'Alleging what, exactly?'
'Conspiracy.'
'There's no such criminal charge in Scotland.'
'Extortion.'
'They never asked you for money. In fact when you offered it, they turned you down. Oz, I'm sure that the Crown Office would come up with a charge, under the Companies Act, maybe, but it would take them a bloody long time to decide what it would be. Let's get the whole picture. Let's find out who the man in the apartment is. Then you can decide what you want to do. But you might be better going to the Sunday papers than the police.'
For once, I could see the sense in everything Ricky said.
'Okay,' I agreed. 'Let's do it that way. But listen, you and your team have done bloody well tonight. Keep a watch on Natalie, and on the mystery man, but give as many of them as you can some time off.
I'll do the trace on the owner of the apartment; I've got time, and I can handle that.' I found a pen and a notepad in the drawer of my bedside table. 'Gimme the address,' I said, and began to scribble down what he said.
He hadn't reached the street name before I exploded. 'Jesus Christ, Ricky!' But then I realised that he had never been there before; there was no reason for him to have known.
'What's up?' he demanded.
'That's our old address,' I told him. 'That's where we used to live.'
Thirty-seven
.
There was little likelihood of sleep after that, so Susie and I got up, went down to the kitchen and made ourselves a pot of coffee. 'When you sold, can you remember who the buyer was?' I asked her, when I had my head together.
She shook hers. 'I never knew. I didn't even sign off on the deal.
Officially, it was the Gantry Group that bought the place from you: legally I never owned it. So when it was sold, the company secretary handled everything.'
'And of course, in those days Greg McPhillips didn't act for the Group.'
'No. The company secretary then was old Barney Farmer.'
'Okay, I'll talk to him tomorrow'
'Is Doris Stokes still around?'
'Ah, of course.' I had forgotten that Greg had taken over the company secretary job after his predecessor had fallen down dead in Union Street one day, overcome, it was said, by shock and grief after dropping a two-pound coin down a drain.
'There will be records of the sale, though. Greg took over all Barney's files. I do remember one thing: the old boy told me that the sale was made to another company. That's right, he said they wanted it as a pied a terre for their chief executive.'
I almost called Greg there and then and told him to get his ass into his office; however, having met Katrina McPhillips, I decided that a few hours' patience was a better option. I did call Jay, though.
Without going into all the details, I told him that the New Bearsden thing had come to the boil and that there was an outside chance of three angry bears looking in my direction.
'I'll talk to Mark Kravitz,' he said, briskly. Mark had been Jay's principal referee when we had employed him. He and I had met on my first film project, when he had been in charge of security. It hadn't taken me long to realise that he was no ordinary security consultant, and that he had contacts in some very dark corners indeed, many of them on the state payroll. He and I had become friends, and he had helped me a couple of times since then, yet I didn't think of him as someone I could call on for this sort of freelance work.
'What will he do?' I asked, a little tentatively.
He laughed. 'Make a couple of phone calls.'
'And?'
'And you won't have a problem.'
'I don't want the police in on this, Jay, not yet, at any rate.'
'They won't be. Mark's contacts have a role in fighting organised crime, but on an international scale. They don't liaise too closely with the locals, but they do know who's who, even relatively small fry like the guys you're talking about. Sometimes they let them run about and play their games, because there's more to be gained by doing that and getting feedback from them.'
'Are you telling me that the Three Bears are MI5 informants?'
'Not necessarily, but MI5 will know about them, and vice versa. Any message that comes from that quarter will not be ignored, I promise you. Okay to do that?'
'Sure,' I told him. 'I wish we'd done it a couple of weeks ago.' A thought struck me. 'Any chance of them knowing the man behind all this?'
'Every chance. I'll ask Mark. Now, boss, you and Mrs. Boss turn in.
It's the middle of the bloody night.'
We took his advice, feeling a deal more secure than before, and this time slept like logs… or in Susie's case like a bag of marbles. When the alarm wakened us again, at seven thirty, I ran the gauntlet of Katrina and called Greg.
Quickly I explained what I was after. 'Is this urgent?' he asked.
I've seen bleary eyes often enough, but a truly bleary voice is rarer; our lawyer had one.
'Check the clock, man. Do I make routine calls at this hour? I need to get into those files.'
'You couldn't have picked a worse day. I've got a staff training seminar first thing this morning… bloody Law Society requirement… and then I'm due in High Court at ten.'
'What are you doing in the criminal court? You're a civil lawyer.'
'Not at this hour of the fucking morning, I'm not,' he shot back.
'Actually it's an old school pal; he's upset the Inland Revenue and I've said I'll prepare his defence.'
'He must have upset them a lot, to be in the High Court.'
'A great deal. Look, I really do have a hellish schedule today, Oz. Is there any chance of you getting to my office by eight thirty?'
'I will if you will. See you there.' I put the phone down and headed for a very quick shower.
Thanks to someone breaking down on the Expressway, it was almost eight forty-five when I walked into Greg's big airy building… anything less like Ewan Maltbie's place you could not imagine.
He was in his office, waiting for me, and he hadn't been wasting his time. A pile of documents lay on his desk. Normally he has someone bring things like that to him, as and when they're needed. 'Why the sudden interest in the purchaser?' he asked, when he had stopped looking at his watch.
'I'm not sure yet. I just need to know who he is. It's complicated, but there's a link to the Three Bears business.'
'It's not one of them, I can tell you that. I know all of the lawyers who act for them, and none of them were involved. The legals for the other side were handled by Murphy and Woolfson, a small firm in Largs.
But the purchaser wasn't an individual…'
'I know that. As far as Susie knew it was another company.'
'Not quite,' said Greg. 'It was a trust: the Glentruish Trust, to be exact, whatever that is.'
'Sounds like an obscure malt whisky. Who signed the documents?'
'Maynard Woolfson, the solicitor, as administrator of the trust.'
'Where did the funds come from?'
'From the solicitor's client account, I assume. There was no record of that on Farmer's files.'
'Was there a mortgage?'
'I can't say for certain,' Greg replied, 'but there's nothing in the correspondence about a survey being carried out. That indicates that it was a cash purchase.' He looked at his watch again. 'And that, Oz, is as much as I can
