‘Where do we start?’

  ‘With motive,’ he declared. ‘It’s the one thing that the Crown doesn’t have; they might suggest one, Chaz’s anger over his sister’s affair with Rogozin, but they’d be clutching at straws. So why bother? For a viable suspect, we need someone who did have a motive to kill Annette.

  ‘That’s where everything changed when Dan Provan found those images this morning, and when Sirena Burbujas came forward with her story of Annette’s sexual persecution. Annette spoke of a secret in her text to Chaz. I know from Paco that he’d been off cocaine for three months, long enough for there to be no metabolites left in his system.

  ‘With his career safe, Rogozin’s hold over her was loosened. From Burbujas’s statement, it seems that his last visit a couple of weeks ago could have triggered the whole thing. If she told him that she’d had enough, and that she was going to call his bluff, he would have a very clear motive to kill her.’

  ‘I follow that, Pops,’ Alex agreed, ‘but we still have her body in the penthouse, and Chaz there at the time she was killed.’

  ‘Yes,’ he countered, ‘but all along, the Crown case has been founded on a basic premise, and we’ve gone along with it: that she was killed in the penthouse. What if she wasn’t? What if she was killed somewhere else, and her body moved there after Chaz had left the building?’

  ‘But is that possible? The place is top security. It’s intruder proof.’

  ‘Not if it wasn’t an intruder. Rogozin was an insider. We know he used the apartment below, and we believe that he summoned Annette down there, just over a week before she was killed.’

  ‘Hold on a minute, Pops. We know he arrived on the Saturday, and made calls to Annette, but by that time she was already dead.’

  ‘Sure he did, but what if those calls were for show? I suggest that when he arrived in the apartment on that Friday evening, he was actually coming back.’

  ‘Suggest all you like, but how will we ever prove that he did?’

  ‘Maybe we don’t need to, after all. All we have to show is a viable alternative to Chaz having killed her.’

  ‘The belt round her neck? The training top with the blood?’

  ‘Rogozin owned the football club, daughter. He had access to the training complex. Chaz told us he kept clothes there. The training top wasn’t found in the laundry basket till next day. He had plenty of time to put it there.’

  ‘True,’ she conceded. ‘What do you do now?’

  ‘I go back to that building and I have a damn good look around. If I have to, I’ll insist that Sammy sends the forensic team back in.’

  ‘Will de Matteo allow that?’

  ‘Fuck him. If I have to I’ll go over his head to the Lord Advocate. Woodrow will play it safe; he’ll agree.’ He grinned. ‘The lovely thing about this situation is that if we can build a forensic case against Rogozin that’s as strong as they have against Chaz, the bastard won’t be around to deny it.’

  Fifty-Nine

  ‘You’re right, Dan,’ Lottie Mann mused, as she admired the opulent furnishings of the Tempus Bar. ‘This is nice.’

  ‘Compared tae some of the pubs I’ve been in, it’s Buckingham Palace,’ Provan chuckled. ‘When I think of some of those boozers on the south side, in the old days . . . Those were dangerous places, if you didnae know your way around . . . sometimes even when ye did.’

  ‘So’s this, but in a different way,’ she observed. ‘This smells of power, it smells of money. It’s the sort of place where deals are done on a daily basis that affect the lives of thousands of people.’

  The bar was quiet; the only other patrons were the two men the DS had encountered in the hotel foyer that morning. Neither looked happy; he guessed that their ‘important’ meeting had been a failure. Beyond them, in the restaurant, only one table was occupied, by a large man with a transatlantic tan and a heavily bejewelled woman.

  His companion cut into his thoughts. ‘I miss this, Dan,’ she said, quietly, with a wistful expression. ‘Being out for a quiet drink in nice surroundings, not being a mum, not being a DI, just being plain Charlotte Mann.’

  ‘You were never plain in your life, kid. You’re a good-looking woman and don’t you forget it.’

  The compliment took her by surprise. To his amazement she blushed. ‘Don’t go all gallant on me,’ she whispered. ‘I mean it. Since Scott and I broke up, I’ve never done this, taken a wee bit of “me time”, not once.’

  She gazed into her past for a few seconds, then at him, in the present. ‘How about you? You’re a good friend, away from the office, and you’re great with Jakey, but when you’re not with us, or we’re not at work, I have no idea what you do with your spare time.’

  ‘Same as you, dear,’ he confessed. ‘Fuck all for the last ten years since Elspeth got fed up wi’ me and headed for the hills wi’ that electrician that came to put in a new circuit board and wound up rewirin’ her.

  ‘Occasionally, when she’s havin’ a crisis in her life, my Lulu will turn up from London and take her old man out tae the pictures or the like, but mostly my social life consists of the delivery boy turning up wi’ the curry Ah’ve ordered over the phone.’

  ‘What a pair, eh?’ Mann sighed. ‘Maybe we should register with a dating agency.’

  Provan laughed. ‘One of those ye see in the telly ads? I’d be a big draw there: Ah’d be the guy that winds up wi’ a fuckin’ camel.’

  She fluttered her eyelashes. ‘There are some nice-looking camels around. Me, I’d probably wind up with a deaf mute Icelandic strongman, with BO and a tiny schlong.’

  ‘I could meet two of those specifications,’ he observed, ‘but Ah talk too much and Ah cannae lift anything heavier than a full pint tumbler.’

  She grinned at him, winking. ‘Two out of four ain’t bad. No, let’s give the agency a miss. Tell you what,’ she said, ‘you got these very expensive drinks in, so in return I’ll take you for a very cheap dinner some night. How about that?’

  Provan’s heart missed a beat, but he kept his expression deadpan. ‘You are so lacking in ambition that you’re asking a guy who’s old enough to be your father out on a date?’

  She reached out and cuffed him gently on the back of the head, triggering a small dandruff snowstorm. ‘Companionship and friendship, Dan, that’s what I need. The size of your schlong is irrelevant . . . or should I say it won’t enter into it? How about it?’

  He smiled. ‘That would be nice; Ah must admit I am getting pissed off with the curry delivery boy.’

  Mann finished her drink. ‘Settled. Now back to business; let’s get down to the casino.’

  They exited the hotel and walked down Hope Street, turning left under the Hielan’man’s Umbrella, and then right following Jamaica Street until it reached the river, and the Garrick Casino next to the pedestrian suspension bridge that led eventually to the once-notorious Gorbals.

  Melvyn Holding works long hours , Provan remarked to himself as they entered. The general manager was standing in reception; he had changed into a white tuxedo, his evening uniform, the DS assumed.

  ‘Sergeant,’ he exclaimed. ‘Good to see you again. Have you and your lady come to try your luck? I’ll be happy to fix you up with a temporary membership.’

  ‘This is no lady,’ Provan retorted, ‘this is my boss. Detective Inspector Mann, Mr Holding, he’s the gaffer here.’

  ‘More questions?’ he sighed.

  ‘No,’ Mann replied, ‘only one. Last night, when Mr Rogozin was here, did he interact with anyone else other than Mr McCullough and your staff?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge, certainly not in the dining room. I’ll need to talk to the gaming floor supervisor to be absolutely sure. Give me a minute.’

  He bustled off and through a door on the right. ‘Funny,’ the DI remarked, ‘casinos have been part of Glasgow all my life, but I’ve never been in one.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Provan admitted. ‘Not as a punter, at any rate. Way back, when I was a plod, we had a call to a slashin’ in a place up Buchanan Street. Waste of time; it was gangsters. Nobody would talk to us, so we went away and left them to maim each other. Different now though; casinos are better regulated, and better run. Nobody misbehaves.’

  ‘They have a dining room here, he said?’

  ‘Oh aye; the head waiter’s my new best friend. Cheap too,’ he added.

  ‘No,’ Melvyn Holding exclaimed as he crossed the foyer. ‘Mr Rogozin did not speak to anyone else other than staff. He barely spoke to Mr McCullough, when he was down there. I’m sorry not to be of more help.’

  ‘Melvyn, excuse me.’

  With a small show of impatience the manager glanced across at a man who was standing beside the sign-in desk. He was big and burly, wearing sharp-creased black trousers and a red jacket with epaulettes, with gleaming patent leather shoes. ‘Yes, Derek,’ Holding responded, ‘what is it?’

  ‘Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing. Mr Rogozin did have a visitor last night . . . or an attempted visitor, I should say. He turned up not long after Mr Rogozin and Mr McCullough arrived, asking if he was here. I said I wasn’t allowed to say who was here and who wasn’t, but he wouldn’t take that. He demanded to know whether Rogozin was in the building, demanded.’

  ‘He was aggressive?’ Mann asked.

  ‘Not as such, not towards me, but he was angry all right. I knew quite well that Rogozin was here, but no way was I letting that guy anywhere near him. I told him he had to leave; I said I didn’t want to call the police, but we couldn’t have a disturbance here. He took that, and he left.’ He looked at the DI. ‘Given what happened afterwards, I wish I had called you lot.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know who he was?’

  ‘Oh aye, it was Paco Fonter, the Spanish footballer. He’s been here before, twice. He’s no a member, but he was signed in by Jimmy Pike, the English bloke that plays for Merrytown. He’s a member; comes here a lot, sometimes with his bird, sometimes on his own.’

  ‘His bird?’ the DI repeated.

  ‘Wrong word maybe,’ Derek admitted. ‘She’s an attractive woman, not a dolly bird. She was all over Jimmy, though.’

  ‘Never mind Pike,’ Provan said. ‘Fonter. Did he come back at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see if he was hanging about outside?’

  ‘No idea,’ the man named Derek replied. ‘You could always ask Lucky Louie.’

  ‘Who the hell is Lucky Louie?’ Mann exclaimed.

  ‘He’s a wino; our resident wino, you might say. He hangs about outside and makes his living by bumming chips off customers when they’re leaving. He’s a poor sod; he always wears an old jacket with a badge on it. He claims that he went to Glasgow Academy, but I take that with a bucket of salt. He’s completely out of his brains most of the time.’

  ‘Ye cannae buy much with casino chips in the Co-op,’ Provan observed.

  ‘We buy them back off him,’ Melvyn Holding explained. ‘They’re legal tender in here, so it’s no loss to us.’ He smiled. ‘We could ask the police to move him on, I know, but as Derek said, he’s a sad case and I for one don’t want to make his life any harder. He’s cunning enough to know which clients to approach and which to leave alone, so he doesn’t usually upset anyone.’

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘God alone knows. I guess he sleeps rough unless he’s got the money for a night in a hostel, but most of the time he inhabits the walkway. You might even find him there just now.’

  ‘We’ll give it a go,’ Mann said.

  Thanking the two men, they stepped outside, back into Clyde Street, then turned, following the path that led behind the casino and on to the river walkway. ‘I could take this way back tae Cambuslang, you know,’ Provan remarked. ‘This is an official walking route now. It goes all the way up to the Falls of Clyde and New Lanark.’

  ‘You don’t want to try it. You might be mistaken for Lucky Louie.’

  ‘Are you criticising my dress sense?’

  ‘I’ve never been aware of you having any.’ She stopped, pointed ahead of them at a bench, on which a shapeless bundle lay. ‘Here, could that be human?’

  As they drew closer, they saw that it could. Long, lank, filthy grey hair lay in strands along the bench, and snores resounded from the being on which it grew. The man’s knees were drawn up to his chest, but the remnants of a badge could be seen on his jacket, with a line of gold wire peeling away from it.

  As they reached him Provan whistled. ‘He stinks,’ he murmured, a hand to his mouth.

  ‘That’s like describing the Queen Mary II as a pleasure boat,’ the DI countered. ‘He takes stinking to a level I’ve never encountered before. If it wasn’t for the snoring, I’d think he’d been dead for a week. No wonder he does well with the casino chips. I’d give him a tenner just to get him to cross the street.’

  The DS ventured close enough to shake the sleeper. He woke with a start, swinging instantly into a defensive position, clutching an empty Eldorado bottle tight to his chest, pulling a grey canvas rucksack close to him, and glaring up at them through a grey creeper-like fringe of greasy hair. His eyes were yellow, creased with red and with black dots in the centre.

  ‘Fuck off!’ His roar was loud and whining. ‘It’s mine!’

  ‘You’re welcome to it, Louie,’ Mann told him, holding up her warrant card, ‘and we will leave you alone, I promise, once we’ve asked you a couple of questions.’

  ‘It wasnae me.’

  ‘I don’t imagine it was. We don’t think you did anything, Louie, but we’re wondering if you saw someone who did.’

  The human wreck made an obvious physical effort to focus his eyes on her. ‘Wha’?’ he muttered.

  ‘Were you outside the casino last night?’

  His forehead ridged, as if he was squeezing an answer out of his brain. ‘Aye. Always am.’

  ‘How late?’

  ‘Till lights went out.’

  ‘Do you remember a man leaving, just after one o’clock?’ If time means anything to you , she thought. ‘A tall man, dark hair, wearing a heavy blue woollen coat.’

  ‘Bastard!’ Louie whined.

  ‘The man?’

  He nodded, sending greasy grey locks flying. ‘Bastard man! I asked him for chips; tried to kick me, ’s if I was a dog.’

  ‘Did you see where he went when he left?’

  ‘Didnae leave. Went wi’ the man.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘Football man.’

  ‘Football man?’ Provan repeated.

  ‘Aye. Angry football man. Been there before.’

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘Naw, just football man.’

  ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Along the walkway; this way.’

  ‘Did you follow?’ Mann asked.

  ‘Naw. Went round the back of the casino. They chuck out food after the restaurant shuts; put it in bins.’

  ‘After that, once you’d eaten, where did you go?’

  ‘Then went along the walkway; came here.’

  ‘Did you see anyone then?’

  ‘Naw.’ Unexpectedly, he broke into a wide, brown and gap-toothed smile. ‘Got lucky though.’ He shuffled his feet and for the first time, the detectives noticed that he was wearing odd shoes. One was an ancient brown Hush Puppy; the other was a black, hand-stitched leather brogue. ‘Found this,’ he chortled, holding it off the ground.

  Provan was in no doubt. He had seen its twin earlier that day. He took out his phone, found the image of Paco Fonter and showed it to Lucky Louie as he revelled in having lived up to his nickname.

  ‘Seen him before?’ he asked.

  The wreck rolled his multicoloured eyes; his befuddled brain had reached the limits of its attention span. ‘Fuck would I know?’ he mumbled.

  Sixty

  ‘We had plans for tonight,’ Sauce Haddock said. ‘Cheeky wants to see the new Star Trek film; she’s a fanatic.’ It was mid-evening, and the sky was beginning to send happy signals to shepherds.

  ‘There’ll be other nights,’ Sammy Pye assured him. ‘Your consolation is that the overtime clock is running. This can’t wait; too much time’s elapsed already since the murder. I’d have left it until tomorrow, but given what Lottie turned up in Glasgow, we have to go now.’

  ‘Would you have fancied Paco Fonter for Rogozin?’ the DS asked.

  ‘Put yourself in his shoes. If someone did that to Cheeky and you found out about it, would you turn just a wee bit homicidal?’

  Haddock glanced across at the DCI, in the passenger seat. ‘I hope not, but I can’t put my heart on my hand and deny it. DI Mann is sure of her identification, is she?’

  ‘Rock solid apparently, at both the Central Hotel and the casino. The witness for later on is flakier, but Lottie says she has enough for us to detain him, and impound his clothing. There’s almost bound to have been a DNA transfer from Rogozin to him in any struggle.’

  ‘How about the other way around?’

  ‘Sure, but after a few hours in the water, forget it.’

  ‘Chances of him still being here if he did it?’

  Pye pulled a face as the sergeant drew to a halt outside the Norton House Hotel. ‘Let’s find out.’ He stepped out of the car and headed for the building,

  By the time Haddock caught up, at the wood-panelled check-in desk, they had their answer. ‘Senor Fonter checked out this morning,’ the receptionist told the chief inspector, ‘just after eight, when I came on duty. I’m on split shift just now,’ he explained. ‘Eight till midday, then eight till midnight.’

  ‘Did he give the hotel any advance warning that he was leaving?’

  ‘Not as far as I’m aware,’ the man, Carlos, according to his name tag, replied. ‘His booking was made by Merrytown Football Club, and it was open ended, one day’s notice. I made up his bill and he left. I asked if he’d be returning, and he said that he wouldn’t.’ He frowned. ‘No, not quite. We were speaking Spanish and what he actually said was, “Después de lo que ha sucedido no quiero estar en Escocia nunca más. Si soy será como un prisionero .” That means, “After what has happened I don’t want to be in Scotland ever again. If I am it will be as a prisoner.” He laughed when he said it, but it wasn’t a funny laugh, if you know what I mean.’