He closed the netbook, laid it aside and took a cellphone from his pocket. ‘This was Tomas’s.’ He found the video folder, hit the ‘play’ key and held it close to McCullough’s face. Neither he nor Martin could see the movie, although they had before, and they had heard the sound, the strange, unintelligible words, and then the endless, endless scream. As it continued the man seemed to press himself further and further back into his chair, his eyes becoming smaller and smaller as they screwed up tight. ‘I would like to believe,’ said Skinner when it was over, ‘that you didn’t order Dudley to do that. Otherwise I will have to consider very seriously letting Jonas know that you did, and then not giving a fuck when he comes back for you. If that happens, I doubt if he’ll stop at toes.’
‘That Dudley was a fucking animal,’ McCullough whispered. ‘Greedy, ambitious and a fucking animal. Henry might not have been too nice, but he had a soft side.’ He caught Martin’s incredulous stare. ‘Oh yes, and he showed it, losing it and killing that guy when he found what he’d done to that girl, then taking her to the doctor’s when she was supposed to go to the farm with the rest. A big mistake, as it turned out. But Dudley. .’
His face twisted, and in that expression Skinner and his colleague saw the heart and soul of Grandpa McCullough, the man within that he had determined to hide for good, at whatever cost. ‘My daughter actually wanted to marry the pig,’ he growled, ‘but I told her that would happen over his dead body.’
‘Your granddaughter took his name, though,’ Skinner countered. ‘She used it when she went to a club where everybody knows that a lot of cops hang out off duty, and picked up one of my young officers. She fucked him so enthusiastically that he thought nothing of telling her all about his day’s work, pillow to pillow, including the bit about the disposal of Tomas’s share in Lituania SAFI to a woman neither he nor anyone else could stand. His inspector brought him to see me this morning, after he’d discovered who she. . “Cheeky Davis”, she called herself. . really was.
‘Poor lad was in tears,’ he continued, ‘not because he thought his career was over. . which it isn’t. . but because he really did believe that she was the only woman he’d ever love. When you asked her to get close to the police in Edinburgh if she could, to check whether we’d bought the story of Tomas’s suicide, and the other accidents, you couldn’t have imagined that she’d pick up that piece of information, but what a bonus when you did. It meant that Dudley could torture Valdas to get Laima’s signature on a piece of paper signing her inheritance over to you.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, she’s a smart lass, all right. She was nearly rumbled last Friday, when Andy here turned up at a dance she was at with her lad. He’d have recognised her, of course, but she had the presence of mind to get them both out of there before he spotted her.’
‘My granddaughter is an independent young woman,’ McCullough murmured. ‘She makes her own choices. I’ve called her Cheeky all her life, and as for using the name of her mother’s partner, nothing unusual about that.’
‘No more unusual than driving robbery vehicles,’ Martin said. ‘And getting away with it, this time. The Crown Office have accepted Himes’s bargain. We can guess whose idea it was, too. You’re sending your own daughter to jail to keep her clear.’
‘Serves Inez fucking right, the idiot, for getting Cheeky involved in it. She’s going to blame Dudley though; she won’t get that long. And it was his idea; she told me the clown knew an assistant pro in the Czech Republic. They were going to send the stuff out there in a crate and he was going to flog it in his shop. Not to France, mind, not Germany, not Spain, where they’ve got real money. No, to the Czech Republic, where they’ve hardly got any fucking golfers. He might have been good at thieving, but when it came to business, brainless. .’ his eyes gleamed, ‘. . and now literally so, now that I come to think about it.’
Suddenly, McCullough sat upright, as if he was coming to attention in his chair. ‘That’s it, gentlemen,’ he announced. ‘This conversation’s at an end. I have another meeting.’
Skinner stood. ‘It’s not quite over. Do something for us, please. Take your tracksuit top off.’
The man laughed, grimly. ‘Why don’t you do the same and we’ll have a pose-down? You look like a chunky guy.’
‘Maybe, but that’s not the issue. When Tomas and his partner went to Uruguay with Valdas and the partner’s minder to set up Lituania SAFI, they all got tattooed, to celebrate. So please, humour us.’
‘Fine,’ McCullough agreed, affably. He unzipped the jacket and slipped it off; beneath it he wore a red Nike training vest, sleeveless, so that his arms were completely exposed. Just below his right shoulder, where Tomas Zaliukas had sported his tattoo, a square of skin was redraw and blistered. ‘A wee accident,’ he said, as the police officers stared. ‘Silly me, I spilled some fucking acid on it.’ He put the top back on. ‘Now, if that’s us done. .’
The chief constable shook his head. ‘No, no, there are two more things. First, the massage parlours.’
‘But they’re not mine, so there’s no point in asking me to sell them, if that’s what you’re going to do.’
‘No, I wasn’t going to. Instead, I want you to get word to the owner, whoever he might be, that I want those places to be run impeccably. No noise, no nuisance to the neighbours and absolutely no illegality going on in there, other than the thing we know about and ignore for the greater public good.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said McCullough. ‘After all, wasn’t that what this whole business was about?’ He smiled. ‘And your other concern?’
‘Regine Zaliukas. She’s coming back, and she’s going to be running Lietuvos Leisure and Lietuvos Developments. You do not even look in her direction. If you approach her in any way, then what I said about Jonas applies. Someone will call him, and turn him and his army loose on you. Not me, of course. I stand apart from such things, just as you do.’
He nodded. ‘I always regarded Mrs Zaliukas as a better business person than her husband. I wish her all good luck in her future endeavours, but I have no desire to extend the CamMac group holdings into Edinburgh. The fact is,’ he added, ‘I doubt if that city’s big enough for both of us.’
‘No,’ Skinner concurred. ‘You can be sure that it isn’t.’
Eighty-eight
‘He wasn’t talking about himself and Regine, you know,’ said Martin as he drove on to the motorway from the slip road. ‘That bit about the city.’
‘Neither was I,’ Skinner snorted.
‘What did you think of him?’
The chief constable leaned back in the passenger seat and reflected on the question. ‘I think he’s one of the most dangerous men I’ve ever met in my life. It’s not so much his physical menace, although he has that in plenty. It’s his ruthlessness and his complete thoroughness that sets him apart. He’ll never feel your heavy hand on his shoulder again, or anyone else’s for that matter. He’s way, way too clever. I hope Murtagh never upsets him, though.’ He smiled. ‘What have I just said? Maybe I do. If I was him I’d steer clear of Goldie, though, given what happened to Grandpa’s last brother-in-law.’