20 - A Rush of Blood Read online

  ‘And yet you never said anything to us? Or even thought about it?’

  ‘Oh, but I thought about it, boyo,’ the chief constable told him. ‘I almost had the pair of you on the carpet for using the job to sort out a family matter. But when I considered it some more, I decided that if you had come to me and reported an attempted extortion, as you should have, I’d have told you to do exactly what you did. I knew who you two were at that point, but I didn’t know a lot about you. After that, I made it my business to find out, and by Christ, look where both of you are now.’

  McGuire smiled. ‘In that case it’s probably just as well that McIlhenney talked me out of beating the shite out of him and throwing him in the dock.’

  ‘That was a good career move on his part, I’ll concede . . . and on Tomas Zaliukas’s, when he threw himself on my mercy. He was desperate to convince me that he was entirely legit, and by that time, apart from the odd wee aberration like his silly threat to Beppe, I reckon he probably was. I’m quite certain that nothing illegal ever happened in any of his pubs, not with his knowledge at any rate. He went on to acquire a dozen pub and club licences across Edinburgh, and a few more in the counties around it. They were all spotless.’

  ‘No drugs going through any of them?’ asked Mackie, his tone sceptical. ‘Not even the discos?’

  ‘Nope. There were warning signs in all the toilets of his clubs, and the managers all had firm instructions; anyone caught smoking hash or popping pills on the premises was chucked out and barred. Anyone caught snorting coke or injecting was detained and handed over to us. It was the same with anyone pushing any sort of drug, but they were usually carrying a few lumps and bumps by the time we arrived.’

  ‘Those principles still apply,’ McGuire confirmed. ‘The notices are still there in the bogs in Indigo . . . and in any of Zaliukas’s pubs that I’ve been in. He welcomes cops in all of them, and because we go there, the places are clean in every respect, and there’s no chance of any of the new young hooligans going into any of them looking for protection money. As for Paula, I don’t think she knows that the place is owned by the same guy who scared her dad, if she even remembers that incident. But come to think of it, I’ve never seen Zaliukas in any of his own places.’

  ‘You don’t, very often,’ said Skinner. ‘Tomas has kept a low profile for some years now.’ He glanced at his deputy. ‘As for the drugs thing, Brian, not even in the wildness of his youth was he ever into that. Tony Manson wouldn’t have allowed it. He was a funny bugger, that one. I know that he dealt drugs himself; it was one of many things we couldn’t pin on him. But I always had the feeling that he did it so that he could control it in his territory. He didn’t leech on the users either; back then it was reckoned that Edinburgh had the cheapest smack in Scotland.’

  ‘Are you saying he was benevolent?’ Steele murmured.

  ‘I’m saying that if there can be such a thing as a responsible drug baron, he was. He realised that if he didn’t feed the demand, someone else would, somebody who didn’t care at all about the addicts, only about the money that could be screwed out of them. Manson didn’t really approve of the business, and he reasoned that made him the best person to run it. This strange morality of his led him to make sure that none of his closest associates, the people he liked most, were involved in it in any way. Lennie Plenderleith never was, and neither were Tommy Zale and his Lithuanian crew. He ran quality control himself, he subcontracted distribution to other people. They hired the dealers, and Tony had Dougie Terry . . . Remember him? The guy we called the Comedian? . . . keep an eye on them to make sure no liberties were being taken. If we’d been running the trade we couldn’t have done it better than he did. When Tomas started to break into the pub business, it was easy for him to make his places drug-free from the start, because Manson spread the word that they were off limits. By the time Tony died, Zaliukas was strong enough to make it stick himself.’

  ‘You sound,’ said Mackie, ‘that you wish Manson was still around.’

  ‘I do, in a way. Since he met his end, the business he ran with discipline and with the understanding that it’s bad practice to bleed your customers dry has been taken over by people with no morality at all. Fortunately they tend to be stupid and we knock them down pretty quick, but when we do that, in the process we create a business opportunity, and the whole cycle begins again. It’s like that bloke who had to push a rock uphill for all eternity.’

  ‘Sisyphus,’ Mackenzie volunteered.

  ‘You can get injections for that,’ the chief constable retorted. He looked up at the wall clock. ‘You people should be getting on with your day.’ As his colleagues stood, he added, ‘My highlight, incidentally, will be lunch in Oloroso with my daughter, to celebrate her appointment as a partner in Curle Anthony and Jarvis. She called me last night to give me the good news. The even better news is that she’s paying.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Steele exclaimed.

  ‘Thanks, Mags, but it was all her own work.’ As the others headed for the door, he put a hand on McGuire’s shoulder. ‘Stay for a minute, Mario, please. Sit yourself back down.’

  When Skinner resumed his seat he saw that the head of CID was smiling. ‘What’s tickling you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m thinking of what you said about Papa Viareggio. You were wrong. He wouldn’t have done anything to Zale himself; he’d have done what Paula did, more or less. She came to me and asked me to see to the guy as I thought best. He, though, he’d have called somebody else, and Zale would have had that hand with the tattoo nailed to a tree, maybe about ten feet off the ground. I remember when I was about eight or nine, this very old man came over from Italy for a visit. He was Papa’s uncle, Patrizio, and he was fucking ferocious. He wasn’t all that big, but he never smiled, and there was something about his eyes that chilled me; there was no twinkle in them, all darkness. He was, and remains, the scariest man I’ve ever met, and from what Papa told me when I was a bit older, my great-grandfather was just like him.’

  ‘Jimmy Proud, my predecessor, knew your grandad well,’ said the chief. ‘He liked him, but he reckoned that he’d evolved from a long line of brigands, and that you have a lot of his blood in your veins. He was right, and it’s brought you to where you are now.’

  ‘I’ll settle for that,’ the DCS confessed, ‘although I’m still surprised by it. When I was a detective constable, detective sergeant was the height of my ambition. I never dreamed I’d get any higher.’ He nodded towards the ceiling. ‘Thanks, Papa.’ He paused. ‘What did you want to talk about, boss?’

  ‘Zaliukas. I’m still thinking about him. That incident with Beppe could have shaken the last of the cowboy out of him; indeed I thought it had. He built his leisure chain still further, he went into property development, taking old, derelict buildings and restoring them; he won a lot of respect in the business community. There was even a feature on him in Insider magazine. He was about to be up there with the big boys . . . and then he went and got himself kicked off the ladder. You know how, of course?’

  ‘Sure,’ said McGuire. ‘He bought Tony Manson’s massage parlours, from his estate, after his death. And when word of that got around, it reminded every one of those establishment figures who were just about to accept him of what he was and where he’d come from. He was back on the outside.’ He looked at Skinner. ‘Did you know that Beppe was offered those, by the selling solicitor?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘The daft sod was interested, but Nana Viareggio, my mother, and Paula all vetoed it. After that, Tomas Zaliukas bought them. Why, do you think? You’re right, it did cut across what he’d been doing up till then.’

  ‘I believe,’ the chief replied, ‘that he honestly thought they’d fit into the leisure business that he was creating. If he did, big mistake, Tomas. It wasn’t like buying an old pub and giving it a makeover. The customer base of those places was never going to change. There was a naivety about Zaliukas; he was a family man by this time, happy with R
egine and Aimée, the first of his daughters. He may well have thought that there was a market for massage parlours, saunas, and general pampering. He may have thought that was what these places really did, even though he’d worked for Manson and seen them close up.’

  ‘Or maybe he just thought he could be anonymous,’ McGuire suggested. ‘I heard he set up another company to buy the places.’

  ‘Maybe, but whatever his motives were he wound up owning a chain of brothels, pure and simple. From being a fast-rising young tycoon, be became “the pimp” behind his back. Sure, he did spend money on the facilities, and he did employ a couple of people who actually were qualified masseurs, of both genders. But the same customers still went in there, with maybe an added twist. He had women turning up and booking the males, looking for the same special services. He had gay blokes going in expecting a hand job from them. Most of his new staff walked out; most but not all. So he gave in to the inevitable, and he ran the places as they’d always been run, on the borderline of legality, clean, but seedy, left alone because they bring prostitutes in off the street. I wonder if that had anything to do with Regine leaving,’ he mused.

  ‘Whether it had or not,’ said the head of CID, ‘his death isn’t something for us to follow up. The aftermath will be for Zaliukas’s lawyers. The man blew his brains out, unassisted; that’s how it was. Dorward’s people won’t find a scrap of evidence that says anything different.’

  ‘But he still has to be identified,’ Skinner pointed out. ‘From what you’ve said, he isn’t recognisable, and there won’t be enough left for a dental match-up either. His tattoo isn’t going to satisfy a court.’

  ‘We’ll get DNA from his car, or from his house, and we’ll match it to the body. That’ll do it.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ the chief granted. ‘But the thing is,’ he continued, ‘I want us to investigate it. Unless the post-mortem shows up a credible reason, I’d like to know what it was that drove Tomas to do something as out of character as taking his own life. What’s the responsible division? Arthur’s Seat? Central, yes. I’d like you to have Becky Stallings and her team do some digging. They don’t necessarily have to go looking for Regine, but they should talk to his team, the people who worked for him, talk to everyone who had regular dealings with him. Find out if anything had happened lately, anything serious enough to make him do something as drastic as this.’

  ‘Is that really our business? We all have to prioritise, boss.’

  ‘It’s a sudden death, from gunshot wounds. We’re required to make a report to the fiscal, so that he can decide how to categorise it. That makes it our business; let’s just spend a bit more time on this than we normally would on a suicide.’

  ‘Even if it leads us nowhere?’

  ‘Even if . . .’ he stopped abruptly. ‘My friend,’ he went on, ‘I might be the wearing chief constable’s epaulettes, but I’m still a detective, and I will be till I die. All my career, I’ve found success by following my instincts. This time they’re telling me there’s something not right here.’

  Five

  Maggie Steele looked up at the façade of the divisional headquarters building in Torphichen Place. She had left her car in its secure park, but preferred to make her entrance boldly by the front door rather than casually by the back. She knew that word of her arrival would have been spread by the gate officer, but that made no difference. She remembered Skinner’s advice at the morning briefing, and wanted to gauge reaction as she walked into her old office for the first time as an ACC.

  The grey stone pile was not impressive. It was an old structure, and if it had been purpose built, then it had been for an era long left behind by modern policing. Any newcomers looking at it would have been forgiven for doubting its fitness for purpose before ever stepping inside; indeed they would have been right. It was small, it was cramped, and it was yards away from the complex Haymarket road junction, making vehicle access a nightmare at the peak periods which seemed to be extending to fill most of the day. It was always a shade too hot or a shade too cold. There was nothing about it that did not need improvement.

  And yet Maggie loved the place. Much of her police career had been spent there, in uniform and in CID. Its faults had been no hindrance to her rise through the ranks, and it had been the scene of the most unexpected yet uplifting turnaround in her personal life. It was where she and Stevie Steele had made their great discovery. Newly out of her unsuccessful marriage to Mario McGuire, she had been in charge of the Central CID office and Stevie had been her DI. They had known each other for years as friends and colleague. He had carried a reputation as something of a playboy, more because he had been attractive to women than from any headlong pursuit on his part, but it had meant nothing to her. He had been a nice guy and a good cop and that had been it. Until one night, one completely unexpected night when she had looked at him and everything, all her assumptions, all her certainties even, had been turned upside down. They became lovers, she fell pregnant, they were married, it was all unbelievable . . . indeed, if not for Stephanie, she might have believed that she had imagined it all. Not too good to be true, but too good to last.

  Life, she reflected, standing in that cold drab street, where the sun rarely shone in winter, is a series of judgement calls. We cross the road through traffic how many times a day? We flick how many switches that might be live, but are not? We drive through how many green lights trusting that we are not about to be T-boned by a skidding truck? Stevie’s fatal miss-call was to rush though a door in a cottage in Northumberland; the wrong door.

  By that time she had known of her illness, and had been faced with a life-threatening judgement of her own: to carry on with her pregnancy until Stephanie was almost full term, or to have her delivered weeks early, on the edge of viability, so that she could have surgery. In the aftermath of Stevie’s death, she had taken the gamble, put the egg before the chicken and delayed her vital operation. Since the end of her follow-up treatment, her regular scans had been clear, and her consultant was smiling. Most of all, though, her baby was perfect, and every time she looked at her, she could see her father.

  She shuddered, not only from the cold, and stepped towards the door entrance to the Divisional building. The door was pulled open before she reached it, by a veteran officer. ‘Good morning, ma’am,’ said PC Charlie Johnston, looking far more neat and tidy than she had ever seen him, ‘and welcome.’

  ‘Thank you, Constable,’ she said as she stepped inside, with a brief, formal nod, thinking, Bob was right. No more advance warning of visits.

  Superintendent Mary Chambers, in uniform, was waiting for her in the public area. She repeated Johnston’s ‘Good morning ma’am’ in a voice loud enough to be heard by the sergeant and two constables who were standing, almost at attention, behind the counter. ‘Jesus,’ Steele asked herself, mentally, ‘when Bob Skinner walked in here unannounced in my time, what did he see?’

  ‘And to you, Superintendent,’ she replied, feeling that she wanted to loosen up, but knowing that she had to maintain the formality. Chambers half-turned, stretching out an arm as if to escort her. Just then, the door at the back of the public office swung open, and Neil McIlhenney stepped through, slipping a waxed cotton jacket over his suit. ‘Hi, Mags,’ he said with a cheery smile, and carried on his way.

  Quickly, Steele headed in the direction from which he had come, leading the way upstairs, to what had been her office less than a year before. As she had expected, her former desk was neat; the files in the out-tray were stacked much higher than the in-tray. She hung her cap on the stand and slumped into a chair. ‘Bloody hell, Mary,’ she exclaimed, ‘I feel like a schools inspector.’

  The superintendent laughed. ‘Want a coffee?’

  ‘Tea, if you have it.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Steele watched as Chambers switched on her kettle, and found a mug and a tea bag as it came to the boil. ‘How goes?’ she asked, as Chambers finished brewing up.

  ‘
Job or personal?’

  ‘Job.’ She took the mug as it was passed to her, handle first. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Official report?’

  ‘No, I’d need that in print. Just you and me.’

  ‘Well, the highlight of my month is that Charlie Johnston’s two weeks off retiring. He’s a nice guy, but a throwback. He’s the original plodder after whom we’ve all come to be named, and he’s been filling in his time, drawing his pay and waiting for his pension from the day he joined the force.’

  ‘He’s reliable, though. He doesn’t make mistakes. His problem is that while he does everything by the book, he does it all very slowly.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Chambers grunted. ‘He seems to have an effect on time itself. If he’d boiled that kettle it would have taken ten minutes.’

  Steele laughed. ‘True. Mind you he does have one virtue that you’ll miss. He knows everything. Nothing goes past Charlie, not a single fact, or piece of gossip, about what’s going on in the office. When I was here, if there was something that I couldn’t quite pin down, I always asked Charlie, and he always came up with an answer. Has he said what he’s going to do when he retires?’

  ‘He’s been talking about applying for a security job in one of the museums or art galleries.’

  ‘Tell him that I’ll give him a reference if he does. Tell him also that if he fancies the idea of being re-employed as a civilian clerk, he should give me a call and I’ll see what opportunities are available.’