By All Means (Fiske and MacNee Mysteries Book 2)

by Alan Alexander

  ‘He’ll be long gone. But it’ll do no harm to circulate what we think he’s wearing. I have a feeling that this trail is going cold very quickly. Remember that little nugget Aisha came up with, about all the Nuttalls who live in Aberdeen? Maybe it would worth her while to spend half an hour with the electoral register – and remind her, not that you’ll need to, she’s really on the ball – that she should look at the unedited version, not the one that people can buy for marketing and the like and that you can ask to be excluded from, and see if she can find a Thomas Nuttall of the same sort of age as our man’.

  *

  The Aberdeen office of Ebright Offshore Drilling was on a small business park just off the main road to Inverness. It occupied one floor of a 1990s prefabricated steel and glass block looking out on a pond populated by some ornamental carp and bordered by some ill-kept grass and shrubbery. Vanessa and Sara pulled into a visitors' space in the car park and, as they got out of the car, Sara said, 'Boss, are you OK?'

  'I'm fine. Why?'

  'None of my business, I know, but I just wondered about all that running to the loo. If you've got an infection or something, you shouldn't be at work.'

  'I haven't got an infection, Sara. Don't worry about me. I'm touched that you care.'

  When they got to reception, Vanessa showed her warrant card and introduced herself and DS Hamilton. 'We have an appointment to see Mr Wootten.'

  The receptionist smiled faintly, dialled a number, said that Chief Inspector Fiske was here, came round the desk and asked the detectives to follow her. They walked through a long open-plan office, with people working at computer screens to the sound of nondescript music of the kind played to waiting customers by call centres, to what seemed to be the only enclosed space on the floor. A discreet plate on the door read: 'T R Wootten: Europe Manager'.

  The receptionist knocked and an American accent called, 'Come!' Vanessa thought that this was unusual. Her experience of the hail-fellow-well-met style of Americans in Aberdeen led her to expect Wootten to come out from behind the desk to welcome them. Her surprise was even greater when she entered the office and saw, sitting at the desk and showing no sign of getting up, a woman of about her own age, wearing a red silk blouse, a gold choker at the neck and large gold hoop earrings drawing the eye to her beautifully cut hair.

  ‘Hi. I'm Tammy Wootten. How can I help you?’

  Vanessa was careful not to show her surprise and wondered why she hadn't known she was coming to see a woman. 'We're investigating the death of Harvey Jamieson on Vermont One and I have some questions about what he was doing there. The platform manager, Alex Randall, couldn't tell us much so I thought I should speak to you before contacting your head office in the States.'

  Tammy Wootten seemed guarded. ‘What is it you need to know?’

  ‘We need to have details of what work he was doing on the platform between his arrival on Sunday, and Thursday. We have some knowledge of what he was doing on the day he was killed – Friday – because we’ve analysed the contents of his laptop, but we need the full picture. I understand…’

  Tammy Wootten interrupted. ‘Yes, Inspector, I know that you have Harvey’s laptop and we need to have it returned to us immediately. It is, after all, our property.’

  Vanessa tried not to bridle. ‘It may ultimately be your company’s property, Ms Wootten, but for the moment it’s evidence and therefore the property of the investigation of a murder. I understand that standard procedure is for someone doing Harvey Jamieson’s job to file reports as encrypted emails each day and that these emails are then automatically deleted from the laptop.’

  Tammy Wooten, with a look of some hostility, nodded.

  ‘We need to see these emails. If you have copies here, that would be very convenient. If they have gone to your Head Office we’ll need to go there. In a last resort, of course, our technical people can probably find them on the hard disk. That would be laborious and time-consuming and I need to move this investigation forward.’

  ‘They would have been addressed to Head Office, not here. These reports go directly to the Audit and Risk Committee. I would only see them if the Committee decided that any local action needed to be taken.’

  ‘Fine. Whom do I have to contact in the States?’

  ‘I would prefer that you went through me. I will get in touch with Head Office and let you know their view’.

  Vanessa smiled. ‘I know you can’t be expected to be up to speed on Scottish police procedure, Ms Wootten, so let me enlighten you. We don’t conduct enquiries, especially murder enquiries, through intermediaries. I will contact the appropriate people at Ebright’s head office directly, and if we have to speak to people there, I will either go to the States or arrange a videolink with the help of colleagues in the local police. However, examination of the emails may make that unnecessary, but I can’t reach a conclusion on that until I’ve seen them.’

  ‘But you don’t know that Harvey’s death was work-related?’

  ‘It is a working assumption. We are also investigating other possibilities, which is why, as I’m sure you know, I’ve had a team of officers on Vermont One interviewing everyone who was on the rig while Jamieson was there, and another team tracing those who left the day he died’.

  ‘All right, Inspector. I’ll let you have names and contact details. We’ll email them to you.’

  ‘Within the hour, please.’

  *

  ‘Thomas is a less common name these days than it used to be’. DC Aisha Gajani was waiting for Fiske and Hamilton when they got back from Ebright’s offices. ‘I found only three Thomases among the Aberdeen Nuttalls. Our man is, according to HR records on Vermont One, forty-two years old, born on 23 February 1970. Two of the Thomases I found on the electoral roll were much older than that. The other was born on 23 February 1970, at Aberdeen maternity hospital, to James and Marion Nuttall, of Torry, both still alive.’

  ‘Good work, Aisha’, Sara said.

  ‘That was the good news. The bad news is that Thomas Nuttall died just over a year ago, of leukaemia.’

  Vanessa sighed. ‘Identity theft. Or, to be exact, identity appropriation. This murder was premeditated. We just need to know why. Sara, have you had time to look at the interview notes from the rig?’

  ‘I asked the PCs to flag up anything out of the ordinary or that might be linked to Jamieson’s death. One of the men interviewed says he saw a heated argument between Jamieson and somebody who sounds a lot like Nuttall. This witness thinks this was late on Thursday, the evening before Jamieson was killed. Nothing else flagged up, but I’m going through the notes just in case.’

  ‘Fine. Aisha can give you a hand. But I doubt you’ll find anything of interest.’

  *

  Neil Derrick was a senior commercial lawyer working for an Aberdeen firm of solicitors specialising in the oil industry. He had started his career as a criminal lawyer, representing petty criminals in crown courts in the South of England, where he had qualified after doing a first degree in Scotland. He had got into commercial law when a colleague asked him to help with a complicated criminal fraud case. A facility with numbers that he had shown since he was a schoolboy had turned out to be very useful. That facility had also helped him to become quite an accomplished bridge player, a talent that he had yet to reveal to Vanessa. Commercial work was intellectually demanding and more quickly lucrative than criminal work – oil companies, as well as other industrial clients he had worked for before moving to Aberdeen, paid a lot more than legal aid – but he sometimes missed the buzz that came from following the evidence and from the analysis of human frailty that came with crime.

  His interest in crime had, of course, been rekindled when he fell for a senior police officer. Vanessa liked to bounce ideas off him when she was in the middle of a case, and they were close enough, especially now, to talk in detail about her cases, even the most sensitive and confidential ones. He had, so far, been careful not to get involved without Vanessa asking him, but t
he oil rig murder was quite close to home, so he thought he might do a bit of research. And, when he had mentioned to Vanessa earlier in the day that he might do some digging, she hadn’t objected.

  Neil caught Vanessa on her mobile while Sara Hamilton was driving her back from Ebright.

  ‘What’s the name of that company that manages the hospital?’

  ‘Hedelco – Health Delivery Corporation. Why?”

  ‘Just checking something. Tell you tonight. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. It’s always better in the afternoon’

  Sara Hamilton gave Vanessa a knowing smile for which she was rewarded with a ‘Don’t go there‘ look.

  *

  ‘The usual?’ Colin MacNee was at the bar of the pub round the corner from HQ and Vanessa was sitting at a corner table. Her ‘usual’ was a large glass of Sauvignon Blanc, so he was surprised when she said she’d rather have a mineral water.

  ‘Not like you, Vanessa, especially after a hard day at the coal face’.

  Vanessa gave him a bewildered look. ‘You mean you don’t know? Janet must take patient confidentiality more seriously than I would! I’m pregnant, Colin. Some champagne the other night with Neil when I told him was my last drink for quite a long time.’

  ‘Well, if champagne was in order, so are congratulations!’

  He leaned over and hugged her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Emma and Cat are going to be almost as excited as you, if they can get over the fact that they can’t have you as a second mummy. And I couldn’t be happier for you and Neil’.

  ‘Thank you, Colin. Just keep it to yourself for now. I have to work out when to take my leave, and I certainly want to get this oil rig murder out of the way before I go. I can’t keep it hidden, so to speak, for very long, anyway. I think that Sara has guessed. But she’ll be discreet.’

  ‘How’s that going?’

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about that. When we spoke on the phone on Sunday night, you said something about being given the runaround by the American managers at GRH.’

  ‘I persuaded the local guy to stop pissing me about, but it was a tedious business. A lot of stuff about confidential inspections, encrypted emails that are automatically deleted…’

  Vanessa banged her glass down on the table. ‘Christ almighty, I had a really difficult conversation this afternoon with a rather formidable woman who runs the Aberdeen office of the company that operates the platform, Ebright Offshore Drilling. She tried to tell me that I had to hand over the laptop that the rig manager didn’t want me to take as evidence. But what’s really interesting, is that she confirmed the procedure that had been described to me on the rig. The dead man’s protocols as an inspector required reporting by encrypted emails that are automatically deleted.’

  ‘So Esslemont’s instinct may be right. Our two murders may be connected. But I still don’t see how.’

  Vanessa drained her glass. ‘I think I should go home and start knitting bootees. But we’ll have to talk to the DCS first thing tomorrow.’

  *

  When Neil got home, Vanessa was lying on the sofa watching Reporting Scotland on the BBC. He leaned down to kiss her and then sat and massaged her feet.

  ‘What would this programme do without, crime, football and quirky highlanders? And the Nats want a Scottish Six O’clock News! God help us! Good day?’

  ‘I had a really difficult contract to deal with but I think I sorted it. At least until the other side’s lawyers crawl all over it. But I also did some light digging into Ebright and Hedelco.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Do you mind if I have a drink, even when you can’t?’ She shook her head.

  Neil poured himself a glass of South African Pinot Noir and sat down in an armchair facing Vanessa.

  ‘I wanted to find out who owned Ebright Offshore Drilling. I’ve never had to deal with them – Vermont One is the only platform they operate in the North Sea, though they’re after a license to drill in the North Atlantic, west of Shetland - so I did some basic computer searches. The kind we do as a matter of course when drawing up contracts. They used to be a independent company registered in Rhode Island, but about two years ago, after they posted a successful strike in Alaska and the one in the North Sea, they were bought by a private equity conglomerate registered in Delaware.’

  ‘The well-known corporate haven,’ Vanessa said.

  ‘So glad you’ve been paying attention, DCI Fiske.’ She threw a cushion at him in response to that.

  This firm is called Burtonhall, and there’s almost nothing they’re not into. Oil, copper, wheat futures, armaments, private security, precious metals. You name it, they make money from it. But they are pathologically secretive. Took me some time – and I’m an expert – to find out who runs it. They have some really big names on their board. A former US Secretary of State, our last prime minister but three, a Russian oligarch, an allegedly corrupt politician-cum-businessman from Indonesia, and a guy who is, according to Forbes, the sixth richest man in America. Incorporation in Delaware fits with their extremely low profile.’

  ‘A culture of secrecy isn’t, in itself, evidence of wrongdoing’, Vanessa said, a touch primly.

  ‘Keeping an open mind, I see. Very commendable.’ Vanessa looked for another cushion, but couldn’t find one, so she said, ‘Watch it, sunshine!’

  ‘How about this, my sweet? Burtonhall also owns Hedelco. Acquired it last year at a knock-down price because it wasn’t doing awfully well. They’ve stripped out most of the loss-making businesses – that’s what private equity companies do – and they’re now trying to make what remains profitable. And that includes the contract at GRH.’

  ‘Neil, you’re wonderful, but you know that already. I’m going to have to talk to Colin and then we’ll both have to have a session with Esslemont. I have a feeling that this is going to turn into a very big deal indeed.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Burtonhall’s corporate headquarters was a modern building of modest size, set in dense woodland just outside Wilmington, Delaware. The architecture, as those who knew both buildings had often noted, was strongly reminiscent of the CIA Headquarters building at the George Bush Centre for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia. Burtonhall’s was on a smaller scale, but it had the same grandiose architectural signatures: the main entrance with the glass arched roof, the paved approach, the grassy courtyard with rustic benches, even a Burtonhall logo that echoed the CIA crest set into the entrance floor of the old CIA HQ. The similarities, which were not accidental and were intended to evoke a mixture of confidence, mystery and awe, were underscored by the array of antennae, aerials and microwave receivers on the roof, though these were rather less discreetly placed than those at Langley.

  The strongest influence on the design of the building, completed in 2010, had been that of Cy Packard, the Chief Executive Officer of Burtonhall. Packard, a CIA veteran, had come to Burtonhall after running private security and protection operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, under contract to the Pentagon, and security for oil companies in the former Soviet republics of central Asia. He had commissioned the design of the building, supervised the architects, overseen the building contractors, and convinced the Board that an instantly memorable, but discreetly located, corporate HQ was the best way to give confidence to investors and the workforce. Insofar as they ever allowed themselves a joke at the expense of the CEO, Burtonhall employees said that he had had to be restrained by the Chairman of the Board from naming the building, in huge letters engraved on a granite tablet, "Packard House". As it was, its existence was announced by a small sign, easily missed by passers-by, saying simply, "Burtonhall".

  On the Tuesday morning after the discovery of the bodies on Vermont One and at GRH, Packard was in his office, interrogating his director of security and head of human resources. The office was minimalist – a huge glass-topped desk, white bookshelves and occasional furniture, two upright armchairs, also in white wood, facing the desk. No ornaments or executive toys
. The walls were decorated with photographs, professionally taken and elegantly posed, of the members of the Board. All but one of these was 12 inches by 10. The exception was the 18 by 12 portrait of the Chairman, a former United States Secretary of State famous for his aggressively interventionist style in defence of the perceived interests of the USA. Anyone moderately well-informed about current affairs, or even any casual reader of the major international news magazines, would have recognised other faces, too: a former UK prime minister, a Midwestern billionaire backer of the Republican Party, the former vice-president of a South East Asian ‘republic’, a Russian oil oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin. It was a display of corporate power intended to impress and to intimidate all those who entered here.

  Packard’s management style was based on knowing everything about everything. Burtonhall had a huge range of interests all over the world. Its main business was profit maximisation in order to increase the returns to the private equity investors who, collectively, had given it $40 billion to manage productively. The CEO insisted on seeing, daily, a one-page report from each of the businesses in which Burtonhall had a major interest. These were known, in a conscious echo of his time in intelligence, as ‘sitreps’. One of his frequent responses to the information they contained, was to descend, unannounced, on local management if he thought they were underperforming or bringing unwelcome publicity. The company maintained a private jet, twenty miles away at Philadelphia International Airport, for the purpose.