The chief superintendent looked at her as if he was trying to decide whether she deserved scorn or pity. ‘Would you like me to?’ he retorted, stone-faced. ‘Would your readers prefer me to declare a state of emergency and to advise people not to go out unless they have to?’
She shrugged, a gesture that annoyed the detective even more. ‘I’m only asking a question. That is what we’re here for, isn’t it?’
‘Actually, love,’ he replied (he knew that Paula would kill him for using the term, if she saw the exchange on television, but he could not have stopped himself, even if he had tried), ‘you didn’t ask a question, you made a statement, designed no doubt to fit somewhere into a knocking piece you’re planning to write. I’m not going to play your game.
‘For the benefit of the serious people here, I’ll repeat for the avoidance of doubt that, on the basis of what we know at this moment, we do not believe that any of these three killings, or the earlier, related, murder of Stacey Gavin, took place at random. All four victims knew each other; that’s fact. Obviously they each had a wider circle of friends and family. I don’t believe the threat extends to them, but they’ve all been given advice on personal security, and offered police surveillance if they want it.’
‘Is anybody under police protection?’ asked John Hunter, from his usual front-row seat.
The question did not surprise McGuire; he and Alan Royston had agreed that it might be asked, and had agreed that there was no point in deflecting it. ‘Yes,’ he told the old reporter, ‘but purely as a precaution . . . and don’t bother asking me who it is.’
‘Chief Superintendent,’ came a voice from the back row. It belonged to Grace Pretty, a Scotsman reporter with whom Royston was on particularly good terms. ‘I’ve just been advised by my London office,’ McGuire glanced at the media manager, seated by his side, and saw him wince slightly at the lie, ‘that Keith Barker, who sat in on yesterday’s press briefing with Mr Davor Boras, has been arrested by the Metropolitan Police. Are you aware of that?’
The head of CID held on to his deadpan expression. ‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell us whether it has anything at all to do with this investigation?’
He looked at her over the heads of the people between them. ‘Grace, you know me, and you know that I like to give straight answers whenever I can.’
‘Yes.’
‘No comment.’
He waited until the buzz subsided.
‘You’re not saying that Keith Barker is a suspect, are you?’ the woman in the front row demanded.
‘Is there anything about “no comment” that you find hard to understand?’ he replied. ‘Any other questions?’ As he spoke, he saw that Alice Cowan was approaching his table; he paused as she slid a note in front of him, then scanned it quickly. ‘Thanks,’ he said, as she left, looking up once more at his audience. ‘Yes?’
‘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 was 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?’
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