Evidence of Death

by Peter Ritchie

  ‘Take me to George Square, driver,’ Nelson said, hoping the man wasn’t one of the blethering bastard types.

  ‘What you up to today then, chief?’ The driver used his favourite opening line; he was interested in his passenger’s accent.

  ‘What I’m up to has fuck all to do with you. Just drive.’ Nelson was pissed off at the turn of events with Clark and just didn’t need to speak to Captain Obesity in the front.

  The driver knew he was dealing with someone who wasn’t just acting and concentrated on the road. He was used to all types so it was water off a duck’s back.

  The surveillance-team taxi took the eyeball and followed Nelson up to the university area. They watched him climb out in George Square, pay the driver without a word and head west on foot. Two surveillance officers were a hundred yards behind him on either side of the street. It was busy with students, which gave them all the cover they needed.

  ‘He’s away on walkabout again. Instructions?’ the eyeball relayed to McGovern.

  ‘See where he goes. Don’t take any chances, keep well back and don’t risk a burning.’ McGovern kept it calm.

  The surveillance team were given their instructions as to where each car should cover to make sure that whatever Nelson did they couldn’t lose him. When Nelson headed towards Potterrow they decided the street was just too quiet so the footman let him run without a tail; wherever he reappeared one of the teams would pick him up again.

  After about half an hour he was spotted by one of the cars in West Nicolson Street, where he jumped a taxi and headed down to Hanover Street. The surveillance team went with him.

  They watched Nelson and Dougie Fisher meet up and swallow a couple of drinks too quickly to have enjoyed them. The footman relayed back to the team that Nelson looked severely pissed off and was giving Fisher an earache about something.

  After about twenty minutes they left the bar, jumping another taxi and going straight to the Royal Infirmary. McGovern had been told about the assault on Clark and realised where they were headed. That was the opportunity McGovern had been waiting for, and he gave the order for a covert team on standby to enter Nelson’s house and place the listening devices.

  It took no more than twenty minutes to do the job. When they got further confirmation that Nelson was still safely tucked up inside the hospital they had a fast look round the house to make sure nothing had been disturbed before they left. The team leader noticed the mobile in the hall and remembered the analyst’s words at the briefing. The phone was on and there was no security lock engaged. Nelson had slipped up.

  ‘Silly Billy,’ he said to himself. He couldn’t risk making a call to get the number, but he looked up the phone memory and noted down the last three calls and the times, knowing the intelligence unit would be able to trace the phones and cross-reference them to get the number of the iPhone he was holding. It was possible that it was the phone they’d seen Nelson using already and was worth a try. He shrugged and secured the door then made his way back to the pick-up vehicle.

  ‘All clear, Jimmy, and job done.’

  ‘Good job, boys. Drinks on me later.’ McGovern felt the pieces were fitting into place and a noose was tightening round Billy Nelson’s neck. He just didn’t know it yet.

  26

  When Nelson and Fisher arrived at the hospital, Rob McLean joined them at the entrance. Fisher and McLean found they could hardly keep up as they speed-walked behind Nelson through the long noisy corridors of the new Royal Infirmary. They glanced at each other and realised they were both questioning their loyalty to the man in front. They didn’t like it: Nelson looked like shit, was in a fuck of a mood, and the last thing they needed was a problem with Clark, who seemed to be struggling to keep Nelson off his back as it was. Fisher and McLean liked Clark and couldn’t figure out what the problem was, apart from the fact the boy wasn’t the brightest star in the sky.

  They found the ward, and a staff nurse approached them and asked if they were family.

  ‘Yes, I’m his cousin,’ Nelson lied without a second thought. ‘How is the boy?’

  The staff nurse looked at the three men and felt uncomfortable, especially with the one who said he was a cousin. He looked angry, and she didn’t want to spend too much time with him. ‘He’s suffered a significant number of injuries but luckily nothing too serious to the head. It’s mainly his arms and legs that have been affected.’

  ‘It would probably be better if it had been his head, darlin’, because he’s got fuck all in it.’

  The nurse paused, struggling to find an appropriate reaction to this comment, especially as it had been accompanied by a friendly smile. She knew Clark was the victim of an attack and looking at his visitors she didn’t want to know any more about them. Having worked as a nurse in Belfast during the Troubles, she knew exactly where they were from. She’d read in the papers about the Belfast gang and guessed it had to be connected. ‘I can get a doctor if you want to know a bit more,’ she said, hoping they wouldn’t want that.

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Nelson replied, almost politely.

  ‘The police have been, but your cousin couldn’t remember what happened.’ She wasn’t sure if Nelson had heard her as he was staring intently through the windows of the side room where Andy Clark looked sound asleep.

  The nurse left them and decided she needed a cigarette even though she’d been off them for over a month.

  ‘Andy, it’s Billy and the boys.’ Nelson shook him roughly and then pulled up a chair beside the bed. ‘What the fuck happened, boy?’

  Fisher and McLean kept back and knew to keep quiet.

  Clark slowly began to wake up, trying to drag his mind clear of the sedatives, and smacked his lips, his mouth bone dry. ‘Gimme some water for fuck’s sake, Billy. You’ll need to do it for me. My arms are fucked.’

  Nelson poured the water and held the glass to Clark’s lips as if he cared about him.

  ‘I’ve no idea. They were masked up and said fuck all. Came out of nowhere they did. Never had a fuckin’ chance.’ Clark avoided eye contact; despite his woozy head, he knew where the conversation was going. He tried frantically to think of a cover story, but Nelson would see through it no matter what he did. There was only one ‘least bad’ option and that was to just tell him what happened.

  ‘Look, I’ve been seeing a wee girl up that way and maybe they wanted to rob me or it was a pissed-off ex-boyfriend or something.’ It even sounded wrong to Clark as he said it.

  ‘A robbery, Andy? Was anything taken?’

  ‘No,’ Clark said weakly.

  ‘Who’s this wee girl that you’ve not told us about then?’ Nelson’s mouth was twisted into a sneer and his eyes looked as if they were retreating into his face, but they glinted at the mention of the girl.

  Clark felt his stomach grind with nerves and any effect the sedatives had had was going with every question Nelson put to him. He’d seen what Nelson could do to women, and he started to panic at the thought of Kristina Orlova coming face to face with him.

  ‘She’s a Lithuanian girl. Works as an escort, but only occasional and high-class stuff. Just got a wee thing going with her. She’s not involved, I promise you. Just leave her out of this.’ He’d started to plead, and Nelson didn’t like pleading – he saw it as a sign of weakness.

  McLean and Fisher looked at each other and shrugged helplessly, knowing what was going to happen.

  Clark suddenly found he was being gripped by the throat; it felt as if pliers had been clamped round his windpipe. Given his shattered arms, he was helpless to protect himself. Nelson’s mouth was no more than six inches from his face and he couldn’t move to avoid the fetid stench of Nelson’s breath.

  ‘Now you listen to me, you little fuck! I’m going to find this whore and ask her some questions. If she was involved and you left yourself exposed and, worse still, us, then you’re out. To tell the truth I’m bored with you anyway, and I can’t have a fuckin’ dummy on the team.’

 
; He let go, leaving Clark gasping for air, his eyes wide in panic, then turned to Fisher. ‘Get the tart’s address and number.’

  As he turned to leave the room, Nelson paused and looked back at Clark. ‘You get any warning to her before I give her a visit and you might as well kill yourself.’

  ‘Please, just leave the girl alone. She’s nobody.’

  Nelson had already left the room. The staff nurse had seen what had happened but was much too frightened to intervene. Her husband, however, was a uniform sergeant in the traffic division, and she would tell him what she’d witnessed when she got home.

  Later that evening Thompson had taken over command of the operation from McGovern. She was on the late shift and had the discretion to call it off for the night if she thought they were wasting their time. They were still in the intelligence-gathering stage and keeping a full squad on all night would mean losing troops to cover any activity during the day. They’d followed Nelson home, which might have been it for the day, but then about an hour later they’d watched him leave, dressed in a smart suit and carrying a small case.

  Nelson had worked with enough officers during his time in the Army to be able to do a passable impression of a middle-class Englishman. He’d already called up the number for Kristina Orlova, gave her the story that he was a company director in Edinburgh for a couple of nights on business and that she’d been highly recommended. He found it difficult to keep the tone light when all he wanted was to make her tell him the truth – after which he’d do whatever needed to be done – and he felt a trickle of sweat run from the underside of his arm to his waist, even though the temperature was several degrees below freezing.

  Orlova liked the sound of his voice and pictured a man of breeding and good manners taken for granted. She liked those types because just for a short while they made her feel special, and a couple of them came back time and again. From what he’d told her, Nelson had already booked into one of the best hotels and taken a suite, so a few hundred pounds obviously made no difference to him, and that type of accommodation clinched the deal for the girl. She thought with a bit of luck he’d do the full tour of duty and buy her dinner. That was Orlova’s great advantage: any man would want to be seen with her. She was intelligent, dressed with style and had looks that made every other man in the room wish he could swap places with whomever she was with.

  The surveillance team saw him jump in a taxi and take the ten-minute drive to the hotel. They couldn’t get too close but they saw him get out and go straight inside.

  ‘Get a footman deployed to have a look and see if he meets anyone.’ Thompson called out the instruction but realised they were short of cover because some of the cars were stuck in a jam behind them. As a result, the footman was slow in getting into the hotel and precious minutes were wasted.

  ‘There’s no sign of him in the bar or the foyer. Instructions?’ The footman was pissed off; like all surveillance officers he hated a loss.

  ‘Is there another entrance?’ Thompson asked, her voice full of tension.

  ‘Yes, there is, and he could be well away if it’s a bit of counter surveillance.’

  Thompson knew that she’d made a mistake – she’d been slow to deploy to cover the possible escape routes from the hotel. Every operational commander makes mistakes but Thompson then made an even more serious one by breaking the golden rule – that you must never presume – and so instead of covering the hotel in case he appeared again she decided that they’d had a complete loss. She took the easy route of running away from the problem.

  ‘Let’s call it a night, guys, and stand it down. The early team will pick him up again in the morning.’

  Thompson thought that giving the team an early finish would keep them happy, but they all knew that McGovern wouldn’t have thrown in the towel so easily.

  As they headed back to Fettes, Thompson knew it was the wrong call and just hoped that Nelson was having a quiet drink before going straight home to his bed.

  ‘Fat chance,’ she said, without thinking.

  ‘What’s that, boss?’ her driver asked.

  ‘Nothing, just thinking aloud.’

  27

  Orlova had decided to put on a bit of a show for the client who’d called her. She’d struggled to get the Flemings and Andy Clark out of her head and was wondering whether it was time to pack up and run again.

  She decided to forget about it for the moment, dress up, enjoy the night and put the gangsters out of her thoughts for a while. She was well aware that she was a beautiful woman – still young and educated to a level the thugs that inhabited her life couldn’t comprehend – and she thought maybe it was time to find a place in the world where she could have something that would pass for a normal life with a normal man and be able to sleep at night. But her experience had made her question whether there was such a thing as a normal man and, if there was, whether she would spend her life always suspecting the worst of him.

  She ached to find a place where people wouldn’t know what she’d been and what she’d endured. Before she left her flat she’d soaked in a warm bath and stared longingly at the pages of a travel magazine describing the good life in California. A golden land with pictures of bronzed models beaming with that elixir that could transform her life and take her away from the creatures she relied on to survive.

  Before she arrived at the hotel Orlova called the room number the man had given her. That was always the first safety check before meeting a client in a hotel – make sure they were genuine, or at least signed into the room they claimed to be in. If they were checked in then the hotel should know who they were, or at any rate have some way of identifying them. That was the theory anyway. At the very least, if something went wrong there was a chance to make enough of a racket to attract attention. The hotels were normally a safe environment for escorts, particularly those at the higher end of the market. The businessmen just wanted a good time and a woman who they could pay then leave behind.

  She walked through the entrance of the hotel and the concierge smiled warmly at the stunning and beautifully dressed woman. Normally they could spot the pros a mile off when they came to entertain the businessmen taking some time off from their wedding vows. Not Kristina Orlova though, who looked for all the world like a very assured woman there to play the power games of the business world. Her smart two-piece business suit, the designer glasses and the expensive handbag all fitted the profile of the clientele the hotel designers thought they should be serving.

  The lift had full-length mirrors and she smiled at her reflection, imagining herself in another life taking the elevator to her expensive apartment in New York or to meet her husband for dinner.

  ‘Maybe, Kristina,’ she said out loud as the doors hissed open.

  The man who answered the door smiled broadly, and she thought he was quite handsome, although maybe just a little weary round the edges. This didn’t concern her as most of the businessmen she met were heart-attack cases struggling to keep ahead of their game. At least this one was youngish, and that was a pleasant change for her.

  ‘Do come in and let me take your coat.’

  He seemed as polite as he’d been on the phone, and she thought that she might just enjoy the evening as he closed the door behind her.

  She walked a few paces forward, looked round the suite and decided it must be one of the best in the hotel. Framed in the window and against the Edinburgh night she could see the outline of the castle towering protectively over the city. It was pleasantly warm and she hoped he would offer her champagne. In this level of room they normally made the gesture to show how important they were.

  She didn’t hear him close in behind her. His right hand, bunched into a fist with the middle two knuckles pushed out to form a wedge, hit her hard and cleanly in the area of her kidneys. Orlova felt like a fireball had exploded in her back – her breath was blown out and she sank to her knees, unable to inhale or recover from the shock. She felt as if she was drowning and the blow had par
alysed her ability to make sense of what had happened. The pain seemed to pulse in sickening waves from the site of the blow, and it was too much to bear.

  He’d overdone it. The woman was lightly built, nearly half his weight, and he’d given her the full bhoona, which on another day could have killed her. Her pain didn’t concern him, but her ability to answer questions did.

  She threw up all over the front of her suit and slumped to the floor, lying on her side.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Nelson said, annoyed at his miscalculation. He realised that he was making too many mistakes and felt a prickle of fear at something he didn’t understand. He’d spent all his life in control, but facing something inside him he couldn’t fight made him feel mortal and very ordinary.

  He left Orlova gasping on the floor, poured a glass of water and sipped it as he watched the girl fight for breath on the rich pile of the carpet. He bent over her and saw she was struggling to deal with the pain.

  He pulled her up by the back of her jacket and screwed up his nose at the stench of her vomit before shoving her onto a seat, taking the tape out of his pocket and wrapping it round her hands and mouth. Her eyes were dull, not fully open or focused, and they didn’t look like she was taking in what had happened.

  He sat on the bed and watched patiently till she came round. The surface of her cheeks was still pale but her eyes cleared enough to show fear of the man sitting staring at her from across the room.

  He lit a cigarette and kept quiet, letting terror soften up any thought of resistance. He wanted her to run through all the worst-case scenarios in her mind before he asked her a question.

  ‘Okay, let’s get started.’

  He’d dropped the English accent and the sound of the hard tones of Belfast panicked Orlova with the realisation of who the man was. She couldn’t control her breathing, and her nostrils flared rhythmically in the search for enough air to feed the heart beating like a hammer in her chest.