Snow Storm

8

The offices of the SCDEA were hardly in the most salubrious of locations. Opposite a branch of a car rental firm, they looked like an up-to-date version of Gayfield Square; a testament to the architect’s lack of imagination or the lack of available options maybe.

They announced their arrival at the front desk and waited. The waiting must have been Edwards making a point. It went on for about ten minutes while Burke checked his phone messages and Facebook updates, eyed some managerial looking portraits of senior officers in the lobby and finally settled on looking at a pamphlet for Crime Stoppers.

It was DC Wilson who finally arrived, looking gregarious as ever. She escorted them to the lift where they made way up to the second floor. The office had a constant hum about it, the noise of activity, several brains processing information; analysts and coppers engaged in a constant struggle to stay one step ahead, or probably more accurately no more than a step behind the criminal fraternity.

They made their way towards a glassed off room at the back of the office, eyed by a stressed looking figure in an office to the side Burke presumed was Edwards. The man spoke into his phone in an animated fashion, gesticulating redundantly with his right hand.

Wilson took coffee orders and went in search of some biscuits as they sat one end of a long conference table. A plasma screen complete with camera hung from the wall at one end of the room for conferencing. On the opposite wall a drop down screen was positioned to take projections from above their heads.

They could see Edwards as he made his way across the floor towards the conference room. He was tall, around 6’2, fair hair and looked as though he kept fit, probably mid 40s Burke thought. In stark contrast to himself, Edwards was what you might realistically expect a Detective Inspector to look like.

“I have to apologise for my lateness, duty calls and all that,” he began, shaking Burke’s hand with a grip which was surprisingly limp.

“Not at all,” Burke lied, “we’re grateful for your time,” he lied again. “Nice offices.”

“Well, it keeps the rain off our heads,” Edwards replied, “But I’m sure you didn’t come here to appreciate the interior architecture.”

“No, quite right,” Burke confirmed. “Thought it’d be a good idea to call in person, seeing as I was through here anyway.” Lie number three.

“Good, well I’m glad you could fit us in,” Edwards grunted, through gritted whitened gnashers.

“Likewise.”

“Obviously, this has caused a bit of a stir.”

“Really?”

Edwards raised his eyebrows in a way that clearly said sarcy bastard. “Really.”

Burke lowered his in a way that clearly communicated mock empathy, with just the right amount of ha ha fuck you thrown in for good measure. “Well I’m sure we all want to inconvenience each other as little as possible. So what have you got for us?”

“I’d like to say not a lot. It would mean we hadn’t wasted hundreds of man-hours on this only for it to go straight down the swanny.”

Burke noted the way he used the expression. There was a hint of the wrong vowel in the way he tailed off with the Y; suggested Edwards was not a man predisposed to using such expressions, would rarely do so socially and probably only did here in a misguided attempt to buy himself some kind of social currency. Not Paisley boy then, or at least not educated here.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d take care of this. I can’t afford any more expensive losses.”

“Of course.” Burke replied.

“Good.” Edwards said, in the manner of a teacher who has just reprimanded a slightly disruptive pupil. “So, Vlad the Inhaler, AKA Vladimir Petrovsky.” He passed them a single paper copy of Vlad’s rap sheet. If it was possible, he looked even more unhealthy with the body attached, going on the evidence of his mug shots. Edwards fired up the projector and hooked in his laptop as Burke and DC Jones leafed through the deceased’s rap sheet and MO. Burke had accessed this already. That was the easy bit, a matter of public or at least police record and so readily available on the database. Edwards ran through the rap sheet as he flicked through the file the projector. Vlad’s bloodhound face looked down at them from the stat covered screen, like the world’s most unlikely sportsman.

“He’s been on our radar for the past ten years, which is when he appeared in the country. Lithuanian national, did some serious time back home after running a crew of thieving scumbags and trying to pull off a daring armed robbery. Who’d have thought there was anything worth robbing in the former Eastern Bloc? Turns out someone was storing diamonds in Vilnius. More fool them. Seems our boy got wind of it. Anyway, he went away for five years, got involved with a bad crowd, or maybe just a worse crowd. Know anything about Russian prison gangs Burke?” He asked this in a way that suggested it was a challenge.

“Not especially. Thought you said he was Lithuanian?”

“Okay, former Soviet Union prison gangs then. He’s ethnic Russian, hence the name. You get the picture. He got involved with those boys before coming out with more fingers just itching to get into more pies than most men would be capable of. You name it, our boy was into it. As I say, he appeared on these sunny shores some ten years back, by way of London. It looks like some of the brotherhood were already fully installed there, but ever the opportunist, Vlad stepped on more than a few toes. They dispatched him to the great undiscovered northern frontier. He settled in like the parasite he is, flitting between the two cities until he got a proper foothold in the capital. He started up with some light people trafficking taking advantage of your fair city’s lenient attitude to saunas slash massage parlours to cash in on his…” He coughed and pantomime fashion, “imports, before throwing in some extras for his clientele, mainly coke. Then about five years ago he got all technological and discovered the merits of internet fraud. This is the latest information we have on his activities.” Edwards opened an Excel spreadsheet. There were different tabs for each of Vlad’s income streams and the names of various contacts, phone numbers and addresses.

“Of course, he got the name due to his love of the hard stuff. He obviously got bored of snorting coke and took up smoking crack. And that’s when things really went nuts. Around a year ago he seems to have cleaned up his act. Edwards pulled out a dongle like object and plugged it into the side of his laptop. He opened the visualisation program and dumped all the data from the spreadsheet into it. As it updated, they were presented with a selection of graphics, structures that looked like snowflakes forming. Names linked to names, linked to addresses, linked to crimes. Vlad’s life in one continuous all-encompassing graphic; this was what they had come for.