. Two of his close associates had already died. Then there were three British fixers who aided Russian oligarchs to get their money abroad, including Scot Young, fifty-two, thrown to his death and impaled on railings in 2014. Not one of them older than sixty, and all dead in a series of mysterious accidents. Two of the favourite methods are heart attacks, brought on by untraceable poisons, or a fall from a high balcony.’
He stopped and wiped his forehead with a filthy cotton handkerchief. It was not hot in the room, but he was sweating. ‘I can tell you, I stopped meeting contacts at restaurants or bars years ago. Anyway, Friedman had two very good Israeli bodyguards and an ex-Mossad intelligence officer who swept the bank’s headquarters in Cyprus for electronic bugs. But they all missed something.’
Levin shook his head at the recollection. ‘Pavel started to get these terrible headaches. Like the worst migraines, that forced him to lie down for hours and hours. Once when he came to St Petersburg I had arranged to interview him at his hotel suite. I was shown into a darkened room, where he was lying down on a sofa. I had to try to remember my questions and rely on the tape recorder to pick them up. His voice was slurred and he clearly wasn’t at the top of his game. Eventually he was given an MRI scan and they discovered an enormous tumour in the back of his head. Completely inoperable.’
‘I thought you said he was murdered,’ Gillard said.
‘He was. Three years previously, in the bank’s headquarters in Limassol, Cyprus, Friedman’s head of security had picked up a listening device, hidden in a desk. So Friedman decreed that all the office furniture would be changed. Everything was bought from new, direct from the factory. He got himself a brand-new leather-covered designer chair. Everything was X-rayed before installation. Nothing was left to chance. Or so he thought.’
Levin took another swig from his hip flask and waved it in the air. ‘There is only so much you can do, yes? Well, when Friedman was taken into hospital, the security chief had an idea. He borrowed a Geiger counter and swept Friedman’s office. There was a faint radioactive source from the chair. It turned out that a small part of the polyurethane stuffing in the head cushion had been soaked in a radioactive source, the kind of thing you might find in a hospital. For a passing exposure it would have been no problem, less radioactivity than you would get from a single X-ray. But hour after hour after hour is something else. For three years, it had been irradiating the back of Friedman’s head.’
‘That is scarily clever. To have the reach to get that in at manufacture.’
‘That is the murderer the Kremlin employed, the person I’m here to tell you about,’ Levin said. ‘He killed Friedman, and I think he killed Volkov too. He has been trained to dispense death.’
Finally, we get to the point, Gillard thought. ‘What’s his name?’
Levin closed his eyes and his mouth tightened as if he was plucking up courage. ‘They call him the Ghost. He leaves no trace. He can get anywhere, he can kill anyone.’
‘What is his real name?’
‘I don’t know. But I have seen him with my own eyes.’
Gillard watched Levin’s tears welling up.
‘Mr Gillard, can you believe that only five years ago I was able to run a marathon? I raised thousands of euros for Chernobyl cancer victims.’
The detective’s eyes widened. ‘What happened to you?’
Levin turned away, screwing up his face against some horrible memory. He lifted a fist to his mouth to mask his trembling lips, but there was a shaking in his shoulders.
‘It was August 2016. I had arranged to meet a good source of mine who had flown over from Moscow to Amsterdam. I was working on an article for the New York Times about corruption in the mining industry. The source was a senior official in the Russian Ministry of Mines. We met in the Hotel Okura, in the south of the city. When I got back to my own hotel, a charming little gabled place on Rembrandtplein, someone was waiting for me in my room. I have no idea how he got in because I had picked the place specially. It was small, with only a single staircase, five bedrooms, and the staff had seen nothing. But he was there, anyway, waiting for me. I am not a big man. He overpowered me, held me face down and gave me an injection which stopped me struggling. He said, “I have come with some sad news. To announce the suicide of Daniel Levin. He had been feeling quite down for some time, so it isn’t a surprise”.’
Levin looked up at Gillard. A single tear tracked down his lined face. ‘He threw me off the balcony. There were cast-iron railings three storeys below, lots of bicycles chained there. He missed, and I landed on a car roof. I broke my spine. The ambulance was there very quickly and saved my life. For two weeks I was in a coma, and when I awoke I couldn’t remember anything that had happened. My blood was found dosed with antidepressants and alcoho
l.’
‘What did the police say?’
‘Of course, they assumed I had thrown myself off. For the first two weeks that’s what I thought too. It was only when I was offered a hypnotism course to recover lost memories that I remembered what had happened to me.’
‘Hypnotherapy worked?’
‘Not exactly. I was on my way to the appointment when I suddenly remembered what happened.’ He barked a short ironic laugh. ‘Naturally, they were reluctant to believe my story. There were no footprints of anyone but me in the apartment. No fingerprints, nothing.’
Hairs lifted on the back of Gillard’s neck: No footprints, no fingerprints. The parallels were ominous. ‘What did this man look like, do you remember?’
Levin lifted a slim leather briefcase to the table and unbuckled the two straps. He slid out a thin manila folder and opened it. He showed Gillard a single piece of paper, a photocopy. ‘This is the Ghost. It’s an artist’s impression I had made soon after the hypnotherapy.’
The image was arresting in its intensity. If provoking fear had been the objective, the artist had done a remarkable job. The buzz-cut white hair, small angular ears and sharp cheekbones combined with dark, deep-set eyes to give a kind of ethereal presence.