‘Dominic Padstow,’ a television reporter intoned, ‘the man we’re all assuming is your prime suspect. Have you made any progress towards tracing him since you issued his image to the media last night?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ McGuire answered, pocketing the note and beginning to rise, ‘as of this minute, we may know who he is. That’s all, folks.’
Fifty-three
‘He’s a journalist?’ Stevie Steele exclaimed.
‘That’s what MI5 believe,’ said Shannon. ‘They’ve e-mailed me a photograph and if he’s not the man in the painting, he’s his twin. I’ve forwarded it on to you, along with his file. Show it to your surviving witnesses and see what they say.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Daniel Ballester.’
‘Unusual.’
‘His grandfather was on the wrong side in the Spanish civil war; he dodged the firing squad and escaped to Britain. It’s all in the file. It should be in your mailbox by now, so you can see for yourself.’
‘Why does MI5 have a folder on him?’
‘For the not uncommon reason that he’s a pain in the arse. He’s a freelance whose speciality is upsetting the government, enough for somebody to have ordered that tabs be kept on him.’
‘Thanks, Dottie, I’ll read it right now.’
‘Five aren’t done with this, Stevie,’ Shannon told him. ‘They have access where we don’t; they’re going to do what they can to trace his movements. In the meantime they’ve raised the alert at all points of exit from the country.’
‘You must have a good contact there.’
‘As good as they get. I’ll be back if and when I hear anything more.’
Steele hung up, switched on his computer terminal and waited while it booted up. As soon as the cursor switched from hourglass to simple arrow, he clicked the internal mail icon and watched the screen. True to her word, Dottie Shannon’s message was there; he opened it and clicked on the attachments, first to download, and then to display the photograph.
He called to Wilding and waved to him to join him. ‘What do you think of this?’ he asked, holding a print of the face from Stacey Gavin’s portrait beside the monitor.
‘That’s the boy,’ said the sergeant, at once. ‘Mrs Dell was right: Stacey really could paint. He’s a good-looking bastard, isn’t he? What do we know about him?’
‘Let’s have a look.’ Steele opened the other file, and read aloud, ‘Daniel Ballester, aged thirty-two, white British subject, heterosexual, unmarried. Son of Archimedes Ballester, stockbroker, and Hilda Roberts, formerly of Hounslow, now retired and residing in Scottsdale, Arizona. No other known relatives. That’s fucking magic; sounds like a dead end already. Graduated with honours in media and politics; vice-president of student union in his final year and a member of the executive of the National Union of Students.’
‘They probably started watching him then,’ Wilding muttered.
‘Could be. What’s next? Hey, he has two criminal convictions, one for being part of a disorderly crowd during his university days, but. . get this. . another for causing actual bodily harm to a girlfriend when he was twenty. He was given a jail sentence of one year, suspended. Jesus, Ray, if Zrinka had only known. .’
‘If wishes were horses, gaffer, we’d all get a ride. What about his career?’
‘It says here that he joined the staff of Sky News as a researcher, straight from Keele, then moved on after a year to the Guardian features department. He made his name there with several exposés of politicians on the take from business, which led to a government front-bencher being thrown out of Parliament, and subsequently jailed. . I remember that one. He was forced to resign from the Guardian just over two years ago after doing a piece for a left-wing magazine, alleging the assassination of Princess Diana.’
‘What self-respecting radical journalist hasn’t written one of those?’
‘Ah, but this one was subsequently discredited and condemned by both the British and French governments, and the editor of the magazine was forced to issue a retraction and an apology. According to this, Ballester was fed false information by an unknown contact who posed as a dissident member of the French Sûreté, and showed him a fake document, purporting to have been signed by the French justice minister, approving the plot, and giving the go-ahead. ’
‘Don’t piss off the government, eh?’
‘So it seems. Since then he’s been operating as a freelance, doing the same type of stuff for whoever will pay him. He’s been involved in a couple of stings on closet gay pop stars, on a kiddies’ TV presenter with a drug habit and on a footballer’s wife who was shagging his manager when he was away on international duty.
‘He lives in London, but. . and this is when it gets interesting. . periodically drops off the radar. His “periods of inactivity”, as they’re called here. . an excuse for sloppy surveillance if you ask me. . appear to coincide with the times he was living with Zrinka and then going out with Stacey. His whereabouts are currently unknown; he was last observed in London in February.’
‘That fits,’ said Wilding. ‘But what does it tell us, Stevie?’
‘Nothing of itself, but it poses some interesting questions. Why Zrinka? Why does this guy, with his track record, suddenly pop up in Edinburgh and latch himself on to the artist daughter of one of the richest men in Britain?’
‘Maybe he’d had enough of scratching around. Maybe he wanted to marry money.’
‘So he targets a girl who’s determined not to live off her father? No, that’s not the reason. I reckon he was on a fucking story, that’s why. He was out to dig up something on Boras. Think about it, Ray: Ballester made his name doing stories about business corruption, and what finer target than him? We know he’s dodgy, that he’s used Keith Barker to bribe a DTI official for useful inside information. Maybe that was the story Ballester was after, or maybe it was something else, but I’ll bet you one thing. Eventually Zrinka found out who or what he was, and that was why she gave him the bum’s rush.’
‘What about Stacey? Why would he move on to her?’
‘Because he didn’t want to give up on his story. Remember, she and Zrinka didn’t become friendly till after he was gone. He couldn’t get to Boras’s daughter any more, so he got to someone close to her. We know from Amy that she wouldn’t have given him the time of day, but Stacey didn’t know his history.’
‘So why did he kill them?’
‘A combination of rage over rejection, jealousy, and maybe frustration that his story was blown; that serious-assault conviction in his background suggests that he’s capable.’
‘It does. So where do we go now? We might know what his real name is, but he’s still disappeared.’
Steele leaned back, gazing up at the ceiling. ‘How did Zrinka find out?’ he asked himself aloud. ‘If I’m right, if he was researching a story on Davor Boras. .’
He sat upright and looked at Wilding. ‘I want to interview Barker,’ he said. ‘No, I’m going to bloody interview him. Ray, we’re going to London. Maybe we could. .’
He stopped short and looked at his watch. ‘Shit!’ he shouted. ‘Maggie’s leaving do starts in ten minutes.’ He stood up and grabbed his jacket. ‘We’re going tomorrow. You make the arrangements: book us on an early flight, then tell the Met that we’re coming and that we want to see Barker, wherever they’re holding him.’
‘What if he’s on bail?’
‘They’ll still have him; tell them not to give him fucking bail. If you have a problem with them, go to DCS McGuire. Meantime, I’m off to join my wife.’
Fifty-four
‘I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you came, sir,’ said Rose, to the tall, tanned man who stood by the window of the conference room in the Torphichen Place police office. He looked slimmer in the waist than at their last encounter, although the tightness of his jacket at the shoulders suggested this might be due to exercise rather than dieting. His steel-grey hair was cut much shorter than she had ever seen it, and seemed to shine, picking up highlights from the evening sun.