Oleg stuck out his bottom lip and shrugged. ‘You want to know the truth?’ I took that to be rhetorical. ‘Jerry did something stupid.’
I asked the Russian what had made him come to that conclusion and discovered that for Jerry Thorn doing something stupid in a chopper was a regular occurrence. He’d previously been disqualified from flying for three months for carrying excess passengers. In the latest stunt he’d flown extremely low over Loch Tay with a couple of mates in wetsuits on either skid. He’d dropped them in the water then gone back later to pick them up, carrying out the same dangerous manoeuvre and narrowly missing a speedboat in the process. This time they’d taken his licence away for a much longer period.
Oleg frowned. ‘Three years. It is very bad. A lot of people come here to see Jerry and have lessons with him. When they ban him, he has an idea to make this place better. Make it into a spaceport.’
Oleg picked up what looked like a large cellphone with a stubby black aerial protruding from the top. ‘Satellite phone. The signal is rubbish out here. Hold on.’ He punched a few numbers and was connected remarkably quickly. ‘Oleg from St Edzell, Mr Thorn. Mr Munro is here to see you now.’ There was a longish pause before, ‘Yes, Mr Thorn. I will tell him.’ Oleg pressed a button and set the phone back in a charging cradle on the desk. ‘Mr Thorn is very sorry, but he has business in Aberdeen. He will come back here to see you if you don’t mind waiting. We could send you in helicopter, but we have no pilots today because the weather is very bad.’
‘How long will he be?’
‘Two, maybe three hours. Mr Thorn says that you make yourself comfortable until he gets back.’ I looked at the single metal chair. Comfortable wasn’t going to be easy. Thankfully, the head of security had other ideas.
‘It is a wee bitty breezy today,’ he said, as I followed him out of the main building and down a side path towards a large, prefabricated structure set well back from the runway in an area of garden ground that had a rectangular lawn to the front, marked out as a five-a-side football pitch and bordered by a white picket fence.
At the front door Oleg unclipped a bunch of keys from his belt, selected one and let me out of the ‘breeze’ that had threatened to blow my head off. Inside it was dark. Oleg squeezed by me, opened a small metal cabinet on the wall by the door and flicked a series of switches. Immediately row upon row of ceiling-mounted LED lights illuminated to reveal the finest airport lounge I’d ever seen, if that’s what it was. It seemed more like a man-cave. Jukebox, retro video game machines, pool table, dartboard, and a well stocked bar. The walls were lined with photographs of cars, sportsmen, aircraft, attractive females in various stages of undress, and television monitors. Around the room soft furnishings were scattered, beanbags, sofas and lazy-boy chairs, even a four-poster bed in one of the corners. Hot air blowers hummed in the background.
‘Please make yourself at home,’ Oleg said. ‘You will find everything you want here.’
I believed him. The lounge/man-cave would be a fine place to spend a few hours waiting for my host to arrive, even if it meant playing pool and darts with the dour Ruski, but if I was going to bluff my way to a few quid with his boss it would help if I could speak with some knowledge. I only wanted to sound out Thorn. I didn’t have the information he wanted. Not yet, though, with time, I was certain I’d find it.
‘Oleg, would it be okay if you gave me a tour of the airport? You know: the hangars, helipad...’ my aviation terminology was drying up fast. ‘Stuff like that?’
Oleg shrugged again. ‘Sure. Where you want to see first?’
The place I wanted to see first and last was the hangar where the crashed helicopter had been stored the night before its final journey. Oleg took me in the buggy to the largest of the three main hangars where two choppers were parked. He pointed to the nearest. ‘Euroeagle BC one-fifty. Five hundred shaft horsepower gas turbine engine. We have three of these before the crash. Can take four passengers, has maximum range of three hundred and fifty nautical miles.’
I could see it was definitely a helicopter. A yellow one. The one next to it was red. I liked the yellow one.
‘Jerry was ace pilot. He gave me lessons too. Said if I passed the test he would get me a pilot job here, flying the famous people about. I liked Jerry. He helped my mother when she was ill back home in Volgograd. He gave me money to send to her. I am sorry he is dead.’
After admiring the choppers for a while, I looked around and noticed a CCTV camera in a corner of the enormous structure. ‘Does the CCTV system record?’
Judging by the length and volume of his sigh, Oleg had been asked this question before. ‘Yes, but not the night Jerry goes missing, if that’s what you ask. That night the camera is broken again. Homer tells me before I go home. I log the breakdown and tell Homer to call the maintenance people. He says they will come out next day to fix it.’
‘So the person on monitoring duty would not have seen if anything strange happened?’
Oleg shuffled his feet and stared down at the concrete floor. ‘That is true.’
The head of security had already told me he hadn’t been on duty that night and, although I only knew one other member of the security team, I had a funny feeling I also knew who’d been roped in that fateful St Andrew’s Day nightshift. I didn’t even have to ask. ‘Billy was on duty. One of the boys phone in not well and I ask Billy to cover for him. He did that sometimes. It was no big deal.’
‘And the next day Billy left and never came back. Does that not seem strange to you? The CCTV camera in the hangar where Jerry’s helicopter was probably sabotaged is out of order when Billy is on duty and then he disappears the next day?’
‘It was not the first time the CCTV camera is broken. I am fed up with it. The system cost fifty thousand pounds. It was my idea to upgrade. Mr Thorn wasn’t happy to pay for it. When it broke again I phone him and tell him to ask for his money back. He come here very angry.’
‘What about these two helicopters? Was there any problem with them?’
There hadn’t been because they had both been hired out. Only one had been left in the hangar overnight; the one Jerry had used to take his fiancée on a late night/early morning flight. It had been green.
We returned to the warmth of the man-cave where Oleg, acting like my very own butler, put some coffee on to brew.
‘What is it you have to tell Mr Thorn?’ he asked.
It was a fair enough question. What did I have to tell him? Not very much. More and more it was distilling down to a choice between two scenarios. Either Jeremy had pulled one crazy stunt too many or the helicopter had been sabotaged. The latter would leave Billy Paris in the frame, Cherry’s conspiracy theory intact and the Secretary of State’s political career on a shoogly peg. The pending report from the Air Accident Investigation Branch would decide the issue. My sole reason for being there that blustery morning was to put a finder’s fee agreement in place, one that Thorn couldn’t back out of. I might not have anything to tell him, not yet, but I would, and since I was doing all the work I didn’t see why we need involve Maggie Sinclair.
What I had to tell Mr Thorn was private, I told the security man, and was halfway through a mug of coffee and biting into my second caramel log when from somewhere a phone began to warble. Oleg went behind the bar and came out with another satellite phone. He held it out to me. ‘Mr Thorn for you.’
I chewed rapidly on my mouthful of biscuit to clear my mouth, in the process inhaling some desiccated coconut and collapsing into a coughing fit. Strange that even while trying to catch my breath I remembered Billy Paris’s preferred way of bringing down a helicopter: impregnating the air filter with copper fragments. A handful of them would destroy the turbine engine much in the same way as the pieces of toasted coconut were threatening to do to my lungs.
‘Hello?’ I managed to croak.
‘Mr Munro? Philip Thorn. Sorry, I can’t see you today after all. I’m bogged down in business talks up here in the Granite City. I’d h
ave let you know earlier and saved you a trip if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in everything that’s going on. Are you free later in the week? How does Friday suit?’
Friday didn’t suit. I was picking Tina up from the airport. ‘I can do tomorrow. No, wait...’ I’d promised Joanna I’d do some hand-holding with her client’s wife. ‘It would need to be first thing in the morning.’
‘No problem. I’m an early riser. And this time I’ll come to you.’
We left things on the basis that he’d call me later to make the necessary arrangements.
Oleg took the phone from me. ‘You are meeting Mr Thorn. Are you going to tell him who killed his son?’
‘If I did, what do you think he would do with that information?’ I asked.
‘Do?’
‘Would he... you know. Do something about it?’
‘What do you mean – do something about it? Do you mean kill somebody about it?’ He was a plain talker. I liked that about the Russian. He came closer, the expression on his face looked as if it had been carved using hammer and chisel. ‘You tell me who killed Jerry,’ he said, ‘and I kill them myself.’
42
That night it was just me and my dad, sitting in his living room, a small glass of whisky in hand, and a coal fire seething away nicely in the hearth. Thankfully there was mid-week football on TV and little need to converse, other than when criticizing players who missed scoring chances we agreed we each would have tucked away with some aplomb.
‘I wonder how the bairn is,’ my dad said, after the first forty-five minutes, raising himself from his armchair to give the coals a poke. His granddaughter’s letter to the fat man in the red suit, all three pages of it, plus a subsequent appendix, had gone up the chimney weeks ago. ‘There’s a lot of crazies over there in France. The rag-heads are running wild. Remember that Charlie Hedgehog magazine thing? And then there was the bombs at the football and the hostages and everything.’
I assured him Tina would be having the time of her life. ‘If you’re so worried, you could have gone with her if you’d wanted. Mrs Reynolds wouldn’t have minded.’
‘Who? Me? Go to France so I can stand in a queue all day just to go on a roundabout and be bothered by a load of folk in fancy dress?’ was my dad’s take on the wonderful world of Disney experience. ‘No thanks. There’s enough clowns in this town without having to cross the Channel to see them, and, anyway, how could I afford a trip like that?’
His words hung like a juicy lugworm wriggling beneath the waters of St Edzell Bay. I let the bait hang. I was too comfortable, and relations between myself and the old man were sufficiently delicate that I decided not to rile him further with mention of his generous police pension or of his historical whisky collection, the latter something of a sore point. He’d started the collection several years before he was set to retire, buying collectable bottles to sell later at inflated prices in order to supplement his pension. Then when he did retire he’d thought, what was the point? He’d only spend the proceeds on more whisky, and as he had the whisky already… Suffice to say the collection was no more and, with whisky prices rocketing and his consumption plummeting since the arrival of his granddaughter, it irked him to think about it. No, I’d save that juicy morsel for later. I had something else to wind him up with.
‘Imagine,’ I said. ‘Paris, the sun setting over the Magic Kingdom. Just you and the rich widow Reynolds... ooh, la la.’ I think it was my wink, and click of the tongue that especially annoyed him.
Without a word he stomped off through to the kitchen. I waited until he returned to give us each a half-time refill. ‘Come on, Dad. It’s thirty-six years since Mum died. You’re not too old to get married again. Don’t you want a wife?’
‘No thanks. I’m just fine wanting what I don’t have. It’s a lot better than having what I don’t want. It’s you who should be finding a mum for Tina.’
‘Me and Malky managed without one,’ I said.
‘Aye, but you were boys. Boys just need someone to keep them on the straight and narrow.’
‘And to give them a skelp when they stray off it,’ I said.
‘Ach, a clip round the ear never did you any harm. Girls are different, though. You can’t hit a girl. A girl needs a mum, someone to learn womanly things from. A female role model.’
‘The helpers at the nursery are female and when Tina starts school so will most, if not all, of the teachers be.’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about someone to look up to, to go shopping with, that sort of thing. What are you going to do in a few years’ time when Tina starts talking about bras and… well, you know, that other stuff that comes by every month.’
‘I’ve got female friends. There’s Grace-Mary, and Kaye helped out the other night, remember? And then there’s Joanna—’
‘Now you’re talking. Joanna. She’d do fine. She’s never away from here as it is. Always dropping in to see you about something.’
I had to admit that over recent weeks I had seen a lot of Joanna, and not just at work. Some evenings she’d pop by to discuss a case or say hello to Tina. Perhaps Vikki had also noticed, put two and two together and come up with a pretty solid five.
‘Never mind Pyxie Girl. Tina thinks Joanna is a superhero. That lassie can do nothing wrong in Tina’s eyes.’
I didn’t want to engage in this topic of conversation, but I could see no other way of avoiding us getting onto the subject of Tina’s missing Christmas present now that it had been raised. ‘Dad, Joanna’s not interested in me. She’s my employee for one thing, and for another she’s about seven years younger than me.’
There was a break for more TV ads before the players came out for the start of the second half. I didn’t have long to stall, normal father/son non-communications would resume shortly.
‘Nonsense, don’t let a little thing like age difference get in the way,’ he said, pausing to strain whisky through his moustache. ‘What about me and your mum?’
‘What about you? You were both the same age.’
‘Aye, but she died when she was younger than you. Anything could happen to you or Joanna. Remember what happened to Tina’s real mum. One minute she was alive, the next…’
Joanna had said I was an optimist. Now I knew where I didn’t get it from. The referee blew his whistle and the second half kicked off. So far, according to the commentator, it had been a case of no goals but plenty of action. In the first minute of the restart the home team was awarded a free-kick in a dangerous position. As the defensive wall was setting itself up to block a shot at goal, a blue graphics banner appeared and a message began to scroll along the bottom of the screen. AAIB findings indicate Jeremy Thorn’s helicopter sabotaged.
I waited for the striker to balloon the ball over the bar and then switched to a news channel where the helicopter crash and its repercussions were making all the headlines. Cherry Lovell’s Night News documentary had not gone unnoticed at Westminster. Now, after this initial report from the Air Accident Investigation Branch, not only was the Secretary of State for Scotland implicated, but the Minister for Aviation and the Business Secretary were also in the firing line. A lot of disgruntled opposition MPs who had backed an English-based spaceport, claimed it had gone to Scotland only to defuse calls for another independence referendum. Like Cherry they pointed to a Secretary of State forced to deliver the goods whatever the cost, and highlighted his connection with the man most likely to have brought down the helicopter. People wanted answers. There was talk about recalling Parliament early after the festive break and a vote of no confidence against a Prime Minister who could condone an act of terrorism if he thought it would save the Union.
Lights shone through the curtains. Outside I heard a car door slam.
‘Santa’s either come early or it’s for you,’ my dad said.
I answered a knock at the door. It was DI Christchurch and his ugly little helper. ‘Evening, Mr Munro. Please listen carefully. There is a posse of journ
alists and TV news crews headed this way. Unless you want to end up a prisoner in your own home, pack a change of clothes and whatever else you need and come with us.’
43
Milton Street, Edinburgh was a road lined either side with towering, sandstone tenement buildings, every other window the frame for a Christmas tree. It began at Abbeyhill, at the foot of the Royal Mile and ended at the boundary wall of Holyrood Park.
The first floor flat at number thirty-one was a safe house, used by the Ministry of Defence Police to hide people they didn’t want other people to find. With a curt, ‘Goodnight,’ Christchurch opened the front door, the Bulldog tossed my holdall through it and then the two of them left. There was no need for further discussion. Things had been made abundantly clear to me on the drive through to Edinburgh. I had a choice to make, the easy way or the hard way. Voluntarily hand over the evidence given to me by Billy Paris or have my office pulled apart by an MDP search squad, who, if they found nothing there, would move onto my dad’s cottage, then onto Malky’s place, then Joanna’s and so on down the list of people I was related to, worked with, or with whom I was otherwise acquainted. I didn’t want to meet Grace-Mary after they’d kicked her door in.
Christchurch, as usual, was the epitome of reasonableness. The platitudes spilled from his lips. I should do myself a favour. Do the right thing. We were all on the same side. For Queen and country. Seekers after the truth.
Having patiently, but firmly explained that whether I cooperated or not, the outcome would be the same, the Ministry of Defence officer said he’d let me sleep on it. I couldn’t. At four thirty next morning I climbed out of a rickety single bed, walked through to the front room and looked down on a road that was sparkling with frost.
I paced the room. What should I do? I wasn’t under arrest. There were no bars on the windows, no guards at the door, just a posse of newsmen hot on my trail.
Christchurch wanted me to do myself a favour by doing what he said was the right thing. The trouble was the two were mutually exclusive, and it didn’t matter if I slept on it all night or all the next day for that matter. It wouldn’t alter the fact that there was nothing in it for me if I cooperated with his government, that is the Westminster Government. Of course, if I chose not to cooperate with that lot in London it would please those sitting in power at Holyrood. But what did I owe a Scottish Government that banged on about access to justice, and yet hadn’t increased the funds available to prepare a criminal defence in a quarter of a century? A government whose quango had recently taken away my livelihood because I hadn’t filled in a few forms correctly. Kirkton Perch said the evidence would vindicate him. Well he would, wouldn’t he? If, or rather when, I found the proof, and if I did hand it over to him, what guarantee was there it would ever see the light of day? And where would we be then? The Secretary of State happily climbing the greasy pole, and me still skint. If Philip Thorn wanted justice and was ready to pay, who said he had any less of a claim to the evidence than the politicians? It was his son who’d died, and while Thorn’s idea of justice might differ from theirs, it was more likely to coincide with mine had it been my only child who’d been murdered.
Present Tense Page 20
