away at high speed.
David Barnes was waiting for Skinner and McGuire at a table in an upstairs room when they arrived just after two p.m. He was handcuffed and his ankles were secured to the legs of his chair. He glared at them as they entered and sat opposite him. ‘What the ’ell is this?’ he barked, in broad Mancunian. ‘Who are you barstards?’
The two detectives produced their warrant cards. ‘That’s who we are,’ said McGuire, as Skinner leaned back and stared coldly across the table. ‘And this is about you being done for the murder of two men, one of them a police officer.’
‘You’re crazy!’ Barnes screamed. ‘I never murdered anyone in my life.’
‘Of course you did,’ the chief superintendent told him. ‘You were in the army, a sergeant on duty with KFOR in Kosovo, about seven years ago. You were part of an interrogation team that interpreted its orders very broadly. You killed three prisoners under questioning in separate incidents, but the third one went public and you became an embarrassment. Consequently your death in action was reported, and you were quietly made to disappear, with the help of Mr Davor Boras, a facilitator with links to the CIA. You went to work for him as his chauffeur-cum- bodyguard. Your duties also included piloting the company’s light aircraft on occasion.
‘A few years ago, Mr Boras and his son decided that it would be a good idea if they appeared to be at odds, and so Drazen was seen to leave his old man’s business, set up on his own and take an English name . . . David Barnes, on the basis that it might be handy to have two of you around.’
McGuire leaned forward. ‘Are you going to dispute any of that?’ he hissed. ‘Because my boss and I would love to interrogate you, just like you used to in Kosovo, only we’re better at it than you were. We won’t kill you, we won’t mark you, but we will fucking well waste you, in memory of our dead colleague.’
Barnes looked, and believed. ‘You’ve got all that right,’ he murmured, ‘but I never killed no copper.’
‘No,’ said Skinner. ‘This is what you did. On Saturday morning Davor Boras called you to see him. He gave you a return e-ticket for the Edinburgh shuttle out of Heathrow at twelve fifteen. He also gave you clothes, specifically jeans, a T-shirt, a very garish denim jacket and cap, and a pair of Oakleys. He ordered you to fly north, in that gear, and to meet the other David Barnes at a location in Edinburgh.
’You did just that. You met Drazen, you changed clothes, and you gave him the return ticket. Then you rode his motorbike back to Walkdean Airfield, near Newcastle, where Drazen had parked the company Beechcraft, and flew it back to the depot in London, returning to London in transport he had left there.
’While you were engaged in this pantomime, Drazen went to Wooler, in Northumberland where he killed a man named Daniel Ballester and, in mistake for two other people, Detective Inspector Steven Steele, a colleague and very good friend of ours.’
Barnes paled. ‘I read about that. He did that? Christ, mate, I never knew.’
‘I couldn’t give a shit what you knew,’ the DCC growled. ‘Tell me, David, do you love Sharon, your wife?’ Barnes nodded. ‘And do you love Wendy, the girl you’ve been shagging on the side in a flat in Victoria Park for a year now?’ The man gasped.
‘Actually, I don’t care about that,’ Skinner continued. ‘But I would like to know whether you would like to see either of them again, or whether you’re prepared to have your body fed through an industrial-sized tree-shredder, maybe before you’re quite dead. Because, mate, as you will have gathered from the depth of our knowledge, and because of the unconventional nature of your arrest, we are in a position to make that happen.’
He laid two sheets of paper on the table. ‘That’s your admission that everything within your sphere of knowledge happened as I have described. Did it?’ he snapped. ‘Yes or no?’
‘Yes!’ Barnes screamed again, but this time out of pure terror, as he stared at the nightmare across the table, pointing a pen at him like a dagger.
‘Then sign that, both pages, within ten seconds or Mario will start breaking your fingers.’
Barnes snatched the Pentel from Skinner, with both manacled hands, and scrawled his name, twice.
‘Thanks,’ said McGuire, amiably, as he pocketed the signed statement. ‘We’ll have you taken back to work now, hopefully before your boss notices you’re missing. But breathe just one word to him, and I promise you, the best that’ll happen is that your wife will hear about Wendy.’
Seventy-nine
‘You know,’ said Skinner, ‘I thought Barnes would have been tougher than that.’
‘Me too,’ McGuire agreed. ‘But I have to confess you scared me a wee bit, so Christ knows what he must have felt.’
‘Maybe we’re getting too good at it.’
‘Maybe, but I’d like to think that there’s still room for improvement when we get our hands on Drazen. He’ll be a harder nut than his namesake, I’m sure of that.’ The head of CID’s eyes narrowed. ‘I wish we could go in there first.’
‘So do I, but that was never on. Amanda helped us as far as she could, and probably further, by having her people snatch Barnes for us. But when it comes to making a proper arrest, we’ve got no locus down here. We had to bring the Met in on it.’ He broke off as a tall figure came towards them, down the corridor in which they stood.
‘Gentlemen, we’re ready upstairs,’ said Deputy Assistant Commissioner Davies, head of Specialist Crime operations in the Met. He wore the air of a man who was doing something that had been forced upon him and did not like it.
‘I hope to God you’re right about this. Right or wrong, I’m going to catch Foreign Office flak for this. That damn woman Weiss has been bending my ear since last Saturday when your man threw her out of an interview.’
‘I thought she was Home Office,’ Skinner remarked.
‘That’s what I allowed Becky Stallings to believe.’
‘Christ,’ the Scot gasped, ‘you lie to your own officers.’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’
’I would. Now don’t lie to me. I want Drazen alive, to stand trial; if you’re under orders from anybody to put a bullet in him to keep him quiet you’d better tell me now.’
‘I’m not, I assure you.’
‘Then make fucking sure that nobody does.’
‘My men will meet force with force.’
McGuire took a twenty-pound note from his breast pocket and held it up. ‘This says they won’t face any. Drazen Boras is anything but stupid: he’s not going to keep firearms in a luxury penthouse that’s pissing distance away from Chelsea Bridge. You could ring the fucking doorbell and he’d answer it and invite you in, yet you’ve got a squad of commandos up there. God bless Harry Stanley, may he rest in peace.’
The taunt, about the man shot dead by armed officers while carrying nothing more lethal than a table leg, struck home hard. Davies turned on his heel and stalked off.
‘You shouldn’t have said that, you know,’ Skinner murmured. ‘That’s the sort of guy that might apply for Jimmy’s job.’
‘The day he gets it, I’m going into the family business with Paula.’
‘He’ll have to get past me first.’
McGuire stared at him, but said nothing, as the sound of indistinct shouts drifted down from the floor above. They waited for ten minutes until, finally, Davies reappeared. ‘You can come up now,’ he said coldly.
They followed him, up one floor and through the open door that led into Drazen Boras’s penthouse. As with his father’s office, the living-room wall was made almost entirely of glass, framing Chelsea Bridge like an enormous picture postcard.
The furniture was 1960s retro, the kind that had once made Paula Viareggio stick two fingers down her throat when Mario had suggested buying a piece. Slowly, a vast white egg-shaped chair began to turn towards them on its base. Settled deep into it, and smiling like a demon, was Davor Boras.
‘I regret,’ he said, ‘that my son is not here to receive you. Nor will he be for quite some time, not until these silly allegations against him are shown to be unprovable and the Attorney General has exonerated him. In the process, you will, of course, be excoriated.’ He leaned on the last word as if he was proud of it.
