“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed. For all we knew, Anthony could have been lying to us about that or Andrew Michaelson might have been lying to him. “How’s your background check on Michaelson coming along?”
“When have I had an opportunity to prioritise that this morning?” he asked, sounding a little exasperated. “There was one thing, though. Remember Fiona McArthur?” The name rang a bell, vaguely.
“Remind me?”
“One of Visser’s one-night stands that you sent Caitlin and Philips to talk to.”
“Okay. What about her?”
“Michaelson was in a relationship with her mum a few years back. They were together for almost seven years. Fiona was sixteen when they split up, and they still keep in regular contact. They seem to have kept up a good stepdad, stepdaughter kind of relationship. Lots of messages, chats, and photos back and forth.”
I pulled up the file with Caitlin’s notes from those interviews. Fiona was now twenty-three and had been less complimentary about Kaj Visser than most of the other girls we’d talked to. She’d been an idiot to expect better of him, she’d said, but they’d got on really well, better than she’d thought they would, and she’d really liked him. Kaj had made it quite clear when she’d texted him to suggest they meet up again that he wasn’t interested. Oh, he’d been nice about it, told her that she was a lovely girl and he’d had a lovely time etc. etc. but hadn’t they both agreed that neither of them was looking for anything more than a little casual fun that night?
It wasn’t much, but she’d made no effort to hide the fact that she felt that maybe he’d taken advantage of the situation. She wasn’t saying she hadn’t been keen, but they’d both had a lot to drink that night, and he hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to encourage her to slow down.
I opened the file with our collection of photos of Visser’s known sexual partners. Fiona McArthur wasn’t the prettiest girl in the gallery, and she was definitely a little heavy-handed with her make-up, but she had a really nice smile. I remembered Diane Burns’ comment about the girl who’d given Visser a resentful look in passing one day.
“Conall,” Shay said then in an unusually urgent tone for him. “We’ve got a problem.”
“What’s up?” I asked, looking over at him.
“Anthony Tait,” he told me. “I’ve been doing some more checking up on him. Remember that driving licence I found?”
“Sure.”
“The photo on it doesn’t match his passport. At first, I thought he didn’t have one. I only found it by searching by name. Our man used a fake identity to apply for the licence. It was only issued in January, too, if you remember. This,” he brought up a photo, “is the real Anthony Edward Tait. He lives at the right address, outside Perth, and he writes travel articles and paints, but he doesn’t own a car, and he doesn’t have a licence.”
The face I was looking at bore a lot of resemblance to the Anthony we knew, but it certainly wasn’t the same person.
“There’s more too,” he continued. “What made me check up on that was a closer examination of the video footage from the phone. Look.” Our Anthony replaced the picture he’d pulled up. Shay zoomed in on the new shot, a frame from the video that had been left for us. “See that faint little scar there, and over here, and here?” He panned around the photo as he pointed out the almost indistinguishable marks.
“Cosmetic surgery?”
“At a guess. The nose, the cheeks, the eyes. He probably used contact lenses too. I think the memorable, gap-toothed smile may have been achieved by having specially designed crowns fitted to replace his upper incisors as well.” He sat back unhappily. “That’s not cheap work or easy to organise without leaving any record of it.”
“So we have no idea who he really is?”
“No, we don’t, and if he’s as good as I now suspect he is, I doubt we ever will. He was probably out of the country before we even got here.”
“You don’t think that whoever hired him disposed of him then?”
“No, I don’t. I thought that video seemed far too conveniently helpful, but I wasn’t expecting anything as elaborate as this. You do realise that someone must have put a hit on Kaj Visser long before he ever met Melissa Soames, right? Let’s just hope ‘Anthony’ wasn’t lying about letting Nicholas Albert go too.”
Twenty-Nine
Norman Donaldson asked to see me again a little after half-past two.
“I have advised my client that it is in his best interests to tell you everything he can,” he told us. “Mr Michaelson would now like to make an official statement, confessing his part in Mr Visser’s abduction, but not in his death.”
Back in the interview room with them both, Caitlin and I listened quietly as Michaelson poured out his sorry story. He’d been first approached by Anthony Tait, he claimed, on Friday the twenty-second of March. Tait had told him that a man named Kaj Visser had seduced his fiancé and ruined his life. She’d come up to Wick with her sister for a short break in January to see the Northern Lights. Anthony said she’d returned home a completely different person. Distant, cold and increasingly depressed. He strongly suspected that something unpleasant had happened to her up here, and the sister refused to talk about it too. Eventually, in early February, she’d told him that she’d spent a night with Visser while she was up here and then abruptly broken off their engagement. He hadn’t been able to get her to speak with him again since.
“He told me that according to Susan, his fiancé, Visser had approached the girls when they’d gone out for a drink on their last night here, and he’d seemed like a pleasantly harmless guy, fun company to liven up their evening chatting with. They’d even let him buy them a drink after they’d been talking for a while. Then another, and another. When the pub closed, he walked them back to their hotel and then spent the rest of the night with Susan.”
Anthony had no proof that anything criminal had occurred. Susan had accepted full responsibility for what had happened that night. She’d had too much to drink. She’d invited Visser to stay, and she despised herself for it. Anthony claimed it wasn’t like her. Susan simply didn’t do things like that. She wasn’t that sort of girl.
“He thought that maybe Visser had put something in their drinks because he couldn’t see how it could have happened otherwise. Susan never allowed herself to get more than a little tipsy, not like some girls.”
Anthony had then hired a private investigator to look into Visser’s activities and become even more suspicious after learning how many women he was managing to seduce in a similar fashion.
“He said he’d come to see me because one of the women Visser had become involved with was someone I knew well, and he didn’t feel comfortable approaching her husband about it. Then he told me it was Melissa Soames. I was shocked. I’ve known Melissa for twelve years, and she’s the last person in the world I’d expect to ever cheat on her husband. I mean, something like that, if Charlie ever found out about it, would destroy her life. There was something else too. There’s another girl I know you see, Fiona McArthur. I was with her mother for a long time when she was growing up, and Fiona and I have stayed really close. I mean, I’m the closest thing to a dad she’s ever had. I didn’t mention her to Anthony, but Fiona had phoned me, really upset, in December, calling herself all kinds of names. She’d met a really nice guy, or so she’d thought. Only, after getting her into bed, he wanted nothing more to do with her. I went straight round to her flat to comfort her after that call. The poor girl was crying her eyes out. Fiona’s never been like that, Inspector. I know a lot of young women these days don’t see anything wrong with taking men they’ve just met to bed with them, and I suppose that’s none of my business. Nice girls like Fiona, though? I don’t care how charming Visser was being. She wouldn’t do that unless he’d put something in her drink.”
I happened to know better, but if Michaelson chose to be blinkered about Fiona, I suppose that was no different to how most men felt about their daughters or other girls
they’d helped to raise. Shay always found that kind of self-willed blindness rather puzzling, as so many ‘dads’ were quite happy to sleep with other people’s daughters when the opportunity arose.
And so our fake Anthony, with a story about a fictional fiancé and a scattering of truth, had lured Michaelson into helping him make sure that Visser ‘got what he had coming’.
“He had photos too, that his P.I. had obtained for him,” Michaelson told us. “Visser escorting girl after girl, week after week. It was sickening. There was even one of him chatting to Melissa in a hotel bar one night.”
The rest had been all too easy for Anthony to arrange. There were other men he’d talked to, he’d said, who would only be too happy to give Visser the beating he deserved. Would Andrew be willing to help him get the man into the hands of the boyfriends of two of the other women he’d used and discarded? Or would he rather do nothing and let Visser keep getting away with it? It wasn’t like they had anything they could go to the police with.
“I agreed to follow Visser that Friday and keep Anthony informed of where he was and where he was planning to go. And that was all I agreed to do. Visser wasn’t supposed to end up dead. Anthony said they’d give him something to get him out of town quietly, give him a good fright, a good beating, and a warning, and that would be the end of it. He even gave me a phone to call him on too.”
Only Visser had been found dead the next morning, and worse, Michaelson’s friend, Sergeant Bruce Malcolm, had called him last Thursday to let him know that it was now being considered a murder case.
“Bruce knew I was interested because I’d called him on Tuesday after I read about the body being found. I wanted to know if Fiona ought to expect to be questioned, as she’d briefly known the man who’d died. He said it was highly unlikely, then. I don’t suppose he saw any harm in letting me know that she might be once he heard that there was going to be a major investigation. When I called Michaelson after that to suggest that he should give the names of the men responsible to the police, he told me not to be a damned fool. Did I think I wouldn’t go to prison if my involvement in the abduction came out? Then he threatened me. If I didn’t do exactly what told me, he said, he’d make sure that I was caught. Did I think he was stupid? I’d be the only man the police managed to find if I wasn’t careful, and he could make sure that I would be if I caused him any trouble.”
Michaelson had done as he’d been told. He’d called Anthony from the places he’d been instructed to, at the given times, ending with the call from Soames’ house on Thursday night. “That’s when he advised me to smash the phone he’d given me and throw it away, which I did.” He hadn’t heard from him since.
When he’d finished talking, sweating and shaken, we began to question him. No, he hadn’t driven to Nybster Broch that night. No, he didn’t know who else had been involved. The ‘code’ used in his phone calls with Anthony had been Anthony’s suggestion. Charlie? Melissa? He hadn’t mentioned anything to either of them about any of it. He’d been convinced that Melissa was just another of Visser’s victims, and the idea of asking her about the affair was out of the question. Charlie was his employer and a friend, but he might not take Michaelson sticking his nose into their private business at all kindly if he found out about it. When had Michaelson really been in Anthony’s car? That had been last Tuesday afternoon. Anthony agreed to meet him in a supermarket car park in Thurso, and he’d got into the Nissan for their talk.
“I’d read about the death by then, and I was worried. Anthony said he’d been told that Visser had been alive but unconscious when the two men he’d delivered him to had left him. Maybe he’d come round, wandered off, fallen into the sea and drowned. Good riddance to bad rubbish if he had. He didn’t seem at all upset or concerned about it. He advised me to go home and forget it had ever happened.” The phone? He’d done as Anthony had suggested. It had gone into the sea during an Orkney ferry crossing at the weekend.
Finally, I asked if he’d known what Anthony had intended to dose Visser up with. He said yes, he’d been told that they meant to add some methanol to his drinks and then quieten him down with something that would wear off quite quickly. Then Visser was going to be told that the methanol in his system would make him go blind if he didn’t get hospital treatment quickly enough to prevent it. That was supposed to scare him enough to make him mend his ways. After that, he was to be beaten before they left him. Michaelson had also been told that they’d make an emergency call once they’d returned to town so that an ambulance would be sent to go and pick him up.
I had nothing else I wanted to ask Michaelson that day. After he’d been taken away again, Norman ‘Norrie’ Donaldson gave me a questioning look.
“What do you intend to change my client’s charge to, Inspector? I doubt you’ll be able to make conspiracy to commit murder stick.”
So did I, by then.
“He’s just confessed to aiding and abetting an abduction that resulted in the victim’s death, Mr Donaldson. Causing the death of another person without planning or intending to is still culpable homicide under Scottish law, and your client has just admitted that he conspired to have serious bodily harm inflicted on Kaj Visser. I’m sure the Procurator Fiscal’s office will wish to pursue a case on charges of abduction and culpable homicide.”
Donaldson nodded his unhappy agreement.
“His confession, and a guilty plea, will help reduce whatever sentence he’s given considerably, but Mr Michaelson is likely to spend several years in prison,” I concluded. The courts did like to encourage guilty pleas. It saved them so much time, expense and trouble. As to the length of the sentence, he was given, that really depended on how lenient the judge was prepared to be.
“And Anthony Tait, or whoever he really was?”
“When he’s found, he’ll face more serious charges. It’s doubtful that his fate will have any bearing on Mr Michaelson’s sentence.” I wasn’t about to discuss our main suspect with the solicitor. “Good afternoon, Mr Donaldson.” He accepted my polite dismissal quietly, leaving Caitlin and me to exit the room in his wake.
Mills collared me as I walked back into our main office. He’d managed to track down the last of Melissa’s four companions. Like the three we’d already reached, the man had found the call both strange and unsettling. No, he most certainly was not willing to confirm that he’d spent a night with a woman of that description. Was this some sort of a joke or a blackmail attempt? Had we spoken to his wife? Like the others, he’d calmed down considerably once the magical words ‘murder investigation’ were uttered. Four for four, then. None of them had been threatened, assaulted or suffered ‘accidental’ injuries.
“I suppose you’re planning to head over to the courthouse next?” Shay asked as he saw me reaching for my coat when I got back to our office.
“Next on my list. We need quite a few search warrants if we’re going to check all the places we know Anthony stayed in. Why? Got somewhere you want to add to the list? You know what it’s usually like, in any Sheriff Clerk’s office, so the sooner I get over there, the better if I want to collar a JP today.”
“Actually, I need to talk to you before you waste your time doing that, or anything else really,” he said in a quiet tone that I really didn’t like the sound of.
“We’re being pulled off the case?” I asked as I sat down, a little heavily, and spun my chair round to face him. I think I may have sounded more than a little sharp because he gave me a really apologetic sideways look, by Shay standards.
“Anthony’s in the wind with a five-day head start on us. He could be anywhere in the world by now. What else do you think you can accomplish here with the people and resources available to you? We've got missing persons searching for Nicholas Albert, you’ve nailed Michaelson for his part in Visser’s death, and we’ve identified the main culprit, as far as anyone can. I don’t see how anyone could have expected us to do more.”
“You found something else, didn’t you? What was it?”
Instead of answering me immediately, he twisted his own chair round to face me fully. “Tell me what doesn’t add up about Visser’s murder, Con,” he invited me, and I relented a little. Whatever he’d done, it wouldn’t be something I could blame him for once he’d explained himself.
“Well, for starters, we’ve got this mysterious, surgically altered ‘not-Anthony’ turning up and roping both Nicholas Albert and Andrew Michaelson into his scheme. It’s all way too ridiculously complicated and expensive a plot for dealing with a local Lothario. Anyone could have masked up and jumped Visser one night far more easily if that was all this was about. Slightly riskier, but not much. Maybe the two ‘boyfriends’ were roped in, too, but it’s far more likely they never existed. Anthony probably had an accomplice or two working with him.”
“Good start. What else?”
“You heard what Michaelson just said. He’d even been primed with an explanation for the methanol poisoning. Threatened permanent blindness? That’s a really good scare tactic, sure. You’d probably spend the rest of your life testing every drink you were ever handed after hearing something like that. Only it was totally pointless. If they intended to kill Visser all along, why give him anything but the ketamine or maybe an ordinary sedative in order to grab him? Something far more predictable than methanol? It’s just another distracting diversion, something unusual enough to puzzle us. Did he drink it accidentally? Was that what made him stumble into the water? Add the attempt to divert us with Charlie Soames for a while, if we ever got that far, and the trail’s bound to be stone cold by the time we figure it all out if we ever do.”
“Anything else?” It was better to humour him if I wanted him to get around to answering my own question any time soon.
“Someone wanted Visser dead, but instead of hiring someone to stab him one night, or something equally simple, they picked a professional who’d come up with a convoluted way of making the death look accidental, at least at first glance, and seriously muddy and delay any investigation that might follow if we decided it wasn’t. Someone like Anthony wouldn’t come cheap, and if you’re right about the cosmetic surgery, it all smells a lot more like a big organisation’s work than a private hire. Not the sort of job even someone like Charlie Soames could finance from his ready cash stash, and you've checked his banking records. Anthony was here for what, almost three weeks? Drawing things out that long would be expensive, as well as leaving us with an awful lot of people and places to look into. And why only give us some of the audio files if he recorded all the calls as he claimed to have done? What else did he lie about?”
Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4) Page 25
