The Body on the Shore

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

  The one question on Gillard’s mind was: had Tokaj fired the shots? He didn’t think his Albanian colleague was armed, but he might have concealed a weapon as well as the grudge to go with it. In Albania anything is possible.

  Chapter 29

  Gillard hid between two very large tombs, squeezed against the freezing stone. As an obvious foreigner he couldn’t afford the attention the bloodstains would bring. He took a tissue and tried to wipe the blood off his face, using the mirror setting on his smartphone to guide him. His shirt collar was peppered too, and there was a coin-sized spatter by the knot of his tie, though you would have to get close to see it, crimson on black. Nonetheless, this was a crime scene he didn’t want to put himself anywhere near. After a few minutes the sirens of approaching ambulances could be heard, and the shouts and cries of the mourners diminished to an angry buzz. Eventually, after a good 40 minutes and with fingers and toes numb, he stood up and walked out of the graveyard’s main gate as naturally as he could. He was among the stragglers leaving the place, and though there were two of the Dragusha henchmen at the gate, they were in a heated conversation with each other and not looking at him. He tried to ring Tokaj, but with no reply had to settle for leaving a message.

  Gillard could not get out of his head the idea that Tokaj was the assassin. The Albanian had played at being reluctant to take the risk of being here. It was Gillard who had insisted. They had crashed the party, but everyone else, surely, was family and vouched for.

  It was too dangerous to wait for the Albanian policeman by the car, which must certainly have been identified by some of the Dragusha henchmen who had so venomously stared at them. So instead Gillard took shelter in the outdoor seating area of a restaurant in a small botanical garden. Though the restaurant was closed given the season, he was able to keep an eye on the street where Tokaj’s car was parked.

  Unable to reach the Albanian policeman, and a little worried about his safety, Gillard felt like hearing a friendly voice. He rang Claire Mulholland and told her what had happened. She was astonished at the turn of events, and expressed fears for his safety.

  ‘I’m all right, but am a bit concerned about my liaison officer. He’s not replying to calls. I was hoping to get to speak to our main suspect, the Angel of Death as he is known, but of course I’ll never be able to do that now.’

  ‘So is that going to be another Albanian dead end?’

  ‘Well, not completely. I’d been trying to get a DNA sample of this guy for days. Now one has been blasted all over me. All I need to do is take off my tie, stick it in an evidence bag and send it back home, and we will be able to find out if he was ever at Colsham Manor.’

  ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ she said. ‘So have you seen any sign of Zerina Moretti or the two children?’

  ‘We have some clues, courtesy of Geoff, that she at least passed through Fier. Things are getting very dangerous now. I can look after myself, but I don’t much rate the chances of an overweight middle-aged aunt with two helpless children against this lot.’

  * * *

  It was another half an hour before Tokaj emerged, walking boldly along the street towards his car. As the Albanian policeman bent to open the driver’s door, Gillard tapped him on the shoulder and made him jump. ‘Oh shit. Don’t do that, you crazy man. Get in, let’s get out of here.’

  Tokaj drove off at speed. ‘I don’t want to be seen anywhere around here,’ Tokaj said.

  ‘Why didn’t you answer my call?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘I lost my phone in the crowd. There was a stampede, and it was knocked from my hand. Lots of mourners were crushed in the panic, women and children were screaming.’

  ‘Then let’s go back for it.’

  ‘No, it’s too dangerous. The Dragusha will make sure that their own police inspector will be in charge of this crime scene. It will be that guy who spoke Italian, the one I told you about.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Gillard looked out of the window for a few moments before asking: ‘Did you shoot the Angel of Death?’

  ‘Are you crazy? Of course not.’

  ‘So who did shoot him? Did you see anything?’

  ‘No. May I use your phone? I have to call my boss.’

  Gillard passed his phone across. Tokaj drove like a maniac while conducting an animated conversation with his head of department in Tirana. Finally he finished, passed the phone back and let out a long sigh.

  ‘We have to go to Tirana, now. Big meeting.’

  ‘But what if the waitress calls?’ Gillard asked. ‘It may be our only chance.’

  Tokaj shrugged. They were now back in the centre of Fier, stuck in a traffic jam in which angry honking horns made conversation difficult. Gillard’s imagination kept replaying the same scene over and over again. The blood erupting from Nikolai Dragusha, the body twisting and falling.

  Tokaj kept looking in the mirror. ‘Motorcycle! Get down!’

  Gillard shrank himself down into the seat as best he could as a trail bike with a pillion passenger threaded its way between the lines of traffic, past them to the head of the queue. He didn’t see a weapon in the passenger’s hands. Nonetheless, visions of Geoff Meadows’s death flitted through his mind

  ‘False alarm,’ Tokaj said, risking a smile.

  ‘Is this the normal method of assassination?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘Yes, especially once they know your vehicle. And by now they will know ours.’

  It took half an hour to get past the roadworks which had caused the snarl-up, and it was only once they were on the open highway heading north towards Tirana that Tokaj began to explain what he had seen at the funeral.

  ‘This was a shot from behind, and seemed quite low, which would indicate someone fairly close behind in the crowd. If it was a sniper’s rifle from some distance it would have been a headshot.’

  ‘I’m no ballistics expert,’ Gillard said. ‘But the size of the exit holes torn in Nikolai Dragusha makes me think that, just like with Peter Young, we are dealing in hollow-point ammunition.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But how he was killed is secondary.’ Tokaj shook his head. ‘What matters is that this is the most brazen assault on the Dragusha clan since the time of chaos. It must be one of the big crime families. No one else could have organized this.’

  ‘What about a squabble within the Dragusha? A fight to take over the clan, isn’t that possible?’

  Tokaj shook his head emphatically. ‘It’s the timing that makes that impossible. Can you imagine, I mean can you even consider, that any one of the Dragusha gang would choose the moment of burial of the head of the family to settle a personal score? I can’t think of a better way to make sure that every single member of the clan will round on you.’ Tokaj continued to shake his head. ‘No, it cannot be family. It must be external. It is designed to humiliate the Dragusha, to show that they cannot even control the burial of their own dead, to show that their enemies can reach them anywhere.’

  ‘Kreshniki?’’

  ‘No. This is surely beyond the resources of a bunch of old widows. But we will learn more at headquarters. Apparently we had a spy at the funeral. I didn’t know that, but apparently there is new information.’

  Monday afternoon

  Tokaj and Gillard sat with Mr Zok in the main incident room at the Tirana police headquarters. An urgent meeting was taking place with several senior detectives. Though Gillard could not understand what was being said, the frowning expressions and the urgency of the discussion seemed to indicate a high level of worry. They were all waiting for a conference call with their undercover officer, apparently female, who Mr Zok called their most precious asset in the fight against the Dragusha. It was almost an hour later when the more junior officers were asked to leave, and with only four of them present, a battered TV screen on the wall crackled into life.

  This was a Skype call, but the camera was angled so that it only caught the keyboard, desk and hands of the woman. She was, from those bare details, middle-aged with
silver nail varnish. Gillard could tell from the slight shine on indentations on her fingers that she had removed her rings, presumably to protect her identity.

  Again Gillard didn’t understand what was being said, but after the call was finished Tokaj translated for him. ‘She said she didn’t see the shots, but she did see two of the Dragusha’s henchmen running down towards the west entrance.’

  ‘That was the entrance that we came in by,’ Gillard said. ‘It was locked.’

  ‘Yes, when she got there she said the toughs were trying to climb over the wall.’

  ‘So someone had escaped that way?’

  ‘Maybe, and maybe with the help of the flower seller.’

  ‘A locked gate. That’s the best way to make sure you couldn’t be quickly followed. For a clean getaway,’ Gillard said.

  ‘There is something else. She returned to her family group and overheard quite a lot of what was said. The Dragusha already think they know who the killer is.’

  ‘Did they name names?’

  ‘No. In fact they’re keeping this completely secret, which is significant in itself. All she knows is what the wife of one of the leading gangsters let slip in the coach on the way home. She said: “Even when you think you have slain the monster, and cut off all its heads, there is always one poisonous serpent left.”’

  * * *

  The conversation was interrupted by Gillard’s phone ringing. When he answered it, all he heard was a breathless female babbling in Albanian. He passed it over to Tokaj, who listened and tried to interject his own comments. Eventually the monologue became a dialogue, and after five minutes Tokaj thanked her and ended the call. ‘As you probably guessed, that was the waitress from the café in Fier. She said the woman came back half an hour ago and asked for the radio news to be turned on. She listened with a big smile on her face.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything. Everyone who’d ever had to pay protection money to a mafia would delight in hearing about them being taken down.’

  ‘Well, yes, but you haven’t heard the rest. Your overgenerous tip has transformed our waitress into a veritable Sherlock Holmes. She engaged the woman in conversation; her name is Bella Lalic and she lives locally, in the same block as the waitress’s brother-in-law. She works in a pharmacy, but has no children because, and I quote, her husband’s pi-pi doesn’t work. She even sneaked a photograph which she emailed you.’

  ‘Not of the offending organ, I hope.’

  ‘No.’ Tokaj smiled and handed Gillard’s phone back. He swiped to his emails and pulled up the picture. Bella Lalic was in her late 40s, with masses of dyed coppery hair, tortoiseshell spectacles, wearing a smart grey trouser suit and rather a lot of jewellery. In the picture she was smoking something rather ostentatious in a holder. It wasn’t Zerina Moretti, though there was a vague resemblance in her dated B-movie dress sense.

  ‘It looks like another dead end,’ Gillard said.

  ‘I think not. I’ve kept the best till last. This woman told the waitress that her younger sister Zerina and her beautiful niece and nephew had come over from Italy to stay with her for a few days, but they left this morning to go back to the Accursed Mountains.’

  ‘Fantastic! She is worth every penny.’

  ‘She thinks so too. She wants $1,000 in cash, used notes no bigger than fifties, to give you the name of the village where they are going.’

  Gillard laughed. ‘We’ve thoroughly corrupted the woman, haven’t we?’

  Late Monday afternoon

  Both policeman knew it was going to be dangerous to go back to Fier, but the waitress’s insistence on cash for the details of Zerina Moretti’s location made it unavoidable. While Gillard rushed to a bank to get the money together before they closed at five, Tokaj went down to the police car park to look for a new unmarked vehicle less well known to the Dragusha.

  They rendezvoused an hour later, in the gathering dusk, in front of the entrance to the police HQ. When Gillard saw that Tokaj had swapped his white Renault for an even older black Golf GTI, he couldn’t help but laugh. The vehicle had been lowered, boy racer-style, and had rusting sills and what looked like a couple of amateurishly filled bullet holes. ‘Well, Besin, this is deep cover,’ he said. ‘Appropriate for junior gangsters. Still, at least it’s the right colour.’

  Tokaj shrugged. ‘This is the trouble for us poorly resourced police,’ he said. ‘This car was seized as part of a prosecution, which is how we get a lot of our undercover vehicles.’

  ‘I just hope it will get us there.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Our mechanics have spruced up the engine. It’s also got snow tyres, and a full tank of fuel.’

  As they drove south, on the busy and now familiar road to Fier, Gillard’s mind was again drawn back to the ghastly vision of Nikolai Dragusha’s chest erupting, and the warm bloody rain that spattered the congregation. Whoever had been the assailant, it was clear that the Dragusha would now be mad with fury. Hundreds of young men, armed to the teeth, desperate to make an impression and fill the leadership vacuum. He couldn’t imagine a more potent recipe for violence.

  As if reading his mind, Tokaj said: ‘We have to be very, very careful.’

  It took less than two hours to reach Fier, and they made their way through the centre of the city without encountering traffic jams. They spotted a number of black Mercedes saloons, each packed with shaven-headed young men, but there were no suspicious motorcyclists. The waitress had agreed to meet them at eight o’clock at a church round the corner from the café, which was now closed for the evening. They were a few minutes early and there was no sign of her. The Eastern Orthodox church was set back from the road on a tree-lined but grubby plaza, strewn with litter. The building itself was grand, with a high square tower at one corner topped by a shiny cupola, and a frontage galleried by arches. Gillard’s attention was drawn to two benches on the plaza occupied by vagrants. One on the left seemed asleep under a blanket, with a bottle visible under the seat. Opposite him, 50 yards away on the right, another man, moustachioed and dark-featured, was wrapped up against the cold with his possessions in a shopping trolley.

  Tokaj was looking at them too. It was a perfect set-up for an ambush. If they were Dragusha men, they could cover every angle to the church.

  ‘What are the chances that we’re being set up?’ Gillard asked.

  ‘About 75 per cent. I don’t like these two.’

  ‘Look. We’re only here for two things. One is the name of a town, which might turn out to be nonsense. And the other is to give her the cash.’

  Tokaj nodded. ‘She’s clearly been talking to somebody in the know because of her demands for the cash. Otherwise we could have wired it to her.’

  At that moment a female figure came into view from around the back of the church. She was nearly 100 yards away, but it could well have been the waitress, overdressed in high heels, dark bulky fur coat and fur hat.

  ‘Let’s ring her. Get her to walk to the café, and we’ll see if these guys move,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Good idea,’ Tokaj replied. He rang her, and they saw the woman lift a phone to her ear. The vagrant lying sideways on the bench levered himself to a sitting position and stretched with an ostentatious yawn.

  Gillard let out a long deep breath. ‘Doesn’t look good. He’s looking around.’

  They continued to watch as the waitress walked steadily left across the plaza and onto a footpath which went through the trees to an adjacent road. Once the woman had crossed that road and walked through some more dimly lit parkland, she would be back at the café where she worked. Neither of the two men on the benches followed, which reassured Gillard. ‘Besin, I think it’s okay. The Dragusha wouldn’t yet be organized enough to have more than two operatives on this, given what’s happened to them today.’

  ‘Agreed. Let’s drive over and park by the café.’

  The two policeman left the car 200 yards further down the road and walked back to the café from the far side. The waitress didn’t se
e them until they were just 10 yards away. Tokaj called out a greeting and she turned to him. Her face lit up, and she began a long discursion in Albanian, before Tokaj cut her off. He took the money out of his pocket, rapidly counted it out for her and got a slip of paper in return. The two policeman thanked her, then beat a hasty retreat.

  ‘She gives receipts?’ Gillard asked as they walked away.

  ‘It’s the address of the woman she saw in the café, Bella Lalic.’

  ‘Zerina Moretti’s sister,’ Gillard said.

  ‘Yes, and she’s also written the name of the village where Moretti has headed to.’

  ‘Great stuff.’

  ‘If it’s accurate, yes,’ Tokaj said. ‘But she could also be taking us for an expensive ride. Anyhow, we’ll know soon enough. Mrs Lalic lives just around the corner.’ Tokaj quickly led him to one of four stained concrete high-rises. Mrs Lalic’s apartment was on the 11th floor, facing inwards over a patch of well-kept gardens and allotments. A few children were playing in the corridor. Gillard pressed the doorbell and waited. No one came. Tokaj asked the children, who ranged in age from 7 to about 12, if they had seen the woman who lives there recently. They shook their heads.

  Gillard and Tokaj exchanged a knowing glance. ‘Let’s do it,’ the British detective said. Keeping his back to the children, he used a gloved fingertip to press gently down on the door lever. It opened.

  The moment the door swung open it was obvious. The Dragusha had got there ahead of them.