‘Of course not. I’m a civil servant.’
‘Then you have no locus,’ Steele told her. ‘This is a serious interview, part of a murder investigation. You can stay, but you will not utter a word unless invited by me, and you’ll sit at the end of the table, so that you cannot make eye contact with the prisoner. Are you carrying any form of recording device?’
‘Yes, but. .’
Steele held out his hand. ‘Give it to me, please. I’ll return it when we’re finished here.’
‘I will not!’
‘Then leave.’
‘I’m here with the approval of the Metropolitan Police.’
‘Which can be withdrawn.’
‘Not by you.’
‘Trust me, it can.’ He turned to Stallings. ‘Becky, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but. .’
‘No problem,’ she told him. ‘If you’ll come with me, Ms Weiss.’
‘Okay!’ The woman took a small personal-memo device from her bag and handed it to Steele.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Now, if you’ll take your place along there, we can begin.’ He took a seat, with Stallings on his left and Wilding on his right, and smiled across the table. ‘Good morning, Mr Barker,’ he began, once Stallings had activated a twin-tape recorder. ‘We’ll just go through the introductions again for the record.’ He recited the time, location, and list of those present, then continued: ‘I’m sorry about that piece of housekeeping, and that we’re meeting again in these surroundings. It might be palatial as police stations go, but it’s a hell of a change from the Caley, you’ll agree.’
‘Yes indeed,’ Barker murmured coldly. ‘It’s outrageous that I’ve been held here overnight, Inspector. Did you have something to do with that?’
‘I think that bribing a civil servant to provide sensitive information had a lot to do with that, Keith.’
Lancelot Hamilton leaned forward. ‘At the moment, Inspector,’ he pointed out, ‘no charges of that nature have been brought against my client.’
‘No, but if you weren’t damn sure that the Met have grounds to lay them whenever they think fit, you’d have screamed bloody murder to have your client released last night. However, Mr Hamilton, that’s not why DS Wilding and I are here. We want to talk to your client about four murders that have been committed in Scotland over the last two months.’
‘My client had nothing to do with any of those terrible crimes. He knows nothing about them.’
‘That’s what we’re here to find out.’ Steele leaned forward slightly and gazed at the lawyer. ‘Look, sir, I don’t want to be rude, but we’ll be done a lot quicker here if you let me get on with my job with as few interruptions as possible. In the process you might save your client a few quid in solicitor’s fees.’ He suppressed a smile, as Hamilton reddened.
‘That is a very well-made point,’ said Barker, grimly.
‘Of course, you won’t be picking up your legal tab, will you?’ said Steele, lightly. ‘Davor Boras will do that, won’t he?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Come on, when you leaned on Dailey, you weren’t acting on your own behalf.’
‘Who is Dailey?’
‘He’s a guy with your cellphone number on the SIM card memory of his, but let’s not get tangled up in that stuff. I’m interested in why, not who. Why should you try to track down Dominic Padstow through the passport agency?’
‘Good question, why should I?’
‘You’re using the royal “I” there, Keith. You really mean “we” and when you do you’re talking about you and your puppet-master, Boras. We’re after Padstow. Your boss offered a million quid to anyone who finds the man and puts him away. So why should he use a bent contact in the Home Office to try to track him down? Does he think that if he does the job himself, he’ll save a million?’
‘Hardly. A million is nothing to that man.’
‘Hey, that’s a sea change,’ Steele exclaimed. ‘A couple of days ago you were kissing his arse. Today, he’s “that man”. He’s denied you, hasn’t he?’ He glanced at Stallings. ‘That’s right, Becky, isn’t it? You interviewed Boras and he told you that if Barker had bribed anyone he had done it on his own initiative, and expressly against his orders.’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘We haven’t. I was going to, but I had orders to leave him alone.’
‘Orders? From whom?’
‘Upstairs; to be exact, from Deputy Assistant Commissioner Davies, the director of operations in the Specialist Crime directorate. He’s overseeing this operation and he set the parameters. He told me that Boras was off limits.’
‘Jesus!’ Steele was incredulous. ‘You’re saying that he’s behind the bribing of a public official and you can’t touch him? I know he’s a business leader and all that but. .’ His eyes flashed along the table and locked on to Rhonda Weiss. ‘Your lot are pulling the strings here, aren’t they? That’s why you’re here. You’re not interested in some middle-ranking twerp who sold information for money. It goes deeper than that.’
‘I can’t comment on that,’ the woman replied, quietly.
‘Well, I can.’ Keith Barker’s voice was laden with bitterness. ‘Through his company, Davor Boras is a major supporter of the Labour Party. Through his charitable foundation, he backs the Tories. He helps both of them, plays one off against the other. Some of the things he’s asked me to do, people he’s asked me to check up on, had nothing to do with business.’
‘And yet you’ve been fired, Keith, for doing his dirty work. You might as well tell me: we could find a journalist in around two seconds who’d call the Continental IT press office and confirm it.’
‘Yes,’ said Lancelot Hamilton. ‘Formal notice of dismissal was delivered to my client’s home late last night.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Redundancy, I believe.’
‘That was quick off the mark, considering your client hasn’t been charged yet.’
‘What were the severance terms?’ Ray Wilding asked quietly.
‘That information’s privileged.’
The sergeant glared at the lawyer. ‘Do you think I’m an idiot? It’s fuck-all privileged. You’ve just said that it was delivered from Boras to your client’s home, not to your office, and not through you. The Met have already searched the place; they have an existing warrant so they can go back any time and pick the document up.’
‘Two years’ salary, in lieu of notice,’ Hamilton muttered.
‘Louder, please, for the tape.’
He repeated the terms of Barker’s sacking.
‘What’s your annual salary, Keith?’ asked Steele.
‘My business.’
‘Who paid you? Boras personally, or Continental IT? If it’s the latter we can find out easily.’
‘Okay! Two hundred and fifty thousand.’
The inspector whistled. ‘So you’ve pocketed half a million. And I bet a good chunk of it goes into your pension fund to minimise tax. If that’s the going rate for gross misconduct, I’m strongly tempted. .’ He grinned and broke off. ‘No, I’d better not say that with the tape running.’
Barker shot him a half-smile. ‘Perhaps not.’
‘Where does that take us?’ Steele went on. ‘You’ve been bought off. Clearly, you can’t work for Boras any longer, not after this. You might even have to do a year or so inside, unless the Home Office leans on the Crown Prosecution Service too, but it’ll be worth it to you, won’t it? I can fire questions at you all day and you’ll keep your mouth shut.’
‘That’s the way it is,’ the man said cheerfully. ‘And it serves you bastards right, for implying to the press that I’m somehow mixed up in these murders.’
‘Hey, Mr McGuire implied no such thing. All he said was “no comment”. He let you off lightly. Of course your arrest was linked to our investigation. You were trying to trace our prime suspect, on behalf of your boss. .’ Barker made to interrupt, but Steele cut him off. ‘Save it, we’ll just take that as read. The follow-up question is, what would have happened if you’d found him? After Boras’s statement at our press briefing on Thursday, we have grounds for thinking that his life would have been in danger.’
‘Why were you trying to trace him?’ Ray Wilding asked. His intervention seemed spur-of-the-moment, but he and Steele had conducted many interviews together.