‘You really don’t know golf, Sergeant, do you?’ Alasdair Fairley smiled, for the first time.
‘You might as well start now,’ Regan told him. ‘I’ll tell our socos, when they get here, just to look for tyre and footprints, not to bother with fingerprints. We can get on our way once they arrive, Lisa. We’ve got no more to do here. Meantime, I might go and take a look at the course. I’ve never been here before, and I’ve heard it’s pretty good.’
‘Call me when you have a free day,’ said Fairley. ‘If we’re quiet you can play it, on the house.’
‘Thanks. I’ll take you up on that.’ He wandered away from the pro shop, towards the first tee. He was peering down the first fairway, through the thinning mist, when his mobile sounded. He checked the number, but it showed ‘Private’.
‘Yes?’ he answered cautiously.
‘George.’
‘Ah, it’s you, Fred.’
For some reason, Detective Chief Inspector Graham Leggatt, senior CID officer in East and Midlothian, was known to close colleagues and friends as ‘Fred’. He always had been, and it was rumoured that not even he knew why. ‘What have you got there?’ he asked.
‘I don’t want to be pessimistic,’ the DI replied, ‘but you can mark this one up for the unsolved column. It was a well-planned job, simple and well-executed. Eighty grand’s worth of untraceable gear’s disappeared into the black economy. I don’t remember anything as pro as this in the time I’ve been on this patch.’
‘There hasn’t been. I’ll tell you how well planned it was.’ There was a pause. Regan heard a slurping sound. Fred Leggatt was famous for drinking tea in industrial quantities. ‘We have three patrol cars in East Lothian through the night, best case. When this job was pulled, they were all en route to calls. Every one of them was false, and when we checked, we found that everyone was made on a different untraceable pay-and-go mobile. How about that for planning?’
‘Gallus bastards,’ Regan chuckled.
‘Indeed. Much as I dislike the idea of putting Mario McGuire off his breakfast, I’ll need to pass this up the line.’
Eighteen
‘Jesus, Sauce,’ Jack McGurk laughed, ‘your eyes are like piss holes in the snow. Is this girl a vampire? Has she been draining your lifeblood?’
‘With respect, Sergeant,’ Haddock retorted, ‘mind your own business. Better still, shut the fuck up. I never said a word when you and Lisanne got together, even though I seem to recall you practically crawling in here a couple of times.’
‘He has a point,’ said Becky Stallings. ‘Cut the boy some slack. All his wet dreams seem to have come true. Now,’ she continued, ‘as I let you know last night, that job we thought was over has been chucked back to us for further attention. The problem I have is that I don’t know what else we can do.’
‘We could ask the French police to find Zaliukas’s wife for us,’ the young DC suggested. ‘That’s assuming she is in France.’
‘Her lawyer may have contacted her already, as Alex Skinner said she would. Even if she hasn’t, this is a civil matter, not criminal. If CID calls France and asks for help in tracing her, it might send out the wrong signals. She might wind up being arrested.’
‘We could look closer at his companies. Maybe they’re not as sound as Gerulaitis claims.’
‘That’s more like it. Pull the last three years’ accounts from Companies’ House and have a look. You know who they bank with, or so you told me, so have a word with his manager. And what about these massage parlours, or saunas, or whatever the hell they are? From what you said they’re all run independently by managers, but Zaliukas must have had regular contact with them. Talk to some of them, see what they say.’
‘What will we be looking for?’ McGurk asked.
‘Ideally, we’ll be looking for someone who tells us that Zaliukas confided in him recently that he was deeply distressed, that he was missing his wife more than he could stand, and that he couldn’t go on. We’ll be looking for any fucking thing that lets me throw this back at Neil McIlhenney with “Mission accomplished” stamped all over it.’
Nineteen
‘Twin,’ Mario McGuire asked. ‘Are you free?’
‘Sure,’ said Neil McIlhenney, and hung up. He was certain that more people within the force, and maybe across Edinburgh, thought of them as the original Glimmer Twins than there were those who recognised it as the nickname adopted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards more than forty years earlier. It had been bestowed upon them, by Paula Viareggio, one night in the Café Royal bar, when they were in the first half of their twenties, when he had been engaged to Olive Clarey, and when the torch that Paula carried for her cousin Mario was still hidden in her handbag.
He left his office and walked the few yards to the one with ‘Head of CID’ on the door. ‘Whassup?’ he asked as he slumped into a seat. ‘Are you narked because the report on Tomas Zaliukas isn’t signed off yet?’
‘No, not especially. If the chief constable wants us to dig deeper, so be it. No, this is something else. There was a burglary overnight at the pro shop at Witches’ Hill golf club. A ram raid; they took out the main door with a vehicle then helped themselves to eighty grand’s worth of golf gear.’
‘Witches’ Hill? That’s in East Lothian, isn’t it, up behind Aberlady? Outside Edinburgh; not my area.’
‘Maybe not, but you’re my de facto deputy, and I want to bounce this off you. This isn’t the only job of this sort that’s been pulled recently. Two weeks ago the shop at the Mayfield course in Broxburn was done in exactly the same way. Then and now, they were long gone and out of town before uniform could respond to the alarm call. The places were well chosen. They’re isolated, and they could get their wheels right up to the premises. We’re nowhere near catching anyone for Broxburn and Fred Leggatt isn’t holding out any hope of a result for today’s either.’
‘I suppose we have to assume it’s the same team,’ McIlhenney murmured.
‘We might even be able to prove it is, if they’ve left tyre marks, but there’s something else. On each occasion our responses were hindered. All our available cars in each area were heading for calls that turned out to be bogus. We’ve traced the originating numbers and in each case, the calls were made from a cheap, disposable mobile.’
‘Bought where?’
‘Dunno yet. That’s our only line of inquiry for now, but there’s every fuckin’ chance that they were stolen too.’
‘How many cars are we talking about?’
‘In East Lothian, three, in West Lothian, five; all diverted to places far away from the crime scenes.’
The superintendent frowned. ‘That isn’t a hell of a lot, is it, when you spell it out.’
‘Tell me about it,’ McGuire snorted. ‘Remember that exchange I had with NYPD? One of the stats I picked up is that they have over three thousand patrol vehicles in a smaller geographical area.’
‘And ten times the tax-paying population to fund them, and a hell of a lot more I’ll bet than ten times the number of incident reports. The world is as it is, Mario; we all have to live within our means.’
‘But how do we do that? For I know for certain that this team will not stop at two jobs. And how long will it take for other clever bastards to get in on the idea? We’ve got the potential for a significant crime wave here.’
‘Then we’ll have to nail them as fast as we can,’ McIlhenney responded, ‘before the media catch on and they start to build a criminal fan club. But this isn’t just a CID job.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m going to raise it at the boss’s daily meeting. .’ he glanced at his watch, ‘. . in ten minutes. I’ve got a fair idea how that’ll develop, so I’d like you to keep yourself handy for a follow-up session with me and Mags, later on this morning.’
Twenty
‘Have either of you had word from the hospital yet about your mystery girl’s condition?’ Ray Wilding asked.