20 - A Rush of Blood

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘In that case . . .’ McIlhenney exclaimed. ‘But just to be certain, give her a call and get her to say it again. If she gives you the all clear, shove the lot in your car and bring it back. We can look at it at our leisure. You’re right, we might have got ourselves a bonus. It’s still second prize, though, behind something to identify Tomas Zaliukas’s partner in the massage parlour business.’

  As he listened, McGurk was aware of hand signals along aside him. ‘That’s Sauce finished now,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing.’

  ‘Bugger!’ the superintendent swore. ‘Still . . . even that tells us something. There should have been a file on Lituania SAFI, but there isn’t. Somebody has beaten you to it, I’m certain. Jack, I want the two of you to wait there. Dorward’s going to love this, but I’m going to ask him to send a team out there. I want that place gone over. If there’s even a single trace there, and we can match it . . .’

  Seventy

  ‘Thanks for the car pick-up,’ said Andy Martin, as Skinner greeted him at the main entrance to the police headquarters building. ‘It’s a bugger trying to get a taxi at Haymarket Station at this time of night.’

  ‘It’s just as well your place is walking distance,’ his host noted. ‘You won’t have to bother with that most nights. Do you think the train commuting will work, long term?’

  ‘I reckon so. I don’t have to tell you how much reading the job’s going to bring with it. I’ll be able to do quite a lot of it on the move.’

  ‘I’m glad you got it,’ Skinner confessed. ‘Tayside was too small for a guy like you. And as for coming back here as my deputy . . . this force is too small to contain both of us these days. You’re best off in the agency.’

  ‘I think I agree with you.’ He shivered. ‘Bob, can we get inside? It’s bloody freezing out here. The cold weather seems to be on its way back.’

  ‘Sure.’ The chief constable led the way through the revolving door, and up the stairway behind the reception desk. At the top, instead of heading left for the command suite he turned right. ‘Where are we going?’ Martin asked.

  ‘Neil’s office. He’s pulled all the relevant files together.’

  ‘Neil? Not Mario?’

  ‘Yup. The McGuire is in France, for reasons that we’ll get to later.’ As he spoke, they arrived at the superintendent’s door. He gave it a quick, unnecessary rap, then opened it. ‘Guest’s arrived,’ he said.

  McIlhenney rose from behind his desk, extending his hand. ‘Hi, Andy,’ he greeted him, like the old friend he was. ‘Good to see you. Congratulations on the new job. And commiserations,’ he added, ‘on the other thing.’ Martin frowned in sudden alarm. ‘It’s OK,’ the superintendent assured him. ‘The boss told me so that I didn’t put my foot in it, but it’s not general knowledge.’

  ‘Good. We don’t plan to issue a press release. Those who need to know, will. Those who don’t . . . can mind their own fucking business.’

  ‘I’m his unofficial PR adviser on the subject,’ Skinner told McIlhenney, ‘having been over the course myself. Are you ready to start?’ he asked him.

  ‘Yes. I’ve got all the files here.’ He waited until the two senior officers were seated. ‘Andy,’ he began, ‘from the days when you were head of CID here, do you remember Tomas Zaliukas?’

  ‘Tommy Zale? Sure; Lithuanian, minor hoodlum as a youngster, never convicted, gone straight, so he says, and doing very well for himself in the pubs and clubs business, then more recently in property development and management.’

  ‘And in another sector.’

  Martin nodded. ‘Massage parlours, or licensed brothels as some call them. He bought Tony Manson’s properties from his estate. Good investment, but the downside was that it soured his reputation among the city establishment. He was on the point of joining the New Club and the Royal Burgess Golf Club, but he was blackballed for both. Regine, his wife, wasn’t too pleased either, but Tommy assured her that the places would be run as clean as he could manage. To ensure that he installed his own people as managers; all Lithuanian, all loyal to him.’

  ‘Jesus wept, Andy,’ McIlhenney sighed. ‘See that memory of yours. Is there anything you don’t know about Zaliukas?’

  ‘I know that he and Regine have two kids, that she runs Indigo, their top place, personally, and that she’s as important as he is to that side of their business. But that’s it.’

  ‘Then you know everything about him,’ said Skinner, ‘save one important fact. He’s dead.’

  ‘What?’ Martin looked at him, incredulous. ‘How?’

  ‘In the early hours of Wednesday morning he climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat with a sawn-off shotgun that must have been a souvenir from the old days, and shot himself.’

  ‘That’s news to me,’ Martin confessed. ‘Mind you I was pretty busy from Thursday on, with one thing and another, so I can claim that as an excuse for missing it. Plus the fact that he wasn’t under the eye of my new outfit, so it wasn’t flagged up when it happened.’

  ‘Maybe you should have been watching him,’ McIlhenney suggested. ‘We believe . . . no, we’re bloody sure that he had a partner in the massage parlour business. Frances Birtles, who acted for the vendor of the Edinburgh places . . .’

  ‘That would be Lennie Plenderleith?’

  ‘Spot on again. The places were bought by an offshore company set up by Ken Green. He told us that it was owned by Tomas and Regine alone, but we know he lied about that. We’re certain there was a partner involved, and we know that when they completed the deal Zaliukas put up half the money personally, and the rest was paid in untraceable bonds. With me?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Let’s go on, then. The night before Tomas died . . . get that, the night before . . . his brother Jonas, who’d only arrived from Lithuania a few days before, told the managers to close up. Next day they were summoned to meet a guy none of them knew. He showed them a letter from Tommy, saying that the businesses were under new direction, and he said that he was the director.’

  ‘Do you know what triggered this?’

  ‘You’re bound to remember Tomas’s cousin,’ McIlhenney grinned, challenging.

  ‘Valdas Gerulaitis? Yes. Slimy character; he does Tomas’s books, in theory, but that’s just to keep him employed and out of trouble. Of all Zaliukas’s home country crew he’s the only one who’s family, and that’s why he was tolerated. He’s a bad bastard and he’s not too clever with it either.’

  ‘You’re not wrong on either count,’ the superintendent told him. ‘A few months ago he decided on a wee bit of private enterprise. He imported nine girls from Estonia, hidden in a lorry, and put them to work on their backs in the massage parlour; more profit per shag than the local talent, so he thought. That seems to have been the catalyst.’

  Martin’s eyebrows rose. ‘Indeed! Now that’s something the SCDEA is interested in. Traffickers of women for prostitution are among our key targets. I’ve got a dedicated team on it. Have you made an arrest? If you have I’d like them to sit in on the interview.’

  ‘You’ve been very busy, Andy. You’ve missed another chapter. Gerulaitis is dead too, and his wife; they were caught in a fire in their house last Thursday.’

  ‘Jesus, this gets better. Where are you holding the women?’

  ‘We’ve only got one of them.’ McIlhenney explained how Anna Romanova had been found, and how she had been treated. ‘She’s still in hospital, and she’ll be taken into care after that. The other eight were being kept at a flat in Scotland Street, but they were moved from there on Wednesday, by two women. We’ve no idea who they are.’

  ‘Can my people talk to this Anna girl?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Skinner, ‘but you won’t learn anything. We believe this was a one-off piece of private enterprise by Valdas, and now he’s dead. This is our reasoning. Zaliukas let Valdas run the Edinburgh massage parlours, and he pulled this daft stroke behind his back. Somehow, the unknown partner found out about it before Tomas did, and the stu
ff hit the ventilator. The pressure on him was so great that he killed himself . . . and he did; there’s no other possibility. But something strange happened after that. In his will, he left his stake in the offshore company to Valdas’s wife, Laima, a fucking horrible woman by all accounts.’

  ‘She was,’ Martin agreed. ‘As I recall, the Lithuanians all called her the Gorgon.’

  ‘Ironic: she wound up being more or less turned to stone herself. Anyway, the following evening, she and he went to the bad fire, and about twenty-four hours later, Ken Green, who’d set up the company, was killed in a car crash, on his way to a cottage where he kept details of the parts of his business that he didn’t want anyone else to see. We can’t prove otherwise, not to jury standards, but we don’t believe for a fucking minute that these deaths were accidental. They were loose ends being tied off. On top of that, Green’s files on Lituania SAFI have vanished from his cottage hideaway. Jack McGurk’s out there just now, with a forensic team. Jack’s found a key hidden under a plant pot in the garden . . . and there were recent marks in the soil beneath it that make it look as if it was used and then replaced. Someone’s been in before them.’

  ‘I can follow all that,’ Martin told him. ‘So Tomas’s partner’s made a hostile takeover for the business, and you’re stuck.’ He grinned. ‘I’m flattered to be asked for help, but what makes you think I can?’

  ‘Because we’re not entirely stuck. We’ve got a description of the man who dumped young Anna at the doctor’s. Also . . . and this is where you come in . . . we’ve discovered that Lituania SAFI has property interests outside Edinburgh. It owns a sex shop, nine massage parlours and a couple of bingo halls, and six of these places are in your old patch, Tayside.’

  ‘I can see why you’re clutching at this straw, Bob,’ his colleague replied, ‘but I doubt if I can add anything. I take it these places are all owned by the offshore company and licensed by someone else?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. If you give me a list of the managers I’ll see if they’ve got form, but other than that . . .’

  ‘We’ve already checked that. They’ve got nothing more than a few speeding charges among the lot of them.’

  ‘Then I don’t see what else I can do. Yes, we took an interest in these places in Tayside, but in truth, in my time there we never had any complaints about any of them. We had a woman in Perth who skulled her husband with the steam iron when she found some credit card payments to the parlour there, but that’s the only occasion I remember any of those places coming to the attention of the police.’

  Skinner sighed. ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered. ‘It was a forlorn hope, I suppose.’

  ‘Look,’ Martin offered, ‘if you tell me you think this is serious organised crime, I will put a team on it, but to me it looks like a fairly localised turf war over some brothels. Even if you’re right, what can we do? We could interview each licensee or manager; but if they are working for a guy who’s serious enough to have had three people killed to protect his identity, do you think they’re going to tell you who he is? I’m new in post, and I cannot send my people off fishing for guppies when their job is to catch sharks.’

  ‘No; I understand that,’ the chief constable conceded. ‘Too bad. We’ll just need to keep on looking for Desperate Dan. He’s the last hope we have.’

  ‘Who?’

  Skinner chuckled. ‘Ah, it’s just a nickname, for the guy who delivered Anna to the surgery, and who might well have done for Linas Jankauskas, her pimp . . . although I’m still not convinced Jonas Zaliukas didn’t take him out. The witness who gave us his description said he’s a dead ringer for the old comic book cowboy.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Martin exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I reckon I know who he is.’

  Seventy-one

  ‘I’m glad we had the satellite navigation,’ said Becky Stallings. ‘This place is further off the motorway than I’d thought from looking at the map. And it’s not very big either.’

  ‘We’d have found it,’ Mario McGuire assured her. ‘My mother lives in Tuscany. Compared to some of the in-country villages there, this Mezin is a metropolis.’ As he spoke, the mellifluous female voice from the box told him to take a right turn into Place Armand Fallières. When he obeyed, it told him that his destination was straight ahead. He drew the car to a halt at the kerbside, in what appeared to be, in the faint light just after nightfall, a square, bounded on two sides by shops and a pizzeria, on the third by a church, and on the fourth, in the direction in which they faced, by houses, with a street opening to the left. ‘That must be Rue St Cauzimis,’ he murmured.

  ‘What time is it?’ Stallings asked. ‘I can’t find it on this display.’

  ‘It’s down there in the corner, see,’ he replied. ‘Bottom right. It’s seven, on the dot.’

  ‘Will we go straight there?’

  ‘No, let’s check into the hotel and dump the motor. According to the map, it’s just behind the church.’ He engaged gear, and drove slowly towards the foot of the square. There he found, as he had expected, a second road beside Rue St Cauzimis, that led into a large manor house with a sign that read ‘Hotel de Ville’.

  He parked the car at the side of the main entrance, and led the way inside. The receptionist smiled as they entered. ‘Our late bookings?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s us,’ said Stallings, cheerfully, pleased to be addressed in English for the first time since they had arrived at Charles de Gaulle.

  They completed the check-in formalities, for one night with an option on a second, and went to their rooms, agreeing to meet back in the foyer at seven thirty.

  When they did, McGuire was still in his travel clothes, black chinos, a red Ralph Lauren polo shirt, and a sports jacket, but the DI had changed from her jeans into a light pleated skirt, with a white blouse and a short, elegant, brown suede coat. She caught his glance. ‘I know I’m here as the obligatory female, Mario,’ she told him, ‘so it’s best that I dress like one. How do we play this? Do we call her first?’

  ‘No. We march right up to number one-oh-five and knock on the door.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘It’s why the boss sent us here. Let’s go.’ He led the way out of the hotel, and down the drive.

  The temperature had dropped by a few degrees in the time they had been in the hotel. Stallings pulled her coat tight. ‘This is France,’ she muttered. ‘Should it be this cold?’

  ‘In the winter it can get a lot worse than this.’

  They stepped into Rue St Cauzimis, a cobbled street that sloped downwards from the square, checking the numbers as they walked, ‘One zero nine,’ the detective superintendent muttered, ‘one zero seven. One hundred and five,’ he announced. ‘This is it.’

  The house was on a corner, old like those around it, and built in stone that an unthinking owner had decided to ruin by painting white. A light hung over the blue front door, showing a brass knocker in the centre. McGuire seized it and rapped three times, hard. ‘God,’ Stallings whispered. ‘Anyone, anywhere in the world would know that’s the police.’

  ‘That or the rent collector.’

  ‘I wonder how much the rents are around . . .’

  She was interrupted by the opening of the door, not by the woman they were expecting, but by a tall man, McGuire’s equal in height if not width, dressed all in black, trousers and a crew-necked sweater. He looked a year or so short of thirty; his dark hair was close cropped and his tan looked out of place in February. A couple of yards behind him stood a second man, identically dressed, a clone of the first, save for a neatly trimmed beard.

  The doorkeeper said nothing; he simply stared, unsmiling.

  ‘We’d like to see Mrs Regine Zaliukas, please,’ the head of CID told him.

  The man replied in a language that neither police officer understood.

  McGuire repeated his request, but in French.

  ‘She’s not availabl
e,’ he said, in the same language.

  ‘Would you like to ask her whether she is or not?’

  ‘Just go away, will you?’

  His French is OK, the detective thought, but his accent’s odd. ‘We can’t do that,’ he said. ‘We’ve come a long way to see the lady, from Scotland. We’re concerned about her welfare.’

  ‘That’s what we’re for,’ the man retorted.

  ‘Now why doesn’t that reassure me?’ McGuire murmured, in English.

  The man edged forward, until the Scot made him pause with a shake of his head. ‘Don’t do that, soldier boy,’ he said, quietly. ‘I’ve been to the same school as you. And think on this. As long as you’re standing in that narrow doorway, it’s just you and me.’

  ‘That might not worry me.’

  The guardian’s hand moved, reaching behind his back . . . but like others before him, he had underestimated McGuire’s hand speed, and was unprepared for the power of the fist that slammed into the pit of his stomach, and upwards, in a surge of agony that drove the breath from his lungs. The detective grabbed him before he could fall and spun him around, making his body a shield against the second man’s advance and, as he did so, snatching the pistol he had sought from the holster that was strapped to his belt, against his spine. ‘Just stop now,’ he ordered. He had reverted to English again, but his message got across.

  ‘Oui, Zaki; arretez.’ The woman’s voice came from the foot of a stairway to the left of the entrance hall. ‘Je connais cet homme. II est police, mais il est un ami . . . je pense. Is that right, Mario, are you a friend?’

  He laughed. ‘I’m surprised you can recognise me in the daylight, Regine. We usually see each other under those UV lights of yours in Indigo. Yes, I’m a friend all right, don’t you worry. We’re not police here, though. We’re no more official than these guys are, but somehow we didn’t think you’d want us to turn up with the local plod behind us.’ He released his hold on the doorkeeper, who was still gasping from his punch, slipped the pistol back into its place, and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Sorry about that, Zaki,’ he said.