He put the mobile away and looked up at me. ‘He’s out of our sight. Avril was watching him, as normal, from her car. He left his flat in Crow Road, heading towards the bookie’s on the corner, where he’s gone every day this week at the same time. Only this time a motor pulled up beside him on the pavement, the back door opened and he got in. Avril was going to follow, but just as she was pulling out, a vehicle cruised past her going slow, with the driver looking out as if he was trying to find an address. By the time her exit was clear, the target car was out of sight. It could have been heading for Scotstoun, or the Clyde Tunnel, or the expressway. ’
‘The number?’
‘The slow car blocked her view. It was an old model Vectra, that was all she could tell me. Sorry.’
‘You should be. It sounds to me as if she was rumbled; that second car could have been there to block her deliberately. It makes me wonder whether I should give you this next job.’
Ricky sniffed. He looked huffed. ‘Suit your fucking self. What job?’
‘We’re playing call my bluff with the Three Bears,’ I told him. ‘I want them all tailed, every one of them. If there’s collusion, and I’m sure there is, we have to be able to prove it.’
‘Are you sure about this, Oz? You don’t mess with these boys, not on their side of the street.’
‘They shouldn’t have come on to mine. Tail them. These guys are supposed never to meet and never to speak to each other. If they do, I want to be able to prove it.’
‘The case won’t get to court, if your scenario’s right. Nat’ll have paid them off before then, as soon as she has control of the Gantry Group.’
‘I don’t want to prove it in court. I want to prove it in the press. When they meet up, I want pictures, location, the lot. Your best people, Ricky, no more Avrils.’
‘She was unlucky, Oz.’
‘In that case I want your luckiest people.’
Ricky sighed. ‘Okay. Actually, when I think about it, the job’s not as dodgy as all that. If any of my people are spotted, the targets will probably assume they’re the Scottish Drugs Enforcement Agency. These guys are used to being tailed by the polis.’
That was a problem I hadn’t anticipated. ‘In that case the SDEA had better know what we’re up to, just in case they do have active surveillance on the Bears. Have you got a contact there?’
He nodded. ‘Of course, loads of them, but the crime coordinator’s the best bet. He’s an old mate, from the Tayside Force. If he does have an operation underway, I could probably persuade him to pull it for a few days, as long as we feed him anything we turn up.’
‘Fine. Go to it,’ I told him.
‘What about lunch?’
‘Who said anything about lunch?’ I asked him. ‘I’m meeting Phil Culshaw here for lunch. You get your show on the road. If you get me the results I’m after, I’ll buy you the biggest bloody lunch you’ve ever had, in the restaurant of your choice.’
He glared at me for a second, but he couldn’t keep it up, and his grin broke through. Ricky’s a pro; he knew it was urgent. ‘If you really mean that,’ he said, ‘there’s a place in Barcelona called the Seven Doors. And we’ll fly there club class, thank you very much.’
‘Deal. Now piss off.’
He did, and Phil Culshaw took his place at the table five minutes later. This time I asked for the menu.
‘I didn’t expect to see you here this week,’ he said. ‘I was surprised when Denise gave me your message.’
I told him about the spotty actor. ‘It’s fortuitous. Gives me a chance to put some things in place.’
‘And to check up on how well I’m doing in Susie’s absence.’
‘Not even I would have the nerve to do that, Phil. But how’s it going?’
‘As anticipated. McPhillips and Company had the expected letters of protest this morning.’
‘Did they return the cheques, though?’
‘No, they didn’t go that far. That doesn’t mean anything, though; not presenting is adequate evidence of rejection.’
‘So what happens next?’
‘There’ll be a brief period of ritual dancing, and then they’ll ask the Sheriff Court to set a date for an interdict hearing. By the end of the week, I’ll expect.’
‘And the Torrent bid? What’s the timetable on that?’
Culshaw shrugged. ‘You read the same papers I do. You know as much as me. Torrent’s advisers told the Stock Exchange that it would be at the beginning of next week, on either Monday or Tuesday. Fisher’s scheduled a board meeting for next Wednesday. Between now and then, I’ve instructed the investor relations consultants to sound out the minority shareholders . . . excluding you, of course.’
‘Did you know that Fisher and Morgan’s uncle were pals?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Natalie.’
Phil slapped a hand on his forehead. ‘Jesus Christ, Oz.’ He cut himself off short as the waiter appeared to take our orders.
‘You didn’t bloody speak to her, did you?’ he continued as the young Australian left. (Sometimes, especially when I’m in London, or when I hear an interview with a Scottish rugby international, I find myself thinking that those people are colonising Britain. And why not? What goes around comes around, I suppose.)
‘Of course I did. No one’s rattling her cage, Phil, although they should be. I had to do something to try to put the wind up her.’
‘And did you?’
‘Not much. She did something funny the day afterwards, though: paid a visit to someone in Glasgow. I don’t know what that was about.’
‘And I don’t want to know any of this. It’s one thing for you to set detectives on a business rival, but keep it to yourself, and outside the knowledge of the company. If you’re rumbled and I’m called to give evidence at an interdict hearing, I want to be wide-eyed and innocent.’
‘Well that’s okay, for I didn’t tell you that I’ve been tailing her. Now what about Fisher?’
‘What about him?’
‘I want his head.’
‘You can’t do that, Oz. He’s too big a fish.’
‘He’s a fucking shark and he’s out to eat my wife. I’m going to harpoon him before that happens. I’m asking you to call an extraordinary board meeting; propose a motion of no confidence. You’ll have Susie’s proxy.’
‘He wouldn’t sanction it; I can’t call such a meeting without his cooperation.’
‘You mean we’re stuck with him until the Morgan offer is tabled?’
‘I’m afraid so. And you know what’ll happen when it is.’
‘It’s been spelled out to me. That means one thing: we’ve got seven days to nail Natalie Morgan’s olive skin to her office door.’
‘And how do we begin to do that?’
‘Like you’ve just said, you don’t. I begin with Mr Aidan Keane, just as soon as he surfaces.’
Chapter 33
As it happened, Aidan Keane surfaced at seven o’clock that evening. His return was announced by the screams of a female pedestrian, on the iron footbridge across the Clyde, who happened to be looking over the side when he floated beneath her downstream, staring up at her with a terminally surprised look on his face.
I heard the news on the late-night edition of Reporting Scotland: they didn’t name the victim at that stage, but I had a terrible suspicion, which was proved right inside half an hour when Arnott Buchan rang me.
‘Are you sure?’ was all I could say after he told me, although I was certain of it myself.
‘I got it from a police source. Identification wasn’t a problem. There was a photographic driving licence in his wallet.’
‘Did he drown?’
‘If he did it was the four bullets in him that weighed him down.’
‘What’s the betting?’ I asked, as innocently as I could.
‘My money’s on Ravens deciding that he didn’t need him on his payroll, or that the other two guys took cold feet and decided to take him off the p
itch. If that’s right, it could look good for you.’
‘How could it? Off the record, our suspicion is that these three guys are colluding to extort money from the company, but Keane was our only real chance of proving it.’
‘Hmph.’ Buchan gave a muffled grunt. ‘Is that all you suspect?’ he asked. ‘You don’t think this is linked to the takeover bid?’
‘If I did, I wouldn’t fucking tell you. Our counsel won’t let us go public with what I just said to you.’
‘Sounds to me, then, as if you’re as far up the creek as the boy Keane.’
‘Maybe that depends on how you guys report his murder.’
‘There’ll be no mention of the Ravens link I told you about, you can be sure of that. It’s no more than pub talk and no lawyer would let an editor run it. The story will be that Keane left the employment of the Gantry Group after Sir Graeme Fisher’s investigation into the New Bearsden cock-up, and less than a week later, he’s dead. To be brutally honest with you, if the coverage points the finger at anyone it’ll be your wife. And, forgive me for saying this, given who her father is, there’ll be a few people believe that.’
‘I may not forgive you,’ I retorted, coldly. ‘Any newspaper that does imply that will be sued out of business . . . yours included.’
‘Don’t worry, Oz, it won’t be me that does it. But I will be doing a piece for Sunday, so is there anything else you can tell me about Keane?’
I could have told him that the start of his last journey was witnessed by a detective in my employ, but I decided firmly to keep that to myself for as long as I could. If I spilled that, every one of our surveillance targets would be looking over his, and her, shoulder from that point on.
‘I can tell you that it’s time something effective was done to stamp out gun crime in this country, but apart from that you’re on your own.’
I rang Ricky as soon as Buchan had hung up. Alison Goodchild was with him, so I killed two birds with one call by telling her to call Phil Culshaw and agree a company statement about Keane’s death.
Once she had gone to do that on her mobile, I spoke to Ross. He knew, but he hadn’t picked up the news from the telly as I had. Avril had called him after a man and a woman she recognised as CID officers turned up at Keane’s flat, and took his hysterical wife off shortly afterwards in their car. She had followed them all the way to the city mortuary.
‘We may have her,’ I told Ricky.
‘What the hell do you mean? Have who?’
‘Natalie. I threw Keane’s name at her on Monday night; I told her that he had been fingered as the inside man in the Three Bears plot. Two days later the guy’s fished out of the drink. If that doesn’t point in her direction, nothing does.’
Ricky growled down the phone. ‘Hold your horses there, man. Natalie Morgan is not the sort of person from whom Mark Ravens, or Jock Perry or Kevin Cornwell, takes hit orders. You knew about Keane because that journalist told you. If his source was talking too much and Ravens, or the three of them, decided there was a danger of their being exposed prematurely, they wouldn’t need telling to take him out.’
‘But she knew, Ricky. She knew and now he’s dead. That trip she made to Glasgow yesterday: could it have been one of the Three Bears she saw?’
‘I doubt that very much. Her visit was in the city centre, and as far as I know none of them live there. But I’ll double check, if you like. Maybe one of them has a fuck pit that his wife doesn’t know about.’
‘You do that. As for the chat we had earlier, is everything in place?’
‘Yup. I just hope you’ve got the cash to pay for it, after Morgan wipes out the family fortune next week.’
‘I thought we agreed this was on a contingency basis. No win, no fee?’
‘Hey, wait a minute . . .’ he began, then realised that I was pulling his chain.
‘Don’t worry,’ I assured him. ‘If the worst does happen, I’m going to make a right few quid on the Gantry shares that I’ve been buying for the last week or so.’
Chapter 34
Next morning’s press stories on the discovery of the latest hazard to navigation in the Clyde were circumspect, to say the least. I guessed that lawyers had poured buckets of cold water down the trousers of each of the tabloid editors, for they reported only the bizarre discovery of Keane’s body, interviews with the lady who had been unfortunate enough to spot it, and little else.
There was, of course, the obligatory police quote. Pending the findings of an autopsy, the death was being regarded as ‘suspicious’.
Only the Herald mentioned the dead man’s connection to ‘the beleaguered Gantry Group’, carrying a quote from ‘a company spokesperson’ to the effect that ‘Aidan was a valued colleague’, and that Phil Culshaw, acting Group managing director, had been hoping to persuade him to return to the post that he resigned last week.
To the best of my knowledge that was a complete fabrication; but, like so many other things in this bizarre situation, its truth or otherwise could never be proved. As I read the story, I threw a mental nod in Phil’s direction. ‘Nice one,’ I whispered.
‘What?’ Susie asked across the breakfast table.
‘Nothing.’
She put down her Scottish Daily Mail. ‘Poor Aidan,’ she said. ‘This is terrible. It’s his poor wife I feel sorry for now. What do you think happened?’
I hadn’t filled in all the details when I’d told Susie about Keane’s demise that morning, but she’d guessed that he’d been unlikely to have drowned while swimming, fully clothed, in the Clyde in the middle of the day. (Poisoning would have been more of a possibility, actually.)
‘I guess he must have bet on the wrong horse, that’s all. Aidan was a gambling man by all accounts. The betting shop that he used, the one where he was headed when he disappeared, is part owned by Jock Perry. Maybe he owed a few quid and was pressured into going along with the New Bearsden scam.’
‘And maybe the police will be able to prove that,’ she exclaimed, brightening up.
‘Don’t bet on that horse either, love. The police have never proved anything against Perry, or against either of the other two guys, not even when they were young, and answerable to bigger gangsters than they were.’
Her fleeting optimism disappeared. ‘Do you really think that the whole thing is linked to the takeover bid, Oz? Did Natalie Morgan really set it all up?’
‘I think it has to be, Suse, because of the leaks to the media. The Three Bears wouldn’t have done that off their own bat, because press coverage is anathema to them. Someone has to have set this up, and the really big winner from the situation will be Torrent, in engineering the acquisition of a supposedly invulnerable company at a realistic price. But I still don’t believe that Natalie set it up. She doesn’t strike me as having the sort of imagination you’d need to dream up a scheme like this, and she doesn’t associate with the sort of people she’d need to carry it out. I come back to this: there’s someone behind her.’
‘There’s another question too,’ Susie observed. ‘Who’s underwriting the takeover?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that Torrent as it stands just isn’t big enough to buy me. The company doesn’t have enough spare cash, and if they write new shares to trade for ours, as people are saying they’ve done already with the Sapphire holding, it will upset the balance of Torrent itself.’
She sucked her teeth for a second, and then went on. ‘I’ve been doing some sums, love. If I chucked in the towel and we accepted the offer, between us you and I would own at least thirty-five, and maybe forty per cent of the enlarged company. At the moment, Morgan owns ninety per cent of Torrent, but a new share issue would dilute that down to around the fifty mark, if that. She’d be struggling to retain control, and I’d back myself to have her out inside six months. So when this formal offer comes in, you’ll find that new shares in Torrent have already been issued and that someone’s subscribed for them. When the offer comes in it will be in cas
h, funded by that new equity, and maybe by some loan and venture capital. That’s probably why Marvin de Luca and Nigel Lanark were at that lunch in the Atrium.’
She frowned. ‘That’s how it’s being done, Oz. I’m certain of it. If you’re right and the New Bearsden ambush was a planned attack on our share price, then the person who was behind it is almost certainly Natalie’s new investor.’
‘Need there be one person in the background?’ I asked. ‘What if I’m wrong and Ravens, Perry and Cornwell have been driving the thing all along?’
Susie shook her head. ‘No, not a chance. Guys like those don’t think that way. These are Glaswegian heavies, Oz; I was born and bred in the city, and I know the sort. I’ve even met Jock Perry, years ago in a disco that I think he owned. He tried to pick me up, without any pretence at subtlety either. I invited him to fuck off, which he did eventually, but with an ill grace. Then one of the guys I was with told me who he was. He was shaking in his boots, because he thought we’d all struggle to get home alive. But somebody must have told Perry who I was, because a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket arrived at our table, with a note addressed to me, saying “Sorry”.’ She paused. ‘There’s another reason why it couldn’t be them. If they underwrote a deal like this, they’d be doing it with bent money. Sure, they all have front businesses, like Ravens’ pubs and Perry’s betting shops, but none of them are in this league. If the banks had the slightest suspicion that Torrent was funding its expansion by laundering money, they would drop the company like a hot potato. And even if Natalie isn’t bright enough to work that one out for herself, her professional advisers certainly are.’
I whistled. ‘Magic. So we don’t just have a mystery enemy. We have a mystery enemy with serious money, and the ability to persuade Glasgow’s three biggest heavies to do his bidding.’ I looked across at my wife. ‘Do any names suggest themselves to you?’
Unnatural Justice (Oz Blackstone Mysteries) Page 19