‘At least then I would be safe.’
‘But for how long? You would never know if or when he intended to come back to finish the job.’ She shook her head emphatically. ‘No, we need to identify the intel source and follow that back to the killer.’
‘And how do you intend to do that, exactly?’
‘We’ll need the mobile phone numbers of all your staff. Plus home addresses, addresses here in the UK if they have one, and any other information you have.’
‘Dmitry can supply you with everything you need,’ said Grechko. ‘I’ll talk to him. What about lie detectors?’
‘Lie detectors?’ repeated Button.
‘You have them, surely? To tell if people are lying. We can question everyone and see who is lying.’
‘Again, that might tip the killer off,’ said Button, standing up. ‘I think for the moment at least we should confine ourselves to thorough background checks and phone monitoring.’ She leaned forward and looked down at the three photographs. ‘There is something I found a little … unusual,’ she said.
Grechko jutted his chin but didn’t say anything.
‘Mr Zakharov made his money in finance and property. He started with a small office block in Moscow and grew it into one of the biggest property developers in the country.’ She tapped the photograph of Yuri Buryakov. ‘Mr Buryakov made his money in oil. He started with a small refinery and built it into one of the world’s biggest independent oil companies.’ She nudged the third photograph. ‘And Sasha Czernik. Steel and aluminium. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992, he was an assistant manager at a steel smelting plant in Kazan. Within five years he owned a dozen factories, blast and steel-making furnaces, steel smelting and rolling units, pipe-manufacturing lines and continuous casting machines. Now his company is one of the biggest steel and aluminium conglomerates in the world with factories in Italy, Germany and Brazil, and he had just started moving into Africa.’
Grechko nodded slowly. ‘Sasha did well, yes.’
‘You all did well, Mr Grechko,’ said Button. She gathered up the pictures, put them back in the envelope and put the envelope into her briefcase. ‘Amazingly well. In 1992 you yourself were a middle manager in a trucking company that moved building materials for the government.’
‘Before 1992, everybody worked for the government,’ said Grechko. ‘There was no private sector.’ He grinned. ‘Not officially, anyway.’
‘That’s right,’ said Button. ‘I read somewhere that you made your money selling second-hand jeans.’
Grechko laughed. ‘Not just second-hand,’ he said. He banged his hands down on to his knees. ‘You couldn’t buy Western jeans for love nor money. So when I wasn’t working I used to hang around the tourist hotels and look for Western teenagers. I’d offer them whatever I could for jeans, worn or otherwise. Sometimes I’d do a swap for vodka or some crap souvenirs, but if they wanted money I’d give them money because I could sell them for three times as much on the black market. The Russian kids, they couldn’t get enough Levi’s and Wrangler’s.’ He laughed and slapped his knees again. ‘Those were the days.’
‘The interesting thing about the four of you is that you have all been friends for a very long time,’ said Button. ‘And you have all become very, very rich. To be honest, you four are among the richest men on the planet.’
‘So? We all worked very hard to get where we are.’
‘I’m sure you did, Mr Grechko. But I do find it interesting that your businesses are all so different. Oil and gas, banking and property, steel and aluminium, trucking and shipping. You were never in competition.’
Grechko laughed. ‘Perhaps that’s why we remained friends for so long.’
Button smiled thinly and nodded. ‘Perhaps that’s it,’ she said. ‘But it is interesting that you all started from nothing, all moved into different businesses, and all became very wealthy, and now three of the four are dead. And it’s starting to look as if the same man killed the three of them and is trying to kill you.’
Grechko’s eyes had hardened as she spoke. ‘The dogs in the Kremlin hate us all,’ he said quietly. ‘And they kill what they hate.’
‘That may be,’ said Button. ‘But the more we look at this, Mr Grechko, the more it seems to us that these killings are not political. They are personal.’
Grechko said nothing, but both his hands clenched into tight fists and his knuckles whitened.
‘So I have to ask you, can you think of anyone who might want to murder you, Mr Zakharov, Mr Buryakov and Mr Czernik? Someone you crossed over the years, someone out for revenge?’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Grechko.
‘What exactly do you think is ridiculous?’
Grechko leaned towards her. ‘You know what Putin has been doing? You have seen what happens to people who cross him. Why do you want me to jump at shadows when I know who is trying to kill me?’
‘Because if this is personal then understanding the killer’s motive means we will stand a better chance of identifying him.’
Grechko stared at her for several seconds, then he shrugged. ‘I can’t think of anyone.’
‘But you have enemies?’
Grechko snorted contemptuously. ‘The world does not give you money, Miss Button. You have to take it. The strong get rich and the weak stay poor. That’s how natural selection works. If it did not work that way, the entire world would be communist.’
‘So I’ll take that as a yes.’
Grechko waved away her comment with a flick of his hand. ‘You wouldn’t understand, you have spent your whole life under a capitalist system,’ he said. ‘You have a nice car, I have seen it. A BMW. You wear that nice Cartier watch and I am sure that you are treated by the very best private doctors. You have children?’
‘A daughter,’ said Button.
‘And I am sure that she is privately educated. You reap all the benefits of living in a capitalist country.’ He bared his teeth and tapped the front two with his finger. ‘Do you see my teeth, Miss Button? My wonderfully even, white teeth? They cost me fifty thousand dollars. Why? Because when I was a child I had state-supplied dental care and the drunken dentist they let loose on me was more concerned about his vodka than his patients. By the time I was twelve, half my teeth were rotten. I had a basic education, I had crap food, I wore cheap clothing and I lived with my parents in a flat close to a munitions factory that was exactly the same as the flat of every other family. We had the same furniture, the same cutlery, the same oven, the same refrigerator, everything was the same as our neighbours. The only difference was the colour of the sofa, which changed each year. My parents had the 1983 sofa. It was green.’
Button opened her mouth to speak but Grechko held up his hand to silence her. ‘Every child got the same bicycle. Your parents put your name down for it when you were born and it was delivered on your fifth birthday. Every bike was the same. There was a black economy, of course there was, how else could I buy and sell my jeans. But it was small and it was illegal and, my God, did they punish you if they caught you. So eventually I got a job working in a shitty office for a man who thought his mission in life was to treat me like a serf. Then I got married and was given my own flat and my own sofa, which was blue, and yes, I bought and sold jeans on the black market because it was the only way I could lift myself out of the shit that is the communist system. I did what I had to do, Miss Button, and you would have done the same. Then in 1992, everything changed. The reins were loosened. Finally people were allowed to think for themselves, to act for themselves. But we still had nothing. So if you wanted something, you had to take it. You had to grab it with both hands before someone else took it and once you had it you had to make sure that no one took it from you. No one owned anything before 1992, can you understand that? Everything belonged to the state. And no one gave you anything, you had to take it. Those that took, got rich. Those that sat on their backsides stayed poor. So if you’re asking me if I trod on a few feet to get where I am today, then yes, of course I did. And I broke a few heads. So did Oleg, so did Yuri and so did Sasha. And so did all of the oligarchs that you are so quick to welcome to your shores. None of us are angels, Miss Button, but you overlook that fact in your rush to take our money.’ He could see that she was about to object but he silenced her with another curt wave of his hand. ‘Not you personally, I’m not saying that, but your political masters. Do you have any idea how much I have paid them over the years? Millions. Literally millions. And like pigs they stick their snouts in the trough and demand more. And not just to their parties. They come in person with their grasping hands out. Members of your House of Lords, the highest office in the land, sticking their tongues up my arse to get what they want. Former prime ministers asking me to hire them as consultants for a million dollars a year.’ He sneered dismissively. ‘Money is all that matters to them, so you insult me by suggesting that I have done anything wrong in trying to better myself. Would you rather that I was still working ten hours a day collating timesheets and checking milometers and going home to a flat with a blue plastic sofa and sandpaper sheets and looking forward, if I was lucky, to a week by the Black Sea once a year?’