Snow Storm

24

Edwards was starting to outstay his welcome. It wasn’t so much that he did or said anything to make him any more annoying that the average career hungry wannabe top-dog. It was more the fact that he seemed to believe and embrace his own hype so wholeheartedly. It was more what he didn’t do or say in terms of his dealings with everyone around him that had the effect of making him an irritant. He was like an eyeful of chilli pepper, or maybe more like an eyeful of annoying condescending bastard.

It was implicit, Burke supposed; the air of grandeur and unquestioned sense of entitlement that can only be instilled from a young age.

Whatever; common decency dictated he should at least try to be tolerant, which was how they wound up in The Cask and Barrel, hanging off a pair of pint glasses, filled only with coke, owing to the time of day.

“I need this James, like you wouldn’t believe. Everything’s contracting. Know what I mean?”

Burke had a feeling he did.

“Everything’s being centralised, we’re all set to be one service and it won’t be long before the axe falls, you mark my words. First we’re part of a bigger beast, Police Scotland, one force, which could seem ok for movement and progression, seamless transition to different roles in different areas but you know there won’t be the opportunities, that’s the thing. They’ll be cutting expenses as always and this whole independence thing looming.” He snorted. “That’ll cut us off from everything if it happens. I’m off. I’ll tell you that much.”

“Really?” Burke heard himself say a bit too enthusiastically.

“Yes.” Edwards replied, dragging out the vowel as he clearly thought for a second and decided to confide his monumental plans. “Serious Organised Crime.”

“Serious Organised Crime?” Burke repeated, losing the will to live with every syllable as he looked longingly out of the window at what seemed to be welcoming drizzle right then.

“Yes. Serious Organised Crime. The UK’s very own answer to the FBI or who knows, maybe Europol. You have to think big.”

“Europol.” Burke repeated, wondering how bad pneumonia really was.

“Shouldn’t feel like a big fish in a small pond anymore. That’s the whole thing for me James. We’re part of a bigger world, a global village.”

Burke noted that he could make a suggestion for village idiot if required, should the vacancy become available.

Edwards sat up as though addressing a much larger audience, which was no small achievement, given the size of the booth they were in. “Let me ask you this Jim. What’s the most important factor in getting on in any business?”

“Knowing how to make a decent cup of coffee?”

“I’ll give you that.” Edwards conceded as he pulled a pen from his pocket, looking as though he was about to move this lecture along into one involving diagrams on the table, but instead merely attempting to use it as a pointing device, though directing it at nothing in particular. “But before that.”

There was a pause as Burke wondered whether he was actually supposed to answer what may or may not have been a question, realised he was and then fought a mini battle in his own head; one where he resolved not to utter the phrase “I don’t give a shit” purely on political grounds.

“It’s not what you know…” Edwards encouraged, seemingly unaware he was simultaneously encouraging the urge Burke had to break his nose or at the very least stamp on his toes before repeatedly jamming his fingers in a door. Instead he decided to frown in a way he felt sure suggested a state of abject confusion but equally could have conveyed constipation or the onset of coronary arrest.

“It’s… who…“ Edwards continued in the manner of a school teacher who has lost all sense of irony and self-respect.

“You bribe.” Burke suggested.

“Might help to grease the wheels I’m told but I couldn’t possibly comment. I was going for ‘who you know’”

“I see,” Burke replied. Not like he was a detective inspector or anything.

“All I need to do is get my name out there, you know, make some connections and I’ll be in. I’ll be playing on a whole other field. The same with Europol. Europe is just such a bigger thing to get my teeth into. There are so many opportunities there. I just need a starting point.”

“Didn’t Hitler have a similar idea?”

“Very droll.”

“So you need to stand out.”

“Exactly. If I can put away a suitably big name, such as our boy Andreyevich, well that’s an impressive scalp. People take notice of a catch like that. Then…” he said, taking a seat on the other side of the desk and leaning back in Burke’s chair. “Then I’ll be a shoe in. And don’t think I won’t remember my friends.” He nodded at Burke, who felt as though someone had poured a bucket of ice water down his back. He sincerely hoped Edwards would not remember him.

“The problem we have right now is the bugger isn’t saying very much is he.”

“No indeed,” Burke agreed. “The Bratva don’t.”

“How so?” Edwards asked, not knowing quite what he was being told.

“The Bratva or the brotherhood…”

“I know what it is roughly. I’ve even played the video game.”

Did people still play video games? Burke wondered if Edwards also liked to hang out at the local discotheque, while trying to chat up the local dolly birds or crumpet or some other seventies-ism for women. “Well, you’ll know who they are,” he replied.

“Of course. Russian Mafia. I’ve only been looking into their activities for the past year.”

“Well, yes. In this case Lithuanian of course but on the right track.”

“So he’s not talking because he swore some kind of oath to his Mafia chums and they might come and do him in on that basis. Seems fairly obvious. There are a good many of these shady business types who claim some kind of tenuous connection on the basis it gives them some kind of associated kudos. It’s no secret Andreyevich is in deeper than that and connected to something big. Honour among thieves is a myth though in my somewhat vast experience. Clearly there’s a war going on out there; first Vlad, then the body down in Leith and now Karpov all of which points in Andreyevich’s direction, given that that he’s connected to and probably owns Karpov’s holding company and Vlad was definitely linked to Karpov, who, let’s face it, was a total fucking enigma, there is a connection there. He just may turn out to be the kingpin and I want to take him down. It’s a fortuitous wind that blew him in our direction. I doubt he’s actually connected to the murders directly and frankly that’s not my issue, but if we can use what he’s in for and the murders as leverage, maybe offer him some kind of protection, we can certainly have a go at twisting his arm. If he knows, or at least thinks he knows he’s going down, and let’s face it, he has no way of knowing we don’t do wild-west justice over here, he might lift the lid on the whole shooting match. All we have to do is make him feel at home and think that the same standards apply here. Do you know how much coke there is on the streets right now?”

Burke shook his head.

“Well I do and let me tell you it’s not a trifling matter and not just something that’s gonna blow over at any moment. And do you know where it’s all coming from?”

Again Burke shook his head.

“Well neither does anyone else and that’s the point. While it’s good for business so to speak in the sense that it keeps all of us in a job, it’s one that seems more and more like treading water in a bog on a daily basis. I want out. I want to catch the big fish and Andreyevich has the look of the prize Marlin about him. We have to convince him to talk while we have him here.”

“That might be your problem.”

“How so?”

“I don’t think he’ll ever talk.”

“Why the defeatist attitude? There’s always a way. We just need to push the right buttons. As I say, fear must be the best motivation we have; fear of the unknown. If we can convince him we can protect him from the bigger players back home we’re in. And the lawyer didn’t look much cop. He’s never even been in this situation before. Just keep plugging away Jim. That’s all we have to do.”

“He’s not keeping schtum because he’s scared.”

“Then why else? An oath? I don’t buy it.” He scoffed and then inhaled deeply before letting out the sigh of a man frustrated by a lack of cooperation.

“It doesn’t matter whether you buy into it or not. What matters is what he buys into.”

“Ok,” Edwards sighed, “I’ll humour you. Go on.”

“We’ve, or rather you’ve established that Andreyevich and Karpov are involved in some way.”

“Undoubtedly. I’m certain Andreyevich owns the majority of the venture capitalist firm who own Karpov’s portfolio of companies. It’s a murky trail I grant you but we have had some forensic accountants look into it and the paper trail so far as I can tell, or more importantly as far as they can tell, looks to lead back to Lithuania and Andreyevich.”

“And what do you know about Andreyevich’s background?”

“Businessman.” Edwards coughed conveying his thoughts on this. “Known to have been involved in some fairly ropey property deals back in the mother country, where local officials who got in the way then got vanished, that kind of thing. Further back, known to have been someone who could get his hands on things. Had a reputation as a top class thief. Records are not quite what they might be. He goes off grid for some time in his late teens and early twenties, thought to have been doing time. Hazard of the job in the tea leaf trade. On the surface there’s nothing to link him to anything, but there are always stories, intelligence from the ground that hasn’t been officially documented. Things he’s ordered done to people’s families. One official tried to block a development in Vilnius, our boy’s home town. His whole family went missing for a month. When they did begin to show up, it was in instalments and I mean small instalments, in the mail. As a warning to others I’d say that was fairly effective, especially when no ransom note was ever attached and no demands were ever communicated.”

“Ok, so we know he spent time in prison.”

“We’re pretty much certain of that.”

“Well, going on Karpov it looks likely, and again I know what you mean about the murky records situation, believe me, I find it hard to trace very much on him without probably sending someone out there, and frankly we don’t have the funds. The surgeon’s coming back in here this afternoon with a solicitor of his choosing. Let’s hope he’s not doing any nervous boob jobs or face lifts and that no one gets stabbed in the eye with a wayward Botox needle in the mean-time. You could just about peel the Karpov’s skin off and stick it to the wall to get the edited highlights of his life story in hieroglyphics.”

“Really?” Edwards asked. “Into Egyptology was he?”

“A more local form of artwork. Russian or at least eastern bloc prison tattoos, all of which tell a story.”

“The fact he has them surely tells a story all of its own.”

“It does, but more specifically, each of the symbols has a different meaning.” Burke switched on his laptop and waited as it powered up and tried to connect to the internet via a dongle that had to wage a war with the pub’s thick stone walls.

“And what’s to stop the wannabe just inking himself with whatever symbol they feel the need to display, assuming they wanted to get a step further up the hierarchy without doing the leg work? It’d be a quick way to do it.”

“It’s strictly enforced by the prison gangs. They’ve been known to cut out the piece of flesh containing the tattoo or even beat people to death for less.”

He waited some more. Finally when the net was accessible again and he was able to read his emails he saw the one from Doc Brown with around fifty attached Jpegs, each showing a different chapter in Karpov’s extensively inked back story, reading to the trained eye like an odyssey of crime.

As Edwards flicked through the grim reel of photographs Burke gave a running commentary as best he could. “If we start with the neck, we can see that there is a dagger here with various drops of blood which are, well, dripping as they do. The knife indicates that Oleg was an assassin available for hire. That’s apparently one of the older ones, so possibly one of the ways he got his start in the business if you like. The drops of blood indicate that he has managed to off thirteen people at that stage. Perhaps he thought it was lucky to stop there.”

“I suppose on the upside they were thirteen criminals.”

“Our local friendly pathologist suggests that this one is over thirty years old, meaning Karpov was probably only in his late teens when he got it done. Moving on, the cat on his chest tells us that he was a thief and clearly proud of it, possibly why he was inside in the first place. The church with the multiple onion domes, rather than being a souvenir from St Basil’s Square actually symbolises time spent in the clink. The number of spires, in this case ten, indicates the number of years spent inside. Interestingly here there’s a rose on the left calf. If it was a white one it would symbolise the superiority of death over a loss of virtue, but the red one, with thorns indicates coming of age in the big house. The orthodox cross on his chest shows that he was eventually a high ranking criminal as does the epaulette on his shoulder and the star underneath. He has similar stars here.” Burke moved the slide show on to show two eight pointed stars geometrically stylised as asymmetrical images on each knee. “These tell the world that he will kneel before no one.”

“Top dog then,” Edwards said, shuffling through some more slides and coming to an abrupt halt at Karpov’s groin which, due to the surrounding artwork, with eyes, gave that part of his body the look of an elephant. “Cheeky one there.”

“Also the thing that led us to the surgeon,” Burke added. “There’s a tattoo for everything in the joint.” He flicked through to one last image. In gothic script, over the heart, the letters V O R were inscribed. “Recognise those?” he asked a clearly confused Edwards.

“Should I?”

“Not especially. Does the phrase Vori V Zakone hold any meaning for you?”

Edwards’ blank expression gave away the depths of his knowledge on this. Should have studied harder, thought Burke.

“Thieves in law. A fairly serious bunch.”

“Well if they’re anything like my in-laws they probably do.”

“Vory V Zakone or the Vori as they tend to be known, are a society all of their own. They originally sprung up out of the destitution in the wake of the communist revolution; prisoners who vowed to fight authority and orthodoxy of any kind. These guys are no mere Russian mafia, they’re a religious order almost. They’ve been around a hundred years or so and they’ve scaled the ranks of society in that part of the world during that time.”

“I hate a social climber,” Edwards chimed in.

“Well, these guys controlled the prisons in what was the Soviet Union, probably not the yacht club cocktail parties you were thinking of. With the collapse of communism they’ve managed to infiltrate other facets of life. Yeltsin had one of them as his minister for human rights until they discovered he’d helped a good few souls shuffle their way off this mortal coil in a previous incarnation. Some of them are pretty peaceful on the outside world now and of course, some of them or at least one of them, until very recently, was running a holding company here in our own capital city.”

“So you don’t think he’ll be easily broken then?”

“Not so much.”