‘What have we done?’
‘Nothing, I hope,’ he replied, the police-punter cliché conversation. ‘I’d like to ask you a couple of questions, that’s all.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Thanks. What sort of traffic do you get through here?
‘It varies; it’s mostly hobby flying, but we do get some commercial landings. There are a few swish resort hotels in the area and they use us when guests want to fly in, for golfing weekends or whatever. I keep hoping that a helicopter firm will decide to base itself here but, to be honest, I think we’re on the wrong side of Newcastle for that.’
‘Did you have anyone land last Saturday?’
She nodded. ‘The usual swarm of microlights, Mr Alexander in his Piper and, oh, yes, the Beechcraft.’
‘What was that?’ Cairns asked.
‘A Beechcraft Bonanza, twin-prop; a cracking little plane, although it’s bigger than it looks in terms of payload.’
‘Were you expecting it?’
‘No, it wasn’t booked in. He came on radio asking for landing clearance and my husband gave him the okay; he was in the control tower at the time.’
‘Family business?’
‘Yes. We own all the land around here, but the farming operation is all tenanted now. This is what we like doing.’
‘Did you see the pilot?’
‘Yes, I did. As soon as he had parked and offloaded his motorcycle he came across, paid his landing fee, and roared off. We’re a cash-only business,’ she added.
‘His motorcycle?’
‘Yes. I’ve seen that before. People fly in from other cities, land here and then bike it into Newcastle. Some even use pedal cycles.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘I’m afraid not. I never saw his face close up. He was wearing his crash helmet when he came in here, and when he came back, it was my turn to be up in the control tower, shepherding the microlights.’
‘Would your husband have seen him?’
‘I doubt it. The guy rode straight up to the plane, loaded the bike, up its little ramp, then climbed inside. He had to wait for take-off clearance, in the queue with the flying sewing-machines, but he got off all right.’
‘He didn’t refuel?’
‘Obviously he didn’t need to. Bonanzas have a range of around eight hundred miles with a low payload, as this chap had.’
‘Right,’ said Cairns. ‘That’ll be all, Mrs Ritter. You’ve been very helpful.’
‘My pleasure, but can you tell me what it’s all about? Has he crashed, or was he doing something illegal?’
He would have answered her question, but he knew no more than she did, and so instead he shook his head and fed her another cliché. ‘No, no, nothing like that; purely routine.’ He gave her a brief salute and stepped outside.
Seventy-eight
The security service safe house was in Millfields Road, a quiet thoroughfare well away from congestion zones, cars parked outside houses with the security of traffic-calming bumps, which prevented them being driven away at high speed.
David Barnes was waiting for Skinner and McGuire at a table in an upstairs room when they arrived just after two p.m. He was handcuffed and his ankles were secured to the legs of his chair. He glared at them as they entered and sat opposite him. ‘What the ’ell is this?’ he barked, in broad Mancunian. ‘Who are you barstards?’
The two detectives produced their warrant cards. ‘That’s who we are,’ said McGuire, as Skinner leaned back and stared coldly across the table. ‘And this is about you being done for the murder of two men, one of them a police officer.’
‘You’re crazy!’ Barnes screamed. ‘I never murdered anyone in my life.’
‘Of course you did,’ the chief superintendent told him. ‘You were in the army, a sergeant on duty with KFOR in Kosovo, about seven years ago. You were part of an interrogation team that interpreted its orders very broadly. You killed three prisoners under questioning in separate incidents, but the third one went public and you became an embarrassment. Consequently your death in action was reported, and you were quietly made to disappear, with the help of Mr Davor Boras, a facilitator with links to the CIA. You went to work for him as his chauffeur-cum-bodyguard. Your duties also included piloting the company’s light aircraft on occasion.
‘A few years ago, Mr Boras and his son decided that it would be a good idea if they appeared to be at odds, and so Dražen was seen to leave his old man’s business, set up on his own and take an English name . . . David Barnes, on the basis that it might be handy to have two of you around.’
McGuire leaned forward. ‘Are you going to dispute any of that?’ he hissed. ‘Because my boss and I would love to interrogate you, just like you used to in Kosovo, only we’re better at it than you were. We won’t kill you, we won’t mark you, but we will fucking well waste you, in memory of our dead colleague.’
Barnes looked, and believed. ‘You’ve got all that right,’ he murmured, ‘but I never killed no copper.’
‘No,’ said Skinner. ‘This is what you did. On Saturday morning Davor Boras called you to see him. He gave you a return e-ticket for the Edinburgh shuttle out of Heathrow at twelve fifteen. He also gave you clothes, specifically jeans, a T-shirt, a very garish denim jacket and cap, and a pair of Oakleys. He ordered you to fly north, in that gear, and to meet the other David Barnes at a location in Edinburgh.
’You did just that. You met Dražen, you changed clothes, and you gave him the return ticket. Then you rode his motorbike back to Walkdean Airfield, near Newcastle, where Dražen had parked the company Beechcraft, and flew it back to the depot in London, returning to London in transport he had left there.
’While you were engaged in this pantomime, Dražen went to Wooler, in Northumberland where he killed a man named Daniel Ballester and, in mistake for two other people, Detective Inspector Steven Steele, a colleague and very good friend of ours.’
Barnes paled. ‘I read about that. He did that? Christ, mate, I never knew.’
‘I couldn’t give a shit what you knew,’ the DCC growled. ‘Tell me, David, do you love Sharon, your wife?’ Barnes nodded. ‘And do you love Wendy, the girl you’ve been shagging on the side in a flat in Victoria Park for a year now?’ The man gasped.
‘Actually, I don’t care about that,’ Skinner continued. ‘But I would like to know whether you would like to see either of them again, or whether you’re prepared to have your body fed through an industrial-sized tree-shredder, maybe before you’re quite dead. Because, mate, as you will have gathered from the depth of our knowledge, and because of the unconventional nature of your arrest, we are in a position to make that happen.’
He laid two sheets of paper on the table. ‘That’s your admission that everything within your sphere of knowledge happened as I have described. Did it?’ he snapped. ‘Yes or no?’
‘Yes!’ Barnes screamed again, but this time out of pure terror, as he stared at the nightmare across the table, pointing a pen at him like a dagger.
‘Then sign that, both pages, within ten seconds or Mario will start breaking your fingers.’
Barnes snatched the Pentel from Skinner, with both manacled hands, and scrawled his name, twice.
‘Thanks,’ said McGuire, amiably, as he pocketed the signed statement. ‘We’ll have you taken back to work now, hopefully before your boss notices you’re missing. But breathe just one word to him, and I promise you, the best that’ll happen is that your wife will hear about Wendy.’
Seventy-nine
‘You know,’ said Skinner, ‘I thought Barnes would have been tougher than that.’
‘Me too,’ McGuire agreed. ‘But I have to confess you scared me a wee bit, so Christ knows what he must have felt.’
‘Maybe we’re getting too good at it.’
‘Maybe, but I’d like to think that there’s still room for improvement when we get our hands on Dražen. He’ll be a harder nut than his namesake, I’m sure of that.’ The head of CID’s
eyes narrowed. ‘I wish we could go in there first.’
‘So do I, but that was never on. Amanda helped us as far as she could, and probably further, by having her people snatch Barnes for us. But when it comes to making a proper arrest, we’ve got no locus down here. We had to bring the Met in on it.’ He broke off as a tall figure came towards them, down the corridor in which they stood.
‘Gentlemen, we’re ready upstairs,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Davies, head of Specialist Crime operations in the Met. He wore the air of a man who was doing something that had been forced upon him and did not like it.
‘I hope to God you’re right about this. Right or wrong, I’m going to catch Foreign Office flak for this. That damn woman Weiss has been bending my ear since last Saturday when your man threw her out of an interview.’
‘I thought she was Home Office,’ Skinner remarked.
‘That’s what I allowed Becky Stallings to believe.’
‘Christ,’ the Scot gasped, ‘you lie to your own officers.’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’
’I would. Now don’t lie to me. I want Dražen alive, to stand trial; if you’re under orders from anybody to put a bullet in him to keep him quiet you’d better tell me now.’
‘I’m not, I assure you.’
‘Then make fucking sure that nobody does.’
‘My men will meet force with force.’
McGuire took a twenty-pound note from his breast pocket and held it up. ‘This says they won’t face any. Dražen Boras is anything but stupid: he’s not going to keep firearms in a luxury penthouse that’s pissing distance away from Chelsea Bridge. You could ring the fucking doorbell and he’d answer it and invite you in, yet you’ve got a squad of commandos up there. God bless Harry Stanley, may he rest in peace.’
The taunt, about the man shot dead by armed officers while carrying nothing more lethal than a table leg, struck home hard. Davies turned on his heel and stalked off.
‘You shouldn’t have said that, you know,’ Skinner murmured. ‘That’s the sort of guy that might apply for Jimmy’s job.’
‘The day he gets it, I’m going into the family business with Paula.’
‘He’ll have to get past me first.’
McGuire stared at him, but said nothing, as the sound of indistinct shouts drifted down from the floor above. They waited for ten minutes until, finally, Davies reappeared. ‘You can come up now,’ he said coldly.
They followed him, up one floor and through the open door that led into Dražen Boras’s penthouse. As with his father’s office, the living-room wall was made almost entirely of glass, framing Chelsea Bridge like an enormous picture postcard.
The furniture was 1960s retro, the kind that had once made Paula Viareggio stick two fingers down her throat when Mario had suggested buying a piece. Slowly, a vast white egg-shaped chair began to turn towards them on its base. Settled deep into it, and smiling like a demon, was Davor Boras.
‘I regret,’ he said, ‘that my son is not here to receive you. Nor will he be for quite some time, not until these silly allegations against him are shown to be unprovable and the Attorney General has exonerated him. In the process, you will, of course, be excoriated.’ He leaned on the last word as if he was proud of it.
McGuire took the chauffeur’s statement from his pocket, and waved it in the air. ‘The other David Barnes doesn’t agree with you.’
‘Come, come, Chief Superintendent,’ the millionaire laughed, ‘would you care to explain how that was obtained? Even now, Mr Barnes is recovering his courage.’
Skinner ignored him and turned to Davies. ‘I want this place searched under your warrant; look for passports. I bet you’ll find two: a guy like this, he’ll have had a third identity ready, in case of emergencies. Or . . . What’s the range of an Embraer jet? Transatlantic, you said, Mario? He’s gone west, hasn’t he, Davor? And when he lands he’ll be welcomed in Virginia.’
From the depths of the chair, Boras winked at him.
Skinner turned on his heel and walked out of the room, through the apartment until he found the master bedroom. He went into Dražen’s en-suite bathroom and started to open drawers. In the third, he found a Philishave electric razor. He flicked it open, and saw that the chamber below the blades was full of beard residue. Very carefully, he closed it again, and returned to the huge, curved living room.
Boras was still in the chair, watching the proceedings with evident amusement. He turned as the DCC re-entered and held up the shaver.
‘Is this your son’s?’
‘Of course. A gift from me, in fact; top of the range, best in the world. He has another in his travel kit.’
‘I’ll borrow it for a while. Mr Davies, have it bagged it for me, please. That’s okay with you, Davor, isn’t it?’
Boras’s smile, and his eyes, narrowed just a little, but he nodded, and replied, ‘Of course.’
Skinner and McGuire stayed silent until they were clear of the building, and half-way across Chelsea Bridge. Finally, the chief superintendent exploded: ‘The shaver: Dražen’s DNA?’ he exclaimed.
‘Chock full of it, and his father’s witness to the fact.’
‘Yes! We’ve got the sod.’
‘If the lab does the business.’
‘Too bad about that confession, though.’
‘Yeah,’ Skinner grunted. ‘I suspect that Boras noticed that Barnes was absent and, in the circumstances, put the screw on him when he got back. “Courage,” he said; money can buy that too. Anyway, that statement was useless in court: the eedjit was too scared to notice that he’d never been formally cautioned.’
The head of CID stopped in his tracks. ‘Earlier on,’ he asked, ‘did I see you log Barnes’s phone number into your mobile, before you shredded Adrian’s note?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Skinner, cheerfully, ‘and his address too. Wicked, eh?’
‘Can I borrow it?’
‘Sure.’ He took the cell phone from his pocket and handed it over.
McGuire opened it, found the number, and pressed the green button. ‘Is that Mrs Barnes?’ Skinner heard him say, as they resumed their walk across the bridge. ‘This is a friend, one of yours, not your husband’s: there’s some stuff about him that you should know.’
Eighty
‘Nice place you have here, Les,’ said Skinner, as he looked round his opposite number’s office. ‘There are times when I don’t like being stuck in the city centre. I hope you don’t lose this under the force amalgamation.’
‘It’ll see me out,’ Cairns assured him. ‘Is that why you’re here, sizing up this office in case they make you head of the new regional force?’
‘Nothing could be further from my mind,’ the Scot assured him sincerely. ‘No, I’m here to apologise for the most unprofessional thing I’ve ever done in my life.’
The Geordie’s heavy eyebrows came together. ‘Thumping Ballester, you mean? On reflection, I should have done that myself. It isn’t against any law I know of to belt a dead man.’
‘Thanks, but that’s not what I meant.’ He opened his briefcase, took out a thick folder and pushed it across Cairns’s desk. ‘I want to give you this, and to say sorry for having kept you in the dark all the way through its compilation.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the documentation of a very private investigation into the murder of Daniel Ballester and Stevie Steele.’
‘Ballester? Murder?’ Cairns exclaimed.
‘I’m afraid so. And it was on your patch, which made it your business. But it started in Scotland, which made it mine. That’s my excuse, anyway. Read that, and you’ll find that you have overwhelming grounds for seeking a warrant for the arrest of a man called Dražen Boras, and his extradition from America, where he’s believed to be hiding.
‘Play it right, Les, and your knighthood could be in there. I want you to give it to the Crown Prosecution Service. They may come under pressure from upstairs not to take it further
. If they do, I’d like you to let them know that I have another copy that I will not hesitate to leak to the newspaper for which Ballester used to work, and to a few others as well.’
‘This is unshakeable?’
‘Cast-iron,’ said Skinner. ‘I got the clincher this morning: the DNA of Dražen Boras, legally obtained, with his father Davor’s consent, given before a DAC in the Met, matches a sample of skin taken by my guy, DI Dorward, from the letterbox at Hathaway House.’
‘And you did all this without reference to me?’
‘I’m afraid so. Apart from that call you made for me on Tuesday, that is; it was part of the investigation, although I chose not to burden you with it at the time. I’m sorry, mate; I had to use some heavy contacts. If I’d done it by the book ...’
‘. . . I might have made a balls-up of it.’
‘Les, I’m not saying that for a second.’
Cairns laughed. ‘No, but I am. Man, you’re playing by the book now, when it really matters, and you’ve saved me a shedload of grief. My biggest problem now will be to explain to the coroner how Ballester’s suicide is suddenly a murder, but I can deal with that. Bob, I’m happy to steal your glory any day of the week . . . and your bloody knighthood, if it comes to that.’
‘You can have my seat in the Lords as well, if you want.’
‘Red’s not my colour.’ Cairns turned serious once again. ‘Look,’ he asked, ‘for me, presenting a solid case is enough, but what are my chances of landing this Dražen bloke?’
‘In truth, somewhere between slim and non-existent,’ Skinner told him. ‘Especially if I find him first.’
Eighty-one
Although he was in the second rank of mourners at Stevie Steele’s funeral, stiff in his uniform, with Aileen and Alex, both in black, on either side of him, and Sir James and Lady Proud beyond his daughter, Skinner stayed in the background during the reception at the Braid Hills Hotel. He felt that that time belonged to families, and so, after no more than fifteen minutes, he left, dropping the First Minister at Holyrood, and heading for Fettes to sign off, before resuming his sabbatical.
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