She hung up and I turned back to my computer. I aborted my draft letter to be resumed at a later date, then opened my intranet mail box. Young Sauce had moved fast. The images and the report he had attached told me that the banknotes had been dusted and had yielded only eight prints in total, but four of them were common to each note. There was a thumb in the corner, index finger in the centre, same side, where someone might leave them when peeling them from a roll, and two others, fainter, one on the front of the fifties and the other on the back. Sauce guessed that these might have been Solomon’s as he took the money from his customer.
The lad had been smart enough to have the notes scanned, and sent four images, with the serial numbers showing clearly. ‘Good boy,’ I murmured, then reached for the phone, not a mobile, but a secure line on my desk.
It’s good to have friends, but it’s great when they have influence. I’ve known Amanda Dennis professionally for years, and whenever I’m in London I try to meet her socially as well. She’s one of those people who keep a low profile. Indeed there was a time not so long ago when she didn’t even exist, officially. Her business is national security, and on occasion it overlaps with mine. She’s the deputy director of MI5, although there was a period when she ran the whole damn show, on an acting basis.
‘Bob,’ she said, ‘this is a surprise. Does it mean you’re coming to the capital?’
‘Hey,’ I laughed. ‘I’m in the capital.’
‘Oh, you bloody Scots. You know what I mean.’
‘Yes, but I don’t have a trip south in my diary at the moment. There’s something I want to run past you, to see if you can help. I’ve got an odd situation in Edinburgh and it’s getting odder by the minute.’ I ran through the story from the beginning, from the anonymous call and the discovery of the body, though to Haddock’s trip to Glasgow and what he had found there.
‘You can’t help it, can you?’ she murmured, when I was finished. ‘You’re a chief constable, supposed to be a pen-pusher, yet here you are on a Friday evening, up to your elbows in an investigation when you should be in your club with your cronies. Does the phrase “get a life” mean anything to you?’
‘You can talk, woman,’ I grunted. ‘Do you actually have a home, or do you have a room in that building?’
‘I have a very nice flat,’ she replied, but I’d known that all along.
‘Sure, in Dolphin Square. You could throw a tennis ball from your office window and it would hit it without a bounce.’
She sighed. ‘Maybe, but you know how it is. The bastards who are trying to get us don’t work office hours; for example, there’s live intelligence about a plot to assassinate a leading British political figure. Whitehall’s on a virtual lockdown because of it. Even without that, the threat level’s constantly high these days. From both sides,’ she added, ‘theirs and our own. Ever since we became a more open book, as it were, we’ve been under more political scrutiny. You know what those chaps are like; Commons committees are stacked with ambitious people looking for a cause that’s going to generate headlines for them, and bashing the security service has become very popular.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I murmured.
‘Oh, do you have problems too?’
‘Do I ever.’ I paused. ‘Amanda, between you and me, what do you know of Toni Field?’
‘Enough to know that I never want to work for her,’ she said, firmly.
‘You’re career Five, chum, going nowhere else; there’s no chance of that.’
‘To the first, yes, I agree. To the second, don’t be so confident. That woman’s ambitions know no boundaries. She cultivates the powerful everywhere she goes. Doesn’t matter who or what they are. She’s the poster girl in the Met at the moment. . the Mayor of London thinks she’s wonderful. . plus she has contacts deep into the Home Office and Justice Ministry, at political and civil servant level. She sees herself running this place one day; the way she operates makes me certain of that. The present Home Secretary hates her, thank God, but nobody stays in that office for long. When I heard she’d got the Strathclyde job, I knew there would be trouble between you two, I just knew it.’
She was so insistent that I had to chuckle. ‘Fact is,’ I said, ‘I have bigger problems than her, but to hell with it, I’ve had enough of them for today. Amanda, I’ve got some fingerprints, and an image of the dead man. We’re running them through conventional databases, naturally, but I wondered if you’d be prepared to do some wider checks for me, within your community. The fact that these guys seem to be foreign. .’
‘I agree. They could just be a trio of tourists, but. . To dispose of a body like that? Worth a check.’
‘And it might be worth checking with your Glasgow office, too,’ I suggested, ‘to see if there have been any undercurrents there. The three men ate in Glasgow; the guy died very soon afterwards, and yet his friends buried his body in Edinburgh and then pointed us at it. Why would they do that? They must have known we’d be chasing our tails in the aftermath, so was that deliberate? Create a mystery in Edinburgh, focus attention there. Smokescreen?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I’m not aware of anything specific in Scotland but I’ll ask. Send me the image and the prints and I’ll have people work on them, straight away.’
Lowell Payne
I hadn’t really fancied a trip to Andorra. I went there on a skiing holiday with Jean in the first year of our marriage, before our daughter was born: I didn’t like it. The country looks as if God landscaped the Pyrenees with an axe when he was making the world. It’s a drab, claustrophobic canyon of a place. Our travel agent fed us a line about how cheap the shops were. Crap! When we got there we found that for most things they were cheaper than Harrods, but nowhere else. An ex-pat resident told me there were bargains to be had in diving equipment. . in a ski resort: work that one out. . and in firearms, but we were in the market for neither.
As it turned out, one phone call was all Mackenzie and I needed to make progress with our investigation. A quick online check told us that while there’s an honorary consul in the mountain state, he operates under the supervision of the British consulate in Barcelona. I called there, and was put through to the Andorran expert, a lady called Betty Ireland.
‘How can I help the police?’ she asked, sounding as if she was genuinely pleased to have a chance to do so.
‘I want to find out all there is to know about a company called Holyhead SA,’ I told her. ‘It’s come up in an investigation. Can you give me some pointers?’
‘A criminal investigation?’
‘Potentially,’ I conceded. ‘We’re interested in some payments that have been made and Holyhead’s the source.’
‘I can make enquiries. Do you know anything about it at all?’
‘We believe it may be owned by a man called Welsh.’
‘Is he a resident of Andorra?’
‘No, he’s Scottish. Lives in Edinburgh. Does that make a difference?’
‘Not necessarily, but you may find that the gentleman isn’t the owner of record. In the past that would have had to be a citizen, but the law is changing, to encourage foreign investment and to encourage the setting up of holding companies there.’ She paused, then switched into full lecture mode. ‘Andorra isn’t your classic offshore tax haven, you understand. It doesn’t have the sort of regime that attracts financial institutions, nor is it the sort of place where you’d set up an offshore trust.’
‘So what’s the attraction?’
‘Income tax: there isn’t any. The taxation is all indirect.’
‘I see.’
‘How urgent is it?’
I grinned. ‘We’re the police, Ms Ireland. Everything’s urgent.’
‘In that case I’ll speak to my contacts and get back to you as soon as I can. I’m sure you won’t mind giving me your main switchboard number, so that I know you really are the police.’
‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ I said. ‘Time frame?’
‘With luck, tomorrow morning; I’m assuming that you’re on weekend duty.’
‘We are on this one. Thanks.’
