by Nick Louth
Gillard had never seen such naked hunger for love in his life. Jealous of a child yet to be conceived. The kid was mixed up and no mistake.
‘Okay, thank you for your time. One final thing. We asked all guests to surrender their phones just to help us track of where people were. We were really hoping that every member of the family would comply, but neither you nor your brother have.’
‘You seriously expect me to give you my phone?’ She looked at him like he was mad.
‘I do. It would be useful to see any messages you had exchanged with your parents recently, that might give us an insight into their state of mind in the run-up to the events of Christmas night.’
‘You don’t need my phone for that,’ she retorted, fluffing out her hair. ‘My dad was besotted with the fossil woman, and my mum only had eyes for Toadman.’
‘I’d still like your phone. You can have it back within an hour.’
‘Get lost.’ She stood up and walked out.
* * *
It was 9:45 a.m. when Gillard ascended the wooden staircase into the Khazi for the inaugural incident room meeting. As he pulled open the plywood door on the Portakabin and peered inside, he could see that no one had recently cleaned off the black mould which was threatening to overwhelm the institutional off-white paint. He turned on all the extractor fans, hoping that their whining noise would be less of a problem than the smell of the mould they were designed to eliminate. With ten minutes to go before the meeting was due to start, he took off his jacket, found the cleaning cupboard and started to give the most accessible surfaces a good wipe-down. The threadbare carpet, like something discarded by an East End pub in the 1950s, was beginning to fray at the edges, but there was nothing he could do about that.
He was just cleaning off the three wall-mounted whiteboards when the squeaking of the door alerted him to someone entering. DC Carrie Macintosh, universally known as Rainy, was wearing her trademark black trouser suit and white blouse. She grimaced as she took in the surroundings.
‘Aye, this reminds me of my auntie’s flat in the Gorbals.’ Rainy was a stockily-built former junior doctor from Glasgow, who maintained she’d joined the police to get away from the fighting, blood and unsociable hours of A&E. Frying pans and fires, was the general opinion.
Watching her boss clean up, she pitched in too. She also managed to find a portable space heater, which she plugged in and set on maximum. ‘Och, it’s a lovely wee fire risk,’ she said, holding out her hands to the warm air as the smell of scorched dust began to replace that of black mould.
Over the next few minutes, DI Claire Mulholland, Research Intelligence Officer Rob Townsend, financial specialist Shireen Corey-Williams and Detective Constable Michelle Tsu all filed in to take their seats. The last to arrive was the widest, DC Carl Hoskins, halfway through eating a sausage and bacon bap he had managed to inveigle from the Westgrave Hall kitchen.
‘Don’t bring that in here,’ Shireen said. ‘I haven’t had any breakfast.’
Hoskins tore the remains of the bap in half and gave her the soggier ketchup-drenched end in a greasy napkin. ‘Happy Christmas, love.’
‘Thank you. I like the festive wrapping paper,’ she said, holding the napkin gingerly. Shireen, of Iranian and Lebanese descent, had learned to love the British banger through her marriage to a Brummie, which also gave her a bit of the Midlands accent. Even so, her colleagues were a little surprised to see her tuck in without hesitation to the morsel Hoskins had offered her. Finally, DS Vikram Singh arrived with a neat folder and what looked like two rolls of wallpaper.
‘Smart guy,’ said Hoskins. ‘Always a good idea to bring spare paper to the Khazi.’
Singh laughed.
Gillard called the meeting to order and set out the priorities.
‘All right everybody, good to see you all here on Christmas overtime pay rates.’
‘Yay,’ said Rainy, giving Michelle a high five. ‘I need every penny.’
‘We’re going to be under a lot of pressure on this one. The media camp that is building at the end of the lane will not have escaped your notice. This is by no means the first killing of a wealthy Russian oligarch on British soil, nor the first in Surrey. Conspiracy theories will abound, and you will no doubt be getting calls from your usual press contacts. Christina McCafferty will be here to brief you in more detail later on what we’re saying to the press, but the short answer at the moment is nothing. Do not expand upon the terse one-liner: three shot dead, no reason to suspect any wider danger to the British public.’
‘Sir, what were all the guys doing with the noddy suits last night?’ asked Hoskins, still chewing the last of his bap.
‘We weren’t provided with the luxury of an answer,’ Gillard said. ‘However, no one heard any clicks on the Geiger counter, and given that the noddy-suits were all gone within an hour, I don’t think we are anticipating any nasty chemicals.’
‘Of course, we’re just a bunch of wee guinea pigs if there is any nerve agent,’ Rainy said.
‘You know, I went to Salisbury once when I was a kid,’ said Michelle Tsu. ‘All I remember is sitting in that park, the same one the Skripals were found in, with my mum and dad, having an ice cream.’
‘Novichok-ice, I expect,’ Rainy said, to widespread groans from the other officers.
Gillard turned to Singh. ‘Vikram, how are we doing on evidence?’
‘It’s coming together. However, one item seems to have gone missing. PC Butterfield retrieved Alexander Volkov’s satellite phone from his inside jacket pocket. She put it on a bookshelf, as she’d run out of evidence bags. When I went in to bag it up, it had gone.’
Gillard’s face tightened. ‘Was that after the spooks took over?’
‘Unfortunately, yes. I’d been too busy with other things previously and hadn’t been able to re-enter the crime scene while CSI were examining the footprints.’
‘Have you got all the other cell phones?’
‘Yes.’ Singh counted them off on his fingers. ‘The dead bodyguard’s, Maxim Talin’s, and that of the unpronounceable head of security.’
‘Just call him Wolf. All right, leave the issue of Volkov’s phone with me,’ Gillard said. ‘Rob Townsend will take charge of the examination of the phones. Anything I should add, Rob?’
‘Yes, sir. We’ve got twenty-or-so phones volunteered by witnesses who were taking video or pictures at the time of the fireworks, so we should be able to identify who was where as the shooting was taking place.’
‘Okay, but concentrate on the devices of those within the library. The rest can wait.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The cartridge cases and bullets have been parcelled off for ballistics and we should get an answer by Boxing Day on some of the basic questions. Claire, how is the search going?’
‘Not bad. We’ve not found anything unexpected. Volkov had over £10,000 in cash in his room, in various currencies. It was just lying in a drawer, admittedly a locked one. There’s a safe in there too, with a combination lock. It was behind a picture, believe it or not. Wolf said that only Volkov would have had the combination.
‘Anything else?’
‘Plenty of electronic devices. We’ll need a Russian translator to help Rob understand what’s on them.’
‘I’ve already got a request in to the chief constable. To save time we could use Wolf on anything that seems important to begin with, and then get everything checked later.’
Claire nodded. ‘Let’s concentrate our resources on where we can make progress quickly.’
‘Agreed,’ Gillard replied, turning to the Sikh officer. ‘Okay, Vikram. I understand you’ve put together a map?’
‘Two maps, actually. I thought it would be helpful to plot exactly where all the bullets and casings were found, putting together the photographs and markers.’ Across a desk he unrolled a six-foot length of decorators’ lining paper. The seventy-yard-long mezzanine floor of the library had been carefully drawn to scale and was spotted wi
th red and yellow dots. ‘I have marked on here the location of every bullet in red, except those still in the bodies. Cartridge cases are in yellow, forty-six in total. We have accounted for thirty-five bullets, again not counting those that may be in the bodies. Some of the embedded ones are still in situ in shelves and walls.’
Gillard looked at the map. ‘This is a very useful contribution, Vikram. What is the other one?’ He glanced at the second scroll of wallpaper.
‘Footprints, sir,’ he unrolled the second map. An identical drawing of the mezzanine was marked with numerous coloured arrows. ‘I basically tried to match up the shoes to the victims, based on the photographs and my own investigations. The red and the blue are Volkov and Talin, while the green, orange and yellow are those of the three who came in after the shooting stopped.’
‘Interesting that we don’t have any for Yelena,’ Gillard said.
‘That’s right, sir,’ Singh replied.
‘Backs up her assertion that she was out before the bullets and the blood.’ Gillard glanced at the confusing mass of colours and realised that this was going to require some serious analysis. ‘It would have helped enormously if the three rescuers had minded where they put their feet.’
‘To be fair, sir, PC Zoe Butterfield did,’ Singh responded. ‘And she told me she nagged the others about it.’
Gillard nodded. ‘In any case, it’s an excellent piece of initiative, as is the bullet map. I take it Yaz Quoroshi has seen them both?’
‘He helped compile them.’
Gillard turned to his research intelligence officer. ‘Rob, I want you to get an early look in on all the cell phone activity in this area for twenty-four hours before the shooting and four hours afterwards. I want to know who was talking to whom amongst this group.’
Rob nodded, and made some notes.
‘Excuse me for being a bit dim, sir,’ said Hoskins. ‘But isn’t this an open and shut case?’
‘Let’s hear it, Carl.’
‘Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but it was a shootout between these two rival businessmen about the woman. This bird was previously married to one, and was having a bit on the side with the other one, so it’s your basic love triangle, isn’t it?’
‘Did you get that startling insight from Hello magazine?’ Michelle asked.
Hoskins grinned. His deliberately non-PC language was designed to ruffle feathers amongst female colleagues and rarely failed.
‘That’s one interpretation,’ Gillard said.
‘Maybe the woman shot them both,’ Shireen interjected. ‘Being understandably fed up with men.’ She glared meaningfully at Hoskins.
‘Nah. She was in the panic room,’ Hoskins replied. ‘Couldn’t get out, because Volkov, who is an even bigger guy than I am, was sitting there dead with his arse against the outward-opening door.’
‘So who shot the bodyguard, Bryn Howell?’ DS Singh asked. ‘He only went in when the shooting began and was right down the other end. Assuming he wasn’t shot by his own employer, he must have been shot by Talin.’
‘Or the woman,’ Shireen insisted.
‘Nah, she was definitely inside the panic room by then,’ Hoskins said.
‘Says who?’ Shireen persisted.
‘She did,’ Gillard said. ‘But that’s no reason to believe her. I’m sure she’s not telling me the truth, at least not the whole truth.’
He tipped several dozen photographic enlargements out of an A3 envelope onto a desk. The officers crowded around to take a look. ‘CSI did a Bluestar examination of the library gallery and ground floor this morning. The place was lit up like a planetarium.’
The old method of finding bloodstains in a room was to use a substance called Luminol, but Bluestar was far superior. The reagent that CSI sprayed onto surfaces in the room did not require absolute darkness and did not produce false positives from bleach as Luminol did. Using 400 ASA film it was quite easy for CSI technicians to spot and record even the tiniest pinpricks of blood. A low-light video recording captured in a panoramic sweep how the various images connected together.
One finding already illustrated by Singh’s bullet map became even clearer on the blood analysis. The shooting had divided the mezzanine floor of the Volkov Library quite neatly into two halves. The balcony adjacent to the long panoramic window on the southern edge of the building was almost entirely free of blood and footprints. The other side of the gallery was drenched. This was the side where all the bodies were found, and which backed onto the library shelves, a few back offices and the two staircases. Spatters and droplets covered the walls like measles, as well as the more obvious pools and footprints on the floor. It was like the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre.
‘Och, what a mess. Reminds me of my first time in theatre to do an emergency caesarean section,’ said Rainy. ‘I could have done with wee windscreen wipers on my specs.’
‘Certainly a lot of bullets,’ Hoskins said.
Gillard nodded. ‘And remember, every bullet is like an encyclopaedia, packed with information. So we’ve got forty-odd volumes of evidence. Give me that over a single-shot marksman any day.’
‘I remember the Kingston architects shooting we were involved with a few years back,’ Claire Mulholland said. ‘That gave us no end of trouble.’
‘It certainly did. Here, I’m hoping that we can quickly gather together some crucial evidence and then stage a reconstruction of the shooting.’
Rainy’s hand shot into the air. ‘Hey, bags I play the baddie. Are yers planning to use live ammunition?’
‘Not a re-enactment, Rainy, just a reconstruction,’ Gillard said with a smile. It was clear to him that the Glaswegian enjoyed being the class joker. Her jocularity and insubordination didn’t quite hide the very sharp brain that she possessed.
‘Given all the embedded bullets in the bookshelves, most of the firing must’ve been from the window-side balcony,’ Claire said. ‘There were only four shots which hit the windows.’
‘That’s right,’ Hoskins said. ‘And the victims must’ve been on the library side almost the whole time.’
‘If they’d been running around a lot, wouldn’t we find bullet impacts more equally distributed?’ asked Shireen.
Gillard smiled and raised both hands. ‘I want to keep an open mind, but the points you’ve raised show we’ve already got contradictions here. One is the simple idea that the two men shot each other. That would be the neatest solution. But if that was so, as Claire says, one of them must have been firing from the window side for a while to get off twenty or more shots to impact on the library side. Moreover, there are at least three bullet wounds in each victim. At least one in each case also has an exit wound, and a messy one at that. It’s quite a stretch to believe that so much shooting took place from the window side, and that it was only when that shooter came back over to the library side that he in turn was mortally wounded.’
Shireen was grinning as if vindicated. ‘The woman in the panic room may have started the shooting, and one of the other two finished it off.’
‘Where’s the gun?’ Hoskins asked bluntly. ‘She didn’t have one, according to Quoroshi. We’ve only found the one upstairs, plus the one on the bodyguard.’
‘It’s a good point. CSI insists they searched the entire place, top to bottom, including the panic room,’ Gillard said. ‘No gun.’
‘Maybe the spooks have got it, along with your notebook and tape recorder, sir,’ Rob Townsend said.
Gillard gave a wry smile. ‘They must have moved quickly to locate a weapon which eluded Zoe Butterfield, Sophie Cawkwell and Volkov’s head of security, who were in the library alone for more than forty minutes.’
‘It’s still possible,’ he said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Gillard conceded.
‘Maybe Sophie Cawkwell pocketed it?’ Shireen suggested.
Gillard inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘All interesting suggestions. However, I’d like to return to the facts at this stage.’ He dimmed the lights,
then pressed a few buttons on his laptop. On the wall-mounted screen, a glamorous red-headed TV reporter wearing a dark fur coat and matching hat was shown against the snowy background of the party. She was talking enthusiastically in what sounded like Russian, and pointing out with long scarlet nails the various activities that were taking place behind her.
‘Let me move it on to the relevant section,’ Gillard said.
‘Spoilsport,’ muttered Hoskins. The fast-forward showed her waddling rapidly down each of the snowy terraces, past dancers, the Cinderella-type carriage and skaters, towards the bridge.
‘Och, she reminds me of a wee penguin heading for the sea in one of those David Attenborough documentaries,’ Rainy said.
‘I’d look after her egg for her,’ Hoskins said. ‘Balance it on me feet.’
‘Aye and offer to fertilise it for her too?’ she winked at him. ‘In yer dreams, sunshine.’
Fireworks began on the screen, and Gillard slowed down. The woman was looking over her shoulder, somewhat redundantly pointing out the multi-coloured explosions, which drowned out her speech.
‘Who made this?’ Hoskins asked.
‘I’ll get yer a copy for your birthday, Carl,’ Rainy said.
‘The producer works for TV96, which is apparently a celebrity TV channel in Moscow,’ Gillard said. ‘The presenter is a former figure skating world champion, Irina something. Earlier footage they sent me shows her whizzing round the rink with the professionals.’
Shireen folded her arms. ‘I imagine if you’re stuck in a freezing flat in Siberia in the middle of winter, this is supposed to cheer you up. Remind you why they had a revolution.’
