‘But it’s important, Oz.’ I’ve noticed this about celebrity; it puts people you’ve never met on automatic Christian name terms. ‘I’m working on a story that involves the Gantry Group and we’re planning to run it as tomorrow’s lead.’ That got my attention, but I wasn’t about to let ‘Jenny’ know it.
‘The Group employs media relations consultants,’ I told her. ‘They’re called Goodchild Capperauld. You’ve got Alison Goodchild’s number on file I’m sure, but if not I’ll give you it.’
‘I don’t want to talk to PR consultants on this, it’s too important. If you won’t let me speak to your wife, I’ll just have to call Sir Graeme Fisher and ask him about it.’
‘And Christ knows what he would say in a crisis!’ I thought. ‘You’re missing the obvious,’ I told her. ‘I will not disturb my wife, but you can talk to me if you like.’
‘Do you have authority to speak for her?’
‘Don’t be fucking dense. Now, what is it, this story of yours?’
Jenny Pollock took a deep breath and then dived in. ‘I believe,’ she began, ‘that the Gantry Group is in the first stages of a major housing project to the north west of Glasgow.’
‘That’s right. It’s called New Bearsden, and I’d say that major was an understatement.’
‘It’s the biggest development of its type that you’ve ever undertaken, yes?’
‘And then some.’
‘Can you tell me something about the house types?’
‘It’s a mix, from apartments aimed at singles, to substantial family houses on large plots. Believe it or not there’s a shortage of high-amenity housing in that area.’
‘I believe it; I live there myself. In fact I’ve been to the Gantry sales office to have a look at what you’ll be doing. I don’t think I’ll be going back, though, in the light of what we’ll be running tomorrow.’
‘And what’s that?’ I was still trying to sound bored, but it was proving difficult.
‘I have information that several notorious alleged criminals have bought some of the biggest and most expensive houses on key parts of the estate. Let me try some names on you: Mark Ravens, Jock Perry and Kevin Cornwell. Have you heard of them?’
Word for word, Phil Culshaw’s strange half-warning replayed itself in my head. I decided to lie. ‘No, should I?’
‘You should read the Record more often, Oz.’
‘Jenny, if I could read it less than not at all, I would.’
‘Very funny.’ To her credit, she laughed. ‘All those guys, as I’m sure you know, are alleged to be among the ring-leaders of organised crime in Scotland. They’re popularly known, in the tabloids and on the street, as the Three Bears. Between them they control virtually the whole of the greater Glasgow area, including Paisley. Their activities include protection, through bogus security firms, reselling stolen goods, including cigarettes and alcohol in huge quantities, money laundering and, naturally, the drugs business.’
Of course I’d heard of those guys. Mark Ravens had actually tried to sell his ‘security’ services to the Global Wrestling Alliance, until a meeting with Everett Davis and Jerry Gradi had convinced him that on this occasion at least he should think small. The Three Bears were serious enough, though, and in their own playgrounds they had been known to do some nasty things.
‘All three of them, I’m told,’ the reporter continued, ‘have bought little palaces on the New Bearsden estate. Furthermore, I’ve also had information that several of their associates are buying in there as well.’
‘And what have you been told might be behind this?’ I asked her.
‘It’s only a hint,’ she said, ‘but . . . Remember the stories a while back about Northern Irish guys trying to muscle into the drugs business in Scotland.’
‘Vaguely.’
‘Well the word is they haven’t gone away, and that the Three Bears have decided to get together for added security. The story we’re going to run tomorrow is that they’re planning to turn Gantry’s New Bearsden estate into a sort of Glaswegian mafia compound. I want to ask your wife two questions, that’s all. Did she know about these purchases, and what’s she planning to do about them?’
‘I’ll answer those questions for her,’ I said. ‘I’m still not letting you speak to her. So, first; she doesn’t know a thing about this story of yours, and second; she plans to find out whether it’s true, or just the usual load of mince. You can phrase the last bit any way you like, Jenny.’
She chuckled down the line. ‘I’ll say she’s launching an internal investigation first thing tomorrow, if that’s all right.’
‘Fine, for it won’t be a lie. Where did you get all this stuff anyway?’
‘I can’t tell you that, Oz.’
‘I know where you didn’t get it. It didn’t come from Ravens, Perry or Cornwell; those guys don’t talk to the press, and they don’t hire media relations advisers either . . . although if they did, I’ve a fair idea who’d pitch for their business.’ I took a chance. ‘It’s not them, so it’s gossip from someone out to harm the Gantry Group. If I dropped the name Natalie Morgan in your ear, what would you say?’
There was a pause, only a couple of seconds, but to me it was very significant. ‘I wouldn’t say anything, because I couldn’t. If I betrayed an informant’s confidence, even under oath in the witness box, I’d never work in journalism again. I’ll tell you this, though, Oz. I honestly do not know the source of this story . . . the informant and the source are not necessarily one and the same . . . but if I was you, on the basis of what I’ve told you, I’d say that Susie has to have a mole in her company.’
Chapter 23
That’s what she said too, once I’d related everything that Jenny Pollock had told me . . . Monarch of the Bloody Glen had only five minutes to go when I came back into the drawing room, so I let her watch it to the end before giving her the bad news.
‘I hate firing people, Oz,’ she murmured, ‘but when I find out who’s passed this information to that Morgan cow, their feet won’t touch the ground.’
‘We don’t know for sure it’s her who’s the informant,’ I reminded her. ‘Jenny Pollock didn’t say that it was. It’s possible that someone in the sales office spotted the three names, put two and two together, made four and then a few more, and called the Record off his own bat.’
‘True,’ she conceded, ‘but whatever happened there’s going to be heads rolling. These three guys are the biggest hoods in Glasgow. They’re bloody celebrities, almost. If this is true . . . you never know, it might be all balls . . . someone should have spotted the three sales and tied them together. I’m going to start right at the top of the project team; Des Lancaster’s jacket’s on a shaky nail, I’ll tell you.’
‘You’d better start with your chairman,’ I suggested. ‘I don’t think that Pollock will phone Fisher, but you never know. In any event, you can’t let him learn about it from the tabloids.’
Reluctantly, she agreed with me, and looked out Sir Graeme’s home phone number. I sat beside her as she told him what would be making next morning’s headlines, in case he wanted to speak to me. He didn’t, though; clearly he still preferred to think of me as a non-person. All he did was shout a lot, so much that Susie held the phone away from her ear.
‘If you wish,’ she said. She murmured a couple of things I couldn’t hear, then exclaimed, ‘You don’t have to spell out the consequences to me, Graeme. I’m well aware of them, and I have my own thoughts on that aspect too.’ She slammed the phone back into its cradle.
‘He wants to conduct the investigation himself,’ she told me, ‘with Gillian Harvey as a witness. I don’t mind that, when I think about it. It’s probably better that the interrogation’s done by someone who doesn’t know the people involved.’
‘What was the last bit about?’
‘The share price. New Bearsden’s a huge project, Oz, it represents a massive financial commitment on our part, but it’s been a gamble I’ve been happy to take, bec
ause there was no way I could see it being a loser. But if this story drives the buyers away, it will mean big trouble. We might have to downscale the project, cancel contracts under penalty, God knows what.’
‘It couldn’t bust the business, could it?’
‘No, but it could put us back to square one, and make us vulnerable. That’s why Ms Morgan has to be behind it.’
I couldn’t argue with that.
By the time that Jay dropped me at Glasgow Airport to catch the sparrow-fart London shuttle, en route for Shepperton Studios, the Record was on the streets. Worse, all the other papers had picked it up for their last editions and BBC was running it on the morning news as well.
The follow-up phone calls had started a few seconds after the first copies of the Record had found their way into the hands of its competitors. Naturally, we were prepared for them; Alison Goodchild had been briefed . . . as I had expected, I had tracked her down with Ricky Ross; their strange, on-off relationship had survived for longer than either of them had anticipated . . . and had programmed our phone to divert all calls to her number.
That didn’t mean that we had a peaceful night, though. Susie was approaching the really uncomfortable stage of pregnancy, where sleeping with her was like sleeping with a bag of rabbits. (We have a very big bed, but she always seems to drift towards the piece that I’m on.) Add to that the fact that she woke me several times to ask me what I thought of so-and-so on the payroll, and whether he or she might be the mole.
At five minutes to four, when all was still dark outside, even in early summer Scotland, she had convinced herself that Denise Scott was the prime suspect, and that she had set the fire in the office herself, then tried to leak the story to the media. She hadn’t convinced me, not by a long chalk, but I grunted and rolled on to the last few square inches of unoccupied space on what I laughingly thought of as my side of the bed.
This was not the ideal preparation for my first day’s studio shooting on the Mathew’s Tale project. Nor was the news I received in the limo that picked me up from the execrable Heathrow, when I used my WAP mobile to check the Gantry share price. The London Stock Exchange had only been open for a couple of minutes, but in that blink of an analyst’s eyelid it had fallen by just over thirty per cent.
I called Susie, because I knew that she’d have beaten me to the punch. ‘What do you think?’ I asked her.
Her optimism surprised me, especially after her night of paranoia. ‘Not too bad,’ she replied. ‘Fisher said we should expect at least a forty per cent mark-down in value. Apparently the City has a wee bit more faith in me than my chairman; the new price is based on the brokers’ assessment rather than on actual trading. I don’t expect there to be much, not initially at any rate.’
‘When there is I’m buying,’ I told her.
‘Don’t be daft, Oz. I don’t want you to do that.’
‘You’re not going to stop me. I’m going to instruct my brokers to pick up any stock that’s offered, and I’m going to have the investor relations consultants let it be known that I’m doing it. I’m going to be seen to support you, honey, whether you like it or not.’
She laughed. ‘You’d better be careful, then. If things get worse you could wind up owning all the minority shareholding. ’ And then she paused. ‘Of course if it did get that bad you couldn’t lose; as soon as a takeover bid came in the price would go up. You could sell out to Natalie Morgan and make a right killing.’ She paused again. ‘Here, Oz, you’re not the mole, are you?’
When I thought about it, I realised that it wasn’t a bad scam, but I protested loudly into the phone until she apologised for her bad taste joke. ‘By the way,’ I asked casually, after I had allowed myself to be mollified, ‘you’re not still harbouring dark thoughts about Denise, are you?’
‘No,’ she admitted, ‘I’m not. That was unworthy of me too. Denise is as loyal as they come. But if it was her, it would say a lot; for example that I must be a really crap managing director if my own PA plotted to get rid of me.’
‘Which you’re not. You’re brilliant, even if you are a grumpy wee witch at times. Now you just let Fisher and Harvey earn their exorbitant directors’ fees by running their investigation, unimpeded by you. Your job is to see whether you can cancel the house sales to these three hooligans and to their henchmen . . . assuming that the Record story’s true, that is.’
‘I’m ahead of you,’ she told me. ‘I was going to get hold of Greg McPhillips first thing, but he beat me to it. He called just after you left in fact. So did Des Lancaster, the project manager. The story’s accurate, okay: Ravens, Perry and Cornwell, the Three Bears, are all purchasers, but in their wives’ names, not their own. As for the henchmen, we can’t say for certain who they are: the development’s been selling very well off the plans and there are a lot of buyers.’
‘What did Greg say?’
‘Nothing good, but nothing I didn’t expect. If we could prove that there was a conspiracy here, we might have a chance of cancelling the contracts, but we’ll have the devil’s own job doing that. All of the three actually do have more or less respectable front businesses, and none of them have any significant criminal convictions. As for their wives, they all raise money for bloody charities. They’ve all signed contracts and paid deposits; the next obligations lie on our side now. They can pull out, on forfeiture of their deposits, but we can’t. As things stand, if we just gave them their money back and told them to piss off, they could sue us . . . unless we cancelled the whole project, which I will not, no, cannot do.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘My instant reaction is to give them their money back, tell them to piss off, and take my chances, but I’ll take serious legal advice before I do that. These people may not care to launch a civil court action.’
‘No,’ I snorted, ‘they may just blow up your office instead. These are gangsters, Susie.’
‘Ach, they are of a certain level, that’s all; there’s bigger than them. The Lord Provost was, for a start. I don’t give a damn about them, really. Let’s try and put it in perspective, now the initial shock’s worn off. Think this through with me, Oz. What’s happened so far?’
‘First, the letter-bomb,’ I said, ‘leaked to the press.’
‘Right. We dealt with that at the time and it did no damage. Next?’
‘The Three Bears buy into the New Bearsden project, and that fact is leaked. This time it has done damage to the company.’
‘True, but that doesn’t need to be a conspiracy at all: the three of them might each have fancied the project separately and bought with no collusion. But someone’s come upon the fact and leaked it. I don’t think that the McMafia give a bugger about us. They’re not our real enemies. The person who’s feeding the press is, and the way I read what Jenny Pollock said to you, that wasn’t done by a mole within this company, but by someone who’s paying them.’
‘So how do we deal with the New Bearsden situation?’ She gave me a small laugh. A good sign; when Susie’s sense of humour is working, she’s on the ball. ‘This time we can’t do what you did with the letter-bomb, and just lie about it. I see another option, but we use it calmly and quietly. Subject to the legal advice I mentioned earlier, what I intend to do is indeed to give our three dodgy clients their money back. But I don’t intend to tell them to piss off. I intend to ask them, through our legal advisers, so that we can’t be accused of defaming anyone, how much it would take for them to agree to piss off. What do you think?’
‘Good old-fashioned bribery? That usually works, I’ll grant you. But remember, love, these guys are among other things in the protection racket. If you give them a bung to go away, what’s to stop them pulling the same dodge on every housing project you undertake in the future?’
‘We’ll see them coming next time.’
‘But will you see their cousins, or their mates, or just some punter they’ve picked up in a pub and paid to front for them?’
‘Maybe not, b
ut I’ll deal with that as and when it happens. This is today’s crisis, and old-fashioned bribery, as you call it, is our best chance of knocking it on the head. Got any better ideas?’
I did, but I doubted whether Everett and Jerry would cooperate. ‘No,’ I said, ‘if you think that’s your best shot, take it.’
‘I will, but there’s something else: our real enemy. Fisher and Harvey can look for the mole, but we need to do more than that. I want to follow my instincts, Oz. I want Natalie Morgan tailed; I want to know everyone she has contact with. I want her phone tapped if it’s possible; I want to know everyone she speaks to. But I don’t want the instruction to come from within the company, in case our mole finds out about it. Do you think Ricky would do it?’
‘Not the phone-tap. He won’t do that because it’s illegal. But as for the rest of it, I’m sure he will. He used to work for Torrent, remember, until Natalie’s Uncle James sacked him. He’s got a long memory, has ex-superintendent Ross. I’m sure he’ll take the job.’
‘Okay. You instruct him. Tell him we’ll pay for it privately.’
‘Susie,’ I protested, ‘I’m working here.’
‘Oh? Where are you now? That doesn’t sound like film studio noise in the background.’ I owned up to my surroundings. ‘Okay, call him now. Get him on the case.’
‘If it’ll make you happy,’ I conceded. ‘Kiss our daughter for me, and I’ll call you tonight. Go carefully, though.’
I called Ricky straight away, catching him at home. ‘It’s you,’ he growled. ‘Thanks a fucking million for last night; the phone never stopped till three in the morning.’
‘That’ll teach you to sleep with a PR consultant. I’ve got a job for you now, though.’ I filled him in on Susie’s requirements; as I had expected, he jumped at the chance to get one back at Torrent. Ross Security had been embarrassed by its public dismissal by the company, and probably a little damaged financially as well.
Unnatural Justice (Oz Blackstone Mysteries) Page 13