20 - A Rush of Blood

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘I’ve just had the communications centre on the blower. They’ve had a call from a member of the public who says he’s found a car off the road up behind Garvald, with a guy in it he says is dead. My problem is that all my vehicles are committed elsewhere, and I can’t get one from Midlothian or Edinburgh for upwards of forty-five minutes. It’ll be well dark before they can get there. I don’t have an available uniform. You’re my only hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi.’

  Regan smiled, for the first time that day. ‘You got lucky, Marty; you picked my favourite movie. Hold on while I have a word with Princess Leia here.’ He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Lisa, are you up for helping uniform out of a jam? It could be messy, mind.’

  ‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘Better than watching you sat there scowling.’

  ‘OK,’ said the DI to White. ‘You’re on. Where is it? How do we get there?’

  ‘Bloody incomers,’ sighed the East Lothian native. ‘Head south, over the Tyne, towards Gifford at first, but you’ll see the sign for Garvald soon. It’s only about five miles away. When you get there, head up the hill out of the village, past Nunraw Abbey and on towards the White Castle. Don’t go looking for a castle, though; it’s an old hill fort, that’s all. A bit past that and you’ll find it. On you go now, before you run out of daylight.’

  The two detectives headed out to Regan’s car, parked at the back of the station. The inspector’s directions were easy to follow, and the road was quiet once they were out of Haddington. They reached Garvald in less than ten minutes, and drove through, as directed. ‘That’s the White Castle,’ McDermid pointed out as they passed a Historic Scotland sign by the roadside. The DI glanced to his left, but saw nothing, other than a flat hilltop.

  ‘Wow,’ he replied, poker-faced.

  They had gone no further than a few hundred yards when he had to brake, hard. A truck sat ahead of them, pulled as far up on to the verge as its driver had been able. He stood beside it, a countryman dressed in blue overalls and muddy boots, of middle height and age, slim, and bald, with a narrow moustache. Regan took a torch from the dashboard compartment and switched on his emergency warning lights as they stepped out. ‘Are you the polis?’ the man asked. ‘I’m Joe Leghorn; Ah’m the grieve at the farm just up the road. Some business this. Poor bugger’s doon there.’

  He stepped aside and the detectives saw that the fence behind him was shattered. Beyond it the ground sloped away for a few feet and then disappeared. ‘It’s a wee cliff, ken,’ Leghorn told them, as he led them to the edge. ‘The road’s muddy, like, after the thaw the day, but he must have been doing a hoor of a speed tae have gone off like that.’

  The DI peered over the edge and saw, in the fading light, the underside of a car; one of its wheels was turning slowly.

  ‘Can we get down there?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh aye.’ The farmer pointed to a track that led off to the right. ‘This used to be a wee quarry, long before my time. You’ll need to be careful, mind, cos it’s still slippy, but if you walk roon there ye’ll get doon. That’s how Ah did. Ah switched off the engine, by the way, so it’s no goin’ tae explode.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ said Regan wryly, as he headed down the path with McDermid at his heels.

  The car had landed on a rocky bed at the foot of the abandoned quarry. As they approached it they could see that it was a Jaguar, a red Mark II, the model driven by a TV cop whose name the DI could never quite recall. The weight of its underside had crushed the passenger compartment, making it difficult to see how anyone could have survived. He crouched beside it and shone the torch inside. The only occupant was, or had been, a man. His body was squashed between the roof and the steering wheel, which had almost severed his head. Regan looked for long enough to make certain that there was no one else inside, then straightened up, and reached for his phone.

  As he dialled Inspector White at Haddington he walked round to the rear of the car. ‘The situation’s as advised,’ he told his colleague as he answered. ‘Red Jag, single occupant, white male, dead as last Christmas’s turkey. We need a recovery vehicle, a fire and rescue team to cut the body out and a mortuary wagon. You better run a check on the registration: it’s G20 KSG.’

  ‘Repeat, please.’

  ‘Golf twenty, Kilo Sierra Golf.’

  ‘I don’t need to run a check,’ said White. ‘I’ve seen that Jag parked behind the Sheriff Court many a time, and I recognise the plate. That’s Ken Green, the lawyer.’

  Fifty-seven

  Chief Constable Bob Skinner gazed at his bare-chested reflection in the mirror of the bathroom in his office suite. He had almost finished shaving, apart from his top lip. ‘Tell me this is all a bad dream, and I’m going to wake up soon,’ he said to the man who stood in the open doorway.

  ‘If that’s an order,’ Mario McGuire replied, ‘I’ll obey as always. But when you do, the guy will still be dead.’

  Skinner scraped off the last of the cream with his razor, and wiped his chin with a hand towel. ‘We are sure it’s Ken Green himself in the car, are we?’ he asked, as he smoothed a men’s moisturiser into his face.

  ‘Boss, this is George Regan we’re talking about, not some rookie plod making assumptions. He knows Green; he’s been cross-examined by him a few times in his career, as most of us have. The body’s pretty banged up, so he didn’t twig at first sight, but when he was told whose motor it was, he got back down and took a closer look. That’s who it is; no doubt.’

  ‘So what are we doing about it?’

  ‘We’re treating it as a suspicious death. The man left his office saying that he was coming here, to Fettes, to see Arturus Luksa, in custody, yet he wound up dead in his car in the wilds of East Lothian. Maybe it was an accident, but after the way the Gerulaitis case is turning out, that’s pretty low down my list of possibilities. I’ve told George to have the road closed off at either end, but there’s been no radio chat on this, so I don’t expect any press to turn up. From what he tells me, though, it will be a bugger of a job to get the body out of there, let alone the car.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Skinner concurred. ‘I know that area. I take my kids exploring over there sometimes. Anything south of the A1 is another world; you could meet dinosaurs over there and not be surprised. The roads are primeval too; there’s barely room for two cars The way you’ve described the scene, it’ll take a crane to lift that Jaguar, but I can’t see you getting one down there.’

  ‘That’s what fire and rescue say too. They’re talking about asking the military for help by lending us a helicopter. The plan will be, get it out of there, transfer it to a lorry on the nearest accessible area and take it to the lab for examination by Dorward’s lot.’

  The chief opened his wardrobe, in which he kept his uniform and a few items of civilian clothes, and selected a linen shirt. ‘And the body?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve told George to make sure that it’s extracted very carefully by the paramedics, once the fire team has cut an exit route, so that there’s as little additional damage as possible. Professor Joe and his bright young things did well on Gerulaitis; we’ll see what they can tell us about the way Green died.’

  Skinner buttoned his shirt, tucked it into the beige jeans he was wearing, selected a soft black leather jerkin from the rail, and closed the wardrobe door. ‘What do you reckon, Mario?’ he murmured, as he stepped back into his office. ‘What’s up here? Let’s think this through; let’s look at things as they happen. Tomas Zaliukas kills himself, less than a week after he brings his brother over from Lithuania, apparently to sort out some trouble. Jonas had a heavy-duty military career, so he’s not been imported as a diplomat. Agreed?’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘What’s the first thing he does? He has Valdas, a nervous Valdas according to our witness, call a meeting of the managers, and he says to them that the imported Estonian girls have to be withdrawn from the massage parlours, like yesterday. Linas Jankauskas questions him, and Jonas drops him like a side
of beef. What does that tell us?’

  ‘It says to me that Tomas might not have known about Valdas importing the women after all, and that when he found out, he hit the roof.’

  ‘Yes, I agree. But how did he find out? And when he did, why didn’t he simply square his cousin up himself? This is still the old Tommy Zale we’re talking about, the man who, legend has it, once cut a guy’s hand off with a chainsaw just for copying his tattoo. He might not have been hands on in the sex business, but he was still capable of taking Valdas into a small room and beating the shite out of him. Yet he didn’t, or if he did, he didn’t stop there. No, he called for his brother, a guy formidable enough to reduce a roomful of fairly hard guys to respectful silence. Then there’s Desperate Dan. Who the fuck is he? Where did he come from?’

  McGuire sighed. ‘As of now, we still have no idea,’ he admitted. ‘Maybe, but we know one thing about him. He had the clout, even with Jonas in town, to call the managers together again . . . before they even knew that Tomas was fucking dead . . .’ as he spoke, he stabbed his desk several times with his forefinger to emphasis the point, ‘and tell them that he was the new man in authority, with a letter from the newly headless Tomas to prove it. The same day, he took Anna Romanova from Linas’s place, over his dead body, and he dropped her off at the nearest surgery . . . and that, my friend is the piece of the puzzle I don’t understand. The other eight girls have been made to disappear, yet Desperate Dan dumped Anna Romanova in our lap. Why the fuck did he do that?’

  ‘He could have thought she was too far gone to be any use to us,’ the head of CID suggested.

  ‘That’s possible, I’ll grant you. However, it may also be the case that he didn’t care, because he thought that all she could lead us to was Valdas. And if he knew that Valdas wasn’t going to be around much longer . . .’

  McGuire’s eyes gleamed. ‘Yes, yes indeed.’

  ‘Look,’ said Skinner, ‘the way I see it we have two possibilities here. Tomas was in trouble; it got too much for him and he killed himself. Jonas wasn’t able to prevent that but he’s blaming people, specifically Linas, who’s been playing the silly bugger with his girl, and Valdas. So he’s been settling up before going back home. He killed Linas, without witnesses, and he tortured and killed Valdas; his wife, being there, had to go with him. I could buy into that; the man has an engineering degree, he’d have known how to set the fire that was supposed to have killed them. He’s got away with it, too. Your woman Kerr’s theory, it’s a good one, I’ll grant you. But do we have any witnesses placing Jonas at the scene?’

  ‘No,’ the chief superintendent conceded.

  ‘And in a burned-out house will we find any traces of him?’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘In which case we’ll never even get him to court . . . if it was him. As I said, I’d go for that . . . but for one thing, or person, or ex-person: Ken Green. If Ken Green’s death was a genuine accident, you could probably persuade me to go with the Jonas theory and close the book on that side of the business. But if it wasn’t, then what possible reason could Jonas have had to kill him? Mario, until you can prove to me that Green was going too fast on a dangerous road and skidded off, through that fence and into that quarry, I’m going to assume that he had help. And I’m going to ask, why?’ He smiled. ‘Specifically, right now, I’m going to ask you why.’

  McGuire sat in the edge of the chief’s desk. He closed his eyes, and sank into thought. Half a minute passed, more; then he opened them again wide. ‘What Desperate Dan said to the managers: he told them that while he’s the new guy they report to, he isn’t the ultimate boss. There’s somebody else.’

  ‘Good, you agree with me. So my alternative to the Jonas option is this. That person, whoever he might be, is very shy. But three people must have known who he was: Tomas Zaliukas, Valdas Gerulaitis, and Ken Green. What did Ken Green do for Tomas?’ Skinner asked, but without waiting for a reply, he continued. ‘He helped him set up Lituania SAFI, the Uruguayan offshore company. And who was involved in that? Tomas and Valdas we know of, but was there a third person?’ He frowned as his mind worked recalling details from briefings he had been given. ‘Wait a minute,’ he murmured. ‘Green told Sauce that Tomas used Regine as a shareholder in the offshore business, because there had to be two. Right?’

  ‘Yes,’ McGuire agreed.

  ‘Then he lied to the lad,’ Skinner exclaimed. ‘Listen, Tomas’s original will left his share in the company to his wife. He couldn’t have done that if she’d been a shareholder already. So yes! There is somebody else; there has to be, he’s listed on the confidential shareholder register out in Uruguay, and Ken Green was so keen to keep the fact from us that he told porkies to a police officer.’ He chuckled ‘No, before you suggest it, there’s no point in you going out there because the names are legally protected from intrusion even by the Uruguayan authorities, let alone us. David Mackenzie checked that out for me yesterday. So what does Green’s death mean?’ he challenged. ‘I reckon it says that there’s nobody left alive to tell us who the mystery man is.’

  ‘So any way you look at it,’ said McGuire, quietly, ‘it’s a dead end.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s only one road. Let’s see what the autopsy on Green shows up, and what our guys can find in his car, but we still have plenty to work on. Look for Jonas; if he turns up back in Vilnius, we need to know. Find Desperate Dan; we’ve got a solid description of him. And not least find those women and, through them, find the missing girls.’

  ‘If they’re still alive.’

  ‘Granted. We can only hope that they are. Mind you, I’ve got no idea where you start, I admit.’

  ‘With the mini-bus they took them away in,’ said the head of CID. ‘Ramanauskas told us it was silver, although he had no idea of the make or model. We’re looking at street camera footage for Wednesday morning; if we find any possible vehicles we’ll show them to him.’

  ‘Good, but something else; we’ve been thinking locally about this from the off. I want you to check out whether Lituania SAFI has other properties anywhere else in Scotland. You crack on with that, and as you do, I’ve got business of my own to attend to. The massage parlours are key to the whole business, we’re agreed, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that being the case, I’m going to talk to the man who sold them to Tomas Zaliukas in the first place; my old sparring partner, Lennie Plenderleith, the beneficiary of Tony Manson’s estate.’ He grinned. ‘Now bugger off, or I’ll be late picking up my daughter.’

  Fifty-eight

  ‘I’ve never been here before,’ said Cheeky, leaning against the bar and surveying the function room. ‘It’s nice. What’s it called again?’

  ‘The Grosvenor,’ Sauce reminded her. ‘It’s not bad at all; it’s the nearest place to our office that’s big enough, so we usually come here for our dos.’

  ‘It’s handy for your place too; we could almost walk home from here. I bet you they give you a good deal, considering who you are.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. There’s a social committee that organises these things, but I’m not on it.’

  ‘How many people are coming?’ she asked. ‘Will there be seats enough for everybody when they serve the food?’

  ‘About sixty, I think.’ He counted the tables surrounding the dance floor. ‘Yeah, it’ll be fine.’ He picked up his drink, and took her arm. ‘Come on and meet my boss,’ he said, leading her towards the far end of the bar.

  ‘I thought Jack was your boss,’ she retorted, nodding towards McGurk, who sat at one of the tables with Lisa Weekes, his partner.

  ‘Jack’s my sergeant; that’s different. This is our boss; DI Stallings.’ He stopped beside a dark-haired thirty-something woman in a dark-blue dress, who stood beside a lean, fit-looking man, with sharp appraising eyes. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘this is Cheeky, my girlfriend.’

  Stallings turned. Unwittingly, she blinked as she took in Haddock’s partner; the girl would have been bea
utiful with no presentation at all, but with her perfectly arranged hair and under-stated make-up, she was stunning. She must have a thing for lads with big ears, she thought, or maybe they’re a sign of something else. ‘Drop the “Ma’am”, Sauce,’ she exclaimed. ‘This a bloody dance, not an inspection. The name’s Becky, Cheeky; I’m not going to ask about your name, but I’m sure there’s a story behind it. This is my other half, Ray.’

  Wilding’s grin stopped a couple of millimetres short of a leer. ‘Welcome to our inner circle,’ he greeted her. ‘Ever been to a policeman’s ball before?’

  ‘No,’ said Cheeky, ‘but I know the punchline. When’s the raffle?’

  He laughed. ‘Ah, we’re not having one tonight. We couldn’t get anyone to put up the prize.’

  ‘Are all your team coming, Ray?’ Sauce asked.

  ‘Sammy Pye and Ruth aren’t; he’s off on his fast-track course. But Griff and Cowan are coming, possibly even hand in hand, if I read things right.’

  ‘That might be interesting,’ Stallings murmured. She nodded towards the door, towards a big grey-haired man in jeans and a leather jerkin, who had just come into the room, accompanied by a tall, slim mid-twenties woman, with big hair and eyes that seemed to command the attention of every man in the room, with the possible exception of DC Haddock.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Cheeky asked him.

  ‘That’s Mr Skinner,’ he replied, ‘our chief constable. And that’s Alex with him, his daughter. She used to go out with Griff; that’s Griff Montell, he works with Ray, and with Alice Cowan. From what Ray’s saying . . .’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ Stallings laughed. ‘That lady left Montell behind a while back. Spat out the bones, I’ll bet.’

  ‘You’re not from Edinburgh, Becky, are you,’ said Cheeky; it was more comment than question.

  ‘No, I’m a newish arrival. I was in the Met when I met Smiler here,’ she dug Wilding in the ribs, ‘and decided I fancied a spell up north.’