‘Yes. He said he would have to deal with the trouble, but that his partner was a very serious man, and there could be danger until it was all made clear. He told me to take the children and come here to Mezin. He said he would come for me when it was safe. But it never was for him.’ Her eyes filled with tears, but she kept her self-control. ‘We left the very next day; I drove and we got here on the Friday afternoon. Everything was fine over the weekend. Tomas called me several times, and I told him we were OK. On Saturday he told me that Jonas had arrived from Lithuania, and also that his partner seemed to understand that what had happened was not his fault. I was going to go back, but he told me I should stay here for a few more days.’ She stopped. ‘I’m sorry. I need something to drink.’
Stallings rose to her feet. ‘I’ll get you some water.’
‘Thank you,’ said Regine. ‘A very little water, please, with a lot of whisky in it. You’ll find both in the kitchen.’ She looked around. ‘Would anyone else . . .?’
The three men shook their heads. ‘Nice shirt,’ Skinner remarked to Jonas Zaliukas, as the inspector left. ‘It looks brand new. Bit tight, though; maybe you should take it back and get a size bigger.’
The Lithuanian shrugged. ‘It’s OK,’ he murmured, with evident disinterest.
They stood in silence until Stallings returned, carrying two glasses, the whisky and a sparkling water for herself. The widow thanked her, and sank half of her drink in one swallow. ‘Where was I?’ she murmured. ‘Yes, the weekend. On Monday morning, just after ten o’clock, the doorbell rang. I thought nothing of it. I assumed that it was the postman, or maybe the friendly Englishman who lives a few doors up. But no, it was two other men, and they were not friendly. One was Dudley; I met him once a long time ago. The other was bigger, big strong man, with big chin. They pushed me into the house, then came in and closed the door. I told them to go or I’d call the gendarme, but Dudley just laughed. He told me we were all going, them, me and Aimée and Lucie. He was going to take us straight away, but the other man . . .’
‘Henry,’ said McGuire.
‘His name is Henry? Ah. He is not a nice man either, but he’s nicer than Dudley; he let me take clothes for the children, and some toys and books. I asked him where we were going, but he wouldn’t tell me. They took us outside . . . there was nobody in the street, but there never is . . . and put us into the back of a car, a hire car with the label still hanging from the mirror. We drove for a while, until we arrived at a cottage on the far side of Agen, in the country, with nothing around it. There was another car parked outside, just like the first. When they took us inside, I saw they had food in bags on the table. I asked how long they were going to keep us there. Dudley said that would depend on Tomas. He said that if he did what he was told we would be home in a couple of days. If not. . . He didn’t finish, but the way he looked at me, and the girls, made me very frightened.’ She shuddered, and winced, as if in pain. ‘Dudley is a very bad man.’
Skinner looked at her and sensed renewed hesitancy. ‘Tell us, please,’ he asked. ‘I think I know but we need to hear it from you.’
She nodded, and finished her whisky in a second swallow. ‘They gave us a bedroom and left us there. The girls wanted to know what was going on. I told them that these men were friends of Daddy’s and that they were going to look after us for a little while. I checked the window, of course, but it had been screwed shut. I thought about breaking the glass and maybe using a piece as a weapon, but with two of them that would have been hopeless. After an hour or so, they came back. They made us all sit on the bed. I asked the other man, Henry, how they had known where we were. He looked at me, and he said, “Valdas’s wife doesn’t like you. She knew where Tomas would have sent you. We only had to ask her the once.” That bitch Laima,’ she hissed. ‘Even if he hadn’t told me I’d have guessed quickly enough. Then Dudley took out a mobile telephone. “We’re going to make a wee movie,” he said, and he smiled, but in a horrible way. He pointed the phone at us, and he began to speak, in Lithuanian, very bad Lithuanian. I was surprised at first, but I remembered those two years at sea.’
‘You speak it yourself?’ Stallings exclaimed.
Regine stared at her. ‘Lady,’ she replied, ‘if you marry a man and you don’t learn his language, then you are a fool.’
‘Of course,’ said the chief constable. ‘But go on.’
‘When Dudley spoke, it was as if he was speaking to Tomas. “Here we are,” he said, “us and your three treasures. And this is what’s going to happen.” The other man stopped him there. He asked me if he could take the girls for a walk. Looking back, I took a big risk trusting him. He could have been a paedophile, anything, but something in his eyes told me that I could, and that I should get the children out of there. So I said yes, and I told them to go with him.’ She sighed. ‘And that left Dudley and me alone.’ Once again, pain flashed across her face. ‘As soon as they were gone, he switched on the phone again, and he began to speak again. “Tomas,” he said, still in his terrible Lithuanian, and I remember every word, “the big man says there’s a price for the crap that’s happened, and it’s you that has to pay it. Tomorrow, you’re to go to your lawyer and make whatever arrangements you need to, to transfer your holding in Lituania SAFI to another company, Scotland SAFI. Don’t you worry, we’ll know when you’ve done that. When you have, you’ll go to a public place . . . and we’ll be watching you, don’t you worry . . . and you will kill yourself. That’s what the man wants. If you don’t do it, then we’ll send your wife and your kids back to you in as many boxes as it takes, but it’ll be at least a dozen. And you know, the man always keeps his promises.” And then he stopped.’ She looked up at Skinner. ‘That’s why Tomas killed himself,’ she said. ‘To save our lives.’ She sat silent for a few seconds. ‘As soon as he’d brought the girls back,’ she continued, ‘Henry left in the other car, and he didn’t come back. Dudley locked us in our room, brought us food and let us out to go to the toilet when we asked, but he didn’t say any more to us. I didn’t want him to, because I was terrified. Two days later on the Wednesday he drove us back to Mezin and let us out of the car on the edge of the village. When he did that, I knew that Tomas was dead.’
Skinner nodded. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, ‘that’s what I thought.’ As he looked at Regine once more, he seemed to share her pain. ‘But that’s not all, is it?’ he added.
The woman’s face twisted; her eyes screwed up tight. ‘It’s all,’ she cried, quietly.
‘Ah, but it isn’t,’ the chief constable went on, as his colleagues’ attention switched to him. ‘Dudley didn’t stop where you said, did he?’
Very slowly, Regine Zaliukas shook her head, and drew her right foot out of its fluffy slipper. Its middle toe was missing, the stump covered by a white bandage.
A small scream escaped from Becky Stallings; from McGuire a low animal snarl.
‘He set the phone,’ the woman told them, her voice almost a moan, ‘so that it filmed him as he did it, with a pair of garden clippers. When I had stopped screaming, he told me that if I did not give him Tomas’s number, he would cut off another. I did, of course. He sent the video to Tomas, and then he waited. After a few minutes his phone rang and it was Tomas. He put it on speaker so I could hear. He yelled at Dudley; he promised that he would take all ten of his, one by one, before he killed him. But Dudley said, “You won’t be able to do that, will you, because you’ll be dead.” And now he is.’ She slumped back in her chair, looked at Stallings, and held out her empty glass. ‘Please.’
‘I’m going to eat that bastard when we catch him,’ McGuire swore, as the DI headed for the kitchen.
‘My sentiments entirely,’ Skinner concurred. ‘Or they would be if Dudley was still fit for consumption. Somebody strung him up last night, in a barn,’ he put his wrists together above his head, ‘like that. Then he cut off all ten of his toes. When he was finished he put a shotgun in old Dudley’s mouth and pulled the trigger. When Henry Brown came c
harging on to the scene, like the Seventh Cavalry, armed with a big Colt handgun, he shot the legs out from under him, and then did the same to him.’ He looked at Jonas Zaliukas. ‘We found them maybe sooner than you expected,’ he said. ‘But it was still too late for us to trace your flight. You were back in France by that time. There’s a late evening service from Edinburgh to Carcassonne on a Monday,’ he explained to McGuire, and to Stallings as she returned with a refilled glass. ‘David Mackenzie found it when he checked all possible flights for me first thing this morning. Its passenger list shows a Colonel J. Zaliukas, travelling on a Lithuanian passport. Let me guess, Jonas,’ he said. ‘You bought the shirt at the airport when you landed.’
‘Yes, I did,’ the man admitted. ‘But I know nothing of the other things.’
‘You know everything, Colonel. You also know that we’ll never place you at that crime scene in a month of wet Sundays.’
‘Maybe,’ McGuire exclaimed. ‘The shirt he wore yesterday . . .’
‘You can have it if you want,’ the Lithuanian offered.
Skinner smiled. ‘Don’t bother, Mario. He wore a sterile tunic, and then he burned it in a bin behind the barn . . . the same bin, I reckon, that was used to burn Ken Green’s files to ashes. He and his clothes will be clean as a whistle. But that’s why Regine wouldn’t talk to you last night. She had to wait until Jonas got back, to tell her it was OK. Did he tell you what he was going to Scotland to do?’ he asked her.
‘I tell her nothing,’ said Zaliukas quickly. ‘Only that she should stay with Max and Zaki and say nothing to anyone until I got back.’
‘So why did you go to Scotland?’
‘I go to make arrangements for Tomas’s funeral. You can check if you like. People called Scotmid will do it.’
‘And it’ll be safe for Regine to go back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure? A man called Cameron McCullough might have a different view.’
‘No. That man, you will find, is a realist. If he did think to do harm to Regine, or rather order it, for he does nothing himself, he would know that while he may have a few hoodlums left, I have an army.’
Skinner stepped slowly across to him, feeling his eyes sting with weariness as he looked down at him. ‘Let me tell you something, Jonas. If any of your soldiers set foot in Scotland, they will be on the first plane home . . . if they’re lucky. Regine will be safe because I will make it my business to ensure that she is. As for McCullough, I still have to make his acquaintance. But I will.’ He tapped him on the chest. ‘And you? As soon as your brother is in the ground, Colonel, you should go back to Lithuania. And you should fucking stay there.’
Eighty-five
‘You don’t think Tayside will be able to build a case?’ Aileen asked her husband. He was beside her, sprawled on the sofa in the garden room. On a table by his side lay three Corona beer bottles, two of them empty, and a plate, on which lay a small piece of crust, the last relic of a pizza that he had picked up from the takeaway on his way home.
‘Not against Jonas. We can track his movements, no problem. He flew to France on the evening before his brother died. He did tell me that Tomas insisted on it. He wanted him to be ready to look for Regine and the kids if those two bastards didn’t keep their word and let them go, but I think also he was afraid that Jonas would try to stop him carrying out their last instruction.’
‘To kill himself?’
Bob nodded. ‘When he got to Mezin, Regine and the kids had just been released. He treated her injury . . . which, incredibly, she’d managed to keep from her daughters . . . and he brought his two ex-soldier pals across to make sure they stayed safe while he took care of business. That may well have been his last order from his brother, but we’ll never know that. What we do know is that he flew back to Edinburgh on Sunday. We know as well that he visited the Scotmid Funeral Service on Monday morning. But we can’t place him anywhere else until he caught that late evening flight to Carcassonne. And there is no chance that we ever will.’
‘Does that bother you?’
He looked at her, sideways on the couch, considering her quiet question. ‘I wouldn’t say this to many other people,’ he began, ‘but during my career there have been a very few occasions, just one or two, when I’ve seen someone get away with a crime, and even though I’ve done my best to nail them, I haven’t been too upset by my failure. This is one of them. We have Tomas Zaliukas’s mobile phone among his possessions. That video’s on it. I’ve seen it, and honest to God, if it had turned out differently and we had that guy Dudley in our custody . . .’ His voice tailed off.
She laid a hand on his chest as he picked up his bottle. ‘You’ve had a hell of a couple of days, my love.’
‘You could say that,’ he conceded, ‘and probably another one to come tomorrow. Andy’s taking me to meet this Grandpa McCullough.’
‘You know,’ Aileen confessed, ‘when you told me about this I couldn’t help laughing at the thought of Tommy Murtagh, caught in flagrante with his client’s sister, the wife of a ruthless killer to boot.’
‘Yes, that was a beauty; I gave in to a small smile myself. Yet lucky wee Tommy’s free and clear. Goldie’s a widow now, so who knows how that relationship might develop.’ He killed his third Corona.
‘I’ll get you another,’ his wife offered.
‘You are an angel of mercy in the darkest of worlds.’
‘How nice.’
‘So don’t just bring me one, bring me a six-pack and an opener. Don’t bother with the lime.’
‘Are you sure? About the beer, not the lime.’
‘Honey, I dropped off to sleep on the flight home. I had a nightmare. Apparently I started to shout some very scary things about toes. Mario had to waken me.’ He waved the empty bottle. ‘I’d like to put a few more of these between me and my next dream.’
When she returned with six more Coronas, he was staring out of the window, into the night, so still that for a moment . . . He stirred, looked up at her and smiled. ‘Thanks, angel mine,’ he said, as she uncapped one and handed it to him. ‘Every little helps.’
‘But don’t overdo it.’
‘I never do. I’ll work it off tomorrow anyway.’ The smile left him. ‘But I’ve got more on my mind than gory crime scenes.’
‘Such as?’
‘A couple of things. This whole damned inquiry for a start. I’ve been reviewing it and I see great big glaring holes in the procedure. For example, the girl Anna Romanova was a direct link to the investigation of Zaliukas’s death, she was found hours after it and yet it took a full day for us to tie her in, and we only did that when two of our CID teams turned up on the same doorstep for different reasons. A shambles, a total. . .’ He sighed. ‘If we’d got our act together quicker, through proper interchange of current information, Valdas Gerulaitis might have been in custody on Friday evening, instead of being tortured and killed. If someone had tried to find out where Ken Green was when he failed to show for a client interview, maybe he wouldn’t be dead now either, and we might have found evidence in his cottage to tie Mr Murtagh’s prize client into this whole business. I doubt that, mind you; everything that man does seems to be invisible.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t really exist.’
‘Oh, he’s real, all right, as I’ll find out tomorrow.’
‘The cottage,’ Aileen exclaimed. ‘If Green was killed, how did they know about that?’
‘They’d probably been there. He probably used it for meetings that he couldn’t have in his office. My guys found a key under a plant pot. There were signs that both had been used, fairly recently.’
‘You can’t blame anybody for that.’
‘Hey, listen, I’m not blaming anybody but myself.’
‘For what?’
‘For a fundamental management mistake I’ve made. The problems we’ve had flowed from a lack of clear, single-minded thinking, at the top of the CID tree, starting with me when I put the present structure in place. The
Glimmer Twins: having Mario as head of CID and Neil as his deputy, it just doesn’t work. They didn’t get their nickname by accident; they are genuinely like brothers. They’re both brilliant detectives, outstanding police officers, but they’re too close and neither ever questions anything the other does. I’m going to have to separate them . . . but without either of them ever knowing it’s happened, for I don’t want either one thinking that he’s failed in any way.’
‘How are you going to do that?’
‘At this moment, I haven’t a bloody clue. That’s next week’s problem.’
‘What’s this week’s?’
‘A leak. I’ve still got one question that’s unanswered. Tomas’s last show of defiance: he was told to transfer his share in the massage parlours to another company. But he didn’t. Instead he left it to Laima Gerulaitis.’
‘A horrible woman, from what you’ve told me.’
‘Yeah, which makes me sure that he didn’t pick her name out of a hat. He did it knowing what might happen to her when Henry and Dudley found out. But how did they? Green’s ex-wife was able to confirm that he’d been to see Veronica Drake and that he’d changed his will, but that was all she could do. After Tomas was dead, Alex asked Drake about the contents; Drake told her, and she told us, via Jack McGurk and young Haddock.’
‘Which makes you think, again?’
‘Which makes me fear . . . that the McCullough clan has a mole in my force.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’
‘What else? Trap it. I don’t know how, but when I do . . . would you like a pair of moleskin gloves?’
Eighty-six
‘You’ve been looking distinctly fresher the last couple of mornings,’ Jack McGurk remarked.
‘What do you mean by that?’ Sauce Haddock retorted, bristling. ‘Did Neil McIlhenney not cure you of that terminal smugness yesterday?’
‘It’ll take more than that. Anyway, you know damn well what I mean.’ The DS peered at Becky Stallings as she came into the room. ‘You, on the other hand, look bloody knackered.’
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