by Nick Louth
* * *
Oleg Volkov lived in a serviced apartment four storeys above Topshop, and within sight of Harrods, London’s premier department store. The two Surrey police detectives rendezvoused with a car full of uniformed Met officers at the entrance of the building. One of the uniforms went with them and the rest waited for the agreed signal to come and search the flat. The lift was poky and old-fashioned, and the landing fairly small. Gillard rang the bell and the apartment’s front door was opened by Oleg’s imposing bodyguard Marcus Dolan, a good six-foot-six, like a scaled-up version of the young Kris Kristofferson. The two detectives introduced themselves and were shown into a palatial space, with floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides. Claire had looked the apartment up on Rightmove on the tube journey and discovered it had been last sold for £8 million, four years previously. The sale included a rare reserved space in the Harrods underground car park. ‘He’s twenty-two now, so that would have made it an eighteenth birthday present,’ she had told Gillard.
Oleg Volkov was sitting on an enormous gold-striped five-seater settee, with his feet up on an onyx coffee table in front of him. He was dressed like a rap star, with gold chains around his neck and rings on both hands, as well as copious tattoos. He was wearing reflector sunglasses, which made him in Gillard’s mind resemble a large and eminently swattable bluebottle.
A very small dark-suited individual sat on an adjacent chair with a hefty briefcase beside him: the lawyer. The only other aspects of the apartment that stood out were two enormous but very thin speakers, and a mixing desk at the far end. Otherwise the place looked like it had been furnished from a catalogue for just occasional use. Gillard detected the influence of Natasha Fein, concierge to the stars.
‘I already made a statement on the night,’ Oleg said. ‘I don’t get why you guys are here now.’
‘Because you didn’t answer any of the calls we left for you, and slipped away from Westgrave Hall without telling us where you were going, and without leaving us your phone as you’d promised to do.’
‘I was upset. I needed to get away.’ The mirror shades concealed all expression.
‘We’re very sorry for your loss,’ Gillard said. ‘But it’s important we find out everything we can so that we can catch whoever it was that killed your father.’
Oleg took off his shades to reveal brown eyes. ‘We all feared it would happen one day. Success is always taken away. He was the man, and he was taken down.’ The partial American accent sounded strained. Russian vowels intruded. If he was bereaved, it didn’t show.
‘It would help us if we could just put all the pieces of the jigsaw together during the night of the party,’ Claire said. ‘So can you describe where you were for most of the evening?’
‘I have a private apartment within Westgrave Hall, and I was there with a couple of girlfriends until ten o’clock.’ He made sure his eyes lingered on Claire so she got the full meaning. ‘We had food sent up, but I came down to watch the arrival of the sleigh with my dad’s fiancée. That was pretty cool. I hung out with a few of the guys after that and watched the fireworks from my balcony.’
‘Did you hear gunfire?’
‘Sure, I must have done. But I guess I thought it was fireworks until we saw people screaming and running around.’
Gillard was momentarily distracted by the movement of male heads, both uniformed cop and bodyguard. He spotted the source of the activity. A slim young woman, dressed only in a smallish towel, darted out from the bathroom and into a bedroom. The door slammed behind her.
‘Had you been in the library anytime that day?’ Gillard said.
He shook his head. ‘Fossils ain’t my thing.’
‘But guns are,’ Gillard said. ‘Your Instagram pages are full of shots of you posing with weapons, and videos of you at shooting ranges.’
Oleg’s face dissolved into frustration. ‘This is branding for the clothes, the shades and so on. I’m just projecting a kind of cool lifestyle. Maybe you don’t understand.’
‘I understand this.’ Gillard showed Oleg his iPad, which had displayed on it the image of him with the golden pistol standing with Westgrave Hall in the background. ‘This is your weapon? A Kahr Industries P380?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘This weapon is not registered in the UK.’
‘Sure, but it’s not in the UK.’
Gillard waved the iPad. ‘This image is of Westgrave Hall, agreed? You are standing displaying a functional and illegal firearm in front of it. On British soil.’
Oleg Volkov said nothing for a moment, and his eyes stole momentarily across to the lawyer, who was returning his gaze as if telepathically beaming an answer.
‘I Photoshopped the background,’ Oleg blurted out. ‘The picture was taken in the States.’ A thin smile played across the features of the lawyer, but he said nothing.
Gillard rolled his eyes. ‘Well, Oleg. It doesn’t matter, because we have found the gun. It was in your car, the Humvee, at Westgrave Hall. And for your information, that is in Britain.’
‘You’re crazy. It wasn’t there.’ Oleg looked at his lawyer, again wordlessly appealing for assistance.
‘It was in the driver-side door pocket,’ Gillard said. ‘It wasn’t even hidden.’
The young man’s jaw hung open. ‘I know enough about weapons not to leave it there. It must have been planted.’
Claire actually laughed at that. ‘You think Surrey Police has a ready supply of golden handguns, just ready to be planted in your car?’
The lawyer spoke for the first time. ‘My client maintains that the weapon found in his car is not his. He does not possess a gun in this country because he knows it is against the law.’
‘He’ll have plenty of opportunity to convince a judge of that,’ Gillard said. ‘Oleg Volkov, I’m arresting you for a breach of the Firearms Licensing Act 2016.’ He then went on to read him his rights. The detective went to the front door of the flat and opened it to let in four more uniformed Met Police officers.
As the cops dispersed around the flat, Oleg stood up and asked, ‘Hey, what the hell is going on?’
‘We have a search warrant for this address, which I can show you,’ Gillard said. ‘You’ll need to go with these officers to a police station, and after you’ve been booked in I am minded not to oppose police bail on two conditions. One, that you surrender your passport, and two, that you remain at a known address.’
Oleg slumped forwards, head in hands. ‘I can’t believe this. I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘If you possess any other firearms or ammunition you had better let me know now,’ Gillard said. ‘I shall be interviewing you again this afternoon.’
Once the young man had been taken away in a police patrol car, the two detectives made their way back to Acton Town tube station to pick up their own cars for the return trip to Surrey. All the while, Gillard kept refreshing his screen to see if the NBIS had finished with Oleg’s golden gun. Even though the Met had the young billionaire’s British passport, Gillard was convinced Oleg was a flight risk. As a dual national, like his father, he would have the resources to slip away abroad using another passport. It was just when he and Claire Mulholland reached their cars that a text came through from Neville Tufton.
It was simple and to the point.
The P380 I was sent is the weapon that killed Volkov, Talin and Bryn Howell.
Chapter Fourteen
Two and a half days after the killings, things were finally beginning to make some sense. The discovery and identification of the murder weapon and the arrest of Oleg Volkov had given the investigation some focus. Gillard had called ahead to Rainy Macintosh and asked her to set up an incident meeting in the Khazi for two p.m. He and Claire got there in quick succession, to find a grand spread of food had been laid out in the Portakabin.
‘What’s all this then?’
‘Courtesy of Tatiana in the kitchen,’ Carl Hoskins said. ‘She’s been ferrying it here for half an hour.’
‘Carl has been working on Tatiana doggedly since day one,’ Rainy said. ‘He’s hoping for an in-depth undercover investigation at any time.’
‘No gratuities or favours, Carl,’ Gillard warned. ‘Remember Constable Woodbridge.’
‘So, no love bites either,’ said DS Vikram Singh, wagging a finger at Hoskins.
‘We are doing her a favour,’ Hoskins said. ‘She said she’s running down the freezers after the party, so it makes sense to use what they’ve got rather than chuck it away. And I thought we could do with a bit of a celebration seeing as we got the murder weapon. There’s caviar and truffles over there.’
‘Aye, that makes for a fine wee Friday feed,’ Rainy said, rubbing her hands together.
Gillard called the meeting to order. Including Michelle Tsu, DC Rob Townsend, DC Shireen Corey-Williams and Claire, there were eight detectives, enough to make the place feel very crowded. Before examining the implications of the murder weapon find, he asked Shireen to tell them about what she had learned from Volkov’s lawyer.
‘I spent the best part of three hours with Hiram Belshin, who best fits the bill of being Volkov’s personal attorney. However, there are at least four other law firms involved in various parts of the business empire. Belshin was reasonably co-operative but it’s clear that the complexity of the asset structures underpinning the Volkov companies would take months or even years to unwind.’
‘So when we ask who inherits, you don’t have a clear answer, is that it?’ Hoskins asked.
‘Well, yes and no. There are at least fourteen versions of Alexander Volkov’s will floating around.’
‘Fourteen!’ Claire exclaimed.
‘Yes. Belshin was able to explain it. Each time Volkov broke up with Yelena, he cut her out of his inheritance, and when they got back together again, she was back in. There were some changes made as a result of the court fight at the divorce, too. When he had a substantial new relationship, the woman tended to be added in after about six months.’
‘Isn’t it just a question of taking the latest will?’ Gillard asked.
‘That’s what I had assumed, but there are complexities. The most recent was signed in Ulaanbaatar and—’
‘Sorry, where?’ Hoskins asked.
‘The capital of Mongolia. And hasn’t yet been re-signed here, according to Belshin. It may be open to legal challenge, because of Sophie’s inclusion. Belshin said there was yet another will, in draft form, that Lord Fein has in his possession, which was under current negotiation. It was going to be signed over Christmas when the final details of the divorce deal were fixed.’
‘Go on, tell us how much Sophie is in line for,’ Hoskins asked.
‘I couldn’t tell you exactly, but it’s clearly in the hundreds of millions,’ Shireen replied.
‘There’s a motive,’ said Claire.
‘She was outside when the shooting took place,’ Vikram reminded her. ‘And Yelena identified the shooter as a bearded man.’
‘They could have been working together,’ Claire said.
‘What about the kids?’ Gillard asked Shireen.
‘Yes, his kids would get billions, but much of it is already in trust to them. As for motive, they’re already drowning in money, so it’s hard to imagine what urgent benefit they would derive from gaining more. What would change, particularly for Oleg as the eldest, would be a great weight of decision-making about the various assets. He’d have a lot of work to do just to administer his extra wealth.’
‘Imagine that,’ Michelle Tsu said wistfully. ‘Drowning in money.’
Gillard smiled. ‘If you think about it, it’s obvious that a sudden massive increase in wealth doesn’t remove your troubles, you just get different ones.’
‘That takes a lifetime to learn, sir,’ Shireen said. ‘And some people never do.’
‘There might be financial motives amongst the staff,’ Claire said. ‘The opportunity to help yourself to life-changing amounts of money which to Volkov would simply have been loose change down the back of the sofa.’
The detective chief inspector shook his head in disagreement. ‘My impression is this is a pretty slack organisation anyway. There are plenty of opportunities for lining your own pockets without having to kill the boss. Besides, it only brings greater scrutiny of what led up to the murder. My gut feeling is that the gigantic sums here have hypnotised us. The motive may be something completely different.’
Hoskins folded his arms and nodded. ‘Your basic love triangle, end of story,’ he said.
‘Okay, enough speculation,’ Gillard said. ‘Shireen, thank you.’ He then asked Rob Townsend to brief them on what he had discovered from the various phones and electronic devices.
Rob’s expression was troubled. ‘We’ve got weeks more work to do, and we don’t have all of the phones that we need, and a lot of what we have got is in Russian and needs translating. Having said all that, the communications in the hours before and after the shooting are just what you would have expected. Contact between family members, lots of short texts sent immediately after the crime occurred.’
‘What about Volkov’s sat phone?’ Gillard said. He was aware it had been seized first by MI5.
‘There were no outgoing calls logged in the previous four days and the only incoming call was the attempt by Wolf shortly after the shooting,’ Townsend said.
‘What about Oleg Volkov’s phone?’
‘I can’t tell you too much as I’ve only just got it. He certainly made quite a few calls during the hours before and after the shooting which show up on the cell tower dump, but it’s what you would expect,’ Townsend said. ‘As for your question about finding a GPS trace for an additional phone within the library, I’ve had confirmed it’s impossible unless you know which app was being used.’ Seeing the look of disappointment on Gillard’s face, Rob added: ‘Sir, I really don’t think electronics is going to provide the confirmation you are looking for.’
Gillard thanked him and asked one further question. ‘Assuming Oleg Volkov’s phone has GPS on it, we should at least be able to interrogate the app and find out whether the phone, like his gun, happened to be in the library when the shooting took place or whether, like its owner, it has an alibi.’
There was silence for a moment, until Rainy Macintosh lifted her hand to ask a question. ‘Assuming Oleg’s alibi stands up, then someone else was using his gun. Yelena’s description seems to be of somebody else.’
‘His bodyguard maybe?’ Rob asked.
‘Doesn’t sound like him. The big guy we met at Knightsbridge is an Irish-American by the name of Marcus Dolan,’ Gillard said. ‘But according to Oleg, he was on leave over Christmas at an address in Liverpool. Shireen, can you check that?’
‘Okay.’
‘He’d have big feet. But the killer left no footprints,’ Carl Hoskins said.
Claire Mulholland interrupted. ‘There are several forensic reasons why a person may not leave footprints that we can detect. For example, while most of those in the building had walked in from the snow and had melting slush on their feet, this person may have had dry footwear if he had been waiting in the building for some time.’
‘But how long was he waiting?’ Hoskins asked. ‘I’ve checked all the CCTV from the two cameras at the entrance of the library for the previous twenty-four hours, and every single person who walked in walked out again, except for our three murder victims, Yelena Yalinsky, and the three witnesses who went in afterwards.’
‘Then it’s impossible,’ Michelle said.
‘It happened, so it’s not impossible,’ Hoskins said emphatically.
‘What about the tunnel idea?’ Shireen asked.
‘I explored that idea with the redoubtable Mrs Mary Hill,’ Claire said. ‘St John’s Easement probably does not reach as far as the library, and it is a sufficiently narrow and awkward route that it would not lend itself to somebody nipping in and out for a killing. While I can’t prove that until we get the remote camera along the narrowest pass
ageway, I would be very surprised if it was even possible. Rob and I are going to take a look this afternoon.’
‘I’ve got the architect’s plans here,’ Shireen said, swiping through images on her iPad. ‘There is no basement level for the library, and the whole thing is built on a four-foot-thick slab of concrete which goes from end to end, except for the panic room which goes down another fifteen feet in its own concrete-lined pit. Even the septic tank is within that concrete shell.’
‘I can verify that,’ Rainy said. ‘I’ve personally examined and tapped at every square inch of the floor of the library including the panic room, and there is nothing underneath it.’
‘All right, school outing,’ said Gillard. ‘CSI is completely finished with the library now, so let’s go over there and see if we can brainstorm any possible way in which our killer could have got in and out without being seen. DS Singh has an idea of his own, which I have to say intrigued me.’
‘What’s your hunch, Vikram?’ Rainy asked.
‘Did you ever see the film The Thomas Crown Affair?’ Singh replied. ‘Not the first one, but the remake, 1999.’
‘Och, now he’s made it into a quiz,’ she muttered to Carl Hoskins.
* * *
The entire detective team trooped over from the Khazi to the library. A female PC was standing in front guarding it, blowing on her hands to keep them warm. ‘Good afternoon, constable,’ Gillard said. ‘Have you seen any activity in the lake?’
She looked baffled. ‘No, sir. I’ve only been here since eight. Pretty quiet actually.’
Realising she hadn’t been briefed about PC Woodbridge’s experience, Gillard said no more and led his team into the ground floor of the library. He turned on all the lights and led them into the first of two ground floor teaching rooms. Desks and chairs had been stacked at one end and the shelves were largely empty of books; there were just a couple of tables in the middle of the room. Rainy described to them how she had tapped on every wall and along the floor. ‘This really left nowhere else to look,’ she said. Then she led Gillard and a team through the disabled toilets and a couple of storage rooms which were similarly short of possibilities for hiding anything. ‘So that’s it,’ she said.