Twenty-one
‘If all customers were as soundly based as the two Lietuvos companies, Detective Constable,’ said Andrew John, ‘the banking sector would never have run into difficulties. Guys like me would still be carrying our bonuses home in bloody wheelbarrows, instead of praying that we can get out of here with our pension funds still intact.
‘In the old days, Tomas Zaliukas was the sort of customer we didn’t want. Cash rich, sure-footed in the licensed premises he bought and always with the knack of picking the right area on the property development side. We made money out of lending in those days, but Tomas never needed to borrow much, not in the long term.
‘Today, guys like him are like gold dust: loads of cash on deposit, property assets that are worth four times our exposure with him, and income to service his loans umpteen times over.’
Haddock let out an involuntary sigh, then hoped that it had not carried across the desk. ‘Still,’ he said, ‘you’ll keep the business.’
‘I can only hope so. For all that he was always on about his roots, Tomas had more sense than to go anywhere near the Lithuanian banks. His cousin might take a different line.’
‘It won’t be his decision,’ the young detective commented, then paused as he realised what he had let slip.
‘You mean Gerulaitis won’t inherit anything? That means it all goes to Regine?’
‘Please, Mr John,’ Haddock begged, ‘forget I said that. I shouldn’t have.’
‘That’s all right, it’s gone already. I’ll give you one in return. I’d rather have one Regine than a hundred Valdases.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because she exudes integrity. Valdas, on the other hand, is one of those guys . . . Let’s just say that if I was forced to invite him for dinner, we’d be keeping all the good stuff well out of sight. Under Tommy’s eye, he was fine, but Tomas never let him out of his sight either. He told me as much; he said once that when the kids were babies, and Regine had her hands full, Valdas asked him if he could manage Indigo, for a change of scenery. He fobbed him off by telling him he was too valuable where he was, and paid him off with a pay rise, but the real reason was that if he had put him in there, he’d have to employ an accountant just to make sure he didn’t bleed the place dry.’
‘Do you think he could have been up to something and Mr Zaliukas found out?’
‘I don’t, because even Valdas is bright enough to have known that he wouldn’t get away with it. Tomas was better than that; he had some nose for business. He took me with him once to look at a pub he was thinking about buying. It was unofficial, of course; we went in as punters on a Friday night and spent a couple of hours there. When we came out, Tommy told me straight off what the place should be doing in profit and what it was actually doing, in other words, what the staff were ripping out of it. When he put his auditors in to do due diligence on the place, they found that he’d been spot on, both times.’
‘So that’s why his pubs make so much money; because he could spot all the scams?’
Andrew John frowned; his left eye twitched. ‘Yes. That and . . .’ He looked Haddock in the eye. ‘You’re not going to hear this, any more than I heard what you said about Tomas’s will, right.’
‘Absolutely, sir.’
‘OK, we all know what Tomas got up to when he was younger, don’t we?’
Haddock nodded.
‘So did you ever ask yourself, when he went legit, what happened to his boys, the “associates” he brought over from Lithuania?’
‘Well,’ the DC replied, ‘I didn’t, because it was before my time.’
‘Let me tell you. They went into the pubs, but later when he bought the massage parlours, most of them became managers and the licensees of record. In other words, they never went away, and they were as close to Tomas as they’d ever been. If you look at all the years he’s been in the pub business, you could probably identify the few people who’ve ever been caught stealing from him just by cross-referencing the names of his bar staff with admissions to A and E.’
‘Wow!’ the young detective exclaimed. ‘Didn’t that make you uncomfortable about having him as a customer?’
The banker smiled. ‘No, it made me very careful always to spell out every clause and condition of every deal we ever did.’
‘Those places,’ Haddock ventured. ‘Do you know where the money came from to buy them? The lawyer involved was vague on the subject.’
‘It was kosher,’ John replied at once. ‘Tomas paid himself a dividend from Lietuvos and that’s where it went. As for Ken Green, he’d have asked no questions; that’s the way he is.’
‘Can you tell me how much?’
‘I can find out. So can you, by pulling the accounts for the right year, but I can probably do it quicker. But tell me. Why do you want to know? Tomas shot himself, didn’t he?’
‘For sure.’
‘But you don’t know why?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you need to?’
‘Because someone way, way above my pay grade does.’
‘If that’s who I think it is, say no more. I’ll call you when I’ve got that figure for you.’
Twenty-two
Griff Montell looked at the forty-something woman in the chair opposite him, and tried to imagine her standing on a street corner, garish blond dye job, red shiny boots, bum-freezer jacket and short skirt maximising the legs that were still her best feature.
He failed, abysmally. Joanne Virtue’s hair was a lustrous brown, and he could tell that every visit to her salon of choice cost her plenty. Her suit had come, if not from Harvey Nichols, then from one of those designer sections on the first floor of John Lewis, where his sister did her clothes shopping. Her face was full of angles, from the sharpness of her chin to her dark, tick-shaped eyebrows, but the smile with which she had greeted them had been kind, and her eyes were expressive.
At that moment, they were expressing anger. ‘Let me get this right,’ she said, quietly, as if she did not want her voice to carry any further than the plush, velvet-draped reception room in which they were sitting, ‘you have come to my place of work to ask me about a part of my life that I’ve left behind me. Thank God we’ve got no clients here the now.’ Her accent was Scottish, but even the South African could tell that it had originated in Glasgow, not Edinburgh.
‘This is an urgent investigation, Miss Virtue,’ Alice Cowan retorted. ‘We’ve got a girl in trouble. We can do this interview down in our office if you’d prefer it.’
Instantly, the woman’s eyes turned icy cold. ‘You listen to me, kid,’ she whispered. ‘If you ever threaten me again, I’ll pick up the phone and I’ll call Neil McIlhenney. I hear he’s gone up in the world since I saw him last, so you’ll know who he is, for sure. “So what?” you might be thinking, he’s a nice guy. But he’s got another side that you wouldn’t want to see. There’s history between Neil and me . . . not that kind, before you jump to the wrong conclusion . . . and I’d only have to ask him the once to have you cut off at the fucking knees.’
Cowan looked at her colleague. ‘Griff . . .’ she began, but he held up a hand.
‘Alice,’ he said, ‘I think we should listen to the lady. Miss Virtue, I apologise for disturbing you here, but it’s necessary. We have a kid in the Royal in her teens, still drugged out of her skull after twenty-four hours and unable to tell us what happened to her. However, we do know that it involved several men and that she was horizontal at the time. It may have been a domestic incident, but . . .’
‘How old is she?’
‘Sixteen, maybe, possibly less. We know nothing about her, but we’re told she may be east European. She’s been fed GHB and booze, probably over a period.’
Joanne Virtue’s strong features twisted into a grimace. ‘Then whoever did it needs sorting out. You want my guess, she’s been brought here, either with the promise of a good job, or she’s just been kidnapped, and she was being broken in.’
‘Ha
ve you heard of that sort of thing happening in Edinburgh?’ asked Cowan, seemingly chastened.
‘No, but I’ve been out of that life for a bit. For a short while, I managed a massage parlour, but I . . .’ she paused, as if she was considering exactly what she had done ‘. . . I made a complete break from what I’d been.’
‘Would it be worth us talking to the owner?’
‘The guy I worked for doesnae own it any more. The last thing I heard about that place was that he’d sold it: that he’d been pressured into selling it, even.’
‘Pressured by whom?’
‘By a Lithuanian guy; one of that lot runs it now. But the word was that a bloke called Tommy Zale was behind him.’
‘Never heard of him,’ said Montell.
‘He owned pubs and the like. That wasnae his real name, it was something longer. There was a piece about him in the Saltire this morning. He was found dead yesterday morning; “no suspicious circumstances” according to your outfit. The Lithuanians have been taking over the massage parlour business in Edinburgh for years.’ She laughed, quietly, briefly. ‘Sorry, the public entertainment business, according to the Licensing Court. I never saw it in print anywhere, but they’re supposed tae control it all. If somebody’s been running girls into Edinburgh, then it’s either that lot, or they’ll be as keen as you are to find out who it is.’ She paused. ‘Where did you find this lass?’
‘She was brought into a surgery near Ocean Terminal.’
‘Mmm. There’s a massage parlour not far from that. If I were you, I’d be asking there about her.’
Twenty-three
‘We are not alone,’ Mario McGuire announced.
Maggie Steele and Neil McIlhenney looked at each other across the small conference table in the head of CID’s office. ‘I’ve always thought there were other beings out there,’ said the detective superintendent, laconically, ‘but I didn’t expect contact to be made in my lifetime. What about you, Scully? What do you think?’
‘You must stop watching that sci-fi stuff,’ the ACC retorted.
‘Indeed,’ McGuire continued. ‘I fed information on our two raids to the national intelligence centre in Paisley, and had an interesting response. Over the last six months, there have been similar, no, pretty much identical robberies at golf clubs in Seamill, in Ayrshire, in Blairgowrie, on Tayside, in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, and on Loch Lomondside . . . not the big club, another one.’
Steele’s eyebrows rose. ‘Nobody thought to issue a national alert? What is the SCDEA for?’
‘They’re short-handed through there, but that will be done now, they promise. The guy I spoke to in the intelligence unit told me that the new deputy director’s been appointed . . .’
‘That’s lightning fast; the boss only mentioned the vacancy yesterday.’
‘I know, but they’ve short-circuited the usual procedures. The director’s just gone off on long-term sick leave, so they need someone in post, like now; whoever the new appointee is, he’ll be running the show from the off.’
‘Your contact didn’t tell you who it is, did he?’
‘He didn’t know.’
Steele laughed. ‘So much for intelligence. But back to the topic. We have a determined, professional outfit in action all across Scotland, running rings round us all. They’ve hit us twice, probably knowing how exposed we are rurally. We have to assume that they’re going to do it again. So what do we do?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ McIlhenney said. ‘How about we have CID teams in place to respond instantly to any alarm calls from golf pro shops?’
‘Jesus, Neil,’ McGuire hissed. ‘Budgets, budgets; they’d be sat on their hands all night, across the whole of our county area. Mags, can you make extra patrol teams available?’
‘Budgets, Mario, budgets.’
‘Can you divert patrol teams from the city?’
‘We’re stretched there too.’
‘Dead end, then.’
She nodded. ‘However,’ she began, ‘there is one tactic that’s occurred to me. Do you know, or can you find out, the time elapsed between the last false alarm call logged in by our communications centre and the alerts from each golf club that’s been done?’
‘I know already. Ten minutes in the first case, eleven last night.’
‘OK. Then how about, if we have police emergency calls during the night in quick succession, taking all of our cars out of play, be it three in East Lothian, four in West, whatever, we delay the response to the last of those calls by fifteen minutes. If we have an alarm warning within that time, the third car heads like shit off a shovel for the location.’
‘But what if these calls are genuine?’ McIlhenney exclaimed. ‘What if some guy really is beating his wife to death?’
‘It’s a hell of a chance to take, I’ll grant you. But statistically, how many calls do we get during the night out in the counties? Damn few. And in quick succession?’
‘Statistics won’t stop someone from bleeding to death.’
McGuire nodded. ‘I agree. It would be a risk, Mags. And I suppose I could have a few CID on stand-by, let’s say one unit in Edinburgh, one in Dalkeith and one in Livingston. But we’d need to get the OK from the boss to holding back responses.’
‘Would we?’ she posed. ‘What about allowing him deniability?’ The words hung heavily in the air. For almost a minute no one spoke.
‘No, Maggie,’ said the head of CID, at last. ‘If we pulled something like this without telling him, and it went disastrously wrong, you know that friendship would go out the window. He said as much yesterday. He’d have our guts, all of us. And at the end of the day, he’d carry the can anyway, whether he knew or not. We’ve got to tell him. I might be the junior officer round this table, but I’m putting my foot down on this one. It’s a matter of loyalty.’
Steele leaned back in her chair, staring him down, but he held her gaze. And then she laughed. ‘Absolutely,’ she exclaimed. ‘Consider that a test, and you’ve passed. I was only wondering whether you two were still the reckless buggers I used to know.’
‘Thanks very much,’ McIlhenney growled.
‘Ah, don’t take it to heart, man,’ she chided. ‘Have you lost your sense of humour as well? I’ve already spoken to Bob, before I came along here. He says, “Do it, and do it from tonight.” Is that OK with you,’ she asked, ‘or do you want it in writing?’
Twenty-four
‘How did you get on with the banker?’ Becky Stallings asked, watching Haddock from the doorway of her small office, as he hung his coat on the stand in the corner of the CID room.
‘Fine, boss,’ he replied, casually, as he took his seat. ‘I thought bank managers were all stuffy beggars, but Mr John’s not like that. He was very helpful.’
‘Hey,’ Jack McGurk laughed, ‘we should send you out on your own more often. Yesterday you had that fucking weasel Ken Green eating out of your hand, and today you’ve got a banker being nice to you. When you say he was helpful, does that mean he told you the time for free?’
‘He told me a damn sight more than that.’ He glanced at Stallings. ‘Boss, if you were hoping that Zaliukas had money worries we didn’t know about, you can forget it. The man was both cash-rich and asset-rich: minted, end of story.’ He paused. ‘Mr John liked him, too; he didn’t say so straight out, but he told me some stories about him that made me think they’d got on. He was wary of him, though.’
‘In what way?’ the DI asked.
Haddock frowned, searching for the words to explain himself. ‘The feeling I have,’ he began, ‘is that Zaliukas was regarded by a lot of people as someone who’d been a seriously wide guy in his youth, but who’d managed to leave all that behind and reinvent himself as a successful, respectable law-abiding businessman, and that when he bought those eight massage parlours, it was no more than a good property deal. Am I right?’
Stallings nodded. ‘I never met the man, but yes, that’s the picture that I’ve formed from what the bosses
have said about him.’
‘Well, from what Mr John told me, I have a feeling that he didn’t change as much as they thought. Everything I’ve heard, from what Alex Skinner said about Willie Conn, her predecessor, from Andrew John himself, and even something I didn’t hear, just a feeling I picked up from Ken Green, makes me feel that the people who actually knew him, and worked with him, still regarded him as a man who shouldn’t be messed with.’
‘Are you saying that he was involved in organised crime all along?’
‘No, I’m not saying that. But we do know that he once ran a gang of Lithuanian hard men, and that he placed a lot of those guys in the legitimate businesses that he acquired or built up over the years.’
‘Apart from Indigo,’ McGurk cautioned. ‘As I understand it, his wife ran that place from the start.’
‘She’s been gone for a week or so,’ Haddock pointed out. ‘I wonder who’s been running it since she left.’
‘Dunno. Valdas Gerulaitis maybe?’
‘No danger. Tomas didn’t trust him. According to Mr John, Valdas once asked if he could have that job, but his cousin told him that he was too valuable at the centre of the business. The truth was he kept him there so that he could keep an eye on him. I reckon he kept an eye on everything. I reckon that his leisure company is as profitable as you’ve probably found out by now that it is, Jack, from those annual accounts that are lying on your desk, because there was virtually none of the pilfering that’s endemic in that industry. Why? Because Zaliukas could spot it whenever and wherever it happened and anyone he caught wound up in the Royal.’
‘I suppose you can prove that,’ the DS challenged.
‘I’m told that I can, if I want to, just by trawling the admissions record.’
‘This from your friendly banker?’ asked McGurk. Haddock was silent. ‘So what did you give him in return?’
The detective constable’s face reddened. ‘Nothing on purpose,’ he replied. ‘I let slip that Valdas isn’t going to inherit any of the Lietuvos businesses, that Mrs Zaliukas and the kids are.’
20 - A Rush of Blood Page 11