pocket, and almost immediately felt it vibrate strongly against his thigh.
Their host looked towards a drinks table, with a laden ice-bucket sitting on it, and a small fridge beside it. A waiter stood ready. ‘Ms Stallings, gentlemen: may I offer you a drink?’ He laughed lightly, ‘Or don’t you do that on duty?’
‘Only when it’s formal,’ McGuire told him. ‘The inspector’s driving, so hers will have to be soft, but if that’s a bottle of Sancerre open in the bucket, the DCC and I will be very happy to join you.’
They stood in silence while the waiter poured the drinks, a Pepsi Max and three glasses, and handed them round. ‘Thank you, Neville,’ said Boras. ‘I’ll call you when we need refills.’ As the man left he showed his guests to a seating area, where leather armchairs were arranged to take maximum advantage of the view. As she settled down, it occurred to Stallings that it would make a very fine ceiling, if the building was just a little higher.
‘Well.’ The businessman fixed his gimlet eyes on McGuire, and gave another thin smile. ‘I’d have done it anyway, you know,’ he murmured, his voice barely carrying to the inspector who was placed furthest from him.
‘What’s that?’ the chief superintendent asked.
‘Make the donation to the Dependants’ Trust. You anticipated my announcement, although some have said that you forced my hand.’
McGuire beamed at him. ‘There will always be mean-spirited people like that, sir. Just as, happily, there will always be generous people like you. I was asked a straight question, and I gave a straight answer. You’re right, I anticipated your announcement, but I never had any doubt that in the circumstances you’d make your gift, if not to that charity then to another worthy recipient.’
‘Of course, I am aware of that, really.
‘I believe that we can say that the investigation into your daughter’s murder is over. Our Crown Office, the Scottish prosecution service, is about to announce that, with Ballester’s death, we are no longer looking for anyone else in connection with the four homicides.’
‘Then I thank you, and I congratulate you. Again, though, I must express my sorrow at the needless death of your colleague, Inspector Steele. I was shocked by it, shocked; he was such a fine, dedicated officer.’
Skinner gazed at the man, looking for the faintest sign of insincerity in his eyes. Over the years he had stared down many guilty men, and he had been able to read their secrets as easily as if they had confessed them, as eventually virtually all of them had. Boras’s expression told him nothing, nothing at all. He had a strange feeling that what the man was saying was literally true. ‘Thank you for that,’ he said, addressing him for the first time. ‘I’ll convey it to Stevie’s widow.’
‘Thank you, sir. If there is anything I can do for her, anything at all, you or she simply has to ask.’
‘That is also kind of you, but in my force, officers’ widows want for nothing.’
‘I’m sure. Will there be a court proceeding of any sort, Mr Skinner? A public inquiry into Zrinka’s death, and the others?’
‘There’s no statutory provision for it in Scotland,’ the DCC told him. ‘Formal hearings into fatal accidents and sudden deaths are only mandatory when a person is killed at work, or dies when in custody. Murder investigations result in prosecution when they’re concluded, but in this case, the Crown has nobody to prosecute. There is no suspect, other than Ballester, and he’s dead. He had motive, opportunity, everything, and we found the murder weapon in his house. We also found personal possessions that he had taken from three of the four victims. He did it.’
‘There is no chance that he could have been framed by someone else?’
‘If you don’t mind my saying so, that’s a strange question, coming from you.’
‘I need certainty, sir, that my daughter’s killer is dead.’
‘Then you have it for, I promise you, that evidence simply couldn’t have been planted. Nobody knew where Ballester was, other than your guys, and neither of them could possibly have killed Zrinka, Stacey, Amy or Harry. Okay, you knew too, but you didn’t murder your daughter, Mr Boras, you loved her.’ The businessman’s mouth opened, then closed, then opened again, but Skinner held up a hand.
‘The irony is that although Ballester was murdered himself, he was our man all right, not a serial killer as my officers suspected at first, but a rejected lover with a grudge, and into the bargain, a previous conviction for violence against a woman.’
Boras glared at the DCC as he finished, and their eyes seemed to lock in unblinking conflict. ‘My guys knew, you say. I knew?’
‘Your former employee,’ said Skinner, ‘Mr Barker, has been talking, in the wake of his arrest for bribing a civil servant, using money which he says came from you. He says that three years ago you commissioned a firm called Aeron to make enquiries about a journalist who had been making unwelcome enquiries into your company. They identified him as Daniel Ballester, in a report that Barker claims to have seen in your possession. He alleges that you instructed Aeron to discourage Ballester from making further trouble. However, shortly afterwards he was professionally disgraced, after being tricked into doing a silly story about Princess Diana’s death.
‘When Dominic Padstow’s name was mentioned that was news to you, Barker says, and you instructed him to trace him through the Passport Office.’ Skinner’s eyes narrowed a fraction. ‘My guess is that you didn’t suspect at that stage that Padstow was Ballester; I reckon you simply wanted to get to him first. But when our clever detective constable came up with his portrait, you certainly knew who he was even before we identified him, because you set Aeron on to finding him. They were good; we’d have found him eventually, but they did it first and again you were one step ahead. This we know from Aeron, rather than Barker.’ He paused. ‘At this stage,’ he asked, ‘would you care to comment on anything I’ve said so far?’
Boras continued to look back at him, his little dark eyes impassive. He sipped his Sancerre. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Please carry on, unless your story is over.’
‘Oh, it isn’t,’ Skinner exclaimed, ‘because we found Aeron ourselves at that point. DI Steele and DI Stallings went to their office on Saturday afternoon. After some persuasion, they were put in touch by telephone with the company’s chief executive, Mr Michael Spicer. He had just arrived at Hathaway House, with his associate Mr Ivor Brown, having gone there, on your instructions, to locate and apprehend Daniel Ballester.
‘At least, that’s what they said your orders were, but even if they were a little more extreme it wouldn’t have mattered, because when they got there, the man was dead. And if Stevie Steele had phoned them ten minutes later, they’d have been dead too. They’d have gone into that house and they’d have walked into the grenade trap.’
‘Indeed?’ The voice was as cold as the ice in the bucket.
‘Oh, yes. You had Ballester killed, Mr Boras. You had him executed. I don’t suggest for a moment that you did it yourself: I’m sure that any investigation would show very quickly that you were at home with your wife all day on Saturday, continuing to make arrangements for your daughter’s funeral.
‘No, you had him killed,’ the DCC repeated, ‘and Spicer and Brown were meant to die too. They were your only contacts with Aeron; they were the only people who could prove that you had prior knowledge of Daniel Ballester, and that you identified him as your daughter’s killer before the police did.’
‘And what about Barker?’ Boras asked. ‘If your fanciful theory is correct, why is he still alive?’
‘Hey,’ Skinner retorted, ‘it’s never a good idea to offer a defence before you’ve been accused, and as we keep on saying, this is an informal visit. But since you ask, Barker’s nothing. He has no evidence that you ever knew Ballester. The Met have got him by the balls for bribing a public official and he’s singing like George Michael to try to get out of it. They’ve also got him for tax evasion, thanks to a slush fund, under the rather frivolous name of Jack Frost, set up with money that will never in a million years be traceable back to you.
‘So you’re not worried about him at all. Mind you, that may not prevent him having a fatal accident in the near future: time will tell.’
He leaned back in his chair. ‘You’re not worried about Spicer and Brown either. My colleagues in Northumbria had no grounds to hold them on Saturday, so they sent them on their way. In hindsight, that’s a pity, for . . . and this will surprise DI Stallings, who doesn’t know about it . . . when I pulled a couple of strings this morning and had Special Branch officers sent to their place to hold them for questioning, they discovered that they were gone. Not just the two of them either, the whole Aeron operation, vanished as if it had never existed.’
He tilted his glass in a gesture that could only have been a salute. ‘My congratulations, Mr Boras: you’ve done what you told a whole roomful of people last Thursday that you would do. You’ve had your revenge on your daughter’s murderer. And nobody will ever lay a finger on you for it.’
