A Rush of Blood

Eighty-seven

‘Do you agree with my diagnosis?’ Skinner asked.

‘About Mario and Neil as a command pairing? Yes, I do. Truth be told,’ Andy Martin continued, ‘I wondered about it when you made the two appointments, but the guys had worked their way there. Sometimes you find things out by trial and error.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘There might be a solution soon, though.’

‘What’s that?’

‘There are going to be two jobs coming up in Tayside; mine and the chief’s. Graham Morton told me he’s going early.’

‘Really? First I’ve heard of it.’ He frowned. ‘I doubt if Mario would fancy a move to Dundee, though, and he’s not eligible for the top job anyway. And Neil couldn’t apply for either.’

‘No, but Brian Mackie could. He’d be a perfect replacement for Graham. Right age, right experience.’

‘By God, you’re right,’ Skinner conceded. ‘I don’t want to lose him, but he deserves the step up. I can’t prompt him, though, Andy.’

‘No you can’t, but I can mark his card. Leave it with me: this conversation never happened.’ He glanced around the great hallway in which they stood. It was Victorian, reminiscent of much of Edinburgh’s New Town, he thought, but grander than any building he could recall. ‘First time I’ve been here,’ he remarked. ‘I hate to admit it, but McCullough runs a very impressive hotel.’

‘What’s it called? I missed the sign when you drove in.’

‘It’s doesn’t have one, not on the road; very discreet. Its name is Black Shield Lodge.’

‘Sounds Masonic.’

‘That’s your Motherwell origins showing.’

‘Maybe,’ he paused as a figure approached them from the right of the stairway, ‘but I tell you one thing. It takes more than a building to stamp class on a place. The staff have a lot to do with it too.’

Martin turned, and laughed softly when he saw who was coming to greet them.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Thomas Murtagh. He was dressed in a five-hundred-pound suit, and immaculately groomed, his hair the customary shade that everyone who saw it assumed was a dye. ‘Welcome to Black Shield.’

‘Nice to see you in a jacket and tie,’ Skinner retorted, ‘and with your fly zipped. You can stop faking nice, though. You hate our guts, and we don’t like you either.’

‘I try to be professional. My client is ready to see you, but there are a couple of ground rules I want to get clear.’

‘What?’ the chief constable roared. ‘We’re police officers, and you’re nothing. You hear me? Nothing!’

‘I’m Mr McCullough’s adviser,’ the former politician countered,

‘and the only way to see him is through me.’

‘Our pleasure,’ Skinner growled, then felt Martin pull gently at his sleeve, as if he was tugging at a leash.

‘Go on, Mr Murtagh,’ he said. ‘Say what you have to and we’ll decide whether we’re staying, or whether we’re going to arrest your client.’

‘I don’t see that you could. My advice to Mr McCullough is that we should all be clear that this is a private visit, not an official one, and that he should be sure that it isn’t recorded.’

‘Oh for fu. .’ the chief sighed. ‘If we were going to tape him, we’d be doing it at our place, not his. As for it being official, just get out the road or it will be.’ Murtagh’s nostrils flared. ‘Now!’ he barked.

‘Very well. Follow me. My client’s in the leisure club lounge. There’s no one else there just now.’ He led them through the hall, out of the building by a back door and across the lawn towards a glass annexe, built to enclose a swimming pool. They followed Murtagh inside, then through it, past the pool and into the area beyond, a gym, with exits marked ‘Spa’ and ‘Relaxation Room’. Their escort opened the door of the second, and ushered them through.

As he looked at Cameron McCullough, Bob Skinner had a very strange reaction. For the first time, he felt every one of his fifty years, a birthday he had decreed would pass by with no recognition by anyone other than his wife and older daughter. He knew that the man was eight years older than him, and yet he realised that anyone walking in on them would take him for his junior. He had a full head of silver hair, and skin that although tanned was smooth and shining with health. He wore a black tracksuit, narrow-waisted, broad-shouldered, and he stood with his thumbs tucked into the pockets of the trousers.

‘Welcome to my world,’ he said, in a voice that seemed to have no accent, and certainly no hint of Dundonian. ‘I understand you want to see me.’

Skinner nodded, then pointed at Murtagh. ‘He leaves.’

‘Oh no I don’t,’ the man retorted.

The chief ignored him, looking McCullough in the eye. ‘In that case, we do. I’ve seen you; job done.’

McCullough smiled, showing perfect white teeth. ‘Tommy, excuse us, please.’

‘But Cameron. .’

‘It’s all right. I’ll pull the panic alarm cord if they get rough with me. Go on, now.’ He laughed. ‘I’ll take it as read that you’ve searched them for hidden microphones.’

Murtagh’s face flushed; he left the room, avoiding the police officers’ eyes as he passed them.

‘He tries,’ McCullough chuckled, as the door closed. ‘I’m sorry about all that crap about recordings; I like him to think I take his advice seriously. He’s useful to me. By the way,’ he added, ‘this room isn’t bugged.’

‘He’s got no influence in politics any more,’ Skinner murmured. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

‘Of course he hasn’t, nationally, but he’s still got some sort of name on Tayside. He knows the councillors, so it’s worth having him on the payroll. I’ve got other political consultants, of course, but they like to stay in the background.’ He picked up a fruit bowl from a table in the centre of the room and offered it. ‘Would you like an apple? Or there’s smoothies in that fridge in the corner if you’d prefer.’

‘We’re fine, thanks. We had lunch in Perth on the way up.’

‘You could have lunched with me, if you’d said.’ The smile again. ‘But maybe not. You know why Tommy was so keen to stay, don’t you? He’s worried you’ll tell me about catching him with my sister.’

‘You knew about that?’

‘Please, Mr Skinner! Surely you know what’s going on in your family?’

‘I don’t have any sisters, my kids are all youngsters, apart from my adult daughter, and she’d kill me if she caught me spying on her.’

‘Your daughter’s a bright girl, I hear. A coming force in Edinburgh legal circles.’

Skinner felt his eyes narrowing, and realised that it was obvious when McCullough raised a hand. As the same time, he sensed Martin stirring beside him.

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen; please, no,’ their host exclaimed. ‘I’m a businessman, and I keep myself abreast of what’s happening in Scotland, and beyond. I like to know who the top talent is, in case I ever need to add to my team of advisers. I promise you I haven’t been checking up on the young lady specifically.’

‘You’d better mean that,’ Martin murmured.

‘Of course I do.’

‘My friend has this fixation,’ said Skinner. ‘He dreams about putting you in jail. He thought he had you too, only you managed to walk away from it.’

‘There were no witnesses to the alleged murder.’ He grinned. ‘There wasn’t even an alleged body. And the police couldn’t produce the alleged drugs that they alleged were mine.’

‘No, they couldn’t, could they. But there were witnesses. They couldn’t be produced because they’d vanished, but they existed. Their bones probably still do, unless you had them fed to pigs too.’

‘Here,’ McCullough protested ‘if you’re going to start that, maybe this should be formal, and maybe I should have Susannah Himes here.’ He relaxed once more. ‘But no, let’s keep this as a quiet chat. I’ll say this, just the once: you’ll never find anything, never, that links me to any enterprise other than those that I own and of which I’m a director.’

It was Skinner’s turn to laugh. ‘Oh Christ, I know that. We never will, and not least because there’s been a disease that’s taken all the witnesses out. Tomas Zaliukas, Ken Green, the Gerulaitis couple. You know what? I think Valdas would have died in that fire anyway, even if Tomas hadn’t pulled his trick of leaving his shares in your offshore company to his nasty wife.’

‘There you go again,’ McCullough sighed.

‘Yes I do,’ the chief retorted, as he lowered himself into a chair, ‘because this is a private meeting like you wanted, and we’re going to talk. I’m going to tell you what we know, and you’re going to listen.’

The man shrugged. ‘OK.’ He took a seat beside the window as Martin walked across to the fridge and chose a soft drink. ‘Shoot.’

‘I’ve been known to, but not today. That’s not something your people are much into either, not recently at any rate. They’ve used other methods. I want to show you some stuff. Andy, have you got that netbook?’

‘Yes, it’s here.’ Martin opened his attaché case and produced a small computer. He hit the space key and it awoke from slumber.

Skinner took it as he rose and crossed to sit beside McCullough. ‘Let me show you some photos, Cameron.’ He clicked a folder and a grotesque image appeared on screen, naked flesh, gore, bone. ‘That’s Tomas Zaliukas on the mortuary slab. . before they started to carve him up, but after he had done what he was compelled to do to save the lives of his wife and children.’ He clicked again and a slide show began. ‘That’s a man called Linas Jankauskas, after your brother-in-law broke his neck.’ Pause. ‘That’s Valdas Gerulaitis, after the fire.’ Pause. ‘That’s his wife.’ Pause. ‘That’s Ken Green, dead in his car, after Henry and Dudley had finished with him. We know they were in the cottage, by the way; we’d have them if they were alive.’ Pause. ‘Only they’re not. This is them as they were found, on Monday night, after Jonas Zaliukas had finished with them.’ Skinner held the photograph and zoomed in on it. As he looked at it, McCullough gave a short gasp, his first reaction. ‘See those things on the ground?’ the chief asked. ‘Jonas played a game before he killed them. This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home, and so on. He played it four times, once with each foot, and then he put them away. Did he tell you he was going to do that when he came to see you, Cameron?’

The man’s eyes locked on to Skinner’s. ‘What do you mean, came to see me?’ he snapped, but a second too late. ‘Pure fucking fantasy.’

‘Fantastic but true. Jonas paid you a surprise visit, at home, on Monday. You had no idea he existed, did you, or what he was. You and he had a chat, just like this one, and after that, probably in exchange for him agreeing to stop at the two of them, you set up your brother-in-law, and Dudley. You’re a seriously hard man, I know, but so’s Jonas. And you’re both realists, so you did a deal, the two of you. Why do I say this? Because Goldie told us that Henry took the call that sent him to the barn on his mobile, his shop-bought pay-as-you-go, no contract, anonymous mobile, the same as Dudley had, and the same as you’ve got so that we can never trace certain calls you might not want us to. Your privacy means everything to you, Cameron; you kill to protect it. Henry took your call, he put his phone in his pocket, he took a gun. . he must have sensed something was off, or you slipped him a signal in your instructions. . and he went to his death. How do I know that’s what happened? Because we never found their fucking phones, man, and we know for sure that Henry had his on him. Jonas took them away from the scene, and destroyed them, along with the legally held shotgun he took from his brother’s house and the shears he took from his garden shed. That was part of your agreement, no doubt. But no, Jonas never told you about his plans for their toes, did he, and he didn’t tell you about this.’

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.’