Say You're Sorry: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A DCI Campbell McKenzie Detective Conspiracy Thriller No 1)

by IAN C. P. IRVINE

  Several times he had even, genuinely, managed to actually, really, help someone.

  It was a curious feeling. Rewarding. Almost pleasurable.

  By the end of the day, his call times had exceeded the required company average, and a manager had come to him and warned him to work faster, speak less, and move onto the next caller quicker.

  In other words, "Stop helping! You're costing the company money!"

  When he finally managed to leave the call centre he could actually count the number of times someone had genuinely thanked him for his help on two hands.

  People, in their time of need, had made a point of saying "Thank you!"

  The feeling this curious sequence of events stirred within Anand was wonderful. It was akin to the thrill he would get when he managed to circumvent the defences of a company network and hack into their systems.

  It gave him a buzz.

  Which he loved.

  And which he quickly identified as having the propensity to become addictive.

  The journey home through the suburbs took slightly longer than normal that evening, and it gave him plenty of time to try to clear his mind and plan the evening ahead.

  More than ever, he was determined to embark on his path of atonement, and tonight he knew exactly how the journey would start: he was going to get Mr Stuart's car fixed and delivered back to his house, so that when Jonathan arrived home, his car would be waiting for him.

  Cleaned. Polished. Looking brand new.

  Just thinking about the surprise Jonathan would get made Anand smile for the rest of the evening.

  -------------------------

  St Leonards Police Station,

  Edinburgh

  Tuesday

  5.15 p.m. G.M.T.

  Operations Room, Basement

  DCI Campbell McKenzie stood at the front of the briefing, signalling for the excited voices in the room to quieten down.

  "Okay, welcome back everyone. I think you've probably all heard that we've got the voice print from Petrovsky's conversation with Urqhart. DC Roberts brought it to me first thing this afternoon, and as a consequence of what I heard, we've decided to make an arrest this evening. DC Roberts, why don't you take the floor. This is your moment of glory, and I don't want to steal it from you..."

  DC Roberts stood up and walked to the front of the room.

  "Thank you, but it's really down to the boys at Fettes Row. They did the leg work for us. A quick recap: this is the voice recording of the call that Petrovsky made to Urqhart four days before he was murdered, the call being made at 1.24 a.m."

  Roberts nodded at the officer standing by the desk in the corner who was controlling the sound system.

  A loud guttural voice filled the room, the voice with a Russian accent unmistakably that of Ivor Petrovsky.

  "Urqhart?", the caller enquired.

  "Yep, that's me. Who are you? Do you know what the bloody time is?"

  "You know who ze fuck I am? I'm person you sold all your shit to some few weeks ago. You know, same shit I so kindly bought off you, because no one else would touch it!"

  "Ivor? Sorry, I couldn't see the number on the display. Number withheld."

  "Deliberately. I'm no fucking amateur. And this is safe SIMM card. No one knows it belongs with me. And no one ever will!"

  There were a few smiles in the briefing room at this statement. It seemed that Petrovsky was an amateur after all.

  "So, Urqhart. The boys in my private laboratory just gave me interesting news. They say they analysed stuff you sold me, and apart from some junk someone added to bulk it up, your coke has same signature as stuff stolen from me several months ago. They even say they think it might be same coke that was stolen from me. i.e. that bloody stuff you sold me, might have been mine all fucking time!"

  There was the sound of Urqhart coughing and swallowing hard.

  "I don't understand? What are you saying? That I stole a load of coke from you and then sold it back to you?"

  "Could be. Sure could look like that, from where I'm sitting."

  "Listen, you've got to believe me Mr Petrovsky, I'd have to be bloody daft to do that. There's no way I'd even think about it."

  "So, where did you get zis shit from then? You have ten seconds for telling me, then I hang up."

  A moment's silence, an intake of breath, the sound of Urqhart's brain cells exploding.

  "I found it. In a car. Belonging to someone we'd just arrested. There was a ton of the stuff in the back of the boot. I was the only officer to see it, so I quickly threw a couple of kilos behind a hedge before any of the other officers noticed, and then I pretended to have found what was left. I went back that night and collected the stuff I’d hidden. I have no idea where it came from beforehand. The twat we arrested refused to speak up or divulge anything. Are you sure that it was yours?"

  "Not yet. My boys are running more tests, better tests. I know tomorrow morning. And iv I find out stuff was mine in first place, you have twenty-four hours for giving me my money back."

  "I can't. Not anymore. I laundered the money by putting it into my pension plan. No questions asked. I even got a tax rebate on it. It's in there now, and I can't get it back out."

  "Did you just hear what I said? If it turns out tomorrow that shit was my shit in first place, I gonna fucking kill you. Do you understand me? No one takes piss out of Ivor Petrovsky. I've got reputation for thinking of."

  "But, even if it was your stuff in the first place, I didn't know."

  "Not my problem. I suggest you borrow some money pretty fucking sharpish. You idiot. I give you until tomorrow night. Only. Then if drugs were mine in first place, I let my wolf play with your neck, or find some other interesting way for make you die."

  The line went dead, with Petrovsky presumably having hung up.

  Back in the briefing room, DCI McKenzie looked around his team and clapped his hands together in appreciation of what they had all just heard.

  "So, now we have a motive. Petrovsky just threatened to kill Urqhart, and we could easily presume that further tests came back showing conclusively that it was his drugs that Urqhart had sold back to him, and that Urqhart was unable to pay him back his money. We all know from previous experience that Petrovsky is a particularly violent criminal, so having made the threat it would be totally in character to carry it out."

  "And..." DC Roberts started to add, "If Petrovsky was able to prove that the drugs were his in the first place, then he would have a strong incentive to make an example of Urqhart. Everyone who crosses Petrovsky dies or gets mutilated in some horribly inventive way. That's how he commands respect. By instilling fear and loathing in everyone. When he says jump, everyone jumps, or else they might find they don't have any legs to jump with."

  "Good point. That's a second motive. To protect his reputation as a hard nut."

  "Did we ever make any progress on finding out if Petrovsky has actually used his dog to kill someone?" DI Wessex asked the room. "He mentioned it again just then. Maybe it's not a joke or an idle warning."

  A middle-aged, brown haired CID officer with bright red cheeks stood up.

  "Actually, I have some news on that. Just after lunch I got a call from one of the morgues. I'd sent an email out to the hospitals, the coroners, the morgues...basically everywhere that dead bodies might turn up, and I asked just that -'had anyone seen a body coming in over the past year or two that looked like it'd had its throat ripped out?' It turns out that there's a body in the morgue in Glasgow, not yet identified and therefore still being kept on ice, that was found in the woods last February minus most of its throat. I've had a few photos sent over, and they're pretty gruesome."

  "This is just a thought, but if we were to get a saliva swab from Petrovsky's dog, can you ask them if they think it might still be possible to look at the throat and see if there's any possibility of finding a dog's DNA on the flesh around the neck wound? Would anything like that be possible after such a long time?" McKenzie asked.

&n
bsp; "I've already asked. About examining the neck wound that is. They've already agreed to look for any traces of fluids that could have been left by a dog. Even better if we can send them a sample of the saliva from Petrovsky's dog."

  "Excellent, good work Detective Lynch. Please follow this one through and get the results as soon as you can. It goes without saying that it would be great if we could connect Petrovsky to another death, especially one that he may have boasted about to two police officers!"

  McKenzie called out two names.

  "Collins and Robertson, I want you to rustle up some uniformed officers and go back round the houses interviewing anyone who may have been in the area on the night of the murder, but this time with photos of Petrovsky. For now, let's park the idea that McNunn may have been there. Hopefully one of the students or a late-night dog walker may have seen Petrovsky somewhere close. And what about ANPR? Can we see if there's a hit on the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system that might give us the location of Petrovsky or any of his cars near the Queen's Park? Whoever brought Urqhart to the cliffs had to get him there somehow."

  "Can I ask a question?" DS Wilson asked from across the other side of the room. "We just heard Urqhart tell Petrovsky that he'd got the drugs from someone he had arrested. He mentioned that there was a 'ton of the stuff' in the back of a boot of a car they'd intercepted, and that he'd helped himself to some of it. What happened to the rest of the drugs? If you don't mind, I'd like to look through the records and see if I can pinpoint that arrest. A couple of things might come out of that. Firstly, depending when it was, we may still have some of the drugs that were recovered. If so, we could get it analysed. As Petrovsky said, it would give us a signature of the drugs that Petrovsky is dealing with. That could be useful in future. Secondly, if the drugs were stolen from Petrovsky and there was a lot of it, it's unlikely that a small, independent drug dealer had stolen them. They wouldn’t have the balls to do something like that. It would've been done by a more powerful organisation. Which leads to the question, who did the drugs really belong to at the time the car was intercepted? I'd like to do some research and find out some more about that arrest and the characters involved. Like I said, I think maybe we could learn something useful from it."

  McKenzie clapped his hands together in his characteristic fashion.

  "Great thinking, Sergeant. And great questions. Please, pursue that line of thought wherever it takes you. And let me have the details as soon as you have them. I'd also like to know how Urqhart was involved in the interception of the car in the first place. Was it just luck, or part of some other case? And if so, which?"

  DS Wilson nodded and made a few notes in his book.

  After listening to the reports of a few other officers, and an offer by DS McIver to get a round of drinks down at the Pleasance Bar to celebrate his birthday, McKenzie wound the meeting up.

  But not before calling for volunteers to assist in the arrest of Ivor Petrovsky.

  Every hand in the room went up, including belatedly that of McIver who despondently saw the chances of a birthday drink evaporate, and who then finally gave into peer pressure and a reluctance to be the only person who didn't volunteer to bring Petrovsky in.

  Two hours later, three police vans, a squad car and a dog van pulled up in the streets outside Petrovsky's mansion.

  Thirty minutes later one Alsatian and a large, vicious Russian bulldog were in custody.

  Neither was pleased. In fact, both were barking mad.

  An hour after that, with all the paperwork completed and filed, the bar at the Pleasance was full after all. Everyone had plenty to celebrate.

  As McKenzie stood at the bar, watching his team begin to put a few pints away, Wessex sidled up beside him.

  "You're not smiling. Why not?"

  McKenzie turned and looked at her. He'd already had two pints, and this was his third, and probably his last. After that, if he wanted a fourth, he would catch a taxi to the Fiddler's Arms and have one to himself while listening to a Ceilidh band playing in the background. McKenzie never got too drunk in front of those who worked for him. As Campbell looked at Wessex, she smiled back, cocking her head quizzically to one side, her green eyes catching the light and sparkling.

  There was no doubt that Wessex was a very beautiful woman.

  "I'm not sure that we've got our man."

  "What do you mean?" Wessex asked immediately, laughing. "You just arrested him."

  "With the evidence we've got, we'd be mad not to. The Procurator Fiscal says that we've got a good case, - not solid - but enough to take him to court. Enough even to possibly get a conviction."

  "So, what's the problem? I don't get you..."

  "I know that everything is beginning to point to Petrovsky being behind the murder, but I'm still worried about it."

  "Your gut feel still tells you that it's McNunn?"

  "Yep. But it's more than that. We don't know what happened after that phone call? Maybe Petrovsky didn't decide to kill him. We've got a death threat, but it was conditional. What if at the end of the day, Urqhart was still in Petrovsky's good books? The motive wouldn't stand."

  "Then why did Petrovsky kill him?"

  "Maybe he didn't. Someone else did. McNunn, perhaps."

  "But you just arrested Petrovsky? Why?"

  McKenzie lifted his beer to his mouth and took a long, satisfying sip before turning to Wessex and smiling.

  "McNunn is a bad criminal, and I'm determined to bring him down, but Petrovsky is a bastard. He is, without doubt, one of the lowest forms of humanity I have ever encountered in all my time on the force. We know what he's done. We know that he's responsible for the deaths and mutilations of umpteen others over the years, but we've never ever been able to pin anything on him. Ever. Three times he's walked free from the courts after a case against him has collapsed, twice because a couple of the witnesses disappeared and were never seen again, and once because the witness turned up on Portobello Beach in two separate pieces, minus fingernails and ears. Mark my words, Petrovsky is scum. So, even if he's not guilty of Urqhart's murder, if the evidence is enough to say that he is, perhaps it's not a bad thing if he gets sent down for it. We have to work with what we've got."

  "And if the court throws it out? If they find the case too weak and the motive isn't strong enough?"

  "Then at least we get him off the street for a while. Hopefully months. Let's see what the longest is that we can keep him in custody for before a trial."

  Wessex studied McKenzie's face. She could tell he'd been thinking about this a lot.

  "In the meantime, what happens if we come up with evidence against McNunn?"

  "Let's cross that bridge when we come to it. The optimal scenario is that we can link Petrovsky to the body in Glasgow, and McNunn to Urqhart. That way we get rid of both of them. A clean sweep. Two scum for the price of one. Anyway, this is all between you and me, understood? The team have done a good job, and I don't want them to doubt it."

  Wessex nodded, and McKenzie noticed her eyes twinkle in the light again.

  There was no doubting it. She was truly beautiful.

  Perhaps it was time for him to leave.

  Chapter 19

  Andheri

  Near Mumbai, Maharashtra

  India

  Wednesday

  00.55 a.m. India Standard Time (IST)

  Anand's mind always came alive at night. He was a night owl who loved it when the world around him quietened down and left him alone to relax in his own solitude and to think.

  He felt excited.

  The best he had felt in months.

  The best since he had started his job in the call centre.

  The rest of his family were already asleep, and he was sitting alone in the other room of the flat, his laptop open in front of him on the floor, and his notebook and pen on the floor beside it.

  He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and how to do it. It involved breaking the law and committing fraud against Swiss Insurance. Y
et, he also knew that the chances of anyone finding out - even noticing it - were minimal. And even if they did, no one would ever be able to pin anything on him.

  It was a no-brainer, really.

  Within the next hour, Anand was going to arrange for Mr Stuart to get his car back.

  The first step in the adventure was to boot up his laptop, and login to the Darknet through the TOR system, which was an alternative internet and used almost predominantly by criminals and others like him who deliberately sought to remain anonymous whilst surfing the web. The TOR system, based upon 'The Onion Routing' project pioneered by the US Navy and then made available to everyone else, hid the identity and location of anyone who used the TOR software and internet browser.

  For criminals it was a godsend, for hackers a best friend, and for governments and police forces, their worst nightmare come true.

  Once logged on to his system, Anand was free to do almost anything he wanted: using his skills he could go almost anywhere on the internet and penetrate any network defences he had the skills to overcome. The likelihood of his activity being detected was minimal, and even if he was, thanks to TOR, they would never be able to trace activity back to identify him.

  In theory.

  Of course, there was always the chance that the legend built up around the open source TOR project was not completely true. There were some stories emerging that hackers who had used and trusted TOR had suddenly been arrested and swept away by police forces in the middle of the night. Perhaps TOR was not as secure as it was cracked up to be. But Anand was prepared to take that risk. Personally, he believed that such stories had been started by the police to try to dissuade people from using it.

  Anand was more worried about the idea of actually committing a fraud.