Robert Parker - Snow Storm

“So were you alone?”

“Not initially. There were other guests. And yes, paid ones before you ask.”

“Could any of these paid guests have harboured any grudges against Mr Karpov?”

“Doubtful. He was always more than generous as far as I could tell. In any case Inspector, it wasn’t any of them.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“They were quite the wrong shape. The kind of people who frequented Oleg’s place were of a slight build. Not much to them.”

“You saw the killers?” Burke demanded, as his blood pressure surged.

“I did,” Douglas replied coldly like he was recounting something much more mundane.

“What did they look like?” Burke asked, wanting to dive across the table and grab Douglas by the throat but reining himself in, trying not to think about the man hours wasted on this because some chinless wonder didn’t have the guts to come forward.

Douglas smiled as he took a deep breath and emitted a long drawn out sigh. “I didn’t see their faces Inspector. They were dressed like terrorists or something.”

“In what way precisely? What do terrorists dress like exactly?”

“They were head to toe in black and wearing balaclavas. You know, the ones with the holes for eyes. Where do they get those from anyway? Some kind of terrorist shop? Anyway that’s all I could see on the screen.”

“On the screen?”

“He had a hefty security system, but surely you know that. The front door and the hallway were both on the big screen at the touch of a button.”

“Which big screen?”

“The massive one, the one you can’t miss. That basement’s wired for everything.”

“What basement?” Burke had a sudden sinking feeling.

Douglas laughed now, “The one I was cowering in Inspector, the one Oleg liked to have his parties in.” He laughed again. “And the one you so clearly haven’t found.”

Burke didn’t know what to say to this so he focussed on the questions at hand. “What did you see while you were cowering in the basement?” He asked as calmly as possible.

“Oleg went to the hallway. He was the worse for wear you might say, so he didn’t really think about who might be there.” Douglas’s eyes seemed to glaze over as he thought about this from what was now presumably a safe distance in his mind’s eye. “I heard the rumbling from upstairs so I checked on the big screen and there it was all happening in front of me. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. There were three of them, all in black, guys obviously, presumably. They were all large, one particularly rotund, probably older, and all had guns, AK47’s I think.”

Burke tried to keep him focussed. “Was there any kind of conversation?”

“Not that I saw, if anything they were ruthlessly to the point.”

“How do you mean?”

“Once he was in the hallway they just shot him. I say they, it was the middle one, the fat one who shot him. The others were just there for, well I don’t know what but they just trashed the place after that.”

“You think they were AK47’s you say?” Burke asked, allowing a break from Douglas’s grim narrative.

“I could pretty much guarantee that,” Douglas replied.

“You know a lot about guns?”

“Not especially, but I know an AK47 when I see one.”

“How?”

Douglas sniffed. “Oleg had one proudly attached to the wall in a display case in the basement, which you would know if you’d discovered it.”

“Or if you’d come forward earlier,” Burke added, probably anything but helpfully, but sometimes you had to say what you were thinking.

“Of course,” said Douglas. “If you didn’t discover the basement, and Oleg’s other life which is all down there you wouldn’t have known anything about me and I wouldn’t ever have needed to come forward.”

Burke couldn’t resist a wide smile at this. “No you wouldn’t. Good of you to go out of your way to do that though.”

“Just get the bastards will you?”

“Bastard getting does tend to be what I do,” he confirmed, before adding “in the meantime sir don’t go anywhere too far.”

The spook arrived pretty much unannounced, circumventing the front desk by means of her rank and the accompanying awe that inspired. She’d more or less materialised at the side of Sam Jones’s old desk, a talent which was no doubt handy in her line.

She introduced himself as Sarah Armstrong with a firm handshake that seemed to fit a little incongruously with her slight demeanour.

“I hope you don’t mind. I’m going to have to keep this brief. I’m due on a flight back to London in under an hour,” she said with a quick glance at an expensive watch.

“You sure you’ll make it?” John McKay asked. “Traffic’s murder this time of day.”

“Ways and means,” she replied, before asking to see his senior officer.

McKay informed her that Detective Inspector Burke was in fact in an interview at present.

“I think you’d better go and get him just the same,” she said, in the manner of a woman who was not used to being told no.

McKay knocked on the door to find Burke winding up the interview with the surgeon.

“Who is it?” Burke asked, probably put out at the loss of a chance to go off and hide somewhere for a bit.

“Says she’s from Whitehall,” McKay replied. “Security services.” He mouthed “MI5” so neither the surgeon nor his brief would get too much wind of it.

Burke made his way back to the main office, without saying a word. Maybe he didn’t actually know what to say and he was thinking up different scenarios. It was hard to tell at the best of times just what went on in the young guy’s head.

The PC who’d been in the interview escorted the surgeon and his lawyer to the front entrance.

McKay nearly managed to catch up with Burke as he rounded the corner into the main body of the office but he was too quick. By the time the boss had shaken the spook’s hand and moved her off into his own broom cupboard, evicting Edwards’ bam pot entourage, he’d been left behind in the rush.

He stared through the glass partition into Burke’s office as the two chatted seemingly calmly, Burke nodding in a way that suggested the spook was imparting some serious information.

McKay found himself wishing his lip reading skills were better.

Andy had managed to spend the whole day in a trance. He’d previously thought this would only be possible following a heavy night on the booze, chemically anaesthetised. Now he realised concussion was more than capable of the job.

The girls chatted amongst themselves in whichever language it was. He realised he had no clue which language was actually spoken in Georgia, or the Ukraine, or most places if he thought about it. Ignorant really, just assuming everyone with an Eastern European accent had to be Polish, but then that was the most likely possibility round here. A good few Polish people had moved into the area to find work and this being Wigtownshire there weren’t many people here, let alone different nationalities. It was always more of a gene puddle than a pool really, not surprising that anyone vaguely different stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.

He got the sense that something was up and the girls knew more about it than he did. The urgency of their whispered tones made him nervous. If they thought they had problems, chances were, he was fucked.

He heard another plane land. You couldn’t miss it in the quiet night. He wondered what this time. The last one seemed to have been taking off, the accelerating engine, sounding like a wayward petrol lawnmower, one of these ones middle aged men sat on that looked like toy tractors and gave the retired accountant an hour of fun every second Sunday pretending to be Old McDonald.