The Bad Fire (Bob Skinner series, Book 31): A shocking murder case brings danger too close to home for ex-cop Bob Skinner in this gripping Scottish crime thriller

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Not much, but he was a strong bastard. I had him in a proper hold, the kind we use as restraint, but he knew how to get out of it. I was holding him by pure strength, but not for much longer, even without Heaney cutting me.’

  ‘Anything else? Did you see or sense anything? We think he was Asian, but we’re not sure about his age.’

  Montell drew a breath, shifted on the bed and winced with pain at the movement. ‘Sauce,’ he said, ‘after that guy sliced my arse half off, he could have been a fucking Martian, for all I knew or cared.’

  Sixty-Nine

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Jackie Wright whispered as she read the email on her screen. ‘Sarge,’ she called out to Tarvil Singh, ‘come and have a look at this.’

  ‘What’s so exciting?’ he asked, rising from his chair and lumbering across the room.

  ‘I asked the Border Force to co-ordinate a check of arrivals and departures from Scottish airports last weekend, looking for the names Wasim and Zaqib Butt. Look what they came back with.’ As he leaned over her, a mix of deodorant and cologne brought her almost to gagging point, but she fought it off. ‘Start with Saturday,’ she told him.

  He did as she suggested. ‘Okay, there’s Zaqib, heading out on Saturday morning, on British Airways connecting at Heathrow with a Qatar Airways flight to Doha and on to Rawalpindi. We knew that.’

  ‘Next day?’

  He peered at the screen, reading. ‘Next day we have Wasim Butt getting off an Emirates flight at Glasgow at thirteen fifteen hours. Fine, but only confirmation.’

  She scrolled on to another page. ‘And here?’

  Singh sighed, then his eyes narrowed. ‘What the fu— Wasim gets back on an Emirates flight that same evening, heading for Rawalpindi via Dubai. But hold on! Wait! Oh shit! That’s Arthur Dorward’s mystery DNA profile. That’s not old Wasim; that’s got to be his other son, Zaqib’s half-brother. So how come we’ve never heard of him?’

  ‘Because,’ Wright replied, ‘he’s not a British national. He has a Pakistani passport, which the Border Force scanned as he left the country. Scanned and copied,’ she added. ‘Now look at this.’ She clicked, and a passport photograph appeared, magnified, on screen. ‘Does that match the image you got off the car park camera, or does it not?’

  Seventy

  The whispers of nepotism were a thing of the almost distant past. Assistant Chief Constable Lowell Payne had proved himself to his team and to his senior officers, of whom there were only two, the chief and her deputy. His meteoric rise during the second half of his career had culminated in his appointment as head of Special Branch in the defunct Strathclyde police force. At the time, there were a few insiders who suggested that it owed much to the fact that he was married to Bob Skinner’s former sister-in-law, but the only one who had been reckless enough to say so to the service’s last chief constable had been told in a loud voice that it owed far more to the factionalism and prejudice of his predecessors in not spotting the man’s talents in organisation, analysis and leadership.

  And yet, when he was faced with a tricky situation on a Saturday morning, it was Skinner he called. ‘This is only for advice, you understand,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all I’m in a position to give you, Lowell.’

  ‘Come off it, Bob. The deputy chief told me about your role in mentoring young SIOs. I know you’re involved in something right now, because one of those young SIOs told me: DCI Charlotte Mann.’

  ‘How did you come to be speaking to Lottie?’

  ‘Because she stood on the toes of a couple of my people. I’ve got an operation going; it’s international, but we’re at the sharp end.’

  ‘Terrorism?’

  ‘No,’ Payne replied. ‘People trafficking and human slavery. There’s an operation called Household Supplies and Services, in Kilmarnock; it’s a shed, a warehouse selling anything for the home, from bog rolls to Brasso, in bulk, to the public and the trade, from the premises and through eBay and Amazon. That side of it probably breaks even at best; it’s the services bit that we’re interested in. Our information is that most of those are provided by illegals who are here against their will, from eastern Europe and the Middle East, refugees who’ve been sucked in and are too afraid to break free. Some of them go out as cleaners, to wealthy householders, shops and factories. Those ones have papers and go through the books. Those who don’t provide other services. Prostitutes, male and female, young and younger; drug mules who bring the stuff in and are then made to cut and distribute it. Fucking horrible business, Bob, and we thought we had them.’

  ‘But now you don’t?’

  ‘Only the other ranks; the commanding officer has disappeared. The frontman in this organisation is Wasim Butt, a British citizen of Pakistani origin. He owns the shed and the legitimate business; he’s been in Scotland for over thirty years, and lives in the Newton Mearns area on the west side of Glasgow. One son, name of Zaqib, who runs a steel stockholder business in Motherwell. We believe it was set up with money laundered from the human slavery trade, but we can’t prove it.’

  ‘Zaqib?’ Skinner asked. ‘What about him?’

  ‘He has no connection with his father’s business; at least none that we can find. He’s twenty-nine, has two kids with a girl he met at uni, lives in Carluke, plays golf at Lanark off a handicap of two, lucky bastard.’

  ‘So why aren’t you picking up Wasim and shutting the whole thing down?’

  ‘Because Wasim isn’t the main player; like I said, he’s the frontman for the legitimate business. There’s somebody else, a younger man, giving the orders as far as we can see and running what we’ll call the import side; in fact, the Importer is our name for him. He’s the trafficker, the slaver; we’ve had sight of him, but the bugger is we don’t know who he is.’

  ‘Haven’t you followed him? Kept him under continuous observation?’

  ‘We’ve tried,’ Payne told him, ‘but he’s too good. In my opinion, the guy has been trained in counter-surveillance techniques; he’s a pro. However,’ he continued, ‘in the last month, he’s been here and he’s been active. We had a tip-off from Poland that there’s another shipment on the move, and this time, my Europol colleagues have managed to infiltrate it. They have a female officer undercover among the traffickees. Through her we hope to tie down all the details of the operation, including how they make landfall here. Most importantly, we hope that she’ll finally put a name to the Importer.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Skinner said, ‘but how does Lottie tie in with this?’

  ‘She ties in because this morning, my guys found her and her DS on surveillance of the same premises as us. They braced her about it. She told them to fuck off and tried to pull rank. They called me and I ordered her to come to my office without informing anyone. She and I had a long conversation, in the course of which she told me that if I wasn’t sharing – which I can’t – neither was she. Her operation was confidential, she said, and under your supervision.’

  ‘I wouldn’t quite put it like that, but I have a degree of knowledge. You want advice, you said?’

  ‘Yes,’ Payne agreed. ‘I want you to tell me whether I should go straight to the DCC and put Mann on a disciplinary.’

  ‘You shouldn’t,’ Skinner retorted. ‘How much of this does Mario know? He’s mentioned nothing to me.’

  ‘Only the nature of the operation. He told me to report when I have results . . . which I’ll never get now, because it appears to be fucking blown. I had further word from Poland a couple of hours ago. The human cargo, their UCO included, were dumped on a beach in Denmark and left there. It happened yesterday; it took them hours to get to the nearest town. And worse, the Importer has disappeared; nobody’s seen the prick since Friday. Mann and Cotter show up, and the show’s over. You still don’t think I should have Mann’s guts for garters?’

  ‘I still don’t think so. What she did . . . I don’t give orders, but my suggestions are usually acted upon. If I’d known about your op, or if Mario had, I’d have sp
oken to you, of course. But neither of us did, which makes Mann innocent.’

  ‘Shit,’ the ACC sighed. ‘What am I going to tell the Poles, the Germans, all the rest of them?’

  ‘Search me,’ Skinner replied. Then he chuckled. ‘That’s what I’d have told you an hour ago,’ he said, ‘before I had a call from another team. Now? You can tell all your friends you’re a fucking hero, because you know who the Importer is. Before you do that, though, I want you to use your international contacts and find out everything there is to know about him. I have a very personal interest in this man, Lowell, and so do you. He killed someone I know, and he almost did the same to your niece, my daughter. I don’t expect you’ll be able to put me in a room with him, but if you can, he’s fucking dead.’

  Seventy-One

  ‘I promise you, Detective Inspector,’ Zaqib Butt insisted, ‘I have never heard of this man, and I have never seen him. What the fuck’s going on here? You ask me to leave my Sunday at home with my kids, you bring me through to Edinburgh and you start to treat me as if I’m a suspect. I’ve done nothing wrong; I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me. I even came home early from visiting my family in Pakistan. Now you throw this shit at me.’

  ‘Bear with us please, Mr Butt,’ Haddock said. ‘Look at the name on the passport: Wasim Butt.’

  ‘I’m looking. I’m looking. There’s fuck knows how many Wasim Butts in Pakistan. You’re telling me this one’s my brother? Are you serious, mate?’

  ‘Half-brother,’ Noele McClair told him. ‘He’s ten years older than you, to the month. The intelligence that our colleagues received from Pakistan this morning confirms that he was born in Hyderabad, to your father and Azra Khawaja.’

  ‘That’s not my mother,’ he exclaimed. ‘Her maiden name’s Rachel Mazari. She and my father met and married over here. Her grandmother was Scottish. That’s where the Rachel came from. My dad worked for her father when he arrived and eventually took over the business. Are you suggesting that she and my father might not be legally married?’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ Haddock assured him. ‘Our information is that your father dissolved his first marriage before he came to Scotland. Wasim junior remained with his mother and her father. He was educated in Hyderabad and went to university in Lahore.’

  Zaqib shook his head, then rubbed his face in his hands. ‘My father has never so much as hinted that I had a brother,’ he said. ‘Uncle Imran’s never mentioned him either. Neither has my cousin Benny. They would know about him, surely?’

  ‘Not necessarily; Wasim junior was born and raised in Hyderabad, remember. My geography’s crap, but that’s not exactly next door to Rawalpindi, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ he conceded. ‘Pakistan’s a place it’s easy to get lost in, I suppose. Bloody hell, you’re turning my life upside down; you realise that, don’t you?’

  ‘We hope we are,’ Noele McClair told him. ‘If not, you could be implicated in very serious crimes.’

  He gasped. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  Haddock looked him in the eye. ‘We believe that your brother murdered Carrie McDaniels, on your father’s orders.’

  ‘This gets even crazier. The only thing my dad could murder is a fucking curry.’

  The DI slid the car park photo across the table, placing the passport image beside it. ‘The same man, yes?’

  Zaqib studied them, moving from one to the other and back again. ‘Yes,’ he conceded after a while.

  ‘The second photo was taken in a car park in Edinburgh early on Sunday morning; this was just after your half-brother and an accomplice attacked Alex Skinner, the solicitor who engaged Carrie McDaniels, in her flat. She was unhurt, but a police officer who was there was seriously wounded before they left the scene. We are fairly certain that when they drove out of that car park, in a stolen vehicle, Carrie’s body was in the boot. They took it to a pet crematorium south of Edinburgh, broke in and put it in the furnace. Once that was done, we think Wasim Butt shot his accomplice and put him in there as well.’

  ‘Fuck! If he knows I’m with you . . . Are my family safe?’

  ‘Your half-brother flew to Pakistan that same day, and we’re fairly sure he’s still there. God only knows where. As you said, it’s an easy place to lose yourself.’

  ‘Are they safe from my father? In case he sends somebody else. They mean nothing to him.’

  ‘Yes, they are. He’s not going to do that, but we’re keeping an eye on them, don’t worry. You’ve been asked before, but I need to hear it again. Are you involved with his company in any way?’

  ‘No, not at all. He doesn’t want me to be; he says it’s too mundane for me. The truth is, the only time I’ve been to the site was when it was LuxuMarket and I worked there, when the Marcia Brown business happened. You’re not going to tell me my father had her killed as well, are you?’

  ‘We’re not ruling it out,’ Haddock admitted. ‘Others are looking into that. Meantime, the money your father gave you to start WZB came from an investment trust registered in Zurich. Did he tell you anything about its history?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t ask. It wasn’t a hell of a lot, in business terms: five hundred thousand. The company was heavily indebted at the beginning; my father arranged a loan that was guaranteed by his company. I was given five years to clear it, and I did it with two to spare. Once I’d done that, the ownership was transferred legally to my name. What is it that my father’s done?’ he asked. ‘What is it that’s so bad that people were killed for it?’

  ‘We can’t tell you that, not yet. For now, I’d like you to stay with us for an hour or so, then I’ll have a car take you back to Carluke.’

  ‘Why wait for an hour?’

  ‘By then I should have heard that your father’s been arrested. There’s no point in us putting temptation in your way, Zaqib, by giving you a chance to phone him and tip him off.’

  ‘He’s gone thirty years without tipping me off that I had a brother, Inspector; you’d have no worries on that score.’

  Seventy-Two

  ‘What do you think?’ McGuire asked as he switched off the TV monitor in his office on which he and his companions had watched the interview. ‘Is he on the level or did he know all along?’

  Skinner grinned. ‘The boy’s okay,’ he said. ‘He plays off a two handicap at Lanark. People off two always want to get down to scratch; that wouldn’t leave enough time to be part of an organised crime group as well. Seriously, though,’ he added, ‘you and I have both been around long enough to know when someone’s faking it, and he seemed genuinely shocked when Sauce told him about his brother.’

  ‘Do we trust Lowell’s information from Pakistan? Could they be protecting one of their own?’

  ‘Would you trust criminal intelligence from Italy, Cornetto? Or from Ireland, for that matter?’

  The DCC grunted an acknowledgement. ‘Granted. What else did they tell us, Lowell, other than what Sauce quoted there?’

  ‘According to them, Wasim junior has quite a background,’ ACC Payne responded. ‘He graduated from Lahore in physics, then joined the army. He served there until he was twenty-eight, then transferred to the Federal Investigation Agency; that’s part of the Pakistani state security machine. He was placed in the immigration wing and worked there for four years until he quit, saying that he was going into the family business.’

  ‘The immigration wing?’ Skinner repeated.

  Payne nodded. ‘Tasked with preventing illegal immigration; laugh if you will, Bob, but it’s an issue, especially with the Taliban active in Afghanistan, hiding out across the border, and being a presence in Pakistan too.’

  ‘I get that. Was his job active, or desk-bound?’

  ‘Very active.’

  ‘Then he must have seen a lot of inventive ways to move people across borders.’

  ‘Will they find him for us?’ McGuire asked.

  ‘They will try, I’m assured.’

  ‘What’s the extradition si
tuation?’

  ‘We don’t have a treaty with Pakistan. It’s not impossible, but we’d have to present a case through the UK Justice Department, one that gave a strong likelihood of conviction. Can be done, but it’ll take time. So, Mario,’ Payne continued, ‘are we go? Can I arrest Wasim senior and execute the warrant for a search of his premises?’

  ‘Have we got enough to hold him?’

  ‘Enough to arrest, for sure. My team can place his son in Scotland last week, on the premises. Then there was his knowledge of Carrie’s visit to Zaqib.’

  ‘Okay,’ the DCC declared. ‘Proceed. That still worries me, though.’

  ‘What?’ Skinner asked.

  ‘Zaqib, letting him go. He’s still in the chain. He told his father about Carrie, and his father ordered the killing.’

  His friend smiled. ‘Ah, but was old Wasim hearing it for the first time? There’s someone else you should lift, but as subtly as you can manage, and not until tomorrow morning, because there isn’t enough to hold him overnight. Also,’ he added, ‘I want to be there when he’s interviewed.’

  Seventy-Three

  ‘What’s all this about?’ Cedric Black asked angrily in the interview room in the Clyde Gateway police office. ‘I’ve gone along with this so far, from the call by the deputy chief constable, no less, asking me if I can advise you on a couple of points in an ongoing investigation. I even went along with the request that I come to the mainland. But I do object to being picked up by uniformed officers in a patrol car and blue-lighted all the way up to Glasgow.’

  ‘Sorry about that.’ The man facing him settled himself into a chair that was more comfortable than he had known in any similar room in any other station. ‘It makes me wonder, though. We thought we were giving you VIP treatment, but you seem to be interpreting it in the opposite way, as if we were treating you like a suspect, a criminal even. Trust me, your average suspect doesn’t get a call from Mario McGuire asking for his assistance; he gets a heavy knock on the door at first light. Mario sends his apologies by the way; he’s been caught up in other things.’