The Body on the Shore

by The Body on the Shore (retail) (epub)

  A bullet hole.

  Mentally setting the car back on its wheels, Gillard realized this hole would have been through the highest part of the window, the bullet fired from a level somewhat higher than the car. Perhaps from a motorcycle. Lying sideways in the snow so as to shine the torch right round the squashed interior, he looked for other bullet holes. He could see none. He was just getting back to his feet when Tokaj and one of the uniformed policeman, a tall man with a high-vis cap, came up to him.

  ‘Did they notice the bullet hole?’ he asked Tokaj.

  They hadn’t. The three of them went round to the other side of the vehicle to look at the passenger window from the outside. The tall officer waved his arms around and said something. ‘He says that is not a bullet hole,’ Tokaj said. ‘He thinks it is a fragment of metal coming from the inside of the car during the crash.’

  Gillard crouched by the hole, removed his glove, and carefully inserted his little finger into the hole. ‘This is too smooth – it indicates a higher velocity than accident splinters,’ he said. ‘Besin, are they treating this as a crime scene?’

  The Albanian liaison officer shrugged. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Gillard stood and brushed the slush and snow from his freezing hands. ‘Where is the door they removed to get him out?’ He looked up towards the recovery truck on the hard shoulder.

  After a brief conversation the tall officer pointed the other way. The door was about 20 yards away, down by the lake edge. Gillard made his way down. The bent and scorched metal, barely recognisable as from a vehicle, had been tossed here, shattering the ice which fringed the reservoir. The British detective gingerly made his way to the water’s edge, and in doing so almost trod on a pair of broken sunglasses. He picked them up by the tip of one arm. They could have been Geoff’s. Nearby was a notebook, its pages already stiffened by ice, which probably had also fallen out of the driver-side door pocket. Gillard picked it up and slid it into his coat pocket.

  He carefully flipped over the door so he could see the inside. Although the entire window frame was twisted, the plastic moulding which formed the armrest assembly inside had simply folded in two, forming a white stress line in the plastic cast. Holding the torch close, Gillard could see a bullet hole through the plastic. Tipping the door back again, there was no exit hole through the exterior metal panel. A metal rattle indicated the bullet might still be trapped inside. With freezing fingers he prised off the interior moulding in its entirety. There, rolling around in a metal well above the door sill, was a bullet. The only plastic bag he could find to put it in was one which contained the spare button on his coat. That would have to do for now.

  As he stood to retrace his steps the snow came in harder, driven by an icy wind that tore across the lake. Making his way up to the road, he saw that the police were now crowded around some kind of mobile food van, from the inside of which a sleepy-looking man with a moustache was dispensing hotdogs and coffee. Having persuaded this poor man to get up for them, the uniformed police were now cheerful, laughing and joking as they sipped their scalding drinks.

  ‘What have you found?’ Tokaj asked.

  For a moment Gillard was unsure what to say. What he had done was a complete crime scene disaster, breaking almost every rule about contamination. Clearly the local police had no intention of pursuing this as a crime, but at least he had satisfied himself that Geoff Meadows didn’t die in an accident. He was targeted. If he gave up the bullet to the local police, then he would have no evidence. On the other hand without the entry and exit points he had seen in the vehicle, possession of a bullet would prove nothing. He would have to trust them.

  ‘I’ve got proof that somebody tried to kill him,’ Gillard said. He lifted up the plastic bag. ‘I found this inside the driver-side door.’

  The tall policeman held out his hand and Gillard handed it over. They locked eyes for a moment before the cop scrutinized the find. The British detective was beginning to feel that he was regarded as little more than a nuisance.

  ‘From the angle, and the fissure in the seat fabric, I expect we will find the bullet passed through the victim’s leg,’ Gillard said. ‘May I see the body?’

  Tokaj translated the request, which had the expected effect of dampening the spirits of the police officers. ‘I don’t think they’re enthusiastic about pursuing your theories at this time of night and in this weather,’ Tokaj said. ‘I will make a phone call in the morning and see if I can get my boss to talk to theirs. But for the rest of tonight, we should sleep. I have booked us a room in a hotel in Elbasan, and we can see Mr Meadows in the mortuary tomorrow morning.’

  Gillard nodded and thanked him. The snow had stopped by the time they reached the ancient fortress city, and the hotel, opposite a floodlit medieval tower in the tourist district, turned out to be modern and comfortable. A long hot shower soon thawed him out. He had mentioned nothing about discovering Meadows’s notebook. He was too exhausted now to pursue it, but he was looking forward to seeing what leads his old colleague was pursuing.

  Too late for Meadows though. Dying here on a lakeside in Albania, he was merely another body on a shore.

  Chapter 26

  Saturday morning dawned bright and sunny. Gillard and Tokaj drove the short distance from the hotel to Elbasan hospital. The British detective had already emailed PC Gabby Underwood, his most trusted family liaison officer, and asked her to break the sad news to Meadows’s family. He would follow up with a personal phone call to them later in the day. But for now, Gillard had to inspect the body.

  The mortuary was a clean and modern facility. A female technician led them into the examination room where a body bag was already lying on a stainless-steel table. She unzipped the bag, and Gillard was able to confirm the formal identification. There were significant head injuries, bruises all over the body and, as he had expected, a long, shallow and bloody puncture wound through the right thigh.

  ‘You were right,’ Tokaj said. He got out his phone and took a series of photographs of the injury. They thanked the technician and made their way out.

  ‘My guess is that the gunmen knew his car and were waiting on a motorcycle at the roadside for it to pass,’ Gillard said. ‘They went after it, and presumably would have tried to overtake to get the easier driver-side shot. But my guess is that Geoff spotted them and accelerated hard. They only got one shot off, and that from the passenger side. But they were lucky. It hit him in the right thigh, and at that moment he lost control and strayed into the path of the oncoming truck.’

  ‘Not the most professional hit job,’ Tokaj said as they sat together in the car. ‘They usually strike in traffic jams in towns, when the target is a sitting duck.’

  ‘But who did it? Who, apart from you and me, knew he was coming?’

  Tokaj shrugged ‘I don’t know. I didn’t even know what hire car he had.’

  ‘Somebody did. Besin, I think this can only mean one thing.’

  Tokaj looked puzzled.

  ‘It’s simple if you think about it. Geoff must already have met a source or contact with connections to Zerina Moretti and learnt something important about her whereabouts. Someone must’ve been observing that meeting to make a note of the car and the direction he was travelling in. So it’s either the contact himself or somebody who had the contact under surveillance.

  Tokaj shook his head with admiration. ‘Craig, that’s a very impressive piece of deduction. Yes, it would make sense. They needed to kill him before he rang you with whatever information he had found.’

  ‘Which means that where he was killed must have been not too far from where he met his source.’ Gillard opened the glove compartment and took out his map of central Albania. ‘Well, the obvious location would be Fier. That’s only 20 minutes away.’

  ‘Home of the Dragusha,’ Tokaj said.

  Gillard nodded. ‘I need access to Geoff’s phone. Can you lean on the local cops?’

  ‘I spoke to Mr Zok this morning,’ Tokaj said. ‘He’s ha
ppy to incorporate this incident into his broader Dragusha enquiry. The local police will hand over the evidence to him. You can rest assured that this is now in the hands of dedicated professionals.’

  In the meantime Gillard realized he had a very sensitive matter to attend to, and asked Tokaj to excuse him for a few minutes. He walked back from the car park into a quiet corridor of the hospital and rang a number in Surrey. The phone rang out 10 or 15 times, and Gillard imagined it echoing in the grand drawing room of Colsham Hall. Eventually, he heard the cultured tones of Sophie Lund.

  ‘Hello Mrs Lund, it’s DCI Gillard—’

  ‘Oh, Craig, do you have any news?’

  ‘Not about the children, I’m afraid. I’m in Albania, as you may have been told.’

  ‘So are you with Geoff?’

  Gillard looked over his shoulder towards the mortuary. ‘Er, no. But it’s about him that I’m calling.’ He deliberately left a pause. ‘I’m afraid I have some rather sad news.’

  ‘Oh my God, what are you going to say?’

  ‘Late yesterday afternoon Geoff’s hire car was involved in quite a serious road accident here. I’m afraid that he did not survive it.’

  ‘God, I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Albania has an exceptionally high rate of road traffic accidents,’ Gillard said. He felt pathetic trotting out this irrelevant factoid, but he knew that it was way too early to tell her the truth, that Geoff had been murdered.

  ‘Oh no. What about his poor wife and children?’

  ‘They’ve already been told,’ Gillard said, impressed that Sophie still had the breadth of humanity in her heart to think beyond the fate of her own children.

  ‘I can assure you, Sophie, that I will take on Geoff’s work as best I can. Now that we know that Zerina Moretti has ignored all attempts at contact from the police, the European Arrest Warrant will be served. It’s not valid in Albania, but it will be effective if she ever returns to Italy. You can be assured of our best efforts to keep your children safe.’ Craig knew that this was the right time for that assurance, even though he was far from confident that he would be able to deliver a successful outcome.

  ‘Thank you so much, Craig,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the least I can do. Now I have a question to ask you: when did you last hear from Geoff? And had he told you where he was going to be yesterday afternoon?’

  Sophie paused and then said: ‘We had an email from him when he was on the ferry from Italy. He said he was on his way to Shkoder, which is the part of the country where Teto Zerina came from. But he also mentioned meeting a new contact who might know of her whereabouts.’

  ‘He didn’t say where?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Craig, one more thing. Do be careful on the roads. I couldn’t bear to hear about another fatality.’

  He thanked her and hung up.

  * * *

  Trying to work out what Geoff Meadows had been investigating when he was killed was proving difficult. Gillard had combed through the notebook he found at the site of the accident, but most of the information scrawled there was a rehash of what was already known. The biggest mystery was an Albanian mobile phone number, twice underlined, but with no indication as to whose it was. Meadows’s mobile phone had already been recovered, but the Elbasan police were sitting on it, together with the satnav from the hire car. Although Mr Zok had promised him that the organized crime directorate would be in charge, the local police seemed to be dragging their feet to show they could not be ordered about. Being mired in local politics was very frustrating. Gillard needed to know exactly where in Fier his late colleague had been, and the satnav would have given vital clues.

  The organized crime directorate seemed to be too busy to return his or Tokaj’s calls. Something was going on and neither of them knew what it was. The two police officers sat in a busy restaurant in the centre of Elbasan, trying to work out what to do next.

  ‘Should we ring the number?’ Gillard said, tucking into a grilled fish and chunky chips that bore comparison with the best of British.

  ‘I could get it traced but it would take time,’ Tokaj said, popping a prawn in his mouth, shell and all, and crunching it noisily.

  ‘With those two kids, I’m not sure we even have time,’ Gillard said. The restaurant was too busy and noisy to make the call, so after they finished and paid for the meal they returned to the car.

  ‘Best use my mobile,’ Tokaj said. ‘If the caller shows up as a domestic number it is more likely to be answered.’ The Albanian tapped out the number and held the phone to his ear. The number rang several times then went to messages. ‘It doesn’t tell us whose number this is.’ Tokaj said, slipping the phone back into his pocket.

  They sat for a few minutes in the car, then tried again with the same result. ‘I have an idea,’ Tokaj said. He rang it a third time, then after the message kicked in he tapped out a few digits, then hit zero on the keypad four times. Gillard watched him as he listened carefully. A smile crept up on the Albanian policeman’s face. Eventually he hung up.

  ‘What have you discovered?’

  ‘From the style of automated message, I guessed I was ringing a dumb phone. There’s an option for message retrieval. I opted for it and guessed that the owner of the phone might not have changed the default code from the factory settings.’

  ‘So you tapped in four zeros? We have a name for that. Phone hacking. It was a big scandal in Britain about ten years ago, journalists digging for celebrity news.’

  ‘I like to think we are doing this in a higher cause,’ Tokaj said haughtily.

  ‘So were there any messages?’

  ‘Yes, a couple of days ago.’ He played the message again, and pressed the phone to Gillard’s ear. He couldn’t understand it, but the woman’s voice was cheerful and full of life. Tokaj translated for him: ‘What she said is: “Hi. It’s me. I’m on the ferry, we get in at 11.55. We’ll wait by the taxi rank. Text me back. So looking forward to seeing you. Bye.”’

  ‘It must be her,’ Gillard said. ‘It sounds like she is talking to a relative or close friend. How on earth did Geoff Meadows manage to get this number?’

  ‘Maybe it was from whoever he met in Fier?’ Tokaj said.

  ‘Can we get your colleagues in the organized crime directorate to dig out the location data?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘I don’t think they’ll get round to it quickly,’ Tokaj said. ‘Something big is going on, and I’m not being kept in the loop.’

  ‘The way I see it we’ve got two options,’ Gillard said. ‘We can either do it the old-fashioned way and go up to Shkoder and start passing around photographs of Zerina Moretti to see if anyone recognises her. Or we do it the modern, underhand way.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘We go to Elbasan police headquarters this evening and steal Geoff’s mobile phone and satnav.’

  Tokaj grinned. ‘I like your style.’

  Chapter 27

  Saturday evening

  Elbasan’s police headquarters was on an aged industrial estate west of the historic city centre. Not as grim as many of the surrounding buildings, which were mainly concrete barracks from the days of Enver Hoxha, but a dull, low-rise piece of architecture nonetheless. Gillard and Tokaj picked their time very carefully. It helped that it was a Saturday. The Albanian football team was playing away against Croatia, a match that started at seven o’clock. At a nearby bar on the main road dozens of men, many of them no doubt policemen, were glued to a giant screen. Gillard and Tokaj drove past the bar and parked outside the police HQ 15 minutes before the match was due to end. As they expected, the place was almost deserted and the reception desk was staffed by a young female constable who looked barely beyond school age. Tokaj slapped down several sheets of paper, topped by a letter written by Mr Zok which bore the impressive crest of the Directorate of Serious and Organized Crime. Beneath it was Gillard’s own request for assistance, in English, signed by the chief const
able of Surrey. It all looked very impressive, especially if you couldn’t or didn’t read it, as none of it pertained to the road accident in which Geoff Meadows died.

  While she flicked through the paperwork, Tokaj said that the directorate had sent them because they urgently needed a quick look at two pieces of evidence retrieved during the accident. He cited the reference numbers. Both Gillard and Tokaj displayed the full array of male impatience, from drumming fingers to watch-checking and tutting. The woman, clearly intimidated, left them at the desk while she hurried off to the evidence room. She was back in five minutes with two brown paper packages, on which were pasted white labels.

  She said something in a plaintive voice which Tokaj translated: ‘According to the labels, she’s not supposed to sign these pieces out without the counter-signatory of the inspector. He’s watching the football, and she is clearly afraid to disturb him. So I said I would ring him.’

  Tokaj made a short phone call, and after some apparently shared laughter and male bonding hung up triumphantly. He then spoke to the desk officer. She shrugged and then signed out the two pieces of evidence, which Tokaj countersigned.