Unnatural Justice ob-7

by Quintin Jardine

  You swallowed it and no mistake; as soon as my call was over… I taped it, by the way… you went straight through to Glasgow to see one of your associates, Mr. Ravens, we assume, since he was going to be Mr.

  Keane's new boss. Twenty-four hours later, what happens? The poor guy's found in the Clyde, with so many bullets in him it's a fucking miracle he can still float. What that makes you, Nat, is an accessory to murder, and legally as guilty of Keane's death as the guys who pulled the trigger."

  I paused to let that sink in, and to study her face; it was a mixture of anger, uncertainty and fear. "Offering Keane a job with Mark Ravens if he got found out was a bloody silly thing to do, by the way. But I don't suppose you expected that he would be found out, or that dear old Graeme would provoke him into resigning, or that he would let slip to a mate where his future employment prospects lay."

  "You can't prove any of this," Natalie shouted, thrusting out her chin and her chest at the same time, in an odd show of hard-nippled defiance.

  "Not without corroboration, we couldn't. It's too bad that one of the Three Bears has realised the risk he's been taking, and has given a full statement to Ricky Ross, so that Ricky can cut a deal with the SDEA that'll keep him out of jail while the rest of you go down. I'm not going to tell you which one; but even if I did, I wouldn't recommend that you have a go at him. He'll be expecting you."

  I smiled at her. "So this is the deal. It's open for twenty-four hours, no more. You either drop the bid, or I will drop you." I turned on my heel and headed for the door. "Oh yes, and tell your partners not even to think about coming after Ricky and me either. He's got connections with the police that would make that a very bad idea, and I've got protection that's out of their league. They'd never make it back across the river."

  I was back home in time for the ten o'clock news on telly. Susie was sat on the couch, with an anthology of twentieth-century poetry on her lap. "So whose woods did you stop by?" she asked.

  "With a bit of the luck of the Blackstones, you'll find out soon enough."

  Thirty-Six.

  I had told Ricky to call me any time, but I didn't expect it to be at two in the morning. He doesn't sound excited very often, but this time he did, and no mistake.

  "I don't know what the hell you said," he exclaimed, as I rubbed sleep out of my eyes, and as Susie growled beside me, 'but it worked and no mistake. If you saw a Porsche whistling past you on the M8 it was Natalie Morgan. She went straight to that address she visited before; got there by quarter to ten."

  "She didn't overtake me in that case."

  "Not for the want of trying. My guy had a job keeping her in sight in his poor wee MG. He did, though, trailed her all the way there. This time she stayed longer; till well after midnight, in fact. And while she was there, guess who else turned up?"

  "One of the Bears?"

  "Better than that. All three of the buggers; by the time the last one arrived my people were tripping over each other at the scene. We've got film and still photos of them arriving, separately, between half ten and eleven, and of them leaving, together and looking rattled."

  "What about Natalie?"

  "She left a few minutes after them. She had the makings of a right sore face too: I'd say someone gave her a belting."

  "Shame. She's still walking, though?"

  "No thanks to you. How did you kick all that off anyway? What the hell did you tell her?" I gave him a run-down of my pitch to Natalie, in her apartment. Susie was wide awake now, listening to every word.

  When I finished, he was laughing. "She is definitely not as bright as she thinks she is. Not only did she not twig she'd been followed to Glasgow the first time, she went straight back again."

  "So who's the guy she went to see?" I asked.

  "That we don't know yet. We know the flat he was in, because this time we saw which button she pushed. But we won't be able to find out who he is till tomorrow at least, till the council offices open and we can have a look at the register of electors."

  "Why not just ring his fucking bell? Right now, in fact."

  "I think I'll hold off on that, if you don't mind. Whoever the guy is, he's serious enough to be able to call the Three Bears and have every one of them drop what he was doing and come to see him. Ravens, Perry and Cornwell may not be the Kray brothers, but anyone who can make them jump when he whistles must be a very serious player indeed. Before I go thumping on that door, or have any of my people do it, I want to know who's behind it."

  "So what do we do now?"

  "Like I said, we find out who he is."

  "But apart from that. What do we do about Morgan to spike this takeover?"

  "Sit on it for a day or so. Let's find out who's behind it."

  "We don't need to. We've got Natalie and the Bears all in the same place at the same time. We could take that to the police."

  "Alleging what, exactly?"

  "Conspiracy."

  "There's no such criminal charge in Scotland."

  "Extortion."

  "They never asked you for money. In fact when you offered it, they turned you down. Oz, I'm sure that the Crown Office would come up with a charge, under the Companies Act, maybe, but it would take them a bloody long time to decide what it would be. Let's get the whole picture. Let's find out who the man in the apartment is. Then you can decide what you want to do. But you might be better going to the Sunday papers than the police."

  For once, I could see the sense in everything Ricky said.

  "Okay," I agreed. "Let's do it that way. But listen, you and your team have done bloody well tonight. Keep a watch on Natalie, and on the mystery man, but give as many of them as you can some time off.

  I'll do the trace on the owner of the apartment; I've got time, and I can handle that." I found a pen and a notepad in the drawer of my bedside table. "Gimme the address," I said, and began to scribble down what he said.

  He hadn't reached the street name before I exploded. "Jesus Christ, Ricky!" But then I realised that he had never been there before; there was no reason for him to have known.

  "What's up?" he demanded.

  "That's our old address," I told him. "That's where we used to live."

  Thirty-seven

  .

  There was little likelihood of sleep after that, so Susie and I got up, went down to the kitchen and made ourselves a pot of coffee. "When you sold, can you remember who the buyer was?" I asked her, when I had my head together.

  She shook hers. "I never knew. I didn't even sign off on the deal.

  Officially, it was the Gantry Group that bought the place from you: legally I never owned it. So when it was sold, the company secretary handled everything."

  "And of course, in those days Greg McPhillips didn't act for the Group."

  "No. The company secretary then was old Barney Farmer."

  "Okay, I'll talk to him tomorrow'

  "Is Doris Stokes still around?"

  "Ah, of course." I had forgotten that Greg had taken over the company secretary job after his predecessor had fallen down dead in Union Street one day, overcome, it was said, by shock and grief after dropping a two-pound coin down a drain.

  "There will be records of the sale, though. Greg took over all Barney's files. I do remember one thing: the old boy told me that the sale was made to another company. That's right, he said they wanted it as a pied a terre for their chief executive."

  I almost called Greg there and then and told him to get his ass into his office; however, having met Katrina McPhillips, I decided that a few hours' patience was a better option. I did call Jay, though.

  Without going into all the details, I told him that the New Bearsden thing had come to the boil and that there was an outside chance of three angry bears looking in my direction.

  "I'll talk to Mark Kravitz," he said, briskly. Mark had been Jay's principal referee when we had employed him. He and I had met on my first film project, when he had been in charge of security. It hadn't taken me long to realise that
he was no ordinary security consultant, and that he had contacts in some very dark corners indeed, many of them on the state payroll. He and I had become friends, and he had helped me a couple of times since then, yet I didn't think of him as someone I could call on for this sort of freelance work.

  "What will he do?" I asked, a little tentatively.

  He laughed. "Make a couple of phone calls."

  "And?"

  "And you won't have a problem."

  "I don't want the police in on this, Jay, not yet, at any rate."

  "They won't be. Mark's contacts have a role in fighting organised crime, but on an international scale. They don't liaise too closely with the locals, but they do know who's who, even relatively small fry like the guys you're talking about. Sometimes they let them run about and play their games, because there's more to be gained by doing that and getting feedback from them."

  "Are you telling me that the Three Bears are MI5 informants?"

  "Not necessarily, but MI5 will know about them, and vice versa. Any message that comes from that quarter will not be ignored, I promise you. Okay to do that?"

  "Sure," I told him. "I wish we'd done it a couple of weeks ago." A thought struck me. "Any chance of them knowing the man behind all this?"

  "Every chance. I'll ask Mark. Now, boss, you and Mrs. Boss turn in.

  It's the middle of the bloody night."

  We took his advice, feeling a deal more secure than before, and this time slept like logs… or in Susie's case like a bag of marbles. When the alarm wakened us again, at seven thirty, I ran the gauntlet of Katrina and called Greg.

  Quickly I explained what I was after. "Is this urgent?" he asked.

  I've seen bleary eyes often enough, but a truly bleary voice is rarer; our lawyer had one.

  "Check the clock, man. Do I make routine calls at this hour? I need to get into those files."

  "You couldn't have picked a worse day. I've got a staff training seminar first thing this morning… bloody Law Society requirement… and then I'm due in High Court at ten."

  "What are you doing in the criminal court? You're a civil lawyer."

  "Not at this hour of the fucking morning, I'm not," he shot back.

  "Actually it's an old school pal; he's upset the Inland Revenue and I've said I'll prepare his defence."

  "He must have upset them a lot, to be in the High Court."

  "A great deal. Look, I really do have a hellish schedule today, Oz. Is there any chance of you getting to my office by eight thirty?"

  "I will if you will. See you there." I put the phone down and headed for a very quick shower.

  Thanks to someone breaking down on the Expressway, it was almost eight forty-five when I walked into Greg's big airy building… anything less like Ewan Maltbie's place you could not imagine.

  He was in his office, waiting for me, and he hadn't been wasting his time. A pile of documents lay on his desk. Normally he has someone bring things like that to him, as and when they're needed. "Why the sudden interest in the purchaser?" he asked, when he had stopped looking at his watch.

  "I'm not sure yet. I just need to know who he is. It's complicated, but there's a link to the Three Bears business."

  "It's not one of them, I can tell you that. I know all of the lawyers who act for them, and none of them were involved. The legals for the other side were handled by Murphy and Woolfson, a small firm in Largs.

  But the purchaser wasn't an individual…"

  "I know that. As far as Susie knew it was another company."

  "Not quite," said Greg. "It was a trust: the Glentruish Trust, to be exact, whatever that is."

  "Sounds like an obscure malt whisky. Who signed the documents?"

  "Maynard Woolfson, the solicitor, as administrator of the trust."

  "Where did the funds come from?"

  "From the solicitor's client account, I assume. There was no record of that on Farmer's files."

  "Was there a mortgage?"

  "I can't say for certain," Greg replied, 'but there's nothing in the correspondence about a survey being carried out. That indicates that it was a cash purchase." He looked at his watch again. "And that, Oz, is as much as I can tell you."

  "I'd better go and see Mr. Woolfson, in that case."

  "You can try." He copied a phone number and an address from a document in the file on to the top sheet of a notepad and gave it to me. "You won't have much trouble finding him. Largs isn't that big a place."

  "Thanks," I said. "Good luck in the High Court, by the way."

  "We'll need all we can get. Just make sure you don't wind up there."

  I left with his warning… it was, it seemed to me, not wholly in fun … ringing in my ears, and retrieved the Lotus from his office car park. Once I was in the open air, I switched on my mobile and called the number Greg had given me. I checked that Woolfson was in, and made an appointment to see him, calling myself Mr. More. I thought that it might not be wise to give him advance warning.

  There are two roads to Largs; the scenic way and the quick way. I don't believe in combining sightseeing and driving, so I headed for the Kingston Bridge and the Greenock-bound M8.

  The traffic was down to a crawl on the bridge, and at one point it stopped altogether. I twisted round in my seat, gazing up at my old home, hoping, I suppose, that I might see that figure again, the one I had spotted when we had crossed in the other direction. There was no chance of that, though; all that hit my eyes was the glare of the sun, reflecting from silvery Venetian blinds. Neither Susie nor I had fitted those; no doubt about it, our successor really valued his privacy.

  By the time I was clear of the roadblock that is the Kingston Bridge, the congestion had eased off, and I began to make better time down to Largs. Once I was through Spango Valley and out of Greenock, it didn't take me long at all. I was almost there when my mobile sounded. I was rigged for hands-free, so I took the call: it was Ricky. "How goes it?" he asked. I explained succinctly how it didn't.

  "Surprise me," he grunted. "I've just checked the electoral roll. The voter listed there is Miss Susan Gantry: no one's ever changed it. I've checked BT and the cable phone company too. No subscriber listed. But that's not so rare these days."

  I heard myself sigh into my collar mike. I tell you, among the many changes it has wrought in our society, the mobile phone has made things a bloody sight more difficult for private detectives.

  "He's a cunning bastard," I muttered. "I'll let you know if I get anything from my next call."

  I arrived knowing three things about Largs; it's the Millport ferry terminal, the Scottish Sports Council has a centre there, and it has a very famous ice-cream shop. The office of Murphy and Woolfson was as easy to find as Greg had predicted. I parked the Lotus with the hood up… it's always windy on the Clyde coast… walked across the street, looked for the blue and white Legal Aid logo and spotted it three doors down. A quick look at the brass plate and I knew I had hit the spot.

  I had ten minutes to kill before my appointment with the lawyer, so I strolled along to Nardini's and had an ice-cream. That hit the spot too. I resolved that whenever I could, I would bring my family there.

  Maybe we'd cross to Millport as well; no harm in giving wee Janet and her brother a taste for the high life from the start.

  The office of Murphy and Woolfson was on the first floor, above a bank, as so many Scots lawyers' premises seem to be. It was in the Maltbie mode rather than McPhillips, but slightly less dusty. I guessed the sea breezes discouraged cobwebs, even in legal chambers.

  There were two desks in the reception area, but one was unattended.

  There was a girl behind the other; I couldn't describe her as a woman, for she didn't look more than fourteen. "Work experience?" I asked.

  She nodded, blushing; the kid couldn't take her eyes off me, so I guessed Mr. More's cover was blown.

  "I've got an appointment with Mr. Woolfson," I told her. "Or was it Mr. Murphy?"

  "There is no Mr. Murphy," she burst
out.

  I smiled at her candour, and as I did, the driver of the other desk came into the room. She was a woman, and no mistake; tall, busty, dark-haired, and just about old enough to have been the kid's mother, or aunt, for I thought I saw a likeness about the eyes.

  "Mr. More?" she began, but with not a flash of recognition.

  I nodded. "I called you a while back."

  "Yes, I'm Nancy Macintosh. Mr. Woolfson's free now." She headed back towards the door.

  As I made to follow, the youngster let slip an "Eh?" I turned back, and read her question in her eyes, for I had seen it countless times before. Without a word, I picked up a sheet of headed notepaper from a pile in one of her trays, autographed it and handed it to her. As I did so, I glanced at the heading and saw only one name listed. There never had been a Mr. Murphy either, I bet myself.

  The whole exchange only took a couple of seconds; Ms Macintosh had been watching, and looked puzzled, but said nothing. I followed her into the hall to a half-glazed door. She opened it and I stepped inside.

  Maynard Woolfson was a small man, with a hook nose and black crinkly hair that managed to look younger than the rest of him, which I guessed had to be at least fifty.

  "Mr. More," he said, as we shook hands.

  "I'm afraid not. He couldn't come. I'm Oz Blackstone."

  He blinked and looked at me again. "Of course you are," he exclaimed.

  If I had a shekel for every time that's been said to me, I'd be richer than all the lawyers in Ayrshire… but then again, maybe I am anyway.

  "How can I help you?"

  "I'm on a detective mission, Mr. Woolfson. That used to be my day job, and I just can't get away from it."

  He looked at me with a non-committal expression in his eyes. I'd seen that before too; it's the one lawyers, bankers, and those millions these days who hide, rightly or wrongly, behind the Data Protection Act, give you before the shutters come down.

  "A little while ago, you acted in the purchase of an apartment in a block in Glasgow. The vendor was the Gantry Group, and your client was the Glentruish Trust. You signed on its behalf. I need to contact the principal of that trust, but I have no idea who he or she is."