The banker smiled. ‘No, it made me very careful always to spell out every clause and condition of every deal we ever did.’
‘Those places,’ Haddock ventured. ‘Do you know where the money came from to buy them? The lawyer involved was vague on the subject.’
‘It was kosher,’ John replied at once. ‘Tomas paid himself a dividend from Lietuvos and that’s where it went. As for Ken Green, he’d have asked no questions; that’s the way he is.’
‘Can you tell me how much?’
‘I can find out. So can you, by pulling the accounts for the right year, but I can probably do it quicker. But tell me. Why do you want to know? Tomas shot himself, didn’t he?’
‘For sure.’
‘But you don’t know why?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you need to?’
‘Because someone way, way above my pay grade does.’
‘If that’s who I think it is, say no more. I’ll call you when I’ve got that figure for you.’
Twenty-two
Griff Montell looked at the forty-something woman in the chair opposite him, and tried to imagine her standing on a street corner, garish blond dye job, red shiny boots, bum-freezer jacket and short skirt maximising the legs that were still her best feature.
He failed, abysmally. Joanne Virtue’s hair was a lustrous brown, and he could tell that every visit to her salon of choice cost her plenty. Her suit had come, if not from Harvey Nichols, then from one of those designer sections on the first floor of John Lewis, where his sister did her clothes shopping. Her face was full of angles, from the sharpness of her chin to her dark, tick-shaped eyebrows, but the smile with which she had greeted them had been kind, and her eyes were expressive.
At that moment, they were expressing anger. ‘Let me get this right,’ she said, quietly, as if she did not want her voice to carry any further than the plush, velvet-draped reception room in which they were sitting, ‘you have come to my place of work to ask me about a part of my life that I’ve left behind me. Thank God we’ve got no clients here the now.’ Her accent was Scottish, but even the South African could tell that it had originated in Glasgow, not Edinburgh.
‘This is an urgent investigation, Miss Virtue,’ Alice Cowan retorted. ‘We’ve got a girl in trouble. We can do this interview down in our office if you’d prefer it.’
Instantly, the woman’s eyes turned icy cold. ‘You listen to me, kid,’ she whispered. ‘If you ever threaten me again, I’ll pick up the phone and I’ll call Neil McIlhenney. I hear he’s gone up in the world since I saw him last, so you’ll know who he is, for sure. “So what?” you might be thinking, he’s a nice guy. But he’s got another side that you wouldn’t want to see. There’s history between Neil and me. . not that kind, before you jump to the wrong conclusion. . and I’d only have to ask him the once to have you cut off at the fucking knees.’
Cowan looked at her colleague. ‘Griff. .’ she began, but he held up a hand.
‘Alice,’ he said, ‘I think we should listen to the lady. Miss Virtue, I apologise for disturbing you here, but it’s necessary. We have a kid in the Royal in her teens, still drugged out of her skull after twenty-four hours and unable to tell us what happened to her. However, we do know that it involved several men and that she was horizontal at the time. It may have been a domestic incident, but. .’
‘How old is she?’
‘Sixteen, maybe, possibly less. We know nothing about her, but we’re told she may be east European. She’s been fed GHB and booze, probably over a period.’
Joanne Virtue’s strong features twisted into a grimace. ‘Then whoever did it needs sorting out. You want my guess, she’s been brought here, either with the promise of a good job, or she’s just been kidnapped, and she was being broken in.’
‘Have you heard of that sort of thing happening in Edinburgh?’ asked Cowan, seemingly chastened.
‘No, but I’ve been out of that life for a bit. For a short while, I managed a massage parlour, but I. .’ she paused, as if she was considering exactly what she had done ‘. . I made a complete break from what I’d been.’
‘Would it be worth us talking to the owner?’
‘The guy I worked for doesnae own it any more. The last thing I heard about that place was that he’d sold it: that he’d been pressured into selling it, even.’
‘Pressured by whom?’
‘By a Lithuanian guy; one of that lot runs it now. But the word was that a bloke called Tommy Zale was behind him.’
‘Never heard of him,’ said Montell.
‘He owned pubs and the like. That wasnae his real name, it was something longer. There was a piece about him in the Saltire this morning. He was found dead yesterday morning; “no suspicious circumstances” according to your outfit. The Lithuanians have been taking over the massage parlour business in Edinburgh for years.’ She laughed, quietly, briefly. ‘Sorry, the public entertainment business, according to the Licensing Court. I never saw it in print anywhere, but they’re supposed tae control it all. If somebody’s been running girls into Edinburgh, then it’s either that lot, or they’ll be as keen as you are to find out who it is.’ She paused. ‘Where did you find this lass?’
‘She was brought into a surgery near Ocean Terminal.’
‘Mmm. There’s a massage parlour not far from that. If I were you, I’d be asking there about her.’
Twenty-three
‘We are not alone,’ Mario McGuire announced.
Maggie Steele and Neil McIlhenney looked at each other across the small conference table in the head of CID’s office. ‘I’ve always thought there were other beings out there,’ said the detective superintendent, laconically, ‘but I didn’t expect contact to be made in my lifetime. What about you, Scully? What do you think?’
‘You must stop watching that sci-fi stuff,’ the ACC retorted.
‘Indeed,’ McGuire continued. ‘I fed information on our two raids to the national intelligence centre in Paisley, and had an interesting response. Over the last six months, there have been similar, no, pretty much identical robberies at golf clubs in Seamill, in Ayrshire, in Blairgowrie, on Tayside, in Cumbernauld, near Glasgow, and on Loch Lomondside. . not the big club, another one.’
Steele’s eyebrows rose. ‘Nobody thought to issue a national alert? What is the SCDEA for?’
‘They’re short-handed through there, but that will be done now, they promise. The guy I spoke to in the intelligence unit told me that the new deputy director’s been appointed. .’
‘That’s lightning fast; the boss only mentioned the vacancy yesterday.’
‘I know, but they’ve short-circuited the usual procedures. The director’s just gone off on long-term sick leave, so they need someone in post, like now; whoever the new appointee is, he’ll be running the show from the off.’
‘Your contact didn’t tell you who it is, did he?’
‘He didn’t know.’
Steele laughed. ‘So much for intelligence. But back to the topic. We have a determined, professional outfit in action all across Scotland, running rings round us all. They’ve hit us twice, probably knowing how exposed we are rurally. We have to assume that they’re going to do it again. So what do we do?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ McIlhenney said. ‘How about we have CID teams in place to respond instantly to any alarm calls from golf pro shops?’
‘Jesus, Neil,’ McGuire hissed. ‘Budgets, budgets; they’d be sat on their hands all night, across the whole of our county area. Mags, can you make extra patrol teams available?’
‘Budgets, Mario, budgets.’
‘Can you divert patrol teams from the city?’
‘We’re stretched there too.’
‘Dead end, then.’
She nodded. ‘However,’ she began, ‘there is one tactic that’s occurred to me. Do you know, or can you find out, the time elapsed between the last false alarm call logged in by our communications centre and the alerts from each golf club that’s been done?’