Death's Door bs-17

by Quintin Jardine

  Barker gave his employer a look that was more of a plea than anything else; it was ignored.

  Seated behind a table, and before a backboard carrying the force logo, the detective chief superintendent looked around the room. He saw five television cameras, but did not bother to try to count the number of reporters gazing back at him.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he began. ‘I’m Mario McGuire, head of CID. You have our press release, but for the record I’ll state that we are now in a position to name the woman found shot dead on a beach near Gullane on Tuesday. She was Miss Zrinka Boras, aged twenty-four, a full-time artist, the only daughter of the businessman Mr Davor Boras and Mrs Sanda Boras. Miss Boras had lived in Edinburgh for around two years prior to her death. She spent Monday night camping above Gullane beach, with a male companion. That young man was also found dead near the scene, yesterday evening, and a postmortem examination has confirmed that he was shot with the same gun that killed Miss Boras.’ He paused, for only a second, but time enough for a chorus of questions to be fired at him.

  He held up a hand and waited for quiet. ‘Now for what isn’t in the press release. As of two minutes ago, I’m in a position to name him as Mr Harry Paul, aged twenty-three, a musician, of Aberfeldy, Perthshire, the son of Travers and Marietta Paul. I’m also prepared to tell you that these murders are linked beyond doubt to that of Stacey Gavin, of South Queensferry, who was found dead two months ago, on the shore near her home. Stacey was also an artist.’ He gazed out at his audience.

  ‘I know that’s going to lead to many columns and broadcast hours of media speculation. That’s up to you: I understand it, but we’re not going to comment on it in any way. We’ll be too busy looking at the links between these brutal killings, the obvious and the less obvious, until we find the thread that will lead us to the person who carried them out. I’m not going to set specific times for future briefings. When we have something to tell you, we’ll call you, be sure of that.

  ‘Now, before you all start shouting at me again, I want to introduce the gentleman on my left. As I’m sure many of you are aware, he is Zrinka’s father, Mr Davor Boras, and he has a statement that he would like to make.’

  This time, as McGuire stopped speaking, the room remained absolutely silent. Boras straightened in his chair, flexed his shoulders and gazed, coldly and deliberately, into each television camera, one after another. Finally, he let his eyes rest on the journalists in the front rank. Most were strangers to Edinburgh, and McGuire realised that the man knew some of them. He understood, without asking, that they had been summoned there by Barker, who had taken a seat at the end of the row.

  ‘I am a strong man,’ Boras began. He carried no notes, and spoke either spontaneously or from a memorised speech. ‘I am a successful man. I am a rich man. Yet the strongest, most successful and the richest man can be brought down by a tragedy such as my wife, my son Dražen and I have suffered. I am here today to tell you that I will not be brought down.

  ‘I am also a determined man,’ he continued, ‘and I find myself made even more determined by my daughter’s death. You will know that in my business career I have created not one but two globally successful companies. I pledge to you that the same energy which enabled me to do that will be placed behind the search for my Zrinka’s murderer, and I pledge to you that it will succeed.

  ‘I stand four-square behind the police investigation and, although the murder of poor Miss Gavin remains unsolved, I have every confidence in them. Nevertheless, I appreciate that their resources are not infinite. I am a man of enormous personal wealth, and I am prepared to devote it to this manhunt. I will begin by announcing a reward of one million pounds . . .’ The silence was broken by a collective gasp as the day’s principal headline was determined. ‘. . . for information leading to the elimination of this beast. I make you this final promise.’ As he stared again along the line of cameras, his little eyes became dazzling, mesmeric. ‘I will ensure suitable justice for my daughter’s death, as sure as my name is Davor Boras. Thank you.’

  He rose from the table without a glance at his companion, beckoned to Barker, and strode from the room with his aide following at his heels.

  McGuire looked at the media assembly, still stunned into a silence that was, in his experience, unique. Finally the arthritic hand of John Hunter, unofficial dean of the Edinburgh press cadre, rose into the air. The head of CID nodded. ‘Yes, John.’

  ‘Tell me if I’m right, Mario,’ the old man asked, in his deceptively strong voice. ‘Did he just promise, on national television, to kill a man?’

  Thirty-one

  ‘You could be forgiven for thinking that.’ Stevie Steele answered the question as he, Griff Montell and Tarvil Singh stared at the live Sky News broadcast in the Leith CID office. He pointed his remote at the wall-mounted television and switched it off. ‘But he chose his words very carefully.’

  ‘Do you think he told anyone in advance that he was going to offer a reward?’ asked Montell.

  ‘No chance, or he’d never have been allowed to do it. I’m sure he told nobody on our side, that is. I’ll bet you that creep Barker knew, though. Did you see Mario glare at him when Boras came out with it? I thought he was going to reach across and throttle him.’

  ‘What’s so bad about it?’ Singh grumbled. ‘The guy’s mega-minted. If somebody killed my kid I’d want to tear him apart. I’d put up a reward if I had the money.’

  ‘The principle’s fine,’ Steele replied. ‘It’s the practice that’s difficult for us. We need a clear path on this investigation: we need precise and useful information. Thanks to Boras, we’re going to have dickheads from all over bombarding us with useless witness claims, yet we’ll have to check them all out. Congratulations, big man: with Ray Wilding still out at Gullane co-ordinating interviews you’ve just talked yourself into that job.’

  ‘What’s he going to get at Gullane, sir?’ the South African enquired. ‘The trail’s pretty cold now.’

  The inspector frowned at him. ‘As far as the girl and young Paul are concerned, maybe, but what about the killer? He arrived there some time, he stalked them and he left. How did he get there, how did he leave? I want to track as many vehicle movements in and out of Gullane as I can. If it was an urban area we might have had the possibility of CCTV film, but out there we have to do it the hard way. We need to talk to as many people as we can find who drove out of the village on Tuesday morning, to see if any of them saw anything unusual, somebody in an exceptional hurry, for example.’

  ‘Maybe he never left Gullane,’ the South African murmured. ‘Maybe he’s local.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I’m just following the only link we have so far between the two girls.’

  ‘We have one, apart from their occupations?’

  ‘Yes.’ Montell’s face split into a wicked grin. ‘DCC Skinner owns work by them both. Alex told me.’

  Steele threw him a dark look. ‘I think we’ll just leave that one on the back burner, Constable, shall we? Look, you want to be a real detective, stop fucking me about and check out some leads. We know that Zrinka went to North Berwick to drop off some work for sale in a gallery. I want you to find out where that was, and how many they took. Her art bag was empty when we found it, and we think that the killer took a souvenir from Stacey Gavin, so maybe . . .’

  ‘The DCC’s expanding his collection?’

  The inspector’s look turned the deepest black. ‘Shut the fuck up, Griff, or I’ll pass your thoughts on to him or, better still, to Alex. She’d have your nuts in a vice if she heard you joke about her old man like that.’

  Montell frowned defensively. ‘Why should it be a joke? You can’t deny it’s a link. Why shouldn’t we follow it up?’

  ‘Because some of us value our careers. Now go and do what you’re fucking told.’

  His gaze switched to Singh. ‘Tarvil, while you’re waiting for the crank calls to start, I want you to track down a man called Dominic Padstow,
Zrinka’s old boyfriend. That’s all I know about him; just the name. Then get in touch with Stacey Gavin’s parents. There was no sign in the initial investigation that she and Zrinka knew each other, but double-check it. Run the guy Padstow’s name past Stacey’s folks too, and see if it means anything to them.’

  He looked at Montell. ‘Griff, once you’ve made those calls to North Berwick, I want you to take Zrinka’s PDA, and go through her contacts file. See if any names there appear in Stacey Gavin’s circle of friends as well.’

  He stood, ushering them towards the door. ‘While you’re doing that, I’ve got a job of my own to handle. Dražen Boras hasn’t surfaced yet, according to his mother and her secretary. There’s something worrying about that; I reckon it’s time we tracked him down.’

  Thirty-two

  ‘It’s just as well we had that slap-up meal in La Potinière last night,’ said Paula Viareggio, ‘and the bacon rolls for breakfast, for the way you looked on telly an hour ago, you were ready to eat somebody.’

  ‘I was,’ Mario replied wryly, ‘but the dish of the day slipped out of the kitchen before I could ram a skewer through him.’

  ‘You’ll see him again, though?’

  ‘Barker? No, he’s going back to London with his boss. Brian Mackie talked the fiscal into authorising the release of Zrinka’s body this morning. It was picked up from the morgue by an undertaker, and it’ll be on board their aircraft when they fly out of Turnhouse in an hour.’

  ‘Just as well for him, by the sound of it.’

  ‘If you think I looked angry, you should have seen Alan Royston afterwards. I’ve never thought of him as an emotional bloke, but he was spitting feathers. He started with “unprofessional”, “discourteous” and went on until he was using adjectives I hadn’t heard in years.’

  ‘Huh! That’s saying something,’ she grunted. ‘What about the million? Is that going to make problems for you?’

  ‘It’ll be a nuisance for Stevie and the team,’ he admitted, ‘but nothing they can’t handle. Anyway, that’s pure bloody window-dressing. I’m more worried about Boras’s attitude.’

  ‘You mean the barely veiled threat he made?’

  ‘Nah, I don’t read too much into that: he’s lost his daughter, he’s bursting with rage. No, I’m concerned because although he said publicly that he’s right behind us, I’m not sure that’s true in private. He has political clout, and if we don’t get a result soon, we may find it aimed at us.’

  ‘Don’t you have political clout too?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come on, I’ve heard the stories about Bob Skinner and the new First Minister.’

  ‘Boras’s influence is in London, and probably heavyweight. His foundation donates to both Labour and the Tories. But maybe I’m misjudging the guy. Maybe I’m misjudging my own troops as well. We might have an arrest by the weekend, and all my concerns will be academic. But that’s not what my gut tells me: it says it’s not going to be as easy as that. So we can’t allow ourselves to be distracted by Boras: we have to concentrate on the job in hand.’

  ‘Good for you. Where are you now? I can hear traffic noise.’

  ‘I’m on my way up to Perthshire, to see the parents of the victim Paul.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘For now. It’s in the Tayside area, so I had to clear it with Rod Greatorix, my opposite number up there. He told Andy Martin and Andy’s decided to sit in on it with me.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Paula declared. ‘You’ll have a familiar face alongside you when you see them. It sounds like an unpleasant task.’

  ‘Telling a couple their son was half eaten by foxes? “Unpleasant” could be an understatement.’

  Thirty-three

  ‘Dominic Padstow,’ Tarvil Singh growled. ‘Just who the hell are you?’

  ‘You not having any luck?’ asked Griff Montell.

  ‘Not so far. There are no Padstows in the phone book for Edinburgh. There are none of them on the electoral roll, or on the valuation roll. This guy might have been in the city once, but he’s no’ here now.’

  ‘Not necessarily: he could be registered to vote somewhere else, he could be living in digs, and he could have a mobile rather than a landline. How about criminal convictions? Does he have any of them?’

  ‘Where d’you think I checked first?’ the big Sikh snapped.

  ‘Sorry. How about the Passport Office?’

  ‘Done that too, but the Data Protection Act restricts the information they can give us. The guy isn’t a suspect; and so he has rights to privacy.’

  ‘Where do you go next? Inland Revenue?’

  ‘I’d run up against the same problems there. No, I’ll try the Gavin parents, like the DI said.’

  ‘Good luck, mate!’ Montell exclaimed, with feeling.

  Singh picked up his phone, checked a number scrawled on a pad on his desk, and dialled. He hoped that his sigh of relief did not show, when Russ Gavin, home from work for lunch as usual, answered the call. Mrs Gavin was a nice woman, totally overwhelmed by a loss that no mother ever deserved, and she had the sympathy of all the detectives who had come in contact with her. However, they were all agreed that she was, as Ray Wilding had put it, ‘as much use as a chocolate teapot’.

  ‘DC Singh,’ said Stacey’s father, ‘what can I do for you? Two calls in two days, first Mr Montell, now you: the investigation seems to be picking up pace again. It’s tragic that it’s taken two more deaths to do it, though.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more, sir.’

  ‘Hey,’ he exclaimed, ‘don’t take that as a criticism. I’m not getting at you, honest, or at Mr Montell. The only guy I’ve got a down on was that clown in uniform who accused Stacey of being a junkie. I appreciate that you and all the rest of the CID team are doing your best.’

  ‘No problem, sir. We’re our own worst critics, I promise you. I want to ask you about the second victim, Miss Boras. She and your daughter were both young full-time artists working in Edinburgh. We’re looking for any links between them, and we need to start by establishing whether they ever met, whether they knew each other.’

  ‘Not to my knowledge,’ the man replied. ‘Hold on, though, my wife’s here. I’ll ask her. Doreen, the police need to know if Stacey was acquainted with the second girl who’s just been murdered.’ Singh heard an indistinct mumble in the background. ‘Boras,’ said Gavin, across his living room. ‘Zrinka Boras.’ The detective waited, but the answer came quickly. ‘She’s shaking her head. No, it doesn’t mean anything to her either. I don’t think it’s a name we would have forgotten if Stacey had ever mentioned it.’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t imagine so.’

  ‘What was she like?’ asked Gavin, quietly.

  Singh thought he heard his voice falter slightly. ‘She seems to have been a very nice woman,’ he told him. ‘Just like your Stacey,’ he added. ‘Killed for no reason that we’ve yet been able to establish. She came from a wealthy background; her dad’s a famous man but she wouldn’t use his name to get on. She wanted to make her own way in the world, with little or no help from her parents, and like your Stacey, she was succeeding.’

  ‘God, it’s tragic, isn’t it?’ Gavin sighed. ‘Can you imagine the mind of a man who would do something like that? Oops, sorry, I should have said “person”. I’m jumping to gender conclusions.’

  ‘No, you’re all right there, sir,’ the detective reassured him. ‘We’re more or less certain that we’re looking for a man. The way the third victim’s . . . the boy’s . . . body was concealed would have taken a lot of strength. But, no, I can’t imagine his mind. That’s one of the reasons he’s been difficult to catch so far: we’ve got no idea what his motive is.’

  ‘He’s an art critic.’ Singh could almost hear Gavin wince as soon as the sentence had escaped from his lips. ‘Jesus, that sounds terrible coming from me. You don’t want to see the way my wife’s looking at me.’

  ‘That’s been said already, sir, among our lot, and i
t’ll be said again too, so don’t give yourself a kicking over it. Anyhow, it’s right, in a way: the link between the victims’ occupations gives us a line of enquiry. For now, though, we’re concentrating on finding personal links between them, mutual acquaintances, and so on. I’d like to put a name to you, to see if it means anything.’

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Dominic Padstow.’

  ‘Dominic Padstow?’ Russ Gavin repeated. ‘Dominic Padstow.’ The detective constable sat patiently through a long silence. ‘There was a Dominic, once, a year or so back, when Stacey was still at art college, but I don’t remember his surname . . . if, indeed, I ever knew it.’

  ‘He was a boyfriend?’

  ‘I suppose so. She was living in a student flat in town at that point, so Doreen and I weren’t really up to speed with her, er, romantic life. She did bring him to the house once, though.’

  ‘You met him?’

  ‘Yes, it was at the weekend. They arrived out of the blue, she introduced him as her friend Dominic, then whisked him up to her studio in the attic.’

  ‘Can you describe him?’

  ‘Roughly, I suppose. As I recall, he was a bit older than Stacey; yes, I recall mentioning that to Doreen at the time. I said that he was getting on a bit to be a student . . . although to be fair to the chap she didn’t introduce him as such.’

  ‘How much older?’

  ‘He’d be about thirty.’

  ‘Did he look like a student? Was he dressed like one?’

  ‘A bit smarter than that, I suppose. He wore denims and a check shirt.’ There was a sound in the background. ‘What’s that, dear? You sure? Okay. Doreen says that the shirt was Paul Smith. She noticed the label; she says they’re pricey.’

  ‘I’m an M & S man myself, sir,’ Singh volunteered. ‘Can you give me a physical description?’

  ‘He was around the same height as me, I’d say, five ten, well built, but not fat, strong-looking, well groomed . . . By that I mean he was clean-shaven and his hair was longish, but properly cut. Now that I think about it, he didn’t really look like a student. He had a more affluent air than that.’