‘Understood.’
The chief constable retraced his steps and joined McGuire, McIlhenney and Wilding in the dead Lithuanian’s bedroom. ‘Right,’ he said, briskly, ‘I don’t need to tell you guys that we have got some job on our hands. First we need to find this van driver, or whatever the hell he is. OK, I know we can’t rule out the possibility that Jankauskas died after he took the girl. . what was her name again?’
‘Anna,’ Wilding volunteered. ‘Anna Romanova.’
‘. . Anna, out of here, but the autopsy may do that for us. We also can’t assume that he acted alone, but Arthur may be able to tell us one way or the other. But we go for this man, big time, computer-generated image if we can get one, the lot.’
‘We should get one, sir,’ said the sergeant, explaining Sally Ross’s cartoon connection.
‘Good. Then find her, now, put her together with one of our programmers and see if she can come up with a likeness.’ He frowned. ‘But that’s not all. From what I’ve been told, there are eight other trafficked girls in this city, and we have to assume that they’ve all been forced into the sex trade, as Anna was. We need to find them, and we need to keep our fingers crossed that there aren’t even more of them out there. That means I want every one of Tomas Zaliukas’s massage parlours opened up, and I want it done within an hour.’
‘Does that mean we’ll need twelve warrants?’ McGuire asked.
‘Mario, we don’t need any fucking warrants. We now have clear evidence that serious crimes are being committed in these places, and that gives us the right to go in there forcefully. While we’re doing that, we’ll raid the homes of every one of the managers of record, simultaneously, and every one we catch will be arrested on suspicion of involvement in people trafficking.’
He stopped and looked at the Glimmer Twins. ‘Isn’t it fascinating, guys,’ he murmured, ‘that on the very day that Tomas Zaliukas took his own life, all this stuff started to blow up?’
‘Yes,’ McIlhenney conceded. ‘It’s as if he knew it was going to happen and couldn’t face the consequences when it washed over him.’
‘Mmm. Looks that way, doesn’t it? Too bad he’s not around to tell us.’ Pause. ‘But fortunately, someone else is. Neil,’ he said, ‘you’re in charge of the massage parlour operation. Get the managers’ addresses from the city council’s licensing office. Pull in uniforms from every city division; use Ray, Becky Stallings and the four officers you have here, and get the job done.’ His eyes shone. ‘While you’re doing that, Mario and I have another job to take care of. We’re going to pick up Valdas Gerulaitis, this Snowman as Montell and Cowan say the girl called him, and light a fire under him.’
Thirty-seven
‘Yes, I met with him, Pops,’ Alex replied. ‘I don’t think he enjoyed our discussion, but he cooperated. But beyond that, I can’t talk about him. You know that.’
‘You can’t talk about Valdas Gerulaitis, your client. But you can help us trace Valdas Gerulaitis, wanted by the police for trafficking teenage girls from Estonia to Scotland for the purpose of prostitution.’
‘What!’
‘You heard me. Have you seen today’s edition of the Evening News? There should have been a piece in it about us trying to identify a young girl who was found drugged in Leith yesterday.’
‘Yes. I saw one of the office copies; I read that story.’
‘She’s one of them. Anna Romanova, a nice kid, according to Griff Montell and Alice Cowan, lured from a convent orphanage in Tallin, thinking she was going to be a housemaid in Scotland. Her description of the shitbag who recruited her matches your client to the very head and shoulders, so they say.’
Sat behind his steering wheel, he listened on his mobile to his daughter’s breathing, on hers. ‘What do you need?’ she asked, after a few seconds.
‘Are you still in the office?’
‘Yes.’
‘An address, that’s all. His phone’s ex-directory. There are places we could go to find out, but if you have his home details that would be quicker.’
‘One minute.’ She was gone for around half that time. ‘He lives in Cramond,’ she said. ‘No street number, just a name. His house is called “Vilnius”, and it’s in Poacher’s Close.’
‘I know where that is; not far from Tomas Zaliukas. He was in Gamekeeper’s Row, and of course his place had to be called “Lietuvos”, hadn’t it.’
‘Pops, when you arrest this man, will you be holding him?’
‘By the balls, as tight as we can, but I don’t know for how long.’
‘What about his wife?’
‘No reason to. Why do you want to know?’
‘I’ll have to arrange a replacement for Valdas, to take over his book-keeping. Even if you have to release him, I’m going to suspend him. I’ll ask the firm’s auditors to send me someone along, and I don’t want her getting in the way.’
‘Do you want me to tell her not to go to the office tomorrow?’
‘No, I’ll do that myself. If you let me know when you’ve left the house with Valdas, I’ll call her then.’
‘Will do. So long.’
He ended the call and slid his gear stick to D. As he drew away from the kerb, he told McGuire of their destination. ‘Will he still be there, boss?’ the head of CID mused. ‘If he’s seen the News as well, and read about the girl, won’t he have realised we’d be after him once she’d started to talk?’
‘Could be,’ Skinner agreed, ‘but he was in his office three hours ago, when he had his meeting with Alex. I reckon if he was going to do a runner, he’d have been gone by then. You heard what I said to Alex; it’s no certainty we’ll be able to keep him in custody for any longer than a day. He must be confident, and I may know why.’
‘Why should he be? Why shouldn’t we be able to charge him and have him remanded?’
‘Work it out, man,’ the chief said as he headed for the western outskirts of the city. ‘At this moment, we have the testimony of one girl that Gerulaitis was her procurer. That won’t be enough. If we’re going to convict him, we’ll need corroboration; the word of a fifteen-year-old who’s spent the last three months drugged isn’t going to be enough on its own. We’ll need at least one other girl to back up Anna’s identification. . assuming that she’s able to pick him out herself when we stick him in a line-up. Trouble is, at this moment, we only have her. The more I think about it, the fact that he was in his office as usual this afternoon gives me an uncomfortable feeling that when Neil’s crews knock down all those doors, they might not find much worthwhile behind them.’
Thirty-eight
‘I need every uniform you can spare, Mary,’ said DI Becky Stallings. ‘Neil McIlhenney told me this comes from the big guv’nor himself. We have five of these places on our patch, and we have to get into them right away. On top of that, three of the managers live close to the premises and we have to pull them in.’ She frowned at the superintendent. ‘It seems bloody heavy-handed to me, but them’s the orders.’
Mary Chambers smiled, grimly. ‘Make no mistake, Bob Skinner is heavy-handed, more so than anyone I’ve ever met, and I spent a good part of my career watching heads being split open in Glasgow, maybe even splitting one or two myself. But his judgement is also the sharpest I’ve ever seen, so if he says that something needs doing, you don’t stand around doubting him, you get on with it. Eight hits to make,’ she mused. ‘Do we expect resistance?’
‘Jack and Sauce say that all the massage parlours they’ve seen have “Closed” signs on them, so they should be OK. They’ve already been into the one in Leith and found no surprises. We’re to enter the rest, check that they really are empty and secure them for forensic examination, that’s all. The homes are different. Who knows what’s going to happen when we knock someone’s bleedin’ door down? Especially when the guy behind it’s a Lithuanian brothel-keeper.’