Death's Door bs-17

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘We appreciate that, sir. Please let me introduce Deputy Chief Constable Bob Skinner, and Detective Inspector Becky Stallings, who’s our liaison officer with the Met.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ he replied, as they shook hands. ‘Come with me; let’s go into my hospitality suite. My office is far too formal.’ Skinner was taken by surprise, but he nodded; he was last in line as they followed Boras into a big square room, set on a corner of the building so that two of its sides offered a spectacular view across the rooftops to the Tower of London and the bridge beyond. As Boras closed the door, the DCC activated the box in his trouser pocket, and almost immediately felt it vibrate strongly against his thigh.

  Their host looked towards a drinks table, with a laden ice-bucket sitting on it, and a small fridge beside it. A waiter stood ready. ‘Ms Stallings, gentlemen: may I offer you a drink?’ He laughed lightly, ‘Or don’t you do that on duty?’

  ‘Only when it’s formal,’ McGuire told him. ‘The inspector’s driving, so hers will have to be soft, but if that’s a bottle of Sancerre open in the bucket, the DCC and I will be very happy to join you.’

  They stood in silence while the waiter poured the drinks, a Pepsi Max and three glasses, and handed them round. ‘Thank you, Neville,’ said Boras. ‘I’ll call you when we need refills.’ As the man left he showed his guests to a seating area, where leather armchairs were arranged to take maximum advantage of the view. As she settled down, it occurred to Stallings that it would make a very fine ceiling, if the building was just a little higher.

  ‘Well.’ The businessman fixed his gimlet eyes on McGuire, and gave another thin smile. ‘I’d have done it anyway, you know,’ he murmured, his voice barely carrying to the inspector who was placed furthest from him.

  ‘What’s that?’ the chief superintendent asked.

  ‘Make the donation to the Dependants’ Trust. You anticipated my announcement, although some have said that you forced my hand.’

  McGuire beamed at him. ‘There will always be mean-spirited people like that, sir. Just as, happily, there will always be generous people like you. I was asked a straight question, and I gave a straight answer. You’re right, I anticipated your announcement, but I never had any doubt that in the circumstances you’d make your gift, if not to that charity then to another worthy recipient.’

  ‘Of course, I am aware of that, really. Samo vas zavitlavam, to use my native tongue. I was only swinging with you; pulling your chain, as we say in English. It is over, then?’

  ‘I believe that we can say that the investigation into your daughter’s murder is over. Our Crown Office, the Scottish prosecution service, is about to announce that, with Ballester’s death, we are no longer looking for anyone else in connection with the four homicides.’

  ‘Then I thank you, and I congratulate you. Again, though, I must express my sorrow at the needless death of your colleague, Inspector Steele. I was shocked by it, shocked; he was such a fine, dedicated officer.’

  Skinner gazed at the man, looking for the faintest sign of insincerity in his eyes. Over the years he had stared down many guilty men, and he had been able to read their secrets as easily as if they had confessed them, as eventually virtually all of them had. Boras’s expression told him nothing, nothing at all. He had a strange feeling that what the man was saying was literally true. ‘Thank you for that,’ he said, addressing him for the first time. ‘I’ll convey it to Stevie’s widow.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. If there is anything I can do for her, anything at all, you or she simply has to ask.’

  ‘That is also kind of you, but in my force, officers’ widows want for nothing.’

  ‘I’m sure. Will there be a court proceeding of any sort, Mr Skinner? A public inquiry into Zrinka’s death, and the others?’

  ‘There’s no statutory provision for it in Scotland,’ the DCC told him. ‘Formal hearings into fatal accidents and sudden deaths are only mandatory when a person is killed at work, or dies when in custody. Murder investigations result in prosecution when they’re concluded, but in this case, the Crown has nobody to prosecute. There is no suspect, other than Ballester, and he’s dead. He had motive, opportunity, everything, and we found the murder weapon in his house. We also found personal possessions that he had taken from three of the four victims. He did it.’

  ‘There is no chance that he could have been framed by someone else?’

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s a strange question, coming from you.’

  ‘I need certainty, sir, that my daughter’s killer is dead.’

  ‘Then you have it for, I promise you, that evidence simply couldn’t have been planted. Nobody knew where Ballester was, other than your guys, and neither of them could possibly have killed Zrinka, Stacey, Amy or Harry. Okay, you knew too, but you didn’t murder your daughter, Mr Boras, you loved her.’ The businessman’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, but Skinner held up a hand.

  ‘The irony is that although Ballester was murdered himself, he was our man all right, not a serial killer as my officers suspected at first, but a rejected lover with a grudge, and into the bargain, a previous conviction for violence against a woman.’

  Boras glared at the DCC as he finished, and their eyes seemed to lock in unblinking conflict. ‘My guys knew, you say. I knew?’

  ‘Your former employee,’ said Skinner, ‘Mr Barker, has been talking, in the wake of his arrest for bribing a civil servant, using money which he says came from you. He says that three years ago you commissioned a firm called Aeron to make enquiries about a journalist who had been making unwelcome enquiries into your company. They identified him as Daniel Ballester, in a report that Barker claims to have seen in your possession. He alleges that you instructed Aeron to discourage Ballester from making further trouble. However, shortly afterwards he was professionally disgraced, after being tricked into doing a silly story about Princess Diana’s death.

  ‘When Dominic Padstow’s name was mentioned that was news to you, Barker says, and you instructed him to trace him through the Passport Office.’ Skinner’s eyes narrowed a fraction. ‘My guess is that you didn’t suspect at that stage that Padstow was Ballester; I reckon you simply wanted to get to him first. But when our clever detective constable came up with his portrait, you certainly knew who he was even before we identified him, because you set Aeron on to finding him. They were good; we’d have found him eventually, but they did it first and again you were one step ahead. This we know from Aeron, rather than Barker.’ He paused. ‘At this stage,’ he asked, ‘would you care to comment on anything I’ve said so far?’

  Boras continued to look back at him, his little dark eyes impassive. He sipped his Sancerre. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Please carry on, unless your story is over.’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t,’ Skinner exclaimed, ‘because we found Aeron ourselves at that point. DI Steele and DI Stallings went to their office on Saturday afternoon. After some persuasion, they were put in touch by telephone with the company’s chief executive, Mr Michael Spicer. He had just arrived at Hathaway House, with his associate Mr Ivor Brown, having gone there, on your instructions, to locate and apprehend Daniel Ballester.

  ‘At least, that’s what they said your orders were, but even if they were a little more extreme it wouldn’t have mattered, because when they got there, the man was dead. And if Stevie Steele had phoned them ten minutes later, they’d have been dead too. They’d have gone into that house and they’d have walked into the grenade trap.’

  ‘Indeed?’ The voice was as cold as the ice in the bucket.

  ‘Oh, yes. You had Ballester killed, Mr Boras. You had him executed. I don’t suggest for a moment that you did it yourself: I’m sure that any investigation would show very quickly that you were at home with your wife all day on Saturday, continuing to make arrangements for your daughter’s funeral.

  ‘No, you had him killed,’ the DCC repeated, ‘and Spicer and Brown were meant to die too. They were your only contacts with Aeron; the
y were the only people who could prove that you had prior knowledge of Daniel Ballester, and that you identified him as your daughter’s killer before the police did.’

  ‘And what about Barker?’ Boras asked. ‘If your fanciful theory is correct, why is he still alive?’

  ‘Hey,’ Skinner retorted, ‘it’s never a good idea to offer a defence before you’ve been accused, and as we keep on saying, this is an informal visit. But since you ask, Barker’s nothing. He has no evidence that you ever knew Ballester. The Met have got him by the balls for bribing a public official and he’s singing like George Michael to try to get out of it. They’ve also got him for tax evasion, thanks to a slush fund, under the rather frivolous name of Jack Frost, set up with money that will never in a million years be traceable back to you.

  ‘So you’re not worried about him at all. Mind you, that may not prevent him having a fatal accident in the near future: time will tell.’

  He leaned back in his chair. ‘You’re not worried about Spicer and Brown either. My colleagues in Northumbria had no grounds to hold them on Saturday, so they sent them on their way. In hindsight, that’s a pity, for . . . and this will surprise DI Stallings, who doesn’t know about it . . . when I pulled a couple of strings this morning and had Special Branch officers sent to their place to hold them for questioning, they discovered that they were gone. Not just the two of them either, the whole Aeron operation, vanished as if it had never existed.’

  He tilted his glass in a gesture that could only have been a salute. ‘My congratulations, Mr Boras: you’ve done what you told a whole roomful of people last Thursday that you would do. You’ve had your revenge on your daughter’s murderer. And nobody will ever lay a finger on you for it.’

  Finally, Boras broke eye contact with Skinner, as he bowed his head to him, briefly. ‘Remarkable, quite remarkable,’ he exclaimed. ‘Your picture is as clear as any my Zrinka ever painted, and just as imaginative. And, of course, you could not resist coming here to set it out for me. I am flattered, sir.’

  Skinner let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a growl. ‘You know, that’s the first silly thing you’ve said. I’m not flattering you, man. I’m not even addressing you. All along I’ve been talking to whoever is monitoring this meeting, to whoever is looking and listening in.

  ‘I’m not sure who it is, but it’s not the Sun, that’s for sure. You have your office swept every day; that’s secure, so why bring us in here, unless you actively want somebody to hear what’s being said.’ He took the small box from his pocket and held it up as he twisted half-way round in his seat to gaze at the back wall, at a point above the drinks table.

  When he turned back to face Boras he saw a teeth-baring grimace on the man’s face. Instantly, it vanished, but the look that replaced it was thunderous.

  ‘You may think,’ Skinner told him, ‘that what I’ve just done was a bit risky. But it wasn’t. It doesn’t matter who’s watching us, I’m too high-profile to vanish off the face of the earth, and so is Mario. On top of that,’ he added, with a smile, ‘we’re both extremely dangerous. I came into this building with a purpose, and I still have it. So what I’m saying to the boys and girls in our audience is this.

  ‘I know that your man Boras is fireproof, but I want the man who killed Stevie, and I’m going to have him. The best thing you can all do is give him to me. The second best is stay out of my way while I find him.’ He pushed himself violently to his feet. ‘Come on, you two. We’re finished here.’ He drained his glass and looked down at the blue-suited figure, into his furious eyes. ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘but I’ve tasted better.’

  Sixty-nine

  It should have been the best day of Sammy Pye’s career. He had been sure that he would move up, one day, from being Mario McGuire’s sidekick, having followed him, as a sergeant, through two divisional commands and finally into the head of CID’s office.

  For some time it had been a matter of when, not if, he would make detective inspector and occasionally he had let himself wonder where that might be. He had been a little hurt when McGuire had told him that he was moving Jack McGurk temporarily to Torphichen Place, with George Regan as acting DI, and it must have shown, for his boss had been moved to tell him in confidence that he was simply waiting for the Bandit Mackenzie situation to resolve itself, before sending him down to Leith.

  The promised move had come about, but not in a way that anyone could have foreseen. Pye had felt uncomfortable from the moment he had settled in behind Stevie Steele’s old desk, as if there were two of them in the chair. The other three guys had done their best to make him feel welcome, but still the atmosphere had been awkward.

  Finally, after Skinner and McGuire had visited and departed, Wilding had pulled his chair over towards him. ‘Listen, Sammy,’ he had said, ‘this is going to be a tough day for all of us, but it would be better for you if you moved into the DCI’s room. Stevie never did, because he didn’t want it to seem that he was jumping into Mackenzie’s shoes. But you never worked with the guy, so there’s no reason for you not to.’

  Sometimes, Pye thought, as he looked through the Perspex wall, when he took off the ‘hail fellow, well met’ guise and turned serious, Ray Wilding was a pretty impressive bloke. He decided that it would be his practice to encourage him to do so more often.

  His musing was interrupted when he saw Griff Montell rise from his chair, and head towards him. ‘Boss,’ said the South African, as he opened the door, ‘I’m into that disk that the fiscal’s office sent up, and there are some things on it you should see.’

  ‘Show me,’ Pye replied, rising to follow him back to his work station. A screen saver was active on the DC’s monitor; as soon as he touched the mouse it vanished and a folder headed ‘my documents’ appeared. ‘How does the calendar look?’ asked the inspector.

  ‘It has him in Edinburgh on the days of all three murders, but that’s not what I wanted to show you. Wait a minute.’ He clicked on a subfolder. It opened another series: Montell moved the cursor on to an icon marked ‘Les Girls’ and opened it. A strip of small images appeared. ‘Watch,’ he said, then hit the ‘view as a slideshow’ command. The screen went black for a second, and then was filled with a clear, sharp photograph of a woman, lying on her back on stony ground. ‘Stacey Gavin,’ the detective constable announced unnecessarily, as Pye had found himself gazing at her image on the wall, with the rest, for much of the morning since his arrival.

  ‘Jeez,’ he whispered.

  The frame held for a few seconds until it was replaced by another, taken from a different angle, then by another, of Stacey’s pale face. The location moved, to a yellow beach, and another dead girl, the same sequence repeating until the naked form of Amy Noone was revealed. As they realised what was happening, Wilding and Singh stopped what they were doing and moved across the room to watch the display as it completed, then repeated, then ran again. There were no photographs of Harry Paul, only the three young women.

  ‘He loved them,’ said Pye, quietly. ‘Look at the way they’re photographed: it’s perfect, they’re beautiful. He killed them and yet he loved them. He loved them . . . and yet he killed them.’

  Seventy

  Bob Skinner did not believe for a second that his confrontation with Boras might have endangered himself or either of his companions but he did read anxiety in Stallings as she sat down to dine with him and McGuire in an Italian restaurant near Covent Garden, after she had dropped off her car in the park behind her office.

  ‘It’s okay, Becky,’ he assured her, as they scanned the menu. ‘Relax, have a couple of drinks with your meal, then get a car to take you home.’

  ‘You know, I think I might,’ she said. ‘That was a very scary scene, especially when you said that the room was under surveillance.’

  ‘It had to be. Why else would he have taken us there, rather than to the security of his office?’

  ‘If what Barker told us was true, why does he have that screened every day?’
>
  ‘Because it suits him. He operates a very high-level business; plus, he’s a very dodgy guy. He has to have somewhere he can function in absolute secrecy. But if he’s involved with the intelligence community, as I reckon he is, he has to accept a degree of surveillance. Boras knew damn well that a deputy chief constable doesn’t travel four hundred miles just to have a drink with him and tell him something that he and the rest of the country heard on telly the day before. That room’s his security blanket.’

  ‘You’re certain it was bugged?’

  ‘One hundred per cent.’ He took the device from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Did you see any cameras or mikes in Boras’s eyrie?’

  ‘No.’

  He pointed to a corner of the restaurant, where a CCTV camera, mounted on a pivot on the ceiling, silently scanned the area. ‘Do you see that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then hold on to that box, and press the “activate” button.’

  She did as he said, then yelped. ‘It’s vibrating.’

  ‘Just as it did in my pocket earlier on. Right now, it’s telling you about that camera up there.’

  ‘Couldn’t it be something else?’

  He laughed. ‘I like healthy scepticism in a police officer. Yes, it could, if this place is bugged as well, but regardless of that, it’s picking up that camera.’

  ‘If you’re right, what’s going to happen?’

  ‘Maybe nothing; maybe they will just stand back and let me get on with it. If not, somebody will get in touch with me, very soon.’

  ‘Do you know who that will be?’

  ‘I suspect it may be someone I know, under orders to persuade me to be a good boy, but I’ll find that out in due course.’

  Stallings frowned. A waiter approached, but Skinner waved him away. ‘Sir, what makes you so sure that Boras is involved in something covert?’