A Brush With Death

by Quintin Jardine

  He took a mouthful of macchiato, and was wincing at the taste when his phone sounded. The detectives watched him as he answered, ‘Yes?’ without naming his caller; saw him listen, smile, nod once, twice, make notes on a paper napkin, then end the call and grin at them across the table.

  ‘Which piece of good news do you want first?’ he asked.

  ‘You choose,’ Mann replied.

  ‘Very well. That was my friend, my principal, my boss, if you like, in London. The first gem is this. Uilyam Mechikov was arrested twenty minutes ago at Newcastle airport, trying to board a flight for Dubai, having just bought a ticket for cash at the Emirates desk. She’s arranged for two officers of what we used to call Special Branch to bring him to Glasgow and hand him over to you, at Pitt Street, at midday tomorrow. When he gets here, you can ask him about the second diamond that’s fallen into our laps, something that was actually known before his arrest. At quarter past five on Monday afternoon, at which time we may assume Moscardinetto was dead, Mechikov made a phone call. Not to Brezinski, or Zirka, or anyone in Russia, but to someone close to home: Gene Alderney. Two minutes after that, our Genevieve sent a text message saying, “Got it. Complication. Dealt with.” The recipient was Bryce Stoddart.’

  Provan beamed. ‘You lot have your uses right enough,’ he laughed.

  Skinner looked at Mann. ‘I suggest that you have those two arrested on suspicion of murder, and detained overnight. We can tackle them in the morning, when we’re fresh and they’re not. By that time, we might know where the hell Alderney comes from.’

  Forty

  ‘You’re something of a mystery, Ms Alderney. I’ve had people check on you. They tell me that you’ve been a part of the Stoddart Promotions team for ten years, but before that, you’re pretty much invisible. In fact, you’re a very special person. You have a passport that says you’re a British citizen, but you don’t appear to have a National Insurance number, you’ve never paid any income tax in the UK, and the NHS haven’t heard of you either. Are you going to tell us how you managed that?’

  The little eyes narrowed beneath the heavy forehead. ‘I’m not going to tell you anything, Mr Skinner,’ the woman replied. ‘My business is my business and if you want to know it you have to find out from someone else. These clever people of yours are going to have to work harder.’

  He smiled. ‘They did. And they got back to me this morning, just as I arrived here. They tell me that the only trace on official records of a Genevieve Alderney was a birth registered in London in nineteen fifty-two, to a single mother whose address was given as a home for girls run by the Church of England. Father unknown, I’m afraid. There’s nothing on the registers after that, no marriage, no children, no death, and only the original of her birth certificate is known to exist. No copies were ever requested or issued. Dead end, it seemed.’

  ‘Tough shit,’ she growled. ‘I am who I am.’

  ‘Yes, but who the hell is that?’ he countered. ‘That’s what we want to know. You see, my clever people didn’t give up. Oh no, they went to the only possible source of information on baby Alderney: the Church. They discovered from its records that the child was adopted when she was only two months old, by a couple with the biblical-sounding names of Joseph and Mary Stoddart, to be a little sister for their son, Benjamin, whom they’d adopted two years previously. The child was renamed Adelaide Stoddart; a second certificate was issued in that name and an NHS number also. The medical history recorded under that number reveals that poor wee Adelaide, God bless her, was a sickly child. She had a heart defect that could be repaired very easily today, but that wasn’t the case in nineteen sixty-one, when she died in Great Ormond Street Hospital.

  ‘Joseph Stoddart, who was a demolition contractor, died of mesothelioma in nineteen eighty-nine. Mary, Benjamin Stoddart’s adoptive mother, died in two thousand and six. In February the following year, Genevieve Alderney’s birth certificate was presented to the UK Passport Office. The form and the photos with it were countersigned by Gino Butler, chartered accountant. Passport interviews hadn’t been introduced at that time in that part of the country, and so it was issued without you having to explain who you’d been for the previous fifty-five years. That’s what we’d like to know now.’

  ‘I’m Gene Alderney,’ she replied. ‘I’ve always been Gene Alderney.’

  ‘And I’ve always been Frankie Valli,’ Dan Provan scoffed, following with a reasonable rendition of the chorus of ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’.

  ‘Yes,’ Alderney hissed. ‘You should stick to that.’

  ‘Moving on from the acting detective inspector’s second career as a Jersey boy,’ Lottie Mann said, ‘and temporarily from the passport issue, we’d like to ask you about a phone call you received on your mobile just after five last Monday from Uilyam Mechikov.’

  Watching her closely, Skinner saw a very slight tightening of the woman’s eyes at the mention of the name, and possibly the first tiny crack in her formidable armour.

  ‘Who is he?’ she blustered. ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘You also know him as Billy Swords. He works for Stoddart Promotions, among others, as a master of ceremonies.’

  ‘Ah, Billy,’ she exclaimed, with a flash of a smile. ‘You should have said. Yes, I probably had a call from him.’

  ‘Probably?’ Skinner repeated. ‘Yes or no?’

  ‘Okay, yes, but I don’t remember the time.’

  ‘Why did he call you?’ Mann asked.

  ‘He wanted to ask me if I knew how much longer we’d be stuck in Scotland. I told him, how the hell should I know?’

  ‘Why do you think he wanted to know that?’ the DI pressed.

  Alderney shrugged. ‘Same answer, dear. How the fuck should I know?’

  Provan raised a hand. ‘Were you no’ concerned about that yourself? Your business is in London, mostly; you came up for Leo Speight’s farewell party, and okay he’s deid, and it’s sad, but the funeral’s no’ going to be for a while, and we havenae asked you to stay here. So? Why did ye, you and Stoddart? Beedham’s is a very nice hotel in a very nice spot, when the midgies aren’t biting lumps out of you, and you’re probably still on Leo’s tab, since it was his place. Even so, I don’t get it.’

  She stared at him, head tilted back, lip curling slightly. ‘Like I give a fuck about that also,’ she sneered.

  ‘What was the complication?’ Mann snapped.

  Once more their subject’s confidence seemed to waver, but only for a moment. ‘What complication?’

  ‘Immediately after you took the call from Mechikov – I’ll use that name since it’s the one on his mobile phone account – you sent Bryce Stoddart a text.’

  ‘You’ve been reading my texts?’ Alderney blustered.

  ‘We’re the police,’ the DI answered coolly. ‘We have access as part of a homicide investigation.’

  ‘But you have not said yet that Leo was murdered.’

  ‘Not Leo,’ Skinner said quietly. ‘The inquiry is into the death of Aldorino Moscardinetto, in Glasgow on Monday. Your associate Swords, or Mechikov, the guy who phoned you immediately after he was killed, has been arrested in Newcastle and is being brought back to Glasgow this morning. What do you think he’s going to say when he’s questioned?’

  ‘I should care? I know nothing about it. Who was he anyway, this Moscardinetto?’ She sneered dismissively.

  ‘We think,’ Mann replied ‘that he was the complication mentioned in your text to Bryce Stoddart. “Got it. Complication. Dealt with.” That’s what it said: we believe that “it” was the dead man’s laptop, which was stolen from his hotel room, along with his phone.’

  ‘The phone was important,’ Skinner added, ‘because he used that to record his interviews. You can shoot a movie with a mobile these days. Some people do.’

  ‘Is that so? Again, I should care. Who are you anyway, mister? You’re n
ot the insurance investigator that Gino Butler said you were, that’s for sure.’

  He smiled. ‘You got me. No, I’m not; actually I’m a sometime member of the Security Service, and believe me, I will find out who you really are.’

  ‘I’m Genevieve Alderney,’ she retorted. ‘Check my passport.’

  ‘We’re checking more than that, believe me. Now, challenge us with an explanation of what your text to Stoddart meant, if it wasn’t what all three of us believe it was.’

  ‘It was to do with our next fight promotion, in London, next month, with McBride the Edinburgh lad heading the bill. We needed a contract signed by an American fighter we’re bringing over. It arrived, but the complication was that a drug-test report was missing. I dealt with by having it faxed to our office. Some people still use fax.’

  Skinner nodded. ‘Pretty good, off the top of your head, so it’s probably true. But I doubt that it happened on Monday. Now tell us something else. Why did you tell Moscardinetto, the man you say you’ve never heard of, let alone met, that Leo Speight was lucky to be alive, but that his luck wasn’t going to last forever?’

  She stared at him for several seconds before replying. ‘Why should I say that?’ she asked softly.

  ‘No,’ he countered. ‘Not why should; why did you, Gene? I don’t know what you found on the laptop, if you were able to access its contents, but that doesn’t matter. There was another copy of the interviews that Moscardinetto recorded. He slipped it to Leo last Friday night. We have it, and we’ve viewed it. You feature, prominently. You really shouldn’t have killed him, you know. He was going to make you all movie stars.’

  Alderney’s face was impassive. ‘You have me on camera,’ she said, ‘talking to a man whose name I can’t even remember, who just turned up at my office saying he wanted to make a movie about boxing and boxers. I told him some truths, some tough home truths, and I said something about Leo Speight. He was the most famous fighter on the planet, so why would I not use his name? You have to do better than that, mister.’

  ‘No, we don’t, we really don’t,’ he told her. ‘That interview tells us a lot, but there’s one word you use that tells me most of all. During it you refer – passionately, if I may say so – to the victims of boxing, citing the example of a young man, vegetative, having, and I quote, “his ass wiped by a nurse”.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alderney barked. ‘It happens, no joke.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Skinner agreed. He smiled and glanced towards Mann. ‘Apologies, Lottie, for the indelicacy, but a London-born lady in her sixties and given to vulgarity would never say that. To her he’d be having his arse wiped, poor lad, as I’m sure he is. I don’t know where you learned your English, madam, but it wasn’t in this country. I will find out where.’

  ‘Theories, theories, all fucking theories,’ she sighed. ‘I have had enough of them. I am leaving; I’m going back to London.’

  ‘Oh no,’ Dan Provan said heavily. ‘That you are not. I don’t care whether we charge you with conspiracy to murder, or Bob here holds you under the Terrorism Act, but either way, you are staying in custody.’

  Forty-One

  ‘Gene is my father’s partner,’ Bryce Stoddart insisted. ‘He’s retired and lives in Arizona. I told him all this.’ He nodded towards Skinner, seated beyond the two detectives. ‘What’s he doing here anyway? He told me he worked for an insurance company.’

  ‘He’s helping us with our inquiries,’ Provan replied, with a mischievous grin that seemed to unsettle the promoter. ‘Look, chum,’ he continued, ‘we’ve checked that out. You lied to Bob here. Your dad lives in a care home in Dulwich, wherever that is, and he has done for seven years. As well as having dementia, he’s in the final stages of motor neurone disease, poor bugger. You tell people that he’s still involved in your business, because most of them don’t trust you. You lied to Bob about Gene Alderney, too. She was never anywhere near your business until about ten years ago, when she appeared out of the blue and your father got her a passport using a birth certificate that he found when his mother died. It belonged originally to his adopted sister, who never made it to ten years old.’

  The promoter paled. ‘How did you find all that out?’ he murmured.

  Provan glanced round at Skinner. ‘Insurance companies know everything.’

  ‘Look, Mr Stoddart,’ Mann continued, ‘we’re not here to play games, and I’m done sparring with you people. I’m going to give you one opportunity to put yourself on the side of the angels, by telling us about the laptop and phone that were stolen from Aldorino Moscardinetto’s hotel room on Monday, after he was murdered, by your associate Billy Swords. When I say one opportunity, I mean it.’

  ‘She does,’ Skinner added quietly. ‘Cough up, Bryce.’

  Stoddart returned his gaze. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

  Provan shook his head. ‘That was really, really stupid. You went to Harrow School, Bob says. I thought you lads were supposed to be cleverer than ordinary folk.’

  The DI drew a document from her bag and opened it for inspection. ‘This is a warrant,’ she announced, ‘signed by a sheriff in accordance with the Criminal Procedure Scotland Act. It allowed us to search Beedham’s hotel for property we believe to be stolen. His lordship took very little persuasion, because we were able to show him that the property really was there. Are you familiar with a facility called “Find my iPhone” and “Find my Mac”? No? That’s a pity for you. It works through the iCloud. When a phone or a laptop is stolen, you can use it to show you exactly where it is. Our clever friends in the insurance industry were able to trace Moscardinetto’s mobile provider. They agreed to help us as soon as they heard what had happened to their client, who was something of a hero in his own country. Yesterday afternoon, my officers searched your hotel on guidance received through the Cloud. It’s not very big, so it didn’t take them long.’

  Stoddart looked at Skinner. If he had hoped to find a friendly face, he was disappointed. ‘We told you,’ he murmured.

  ‘Okay!’ the promoter exclaimed. ‘I’ll tell you. They’re in the safe in my room.’

  ‘You’re too late,’ Mann told him. ‘We’ve got them. You had your chance and you turned it down. As DS Provan said, you’ll have a few years to reflect on how stupid that was. For now I’m suspending this interview, but you and Ms Alderney will be charged, after you’ve been given the opportunity of a consultation with a solicitor.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it!’ Stoddart protested.

  ‘Stop!’ Skinner called out. ‘I’m going to give you another piece of advice, and this time take it. You have rights; take advantage of them and keep your mouth tight shut from now on until you’ve seen a lawyer.’

  ‘Do you know one?’ he asked.

  ‘As it happens, I do, but it wouldn’t be ethical for her to represent you as I might be a witness in a future trial. The big noise in Glasgow is a man called Moss Lee; I’m sure he’ll take you on. We’ll give you his number and leave you alone so you can call him from this room, but don’t do anything stupid. There’ll be a cop outside.’

  The trio headed for the door. When they were outside, Provan turned on Skinner. ‘What the fuck did you do that for, tellin’ him to keep quiet?’

  ‘You know as well as I do,’ he fired back, ‘or you bloody should. As soon as Lottie told him he was being charged, you passed the point where you could question him.’

  The DS sniffed. ‘Mibbe,’ he conceded. ‘But why did you tell him to call Moss Lee?’

  ‘Two reasons. If he’d asked around, chances are that’s the name he’d have been given anyway. Also, Lee’s not half as clever as he thinks he is. I had a call from my daughter last night, of which more in due course.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right, for lots of reasons,’ the DS sighed. ‘What’s all this about, Bob? Any ideas?’

  ‘Not all
of it, but I have about this part of the inquiry. I have a gut feeling that it all goes back to . . . Bugger!’ he exclaimed as his phone sounded. ‘I meant to put that on flight mode.’

  He looked at the screen; it read ‘Alex’. He took the call. ‘Yes, kid?’

  ‘Bad time?’ she asked. ‘You sound a shade testy.’

  ‘Sorry. No, not really. The crisis is over. What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve just had a call from a cop in Newcastle, Detective Chief Superintendent Ciaran McFaul. He says he knows you from way back.’

  Yes, Skinner knew him. Their paths had crossed twenty years before during a murder investigation, from which many things had flowed, including his son Ignacio. The victim had been Mia’s brother, and a relationship had developed, very brief but long enough.

  ‘He phoned me,’ Alex continued, ‘about a man who’s been arrested in Newcastle, on suspicion of murder. He’s being brought north to Glasgow, but before he and his escort left, he was advised of his rights to legal advice. He asked DCS McFaul if he knew any lawyers in Scotland. He must have heard of me, somehow, for he dropped my name. The call was made at the suspect’s request, asking if I would represent him. His name is Uilyam Mechikov, but according to DCS McFaul he’s also known as Billy Swords. Pops, this thing you’ve been working on in Glasgow and been all mysterious about, is it connected?’