Death's Door

Seventy-eight

The security service safe house was in Millfields Road, a quiet thoroughfare well away from congestion zones, cars parked outside houses with the security of traffic-calming bumps, which prevented them being driven away at high speed.

David Barnes was waiting for Skinner and McGuire at a table in an upstairs room when they arrived just after two p.m. He was handcuffed and his ankles were secured to the legs of his chair. He glared at them as they entered and sat opposite him. ‘What the ’ell is this?’ he barked, in broad Mancunian. ‘Who are you barstards?’

The two detectives produced their warrant cards. ‘That’s who we are,’ said McGuire, as Skinner leaned back and stared coldly across the table. ‘And this is about you being done for the murder of two men, one of them a police officer.’

‘You’re crazy!’ Barnes screamed. ‘I never murdered anyone in my life.’

‘Of course you did,’ the chief superintendent told him. ‘You were in the army, a sergeant on duty with KFOR in Kosovo, about seven years ago. You were part of an interrogation team that interpreted its orders very broadly. You killed three prisoners under questioning in separate incidents, but the third one went public and you became an embarrassment. Consequently your death in action was reported, and you were quietly made to disappear, with the help of Mr Davor Boras, a facilitator with links to the CIA. You went to work for him as his chauffeur-cum-bodyguard. Your duties also included piloting the company’s light aircraft on occasion.

‘A few years ago, Mr Boras and his son decided that it would be a good idea if they appeared to be at odds, and so Dražen was seen to leave his old man’s business, set up on his own and take an English name. . David Barnes, on the basis that it might be handy to have two of you around.’

McGuire leaned forward. ‘Are you going to dispute any of that?’ he hissed. ‘Because my boss and I would love to interrogate you, just like you used to in Kosovo, only we’re better at it than you were. We won’t kill you, we won’t mark you, but we will fucking well waste you, in memory of our dead colleague.’

Barnes looked, and believed. ‘You’ve got all that right,’ he murmured, ‘but I never killed no copper.’

‘No,’ said Skinner. ‘This is what you did. On Saturday morning Davor Boras called you to see him. He gave you a return e-ticket for the Edinburgh shuttle out of Heathrow at twelve fifteen. He also gave you clothes, specifically jeans, a T-shirt, a very garish denim jacket and cap, and a pair of Oakleys. He ordered you to fly north, in that gear, and to meet the other David Barnes at a location in Edinburgh.

’You did just that. You met Dražen, you changed clothes, and you gave him the return ticket. Then you rode his motorbike back to Walkdean Airfield, near Newcastle, where Dražen had parked the company Beechcraft, and flew it back to the depot in London, returning to London in transport he had left there.

’While you were engaged in this pantomime, Dražen went to Wooler, in Northumberland where he killed a man named Daniel Ballester and, in mistake for two other people, Detective Inspector Steven Steele, a colleague and very good friend of ours.’

Barnes paled. ‘I read about that. He did that? Christ, mate, I never knew.’

‘I couldn’t give a shit what you knew,’ the DCC growled. ‘Tell me, David, do you love Sharon, your wife?’ Barnes nodded. ‘And do you love Wendy, the girl you’ve been shagging on the side in a flat in Victoria Park for a year now?’ The man gasped.

‘Actually, I don’t care about that,’ Skinner continued. ‘But I would like to know whether you would like to see either of them again, or whether you’re prepared to have your body fed through an industrial-sized tree-shredder, maybe before you’re quite dead. Because, mate, as you will have gathered from the depth of our knowledge, and because of the unconventional nature of your arrest, we are in a position to make that happen.’

He laid two sheets of paper on the table. ‘That’s your admission that everything within your sphere of knowledge happened as I have described. Did it?’ he snapped. ‘Yes or no?’

‘Yes!’ Barnes screamed again, but this time out of pure terror, as he stared at the nightmare across the table, pointing a pen at him like a dagger.

‘Then sign that, both pages, within ten seconds or Mario will start breaking your fingers.’

Barnes snatched the Pentel from Skinner, with both manacled hands, and scrawled his name, twice.

‘Thanks,’ said McGuire, amiably, as he pocketed the signed statement. ‘We’ll have you taken back to work now, hopefully before your boss notices you’re missing. But breathe just one word to him, and I promise you, the best that’ll happen is that your wife will hear about Wendy.’