Thirty-two
‘It’s just as well we had that slap-up meal in La Potiniere last night,’ said Paula Viareggio, ‘and the bacon rolls for breakfast, for the way you looked on telly an hour ago, you were ready to eat somebody.’
‘I was,’ Mario replied wryly, ‘but the dish of the day slipped out of the kitchen before I could ram a skewer through him.’
‘You’ll see him again, though?’
‘Barker? No, he’s going back to London with his boss. Brian Mackie talked the fiscal into authorising the release of Zrinka’s body this morning. It was picked up from the morgue by an undertaker, and it’ll be on board their aircraft when they fly out of Turnhouse in an hour.’
‘Just as well for him, by the sound of it.’
‘If you think I looked angry, you should have seen Alan Royston afterwards. I’ve never thought of him as an emotional bloke, but he was spitting feathers. He started with “unprofessional”, “discourteous” and went on until he was using adjectives I hadn’t heard in years.’
‘Huh! That’s saying something,’ she grunted. ‘What about the million? Is that going to make problems for you?’
‘It’ll be a nuisance for Stevie and the team,’ he admitted, ‘but nothing they can’t handle. Anyway, that’s pure bloody window-dressing. I’m more worried about Boras’s attitude.’
‘You mean the barely veiled threat he made?’
‘Nah, I don’t read too much into that: he’s lost his daughter, he’s bursting with rage. No, I’m concerned because although he said publicly that he’s right behind us, I’m not sure that’s true in private. He has political clout, and if we don’t get a result soon, we may find it aimed at us.’
‘Don’t you have political clout too?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come on, I’ve heard the stories about Bob Skinner and the new First Minister.’
‘Boras’s influence is in London, and probably heavyweight. His foundation donates to both Labour and the Tories. But maybe I’m misjudging the guy. Maybe I’m misjudging my own troops as well. We might have an arrest by the weekend, and all my concerns will be academic. But that’s not what my gut tells me: it says it’s not going to be as easy as that. So we can’t allow ourselves to be distracted by Boras: we have to concentrate on the job in hand.’
‘Good for you. Where are you now? I can hear traffic noise.’
‘I’m on my way up to Perthshire, to see the parents of the victim Paul.’
‘Alone?’
‘For now. It’s in the Tayside area, so I had to clear it with Rod Greatorix, my opposite number up there. He told Andy Martin and Andy’s decided to sit in on it with me.’
‘That’s good,’ Paula declared. ‘You’ll have a familiar face alongside you when you see them. It sounds like an unpleasant task.’
‘Telling a couple their son was half eaten by foxes? “Unpleasant” could be an understatement.’
Thirty-three
‘Dominic Padstow,’ Tarvil Singh growled. ‘Just who the hell are you?’
‘You not having any luck?’ asked Griff Montell.
‘Not so far. There are no Padstows in the phone book for Edinburgh. There are none of them on the electoral roll, or on the valuation roll. This guy might have been in the city once, but he’s no’ here now.’
‘Not necessarily: he could be registered to vote somewhere else, he could be living in digs, and he could have a mobile rather than a landline. How about criminal convictions? Does he have any of them?’
‘Where d’you think I checked first?’ the big Sikh snapped.
‘Sorry. How about the Passport Office?’
‘Done that too, but the Data Protection Act restricts the information they can give us. The guy isn’t a suspect; and so he has rights to privacy.’
‘Where do you go next? Inland Revenue?’
‘I’d run up against the same problems there. No, I’ll try the Gavin parents, like the DI said.’
‘Good luck, mate!’ Montell exclaimed, with feeling.
Singh picked up his phone, checked a number scrawled on a pad on his desk, and dialled. He hoped that his sigh of relief did not show, when Russ Gavin, home from work for lunch as usual, answered the call. Mrs Gavin was a nice woman, totally overwhelmed by a loss that no mother ever deserved, and she had the sympathy of all the detectives who had come in contact with her. However, they were all agreed that she was, as Ray Wilding had put it, ‘as much use as a chocolate teapot’.
‘DC Singh,’ said Stacey’s father, ‘what can I do for you? Two calls in two days, first Mr Montell, now you: the investigation seems to be picking up pace again. It’s tragic that it’s taken two more deaths to do it, though.’
‘I couldn’t agree more, sir.’
‘Hey,’ he exclaimed, ‘don’t take that as a criticism. I’m not getting at you, honest, or at Mr Montell. The only guy I’ve got a down on was that clown in uniform who accused Stacey of being a junkie. I appreciate that you and all the rest of the CID team are doing your best.’
‘No problem, sir. We’re our own worst critics, I promise you. I want to ask you about the second victim, Miss Boras. She and your daughter were both young full-time artists working in Edinburgh. We’re looking for any links between them, and we need to start by establishing whether they ever met, whether they knew each other.’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ the man replied. ‘Hold on, though, my wife’s here. I’ll ask her. Doreen, the police need to know if Stacey was acquainted with the second girl who’s just been murdered.’ Singh heard an indistinct mumble in the background. ‘Boras,’ said Gavin, across his living room. ‘Zrinka Boras.’ The detective waited, but the answer came quickly. ‘She’s shaking her head. No, it doesn’t mean anything to her either. I don’t think it’s a name we would have forgotten if Stacey had ever mentioned it.’
‘No, sir, I don’t imagine so.’
‘What was she like?’ asked Gavin, quietly.
Singh thought he heard his voice falter slightly. ‘She seems to have been a very nice woman,’ he told him. ‘Just like your Stacey,’ he added. ‘Killed for no reason that we’ve yet been able to establish. She came from a wealthy background; her dad’s a famous man but she wouldn’t use his name to get on. She wanted to make her own way in the world, with little or no help from her parents, and like your Stacey, she was succeeding.’
‘God, it’s tragic, isn’t it?’ Gavin sighed. ‘Can you imagine the mind of a man who would do something like that? Oops, sorry, I should have said “person”. I’m jumping to gender conclusions.’
‘No, you’re all right there, sir,’ the detective reassured him. ‘We’re more or less certain that we’re looking for a man. The way the third victim’s . . . the boy’s . . . body was concealed would have taken a lot of strength. But, no, I can’t imagine his mind. That’s one of the reasons he’s been difficult to catch so far: we’ve got no idea what his motive is.’
‘He’s an art critic.’ Singh could almost hear Gavin wince as soon as the sentence had escaped from his lips. ‘Jesus, that sounds terrible coming from me. You don’t want to see the way my wife’s looking at me.’
‘That’s been said already, sir, among our lot, and it’ll be said again too, so don’t give yourself a kicking over it. Anyhow, it’s right, in a way: the link between the victims’ occupations gives us a line of enquiry. For now, though, we’re concentrating on finding personal links between them, mutual acquaintances, and so on. I’d like to put a name to you, to see if it means anything.’
‘Fire away.’
‘Dominic Padstow.’
‘Dominic Padstow?’ Russ Gavin repeated. ‘Dominic Padstow.’ The detective constable sat patiently through a long silence. ‘There was a Dominic, once, a year or so back, when Stacey was still at art college, but I don’t remember his surname . . . if, indeed, I ever knew it.’
‘He was a boyfriend?’
