Death's Door bs-17

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Dominic Padstow,’ a television reporter intoned, ‘the man we’re all assuming is your prime suspect. Have you made any progress towards tracing him since you issued his image to the media last night?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ McGuire answered, pocketing the note and beginning to rise, ‘as of this minute, we may know who he is. That’s all, folks.’

  Fifty-three

  ‘He’s a journalist?’ Stevie Steele exclaimed.

  ‘That’s what MI5 believe,’ said Shannon. ‘They’ve e-mailed me a photograph and if he’s not the man in the painting, he’s his twin. I’ve forwarded it on to you, along with his file. Show it to your surviving witnesses and see what they say.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Daniel Ballester.’

  ‘Unusual.’

  ‘His grandfather was on the wrong side in the Spanish civil war; he dodged the firing squad and escaped to Britain. It’s all in the file. It should be in your mailbox by now, so you can see for yourself.’

  ‘Why does MI5 have a folder on him?’

  ‘For the not uncommon reason that he’s a pain in the arse. He’s a freelance whose speciality is upsetting the government, enough for somebody to have ordered that tabs be kept on him.’

  ‘Thanks, Dottie, I’ll read it right now.’

  ‘Five aren’t done with this, Stevie,’ Shannon told him. ‘They have access where we don’t; they’re going to do what they can to trace his movements. In the meantime they’ve raised the alert at all points of exit from the country.’

  ‘You must have a good contact there.’

  ‘As good as they get. I’ll be back if and when I hear anything more.’

  Steele hung up, switched on his computer terminal and waited while it booted up. As soon as the cursor switched from hourglass to simple arrow, he clicked the internal mail icon and watched the screen. True to her word, Dottie Shannon’s message was there; he opened it and clicked on the attachments, first to download, and then to display the photograph.

  He called to Wilding and waved to him to join him. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, holding a print of the face from Stacey Gavin’s portrait beside the monitor.

  ‘That’s the boy,’ said the sergeant, at once. ‘Mrs Dell was right: Stacey really could paint. He’s a good-looking bastard, isn’t he? What do we know about him?’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’ Steele opened the other file, and read aloud, ‘Daniel Ballester, aged thirty-two, white British subject, heterosexual, unmarried. Son of Archimedes Ballester, stockbroker, and Hilda Roberts, formerly of Hounslow, now retired and residing in Scottsdale, Arizona. No other known relatives. That’s fucking magic; sounds like a dead end already. Graduated with honours in media and politics; vice-president of student union in his final year and a member of the executive of the National Union of Students.’

  ‘They probably started watching him then,’ Wilding muttered.

  ‘Could be. What’s next? Hey, he has two criminal convictions, one for being part of a disorderly crowd during his university days, but . . . get this . . . another for causing actual bodily harm to a girlfriend when he was twenty. He was given a jail sentence of one year, suspended. Jesus, Ray, if Zrinka had only known . . .’

  ‘If wishes were horses, gaffer, we’d all get a ride. What about his career?’

  ‘It says here that he joined the staff of Sky News as a researcher, straight from Keele, then moved on after a year to the Guardian features department. He made his name there with several exposés of politicians on the take from business, which led to a government front-bencher being thrown out of Parliament, and subsequently jailed . . . I remember that one. He was forced to resign from the Guardian just over two years ago after doing a piece for a left-wing magazine, alleging the assassination of Princess Diana.’

  ‘What self-respecting radical journalist hasn’t written one of those?’

  ‘Ah, but this one was subsequently discredited and condemned by both the British and French governments, and the editor of the magazine was forced to issue a retraction and an apology. According to this, Ballester was fed false information by an unknown contact who posed as a dissident member of the French Sûreté, and showed him a fake document, purporting to have been signed by the French justice minister, approving the plot, and giving the go-ahead. ’

  ‘Don’t piss off the government, eh?’

  ‘So it seems. Since then he’s been operating as a freelance, doing the same type of stuff for whoever will pay him. He’s been involved in a couple of stings on closet gay pop stars, on a kiddies’ TV presenter with a drug habit and on a footballer’s wife who was shagging his manager when he was away on international duty.

  ‘He lives in London, but . . . and this is when it gets interesting . . . periodically drops off the radar. His “periods of inactivity”, as they’re called here . . . an excuse for sloppy surveillance if you ask me . . . appear to coincide with the times he was living with Zrinka and then going out with Stacey. His whereabouts are currently unknown; he was last observed in London in February.’

  ‘That fits,’ said Wilding. ‘But what does it tell us, Stevie?’

  ‘Nothing of itself, but it poses some interesting questions. Why Zrinka? Why does this guy, with his track record, suddenly pop up in Edinburgh and latch himself on to the artist daughter of one of the richest men in Britain?’

  ‘Maybe he’d had enough of scratching around. Maybe he wanted to marry money.’

  ‘So he targets a girl who’s determined not to live off her father? No, that’s not the reason. I reckon he was on a fucking story, that’s why. He was out to dig up something on Boras. Think about it, Ray: Ballester made his name doing stories about business corruption, and what finer target than him? We know he’s dodgy, that he’s used Keith Barker to bribe a DTI official for useful inside information. Maybe that was the story Ballester was after, or maybe it was something else, but I’ll bet you one thing. Eventually Zrinka found out who or what he was, and that was why she gave him the bum’s rush.’

  ‘What about Stacey? Why would he move on to her?’

  ‘Because he didn’t want to give up on his story. Remember, she and Zrinka didn’t become friendly till after he was gone. He couldn’t get to Boras’s daughter any more, so he got to someone close to her. We know from Amy that she wouldn’t have given him the time of day, but Stacey didn’t know his history.’

  ‘So why did he kill them?’

  ‘A combination of rage over rejection, jealousy, and maybe frustration that his story was blown; that serious-assault conviction in his background suggests that he’s capable.’

  ‘It does. So where do we go now? We might know what his real name is, but he’s still disappeared.’

  Steele leaned back, gazing up at the ceiling. ‘How did Zrinka find out?’ he asked himself aloud. ‘If I’m right, if he was researching a story on Davor Boras . . .’

  He sat upright and looked at Wilding. ‘I want to interview Barker,’ he said. ‘No, I’m going to bloody interview him. Ray, we’re going to London. Maybe we could . . .’

  He stopped short and looked at his watch. ‘Shit!’ he shouted. ‘Maggie’s leaving do starts in ten minutes.’ He stood up and grabbed his jacket. ‘We’re going tomorrow. You make the arrangements: book us on an early flight, then tell the Met that we’re coming and that we want to see Barker, wherever they’re holding him.’

  ‘What if he’s on bail?’

  ‘They’ll still have him; tell them not to give him fucking bail. If you have a problem with them, go to DCS McGuire. Meantime, I’m off to join my wife.’

  Fifty-four

  ‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you came, sir,’ said Rose, to the tall, tanned man who stood by the window of the conference room in the Torphichen Place police office. He looked slimmer in the waist than at their last encounter, although the tightness of his jacket at the shoulders suggested this might be due to exercise rather than dieting. His steel-grey hair w
as cut much shorter than she had ever seen it, and seemed to shine, picking up highlights from the evening sun.

  ‘Mags,’ his sigh had a laugh in it, ‘for once in your life, will you please call me Bob?’ He glanced at his watch, awkwardly, since he was holding a glass in his left hand and a plate, laden with sandwiches, in his right. ‘It’s past five o’clock so you’re a civilian, for a while at least. To tell you the truth, I thought about not coming. A lot of people here haven’t seen me for a while, and might want to bend my ear about things. You’re the centre of attraction here and I didn’t want to take away from that.’

  ‘I’m glad you changed your mind.’

  ‘Thank my daughter. She told me that I’d an inflated idea of my own importance and that staying at home wasn’t an option. She’d have come with me, by the way, only she’s in Manchester today, on business. Bloody jet-setter; she’s flying higher by the month, that one.’

  ‘I know. Mario told me how highly Paula rates her, in what she’s doing for the business; he says that Viareggio PLC, as it is now, was very much her creation.’

  ‘Speaking of Mario, I don’t see him, or your new husband for that matter.’

  ‘Stevie will be here; he’s on a three-liner. As for my ex, he’s expected, but . . . they’re both under a hell of a lot of pressure just now.’

  ‘I can imagine. I feel a bit guilty about that too, Maggie. I did think about making my presence felt, and giving Stevie and the team my support, but the other lady in my life persuaded me that if DCC Skinner broke off a well-publicised sabbatical to take personal charge of the investigation, it would be seen by our enemies in the media as a vote of no confidence in them. That’s why I’ve stayed out of it.’

  ‘I guessed as much, and so did they.’ She smiled up at him. ‘Now if you hadn’t turned up today, that would have been a cause for guilt.’

  ‘You’re looking great, you know,’ he told her. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m just gobsmacked by the turn your life has taken.’

  ‘So am I, Bob; so am I. This time last year, if anyone had told me that . . . Jesus!’

  Skinner thought he detected an edge in her voice. ‘You’ve no regrets, have you?’

  ‘Absolutely not. I have never in my life felt more fulfilled. I am totally focused on delivering this child safely into the world, and I can think of nothing beyond that.’

  ‘Having fathered some in my time, I know the feeling.’

  ‘Thanks. Actually you’re not looking too bad yourself, considering what you’ve been through.’

  ‘And thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m fine now. I’m over the divorce and I’m content with the arrangements that Sarah and I have made for the kids, especially now that I’ve seen how it’s working out. They had a great time in Connecticut at Easter and they’re looking forward to the summer holidays already.

  ‘Sarah’s happy too: she loves being a proper doctor again, rather than a pathologist, working, as she puts it, with people who ain’t dead yet, and trying to keep them that way.’

  ‘You’ve seen her there?’

  ‘I flew across with the nanny and the kids, hired a car and drove them up to her place. Then I headed north to Canada.’

  ‘Now I did know that. Stevie’s cousin’s with the force there, and he told him. It’s a tiny world.’

  Skinner chuckled. ‘You can’t do a bloody thing, can you? The fact is, a sabbatical isn’t a holiday, it’s a working break. Since I’ve been away from Fettes, apart from my visit to the RCMP, I’ve spent some time with the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan police force, and I’ve lectured at the FBI Academy in Virginia.

  ‘There was a purpose to the visits to Toronto and Barcelona. Ontario and Catalunya have what are effectively unitary police forces covering those entire regions. I’ve been studying how they work; my findings will be contained in a paper I’m writing.’

  ‘A thesis? For a doctorate?’

  ‘No, that would just be another ego trip. It’s for Aileen; she asked me to do it.’

  ‘You mean the executive’s looking at setting up a national force for Scotland?’

  ‘Not officially; at this stage it’s private enterprise on our part. If it floats, she might give it to a policy unit for a view to launching it. Why not? The population of Ontario is twelve million, and Catalunya has eight million. We have five. Mind you, Maggie, this is between you and me. The chief knows what I’m doing, so does Alex, and so does Andy Martin, but that’s it.’

  She gazed up at him thoughtfully. ‘I’m more than a bit honoured that you’ve chosen to tell me.’

  ‘Don’t be; you’re one of the best officers I’ve ever worked with, and you’re a friend. I value your opinions and I’d like to talk my thoughts through with you before I finish my report. Can I do that?’

  ‘Of course,’ Rose replied. ‘I’ll have plenty of time on my hands over the next few weeks.’

  ‘You sure will,’ said Stevie, approaching from behind just in time to hear her last few words. He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Sorry I’m late, love, but things have been moving fast. You’re going to have to see Ray’s cousin on your own tomorrow, I’m afraid. Ray and I are off to London to interview Keith Barker, that character I told you about.’ He looked at Skinner, extending his hand. ‘Hello, sir, good to see you. I’m chuffed you would make it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been anywhere else.’ He glanced across the room and saw that McGuire had arrived also. ‘Maggie,’ he said, ‘you should circulate. I want a word with your old man and your ex.’

  As Rose headed off in the direction of the chief constable, Skinner caught the eye of the head of CID, who read the summons, and made his way through the assembly. ‘Afternoon, boss,’ he greeted the DCC.

  ‘And to you. How are you guys getting on? I’ve been following with interest, don’t worry.’

  ‘We’ve identified Padstow,’ Steele replied. ‘He’s really an investigative reporter called Daniel Ballester. We don’t know where he is, but we do know that we’re not the only people who have been after him; hence my trip to London tomorrow, to question Barker.’ He glanced at McGuire. ‘That’s all happened since we spoke last,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ the head of CID told him. ‘Shannon kept me in the loop.’

  ‘The only family lead is to his parents, retired and living in Arizona. They need to be interviewed.’

  ‘Give me the details,’ said Skinner, ‘and I’ll use my FBI contacts. I’ll make a call tonight; if his folks know where he is, you’ll know by tomorrow.’

  ‘What if they won’t say?’

  ‘They will: retired British subjects in the US need to be good citizens if they want to stay there.’

  ‘Maybe he’s on his way out there already.’

  ‘Have you put out an all-ports-and-airports warning on this man?’

  ‘That’s in place; Dottie Shannon arranged it.’

  ‘In that case, it’s less than twelve hours since the Noone girl was killed. If he’s your man and he has made it out of the country, his name will be on a flight passenger list somewhere. If he’s landed, we have a hot trail. If he’s still up in the air, when he gets down he’ll wish he’d stayed there. Now, what the hell is this about Barker?’

  Stevie chuckled. ‘He came in handy,’ he said to Skinner. ‘The media are going crazy trying to find out why he’s been lifted.’

  ‘Why has he been?’ asked the DCC.

  ‘For bribing a guy in the Home Office.’

  ‘Christ! That’ll keep him out of circulation for a while. Have the Met tied it to his boss?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘See if you can help them. I took a big dislike to that man when I saw him on telly; it was plain as the scar on my forehead that when he sat in on your briefing he was looking right through the cameras at the stock market. Now,’ he continued, ‘about your inquiry; there’s something I need to tell you. I’ve put you in an embarrassing position, and I apologise.

  ‘I know what happen
ed with young Griff; I got feedback from Five as well, and from Amanda Dennis herself, not from the duty officer. He called Shannon without reference to her, and he’s still aching because of it.’ He smiled, his eyes distant for a second.

  ‘You guys are bound to be wondering why I didn’t react when I saw the photo of Zrinka Boras. The answer is that I’ve never met her, as such. When Alex bought me that picture from her stall at the market, I was busy elsewhere.

  In fact, I was trying to free my younger daughter from a faceful of candy floss, a job and a half, if you’ve never had to do it. When I opened the parcel at home, I found that Zrinka had put one of her business cards in with it. That’s how I came to have her e-mail address.’

  ‘I’d worked that out, sir,’ said Steele. ‘I took a couple of those cards from her flat.’

  ‘Maybe so, Stevie, but you should have bloody asked me about it, for the book.’

  ‘Sorry, boss.’

  ‘Forgiven. Now, what else should you have asked me?’

  ‘Whether you knew Stacey Gavin as well, since you and Alex each have one of her paintings.’

  ‘Exactly. For the moment, we’ll leave the question of how Montell came to recognise a picture hanging in my daughter’s bedroom, then shoot his mouth off about it in the office. That’s for me to raise with him on another occasion,’ his eyes gleamed, ‘although you can feel free to tell him that I plan to do just that.

  ‘The fact is, I didn’t know Stacey, nor did I make the connection until Alex told me about the good detective constable spotting it. I bought both of those works from a gallery; the signature she used was “Gavin”; that was all. The day that she was murdered, I flew out of Edinburgh for the start of a ten-day trip to Barcelona so I missed the press coverage. I saw references to the investigation in the papers after I got back, but by that time all the detail about her had been worked through.

  ‘That’s it; that’s all I know. Now, what you must do is get that into the record and make fucking sure that the fiscal is aware of it. You’re doing a first-class professional job, Inspector, but there must be nothing swept under the carpet in this investigation, or laughed off as ridiculous. Be absolutely clear about that.’