McDermid exclaimed, shielding her eyes with a mitten-clad hand against the low sunshine of the crisp, clear early morning.
‘A crude technique, I’ll grant you,’ said DI George Regan, looking massive in the well-worn Crombie overcoat that he had inherited from an uncle a few weeks before, ‘but there’s nothing new about a ram raid.’
‘I’ve never seen one.’
‘Not even when you were in uniform?’
‘No.’
‘Simple but effective. Get a truck, an old Land Rover, any sort of chunky vehicle and stick it through the front door of the target premises. Entry achieved, you help yourself. This place is a classic target; a golf pro shop, nice big double doors, just one step up from ground level.’
‘But it’s alarmed. They were pretty reckless, trying it on.’
‘No; they were professional. That’s no deterrent to these characters. They’re in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, and in a rural area like this one . . .’ He called to a uniformed sergeant, standing a few yards away. ‘Kenny, what was our response time? Do you know?’
‘Twenty-five minutes. Our nearest car was in Dunbar.’
‘There you are, then,’ Regan told the DS. ‘The owner of the business got here before we did, and he was in bed in Dirleton when this happened. The alarm company’s monitoring centre called him first, then us. Me, I like old-fashioned alarms, with bells or sirens that make lots of fucking noise and waken the neighbours. Remotely monitored things like this one don’t; those casings up there are empty, just for show. Sometimes they’ll put sirens on the inside, the thinking being that burglars will be scared off.’ He grunted. ‘Scared off, my arse. Waste of time and money.’
‘A siren wouldn’t have done much good here,’ McDermid pointed out. ‘Witches’ Hill Golf and Country Club; it’s not quite in the middle of nowhere, but isolated enough. There isn’t a house in sight. Besides, do we want neighbours having a go and getting their heads bashed in with baseball bats?’
‘Come on, Lisa,’ the DI retorted. ‘Not many people are actually that brave, but they do call us with vehicle descriptions, registration numbers and so on. The bastards who did this are clean away. The socos will take all the fucking fingerprints they like, but it won’t do us any good. This is a shop. Hundreds of people will have left their dabs all over it. I remember a break-in a few years ago in a store in Fountain-bridge, where they came up with prints that matched two well-known blaggers. Bingo, we thought. It took us a week to trace them, and no wonder; when the shop was done they’d been on holiday in Gran Canaria. They’d been in the place as legit customers. Our best chance here is if the stuff they’ve nicked shows up online, but they’ll not be daft enough to do that. Likely it’ll be sold privately, word of mouth, at a knock-down, but still for enough to make the job worthwhile.’
‘Do we know what’s been taken?’
As she spoke, a man, lean and white-haired, of medium height, stepped from the violated premises and stood in the shattered doorway. ‘We’re about to find out,’ Regan said. ‘What’s the damage, Mr Fairley?’
‘Clubs,’ the golf pro told him. ‘They’ve cleaned me out of all my high-end stock. The trade-ins and the cheaper starter sets are still there, but the Callaways, the Titleists, the Taylor-Mades, the Pings, they’re all gone; irons, woods, and all the putters and the specialist stuff, the rescue clubs and lob wedges. They’ve taken the best of the balls too.’
‘Any idea of the total value?’
Alasdair Fairley frowned. ‘Net?’ Regan nodded. ‘I can get you an exact figure off the computer, but with the stock I was holding, in the region of eighty thousand.’
‘And they’ll shift it for about twenty-five, if they sell direct, yes?’
‘You probably know more about it than me, but that sounds about right.’
‘But couldn’t we trace it in use?’ McDermid asked. ‘Through golf courses and the like.’
Fairley frowned at her. ‘You’re not suggesting that a PGA professional would handle stolen golf clubs, are you?’
‘No, not at all,’ she said, hastily, quelling his outrage. ‘I meant couldn’t we carry out spot checks on golfers to see what they’re using?’
The pro looked at Regan, one golfer to another, as if to say, ‘Will you tell her or will I?’
The DI picked up the prompt. ‘Lisa,’ he explained, ‘golf clubs don’t have bar codes, or serial numbers of anything permanent to identify an individual item. So once Mr Fairley’s own sticker has been removed, that’s it for tracing them. More than that, once a club’s been used, it’s changed in some small way. So even if we were to do anything as fascist as to walk on to every golf course in Scotland and ask players to show us their equipment, it wouldn’t do us a blind bit of good. But we’re not going to do that. Why not? Because the chief constable’s a golfer. So’s the deputy chief. So’s the chair of the local council. So are most of the judges on the Supreme Court bench, and so, for that matter, am I!’
‘So what are we going to do?’ she demanded.
‘You’re going to circulate the information nationally, and Mr Fairley here’s going to claim on his insurance.’
‘And maybe look at installing CCTV,’ said the victim.
‘That’s the cheap option,’ Regan told him. ‘You could do that, outside and in, but . . . These people have had a look at this place before they did the job, as any good thief would do. If you’d had cameras, they’d have masked out number plates, worn masks and put the things out of commission as soon as they could. No, the only way you can improve security is by spending a hell of a lot of money on steel roller grilles to make this place impregnable.’
‘I only own the stock, not the shop itself. The Marquis of Kinture does; it’s his club. I doubt if he’d fork out for that.’
‘In that case, do what you can to make it difficult to get in, and hold less stock in future.’
‘I expect my insurer will limit my cover from now on, so I’ll have to do that anyway.’ He paused. ‘How long will it be before I can start clearing up the mess?’ he asked. ‘I’ll also need to arrange for the place to be made secure. Plus, I should be opening the shop now. I’ll have members turning up soon.’
‘When it’s this cold?’ McDermid exclaimed.
‘You really don’t know golf, Sergeant, do you?’ Alasdair Fairley smiled, for the first time.
‘You might as well start now,’ Regan told him. ‘I’ll tell our socos, when they get here, just to look for tyre and footprints, not to bother with fingerprints. We can get on our way once they arrive, Lisa. We’ve got no more to do here. Meantime, I might go and take a look at the course. I’ve never been here before, and I’ve heard it’s pretty good.’
‘Call me when you have a free day,’ said Fairley. ‘If we’re quiet you can play it, on the house.’
‘Thanks. I’ll take you up on that.’ He wandered away from the pro shop, towards the first tee. He was peering down the first fairway, through the thinning mist, when his mobile sounded. He checked the number, but it showed ‘Private’.
‘Yes?’ he answered cautiously.
‘George.’
‘Ah, it’s you, Fred.’
For some reason, Detective Chief Inspector Graham Leggatt, senior CID officer in East and Midlothian, was known to close colleagues and friends as ‘Fred’. He always had been, and it was rumoured that not even he knew why. ‘What have you got there?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want to be pessimistic,’ the DI replied, ‘but you can mark this one up for the unsolved column. It was a well-planned job, simple and well-executed. Eighty grand’s worth of untraceable gear’s disappeared into the black economy. I don’t remember anything as pro as this in the time I’ve been on this patch.’
‘There hasn’t been. I’ll tell you how well planned it was.’ There was a pause. Regan heard a slurping sound. Fred Leggatt was famous for drinking tea in industrial quantities. ‘We have three patrol cars in East Lothian through the night, best case. When this
job was pulled, they were all en route to calls. Every one of them was false, and when we checked, we found that everyone was made on a different untraceable pay-and-go mobile. How about that for planning?’
‘Gallus bastards,’ Regan chuckled.
‘Indeed. Much as I dislike the idea of putting Mario McGuire off his breakfast, I’ll need to pass this up the line.’
Eighteen
‘Jesus, Sauce,’ Jack McGurk laughed, ‘your eyes are like piss holes in the snow. Is this girl a vampire? Has she been draining your lifeblood?’
‘With respect, Sergeant,’ Haddock retorted, ‘mind your own business. Better still, shut the fuck up. I never said a word when you and Lisanne got together, even though I seem to recall you practically crawling in here a couple of times.’
‘He has a point,’ said Becky Stallings. ‘Cut the boy some slack. All his wet dreams seem to have come true. Now,’ she continued, ‘as I let you know last night, that job we thought was over has been chucked back to us for further attention. The problem I have is that I don’t know what else we can do.’
‘We could ask the French police to find Zaliukas’s wife for us,’ the young DC suggested. ‘That’s assuming she is in France.’
‘Her lawyer may have contacted her already, as Alex Skinner said she would. Even if she hasn’t, this is a civil matter, not criminal. If CID calls France and asks for help in tracing her, it might send out the wrong signals. She might wind up being arrested.’
‘We could look closer at his companies. Maybe they’re not as sound as Gerulaitis claims.’
‘That’s more like it. Pull the last three years’ accounts from Companies’ House and have a look. You know who they bank with, or so you told me, so have a word with his manager. And what about these massage parlours, or saunas, or whatever the hell they are? From what you said they’re all run independently by managers, but Zaliukas must have had regular contact with them. Talk to some of them, see what they say.’
‘What will we be looking for?’ McGurk asked.
‘Ideally, we’ll be looking for someone who tells us that Zaliukas confided in him recently that he was deeply distressed, that he was missing his wife more than he could stand, and that he couldn’t go on. We’ll be looking for any fucking thing that lets me throw this back at Neil McIlhenney with “Mission accomplished” stamped all over it.’
Nineteen
‘Twin,’ Mario McGuire asked. ‘Are you free?’
‘Sure,’ said Neil McIlhenney, and hung up. He was certain that more people within the force, and maybe across Edinburgh, thought of them as the original Glimmer Twins than there were those who recognised it as the nickname adopted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards more than forty years earlier. It had been bestowed upon them, by Paula Viareggio, one night in the Café Royal bar, when they were in the first half of their twenties, when he had been engaged to Olive Clarey, and when the torch that Paula carried for her cousin Mario was still hidden in her handbag.
He left his office and walked the few yards to the one with ‘Head of CID’ on the door. ‘Whassup?’ he asked as he slumped into a seat. ‘Are you narked because the report on Tomas Zaliukas isn’t signed off yet?’
‘No, not especially. If the chief constable wants us to dig deeper, so be it. No, this is something else. There was a burglary overnight at the pro shop at Witches’ Hill golf club. A ram raid; they took out the main door with a vehicle then helped themselves to eighty grand’s worth of golf gear.’
‘Witches’ Hill? That’s in East Lothian, isn’t it, up behind Aberlady? Outside Edinburgh; not my area.’
‘Maybe not, but you’re my de facto deputy, and I want to bounce this off you. This isn’t the only job of this sort that’s been pulled recently. Two weeks ago the shop at the Mayfield course in Broxburn was done in exactly the same way. Then and now, they were long gone and out of town before uniform could respond to the alarm call. The places were well chosen. They’re isolated, and they could get their wheels right up to the premises. We’re nowhere near catching anyone for Broxburn and Fred Leggatt isn’t holding out any hope of a result for today’s either.’
‘I suppose we have to assume it’s the same team,’ McIlhenney murmured.
‘We might even be able to prove it is, if they’ve left tyre marks, but there’s something else. On each occasion our responses were hindered. All our available cars in each area were heading for calls that turned out to be bogus. We’ve traced the originating numbers and in each case, the calls were made from a cheap, disposable mobile.’
‘Bought where?’
‘Dunno yet. That’s our only line of inquiry for now, but there’s every fuckin’ chance that they were stolen too.’
‘How many cars are we talking about?’
‘In East Lothian, three, in West Lothian, five; all diverted to places far away from the crime scenes.’
The superintendent frowned. ‘That isn’t a hell of a lot, is it, when you spell it out.’
‘Tell me about it,’ McGuire snorted. ‘Remember that exchange I had with NYPD? One of the stats I picked up is that they have over three thousand patrol vehicles in a smaller geographical area.’
‘And ten times the tax-paying population to fund them, and a hell of a lot more I’ll bet than ten times the number of incident reports. The world is as it is, Mario; we all have to live within our means.’
‘But how do we do that? For I know for certain that this team will not stop at two jobs. And how long will it take for other clever bastards to get in on the idea? We’ve got the potential for a significant crime wave here.’
‘Then we’ll have to nail them as fast as we can,’ McIlhenney responded, ‘before the media catch on and they start to build a criminal fan club. But this isn’t just a CID job.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m going to raise it at the boss’s daily meeting . . .’ he glanced at his watch, ‘. . . in ten minutes. I’ve got a fair idea how that’ll develop, so I’d like you to keep yourself handy for a follow-up session with me and Mags, later on this morning.’
Twenty
‘Have either of you had word from the hospital yet about your mystery girl’s condition?’ Ray Wilding asked.
‘I’ve just checked,’ Alice Cowan replied. ‘She’s stable, and more lucid, but she’s not responding to questions yet. The doctor in charge says we needn’t even try to interview her before this afternoon.’
‘That leaves you sat on your hands. Has the press office issued your public appeal yet?’
‘Yes, they put it out first thing this morning. It’ll be in the Evening News, and on broadcast media by lunchtime.’
Wilding frowned. ‘Couldn’t they have done it last night?’ he grumbled.
‘Alan Royston said it was too late to catch anything. He’s been around long enough to know what he’s doing, so I didn’t argue.’
The DS grunted. ‘Not everyone would agree with that. I’ve got a pal who works on local radio; he’d have put it on air straight away if he’d been given it. How did you word it?’
‘I didn’t; Griff drafted it.’
‘I put in as much as we want used,’ Montell offered. ‘Young girl, dyed blond, reasonably well nourished, possibly eastern European, brought into surgery after being found dazed and incoherent in the street nearby. Anxious to trace anyone with any knowledge of her, in particular the Good Samaritan van driver who brought her in, and maybe saved her life. OK,’ he said, ‘the last part may be an exaggeration, but it’s headline material.’
‘As in “Good Samaritan lifesaver vanishes”, you mean? Next thing you know the red-tops will be inviting the punters to buy him a pint when he’s found. There’s no mention of possible sexual assault, I notice.’
‘Are you kidding, Ray? Even if the guy is absolutely genuine, it’s odds against him coming forward. If I’d included that, there would be absolutely no chance.’
‘Yeah, granted,’ Wilding conceded.
‘One thing we have got, though, is a quick respo
nse from the lab. I hadn’t expected anything much today, but I’ve just had an email. Nothing firm yet, but interesting nonetheless. Apart from her slippers, all the girl was wearing was her cotton dress, a bra, and pants. She didn’t wash her knickers very often, and wasn’t too worried about getting stripped for action either, for they’ve found semen stains on both garments, from more than one donor. They’re not going into numbers yet, but either this girl was gang-banged, or . . .’
‘She’s on the game,’ Alice Cowan declared. ‘Now there’s a surprise,’ she added, her voice heavy with irony.
‘In that case,’ said Wilding, ‘maybe some of the local girls will know who she is. Go ask some questions.’
‘Now?’ Cowan challenged. ‘Where are we going to find prostitutes at this time of day?’
‘The massage parlour girls you won’t find that easily, but there’s someone else you might ask. Have you ever heard of Joanne Virtue, Alice?’
The DC frowned. ‘I can’t say that I have. Who’s she?’
‘Big Joanne is the nearest thing we have to an oracle down here in Leith. She used to be a hooker herself, although she’s out of that life now.’
‘I take it Virtue was her work name,’ Montell said.
‘Nope,’ the sergeant chuckled, ‘it’s the one on her birth certificate. When she was on the street, they used to call her the Big Easy. Life throws up some oddities, and she’s one of them. Joanne’s never been an informer as such, as in grass, but if something happened that she thought was wrong, she’d tell us about it. Ask her if she’s heard about any new talent, maybe not being treated right, and see what she says.’
‘Where do we find her?’
‘At work, probably. After she passed on her street corner to a younger model, she managed a massage parlour for a while, for a wee hood called Kenny Bass. But she moved on from that. Last I heard she’d got herself a job as a receptionist with a funeral undertaker. Makes sense when you think about it. Who better to make that first, sympathetic impression on the newly bereaved than a retired whore with a heart of gold?’
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