‘Did Pollock help?’ Sauce Haddock asked, joining in from Edinburgh.

  ‘To an extent,’ Mann said. ‘He told John that in the second half of last year he had a call from Sandra. He told him that she had bought a motor home from a company in Germany and that she was flying to Frankfurt to pick it up. She asked him if he was free, and if so whether he fancied going native for a while and touring Europe. He said that he was, and that a road trip could be quite good for him business-wise, if he could plan ahead.’

  The DCC shook his head. ‘Influencing’s a business now?’

  ‘You’d better believe it,’ Haddock said. ‘Isn’t that right, Lottie?’

  ‘So it seems, and Sandra was fine with it, Gordon said. She gave him a list of places she wanted to visit, and he planned around that. Mostly they were cities: Lyon, Barcelona, Milan, Amsterdam and Paris. Luxembourg too, if that counts as a city, not a country. He was able to fix up a promotional link in each place. There are records of every stop in his YouTube channel. They went as far as the south of Italy, and brought in the new year there, until Sandra said late January that she wanted to head back to Britain. She was having a crisis of conscience, she said, about not having visited her Aunt Sally . . . yes, that was really her name . . . in her care home in Biggar. So they did; they took the mobile home on the ferry, then rather than take it into London, Sandra dropped Gordon off in Guildford, where she posted a card to her nephew and niece, then headed north. We know she got as far as Berwick, but that’s all. After that, effectively she disappeared.’

  ‘Did she visit the aunt?’ McGuire asked. ‘Do we know that?’

  ‘John checked that straight away. The home manager said there’s no record of her being there. The bank records that the man Bonar gave Jackie, they back all this up. Through fuel stops and parking fees we can build up a pattern of her movements that’s almost as good as the disabled navigation system in the van would have given us, until it stops, abruptly.’

  ‘That should pinpoint where she was when she was taken out, shouldn’t it?’ the DCC suggested.

  ‘Not at all, unfortunately. Her last buy was fuel, in Berwick. Given the range of the thing she could have been anywhere within a three hundred mile radius.’

  ‘Sod it,’ Haddock whispered.

  ‘Exactly, Sauce,’ Mann agreed, ‘but . . . all this might tell us where she was, but it doesn’t take us anywhere near a motive for her murder. Gordon Pollock didn’t tell us anything that would help in that respect. I need a complete picture of Sandra Bulloch’s life from the time she moved to the Bahamas to the day she died, and I’m not going to get that through phone interviews or video calls like this one. We have to talk to people on the ground. I need to send Jackie Wright or John Stirling over there, probably Jackie, since she has seniority.’

  ‘She does but is she senior enough for an assignment like that?’ Haddock wondered. ‘I agree with you, we need to go there, but I think it needs a higher rank . . . for example Detective Chief Inspector.’

  ‘I can’t go. I’m the SIO. Can’t we make Jackie acting DI?’

  ‘I suppose . . .’

  ‘Yes but,’ McGuire exclaimed. ‘I’m sorry to hose you both down, but I need to. I sat in on a meeting yesterday with the Chief and a couple of suits from the Scottish government. It was all about budgets, or to be more specific, budget cuts. From now on, all of our spending will have to stand up to public scrutiny, and our financial decision making will have to be spotless. For example, if the victim in a homicide was, let’s say, an ordinary punter who’d been in a foreign country and might have upset somebody there badly enough to get bumped off once he was back home, would we send officers there to investigate the background? Most probably not; most likely we’d share information with the locals and ask for their assistance.’

  ‘Hold on sir,’ Mann argued. ‘I was sent over to Spain earlier this year.’

  ‘Yes, you were, but that was to assist the Spanish. Plus, there were American interests, and there were secret squirrel factors, with Bob Skinner getting kidnapped and such. In this case the victim was killed in this country, months after she left the Bahamas, and, she was a former police officer. That leaves any decision I take about overseas deployment open to comparative scrutiny. Would we be applying different standards because she was one of our own? I hear what both of you are saying, and personally, I agree with it, but: the sad fact is that we have a chief financial officer. She’s not a cop, so she isn’t part of the command structure, but she does have oversight of everything we do. She might not have the power of veto, but she does have the ability to make a fuss. Look,’ he sighed, ‘I’ve thought about this, and if this was put to her, she’d point out that the Royal Bahamas Police Force predates our service by about a hundred and seventy years, it has a commissioner and fourteen assistant commissioners. That’s more than we do. Sorry, I can’t justify sending anyone, regardless of rank. Lottie, you have to ask the RBPF for assistance.’

  ‘And where will we stand in its priority list?’ Haddock protested. ‘Not very high up, that’s for sure. Fuck it!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve got about a month’s accrued leave, and I want to take Cheeky somewhere warm before she gets too pregnant to fly. I’ll go, on my own time and at my own expense, and fuck the bean counters.’

  Forty-Five

  Dolça Nuñez was excited, but it was not in her nature to let it show. She had been surprised by the invitation to the chairman’s office, a little apprehensive initially until she had reasoned that if she was going to be fired she would have been told to report to someone in HR.

  The outcome was not something she could have imagined, ever. She had a flair for investigative reporting, one that she had demonstrated on a student newspaper by outing a plot by a right wing nationalist group to infiltrate the campus. She had the courage that had to go with it also. She had not ignored the potential threats made to her personal safety. Instead she had included them in her story, which had caused the perpetrators to be expelled from the university and to be placed under judicial investigation. And yet the episode had featured nowhere on the CV that she had presented when applying for a trainee position with InterMedia. She had been concerned that if she had included it she might be flagged as an agitator herself, but on the left of the political spectrum, and turned down on that ground.

  She thought of herself as a strong personality, capable of holding her own in any company, and yet in hindsight, she realised that initially she had been a little intimidated by Sir Robert Skinner. The man had an intensity about him, a personality that was almost visible. Like most of Spain’s journalistic community she had been surprised when he had been unveiled as the successor to Xavi Aislado as executive head of the InterMedia group. Xavi himself had succeeded Josep Maria Aislado, who had purchased what was then little more than a regional daily newspaper with a bad reputation. Old Joe had begun by clearing out the Francoist influence, and had been expansionist from that point on. He had been a pure businessman, but Xavi was a journalist from his bootlaces up. He had taken a view that was even more global than his predecessor. Among those who knew him the expectation was that he would groom his daughter as his successor, and stay in post until she was ready, until the death of Sheila Craig, his wife, Paloma’s mother, had derailed everything.

  InterMedia’s rivals had stopped short of celebrating Xavi’s emotional collapse and withdrawal from business and public life, but they had anticipated that they would benefit from it as their rival declined without its leader. When Skinner had been unveiled as his successor, and they had looked at his background, those expectations had increased. And yet a year later they were in full retreat; the InterMedia group’s operations across Europe had been strengthened and it had posted record profits. Most striking of all, Skinner and his chief lieutenant, Hector Sureda, had surprised the industry by announcing an expansion into the US, and obtaining approval to launch their upcoming Hispanic cable news outlet. From being a curiosity, Sir Robert Skinner had become a story himself.

  And he had chosen her, Dolça Nuñez Otero, as his undercover agent. When she had left his office, clutching the folder he had given her, to settle into the small room he had assigned her on the executive floor, Mount Olympus, as they called it downstairs, she knew that she had been handed a career-making opportunity . . . or career breaking, if she screwed it up. ‘But I won’t do that,’ she murmured.

  Opening the folder she found herself looking at several photocopies. Two were photos of the packages delivered to the Diaz Hoverstad offices. They were as Skinner had described them: a message in a bottle, and a deceased rodent with enclosures. She shuddered at the latter; she had grown up in an underprivileged neighbourhood in Valencia where rats were an everyday presence. The notes were there too, photocopied. Explicit, to the point, and threatening. No wonder the poor woman had been scared, she thought. The other enclosures were also photos, close-ups of the barcodes on the bottle received in Barcelona and the label that had been affixed to the rat. There for a reason, she thought, but . . .

  ‘Do I take these to Ciervorapido?’ she asked herself. Inge Hoverstad had kept this thing between the company and the police, the boss had told her. Sure, the Mossos and the Policia would go to the company, but if she did, the assumption would be that the media were on to the story. For sure Ciervorapido would issue a press statement, aimed that hosing down a fire that did not actually exist.

  ‘No,’ she decided. Discreet, Sir Robert had said, so discreet she would be. But, share with no one, that was a different matter. In her university career, Dolça had built a wide circle of friends, people of many talents and skills, most with an alternative outlook on life. She took out her phone, found a number and dialled.

  She and Jorge Poch had met in her first post-graduate year, which she had spent in Sevilla, looking for the right employment opportunity while making ends meet by working as a waitress by day and a call-girl by night, seven hundred euros a trick. Not for the first time: Dolça had put herself through university by any means necessary. She had grown up poor but had no wish to stay that way.

  Jordi Poch Hierro was like-minded, a boy from a background similar to hers who had earned a degree with distinction in computer science. If he had chosen to pursue a Masters it would have been in online stealth. He was an investigator of sorts, one whose specialty was, as he put it, accessing information without its owner ever being aware that his pocket had been picked. He was a hacker, a data protection officer’s worst nightmare. He moonlighted also, as a security adviser, plugging holes for his clients that he had created, undetectably, himself.

  ‘Baybee,’ he greeted her as he took her call. ‘How are the provinces?’

  ‘More interesting than I had expected.’

  ‘Are you still doing two jobs?’

  ‘No.’ She paused. ‘I don’t waitress anymore.’

  Jordi gasped. ‘You’re . . .’

  She laughed. ‘No, I’m kidding. This is a small city; I couldn’t keep such a secret here.’

  As she spoke, she gasped involuntarily, as a throwaway remark by the chairman returned to her. ‘I know already I can trust you in that respect.’

  ‘And he did,’ she realised. ‘They had another Jordi look at me, and still they hired me. God, maybe it was him! But no, he wouldn’t have told.’

  ‘So why the call?’ he asked, breaking into her moment of realisation. ‘Have you finally realised that you love me?’

  ‘I knew that a long time ago, my dear, as you love me. Now I want to take advantage of it. There’s a pocket that I want you to pick.’

  Forty-Six

  ‘So, we meet again,’ Gino Butler said, as Lottie Mann lowered herself into a tight-fitting leather chair in the golf club members’ lounge, while John Stirling chose the easier option of a sofa. ‘Too bad that it’s in the same circumstances as the last time.’

  ‘Not quite,’ she countered. ‘This one is very definitely a murder investigation.’

  ‘As you thought Leo’s was too, until things got more complicated. You and your wee sidekick were dead certain of it. I remember you on the day I found his body. Where is he now, by the way?’

  She checked her watch. ‘Right now? Lecturing at the police college.’

  ‘I’d like to be in that class,’ Butler chuckled. ‘He was a peppery little bugger. He had me down as suspect straight away . . . even though it was me that found the victim . . . assumed victim,’ he corrected himself.

  She made herself return his smile. ‘Being first on the scene doesn’t automatically rule someone out as a person of interest. I can think of a couple of precedents, incidents where the perpetrator came back, called it in and made a great show of having found the victim.’

  ‘Well I didn’t,’ he said, suddenly grim. ‘I will never forget it. I walked in and there he was, my best mate, dead in his chair.’

  ‘And your employer,’ Stirling observed. ‘A double hit.’

  Butler stared at him and whistled, then looked back at Mann. ‘Has this one been in your ex-partner’s class? He’s got the same direct approach.’

  ‘He’s had a few tips,’ she conceded, then continued. ‘Sandra was there that morning as well.’

  He nodded, frowning as he gazed at the table between them. ‘How could I forget . . . but I never knew that she would be until she turned up. If I’d known she was coming I’d have been waiting for her outside, to warn her.’

  ‘But you didn’t know then that she and Leo were a couple.’

  ‘No, I didn’t, but I knew they knew each other. She was Faye’s sister, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Yes,’ the DCI murmured. ‘Faye.’ She glanced at him. ‘And you and she were . . .’ She allowed the remark to hang in the air.

  ‘Yes we were, but as you know, I’ve moved on from there; moved a long way as it happens.’

  ‘Yes I know,’ Mann agreed. ‘I’ve met with your wife. Your life’s taken quite a different turn . . . unlike Faye’s. She’s still sitting in her nice house by the beach raging at the world.’

  ‘Whatever she says, DCI Mann, remember this. Faye’s a congenital liar, and vicious with it. You talked about people of interest. She’s got to be one, hasn’t she? You must rememeber what she did when she found out about Leo and Sandra.’

  ‘I do but I can’t comment on it, or on any other aspect of our investigation. Nobody with a potential grievance against the victim has been ruled out yet, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘Not even me?’ Butler ventured.

  ‘Nobody,’ she repeated. ‘It struck me at the time that given how close you and Leo were, you had a relatively minor bequest. What was it again? The cars in the garage at Ayr and a paltry half a mil?’

  He grinned, shaking his head gently. ‘Yes,’ he chuckled. ‘That’s what quite a few people thought, but none of them ever looked in the garage. The place was more like a motor museum. There were six cars in there, every one a classic, high value vehicle. The prize exhibit was a nineteen fifties Ferrari, that had actually belonged to Enzo himself. I sold that at auction for three and a half million, net. No, Chief Inspector,’ he said. ‘I’m not disgruntled. Far from it: I’m probably the most gruntled person . . . if that’s a word . . . in this room.’

  Mann was taken aback, but she maintained her legendary impassivity. ‘When did you last see Sandra, Mr Butler?’ she continued.

  ‘Gino, please.’

  ‘We’ll keep it formal if you don’t mind. Are you going to answer me?’

  ‘Yes. I haven’t seen Sandra Bulloch, not face to face, since that morning in Ayr. Obviously as one of Leo’s executors, I had contact with her during the processing of the estate, but it was all done long distance. We spoke a few times, and I emailed her stuff to be Docusigned, but she didn’t come back to Scotland and I didn’t go out there. Once all the legal stuff was done, I distributed all of the bequests, my own, Trudi’s, Gordon’s, the kids’, then handed all the rest over to Sandra through the state lawyers and went away. I’ve never contacted her since then, nor did she ever get in touch with me.’

  ‘How about Mr Baxter?’ Stirling asked. ‘Has he seen her?’

  ‘I can’t speak for him. I know they didn’t meet while we were preparing the estate for confirmation, but it’s possible they’ve met since then. He’s the property guy and that all went to Sandra . . . apart from the hotels, that is: they went to Gordon, as you’ll know.’

  ‘Which you manage for him,’ Mann said. ‘We’ve spoken to him.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Butler confirmed. ‘I was his trustee until he turned twenty-one and he didn’t have a clue, so I had to take decisions. The ownership was a shambles: Leo had bought the properties individually and run them as such, with managers. I wasn’t much involved then, but as Gordon’s trustee I was able to bring them all together into a holding company, hire an experienced general manager and give her oversight.’

  ‘Do you take a percentage?’

  ‘I didn’t as a trustee, but when he took ownership as an adult, Gordon, and Trudi too, asked me if I’d continue, in a different way with . . . what do I call it? . . . appropriate remuneration. By that time, Gordon had moved to London and was completely obsessed by growing his online persona . . . at which he’s bloody brilliant by the way. The hotel GM’s still in place, and reports to me. At a fairly early stage she proposed that we buy a brand . . . you’ll have heard of Best Western? Same idea, only a different name . . . but that didn’t work out too well so now they just trade as Pollock Hotels.’

  Mann nodded. ‘Who’s the trustee for the three minor children?’ she asked.

  ‘For Raeleen, the kid in Las Vegas, the youngest one, her mother is; Rae Letts. Leonard and Jolene, theirs is Herbert Chesters, solicitors: in other words my wife.’

  ‘Not their mother, that I understand, but not Sandra either?’

  ‘No.’ Butler hesitated. ‘If you remember, the final version of Leo’s will was written very quickly, by him alone. Trudi was a witness, but only to his signature. Its purpose was to make Sandra his principal beneficiary. It would have made sense for him to make her the kids’ trustee, but Leo never thought of that. Why do you ask?’