by Nick Louth
‘Can you find out what’s going on?’ John asked.
He sighed. ‘I probably could, but the last thing that my contacts in the Met want is a whole load of rubbernecking by members of other forces who don’t need to know.’
A text signal beeped on Gillard’s phone, and he stared at it. ‘Hmm. Having said that, it seems one of my junior colleagues has already been digging. There’s at least one dead male from inside the car, and another seriously injured. Others may have been blown from the car. No word on victim IDs yet.’
‘It’s got to be somebody important,’ John said, looking to Gillard for confirmation. ‘That’s definitely a limo.’
Sam and her husband exchanged a look. Her father had long viewed Craig as an inside source to be used whenever he felt like it.
‘Well, I’ve just got a bit of research to do on my own case,’ he told John and Carol. ‘I may not be finished before you go to bed, so I’ll say good night.’
Sam followed him out to the stairs and shut the living room door behind her. They embraced, and he stroked her hair. ‘I’m so sorry I’ve missed most of Christmas, Sam. I will make it up to you.’
‘Let’s take a holiday in the new year,’ she said.
‘Yes, good idea. When this lot is finally put to bed. Rigby wants a culprit identified by Monday, ready when she goes to the Cobra meeting.’
‘That’s a tall order,’ Sam said.
Craig shrugged. ‘If my hunch is right, I might just be able to manage it.’
* * *
Gillard made his way upstairs and shut himself into his home office. It was just gone ten p.m. So much for a quiet Friday night. Seeing Sophie Cawkwell’s TV programme had reminded him what Natasha had said about her making a documentary on Volkov’s giant fossil for National Geographic. He’d quite like to see any raw footage and was minded to contact Sophie to ask for it.
Before he got a chance, his mobile rang. It was DCS Geoffrey Corrigan at Special Branch.
‘Evening, Craig. Just a quick heads-up. You’ll no doubt have seen the news.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve just identified the vehicle. A Mercedes-Benz Pullman limousine registered at Westgrave Hall to the late Alexander Volkov. Any idea who might have been in it?’
For a moment Gillard was speechless. ‘I’ll speak to Volkov’s head of security, sir, he might know. Can I ask, was this a bomb?’
‘Sorry, can’t share any confidential information at the moment. I’ll be sending a team down to Westgrave Hall, so I’d like you to be there to work with them.’ Corrigan cut the call.
‘Bastard,’ Gillard muttered. This was just the kind of thing that retarded co-operation between different branches of the police and security services.
Fifteen minutes later, after numerous heartfelt apologies to Sam, Gillard was back on the road heading for Westgrave Hall. On the hands-free, he called his team. He’d already alerted them by group text, but some would be there before him and there was no time to lose. The most important person to have aboard at this stage was DC Carl Hoskins.
‘Carl, are you at Westgrave Hall or in the bunkhouse?’ he asked when the detective picked up.
‘At the hall, sir. I’m in the kitchen.’
With Tatiana no doubt, Gillard thought. ‘Look, Carl, there is a contingent of spooks on their way down, I need you to make sure the evidence van is secure. I don’t trust them to leave things alone.’
‘Is this connected to the bomb blast outside Buckingham Palace?’
‘Very perceptive, Carl. Yes, it is.’
‘I can’t take any credit for the insight. Wolf left here some hours ago driving the limo and I’ve not been able to reach him on his mobile.’
Gillard didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but this was sounding worse and worse. ‘Where was he going?’
‘I don’t think anybody knows. Maybe to fetch Anastasia, because she was in central London, wasn’t she? Tatiana thinks she’s staying at the Dorchester.’
Gillard thanked him and cut the call. He rang the Met to ask about Oleg Volkov. The call handler left him on hold for ten minutes, and then she said, ‘He’s no longer at his designated address.’
‘Shit! Can you find out when he left?’ Oleg was breaking the terms of his bail by leaving the Knightsbridge flat, but that was the least of his problems if he had been in the limo.
‘Hold while I check, sir.’
It was another couple of minutes before she replied. ‘We don’t currently possess that information.’
‘Isn’t he under surveillance?’ Gillard said, trying to keep the irritation from his voice. He didn’t want to shoot the messenger, who was only doing her job.
‘I don’t have that information, but I imagine we’re stretched for resources given the Buckingham Palace incident.’
Gillard apologised, thanked her and cut the call. Either Oleg or Anastasia could be in that limo. Possibly both. His head spun with the possibilities. Finding himself in heavy traffic on the A3, he hit the blue lights and put his foot down.
And he hadn’t even had chance to investigate his hunch about Sophie.
* * *
Gillard arrived at Westgrave Hall just after eleven p.m. to find two police patrol cars and two unmarked black BMWs already there. He sat in the car and used his phone to find the latest news, which now said that a female bystander and a male inside the car had been killed. The driver was in intensive care, with life-changing injuries.
Poor Wolf, if that’s who it was.
Gillard peered out of the windscreen. A number of suited spooks, heavy with lanyards, were emerging onto the steps from the grand main hall. A bespectacled uniformed chief superintendent was conversing with a small man with a baggy suit. Haldane. Gillard sighed, and got out of the Vauxhall. Seeing him approach, the MI5 officer greeted him, before turning to his colleague.
‘May I introduce you to one of your country cousins?’ Haldane said. ‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Craig Gillard of the Surrey force.’
‘Clive Basford, anti-terrorism.’
‘I know you by reputation, sir,’ Gillard said.
‘You’re no slouch in that department yourself,’ Basford said. ‘I take it you have been briefed on the bomb?’
‘No one’s told me anything, sir. I’ve had to rely on the TV,’ he said, looking pointedly at Haldane.
‘All right,’ Basford said. ‘Our best guess is that it was a couple of pounds of plastic explosive or something similar, under the centre of the passenger compartment. It will take weeks for us to reconstruct from fragments.’
‘Anything about the victims, sir?’
‘The driver is alive, but critically ill. We’re not sure if there were one or two passengers. One is male. It’s a pretty grisly scene. I take it you took DNA samples from everyone in the Volkov family, because we’re going to need them to cross check.’
‘Those were my instructions,’ Gillard said. ‘Of course, as each of them was verified to be outside the library at the time of the shooting, we have been concentrating on other areas. Speaking of which,’ he said turning to the spook. ‘How are you doing tracking down Jason Lefsky?’
‘I’ll let you know when we have him,’ Haldane said.
‘So you don’t have him yet?’
‘As I say—’
‘Daniel Levin was quite possibly murdered,’ Gillard said. ‘He was a useful witness in my case. It would be nice if you would co-operate with me as I have co-operated with you.’
‘My hands are tied, Craig,’ Haldane said. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure than letting you see everything that we know, but this business here, even the bombing, is only a small part of a very big picture which I’m not allowed to share with you.’
Basford rolled his eyes at Gillard in conspiratorial sympathy.
‘We’re going to need a look at some of the evidence you’ve accumulated,’ Haldane said. ‘But someone appears to have moved the evidence van from outside your mobile incident room. I tru
st it hasn’t been stolen?’
‘We have operational reasons to keep evidence secure.’ Gillard didn’t actually know, but he hoped that it was Hoskins who had moved the van.
‘Well, let’s start with the CCTV then, shall we?’ Haldane said.
* * *
Gillard walked with Haldane to the Westgrave Hall control room, and was surprised to find that it was already occupied by three of Basford’s anti-terrorism officers, two of whom were making themselves at home in front of the CCTV monitoring station. He had recalled that entry was controlled by an iris scanner, but then remembered that Wolf had discovered some spyware in the rear USB ports of the main computer there. This may well have explained why the officers were able to get in.
One of the officers turned around to Basford. ‘Sir, from the footage we’ve seen so far, the limousine seems to have been parked in the garage for at least a couple of weeks, which dramatically restricts the number of people who could have had access. We’re looking through the internal CCTV records now, but there’s certainly nothing in the preceding three or four days that arouses suspicion.’
‘Perhaps the bomb was planted when the limo was away from here,’ Gillard said.
‘That’s the direction we are leaning in,’ Basford said. ‘The satnav device in the vehicle was destroyed, but we should be able to get access to the satnav’s GPS data from the server to find where else the car had been. We will be in a better position once GCHQ has taken a look. If anything can be retrieved, they can do it,’ he said.
Basford excused himself to take a phone call. He then called Haldane over and took him out of earshot of Gillard. Just looking at their faces showed it was something momentous, so he concentrated on reading lips as best he could. It was a skill he’d been taught by a female machinist while working in a noisy factory in his late teens, and he still practised it when using public transport or in busy pubs.
Haldane was shaking his head. All he caught of the conversation was Basford saying: ‘The DNA matches.’ That was a good start. Lip-reading is all about context, and then hanging missed words between known syllables to produce a kind of predictive text. Big words were a great help.
‘But witnesses said it was a bystander,’ Haldane replied.
‘I don’t think so. Most of her was blown out of the car,’ Basford whispered. ‘That’s why they thought that.’
‘And the male passenger?’
‘Bodyguard, possibly. We’ve recovered parts of what might be an earpiece, and a radio receiver.’
‘Geneva didn’t tell us she was coming back,’ Haldane hissed, shaking his head ruefully.
‘Well, with her precious son under arrest, are you surprised?’ Basford said.
Gillard now knew who they were talking about. Yelena Yalinsky.
He called across to them. ‘Is Yelena dead, then?’
Neither replied, but the look on Basford’s face was a complete giveaway. He’d never make a spook.
‘Is she dead or not?’ Gillard said, as he approached.
‘Yes, Craig. She was in the car,’ Haldane said. ‘Happy now?’
‘Far from it. She’s my only witness, the only one who actually saw what happened in the library.’
Haldane looked at Basford. ‘Yes, it is really quite inconvenient all round.’
‘The logical deduction is that whoever blew up the car is the gunman, who wanted her silenced,’ Gillard said.
Haldane just looked at him, his blank countenance neither confirming nor denying. Gillard turned to the less opaque visage of Basford.
‘That sounds reasonable, Craig,’ Basford said. ‘But there could be other reasons.’
‘Such as?’
The question hung in the air like smoke before dissipating.
‘We’ll keep you in the loop, where we can,’ Haldane said, turning away and bringing Basford with him.
* * *
Within an hour, MI5 and its minions had gone. In the small hours of Saturday morning, Westgrave Hall was in the hands of grim-faced junior staff, many of whom were clearly distraught about the news on Wolf. They locked up all but the essential rooms, and turned off many of the lights, leaving just a collection of candles lit in the biggest fireplace, in front of the biggest Christmas tree. Some of the chambermaids and kitchen staff were gathered there. Some, including Mrs Bell and Tatiana, planned to maintain a vigil through the night.
Gillard was the only member of the detective team present, though four police constables were still dotted about the exterior of the hall. One of those was guarding the capacious Westgrave Hall garage, where the evidence van had been parked amongst the sleek Ferraris and Maseratis. Carl Hoskins, who had stayed as long as the kitchen was open, had let Gillard know about the van as he signed off an hour ago. Hoskins was presumably asleep in the village hall bunkhouse.
After spending far more hours than he cared to count sitting in the damp, smelly Khazi, it was two a.m. before Gillard got the chance to put aside the minutiae of the case and reinvestigate his hunch. Natasha’s remarks had reminded him of something. Sophie Cawkwell’s first husband, an art collector called Monty Moore, had died a dozen years ago, at the age of fifty-eight, just two years into the marriage. It had been mentioned in passing in one of the articles he’d read about the Westgrave murders. He searched online for more detail and found it in an obituary in The Times in April 2007. Moore, it seemed, was a wealthy art collector more than twice the age of his bride. She had inherited the bulk of his art collection, although his family had contested the will, and a partial compromise was ultimately made.
Fascinating. It seemed Sophie was already rich. The one thing not mentioned was how Monty died. That answer he found in a smaller Daily Mail piece. He had apparently taken his own life. A collection of prescription medicines was found at his bedside alongside a suicide note. Moore had a history of depression. Sophie was abroad at the time and returned to find his body.
Just as she had found the body of her beloved fiancé Sasha.
Interesting.
Arranging the suicide of her first husband would be complex enough, but for the killings at the library, she would have needed an accomplice, someone to pull the actual trigger, who was inside when she was out. The bearded man in the dark clothing that Yelena Yalinsky had identified. And there was still no explanation of how this person, whoever he was, had managed to get in or out.
Gillard had requested a criminal record check on all of those who were key witnesses but had relied on his subordinates to notify him of anything worth looking at. Sophie Cawkwell’s record hadn’t been notified to him, so he assumed she didn’t have one.
That wasn’t quite true.
Once he made his own checks, it was quite interesting. Formally, his underlings were correct. She had no convictions, bar speeding. But in 2005 she was prosecuted for assault, then cleared, at a magistrate’s hearing. That it never went to Crown Court implied it wasn’t a serious assault, but still. There was no detail on who was supposedly assaulted. Could it have been Monty Moore? It had all happened several years before she became well-known. Googling her in greater detail, he learned several more intriguing facts: Ms Cawkwell had spent several postgraduate years in Russia and Kazakhstan. One of the interviews mentioned her impressive command of Russian.
Useful, of course, if you spend a lot of time digging up fossils in the former Soviet Union. And for other things too.
He emailed Claire Mulholland and asked her to visit the TV presenter first thing tomorrow. Perhaps then they would get some answers.
* * *
Just before three a.m. Gillard got a text from Rob Townsend, and a whole trove of new and damning evidence about Oleg Volkov. It was tempting to think of the young Russian as no more than a spoilt brat, with his sports cars and scantily-clad hangers-on. Certainly, the photographs that Townsend had uploaded to the evidence database showed an ego well out of control. As the research intelligence officer had hinted, looking through this lot was going to take months. As well as
the public Instagram account, they had access to Oleg’s private hard drive, and Townsend had pre-labelled various sections to examine in a more detailed search. One section covered cars, helicopters, speedboats and various boys’ toys, excluding those showing a gun, which Townsend had put in a separate folder. Most of the rest was simply labelled ‘home-made porn’. Gillard permitted himself a brief glimpse, and found that Oleg fancied himself a bit of a stud, particularly with amateur student-age women, who were filmed receiving handfuls of banknotes as a prelude to stripping off, and usually a whole lot more. Not necessarily illegal if permissions had been obtained and depending on which jurisdiction the filming took place in, but nasty and exploitative all the same. The detective switched instead into the weaponry section. Most of it was shooting range footage, which from the accents of the instructors looked to be set in the United States. Lots of pistol training, automatic weapons. There was even one rather alarming escapade with a flamethrower, in which Oleg blew up some oil drums and an old van. Some of the voice-overs were English, but mostly it was conversation with Russian-speaking friends. Turning back to the boys’ toys section, there was one labelled ‘jet skis plus miscellaneous’ which Rob Townsend had marked as yet to be viewed.
Gillard casually watched a few seconds of each of these generally tedious clips, mainly show-off stunts of Oleg racing round the Black Sea coast on a jet ski with some bikini-clad babe on the back. After six trips into the manic ego of the boy-king Oleg, Gillard gave up. His eyes were drooping and he was yawning almost continuously.
Somehow, he just didn’t seem to be thinking straight. All this work of Townsend’s was a waste of time. It didn’t matter how much of a gun enthusiast Oleg was, it didn’t matter how many times he posed with weapons or played at firing ranges or even that he had the motive of inheritance, or perhaps hating one of the victims. None of that mattered. Unless it could be shown that he had paid or instructed somebody to conduct the killing, there was no reasonable chance of securing a conviction. The Crown Prosecution Service would just throw it all back in his face.
