20 - A Rush of Blood

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘There probably is no more,’ Sauce muttered gloomily. ‘These girls will be scattered all over the place by now.’

  ‘Speaking of girls and sex,’ said McGurk, as the monument on the distant road junction came in to view, ‘you look fresher this morning.’

  ‘Weekend coming up, Jack,’ the young DC replied, ‘starting with the disco tonight. We’ve got to save our strength for that.’

  Forty-five

  Detective Inspector Regan’s mind was still at home as he eased his car up the driveway that led to the pro shop and club house at Witches’ Hill, sticking close to the ten miles per hour speed limit. The morning was bright and, if not exactly warm, much less cold than the previous few days had been, and so he was not surprised to see that the car park was almost half full, even as early as ten past nine.

  He slid into the first empty bay, then headed for the shop. Three figures waited outside; the tall, slim Fairley, an older man, dressed for golf in tartan slacks, a crested sweater over a polo neck and a flat cap, and another, in a powered wheelchair.

  ‘Hello, George,’ the second man called out as he approached.

  Regan peered at him, and blinked. He had rarely seen Sir James Proud in anything other than uniform. ‘Good morning, Chief,’ he replied.

  ‘Not the chief any more, son,’ Bob Skinner’s predecessor pointed out.

  ‘Ah, but it’s a bit like being President in America,’ the DI countered. ‘You keep the title for life.’

  ‘But not the salary, unfortunately.’

  You must be doing all right if you can afford to be a member here. He kept the thought to himself.

  ‘Have you met the Marquis of Kinture?’ Sir James continued.

  ‘No, sir,’ said Regan, adding mentally, he doesn’t drink in my local.

  The man in the wheelchair extended a hand, and they shook. ‘Inspector,’ he grunted.

  They might never have met, but following his transfer to East Lothian, Regan had made a point of reading up on the county’s movers and shakers. He knew Kinture’s story: latest of an ancient and titled family, a top-class golfer before being crippled in an accident, he had channelled his love for the game into the creation of a world-class course on a piece of otherwise useless land on his estate. After a colourful beginning, Witches’ Hill had matured to a level that had led to its being discussed as the venue for a European Tour event.

  ‘Good to meet you, sir,’ he replied. He was puzzled. Had Fairley asked him to come along for a lecture on rural crime prevention from Proud Jimmy and his mate?

  ‘We’re getting in the way here,’ the retired chief declared, putting an end to that supposition. ‘We’ll clear off and leave you and Andrew to it.’

  ‘Is he playing?’ Regan asked as they left, Proud lengthening his stride to keep pace with the wheelchair.

  ‘The Marquis, obviously not,’ Fairley replied. ‘Sir James is. He and Lady Proud are in a mixed foursomes tie in about half an hour.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was a golfer.’

  ‘Between you and me, he isn’t, not yet, but he’s had a couple of lessons and he’s got the makings.’

  ‘Like his successor?’

  ‘Not quite. I hear that Mr Skinner’s playing off seven just now; that makes him the biggest bandit in East Lothian.’ Fairley smiled. ‘That reminds me; we had another of your lot out here a few months back,’ he added, ‘playing against us in a winter league game. A lad called Haddock; he gave our club champion a dog licence.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Beat him seven and six. I wish he’d join here; he’d walk into our team.’

  ‘He won’t be doing that on a DC’s pay, Andrew. Now, what’s the problem? Did our people leave a mess behind yesterday?’

  The pro shook his head. ‘No. I’d rather that than what’s happened. You’re not going to believe this: I’ve been bloody well done again.’

  ‘What?’ Regan gasped.

  ‘No kidding. I got a local firm in yesterday to fix the damage from the previous night’s robbery, and to make the place secure. They did what they could, but all they could manage short-term was a temporary door, with wired glass. As well as that I asked the alarm people to come in and repair the system. That was buggered when the sensors were ripped off the door frame; somehow it shorted out the control box. They couldn’t fit it in yesterday, but they promised me they’d do it today. Fucking brilliant, that. I got in this morning and found the replacement door jemmied open. Yesterday it was golf clubs; today it was all my clothing.’

  ‘The lot?’

  ‘Well no, not quite. They left everything that had the Witches’ Hill crest on it, but they’ve still got away with about forty grand’s worth of designer stock, men’s and ladies’. They took my shoes as well: FootJoys, Adidas, all gone.’ Fairley frowned. ‘I’m wondering if it was the builders, George. Or maybe a leak from the alarm company that the place wasn’t covered.’

  ‘We’ll check them both out, Andrew, I promise you, but I don’t hold out hope of a result from either of those. Alarm companies’ information security is always very tight. As for your builders, if they’re local . . . Unless they had a casual on yesterday, someone they don’t know, I can’t see that either. You know what I mean; shite, own doorstep, etc.’ He walked over to the door and examined it; splintered frame, top and bottom, opened expertly with a minimum of force. ‘No, whoever did this had a shopping list, and he was smart enough to leave anything that would be easy to trace. Just like yesterday’s team. In fact,’ pause, ‘I’m going to get our technicians back here to see if they can find and match any tyre tracks. I wouldn’t be surprised if what we’ve got here is a repeat performance.’

  Forty-six

  Mario McGuire winced, his disposable tunic rustling as he stepped into the ruined house, joining two people who stood beside what was still recognisable as an Aga cooker. ‘Do they all smell as bad as this the day after?’ he muttered.

  ‘This is mild,’ Frances Kerr told him. ‘At some scenes we’d still be wearing breathing apparatus the day after.’

  ‘How did you get into this business?’ the head of CID asked.

  ‘I chose it,’ she replied, ‘out of necessity. I was a firefighter, station officer rank, but I hurt my right shoulder at an incident. It left me with a permanent weakness that would have made me a liability on operational duty. Normally that would have been it, but the fire service is very aware of the need to be seen as an equal opportunity employer. That might be why I was offered the chance to retrain for this side.’

  ‘Crap,’ said ADO Hartil, cheerfully. ‘You have to do a pre-entry qualification before you get anywhere near training as an investigator. Frances was top of the class by a mile.’

  ‘Shut up, Joey,’ she told him. ‘Don’t build me up before I’ve found anything definite.’

  McGuire glanced at her. ‘What have you found so far, then?’

  ‘Nothing beyond first impressions last night.’ She pointed to a burned-out metal box that sat against the wall next to the door that had led into the big dining kitchen from the hall. ‘That was a wine cooler,’ she said. ‘Its cable was frayed right through, as if it had been trapped under one of its feet at some point. That thing on the wall next to it was a rail. There’s what’s left of some kind of fabric around the cable, leading to the possibility that a tea towel fell on to it, and was ignited. Whatever it was, that’s where the fire started. The place was carpeted, the flames would have spread very quickly along the floor, and in a kitchen there’s all sorts of stuff to fuel it. The exit into the hall would have been cut off right away, and that would have left the door to the conservatory as the only escape route.’ She moved towards it, stopping halfway beside a pile of black cinders. ‘This was a table. I found two plates, wine glasses, a bottle, and cutlery among its remains. The plates had food burned into them, and there was a casserole dish in the oven with what was left of a moussaka. It looks as if Mr and Mrs Gerulaitis were at their dinner when the fire started, probably be
hind them.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they have smelled the smoke right away?’

  ‘I’m not sure there would have been a lot of smoke, not at the start. But as I said, the fire would have spread very quickly. Whatever alerted them, the only way out was that door, that locked door. We found the key eventually,’ she added, ‘in a kitchen drawer.’

  ‘So why didn’t they find it? That part of the floor was tiled. Couldn’t they have reached it?’

  ‘Panic, Chief Superintendent,’ said Joey Hartil. ‘That’s what people do when they’re trapped by a serious fire. Panic’s a major cause of death in these situations. It makes people overlook the obvious, it makes them jump out of high windows when they’d have been all right if they’d stayed calm and waited for us.’

  ‘So the poor bastards were caught between a locked door and a hot place.’

  ‘Colourfully put,’ Frances Kerr conceded, ‘and accurate, until they were eventually consumed by the hot place. That’s my theory, anyway; it’s what the scene’s telling me.’

  ‘Gerulaitis wasn’t a wee bloke. Couldn’t they have smashed their way out?’

  The investigator shook her head. ‘Obviously not, not without one of your rams, at any rate. This is a well-built house; its doors and windows were designed with security in mind. If they’d been able to reach the window beyond the food prep area, they might have got out that way. But they couldn’t, poor people.’

  McGuire frowned. ‘Earlier on you said you hadn’t reached any definite conclusions, but you sound pretty certain to me.’

  ‘Och, I am, really. We’ve just got one or two more things to do and then I’ll be able to turn in a report.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I need to go over the outlying areas of the fire, that’s one. Then there’s the dogs.’ She looked at Hartil. ‘How are we getting on with that, Joey?’

  ‘We should have them this afternoon.’

  ‘What bloody dogs?’ the head of CID asked, puzzled.

  ‘The Central Scotland brigade has a couple of dogs,’ Kerr explained.

  ‘They’re specially trained to sniff out accelerants at fire scenes. We’ll run them through here as a matter of routine, to save us having to do it later when the insurance assessors arrive on the scene. Those boys are worse than juries; they want everything beyond even an unreasonable doubt before they pay out.’

  ‘That’s all? You’ll be able to give me a formal report by the end of the day?’

  ‘Yes.’ She gazed at McGuire, her brow furrowed. ‘But why you? You’re CID, top man in CID at that.’

  ‘Let’s just say,’ he replied, ‘that we’ve got a file on Mr Gerulaitis that needs closing.’

  ‘Understood, but this is an accidental death.’

  ‘Understood also.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe I’ve been a cop for too long, Ms Kerr; but when I encounter an accident that’s as damn convenient as this one, my nerves start to jangle.’

  ‘Let me put them at ease, then, as soon as I can.’

  ‘You do that. Meantime, I’m going to attend the post-mortems on the pair of them, if only to make sure that they really were Valdas and his wife. I’m a bit of an unreasonable doubt man myself.’

  Forty-seven

  ‘OK, George,’ Neil McIlhenney sighed, ‘since Mario’s out, I’ll speak to Arthur Dorward and ask him to send a couple of people out to join you. Meantime, don’t let any more vehicles near that shop.’

  ‘I won’t. The members don’t drive up to it anyway; they use the car park, then walk to the clubhouse. The only contaminating tyre tracks they’re liable to find will be from a wheelchair. I’ve just met His Grace, or whatever you call a marquis.’

  ‘I think “My Lord” usually cuts the mustard with them. I’m not surprised he was on the scene; he must be spitting bullets. We’d better look out for him to be on the phone to the boss; the two of them are pals.’

  ‘He doesn’t need to,’ Regan sighed. ‘He was able to bite the ear of the old boss, in person.’

  ‘Sir James?’

  ‘None other. He was with him. But as it happened, they were both pretty reasonable, given the circs. It doesn’t stop me feeling like a tosser, though.’

  ‘Nah, George, nobody’s going to blame you apart from yourself. If you’re right and it’s the same team, they’ve put one over on all of us. We’ll learn and it won’t happen again. If it’s somebody else, it’ll be a local opportunist and you’ll nail him.’

  ‘It happened on my patch, though.’

  ‘Forget it. You’re CID, not crime prevention. The guy who should be kicking himself is your man Fairley, for not moving his stock into the main clubhouse till the shop was properly secured.’

  McIlhenney hung up, then called Arthur Dorward at the police lab, told him what had happened, and asked for specialist technicians to be sent to the scene. That done, he walked along to Maggie Steele’s office, arriving just as she returned from the chief constable’s morning meeting.

  ‘I can guess why you’re here,’ she said, as he held the door open for her. ‘You want to know whether we had any false alarm calls last night.’

  ‘I’ll bet we didn’t,’ he replied. He told her what had happened at Witches’ Hill. ‘Poor old George Regan. He got along there and found Lord Kinture and Proud Jimmy waiting for him. He’s checking out the local possibilities, but I agree with his view that it’s the same crew come back for what they left the night before.’

  Steele winced. ‘Word can’t have filtered back to Bob or he’d have mentioned it, for sure.’ Pause. ‘Neil, do you reckon this is worth feeding to the Serious Crime Agency?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that,’ the detective superintendent admitted, ‘then decided against it. This isn’t serious crime, and it isn’t even organised in the accepted sense. It’s just a clever, opportunist team, operating across Scotland. I reckon it’s best dealt with by CID in the various forces pooling information, so that we can all be on the alert for a sudden unusual burst of 999 calls, and also for signs of the stolen gear appearing on the market . . . unless most of it’s been moved on already.’

  ‘I’ll bet it hasn’t. If they’re as clever as all that,’ she pointed out, ‘they’ll have a disposal plan worked out. First thing we should do is assess the total value of everything they’ve stolen. Let me have a list of all the robberies, with contact points for each. I’ll ask David Mackenzie to pull everything together and see what we’ve got. It could be,’ she ventured, ‘they’re thinking about moving it in one lot.’

  McIlhenney frowned, doubtfully. ‘Dunno about that, Mags. The only way to shift that amount of specialist gear would be to open a pro shop of your own.’

  Forty-eight

  The interview room was in the basement and so it had no windows. Its only illumination came from a low-energy bulb, its walls were bare and the radiator that was its only source of heat had been switched off. Arturus Luksa was shivering as he sat at the small table; it, and two chairs, were its only furniture. He stared up at the tall, grey-maned figure who had just entered the room and ordered his uniformed guard to leave them alone. The man was in shirtsleeves, as he was, but looked altogether warmer, as he settled himself into the chair opposite the Lithuanian.

  ‘I want a lawyer,’ Luksa declared, trying to force defiance into an expression that until then had looked uncertain. ‘I want Ken Green.’

  ‘This is Scotland, not England,’ the newcomer snapped. ‘You get a lawyer at our pleasure.’ In the pause that followed the prisoner realised how cold pale blue eyes could be. ‘At my pleasure. And I have to tell you that I am not fucking pleased. I’ve got a lady officer with a knife wound in her neck.’

  ‘It was only a little scratch . . . and anyway, I never touch her.’

  ‘Don’t insult me, boy,’ the man growled, almost bear-like. ‘We have your prints and DNA on the weapon, and we have her skin and blood on it. We have witness statements from her and from PC Johnston, the officer who decked you. We also have a recording made over Cha
rlie’s open radio of you shouting at Superintendent Chambers as you lunged at her. You are going down, Mr Luksa, for attempt to murder. When we are ready to interview you formally, we’ll do that, and you will have a lawyer present. Obviously, Superintendent Chambers won’t be handling the interview. That will be done by the head of CID and his deputy, who are, incidentally, every bit as displeased with you as I am. This here, now, is just a chat between you and me. The camera you can see up in the corner there, that’s switched off. There’s no two-way mirror; they’re only for cop shows on the telly. There’s no tape recorder, and the lad who was in here with you before has gone for his tea. There’s just you and me, Arturus. You’re not even handcuffed.’ He frowned. ‘Fuck me, I’ve been careless, haven’t I? You’re probably thinking right now that you could go right through me, out the door and be halfway to fuckin’ Lithuania before anyone was any the wiser. And maybe you could. You’re a big lad, you’re nearly twenty years younger than me. Yes, maybe you could.’ The blue eyes fixed on Luksa; suddenly he felt even colder. ‘Except nobody ever has, not in all my career on the force, not in all my life. That’s one reason why we’re here, you see, I actually want you to have a go at me. That means I’ll get to restrain you just like my old chum Charlie did. The difference will be that Charlie does everything absolutely by the book, even when it comes to taking down diddies like you. I don’t; never have done.’ The man stood. ‘So come on, take your shot if you fancy it; I really would like to hurt you, very badly.’

  Luksa’s eyes fell to the floor, away from that chilling, unblinking gaze. He grasped the sides of his seat, and shook his head, slowly.

  The man sat down again. ‘You’ve disappointed me,’ he said. ‘I thought you had balls. Tomas Zaliukas did; I’ll say that for him. He never made it through me either, by the way. I was looking forward to seeing whether you were anything like as tough as him. Too bad . . . for you. I don’t take kindly to disappointment, so you’d better not do it twice. I want you to talk to me, Arturus. I want you to tell me about the girls, and I want you to tell me how the massage parlours came to be closed.’