Last Resort (5 page)

‘Let’s get you through school first,’ her father laughed.

A man had come into the room with Paloma. He was around the thirty mark, with a mop of dark hair and a black full beard; her stepbrother, I assumed, and this was confirmed when he spoke to Sheila.

‘Mum, can I borrow the Toyota again?’ he asked. ‘There’s a film being shown in English tonight in Girona and I fancy catching it.’ He stopped then turned to me, hand outstretched. ‘I’m sorry, no manners, I’m Ben McNeish.’ He smiled, and I read a hint of shyness in him. ‘You are the Mr Skinner, aren’t you?’ His tone underlined the definite article.

‘I’m probably the one you’re thinking about, yes,’ I replied.

‘It’s an honour, sir.’

‘My pleasure too, Ben. I hear you’ve had some bad luck on the job front . . . in which case, I know how you feel.’

‘Mine was inevitable, the way things have gone in the book trade.’

‘Mine too,’ I countered, ‘given the clowns that run our country just now.’

‘The police could do it better, then, Bob?’ Xavi challenged. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘We’d run it more efficiently, that’s for sure. However, I’m for wider police accountability, not for none at all.’

‘Dad, can I have some Playstation time?’ Paloma asked, uninterested in Scottish politics. ‘I’ve no homework.’

‘In that case, my love, please do. We’re in mid-discussion here. Ben,’ he turned to his stepson, ‘since you’ve got a woman to impress, why don’t you take your mum’s Range Rover . . . or mine, for that matter.’

‘Thanks, Xavi,’ he replied, ‘but the Rav Four’s fine. I’d be nervous in yours. How did you know I’ve—’

‘Once a journo, always a journo; I have a nose for these things. Plus I noticed how long you spent on the fashion desk when I took you into the newspaper office yesterday.’

His stepson laughed softly. ‘I’m that transparent, am I?’

The new arrivals went their separate ways and we returned to serious business.

‘That’s agreed,’ Xavi said. ‘I’ll ask Susannah to take a close look at the digital department accounts first thing tomorrow. She’ll find nothing, though.’

‘I’m sure she won’t, but it needs doing. You don’t have to let his mother know.’

‘Why not? It might do her good to see that something’s being done.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Do I need to spell that out too?’

Sheila had tuned in to the message. ‘He means in case Hector has been at it and she’s involved.’

‘Jesus, Bob,’ her husband gasped, ‘do you suspect everyone?’

‘The law says innocent until proven guilty. We cops don’t go quite that far.’

‘If that’s so, you’d better investigate me too, in case I’ve done him in and buried him at the foot of the garden.’

‘No, you’re definitely innocent,’ I said. ‘If you’d done that, I’d be the last person you’d have called.’

‘Thanks for that small vote of confidence,’ he grunted. ‘So, on the assumption that Susannah finds everything in order, what can we do to find Hector?’

‘How about the blindingly obvious? You can call in the police.’

He shook his head. ‘That I do not want to do, for now. As you’ve just pointed out, there’s no evidence of violence, so they might laugh in my face if I ask them to investigate. But if they don’t, if they take it on, then for sure it will leak. All our rivals . . . and that’s the rest of the Spanish media . . . will run the story and they will use it to put the boot in.’

‘And that’s your fear, is it? That somehow, Hector’s been taken by a business enemy to destabilise InterMedia?’

‘Yes, it is; either that or for ransom. But if that was the case, surely we’d have been contacted by now?’

‘Not necessarily,’ I countered. ‘A kidnapper might wait for a few days, to see how you react to Hector’s disappearance. But in my experience . . . and it’s limited, abduction not being a major industry in Scotland . . . you’d have heard something within forty-eight hours.’

I hesitated before I went on. ‘When you suggest that a business rival might have taken him, do you have anyone in mind?’

Xavi considered his answer for even longer than I’d taken to put the question. Finally he responded.

‘Over the last two years we have had three approaches from interested parties. The first was a German media group, who made contact through its lawyer. He asked if we’d be interested in selling, and I said there was no basis for negotiation. He accepted that and asked to be notified if the situation changed. I gave him that guarantee.

‘The second was from an American investor, who said that he wanted to establish a European media portfolio and thought that InterMedia would be a good place to start. I told him to start somewhere else. A few months later he bought an ailing newspaper chain in France.’

‘And the third?’ I asked.

‘That was from an Italian conglomerate, an expanding business called BeBe, whose driving force is a youngish woman named Bernicia Battaglia. Have you heard of her?’

‘Yes, don’t they call her the “Warrior” because her surname means “battle”?’

‘The one and only. She turned up unannounced in the office in Girona just over two months ago. I saw her alone, in my room. She told me that she was going to buy the InterMedia group for one hundred million euros in BeBe shares.

‘I’m afraid I laughed in her face. I told her that I’m half Catalan, half Scots and because of that I only deal in stuff that I can take to the bank. She said, “Okay, sixty million cash.”

‘I said that if I was interested in a sale it would take a hell of a lot more than that, but that I wasn’t going to play games with her, because the business was my life and I wasn’t about to part with it.

‘She looked back at me, across my desk, this tall jewel of a woman, dressed in her finest Versace, drop-dead gorgeous even though she wore hardly any make-up, and she told me, “In that case I will take your life, Señor Aislado.” Then she got up and walked out.’

‘Have you heard from her since then?’

‘No, not a cheep. But if you’re asking me who I’ve met in business that I reckon would be capable of attacking me in this way, it would be her. She’s a very smart woman, and she will know that one person is crucial to the stability and success of InterMedia, and that it isn’t me, it’s Hector Sureda.’

‘But she’s only a businesswoman, not a warlord, for all her name.’

‘Don’t be so sure of that. Ten years ago, BeBe was the third-largest media company in Italy. The head of the second largest was an old bloke named Durante who was keeping it in shape for his son to run after he got over what Dad saw as a fleeting obsession with politics.

‘One day Durante junior was walking home from the Chamber of Deputies when someone put a bullet through his head. The assassin was never traced and within three months, the Warrior had bought the old guy out.’

I confess that until that moment, all I had really been able to see was Hector as an unstable man, perhaps on the rebound from a broken romance, deciding on a total life change and buggering off to get on with it. The Durante story got my attention, not least because I remembered it.

By chance, I’d been in Rome, on holiday with Sarah, when it had happened. I’d understood none of the press coverage, but I’d mentioned it to the hotel barman, and he’d said the cops were denying that it was a Mafia job.

I didn’t really want Sheila to hear what I had to say next, but I had no choice.

‘If you’re connecting that to Signora Battaglia,’ I murmured, ‘doesn’t it follow also that you may be looking for a dead man?’

Xavi winced. ‘The thought has occurred to me,’ he admitted. ‘But my hope is that she’ll realise that Hector is so important to InterMedia that his death would diminish it to the point that it was no longer worth having. As I said, the man is a genius.’

‘So your scenario is?’

‘That he’s been snatched and that he’ll be held until I agree to sell our family shareholding in the group, with his contract in place.’

‘But that would tie her to the abduction,’ I pointed out.

‘Not necessarily. She could wait me out. Hector’s absence will be felt very quickly.’

‘Okay,’ I agreed, not entirely convinced that one man could be so important, ‘but I still think it’s a job for the police. If you suspect organised crime involvement it would be handled discreetly.’

‘Nothing is leak-proof, Bob. My profession gets everywhere.’

‘You could always sell out,’ I suggested, bluntly.

‘I could,’ he agreed, ‘but I’m not there yet. I want to try to recover Hector . . . assuming he’s still recoverable. Resources aren’t a problem. I’ll hire my own people to find him and get him back safe. My hope is that you’ll be able to tell me where to begin.’

‘Mmm.’ I scratched an itch on my right temple. ‘A few months ago, I ran across a couple of guys who might have been useful to you on the recovery part. But they’re no longer in the game.’

‘Why not?’

‘Let’s just say that a colleague and I retired them; but let’s not dwell on that. Before you get to that stage, you need to make sure of the situation. And for that you will need the best investigator in the business.’

‘Where will I find him?’

‘You’re looking at him. Go and open another bottle of cava; my brain’s a little rusty, and that’s the best lubricant I know.’

Five

T
o this day I’m not sure why I said that, but in doing so I tossed the dice and crossed the river and did all the other symbolic stuff involved in stepping from one life into another.

It was the moment when I realised that in my heart I had always wanted to remain the hands-on cop I had been, rather than the civil servant . . . albeit a very senior one . . . that I’d become.

It was the moment when I realised that what I’d laughed off as the ‘Sherlock Option’ when considering my future was actually a possibility, and a very live one at that. I had skills and if someone wanted to hire them for a purpose within the law then why the hell should I not accommodate them?

After I’d made the offer, I felt as surprised as Xavi looked, but it was out there and I wasn’t going to renege on it.

Once he’d popped the cork on another bottle of Freixenet and Sheila had left us while she looked after dinner (this is a fact; I know quite a few millionaires, and not one of them has a cook), he got down to business.

‘What are your terms and conditions for this sort of assignment?’ he asked.

I hadn’t considered either, not at all, but my reply was instantaneous. ‘I have only one condition. Whatever I do I’ll play by the rules; by that I mean I’ll be bound by the same constraints that I was as a police officer. By that I mean I will not be hacking anyone’s communications.’

‘I wouldn’t expect otherwise. And your terms? By that I mean financial.’

‘In the future, I haven’t a clue, but this is a favour for a friend.’

‘You’ll have expenses, surely?’

‘Will I? I may make a couple of phone calls and it’ll all be sorted.’

‘Really?’

‘No, probably not,’ I admitted. ‘We don’t get that lucky very often. Xavi, I have no idea where this will go. If there are costs incurred, I’ll let you know . . . but chances are you’ll be involved in what I do. In fact the more people I have to speak to, the deeper in you’ll be.’

‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘but why?’

‘For one very good reason: I’ve had a place here for a long time but I only speak restaurant Spanish, at best, and a lot of that’s got Catalan mixed in. I’ll get by as best I can, but there will be times when I’ll need a translator, and given the sensitivity of this business, that can only be you. Besides, you’re a pretty damn good investigator yourself. You built a career on it, if you think about it.’

He frowned. ‘I suppose I did,’ he conceded. ‘But journalists tend not to interpret, we simply establish facts and report them.’

‘So do detectives; the remit’s the same except we report to the fiscal, not the public. The only advantage we have is that when we want to interview people they can’t slam the door in our faces. So, will you be my voice when I need it?’

‘Of course. Where will you begin?’

‘First off,’ I responded, ‘I’m going to look for Hector’s car. He was last seen driving to work, you said. Generally you can make a person disappear more easily than a car. What did he drive?’

‘A Porsche Boxster, a little yellow thing; looks like a fucking canary with wheels. It’s not the most practical car for these parts, but it’s what he wanted.’

‘What he wanted?’ I repeated. ‘Does that mean it’s company owned?’

‘Leased,’ he volunteered. ‘All the directors’ cars are, apart from Joe’s Merc.’

‘That could mean it’s still in one piece; if it had been involved in an accident or dumped somewhere, the police would have contacted the leasing company, and they’d have been on to you. First thing tomorrow morning you should make a call.’

‘To whom?’

I countered with a question. ‘Who’s your best contact in the Mossos d’Esquadra?’

‘Comissari Canals in the Girona office . . . but Bob, you know how I feel about police involvement.’

‘You can’t avoid it,’ I insisted. ‘You only need to tell him that one of your cars is missing, and ask for his help in finding it. You don’t need to say that the driver’s missing as well.’

‘Won’t it be logged into their system as a theft?’

‘Along with how many hundred others?’ I pointed out. ‘It’s necessary, Xavi, or we’d have to find it ourselves. Once we have it, who knows what we’ll find in it?’

‘What’s your guess about that?’

‘I’ll be hoping to see traces of anyone who was in that car, other than Hector.’

‘Okay,’ Xavi agreed, ‘I’ll call Canals. What else do you need?’

‘I want to talk to Hector’s parents.’

‘Why, Bob? They can’t tell you any more than I have.’

‘Nonetheless, I want to hear it from them. They may recall something that’s significant to us, something he said or did. But I really don’t want to anticipate. You’ve told me what you believe, Xavi, and I can understand why you do, but I have to go into this with a completely open mind.’

‘Then tomorrow I’ll arrange a meeting with Pilar, in the office in Girona.’

I didn’t fancy the idea. ‘Why can’t we go to Begur?’ I asked. ‘I’d much prefer that.’

He gave a huge sigh. ‘There’s a problem with Simon. He has a very bad heart condition; he needs a valve replacement, urgently. It’s scheduled for next week; Pilar’s been told that he must be kept calm and quiet until then. They have him on constant sedation, until they’re ready to admit him to hospital in Barcelona. He can’t know about this.’

‘Then he won’t,’ I said. ‘But I’d still like to go to Begur. You said that Hector has his own section of the house. Would it be possible for me to see it without Simon even knowing I’m there?’

He looked at me, a little sceptically. ‘Do you really need to?’

‘Open mind, Xavi,’ I repeated. ‘I have to start this from scratch, with Hector saying
adios
to his mum, and I’d like to see the rooms he left behind him. It may be that before this is done we’ll need to go to his Barcelona pad too.’

‘We won’t find him there; I called his landline, no answer, and I even got someone from our office in the city to call round on some pretext or other.’

‘But they didn’t get in?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody home.’

‘Then we should go, unless we find him or he turns up in the next twenty-four hours.’

The big man nodded. ‘If you say so.’

‘I do; but first, the car. Can you make that call to your Mossos mate tonight?’

‘I can try his office. He’s a workaholic so he may still be there. Before I do, though, I’ll need to check the Boxster’s registration plate. I can access it through my computer, in my office upstairs.’

‘Good. You do that. While you’re at it, I promised Sarah that we’d speak tonight. If she’s tried me on the L’Escala landline she’ll be wondering where the hell I’m at.’ I took my phone from my pocket, and switched it on. ‘Do you have a decent signal here?’ I asked Xavi as I waited for it to fire up.

He smiled. ‘Of course. We have some influence with Movistar.’

Sure enough, my screen showed five bars. When I entered the pass code it also showed two missed calls, one from Sauce Haddock, and the other from someone I wasn’t expecting to hear from; Mia, my secret son’s mother.

I gave Sauce priority, and hit the return button. ‘Chief,’ he said as he came on line, but quietly. I guessed that he was not alone, and he confirmed it at once. ‘I’m with Sammy.’

DI Sammy Pye is his boss; he’s another of those I like to call ‘my people’. The two of them work out of the Leith office and make a pretty formidable team. As their careers develop I expect Sauce to pass his gaffer by at some point, even though Sammy is famously ambitious. Young Haddock has that edge, a quiet determination that will not allow him to put the pieces of a puzzle back in their box until he’s assembled the complete picture. Once he adds Pye’s judgement to his arsenal, he’ll be unstoppable.

‘I had to let him in on it,’ he continued. ‘Your email used my force address, so he could have accessed it anyway.’

‘I’ve got no problem with that,’ I told him. ‘I only called you because you owe me one after the help I gave you a couple of months back. Any progress?’

‘Yes, some; Carrie McDaniels is her real name. She’s twenty-eight years old and she’s no more a journalist than I am. You were right, the story she spun you is pure fiction. The Belgian tour company does exist, but it never uses freelancers on its flight magazines. She probably used its name because it flew her to Barcelona, on a flight out of Brussels, last Saturday.’

‘Do you know what she was doing there?’

‘No more than connecting, as far as I can see. She caught an early-morning FlemAir flight to Belgium out of Prestwick.’

‘Did she travel alone?’

‘Yes, but she didn’t pay for it; the booking was charged to the credit card of somebody called Linton Baillie, billing address in Edinburgh.’

‘Do we know who he is?’

‘The gaffer let me run a PNC check; it showed him as not known to the police, so I Googled him. Several hits came up, most of them on Amazon. He seems to be an author, specialising in what they call “true crime”. There’s no image of him anywhere that I can find, so we don’t know if he’s the guy in Carrie’s photos. We could try the Passport Agency, but . . .’

‘No,’ I said, understanding his hesitancy. ‘They’d want to know why, and if you told them the truth, that it’s a private inquiry, then you’d be shafted by the Data Protection Act.’

‘Exactly. But the DI says that if you want to make a formal complaint . . .’

I laughed. ‘For what? The only thing we might have against him is indecent exposure on Gullane beach.’

‘We could talk to his publisher,’ Sammy Pye called out, close enough for me to hear him.

‘Tell him no thanks, Sauce,’ I said. ‘If the guy’s a serious nuisance I’ll find him myself. Back to McDaniels: you’ve found out what she isn’t. Got any clue to what she is?’

‘Yes, believe it or not, she’s a private investigator.’

‘A what?’ I exclaimed.

‘No kidding, Chief. She’s a licensed private detective. I found her CV online; it was pretty informative.

‘It says that she started her career with an insurance company, straight from school, about ten years ago; as an assistant in its claims department. When she was twenty-one she joined the Territorial Army Military Police. She served mainly in Scotland but did a couple of short tours of duty in Germany and in Afghanistan.

‘Two years ago, she left the TA, as a corporal, and got herself what they call a front-line licence from the Security Industry Authority. Armed with that she resigned from the insurance company and set up on her own as CMcD Investigations.’

‘Working for whom?’

‘According to the website, for her old employer, for a couple of retail chains, and for “a number of private clients”. I’m quoting there, by the way.’

‘One of those being Mr Linton Baillie,’ I murmured. ‘With tracking me as her brief, it seems. The bloody woman’s had me under surveillance.’

‘Looks like it, sir. Do you want us to look closer at this Baillie guy? Sammy’s sitting here nodding, if you do.’

‘No, I don’t think so. For the moment, he thinks he’s a secret. He can keep on believing that until I’m ready to deal with him. He’s low priority at the moment; I’ve got something else to sort out here. Thanks for your help, both of you.’

Sauce’s information would probably have driven Mia’s missed call out of my head, had there not been a little red reminder on the screen of my phone. I thought about deleting it, for I wanted none of her in my life. But then I realised that she felt the same way about me, and that she wouldn’t have phoned me just to pass the time. Shortly afterwards my scrambled brain recognised that we had exchanged mobile numbers for one reason alone: Ignacio, our son.

I made the call. When Mia answered she sounded more than a little agitated. ‘Can’t talk now,’ she hissed. ‘I’ll call you back in five.’

‘That’s if you can get through,’ I muttered, after she’d gone, then hit Sarah’s number.

‘Hello, my darling.’ Her voice had an echo to it that told me she was driving. I checked my watch and saw that it was seven forty-two local time, an hour earlier in Scotland. I’d caught her on the way home from work, bound for Gullane. Our reconciliation is recent enough for us still to keep separate houses, although more and more she’s been coming to mine, especially through the week when the kids are at school.

‘Good flight? Settled in okay? Is L’Escala quiet?’

I smiled, as if we were speaking across the dinner table. ‘Yes to the first; sort of, to the second; not as quiet as I’d like it to the third.’

‘That last one sounds pretty mysterious,’ she chuckled.

‘It isn’t really.’ I decided to say nothing about Carrie McDaniels; not then at any rate. ‘I was surprised by the number of ex-pats in winter, that’s all. But I’ve been distracted.’

I told her about Xavi’s call, and that I was phoning from his place. ‘He’s in a bit of a predicament and he wanted my advice.’

‘What kind of advice?’

‘Professional. He needs to trace a missing person, discreetly. I’ve said I’ll help him.’

The chuckle became a full-throated laugh. ‘Bob, since when did you do discreet?’

She had me there. For all my high police rank, I have a reputation for leaving carnage in my wake.

‘This’ll be fine. We’ll trace the guy in a day or two, and I’ll get back to what I came here to do.’

‘Let’s hope so. I want to see a man with a plan when you get back.’

‘It’s taking shape already,’ I assured her. I wasn’t kidding; I was amazed by the buzz that Xavi’s situation was giving me. Furthermore, if somebody like Carrie McDaniels could set herself up as a licensed investigator, on the basis of a couple of years as a part-time Redcap, then what could I do?

‘How’s your day been?’ I asked.

‘Routine. This morning I did an autopsy on a fit and healthy twenty-six-year-old man who was found dead in his armchair. It was uncomplicated; the guy drank too much beer and ate too many pakoras, then fell asleep and inhaled enough of his own puke to see him over the line.

‘This afternoon, I lectured to a couple of classes at the university, then wrote up my notes on the morning’s subject for the insurance company that hired me to carve him up. He was insured for two hundred and fifty grand, double for accidental death. The argument will be whether it was accidental or self-inflicted.’