‘I wonder where they were going.’
McGurk looked at Haddock. ‘That’s barely relevant is it, Sauce?’
‘Probably not. It’s just that he set up the offshore company around that time, and Mr Gerulaitis told us that he had nothing to do with that part of his cousin’s business. Yet Alex Skinner said that her predecessor, Conn, thought that he did.’
‘Interesting. What did Green say?’
‘He didn’t know.’
‘Still . . .’
‘Let’s not over-complicate things,’ Stallings told them. ‘That’s not really relevant, is it? You two put a report together now, saying suicide, motive unknown, and I’ll email it to Mr McIlhenney.’
‘But what about the money?’
‘What effing money, Sauce?’
‘The money to pay for the massage parlours. Shouldn’t we find out where that came from?’
‘There’s no one left to tell us that,’ she countered, ‘except maybe the widow.’
‘Or maybe Gerulaitis. Or this man Plenderleith; his lawyers might still hold the detail of the transaction.’
‘DC Haddock,’ Stallings told him firmly, ‘just do that report.’
‘Boss, I’ve got a date.’
‘Then the quicker you’re done, the less late you’ll be. If she really fancies you, she’ll wait.’
The young man sighed. ‘Very good, ma’am.’ He looked across at McGurk. ‘I’ll do notes of my interviews with Alex Skinner and Mr Green, Jack, yes?’
‘You do that. I’ll write up mine and summarise everything.’ He paused. ‘By the way,’ he added, ‘it’s lucky for you that cunning Ken was cooperative, otherwise you and I would be having a discussion about an excess of initiative.’
‘I saved time, didn’t I, by going straight along there to see him? If I hadn’t taken the chance, it could have been a couple of days before we’d got to see him. Anyway, he was OK, nothing like the slippery bastard they say he is.’
The DS chuckled. ‘You wait till the first time you come up against your new best friend in the witness box. Then you’ll see what he’s really like. Go on, get on with it; you’ve got a hot blonde waiting somewhere.’
Haddock nodded and bent over his keyboard, but he had barely typed half a page before his mobile played the opening bars of Bon Jovi’s ‘Living on a Prayer’. ‘Bugger,’ he whispered. He picked it up; the number on the outer screen was vaguely familiar. He flipped it open. ‘Sauce,’ he said.
‘Do you always answer like that, Detective Constable?’ Alex Skinner asked.
‘Unless I know it’s the chief on the line,’ he replied.
She laughed. ‘I’ve got some information for you. I’ve spoken to my colleague in our personal client department, and I can give you the details of Mr Zaliukas’s will.’
‘Thanks.’ He grabbed his notebook and a pen. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s pretty simple in outline. His property and all its contents, investments, cash, and valuables, all pass to Mrs Regine Zaliukas. His holdings in Lietuvos Leisure Limited and Lietuvos Developments Limited are to be vested in a trust fund for the benefit of Mrs Zaliukas and their children. That’s it, almost. There’s one other item; his shares in something called Lituania SAFI, of which this firm has no knowledge, but which looks like an offshore company of some sort, is to be transferred to a Mrs Laima Gerulaitis.’
‘Her?’ Haddock exclaimed. ‘Why the hell would he do that?’
‘Who is she?’ Alex asked.
‘His cousin’s wife. According to him, she didn’t like Zaliukas.’
‘What’s this company anyway? Can you tell me? My partner’s going to need to know.’
‘It owns the massage parlours. As it was explained to me, it’s a liability shelter. The directors and shareholders are guaranteed secrecy under Uruguayan law.’
‘Jesus! That’s pure Ken Green.’
‘But legal, yes?’
‘So far. It gives you an insight to Mr Zaliukas, though, and reminds me of one of my dad’s personal aphorisms: you can take the man out of the gang, but you can’t take the gangster out of the man.’
‘Seems not. Who’s the executor?’
‘Mrs Zaliukas.’
‘That’s no surprise. Now, what about the lady . . . the widow, I suppose? Can we interview her, or will you give us her statement? It’s no big deal either way, to be honest. We’re probably in the process of wrapping this thing up even without it.’
‘Just as well, for we haven’t been able to get in touch with her. We have a mobile number for her, but she’s not answering at the moment. When we raise her, I’ll let you know.’
‘We could get the French police to trace her.’
‘They wouldn’t know where to start, and anyway my partner would rather you didn’t. She knows Mrs Zaliukas and would prefer to break the news herself.’
‘Fair enough. I’m cool with that. Anything else?’
‘Just one small point. The clause in the will transferring the offshore holding to Mrs Gerulaitis . . . that was inserted only yesterday afternoon. That might indicate that my late client’s suicide wasn’t a complete spur-of-the-moment thing.’
Haddock smiled. ‘Hey, Alex,’ he said, ‘I’m supposed to be the detective here.’
Fifteen
‘How are you doing?’ Bob Skinner asked his wife. ‘I’m ready to head home if you are. Gerry’s gone already.’
‘I’m almost done,’ she told him. ‘If you leave now, by the time you get here I will be.’
‘How’s your day been?’ he asked. ‘How did First Minister’s questions go?’
‘Are you telling me you didn’t even watch it on television?’
‘I couldn’t. I got tied up in a meeting, then I had to leave to meet Alex.’
‘You were better off with her. It was pretty dull today, no flashpoints. The BBC political editor’s going to say that we boxed a draw, but the truth is there wasn’t a blow struck on either side. How about you?’
‘Nice lunch. My kid’s got an extra glow about her. It’ll last for a while, and then she’ll work out what her next ambition is and set off in pursuit of that.’
‘Marriage and children, maybe.’
‘That’s well below the horizon.’
‘The right guy will turn up one day, you’ll see.’
‘As long as he’s not a cop . . .’
‘Bob! That business with Andy is history; get over it.’
‘I am over it. As for forgetting it, no danger. Now go on, finish off what you’re doing and I’ll pick you up in front of the Parliament building in fifteen minutes or so. Wait inside for me, though. It looks colder than ever out there.’
He hung up, stood, and slipped on his jacket. He was almost at his door, when there was a soft knock and it opened. ‘Got a minute?’ Neil McIlhenney asked.
‘Yes, but only the one. What is it?’
‘Tomas Zaliukas. I’ve just had a report from Becky Stallings. She wants me to sign it off to be passed to the fiscal. You started this off, so I thought I’d better run it past you.’
‘What does it say?’
‘Read it for yourself.’ The superintendent handed him a printout of Stallings’ email.
Skinner glanced through it, then read it for a second time, more closely. ‘No doubt about the suicide, then.’
‘No. The note on the computer more or less caps it. Plus, when we did a full search of the house we found a floorboard in Zaliukas’s study that had been taken up. There was a box of shotgun ammo hidden between the joists, and it wasn’t full.’
‘And the note points to the motive.’
‘That’s right; depression, over Regine leaving him.’
‘You know me and guesses, my friend. I’ve never minded following them up, but I bloody hate including them in submissions to the Crown Office. Young Haddock’s note says Alex told him that he made a material change to his will yesterday, Tuesday. One day later, that will’s in effect. In it, he left everything else to the wife
and kids, except those massage parlour properties. Why not?’
‘They’re brothels, Bob.’
‘And Regine could have sold them if she wanted out of that business. But he left them to his cousin’s wife. Why? Could he have been screwing her?’
‘According to McGurk and Haddock, even the cousin must have to pluck up his courage to do that.’
‘OK, there has to be another reason, as yet unknown, so this report is incomplete. On top of that, there’s Ken Green; I hate it when that bastard’s involved. I hate it even more when he suddenly starts being cooperative with a raw young DC.’ He handed the report back to McIlhenney. ‘Don’t let Stallings submit this to the fiscal, not yet. We’re not done.’
‘But what else can we do?’
The chief constable smiled. ‘There’s these two seagulls, out in Gullane. Every day in the winter, when the weather’s frosty, like it is just now, they appear on the green . . . us Motherwell boys don’t have lawns . . . in front of our house, and they drum their feet on the ground, pit-pat, pit-pat, pit-pat, just like that, until their food supply sticks its head out to see what all the fucking noise is about. That’s what we can do, Neil. You tell Becky and her boys to get back out there and drum up some worms.’
Sixteen
‘The worst moment in a girl’s life,’ said Cheeky, ‘is when she’s sitting on her own in a pub, thinking that she’s been stood up. If you hadn’t sent me that text . . .’
‘. . . you’d have been out of here. I know,’ Sauce sighed.
She laughed, a soft tinkling sound, yet it cut through all the background noise of a bar that was not completely full, but still busy for a midweek evening. ‘No,’ she told him, ‘but I’d have been hammered by the time you arrived.’
He looked at her as he settled into his chair, setting a white wine on the table before her then pressing a wedge of lime into his Sol beer with his thumb. She was dazzling; her teeth sparkled as she smiled, her shortish blond hair was perfectly haphazard, and her make-up helped to emphasise the blueness of her eyes. ‘Come on, Cheeky,’ he replied, ‘admit it. You’ve never been stood up in your life.’
She beamed. ‘OK,’ she admitted, ‘I wasn’t speaking from personal experience. Have you? Ever been stood up, I mean?’
‘Find me a guy that hasn’t. I’ve had my share. I wasn’t even certain that you’d be here tonight.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Do I strike you as a “fuck ’em and chuck ’em” girl?’
‘No, but my sad experiences with women have left me taking nothing for granted.’
‘What’s your worst one?’
He whistled. ‘Out of so many?’ He scratched his head. ‘I learned early on not to arrange to meet in places where a lot of people would see you being dissed.’
She glanced around. ‘You took a chance on this one.’
‘Maybe, but you’re not the sort of woman a guy would arrange to meet outside McDonald’s, or on the Waverley Station concourse.’
She winked. ‘I’ll take that as a compliment, rather than just you trying to talk your way into my knickers . . . again. Now come on, spill some beans.’
‘Well,’ he began, ‘my most publicly humiliating experience wasn’t a stand-up in the conventional sense of the word. I was at Indigo one night, with some mates, and I asked this girl up to dance. When we were done she stayed up for another, and a third: I thought I might be in there. Then she said to me, “Just you wait there,” and headed off through the crowd. I mean I thought she’d gone for her coat, so I did what I was told. I stood there for a couple of minutes, then five, then ten, right up until I saw her back out on the floor with one of my pals, putting a fucking lip lock on him, and realised that the rest of the team were stood up at the bar laughing their rocks off at me.’
‘What a slapper! What did you do?’
‘I told them that none of them would ever park safely in Edinburgh again.’
‘You abused your police powers?’ she gasped in mock condemnation.
‘Nah. I wish I could have, but the traffic wardens are separate from us. Speaking of parking—’ he added.
‘I didn’t bring my car,’ she told him, before he could finish. ‘Going by what I saw this morning, I reckoned it would be impossible to park at your place, so I caught the train.’
‘Where do you live anyway?’ he asked. ‘You never told me.’
‘You never asked. I’ve got a wee house out in South Gyle.’
‘On your own?’
‘No, with my husband and two kids! And he’s an all-in wrestler.’ She paused. ‘Yes, Sauce, I live on my own. Like I said, it’s a wee house, no bigger than your flat, and not in nearly as lively a part of the city.’
‘It’ll be new if it’s out there.’
‘Fairly. I’m only the second owner.’
‘You did well to get a mortgage. If I wasn’t a cop, I’d have been struggling.’
‘Accountants are a good risk too.’
‘You’re an accountant?’
‘Yup. I don’t have my full CA qualification yet, but I’ve got my degree.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘I’m on my second year of a training contract with a firm called Deacon and Queen.’
‘Never heard of them.’
‘Maybe not, but they’re top five. Name me half a dozen accountancy firms you have heard of.’
He smiled. ‘You have a point. So how come you didn’t have to go tearing in there this morning?’
‘I’m on an audit team, out with a client just now. I sent them a text saying that I had a domestic situation. That wasn’t exactly a lie, was it?’
‘No, I’d have bought that.’
‘So how was your day, when eventually you got there?’
Sauce shrugged his shoulders. ‘I suppose I could call it routine. I spent it on a sudden death investigation. You want to talk bizarre coincidence? The victim was the guy who owned Indigo. I just finished the report. That’s why I was a bit late.’
‘How sudden was it?’
‘As sudden as they get. Suicide by swallowing a sawn-off shotgun.’ He winced. ‘Shit, I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have told you that.’
She screwed up her face. ‘Yuk! OK on an empty stomach, but only just. What a mess it must have been.’
‘Happily I didn’t get to see it. All I’ve had to do is the follow-up, trying to establish why he did it.’
‘And did you?’
‘I talked to his cousin, to a nice lawyer and to a dodgy lawyer, but no, not really. The guy’s wife left him last week, and took the kids; that’s the only motive we’ve got.’
‘Maybe it was an accident,’ Cheeky suggested. ‘Maybe he was just playing with the thing and it went off.’
‘On top of Arthur’s Seat, in the ball-freezing cold? No, we’re sure that killing himself had been on his mind, because he changed his will just before he did it.’
‘To take his wife out of the picture?’
Sauce shook his head. ‘No. She and the kids get the lot, apart from some pieces of not very desirable property that he seems to have decided at the last minute to leave to his cousin’s wife.’
She frowned. ‘Things like that are awful sad,’ she murmured, sipping her wine.
‘I suppose,’ he conceded. ‘It’s best not to think about the emotional side of an investigation; the physical can be hard enough. Mind you, sometimes you can’t avoid it; if it’s a colleague, say . . .’
They sat silent for a while, as if they were reflecting on their first serious discussion.
‘Those properties,’ said Cheeky, finally moving on, ‘they must be really crap.’
‘Oh, they are. Not nice at all.’
‘I wonder why he decided to leave them to that woman, then.’
‘So do we. Maybe it’s because she’s a crap person.’
‘You’ve met her?’
‘Jack and I did, this afternoon. Not very nice at all.’
She reached across and squeezed his arm.
‘Never mind, Sauce. Cheer up, you’re finished with all that, you said, so what are you doing tomorrow? What’s your working day like? Mine’s pretty predictable.’
‘That’s the attraction of CID, I suppose. We never know what’s next, unless we’re on a specialist unit. Maybe you could join us when you finish your training. There’s a dedicated fraud unit that covers the whole of Scotland. They recruit accountants for that.’
‘Show me the money, love. That would be the problem.’
‘I’m sure. Police pay’s all right, but it would be nice to climb the ladder as fast as I can. At the moment I’m right at the bottom. But you were wrong when you said that job was finished. I had a text from Jack just as I was coming through the door. We signed off on the report, sure, but the bosses have kicked it back.’
‘Why?’ Cheeky asked, casually. ‘Have they got a down on you and him?’
‘Not that I know of. No, it’s . . .’ He stopped.
Cheeky held up her hands. ‘Don’t tell me! Don’t tell me! I don’t want to know.’
‘Ach,’ he chuckled, ‘it’s OK. It’s probably just that this guy was a bit of a hoodlum in his youth, so the high heid yins are being ultra thorough.’
‘They can do that on their own time,’ she declared. ‘This is ours. Let me get you another beer, then . . . what do you want to do?’
‘A meal, I thought. What do you like?’
She reached to the left, to the side of her chair that he could not see, and held up a bag, an overnight bag. ‘What do I like or what do I want? I like pizza and I want . . . the biggest takeaway we can get from Papa John’s, or Mamma’s, whichever’s nearest to your place. Then no more shop talk, just all that pepperoni, and you and me. Does that sound like a deal?’
‘It works for me . . . and forget the second beer.’
She drained her glass and eased her long legs out of her chair. ‘Then let’s get the show on the road, for I warn you now, Sauce, I can’t call in late two days on the trot.’
Seventeen
‘The brass neck these bastards have got,’ Detective Sergeant Lisa
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