‘She told me. She never tried to hide it; she simply refused to trade on it. She was only ever known as Zrinka on my database. When we met, we had a two-way chat, but nothing was resolved. I’m sure she had me checked out, for it was a few days before she came back and said that she’d like me to represent her.’
‘Has she been successful?’
‘Oh, yes. If you look into her affairs, you’ll find that she set up a limited company to handle the work she put through me.’
‘But she was selling directly as well, from a stall.’
‘She was, but that was part of our agreement, and I was happy, as long as she didn’t undervalue her work.’
‘And Stacey?’
‘Zrinka brought her to me last year, after she had graduated from college, and introduced her. It was a very generous thing for her to do, but she was that sort of woman. Stacey was very talented too, maybe even more than Zrinka.’ She held the print up. ‘I could have landed her some pretty serious portrait commissions, you know, but she insisted that she wasn’t ready for that. Too bad. I hope her parents have an idea of the long-term value of the work they’re holding.’
‘What about Harry, and Upload?’ Singh asked her. ‘Why did you go into music?’
‘For Jacky.’ She smiled at her son. ‘He wanted to come into the business, and he persuaded me that music would fit naturally into a creative agency. He has a good ear for that sort of stuff. It’s all beyond me, but he got it right with Harry and the boys, when Zrinka brought them along to see us. The contract they had . . . I can’t bear to think of the money we’d all have made.’
‘And still can, Mum,’ Jacky told her. ‘Harry can be replaced in the band. He’s dead, but his compositions aren’t.’
Hope Dell looked at him, surprised. ‘Do you mean that?’
‘Of course I do.’ Suddenly, the boy was no longer an awkward teenager. Before the detectives’ eyes, he turned into a sharp, fast-talking businessman. ‘We’ve got a guy on our books, Craigie Speirs. Compared to Upload, he’s been doing fuck-all . . . sorry, Mum . . . because it’s a lot harder to push solo acts, but he would slot right in there. If A-Frame and Benjy are up for it, I’m going to talk to him about it.’
‘Zrinka introduced Upload too?’ said Wilding, bringing the discussion back on line.
‘Zrinka did everything,’ Jacky told him. ‘Zrinka was pure gold.’
The sergeant showed him the print of Padstow. ‘Do you recognise this man?’ he asked.
‘No,’ the boy replied grimly, ‘but if he did what you think he did, I know a lot of people who’d like to meet him, me included.’
Forty-five
Stevie Steele nodded his way past the officers on duty at the public entrance to the Fettes police headquarters, and headed straight for the Special Branch suite. Once he had entertained hopes that he might succeed Neil McIlhenney in that office, but the job had gone to Inspector Dorothy Shannon.
His brief disappointment had been ended by his wife, who had persuaded him that he was too gregarious to spend his working life in a regime that was of necessity secretive, and that he would be much happier in mainstream CID, where the breadth of his thinking and his innate popularity with colleagues would be an asset.
He had wondered for a while whether he might not have been considered tough enough for the job, but Maggie had disabused him of that notion very quickly. ‘They might like you within the ranks, my love,’ she had told him, ‘but they know you’re up there with Mario and Neil as someone not to be messed with.’
As he headed for Shannon’s office, he had an inkling of why people might feel that way about him.
He opened the door of the SB suite and marched in. Alice Cowan, the inspector’s sidekick and general watchdog, was at her post as usual. ‘Is she in?’ he asked, nodding towards the inner office door and barely breaking his stride.
‘Yes,’ Cowan replied, ‘but you . . .’ He ignored her, thrusting open the inner office door and stepping inside.
Dottie Shannon was standing beside a corner table, scanning that morning’s
‘Reporting as ordered, Detective Inspector Shannon.’
‘Now, Stevie . . .’
He stared back at her, his eyes like ice. ‘Don’t Stevie me,’ he growled. ‘What the fuck do you think you were up to barging into my office in the middle of the bloody night and haranguing one of my officers? That was out of order of itself, but to instruct him to have me come to see you . . . Inspector, you have let your new job go to your head.’
‘And so have you, by the sound of things, Acting DCI. Or are you still holding a grudge?’
Steele gasped, then laughed out loud. ‘Don’t be bloody stupid, Dottie; I washed you out of my hair the day I chucked you. I never had a grudge to hold. If you remember, you and I had a thing that I thought was serious; then I found out you were banging George Regan on the side. So I pulled the plug on you.’
‘Very sensitive, weren’t you?’ she retorted. ‘We were both free and single.’
‘Which is more than George was. Apart from being my mate, he’s married, and I like Jen very much.’
‘So much that you threatened to tell her about George and me.’
‘Wrong. I’d never hurt her like that. All I did was tell George that you were a slag and, if he hadn’t noticed, a mediocre lay, and that if he didn’t straighten his act up he was in danger of losing both his wife and his pal.’
‘Jesus, you really aren’t Sir Galahad, are you?’
‘I can put the boot in when I have to.’
‘I’ll remember that.’ Her squared shoulders relaxed, just a little. ‘Look, Stevie, that’s all in the past.’
‘You were the one who brought it up.’
‘I know and I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry I tore up your DC last night. By the book I should have called you, but I live just round the corner from your office, plus I didn’t fancy waking up a pregnant chief superintendent as well as you, so I went round and dealt with it myself. If I laid into the guy more than I should it was because I don’t appreciate being yelled at myself by my higher-ups.’
‘Who yelled at you? Mario McGuire? Brian Mackie? The chief?’
‘No, the higher-ups in Special Branch, specifically the security service. Some of them don’t love me, I have to tell you, for reasons of their own.’
‘I see,’ Steele murmured. ‘But where exactly do MI5 get off, interfering in a multiple-murder investigation?’
‘They go off the deep end when you start making blanket enquiries about someone who, as they put it to me in a loud voice, couldn’t have had anything to do with the situation and who is security cleared right up to God.’
‘Did they give you the name?’
‘Are you kidding? They gave me five minutes to shut your guy down or they’d ask Bob Skinner to do it.’
‘Okay. I can see that you were under pressure; I’ll explain that to Montell and give him your apologies.’
She glowered at him, then her eyes softened. ‘All right, you can tell him I’m sorry. But explain to him that sometimes enquiries about specific people get them nervous. They didn’t just want me to stop Montell, they wanted me to check that it was really him looking for the information.’
‘Fair enough. We’ve done what they want, now let’s see if they’ll do us a favour in return.’
Shannon snorted. ‘MI5 aren’t famous for doing favours for local cops.’
‘They’ve got a serious-crime function, haven’t they?’
‘Yes.’
‘Three shootings is pretty serious in my book.’ He took a computer disk from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘That holds an image of the man we know as Dominic Padstow. We’ve drawn a total blank on him. I’d like you to send it down to them to see if it matches anyone on their files. If they’re iffy about it, you can remind them that we
