‘Were you aware that one of these places, in Polwarth, caught fire, and another, in Lauriston, was flooded out, not long before the sales happened?’
‘Of course not.’
McGurk smiled. ‘Neither were we, to be honest, until I asked a few questions of my colleagues in fire and rescue earlier on today. Did you know that another initially reluctant seller, a guy called Kenny Bass, was the victim of a hit and run accident not long before you and he came to terms?’
‘I’ve no knowledge of any of that stuff. Look,’ he protested, ‘Tomas ran his pubs and clubs like clockwork, but as far as I know he kept his hands well off the other places.’
‘What do you know about Gerulaitis?’
‘Nothing!’ He hesitated. ‘Well, I know he was Tomas’s cousin, and I know that when Tomas went to Uruguay to set up the company, he took him with him for. . well, for company.’
‘Were you there too?’ Haddock asked.
‘No. That wasn’t necessary; I made all the arrangements through an agent.’
‘Since yesterday, have you had any instructions about the running of these businesses?’
Green shrugged. ‘Who’s to give me instructions? Regine, I suppose, but that’s hardly going to be at the top of her to-do list right now.’
‘Not necessarily Mrs Zaliukas,’ said McGurk.
The lawyer’s eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean by that?’ he challenged. ‘Who else would Tomas have left his piece of the company to?’
‘I’m not free to tell you that, but I do know that it isn’t her, or their children. All I will say is that while you might have been able to maintain your innocence before, you might find it more difficult from now on.’
Twenty-eight
‘I preferred the old Royal,’ Alice Cowan volunteered, as she tucked the parking slip into her pocket.
‘Before my time in Edinburgh,’ Montell reminded her. ‘What sort of a building was it?’
‘You mean “is”; it’s still there. It’s being redeveloped. Victorian. Ancient. Something like Gormenghast, if you know your Mervyn Peake. It was a shambles of a place, a nightmare to get about, with its own resident cockroach population that they could never quite eradicate, big old-fashioned wards with little or no privacy, just about everything a hospital shouldn’t be. . and yet people loved it, and they associated with it in a way they never will with this new place.’
‘Parking must have been a nightmare.’
‘Not as bad as you’d think, and not as expensive as it is here either.’
‘Claim it on expenses.’
She gave him one of her rare, warm smiles; sometimes he thought they were rationed to a set number per day, or even per week. As he looked at her, he found himself wondering whether she smiled in bed, and resolved to find out. ‘Too damn right,’ she said, knocking him off his guard for a second.
‘Where is the girl?’ he asked, snapping himself back to the professional present.
‘Ward two zero seven. General medicine, second floor.’
‘You seem to know your way around.’
‘A cousin of mine was in here last year, in the same ward.’ Alice led the way into the building, and straight in until they came to the main stairway. ‘Over there,’ she said, when they reached the second level.
‘Where do we find her?’ Montell muttered.
‘Dunno.’ She paused then pointed towards a young woman PC, in uniform, who stood at the entrance to the ward. ‘But she might give us a clue. Hiya, Kylie,’ she greeted her, as they approached.
The girl looked round, startled. ‘Alice,’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you here for the kid?’
Cowan nodded, then glanced sideways at her companion. ‘Yes. Do you know Griff Montell? Griff, PC Kylie Knight.’
‘How do,’ she said, as she shook hands with the burly South African, thinking, no, but I’d like to. ‘I’m glad to see the pair of you. I’m bored out my scone just standing here. Waste of time, too. The lassie isn’t going anywhere. She’s just glad they’re feeding her. Has she been charged with anything?’
‘No.’
‘What? Not even possession? Then what the. .’ pause, ‘. . am I doing here?’
‘We think she’s a victim of a sex crime. The story we have is that she was found in the street. We thought she might have escaped from somewhere. You were here in case somebody came after her.’
‘Well, nobody did,’ Knight replied, still a little reproachful. ‘Can I go, now the CID posse’s arrived?’
‘Humour us, Kylie,’ said Montell. ‘Look after our horses while we interview her, then we’ll know if we still need cover here. Where is she, anyway?’
Knight half-turned, indicating a door behind her. ‘She’s in that side room. The interpreter arrived about five minutes ago; she’s in the nurses’ station with the charge nurse. Ah,’ pause, ‘she’s seen you.’
The detectives looked into the ward, to see a male, blue-clad nurse approaching, followed by a small woman, in a dark trouser suit. ‘I’m Russell Cairns,’ the man announced, ‘and this is Mrs McStay, from university.’
‘Lyudmila McStay,’ the interpreter added, in explanation. ‘I acquired the surname ten years ago.’
‘DCs Cowan and Montell,’ the former replied. ‘We were called yesterday when our girl was brought into the surgery. How is she now?’ she asked Cairns.
‘She’s OK for you to talk to. We want to keep her for at least another day, though, to let the drug clear her system. We’ve identified it as GHB, for sure.’
‘So have we,’ Montell told him. ‘Our lab’s also working on other samples.’
Cairns winced. ‘I won’t ask. We’ve also tested for the whole range of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV; happily she’s come up clear, so far, but it’ll take weeks for us to be absolutely certain. Come on, let’s look in on her.’ He led the way past PC Knight and into the small side room. The window looked south, letting the weak afternoon sunshine brighten the scene. The girl the detectives had last seen the day before lay on the only bed in the ward, propped up on cushions with an empty plate on her lap, a bag of sugar sweets on her side table, and a can of Irn Bru in her hand. Her hair had been washed and brushed, and some colour had come back to her cheeks, making her look even younger and far prettier than before. She smiled at the nurse as he stepped up to her, but when she looked beyond him, at Cowan and Montell, it was without the faintest flicker of recognition.
Mrs McStay went to the foot of the bed. ‘We’ve already had a chat,’ she told the officers, ‘but only to establish that her name is Anna Romanova, and that she’s fifteen years old.’
‘Fifteen?’ Cowan hissed.
‘That’s what she told me, and I don’t doubt it.’
‘Does she know why we’re here?’
‘No, and it’s pretty obvious she doesn’t even know who you are.’
‘Then tell her please.’
They listened as the interpreter spoke to her, in her own language. Halfway though, a frown appeared on her face, and by the time she was finished it had turned to a look of pure fear, reflected by the tone of her voice, unmistakable to them, even in an alien tongue.
‘She says have you come to send her back?’
‘Tell her, if you can,’ Montell replied, ‘that we’ve come to look after her. Her best interests are all we’re interested in. Ask her where she’s from.’
As Mrs McStay explained what he had said, Anna seemed to calm down, but the frown remained. When she replied, a conversation developed, and continued for some time.
‘I’ve made her understand,’ the translator told them when it was over, ‘that you two are on her side, that you’re not going to put her in prison. I’ve anticipated some of your questions, and established a little more. Anna is Russian, but only ethnically. She says that she is from Estonia. . that’s quite believable; a quarter of the population are of Russian descent. . that she was born there, and so were her parents. They were killed in a train accident when she was eight; there was nobody to look after her, other than her grandmother, her father’s mother, who was too old to take her on, so she wound up in an orphanage called St Olaf’s, run by the Russian Orthodox church. . although from what she says, it wasn’t very Christian in its practices. She also speaks Estonian, by the way, but it’s been very much her second language all her life.’