"That's nice of you David." Cough. "Sorry, blasted cough. I think the taxi is already taken care of. The doctor has arranged it for me. Listen, I'm sorry about the other day. I think I fainted after I spoke to you, and when I woke up, you were gone."
"I did hang on for a long time... I was really worried about you, but then the office closed and we had to go home..." David said, telling the truth, then suddenly worrying that he may have given the game away about the true location of the call centre. With those working hours, they obviously weren't in the UK. But then David realised he didn't care. He wasn't going to lie to Mr Stuart anymore."Why did you faint? Have you seen anyone yet?"
"Not yet. I'll mention it to the doctor later. I don't know why I fainted. I think the stress of everything just got to me. To be honest, I'm finding it really difficult to deal with all the business about the car... It's all so complicated. I thought you guys were meant to help us out of a difficult situation when we had an accident and things like this happened. It just seems like the complete opposite is happening."
David swallowed and looked briefly at his supervisor who was prowling like a panther up and down the rows of call centre workers, ensuring that no one was being too helpful.
"Mr Stuart...., I'd like to say sorry to you for all the stress we're causing you."
"Aha! An apology. You just said you were sorry! Wonderful. I appreciate it. You know, sometimes that's all it takes. I know..." cough, cough," excuse me, I know that you're just trying your best to help and that most of this is probably my own stupid fault..." cough, cough... "But I really appreciate the apology. Actually, if I could just get one more, it would be even better!"
"What do you mean?"
"The guy who drove into me... Thomas McNunn. Excuse the French, but he's a lying bastard. He knows he drove into me and smashed up my car, and for whatever reason, he's lying through his teeth just to save a few pounds on fixing his car." Cough, cough, cough! "Sorry, David, it makes my blood boil just thinking about him. Bloody liar!"
At the other end of the phone, David was starting to sweat, and it wasn't because of the heat in India. The call centre was perfectly cool today and all the ventilation systems were working fine. No expense was being spared today on keeping the employees cool while they screwed the customers out of their money. David was feeling terrible for what Mr Stuart was going through. Despite what David had managed to persuade him to believe, it was not all his fault. It was standard company policy to try and ensure that the scales were always tipped in the company's favour: excesses were as high as possible, legal expenses avoided as often as possible, car valuations were always low... VERY low... etc. etc. David knew all the games his company played. Mr Stuart's case demonstrated them all. Worst of all was that the latest report showed very clearly that the damage done to Mr Stuart's car was more than that done to the man who caused it: yes, Swiss Insurance knew that the other claimant, Mr Thomas McNunn was almost definitely to blame. Years of experience and processing the lies that so many people were perfectly prepared to spew out in the hope of shifting the blame from themselves to anyone else possible, clearly told the assessors at Swiss Insurance that McNunn was lying through his teeth. The problem for Mr Stuart was that once all the valuations and projected costs were input into the system, the calculations carried out by the computer stated quite simply that if Swiss Insurance went with Mr Stuart's story and assigned the fault to McNunn, then the cost of fixing Mr Stuart's car would be hundreds of pounds more than fixing Mr McNunn's. If the company wanted to save money, they should believe Mr Thomas McNunn and screw over Mr Stuart. Which they had proceeded to do.
It was good company policy.
Ignore the truth. Count the company's pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves. Don’t worry about the customer.
"Mr Stuart, are you okay?" David spoke next, wiping his forehead free of sweat.
"Don't worry. I'll be okay." Cough. "I called him, you know. Again. I don't know if I told you already, but I called him once before to try and reason with him. I wanted to persuade him to settle with me privately and not make any Insurance Claim. Both times I called him he was very rude to me and told me to leave him alone..."
"What do you mean? How?"
"Well, he basically told me to 'fuck off' and never to call him back. I don't understand people like that. They don't seem to care about other people at all. Anyway, after you and I spoke on Saturday I realised that the chances of me getting my car back so long as you believed what he was saying was practically nil, so I called him to try to reason with him. I said that I accepted that I probably couldn't cope with dealing with you any more. Sorry, I meant the insurance company, and that all I wanted was for him to admit he was to blame and say he was sorry. Just to apologise to me personally and say that he was sorry. That's all I wanted. A simple apology..."
"And, what happened? Did he apologise?" David asked, drawn into the story and hoping for the best.
"What do you think? Actually, this time he literally did tell me to fuck off...no sorry, his actual words were 'fuck you'... Listen, David, sorry for all the swearing." Cough, cough, cough... "I'm angry and upset, and I think this is all making me ill, to be honest, but I was hoping that the man would show an ounce of decency and just admit to me off the record that he was at fault. All I wanted was an apology. An apology. Instead he refused and was offensive to me. What sort of person behaves like that? You know, my wife Sally, she had a word for people like him. A good word which describes them exactly."
"What word was that?"
"Scum."
David felt slightly sick.
He knew exactly what Sally had been talking about. She was right.
And looking around the other highly trained thieves that sat in the seats about him in the call centre, David knew that he was just as bad as all the McNunn's in the world.
He and everyone else who worked at Swiss Insurance were scum too.
Scum.
Just then the person sitting beside David answered another call, and David heard the beginning of his pitch.
"Hello, this is Swiss Insurance, can I help you?"
In that moment, something snapped in the back of David's mind.
Enough was enough.
David may be scum now but before he joined this place Anand had been a good person. A decent person. A real person.
It was not too late.
There was still time to help Mr Stuart.
"Mr Stuart, can I tell you something? My name... my name is not David... it's Anand. Anand Mhasalkar. I'm afraid I've not been as helpful as I maybe could have been. I'd like to change that. All of it. Hello?... Hello, Mr Stuart?... Jonathan?... Are you still there?..."
-------------------------
Portobello
Monday Morning
8.58 a.m.
David hung up the phone.
The policeman had just informed him that after consultation with the ambulance driver, who Anand had first called and alerted, they had forced entry to the front door of Mr Stuart’s house and found him unconscious in the hallway.
He was still alive, but weak, and the ambulance had just that moment whisked him away to the local hospital.
Anand had explained to the policeman that Mr Jonathan Stuart had told him that he was expecting to go to the hospital that morning for an existing appointment. He described the symptoms that he had observed from Mr Stuart over the phone, including the fact that Mr Stuart was very stressed and feeling very ill. He also related to the police officer the occurrences of the other day, Saturday, when Mr Stuart had also fainted whilst he had been on the phone to the insurance company.
Anand was keen to make sure that the authorities in Edinburgh had all the facts.
After he hung up the phone, Anand stared into space for a while, in a daze.
A manager had seen him and come across and encouraged him to return to the phone. To go back to the work. Unhelping other people.
Anand had stood up, excusing himself for feeling
very ill.
Making it to the toilet just in time, he threw up violently.
Shaking, and scared, Anand worried that he had just caused Mr Stuart to have a heart-attack.
If so, and Mr Stuart died, would it be Anand's fault?
A thought began to torture him, running around in his brain, over and over again:
had he, Anand Mhasalkar, just killed someone?
-------------------------
St Leonards Police Station,
Edinburgh
Monday
9 a.m. G.M.T.
Operations Room, Basement
"Who wants to go first?" DCI Campbell McKenzie asked, standing at the front of the room, hands extended outwards in an encouraging gesture.
"I have something," P.C. Marilyn Thomson stood up.
"The floor is yours..." McKenzie nodded towards her.
"To cut a long story short, I was talking to one of my contacts in Leith, trying to find anyone who knew anything we should know about Keith Urqhart, and she said that the word on the street is that he was bent. The word is already out that he's dead. And get this, apparently, he was selling drugs to Ivor Petrovsky. A lot of drugs. But just the knowledge that he was working for or with Petrovsky made a lot of people keep their distance from him."
"Very interesting. Perhaps that explains the money that was in his account? Had Petrovsky bought some drugs off him recently?" Campbell McKenzie turned to the person who was scribbling notes on the big white board and watched the connection being recorded. "So, there could be a direct involvement with Petrovsky that we need to explore. Two questions, if Petrovsky was buying drugs from a police officer, where was Urqhart getting the drugs from? Second question, if Urqhart was a supplier to Petrovsky, could there be a connection between the drug dealing and Urqhart's death?"
DI Wessex stood up and informed everyone else of her activities since the last session.
"On Saturday I sent a sample of dog hairs which we had found on our clothes after we visited Petrovsky's house, to the lab. I'm hoping to get the results back today or tomorrow morning. With any luck, the dog hairs will belong to the same dog as that hair found on Urqhart's body."
"Good. At last we're getting some momentum going." McKenzie clapped his hands together.
The rest of the meeting didn't reveal anything new.
Finishing up, McKenzie summarised some of the main areas of investigation to be pursued.
"One: where did the money in the accounts come from? Can we establish a link to Petrovsky? Two: Dog hairs - do our hairs all come from Petrovsky's dog? Three: was Urqhart a drug dealer? If so, what gang was he getting his supply from? Four: has anyone been found dead with their throats ripped out in the past five years... possibly by an Alsatian? We need to check the unsolved cases, newspapers, and hospitals. Undertakers too. Five: are there any known connections between Urqhart and any of the other crime lords in Scotland? I have reason to believe there might be... I just want some independent thoughts on this... Six: how did Urqhart get up to the top of the Crags without being seen? Someone had to have seen something. We need to speed up the analysis of the CCTV cameras of the cars going into the park, and the video feeds of the major pathways that led into the park. Surely, if he didn't drive, we must have something on film somewhere with him walking? And last but not least for today... We need to start making enquiries in the force itself about Urqhart. If he was bent, how come his record is so clean? How long has he been bent? Was he working alone? Does anyone in Police Scotland know anything that we need to know?"
As he dismissed the team, McKenzie began to worry for the first time whether they were about to open a big can of worms.
Was Urqhart acting alone? If not, how far did this go?
-------------------------
Longniddry Bents
Edinburgh
Monday 2 p.m. G.M.T.
Tommy McNunn stepped out of his car, and stood up straight, stretching his spine and breathing in the salt air from the sea.
Above him the seagulls circled and dived, their squawking filling the air.
"Boss?" one of the two heavies that always accompanied him asked.
"No, come with me to the edge of the beach, but give me some space. I want to be alone."
"Sure thing, Mr McNunn."
The two gorillas followed him through the sand dunes to the beach, and took up positions about a hundred metres from each other, so that they could each easily survey the long, open expanse of wild beach.
The sun was shining, the sky was clear of clouds, and there was a light breeze. It was a cracking day, and Tommy knew that this was probably one of the last beautiful days of the year. From here on in, the days would get shorter, darker, more depressing, and incredibly cold.
Tommy hated the cold.
The long, sandy beach at Longniddry Bents was one of Tommy's favourite places. It was the place he came to free his mind. To think. And to plan.
Several miles outside of Edinburgh, it sat near the mouth of the Firth of Forth, curling inwards back towards the city. On the left side of the river you had a fantastic view of Scotland’s capital and the Pentland Hills which formed a dramatic backdrop to the city - and where several years ago Tommy had purchased a small farm beside a reservoir and built himself a small nuclear bunker, the farm being another of his favourite places. On the right, the view swept across the Kingdom of Fife, the land on the other side of the Firth which bounded the river Forth as it opened out and diffused into the sea.
Incredibly, hardly anyone ever came here, save for a few people with metal detectors and some older folk who came to collect the pieces of coal that were washed up on the beach.
Tommy had always wondered where exactly the coal came from. So far, he had never figured it out.
He walked down across the sand and found himself a seat on a large rock. Lifting his head, he closed his eyes and let the sun fall on his face, absorbing the heat like a lizard, soaking up the rays and memorising the feeling to help him get through the harsh months ahead.
After a while he lowered his head and scanned the seascape all around him.
From where he sat, he could count at least ten oil rigs dotted around the deeper waters of the Firth.
They were a sign of the times.
The oil industry was not doing so great anymore, and as the wells ran dry or the remaining oil got too expensive to drill for, it seemed that the Firth of Forth was becoming a dumping ground for all the oil rigs that were no longer economical.
Tommy was glad he was not in the oil industry. In contrast to that, his industry, the crime and drugs industry, was booming.
Tommy knew that even though things were going well just now, things could get even better.
When times got tough, when the economy dived, as it was sure to continue to do so in the coming months, crime rocketed as people turned to drugs to escape.
Tommy controlled them both.
Not all of it. But much of it.
Tommy was not particularly well educated, but he was a good businessman, and he knew that in a growing marketplace, now was a good time to expand his business empire.
To expand, the choices were simple: find new product lines, merge with the competition, or take them over and acquire them.
Of the three, Tommy knew that the third option was the best.
A war was coming. A war of his own making. But it was a war that he was intending to win.
Taking out the piece of paper from his trouser pocket, he looked at the list of names he had written down.
Three names.
All lieutenants of his largest rival.
Tommy had already set in motion his plans to have the kingpin removed. All he had to do now was to ensure that those immediately beneath him would disappear shortly afterwards. If Tommy didn't ensure that they disappeared immediately after their boss, there was a significant risk that one of them would step into their boss's shoes and simply take over.
No, that couldn't happen.
This was going to be a very hostile takeover.
With emphasis on the word hostile.
As soon as their boss went, they all had to disappear.
To die.
And soon.
Chapter 17
Andheri
Near Mumbai, Maharashtra
India
Monday
10.00 p.m. India Standard Time (IST)
The day passed slowly for Anand. He lay on his bed underneath the mosquito net with a thin sheet pulled up over his head, trying to block out the world. His family were worried for him, and kept coming into the room to enquire after him, but he shooed them away, turning down food and even water.
What was happening to Mr Stuart? Was he alive or dead? How would he find out?
Anand’s mind was awash with thoughts. If Mr Stuart was dead, if he'd had a heart attack caused by the stress in dealing with Anand and Swiss Insurance, how would he ever live with himself?
He felt physically sick. Worry. Stress. Fear. All mixed up together.
He knew that he couldn’t go back to his work and carry on as normal. He couldn’t do the same to others as he had done to Mr Stuart. Swiss Insurance was evil, and Anand had become evil too, but it was not too late to save himself. Or was it?
If he had killed Mr Stuart, how could he ever atone?
Yet, Anand knew that he had to go back to work. His family depended upon him for their survival, and without the money he earned from the call centre, they would starve.
Anand knew that life in India was not as easy as it was in England. But was it right to make a living by doing something which he knew was so wrong? Even if he needed the money to feed his family, was it not wrong to steal from others to feed yourself?
He lay there, tossing and turning. Fighting with his thoughts. Trying to find resolution to the emotions which wracked his body.
Perhaps, if he looked harder, he might be able to find another job. Now he had some experience in the call centre, maybe he could find work elsewhere? Surely, there had to be something else out there.
Say You're Sorry: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A DCI Campbell McKenzie Detective Conspiracy Thriller No 1) Page 11
