Quintin Jardine - A Rush of Blood

‘Yes, I did,’ the man admitted. ‘But I know nothing of the other things.’

‘You know everything, Colonel. You also know that we’ll never place you at that crime scene in a month of wet Sundays.’

‘Maybe,’ McGuire exclaimed. ‘The shirt he wore yesterday. .’

‘You can have it if you want,’ the Lithuanian offered.

Skinner smiled. ‘Don’t bother, Mario. He wore a sterile tunic, and then he burned it in a bin behind the barn. . the same bin, I reckon, that was used to burn Ken Green’s files to ashes. He and his clothes will be clean as a whistle. But that’s why Regine wouldn’t talk to you last night. She had to wait until Jonas got back, to tell her it was OK. Did he tell you what he was going to Scotland to do?’ he asked her.

‘I tell her nothing,’ said Zaliukas quickly. ‘Only that she should stay with Max and Zaki and say nothing to anyone until I got back.’

‘So why did you go to Scotland?’

‘I go to make arrangements for Tomas’s funeral. You can check if you like. People called Scotmid will do it.’

‘And it’ll be safe for Regine to go back?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure? A man called Cameron McCullough might have a different view.’

‘No. That man, you will find, is a realist. If he did think to do harm to Regine, or rather order it, for he does nothing himself, he would know that while he may have a few hoodlums left, I have an army.’

Skinner stepped slowly across to him, feeling his eyes sting with weariness as he looked down at him. ‘Let me tell you something, Jonas. If any of your soldiers set foot in Scotland, they will be on the first plane home. . if they’re lucky. Regine will be safe because I will make it my business to ensure that she is. As for McCullough, I still have to make his acquaintance. But I will.’ He tapped him on the chest. ‘And you? As soon as your brother is in the ground, Colonel, you should go back to Lithuania. And you should fucking stay there.’

‘ You don’t think Tayside will be able to build a case?’ Aileen asked her husband. He was beside her, sprawled on the sofa in the garden room. On a table by his side lay three Corona beer bottles, two of them empty, and a plate, on which lay a small piece of crust, the last relic of a pizza that he had picked up from the takeaway on his way home.

‘Not against Jonas. We can track his movements, no problem. He flew to France on the evening before his brother died. He did tell me that Tomas insisted on it. He wanted him to be ready to look for Regine and the kids if those two bastards didn’t keep their word and let them go, but I think also he was afraid that Jonas would try to stop him carrying out their last instruction.’

‘To kill himself?’

Bob nodded. ‘When he got to Mezin, Regine and the kids had just been released. He treated her injury. . which, incredibly, she’d managed to keep from her daughters. . and he brought his two ex-soldier pals across to make sure they stayed safe while he took care of business. That may well have been his last order from his brother, but we’ll never know that. What we do know is that he flew back to Edinburgh on Sunday. We know as well that he visited the Scotmid Funeral Service on Monday morning. But we can’t place him anywhere else until he caught that late evening flight to Carcassonne. And there is no chance that we ever will.’

‘Does that bother you?’

He looked at her, sideways on the couch, considering her quiet question. ‘I wouldn’t say this to many other people,’ he began, ‘but during my career there have been a very few occasions, just one or two, when I’ve seen someone get away with a crime, and even though I’ve done my best to nail them, I haven’t been too upset by my failure. This is one of them. We have Tomas Zaliukas’s mobile phone among his possessions. That video’s on it. I’ve seen it, and honest to God, if it had turned out differently and we had that guy Dudley in our custody. .’ His voice tailed off.

She laid a hand on his chest as he picked up his bottle. ‘You’ve had a hell of a couple of days, my love.’

‘You could say that,’ he conceded, ‘and probably another one to come tomorrow. Andy’s taking me to meet this Grandpa McCullough.’

‘You know,’ Aileen confessed, ‘when you told me about this I couldn’t help laughing at the thought of Tommy Murtagh, caught in flagrante with his client’s sister, the wife of a ruthless killer to boot.’

‘Yes, that was a beauty; I gave in to a small smile myself. Yet lucky wee Tommy’s free and clear. Goldie’s a widow now, so who knows how that relationship might develop.’ He killed his third Corona.

‘I’ll get you another,’ his wife offered.

‘You are an angel of mercy in the darkest of worlds.’

‘How nice.’

‘So don’t just bring me one, bring me a six-pack and an opener. Don’t bother with the lime.’

‘Are you sure? About the beer, not the lime.’

‘Honey, I dropped off to sleep on the flight home. I had a nightmare. Apparently I started to shout some very scary things about toes. Mario had to waken me.’ He waved the empty bottle. ‘I’d like to put a few more of these between me and my next dream.’

When she returned with six more Coronas, he was staring out of the window, into the night, so still that for a moment. . He stirred, looked up at her and smiled. ‘Thanks, angel mine,’ he said, as she uncapped one and handed it to him. ‘Every little helps.’

‘But don’t overdo it.’

‘I never do. I’ll work it off tomorrow anyway.’ The smile left him. ‘But I’ve got more on my mind than gory crime scenes.’

‘Such as?’

‘A couple of things. This whole damned inquiry for a start. I’ve been reviewing it and I see great big glaring holes in the procedure. For example, the girl Anna Romanova was a direct link to the investigation of Zaliukas’s death, she was found hours after it and yet it took a full day for us to tie her in, and we only did that when two of our CID teams turned up on the same doorstep for different reasons. A shambles, a total. .’ He sighed. ‘If we’d got our act together quicker, through proper interchange of current information, Valdas Gerulaitis might have been in custody on Friday evening, instead of being tortured and killed. If someone had tried to find out where Ken Green was when he failed to show for a client interview, maybe he wouldn’t be dead now either, and we might have found evidence in his cottage to tie Mr Murtagh’s prize client into this whole business. I doubt that, mind you; everything that man does seems to be invisible.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t really exist.’

‘Oh, he’s real, all right, as I’ll find out tomorrow.’

‘The cottage,’ Aileen exclaimed. ‘If Green was killed, how did they know about that?’

‘They’d probably been there. He probably used it for meetings that he couldn’t have in his office. My guys found a key under a plant pot. There were signs that both had been used, fairly recently.’

‘You can’t blame anybody for that.’

‘Hey, listen, I’m not blaming anybody but myself.’

‘For what?’

‘For a fundamental management mistake I’ve made. The problems we’ve had flowed from a lack of clear, single-minded thinking, at the top of the CID tree, starting with me when I put the present structure in place. The Glimmer Twins: having Mario as head of CID and Neil as his deputy, it just doesn’t work. They didn’t get their nickname by accident; they are genuinely like brothers. They’re both brilliant detectives, outstanding police officers, but they’re too close and neither ever questions anything the other does. I’m going to have to separate them. . but without either of them ever knowing it’s happened, for I don’t want either one thinking that he’s failed in any way.’